Missing in never never l.., p.27
Missing in Never Never Land, page 27
She did, feeling even more self conscious. He sat her back on his lap, wearing only her panties and he fondled the little pimples on her chest as he called them. It did feel nice and she could feel that hard lump in his trousers again. Then he picked her up and carried her over to the bed where he lay her down, pulling off her panties and saying he wanted to look at that place.
She let him and felt him put his fingers inside, much further than before. At first it felt nice but then it hurt as he pushed in further. Then he took his clothes and she saw him standing there with his huge red thing, she had seen it before but she had never seen it with all his clothes off.
He told her to stay lying on the bed and he was going to have a feel inside that place with his thing. She did not want him to do that, she knew now it was a thing that only grown-ups did and she was still a little girl. She shook her head and tried to say no. But he held her down on the bed and put his body on top of hers. He forced legs apart and pushed and pushed there with his thing. She started to cry, saying to stop, he was really hurting, but he would not listen, it was like he pretended not to hear her.
He just kept pushing and pushing and it hurt more and more. Finally something gave way and it went right inside her. Then he lay on top of her pushing it in and out, over and over again, until suddenly he gave a big shudder and lay still.
After, when he got dressed, he told her she must never tell her parents about this or they would both get into big trouble. She promised not to, she did not know what else to say.
Then she fixed him some dinner. He seemed in a hurry to go, even though she said he should stay to say hello to her parents. They ate quickly and she thought he would go after that. But, just as he was leaving, he said he had changed his mind and he could stay a bit longer.
He brought her back up to her room, saying he wanted to try it out with her one more time before he left. So he did it again. This time it did not hurt quite so much. Soon he finished again with another big shudder.
As he dressed to go he said to her. “I thought I would have to wait another year until you were ready. But, even though you are a year younger than your sister was when I first did it to her, you were ready too and I really liked it with you, just as much as with her. Soon you will learn to like it too.”
Now she glimpsed a terrible truth. She asked him, “What do you mean; you did it to my sister?”
He said, “Last time I was here, a couple days before she died, I took her for a walk in the forest, down by the lake. When we got there, I made her take her clothes off, just like with you. Then I made her lie down on a blanket I brought and I did it with her the same as with you.
“She was bigger and stronger and she tried to fight me off. But I held her down until I had finished. She was cross and crying afterwards saying I should not have done that.
“I told her she would soon get used to it and enjoy it, that we would do it lots more times until she learned to like it as much as I did.
“She ran away back to the house and I went back to the army base because I had to leave that night. I was sad when I heard she had died as I would not get the chance to do it with her anymore.
“But once I got back from overseas I decided to come and visit you to see if you were ready to try it too. It is lucky that I found you here all by yourself so I did not have to wait to try it with you. You even have her name now. So it is like one Cathy has gone away and I have the second Cathy in her place, just as good as the first one.”
Cathy stood looking at his gloating face. She could not understand how she had ever liked him. Now she understood what had happened on that day, that what he had done was the reason why her sister had died.
She felt white hot rage towards him. Despite her small stature she screamed at him. “Get out you murdering bastard. You raped my sister and she killed herself. You did not care that she had died. The only thing you cared about was doing the same to me as well. I will not tell my parents because I could not bear for them to know. But you will never, ever touch my again, if you do I will kill you, I promise you that.”
She ran to the kitchen and got the biggest knife she could find and stood in the corner waving at him lest he try to come near her again.
He looked at her, shrugged, then got in the car and drove away. When he was gone she felt so sick and disgusted with herself, even though she pretended she was happy to see her parents when they came home, determined they should never know.
Anne got to the end of her writing of this small part after three tortuous days, it was only five pages of printed text, but she felt she had lived a lifetime in writing these words, telling and reliving a monstrosity done by an evil man.
She placed herself in the mind of Cathy, in the circle of this man’s comfort and imagined how it might have gone. She felt Mark’s arms tighten around Cathy as she worked her way through the story, telling every intimate detail. When she had finished the most awful part he recorded she turned her face back to Mark and he said to her, “He deserves to die. One day soon he will.”
The diary told Anne that Cathy pushed her finger to Mark’s lips, telling him to calm down, she would never let her Uncle find her or touch her again and how she had watched unspeaking until Mark’s rage abated.
When Mark was calm again she continued her story; how her life had drifted out of control after that, with this terrible secret that she could not tell anyone about how this man destroyed both her childhood and her sister’s life. She was sure, though she could not prove it, that her sister went off in the night and flung herself into the water of the lake to wash away the shame.
She did not know if her sister planned to kill herself or if she had drowned by accident, but the end result was the same; her uncle had effectively murdered her. Cathy knew but there was no way she could tell her parents without destroying their lives as well. So she had borne a secret no child should ever have to carry and it had torn her own life apart.
