The Shark Net Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE SHARK NET

  Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne and grew up on the West Australian coast. His short stories and novels have been widely translated, won many national and international prizes and been adapted for film, television, radio and the theatre. He has also written plays, screenplays, journalism and film criticism and edited two international anthologies of stories.

  The Shark Net won the 2000 Brisbane Courier-Mail Book of the Year Award, the 2000 Western Australian Premier’s Non-fiction Book Award and the 2001 Vision Australia Braille Book of the Year Award.

  REVIEWS OF ROBERT DREWE’S

  THE SHARK NET

  ‘In this magnificent and haunting memoir of murder, sharks and rubber goods, Robert Drewe proves himself too subtle and too adventurous a writer to settle for “the truth, plain and simple”. He creates instead a resurrection of his boyhood in Australia which is as ornamented, engaging and ambitious as any great novel.’

  JIM CRACE

  ‘Deft, nuanced, beautifully structured – the equal of the novels that have made Drewe one of Australia’s most loved and celebrated writers.’

  PETER CAREY

  ‘Captivating … A charming coming-of-age story with undertones of noir memoir. Drewe tracks brilliantly the emotional challenges of a coastal boyhood, Australian-style. Superb … Wonderful … Macabre.’

  New York Times Book Review

  ‘Suffused with a wonderfully achieved sense of menace … Drewe himself is a master of the undertow, and his subtle, suggestive recollections transform boyish tales into a far more original, affecting meditation on the nature of childhood itself.’

  The Guardian

  ‘So very sharp, atmospheric, brutal and deeply moving. There is a strange and haunting sweetness in the voice of the narrator, a clean wondering charm … It is beautiful.’

  CARMEL BIRD, Australian Book Review

  ‘Like Albert Camus’s North Africa, blinding in its brightness.’

  New York Times

  ‘A grace-filled and captivating achievement. Drewe offers gardens of literary delight, ripe with tragedy, zaniness, color, texture, vibrancy and, above all, high comedy … Drewe has created something very special – something that is at once full of wonderful humor and genuine sorrow.’

  San Diego Union-Tribune

  ‘Strange and utterly recognisable. He makes childhood alive with the wondrousness of its own time and place.’

  DRUSILLA MODJESKA, The Australian’s Review of Books

  ‘This beautifully limpid work … is a marvellous combination of personal memoir, reportage and imaginative recreation … A compelling read.’

  ROD MORAN, The West Australian

  ‘Nothing short of dazzling … Deft, poignant and very funny.’

  CASSANDRA PYBUS, Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘A beautifully told memoir of a time, a place and a city.’

  Sunday Times

  ‘This fine, moving book is both a charming and funny memoir … and an unsettling true-crime story … His ability to create vivid pictures with a handful of words is virtually unmatched.’

  Booklist, American Library Association

  ‘Damnably compelling … Drewe stakes out new literary territory.’

  Kirkus Review

  ‘This is not a book about sharks … But Drewe writes so well and creates or recreates his early life with such sensitivity that I don’t think it matters.’

  Literary Review

  ALSO BY ROBERT DREWE

  Fiction

  The Savage Crows

  A Cry in the Jungle Bar

  The Bodysurfers

  Fortune

  The Bay of Contented Men

  Our Sunshine

  The Drowner

  Grace

  The Rip

  Non-Fiction

  Walking Ella

  Montebello

  Plays

  The Bodysurfers – the Play

  South American Barbecue

  As Editor

  The Penguin Book of the Beach

  The Penguin Book of the City

  ROBERT DREWE

  THE SHARK NET

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  PART ONE: COMMITTAL

  PART TWO

  1: BLACK BOYS

  2: SATURDAY NIGHT BOY (I)

  3: YELLOW SAND

  PART THREE

  1: THE REAL WORLD

  2: SATURDAY NIGHT BOY (II)

  3: THE FULL MOON CLICHÉ

  4: SATURDAY NIGHT BOY (III)

  PART FOUR

  1: PHENOBARBITONE

  2: TRIAL

  3: THE BOY THE COLOUR OF SAND

  4: THE MURDERER’S WIDOW RECALLS THE EXECUTION

  5: THE VIEW FROM THE ESPLANADE HOTEL

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Penguin Notes for Reading Groups are available for this title

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This edition first published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 2000

  Montebello material added 2012

  Copyright © Robert Drewe, 2000

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228445-3

  For Jan and Bill

  Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear,

  And he shows them pearly white.

  Just a jack-knife has Macheath, dear,

  And he keeps it out of sight.

