Sex Crimes (18 page)

‘Nah,’ I shook my head. ‘That would be too surreal.  How would she know about you? It was a secret, it’s not like anyone ever found out. You’re being paranoid. Thousands of teenage girls fantasize about your husband, sorry, but true and just because your old…mistake…has a teenage daughter..it’s just coincidental. A father wouldn’t tell a daughter about a secret old adulterous affair!’

‘I think she does know and was paying me back in some sick way,’ Meg said shaking her head.

‘But you didn’t tell Chris, obviously,’ I said. ‘You let him suffer through the humiliation of confessing to you…’

Meg was crying silent tears, which drained down to the indentations at the corners of her mouth.

‘Hang on, Julie,’ she said  ‘…he was home for a few weeks before he was arrested. There was no confession then. He had no intention of ever telling me. He only told me because he had to. So why should I tell him?’

She was trying to justify her silence, her lack of confession, to his own. But she should have told him. It would have been the right thing to do.

‘Just to be fair and so you could have explored the possibility that the whole thing was a revenge beat-up by the girl. It might have been relevant. I don’t think so, but you never know. That info might have been important for his defence but you kept it quiet and he could have gone to prison.’

‘Well, he, O’Neil, didn’t offer it up as evidence,’ she said defensively. ‘He didn’t come out and announce the connection and he must have known who I was. After that chilling confrontation at the window, I have no doubt of that. And I’ve got my own profile as a writer in the same name that he knew me. So he knew too and he kept his mouth shut. ’

‘Are you ever going to tell Chris, now? To level the playing field?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been dreading it coming out. I actually thought it might surface today. Maybe it did. I don’t know.’

She looked like a terrified marsupial.

‘If it did come out, then you and Chris have some meaty stuff to throw at your marriage counsellor next week,’ I sniffed back my earlier tears that were pooling in my sinuses.

‘But if it hasn’t come out and I don’t think it has, I’m just going to let it rest. It really isn’t in the ball park of Chris’s indiscretion,’ Meg said quietly, ‘…. and would just cause more problems for us. Thank God this is over and we can be done with the legal side of it. I’m breathing much easier.’

‘Shhhh,’ I cautioned with a frown as I saw Chris and Clay approaching our table.

Chris bent to kiss Meg on the cheek. She flinched and turned away and he got her ear. He then looked down at his son and then across to me. He looked haggard and much older than he was. It had been very taxing on him.

‘Great news, Chris. Was it Clay’s brilliant testimony that did it?’ I beamed.

And then they sat down and told us about the footage on the girl’s phone. I was aghast and horrified. Those little monsters were sexual perverts. Sick and distorted little teenage minds.

‘So the charges were dropped and then Chris and his lawyer lodged a formal complaint to the police and they arrested the girls and they’re being charged and questioned as we speak.’

‘With what? Making a false claim of rape?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Clay nodded, ‘….and also of aggravated sexual assault and being an accessory to the assault.’

‘You’re charging the girls with rape?’ Meg asked, frowning and shaking her head. ‘They can do that?’

‘Yep. Why not? Teenage boys go down for filming themselves abuse drunk chicks all the time. Why not the girls?’

I could see in Meg’s eyes that she wasn’t happy with this turn of events. She was going to have to live with the fear of having her own ancient sexual misadventures exposed for a while longer yet.

I glared across the table at her and she knew what I was willing her to do. I loved them both like family and yet Meg was not being fair. Chris deserved better.  But I would not betray her confidence. I had never ever told Clay and despite the monumental coincidence and possible motive for the whole business, I would never mention it again.

***

13.

Clayton Farrelly

‘Do you realise how many young teenage girls are posting sick messages on the band’s Facebook page, asking if they can date-rape you?’ I said to Chris.

I wasn’t trying to have a dig at him, just let him know how fucked up this whole thing was getting. Blokes around the world have rallied behind him for going after those girls for what they did but there are some feminists who still want his blood. They reckon Chris thought the girls were good enough to screw and get blown by while he was awake and they reckon he’s just doing it to pay them back for going public. But hey, that little elfin bitch was ready to have him locked up and registered as a child sex offender. And he’d never even banged her. That’s fuckin’ evil, man. Really messed up. And a girl who cries ‘rape’ for kicks is due everything she’s got coming at her. It might just make chicks think twice before calling something rape when it’s not.