All the time she spoke, recounting this later memory in detail, Mark kept an arm around her gently hugging her and running his fingers lightly through her hair to comfort her as one would a child.
When she finished there were no tears in her eyes. Even though part of her anger remained she said she felt comforted for saying it to someone at last. Lastly she told him of the new letter, coming from her mother to Adelaide, telling of her Uncle’s planned visit and how she needed to escape. That was why she had asked him to bring her with him.
Mark hugged her tighter, saying, “If it will help I will go back to Adelaide and take him for a drive. No one will ever see him after that and he will never bother you again. I will put him where no one will ever find him. That is what he deserves for what he did to you.”
She shook her head. “Please do not do that. Killing him can never undo what he did, but it would hurt others. It is enough I have told someone. I have been trapped with this secret for far too long.”
It seemed that Mark had accepted her request and let the story continue but then again perhaps not. Marks wrote and underlined his own comment at the end of this section. It seemed a fitting close.
‘He deserves to die, very slowly and very, very painfully. Perhaps to burn that part slowly while he watches would be fitting.’
Anne felt a strange concordance with this man, she should abhor his use of violence to gain justice, but yet she applauded his sentiment, perhaps even his intent for action. She wondered if he had spoken these words aloud to Cathy and made her afraid he would really do this thing. But is seemed more likely he had written this later, perhaps after she was gone and at that time he said no more and let her story continue.
After this, as she lay beside him, she told him of her life as a prostitute, selling her body to men for money was the only way she knew to regain a measure of control, until finally she needed to end that too. So now she had come to Australia to start a new life as a completely different person.
When she finished she put his hand between her legs, holding it there and saying. “I have never done this with a person I really liked. But I am ready to try it with you.”
Mark shook his head. “No, I would be lying if I said I do not want that with you. But, for now, all that matters is that I am your friend. I would not be your true friend if I took advantage of you in this place. You have bared your soul and told me your most awful secret.
“Tonight I must tell you something of me just as dark and see if you can still like me the way I like you. I will tell you the story of Belle and how I killed her with my own hand, and how, in doing so, I killed the thing I most loved.”
Chapter 42 – Fragments of Nothing
That was it really, the end of the story of Cathy.
Mark’s diary told of their next night very briefly; them lying together in a swag under the stars, him telling her the story of Belle, how he had shot her, and of the awful grief and remorse which followed. She had comforted him with her body, the way that only a woman could, lovers at last, taking his pain inside herself and giving a little healing in return.
The diary did not record him telling her about the other deaths he had caused. That suggested he had not told her of these, perhaps he thought this was a truth too bad for even her to hear.
The story ended with the words,
“I lay with her under a starry desert sky and bared my soul, I spoke of Belle and how I loved her, yet how I killed her, and how that killing of what I loved was now killing my soul. There was something in Cathy that was like my Belle, it was a look, as if she saw into my soul and judged me not.
“Cathy comforted me as only a woman can, this woman whose soul was torn by her own anguish. She took my body inside her own. I emptied my seed within her and it felt as if some part of the badness in my soul was emptied too. She loved me with her body.
“As I held her I was comforted. In some small measure I hope I gave her comfort too though a part of me fears I betrayed our friendship by taking what too many men had taken before.
“But, after it was done, she said this night it was different, she had given herself to me with love, something she had never done before. I hope our shared pleasure has given her healing. But a part of me knows fear for her; fear that I have added another layer to her pain, giving her my pain to share.”
After those lines telling of them as lovers, giving and returning love, Cathy was gone. The only other time her name appeared was a brief mention in a poem. It was placed after a page on which he had drawn a picture of an eagle in the sky and a dingo standing alone and proud on a ridge top, mouth open and howling at the night sky.
Anne wondered if it was symbolic of the eagle flying away and him, left alone yet again, howling into the desolation.
The final entry with her name was poetic and cryptic.
Cathy vanished I know not where
I searched for her and found only air
Perhaps she has gone to a place in the sky
A place to which only the eagles can fly
I hope I have not harmed her
In my dreams I have fear
That something terrible has happened to her.
But where she is now I have not any clue
In heaven or hell, only God knows what is true
I wish her well in this life or the next
I most wish to hold her and again feel her breath
But still with her leaving I have her wise words
‘I have started again, Mark, so also must you
One day you will find her, your own new queen
You will travel with her to a place never seen
Would that queen was me, perhaps in time it can be
But first I must heal myself, mend my own broken soul
For a beginning of this I thank you, my friend of all worlds’
Then on the same page under the poem was a single line that may have referred to her uncle. ‘One day he will pay, I will make it so’
So Anne had a detailed picture in part, three days of their trip in the diary, an intimate and detailed account of what Cathy had told him of her own rape and life as a prostitute. This story was so explicit that it seemed as if, after she was gone, Mark recorded every word as she had spoken it, so others could know of the awfulness done to this child.
