Ghost Child (3 page)

By way of an answer, he said, ‘He’s not my kid.’

I’d already figured that for myself, so I let it go and scanned the room, and immediately saw a portrait – a bright, white-and-blue portrait of four children – in a cardboard frame on the mantelpiece. I picked it up and said, ‘Are these the children? Which one is Jake?’

Unaccountably, Peter brightened.

‘I paid for that,’ he said. ‘Pretty all right, isn’t it? Pretty good, actually.’

He seemed not to understand the seriousness of the situation. We weren’t here to
admire
the photo; we were here to find Jake’s attacker. Again, I said, ‘Which one is Jake?’

Peter considered the photograph for a moment, then pointed and said, ‘That one.’

Jake was seated in the middle of the group. Like all of them, he was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, and he was flanked on both sides by siblings. Behind them was a cloudy background: not dull-cloudy, but a bright blue background with white clouds. I handed the photograph to the
Sun
photographer, who laid it down on the kitchen bench and said, ‘Thanks, mate. We appreciate this.’ He lifted up his camera and began photographing it. That was the easiest way to get a copy in those days, before digital prints and email, you’d just copy a photograph with your own camera, develop it in the darkroom, and send it by courier to colleagues from rival papers. The copies would be in colour, but in the newspaper they’d turn out black and white, which was a pity, because the thing that was most striking about the kids, the thing that any witness was likely to remember, was the hair.

Peter seemed very interested in the photographer and his gear, but he didn’t seem too happy about his portrait being copied. He said, ‘Why do they need a picture?’

I said, ‘If anybody sees this picture, they might
remember seeing Jake on the way to the shops and they might remember something suspicious, and that’s going to help us catch the culprit.’

Peter said, ‘Yeah, okay, but remember,
I
paid for that picture.’

The photographer looked up, surprised. Was Peter suggesting that he should pay for the right to copy it? The photographer let it go. I remember thinking, ‘These guys aren’t bad. The press gets a bad rap but they’ve got a job to do and, on this occasion, that meant getting a picture, any picture of the kid, so people could look at it and say, “What a cute kid! How could anybody hurt a child like that? What’s the world coming to?”’

When the
Sun
guy was done, I put the portrait back on the mantelpiece and went outside. The press was waiting for me, waiting for some kind of official comment to go with their stories. I stood in the forest of microphones and said, ‘As you have no doubt gathered, we have a serious incident on our hands here.’

They nodded and waited.

‘We’ve got a five-year-old boy who was sent to the shops with his brother, and it appears that they’ve been set upon by a man who has bashed him, possibly for the change they were carrying.’

I paused to give them time to write this down.

‘I think you’ll agree that’s a cowardly crime, to beat an innocent boy, a five-year-old boy,’ I continued.

‘We are appealing for witnesses to come forward. We ask anyone who might have seen anything suspicious to please call Crime Stoppers. I think you’ve all got the number.’

One reporter said, ‘Can we speak to the parents?’ and I said no. Another reporter wanted to know what kind of injury the boy had suffered. I said, ‘That’s obviously a matter for the specialists. At this stage it’s unclear, but I think I’m safe in saying that the young lad is in quite a bad way.’

They wanted to know the boy’s name and I told them: Jacob Cashman. They wanted to know how to spell Jacob – was it Jakob or Jacob or, who knows these days, Jaycub? – and I confirmed it: It was J-A-C-O-B, Jacob. Jacob John Cashman. Referring to notes taken by the new recruit, I added: ‘Born 1 August, 1977. He’s five.’

‘He’s what?’ The reporters hadn’t heard me. Daylight was fading and the cockatoos that made their nests in Barrett’s gum trees had taken flight. They were swooping and screaming, apparently furious.

I repeated myself, louder this time. I said, ‘Five. The young boy, the victim, he’s five.’ And somehow, those words brought silence upon all of us.

I turned and went back through the front door. The boyfriend, Peter, had turned on the TV and the children were watching, of all things,
The Love Boat
. They didn’t turn to look at me. There was a day
coming when they’d have to face up to what happened in that house on DeCastella Drive, but it wouldn’t be that day and, likely, not for years, so I let them go on watching.

The minute I saw the photographs of Lauren Cameron in the newspaper, I thought to myself, ‘I know that girl.’ I couldn’t remember the details at first so I got onto my daughter, who’s a reporter herself these days, and asked her to have a bit of a search around the archives, and then I pulled out my own files to refresh my memory. I’ve still got a few of the old scrapbooks I used to keep, with my articles cut out and pasted in, from before the whole world went electronic.

It was a bloody horrible story, and I suppose it’s reasonable to ask, ‘A story like that, how do you forget it?’ But, I mean, I’ve worked for newspapers for twenty-seven years and I can tell you now, I’ve seen plenty of bloody horrible stories. Kids getting beaten, kids getting dumped, kids getting
raped
, if you can believe that, and
I learnt pretty quick that if you spend too much time thinking about it, you’ll go out of your mind.

