The Complete Stories (74 page)

The earliest victims were disbelieved. They were written off as hysterical. Two of them were unmarried, one was a young mother of three with a history of mental illness, another a schoolgirl of sixteen. It was only after the sixth or seventh attack that one of the newspapers got on to the story, and almost overnight, it seemed, we had a prowler. From that point on, the assaults ceased to be imaginary.

Scarcely a day has passed since then without a new report. Once the prowler entered our lives, via the columns of the paper, he was everywhere. He dominated the headlines and became the obsessive subject of even the most casual conversations. He began, little by little, to change the fabric of our lives. So local schoolgirls no longer walk up from the bus-stop alone. They ring from town and are met by anxious fathers in the Holden Kingswood. Wives, returning home from a meeting, have learned to drive with the doors locked and the windows up, waiting in the garage till someone appears on a lighted verandah to see them safely inside. What did we do with ourselves before there was the prowler? What did we talk about? He is as much part of our lives now as the milkman or the newsagent. Every suburb has its prowler and we have ours. It is, the newspapers tell us, the price we pay for modern living. Prowlers come to us as part of that “way of life” that elsewhere in the papers we are urged at all times to defend.

Not all of the attacks follow the same pattern.

Sometimes the prowler does no more than watch a sleeping woman from the windowsill or from the foot of the bed. When she starts awake at last, suddenly aware of a real presence in her dreams, he signals with his forefinger to his lips that she should not cry out, shows the edge of a knife, and then just sits, holding her thus—captive, mesmerized—till the light begins to grow in the room and his face, a darkened blank against the sky, is in danger of becoming clear. Then, without a word, he rolls over the sill and is gone.

Often, while the woman is washing up at the sink, he slips in behind out of the darkening house; an arm goes round her waist, a hand covers her mouth, she feels his breath, his fingers, but sees nothing. On some of these occasions, startled by the sound of a step on the verandah, or a train whistle, the attacker will break and run, and the last she will hear of him is the banging of a wirescreen door—which from that moment onwards will always “assault.” Sometimes the man is naked. More often he is not. There are times when he has been sighted by a curious neighbour, but only rarely are these sightings reported till after the event. One wonders why. What, standing there at the bathroom window or behind the slats of the venetians, did the observer make of a naked figure stalking across the lawn? What area of a neighbour's secret life did he think he had stumbled on, that might be observed but not violated? There are lines, it seems, that we are conditioned not to cross. Does the prowler know this, and feel certain that in nine cases out of ten, even if sighted, he will not be betrayed? His assurance comes perhaps from the very fact that he is a prowler: that is, one for whom the lines exist to be crossed.

Under pressure of public opinion, and after a series of heavy editorials, the Police Department has decided to set up a special section to deal with the assaults. Called the Incident Squad, it is under the direction of Senior Detective William Pierce, who has two full-time assistants. One of them, following on a petition to the Department from local women's groups, is a woman.

Senior Inspector Pierce is a widower, aged thirty-nine, with two small boys.

It might be anyone.

A fresh-faced kid running round an oval after dark stands panting for a bit with his hands on his hips, then dips his head like a big wading-bird to ease the muscles of his neck. After a brief burst of running on the spot, he resumes his training, alternating stretches of steady jogging with fifty-metre sprints, a lone figure on the darkening oval, a speck of white, moving fast, moving slower, moving fast again against a field of green. Minutes later he is dropping on all fours under a lighted window.

To watch.

At last, slipping out of his gym-shoes, unzipping his track-suit, easing the elastic of his shorts, he stands for a moment in the summer dark—still, poised as if before a barrier he must clear, preparing himself inwardly for the effort it will take, raising himself lightly on the balls of his feet. Then he moves.

Or a man rolls to one side of the bed where his wife is turned heavily away and sets his footsoles on the floor; pushes himself upright, slowly, lest the bed creak; stands, creeps to the hallway. Having learned the catlike quietness of his movements, and also perhaps his need for violence, in this very house and from the woman he leaves dreaming in the bed behind him. He pauses outside the room where his children sleep and listens a moment to their breathing. Then goes on.