After Cathy told him of her life the story jumped straight to the intimate account of the night when they became lovers. It must have been a subsequent night, probably the next night, but that was only a guess.
There was no description of them leaving Coober Pedy on the morning after the party, though others confirmed that they had, their holding hands at breakfast, hugging their hosts and promising to come again, then a last sight of them driving away towards Alice Springs.
There was no clear record of them being in any other place. That final night was not a story about a physical place where they became lovers, nor about the act itself. It was a story about an emotional connection, a second part of their joint healing as she took his body within her own and gave comfort to his soul’s pain. And, in a strange way, it also seemed to be a closure to the story of Belle, as if Mark saw something in this woman that was of the other, a look and a kind friendship. It seemed to Anne that, when he was with Cathy, a truth was told and accepted and that gave him a way forward.
But Cathy, so alive and vibrant, just vanished. All Anne held in her hands to mark this passing was fragments of nothing.
Was she alive of dead? The story gave no clue. Perhaps Mark had really not known. After the tenderness of their few days together it was impossible to believe he set out to kill her. Yet she was gone and tragedy seemed to stalk all the companions of this man.
So it could be so, that she was dead, but Anne was determined not to abandon this one to the same lost fate as the others, a truly lost girl. She lived in hope that Cathy had just vanished somewhere to escape the story she could never bring herself to tell her family. Perhaps she was fearful of what Mark would do to her Uncle if he ever met him.
This part of Mark’s dairy told a deeply personal story of this girl, a story she had told to only one man in the confidence of a night together. Anne understood she did not have Cathy’s permission to it share with others, not even Cathy’s own family, it would betray her clear intent after all she had done to keep her awful secret.
Chapter 42 - And Along Came Susan
Anne felt she had travelled as far along the path as Marks words would take her in the search for Cathy. She was a highly significant person in Mark’s life, as evidenced by the pages he had written about her. But she appeared for but a short time, bright though her impression was, seen like a shooting star lighting the night sky. And, once gone, no shadow of her presence remained.
But Mark’s diary story still had fifty pages to run, concluding with Susan, who occupied most of the last thirty pages, only finishing on the last night. So Anne had two tasks yet to do to complete telling the story in this ‘Diary of the Lost Girls’ the title her mind had assigned Mark’s book.
The first was to come to know Susan through Mark’s eyes, in the hope that this understanding might give some further insights into what followed. Some of Susan’s reactions and actions were surely driven by the Mark she had discovered in the month period in which she had known him. Perhaps this book would even give clues to where Susan went in the end.
Anne did not believe this, but felt she still must search it, just in case. More, she felt she had to try to understand the contradictions at the heart of this story. Why, for all but one day, had he treated her as a most loved person, but for a final day he treated her as an animal, trussed as wild and dangerous. He made her believe he killed others and would do the same to her, that he would callously murder her and give her body to the crocodiles. He let her spend a day and night in abject terror believing this. Her fear was so real, that she had killed him, seeing this as her only escape. But, when this was done, she stayed fiercely loyal to him and his memory, seeking for his name to remain unsullied.
Anne thought it was in part to protect her unborn children, but she was sure it was more than that. What happened on that last day and night was an enigma within an enigma, the enigma of Mark, the why h did what he did, and within it the enigma of Susan, both before and after she killed him.
In Susan’s telling of the story, captured on the tape, this part was most scant. She told in detail of the phone texts, she told of Mark tying her up, carrying her locked in the cooler box, of becoming his lover again on the last night in which she was a willing participant. She told how he returned her to captivity with the apparent intent of her death, after he told her his life story. She told finding the knife, using her seductive powers to lower Mark’s defences, seizing the opportunity to end it by ending him, the knife and the branch her weapons. She told of dragging his body to the billabong, not sure if he was really dead, and of watching the feeding frenzy as three crocodiles tore his body, limb from limb, until only blood and tiny scraps of flesh remained in the water. Then she told how she systematically hid all evidence of them being in this place, so all that remained was the box of buried passports and a few metal objects consigned to various watery graves. Last she told of how she had driven to Darwin, cleaned and left the car, and flown home, maintaining a fiction that all this had never been.
The chronology of this story was complete and verified. But something was missing, that ongoing story of ‘Why?’
Why had he treated her one way and then another, why had she done the same, what drove these reversals. Was it just two crazy irrational people or was there a layer of this story still hidden, a Russian Doll within a Russian Doll. Anne did not know if this book would give her the clues she sought but her job was unfinished until she tried to discover them. So she read and reread these last fifty pages, over and over, seeking understanding that refused to come.
Still gradually two things became clear, that there was no evidence of any girls after Cathy before Susan, whereas, before, brief presences of many were dotted through the narrative, most came and went quickly for temporary visits, a night or two, at most a week. He described these freely and intimately but with little emotion, “she was a good lay” was the sort of way he spoke.