The Cashman story, well, it wasn’t in the worst category of crimes I’ve had to cover for the papers. I know that sounds rotten, but as far as I could tell, it wasn’t a savage beating, and not systematic abuse, like you see these days, with kids starved to death and kids hog-tied face down on the bed with rags. This wasn’t one of those. There was barely a mark on the boy. I got a glimpse of him when they were putting him in the ambulance and he looked like he’d been knocked out. I remember thinking, ‘What’s happened here?’ Maybe it was an accident, or maybe they’d just gone too far.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I would have been affected by it. I’m not made of marble. I’ve got kids of my own. But the thing is, I was working for
The Sun
, and we had a couple of editions to fill every day, and news moves pretty quickly. We might have had a horse race one day – the Melbourne Cup, right? – and then a bashed kid the next day, and after that, an election, and then it’s Christmas and it’s time to do the cricket stories, and, well, life goes on, doesn’t it?

By rights, I shouldn’t have been out on the road the day that Jake Cashman got bashed. I was the news editor. That means I was supposed to sit at the desk at
The Sun
’s old headquarters in Flinders Street, ashtray to my left, keeping track of the stories coming in. On November 11, we wouldn’t have had anything much, just the
usual pictures from the Remembrance Day ceremony, standard fare that nobody much cares about any more. We covered it because we at the
Sun
had respect for the diggers. Then the call came through from the bloke on police rounds, saying, ‘We’ve got something.’

Police rounds weren’t based at the paper. They were down at Russell Street, where they had the scanners, so he would have called me up and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a kid – a five-year-old – and the official story is he was grabbed by a man at the local school and left on the ground and his kid brother ran home to Mum and she had to carry him home.’

I would have thought, ‘That’s a good yarn.’ I told the editor, ‘We’ve got an ambulance on the way to a kid, and it looks like a bashing.’ Probably he said, ‘Beauty,’ because that’s what we would have felt. It’s not callous, it’s just, like I say, we’ve got a paper to put out and we need stories to fill it. The editor would have wanted to know where the kid lived and I would have said, ‘Barrett Estate,’ and he would have rolled his eyes because Barrett … look, I’m sure the people who live there will tell you it’s a good neighbourhood, but it’s got something of a reputation.

The editor would have wanted to know: ‘You got anyone to send?’ That was part of my job, to find a reporter to get to the scene, but I didn’t have anyone, or maybe I did but I just felt like doing it myself. Sitting in the office all day, it used to get me down, so I would
have rounded up a snapper – a photographer, an old hand – we’d have made sure we had a pack of smokes between us, and driven out to Barrett. We’d have had to step on it because if we left it too long, the ambos and the coppers would be gone and we’d have nothing.

I remember we had a bit of trouble finding the place because DeCastella Drive was not actually in the
Mel-ways
. We had to ask a guy at the servo where it was, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, coupla weeks ago the council decided to create some chaos by renaming all the streets.’ Apparently, they had a Main Road West, and a Main Road East and an Old Main Road or something and they reckoned that was confusing, so they were having a competition to rename the roads, and people could put forward suggestions. This was just, like, weeks after the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, and everybody was all excited about all these gold medals that the Aussies had won in the pool, and the weightlifting, and the marathon with Deeks in it, so all the councillors went down there in their robes and put up new signs that said ‘Lisa Curry Court’ and ‘Dean Lukin Close’ and ‘DeCastella Drive’, which was where the Cashmans now lived, and the road we had to find.

Anyway, we needn’t have freaked out because we were first on the scene. First reporters, I mean. When a kid gets in strife, it’s not really a story for
The Age.
They’ll cover it, but usually from some wanky social-justice angle, and two days after everyone else has picked
it to pieces. Not like
The Sun.
We’d get it on the front page and make the most of it.

There were no TVs there – no TV reporters, I mean – because the call to the ambulance had come in late, so they wouldn’t have bothered. No point going out there if you can’t get it to air for the 6 p.m. bulletin, right? In those days, a story was only a story if Brian Naylor told you so. On the papers, we had a bit more time. It was actually better if something happened a bit late, because we knew we’d have it on our own, and if it turned out to be a good story the TVs would be onto it the next day.

The ambulance was still there when we arrived, thank God. The snapper jumped out of the car and got a shot of the kid getting loaded in. The coppers were there, too, so there was no point knocking on the door. There’s no way they’d let us in, so we hung around the front of the house for a while, talking to the neighbours. I ascertained pretty quickly that a fair number of kids lived in the house, that the mother was on welfare, and that it was a Commission house. I would have been thinking, ‘This isn’t ideal’ – not from a news point of view, because it’s always a bit better when the family aren’t bogans, but how often do kids in the good neighbourhoods get bashed? Not often, mate, let me tell you, not often. But then again, we always made a point at
The Sun
that half our readers were probably on minimum wage and just because people were poor didn’t
mean they were up to no good. We didn’t look down on them like
The Age
.