It might be either of these.

Or a painter's apprentice already naked under his white overalls (who sets his lunch-tin down very carefully beside a garden tap) or a grease monkey naked under his blue ones.

Or a man in shorts and singlet, slap-footed in thongs, who has been walking a muzzled Greyhound. He ties it now to a tree, flicks his lighted butt into a camellia bush, and smiling, eases up a window. Already in his imagination he is halfway in. Behind him the dog stands tense, quivering, then as the garden sounds grow familiar settles to wait.

It might be any of these.

It might be anyone.

The Incident Squad had issued an identikit picture, assembled from the evidence of nearly seventy victims.

Each victim is presented with the outline of a face and a booklet containing page by page a variety of features; as for example, eyes close set or far apart, small pig-eyes, gimlet slits, round eyes frank and open, eyes that bulge a little, eyes that slant upwards at the corner, eyes that slant down, eyes with heavy lids, flat lids, no lids at all; eyebrows far apart or joined at the bridge of the nose, arched, pointed, straight, tilted up or down; eyebrows thick, thin, tufted etc.; and so on for the various shapes of nose, mouth, chin, ears, the various colours and kinds of hair. When each of these features has been considered, and the chosen eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, hair, affixed to the plastic outline, a face takes shape and the prowler begins slowly to emerge out of the victim's memory, out of the fog at the back of her head. Feature by feature he comes into focus; and so vividly in some cases that the victim has immediately gone into shock at conjuring up, once more, the image of her assailant.

So then: seventy men re-created out of the dark experience of seventy different women. These seventy images are then superimposed one upon the other to discover what is common to them.

The results are puzzling.

Three separate types emerge, and have now been promulgated as possible likenesses of the prowler.

Three? Can the prowler then change his form? Is he perhaps an expert at disguising himself?

For the fact is that some of the features the women are most insistent upon—as for example black hair closely cropped and a zapata moustache—cannot be reconciled with others, long blond hair like a surfie's, thin pale beard, etc. The various images have been further sorted and amalgamated, and so we have the prowler's three faces, one young, one middle-aged, one old, rather like that mysterious portrait attributed to Titian in which the three heads of youth, maturity, and old age rise from a single trunk and look in three different directions— a whole lifespan, as it were, telescoped into the space of a single frame. In Titian's case the triple portrait has a pendant, a reflection, in
which the three human heads are replaced by those of animals: lion, fox, and dog.

But to return to the identikit pictures. What seems strangest is that when the sharply detailed memories of these women have been laid one over the other to produce a composite picture, the face that emerges is both immediately recognizable (because typical) and at the same time quite useless as a key to identification. The three faces are clichs. They look like everyone and no-one. Blondish baby-faced youth, lean, shy-looking, with the beginnings of a moustache—student, bank clerk, apprentice plumber, railway porter. Clean-cut young married with short back and sides—an architect perhaps, or a schoolteacher or swimming-pool contractor, someone in advertising or the Town Clerk's office. Older man, distinguished-looking but with a hint of looseness about the mouth; might be a travelling salesman, a green-keeper, or a professional soldier recently cashiered or the owner of a small grocery business.

But these images will get us nowhere. Half the male population of the suburb, of the city even, might move without difficulty into these familiar outlines.

What does it mean?

Are there, quite simply, three prowlers of different ages? Or are the women's memories in some way inaccurate—or not so much inaccurate as so creative, so deeply stimulated, that they have added to their experience and remade it, so that what they reproduce is not what they saw at the moment of the attack (some of them can have seen very little) but what sprang into their minds as a visual equivalent of what their hands encountered in darkness, rough cloth, metal, the coarseness of hair, of what forced itself into their nostrils as an unforgettable but unidentifiable odour, and into their ears as a series of obscene monosyllables or grunts or beery endearments. These details do not interest the police; they can do nothing with them.