  BERTOLT BRECHT, THE THREEPENNY OPERA

  AND LOUIS ARMSTRONG, ‘MACK THE KNIFE’

  You can only predict things after they have happened.

  EUGÈNE IONESCO, RHINOCEROS

  One night at a time when people were being mysteriously murdered where we lived, and the police had just fingerprinted my father and me, he started singing an old Bing Crosby song on our way home from the police station.

  Where the blue of the night

  Meets the gold of the day,

  Someone waits for me.

  It gave me a start. He didn’t sing very often and in the circumstances it sounded bizarre. I wondered whether his mind had snapped.

  Our live
s at this stage were in a chaotic condition. Our peaceful neighbourhood was in an uproar, and for its own reasons my family was in a state of shock.

  A boy I knew had been one of the murder victims. One of the murder weapons had belonged to another friend of mine. Everyone seemed to know someone who had been killed.

  Of course my father was just crooning an old song, one with a different, romantic, meaning to the one which had struck me …

  PART ONE

  COMMITTAL

  It’s a different sunlight – harsher, dustier, more ancient-looking – that enters courtrooms. Streaked by this ominous light, guarded by two big uniformed cops and hunched in his old-fashioned blue pin-stripe suit with the curling lapels, the prisoner looked different too. He was uglier, smaller, and, with the eyes of the courtroom on him, even more self-conscious than usual. He looked like a criminal in a B-movie or in Dick Tracy. He really was the stereotype of a crook. Even so, for my own reasons I was having trouble fitting the headline Maniac Killer At Large to him.

  The hearing droned on, the murder evidence piled up, and the voices of authority and retribution slid back into the warm hum of a Perth spring afternoon. In the dusty sunbeams my Pitman’s shorthand symbols danced before my eyes. I was writing something down, recording some legal side-issue which the prosecutor and the magistrate were batting back and forth, and my sentence just petered out. I stared at my notebook thinking how strange those hieroglyphics were, those funny upward-and-downward chicken scratchings. And then they didn’t seem odd at all. I didn’t see them any more.

  I was so keyed up, so confused, depressed and, yes, also elated by recent events, so tired of experiencing the extremes of emotion, that my mind had given up and drifted off into a semi-conscious daze. For a while I forgot where I was, what I was doing, what was happening.

  It felt like I’d been out to it for at least an hour but it must have been only a minute or so before I snapped awake. The tapping of the court typist, accusingly loud, brought me round. Then everything flooded back. The dry legal voices rang louder in my head. I heard again the car horns out on the street, the trucks rattling over the Barrack Street Bridge, the screech of a train’s brakes in the station below.

  How could I do that? I felt my heart pounding. Had I fainted? Had anyone noticed? It didn’t seem so. Up there in front of me again was the focus of all the room’s – and the city’s – attention and emotion. Of course he hadn’t gone away; he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Everyone believed he was as good as convicted of multiple murder. I was trying to stay objective, but I thought so, too. Then again, I told myself, put anyone in the dock and they look guilty of something; especially those middle-class first-timers who sprang blithely up the steps – the spruce church wardens, scoutmasters and stockbrokers. The instant they gripped the dock rail and faced the music their faces went red or ashen.

  This instantaneous blushing or blanching – like the ominous sunlight – was one of the many interesting courtroom observations I’d made in my short time as an apprentice reporter on the West Australian. From my Press-table vantage point as assistant to the police-courts reporter, Jim Dollimore (a shorthand wizard of twenty-three), I’d noticed how the most minor petty-sessions court, the most trivial charge, had the same humbling effect. Even a negligent-driving charge in the Fremantle traffic court would do it. It didn’t take the presiding presence of a magistrate or judge. Well before the start of proceedings, the courtroom’s stern demeanour and furnishings and coat of arms – that powerful combination of law, history, punishment and varnished timber – had awed and mystified them. As much as by their current adverse circumstances they looked crushed by important-looking wood.

  This certainly applied to the small, frowning figure in the dock. Only because I knew him, and he was sitting up there in front of me, living and breathing and looking anxious (if oozing criminality!), was I able to still give him, if only for a second or two, the benefit of the faintest doubt.

  The odd thing was that after nearly two days of undramatic and convoluted detective-speak (‘Whilst in attendance I ascertained that a male person had been shot in the head whilst lying in bed by a person in that immediate vicinity’), and the prosecutor’s low-key delivery, it was strangely, cruelly, easy to forget that the charge he faced involved someone else I’d known, a boy who was now dead.

  But then, like some legal afterthought, the victim’s name would suddenly come up again in proceedings. Oh, yes … him. And with a sickening shock I’d remember that the subject of the police photographs on the court clerk’s table, Exhibit 14 – the shattered head, the blackened mess of blood and matter – was a friend of mine.