I’ve never made a girl do anything she didn’t want to do. I’ve probably rolled over in the morning and started getting it on with Jules before she’s fully awake and heaps of times we’ve made out late at night after ten too many Bourbons and I don’t even remember in the morning but that doesn’t count. She fell asleep once during and I kept going but she thought it was funny later and apologised for crashing out. She can wake me up with a blow job any day of the week. I wish. But when you’re with a stranger you got to be so careful. She might be a bunny boiling mental case. That’s why I feel safe and fine with being in a monogamous , relationship. If I was acting like I did back in the band’s early days, I could so easily have found myself in Chris’s situation. Actually so many dudes in the industry are saying the same thing. Truth be told, we’ve probably all banged a fifteen year old at some stage.

Nobody asks for ID. It’s probably a good idea but at clubs and gigs we expect that girls who don’t have a curfew are probably fine. They’re at a club at midnight. I wasn’t doing that when I was fifteen that’s for sure. And they don’t look like kids.

Chris nodded when I told him about the Facebook messages.

‘It’s a sick world. Kids these days. I hope Olive doesn’t start hanging with any of those sorts of creatures,’ he said sadly.

‘How you holding up, bro?’ I asked him.

He was still staying with us and it had been a month since the court hearing and his little baby boy was five weeks old and it was cutting him up bad that he was a ‘visiting’ weekend Dad. Olive came and hung out with us some weekends. She’s a kid with a good head on her shoulders. That’s some good parenting. I just hope Jules and I are as good as raising our kid as those two. We had an ultrasound the other day and they reckon it’s a boy. I’m pushing for Dillinger for a name but Jules is pretty stuck on something like George or Charles or something traditional like that. We’ll end up meeting in the middle.

  Jules is working on Meg. She’ll take him back. There’s too much water under the bridge and history and shit with those two. They’re like soul mates. She’s was spending the day in the Mountains with her, trying to get her to see the best of Chris instead of the worst.

‘What are we going to do about the band?’ he asked me. ‘I mean is it still viable? I don’t want to do gigs and have fucking training bras thrown at me, you know.’

‘What are you saying? You’re thinking of quitting the band?’ I said, freaking out on the inside.

‘I’ve got two kids. I’m desperate to get Meg back and I’ll do whatever it takes, man,’ he said. ‘I screwed up big time and maybe it was me sabotaging myself…’

‘I think you were getting sabotaged by some fucked-up groupies,’ I felt I needed to point this out.

‘It was a catalyst I think,’ he sighed.

Pass me another beer, please bartender!

‘What the fuck is a catalyst?’

‘A sign. A signal. A turning point. Fork in the road,’ he said.

‘Don’t quit, man. You
are
the band. We’re not gonna do an embarrassing INXS and get a passing charade of characters to fill your boots. Don’t do it. Rise above this and live to fight another day.’

‘Meg hates me touring,’ he said.

‘All our chicks hate us touring but it brings in the big bikkies. It’s made us rich.’

‘I’m rich enough,’ he answered.

‘Nobody’s ever rich enough, mate. You’re thirty-two. A baby. You and I got another sixty years plus and that money will run out.’

I was not liking how this conversation was turning out. We were sitting in my back courtyard and the sun was bearing down on us, burning our arms. I’d wanted to go and pull a few beers at the local pub but Chris had become a recluse, a hermit since the business. He couldn’t go anywhere without someone patting him on the back for ‘taking down those little scrubbers’ or having some braless, bull-dyke swear at him that he was a kiddie rapist. I guess that would get on your nerves and mess with your head, after a while.

‘My family is my number one priority,’ he said snapping the top off another Heineken. ‘Always has been, except for that night. You know what I reckon? I’ve been researching it and so has Tim Murphy.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Well, I took a few drinks from that goblin girl and it looks like she was also carrying an ADD drug like speed, right? And then the little cow spikes my drink with Viagra….so maybe she dropped some of the other too which is why I was so fucked up and mental…’

‘You’ll laugh about this one day, man. Listen to the story. It’s crazy, hey?’