I thought to myself, ‘Hang around, Frank, and just see what happens,’ but it was getting late and I didn’t have much copy to fill out a story, so we spoke to the media guy – the police media guy – and he said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got at least half an hour before there’ll be any action here, so if you want to go for a quick lap around the block that’ll probably be okay.’ So we did that. We tracked down the kind of guys you can rely on to give you a couple of quick quotes – the priest we found at Barrett Anglican, for example, and the mayor – so that we’d have some kind of story whether the cops came out to talk to us or not. The cops were pretty helpful in those days, though, and we knew they’d give us a few quotes if we hung about long enough, so we went back and, yep, they were good to us.

First, they invited our guy in to copy the portrait of the kid, which saved us from tracking one down ourselves. It can be a real pain in the arse: you have to find classmates, you have to find grandparents, you have to try to talk them into giving you a snap, and it’s not always easy. So it was good when the cops handed over a pic, and I remember when I finally saw it back at the darkroom, I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s all right,’ because the kid, from a news point of view, was pretty much perfect: very Aussie-looking, pale and freckly, and not Aboriginal, which was good, because
it’s much harder to work up sympathy when the kid’s Aboriginal.

After we got the pic copied, the cop came out and told us the story about the kid being bashed, which I took down verbatim despite thinking it was bullshit. What else can you do? You can’t really write, ‘Oh, the cops say this and this, but we reckon they’re full of it.’ That’s not what a newspaper does.

I wouldn’t have had a mobile phone with me. It was before mobiles, really. Some people had them but they were big, blocky things that you carried around in a suitcase, so I’d have had to find a phone box – preferably one that wasn’t all smashed up, preferably one where the kids hadn’t cut the cord, before they got the idea of making them out of that stretchy steel stuff – to let the editor know that we had the story and it was a goodie, and would run for a few days. Otherwise, he’d be sitting in the office, wondering what the hell was going on. Filing copy was a pain, too – no laptops in those days, only copy-takers back at the office, amazing old chicks who would sit on the phone with you, and take it down in shorthand, and then enter it into the system, which means you had to compose the yarn as you went, trying to remember what you’d already said, and trying to think where the comma ought to go. So, yeah, I would have got into a phone box, I would have balanced the handset on my shoulder – it would have been one of those black bastards that weighed a tonne – and
I’d have dialled with my pen and gone through my notebook, writing the piece on the hoof, and reading it out, and then reading the graffiti on the walls while I was waiting on the line for the editor to tell me it was all good, and all received.

The editor told me that if I got back by nine, he’d hold the press and get it on the front page, so that’s what we did, me driving and the photographer stressing out, because it was his pictures of the kid that everybody was waiting on.

I have to say, I’m still pretty pleased with what we achieved that day. I’ve got the clipping in my scrapbook, so I must have been pretty proud of myself at the time, too.

‘MAN BASHES BOY.’ That was the headline. It ran across the top of the front page. I tried to get a touch of outrage into the copy. ‘A five-year-old boy was savagely bashed by a man as he walked through his own schoolyard near his home,’ I wrote.

‘Police say Jacob Cashman was sent by his mother to the shops to get cigarettes.’

Now, you see, most parents could relate to that. Send the kids to the shop, you assume it’s all safe, you live in the neighbourhood, you know all the neighbours, and look what happens.

‘The boy’s brother, Harley, who witnessed the beating, said Jacob was knocked to the ground, kicked in the head and the stomach,’ I wrote.

‘Little Jake is now fighting for his life in the Children’s Hospital.’

The rest of it was pretty standard: police were appealing for witnesses. Neighbours were all upset and wondering whether to keep the doors locked. Inside the paper, we had the commentary from the mayor and the priest, both of them blaming television.

‘There’s too much violence on the box,’ the mayor said. ‘People see a murder every other day and they don’t realise it’s not real.’

We ran the picture of the kid right across the front, six columns (the seventh was always reserved for sport, like a footballer with a groin injury or something). Even though the picture was black and white, you could still see that the kids were pretty surreal-looking, and I wasn’t the first to notice. One of the neighbours told me that the Cashman kids were known around the Barrett Estate as the ‘Ghost Children’.

When I’d asked some of the other neighbours who were standing around whether they were good kids, they mostly said yes, but then one guy, he spun me out a bit. He said, ‘Actually, mate, I’ve always found them a bit weird. You know, with that white hair scraped back. When you see them all together it’s like the
Village of the Damned
.’

And that was actually dead on. That’s exactly how they looked, and it must have stuck in my mind because I can’t find it in the paper. Obviously I left it out of the
story. Whether that was because of space, or because in the circumstances that would have been pretty inappropriate, I don’t recall.