  Throughout the first day of the committal hearing in the Perth police court the top photograph of Exhibit 14 was visible from my seat. It wasn’t one of the more grisly ones. This wasn’t one of the full body or head shots. It was a 10 x 8 inch glossy print of my friend’s narrow wooden bed on the back veranda of the student boarding house where he was shot that summer night – the evening of Australia Day – while he was fast asleep.

  I couldn’t stop glancing towards the photo even though members of his family were in the court and I felt bad about them catching me looking.

  The sheets, mattress and pillow in the photograph were black with his blood and more blood was pooled on the cement floor. The veranda was narrow, more an open porch leading from the kitchen door to the laundry and lavatory, and the bed-head was only about three feet from the lavatory door. There was barely room for the bed and a small table and a couple of unmatched cane chairs at the foot of the bed. It was rudimentary student accommodation, and hot-weather student accommodation at that.

  In front of the bed a clothesline had been strung between two veranda posts, and a sheet was pegged to the line as a makeshift curtain, perhaps intended to give a little privacy to the outdoor sleeper but more likely in this case, I thought, to keep the sun’s rays from waking him too early after a late night.

  To get uninterrupted access to the boy on the bed, some person had hurriedly twisted the sheet up on the line rather than remove it altogether. It hung there like a chrysalis. I wondered if this person had been a detective or an ambulanceman. Or the murderer.

  For efficiency’s sake the authorities had decided to try the prisoner on this particular murder charge alone. In the unlikely event that it failed they had plenty of other charges to fall back on. During the first day and a half of the hearing I almost forgot about the other murders.

  I was also forgetting the detailed confession. I remembered it, however, late in the afternoon of the second day. The prosecutor was outlining how cooperative the defendant had been, how thoroughly he’d re-enacted his crimes for the detectives, how willingly he’d revisited all the murder scenes and even recalled the exact light stanchion (No. 324) nearest to where he’d thrown one of the rifles from the bridge – enabling the police divers, after three hours’ effort in sixteen feet of water, to recover it from the silt of the riverbed.

  As this helpful act was revealed – the barnacle-encrusted rifle was lying there on the exhibit table, next to a bloodstained dressing-gown – a strange expression spread across the defendant’s face. In my experience of courts, brief as it was, your average alleged murderer would have shaken his head at this point, or frowned, or simply looked blank. But this one looked grateful. His frown vanished and his mouth twisted into a modest but comradely grin. He nodded his head in agreement. As odd as it seemed, he cheered up.

  More than anything his manner reminded me of one of those unspectacular but useful utility players interviewed by a sportscaster after a winning football game. One of the team at last, and quietly pleased and proud to have his efforts finally recognised.

  For security, I supposed, as much as for architectural reasons, the windows of the Victorian building housing Perth’s petty-sessions and committal courts, as well as the State’s police headquarters, detective bureau and central police station, had been built high in the thick ston
e walls, about twelve feet off the floor.

  Opening onto a grim asphalt yard, where the prisoners brought from Fremantle Prison were unloaded from the Black Marias and taken to the courts’ holding cells, the windows faced west over the lockup and a phenol-smelling toilet block and along Roe Street, infamous since the eighteen-nineties’ gold rushes as the street of police-sanctioned brothels, and only recently closed down.

  Although the panes were smeared by years of grit and soot from the adjoining traffic bridge and railway station, by mid-afternoon on the second day of the hearing the defendant was sitting in the dock wreathed in sunshine. The dock faced west, too. Now and then he’d patiently inch his chair out of the glare and his guards would look more alert for a moment and make self-conscious adjustments to their own chairs and postures and already grim facial expressions. He had to squint into a stream of rays to see me sitting below the windows, bent over my notebook.

  Suddenly I felt him staring at me. I’d been avoiding his eyes, hoping he wouldn’t recognise me, but a moment later he winked. I winked back, then I felt a hot wave of embarrassment that quickly turned into anger at myself. I hoped that no one, not the magistrate or the other reporters, and especially not the victim’s family, had seen me.

  I told myself I should have ignored his wink and looked away. But in the split-second when I’d weighed up my response, I decided he was in such deep shit that it would be uncharitable and somehow treacherous not to wink back.

  And there was another thing, something pretty horrible: part of me had also responded gratefully to recognition from a celebrity – even from the worst type of celebrity. For a second I felt recognised, in the centre of things. To be a participant instead of an observer went totally against my training as a reporter. But I liked the feeling.