‘Anyway…the combination of the cocaine and the blue pill can actually be fatal. It can cause a massive drop in blood pressure which causes personality changes, hypersexuality, seizures, vision problems and unconsciousness and even death..’ he said leaning forward and pushing up his sunglasses so that we were eye to eye.

‘That’s messed up,’ I agreed. ‘So the little sluts could have killed you.’

‘Yeah,’ he cringed. ‘But don’t use the word sluts okay. I don’t like it.’

‘If the shoe fits!’ I roared with laughter and went to the outside bar fridge for top-ups.

‘Nah, it’s sexist,’ he said.

I turned around and looked at him. Couldn’t believe what he’d just said. He sounded like that bird, Germaine something-or-other.

‘Saying slut is sexist?’ I said slowly, raising an eyebrow Jack Nicholson-style.

‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘You know the whole concept of promiscuity is only given as a label to women and gay men.’

‘As I said,’ I laughed, sitting back down, ‘….if the shoe fits.’

‘Well you used to be a total slut back in the day,’ he said pointing the finger at me.

‘Playboy, my man,’ I ribbed back and winked.

‘And the connotation there is of someone cool, debonair, like James Bond. When you say slut you think of drugged out Lindsay Lohan or Brittney Spears at their worst. It’s ugly.’

‘Oh, fuck me, brother,’ I sighed and then took a deep sip of my very refreshing ale. ‘You have gone all feministo on us. But aren’t you fighting the femos?’

‘No,’ he said and got up, looking frustrated. ‘No man. I am a feminist and proud of it. But feminism isn’t about who’s better. ‘I’m a feminist so I think women are better than men?’ That’s not feminism. That’s sexism and the fundamentalists have shifted the equality issue into that dangerous ground. Bloody fundamentalists, eh? If you’re going to have equality then you’ve got to treat males and females equally. That’s the point I am making with this case.’

‘True. But men and women are different,’ I argued. ‘They just are.’

‘Not where it counts, man,’ he said shaking his head and reaching for a smoke.

‘You gave up,’ I frowned.

‘Just decided to take it back up. Just for today,’ he smiled. ‘When you’re talking responsibilities and human rights and respect. Penises and vaginas don’t come into that equation…or shouldn’t.’

‘Penises and vaginas?’ I mocked. ‘Since when do you say penises and vaginas? Its pussy and cock, man. Flange and meat. Toad and hole. Who
are
you becoming, Jesus?’

‘A man, Clay,’ he said looking at me like someone who has been converted to some weird cult. ‘I feel like up until this I was just a boy and I left that boy in that hotel room that night. I’m becoming a man. A man I want my children to be proud of.’

‘Look, that’s nice,’ I said. ‘But at the end of the day, if you get these girls sent to Juvie, what does it prove?’

‘Just for a sec, Clay, imagine your daughter had her unconscious body filmed and her genitals abused and made fun of. Just imagine your son falsely accused his hot Science teacher with rape because she failed his last paper. Hurting people like that is wrong.’

He was on fire. Hands waving all about the place like he was running for President.

‘If someone did what those girls did to me, spiked my drinks and then made that fucking god-awful recording, if someone did that to my son, I would be championing his right to prosecute. No-one ever has. This is a wake-up call to all those fucking stupid teenagers out there, male and female. I’m doing this for my son and my daughter. And for stupid men like I was too.’

He was on his soap box and talking like a preacher but he was passionate about what he was saying so he got points for that.

Me? I would sooner cut my nuts off than tell the world I got raped by some horny, teenage girls. I’d just suck it up and move on.

Chris’s phone on the table began to ring and he looked at it.

‘Meg,’ he said and quickly hit the answer button and turned away.

I all but sculled my entire beer after that heavy little conversation.

A few minutes later, he came back, looking better than he had for months.

‘She wants me to move home,’ he smiled like a schoolboy. Like a puppy.

‘Good, cos you were starting to get on my nerves,’ I laughed and threw a bottle top at him.

I pulled my sunnies down and looked over them.

‘And no more mention of quitting the band, eh?’ I growled.

‘We’ll see,’ he said.

Well what the fuck was that supposed to mean?