Ghost Child by Caroline Overington Read Free Book Online Page B

been one out of the box. Kids just don’t get bashed by strangers, or at least they didn’t then, and certainly not at five years of age. You get your perverts flashing at kids in the park, you get your drug problems, but there isn’t any research anywhere that suggests that five-year-old white kids in the Australian suburbs get beaten by strangers. No, the data tells us this: when a person who is what we call ‘vulnerable’ – a homeless man, for example – gets hurt, there’s a real chance it’ll be at the hands of a stranger. A group of drunks mightlose their heads on the way home from the pub and give him a kick while he’s lying in the doorway. But when you’ve got a person who is not classified as vulnerable – that is, when they are a five-year-old kid, enrolled in the local school, living at home with their mother and their siblings – and they get hurt, well, it’s almost never a stranger. In almost every case, the perpetrator is somebody known to them.
    I said, ‘I’d like to see the bedroom.’
    I’d moved by now to the sofa opposite Lisa and, although it was sagging and my knees were up under my chin, I could see most of the house. Directly in front of me, there was the hall where I’d first seen Lauren. I knew enough about houses on the Barrett Estate to know that if I walked down that hall, I’d find a bathroom, a toilet and three bedrooms. Nobody had anything else: there were no studies, no sewing rooms, no indoor gyms, not then.
    When I was a kid, there were no houses like the Cashman place on the Barrett Estate. Come to that, there were no houses at all on the Barrett Estate. It was just land, acres of land. We used to get told that it would never be developed, that it would always be there for kids to roam across, and in any case, there were rumours that the land was contaminated because they used to test munitions there. Nobody could be sure how much lead was in the soil. Then demand for housing skyrocketed and some time in the 1970s, the Commonwealthreleased the land to developers who carved it up and built upon it. These developers stuck billboards on the freeway, advertising the place as a new ‘satellite city’ that would be perfect for young families. In those days, a perfect estate was one with straight roads and proper kerbing, and nobody cared much about the natural environment. When they cleared the joint, they left exactly six gum trees standing.
    I got up – it wasn’t easy since I’m a big guy, and that sofa was collapsed – and walked down the hall. Lisa was right behind me. I did as I’d been taught to: I made mental notes of everything . On the left, behind the first door, there was the bathroom. It was nothing extraordinary, just pale pink tiles on the walls, shampoo bottles lined up on top of the shower cubicle. Behind the next door there was a toilet – a separate toilet, they call it now – with an empty Harpic Blu Loo hanging in the bowl. Next to that there was a pile of magazines in a basket: TV Week, New Idea, Wheels , that kind of thing, nothing that got me thinking anything was too weird. On the window ledge there was a can of air freshener. The smell was like lemons.
    On the other side of the hall, to my right, there was the first of the three bedrooms. It was beige like all the rest, but still obviously a girl’s room. The bed was pink and the curtain was a purple sheet, and in amongst the toys, well, there was Lauren. She startled me, maybe because she’d been so quiet. I’d totally forgotten abouther, but there she was, sitting on her bed with a doll – a naked doll with close-cropped hair – both of them staring back at me. I didn’t speak to her. It wasn’t a good idea, not without a social worker, but I did catch her eye. Her expression was troubling. It was something like: Am I in trouble now? But you get that with kids who are always getting it in the neck from their parents, and I’d reckoned that these Cashman kids were always being told