“His breath on my neck"—what use is that?

“His body was so hot—like an oven.”

“There was a smell of mice.”

“Salt. His hand tasted of salt.”

The visual features of the identity-kit picture are attempts to render, in another language, what the women did not see but sensed, or
heard, or smelled, and the translations are clichs, they derive from the common pool of their reading or from the movies. What the identikit pictures provide us with is not the composite picture of a prowler— some citizen engaged at this moment in delivering bread or sealing envelopes in an office or teaching his kids to box with a bag under the house—but a picture of the man these women fear most, or know best, or most long for, or have dreamed of once on some remote occasion and forgotten.

It is no coincidence that if we treat these pictures as caricatures, the man who most resembles the victim's assailant is often a member of her own family: a father, an uncle, a brother-in-law, a son.

A burglary takes place. Nothing much is stolen. But a man, turning afterwards to the drawer where his handkerchiefs are kept, discovers that one of them has been used. He stares at the patch of quite ordinary wetness and feels panic. Not disgust but panic. As if his house could never be his own again; as if it stood roofless and could never again offer him refuge or protection because there is no such thing in the world; as if he himself stood naked. Whimpering with shame he tumbles the handkerchiefs out on to the floor and removes them with a stick.

What unnerves him is not the patch of wetness itself, but what it forces upon him—the fact of the burglar's ordinariness and at the same time his utter strangeness. He has before him the man's bodily juices, but no face, no name, and it comes home to him that he lives among strangers, more than half a million of them, who might at any moment break the unwritten contract and force their way into his bedroom, open his tallboy, put to use one of his initialled handkerchiefs.

Later he comes to think of his reaction as excessive and finds it difficult to isolate the precise cause of his panic. It seems irrational. But it is precisely this irrationality that continues to exert an influence on him. When he thinks of the incident he burns with shame.

So it is that many of the attacks—perhaps even the majority—go unreported.

Each morning nearly a dozen women appear at the office of the Incidents Squad with information they will impart only to Senior Detective Pierce in person.

Senior Detective Pierce has become a popular figure in our little world. Smilingly reassuring when he appears on television, grim and determined when he is snapped at press conferences, he is a sort of prowler in reverse who has caught the imagination of the public in much the same way as the prowler himself. What did we do, we ask ourselves, before we had Senior Detective Pierce?

Even the genial detective's two small boys have entered the pantheon. They are called Sam and Harry, aged ten and seven.

They bear no clear resemblance to Senior Detective Pierce but are said to be the living picture of his dead wife, whose absence lends a touch of pathos to the policeman's rugged assurance and brings to an image that is otherwise all assertiveness and power an engaging ambiguity. It allows him to be a family man, very solid and reliable, but also turns him loose.

The two boys, tough-looking blonds, keep the mother's figure clearly in view (did she really look like that?) but in their cocky imitation maleness it is disturbingly redefined. When Senior Detective Pierce and his boys are photographed together at a swimming carnival or at one of our local rugby matches, this simultaneous absence and presence of the wife and mother constitutes a mystery that women respond to (and some men as well) without at all knowing what is in play. Around the rough edges of the two boys, all grazed elbows and knees, glows the aura of the missing wife, and the hard outline of Senior Detective Pierce, ex-lifesaver and League forward, is softened as he stoops to see that Sam's windcheater is buttoned, or with the corner of a handkerchief wet with spit, cleans ice-cream from Harry's shirt-front, by the lineaments of the tender, all solicitous mother.

“How are Samnharry?” women tend to enquire as a way of easing themselves into their story, slipping thus, as they might see it, into the role of family friend or next-door neighbour.

Then immediately, breathlessly, before the proud father can answer: "I have
seen the prowler!”

The information provided by many of the victims has no basis in fact. That is quite clear. But it is not therefore false. They
have
seen the prowler, but in one of those dreams that nightly crowd the streets of our suburb with a life as intense, as busy, as any it knows by day. Here is just one of them.