Congenital insensitivity to pain—when a soldier gets shot during war it may be counterproductive for the nervous system to radiate pain as there could be other, more fatal dangers to attend to at that moment.
Stockholm Syndrome—a psychological response that occurs when hostages or abuse victims bond with their captors or abusers. This psychological connection develops over the course of days, weeks, months or years of captivity or abuse.
Subfuscus’s dossier of evidence relating to a number of true cold case crimes
I’ve always been a detective and therefore hypervigilant in my surveillance or was it my hypervigilance that made me, by default, a detective? Perhaps it is this hypervigilance that has granted me the blessing and the curse of a photographic memory, although Dr Mourn alluded to PTSD. So, now I have given myself many names over the years because when you’ve murdered that one who bore that first name what does it matter—any name, many names will do. I go under the single name—Subfuscus—for I am now this someone sodden with the dark brown loam dug from tear-soaked graves. She, Subfuscus, came to me deep in the night. I heard the door opening and watched as she dragged the bulk of herself through the door and over to my bed to bestow her name on me. Bestowed as gift or curse? I don’t know as yet. But, before she left, she loomed her huge brown face over my bed and looked directly into my eyes and spoke straight into my face. Her words were, ‘Evil is that which is not given its due’.
***
I have investigated four major criminal cases during my lifetime—cases of incest, defamation, murder and one of serial mercy killings. Two are solved—that of ‘Great-uncle Phil the Kiddie Fiddler’ and the other I’ll call ‘Sex, Lies and the Stamp Collection’. The third case, ‘Matricide Most Foul’, can never be solved now but the incontrovertible evidence of the hairs on the back of my neck standing up (herewith referred to as the hbnsu-evidence-effect) and my dreams tell me I’ve been right all along. (Needless to say this is below even the threshold of circumstantial, let alone, admissible evidence.) Television crime shows have educated me and, as well as a detective, I have become an evidence analyst, a forensic pathologist, a forensic psychologist, a forensic psychiatrist, a criminal profiler, a coroner, attorney for both the defence and prosecution, judge, jury and executioner. (For, as you’ll see, I believe in capital punishment.) I thought if I solved these three crimes I could solve the fourth crime.
These three crimes are responsible for the fourth crime which Dr Mourn and I are trying to solve—the crime of myself. We’ve made the grim discovery that I am the kill site, the death zone, the crash site and full of corpses. (Although we are still not sure of the body count.) When I close my eyes I see the bodies all lined up, one after the other, safe in their open mass grave. I note their ages, the colours and design of their clothing, the length of their hair and so forth so I can approximate the dates of their deaths. Each one is a suicide or, more accurately, a mercy killing, and they have all been s/mothered. They are each curled fatally and foetally and I’ve placed them on their right sides to avoid putting strain on their hibernating hearts. They look very peaceful, almost embalmed, just like they are sleeping, laid out like a Death Row of Matryoshka Dolls. But I know there are others, left out somewhere, scattered around the place. I long to find them. In my guilt I’ve placed RIP—Rest In Promise—makeshift memorials above each body and I intend to honour my promise to never forget them, to never forget their suffering and to prosecute those responsible for their suffering. I’ve placed fresh flowers around each grave but I have not, as yet, covered them with the earth I am. Made of soil myself I will spread myself over them and sleep soundly down there with them all, my outstretched arms hugging into them in the hope of their forgiveness once I have honoured my promises.
Mysteriously, however, beside the five-year-old, there is a tiny, empty baby’s grave. Has somebody robbed the grave? I long to bring her home and give her a decent burial—maybe then I can let them all rest, cover them with my soft soil, consign us all to the earth. I don’t know where that baby’s body is or who has her. Where have I put her?
I have followed evidence trails and chains of custody, gathering scraps of information, memories, images, flashbacks, dreams scattered, willy-nilly, in a paperchase across The Swamp. I will write up all four cases in the hope of closing these cold cases, without any hope, however, of a conviction or of justice.
Case 1
‘Uncle Phil—The Kiddie Fiddler’
Evidence for the crime of incest
Definition of incest: Sexual relations between people classed as being too closely related to marry. The crime of having sexual intercourse with a parent, child, sibling or grandchild.
Evidence 1
There were three beds in a row on the long side-verandah of Phil’s house. When I was a child I had a Little Golden Book Collection and this was my interpretation of the ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ story; not just because of the numeral three but because two of the little girls, my cousins, had bleached blonde curls. I’ll call the older one Goldilocks 1 and the younger Goldilocks 2. I’d watched, with a queasy interest, as their mother bleached and curled their hair from infancy. I was some years older and, as I say, hypervigilant. I had my infallible hbnsu-evidence-effect even then.
My Family would visit the Phil Family each year. My bedroom was diagonally opposite to the Goldilocks’s beds and each night I would wait to watch Uncle Phil visit the beds of Goldilocks 1 and Goldilocks 2 but never the bed of the oldest, Dolores. (Dolores never had blonded or curled hair.) As I watched I’d compulsively repeat the refrain, ‘Her bed’s too big. Her bed’s too small but my bed’s just right’, and to counter this and calm myself, I’d silently chant, ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’ Mr Wolf wasn’t there reading bedtime stories to the girls so what was Mr Wolf doing all that time? The two beds he visited were some distance away from mine so I could never quite see or hear in the dark.
Dolores had the third bed, which was right in front of my door so I watched and waited but Mr Wolf never visited that bed. As a result of my investigations I now believe the reasons for this were twofold:
- Some nights a beautiful apparition, all vibrant blue, shimmering and pulsating light would sit at the end of Dolores’s bed, protecting her. I knew the face from the portrait of our dead great-grandmother which hung on the wall at ‘home’. She always looked directly into my eyes with such love. I’ve always wished I’d had the courage to speak to her.
- Through my research I have discovered that, apparently, sometimes these men leave one for their wives. One, to continue the control and to contain the situation, much as they have trained their wives to do.
Evidence 2
I have the vivid picture before me of the two Families sitting in the Phil’s lounge room around the television while Goldilocks 2 curled up under a blanket on Phil’s lap. The two of them sat this way for hours, both with their eyes closed and both making strange, strangled moaning and grunting noises. It was unsettling to say the least. I waited for someone to say something but the women, the mothers, walked around this scenario discussing the dinner menu and distributing cups of tea or coffee. I kept asking the question in my twelve-year-old mind, ‘What is wrong with this picture?’
Evidence 3
Uncle Phil had a special room. It contained a fantastic train installation—a whole world of railway tracks, tunnels, buildings, trees, cottages, train stations, little tin-toy people. How those miniature electric trains zipped around and around the tracks, whistling and choo-chooing behind a well-closed door.
Evidence 4
I must have been about twelve or thirteen when my mother, Foxglove, told me one Saturday morning that Uncle Phil was coming to stay for the weekend. I said, ‘Oh! I’ll do a painting for him’. I don’t know what possessed me to do what I did. Search as I might I have nowhere to go to understand this except to accept what Dr Mourn suggests—that I must have been living on and in some unconscious realm. In my little white room and at my little white desk I painted a picture I titled, in brown acrylic cursive script along the bottom, ‘Penii on crutches’. It was an oozing landscape of greys, browns and dirty greens that I called ‘The Swamp’ where many flaccid grey penii, at various stages of semi-erection, slumped over bifurcated tree-branch crutches. I do remember presenting it to Phil when he arrived but, although I have done much work with Dr Mourn on the subject, I remember nothing after that.
Evidence 5
Decades later I was staying at ‘home’ with my (parents), Drayne and Foxglove, and they were at the kitchen table having breakfast. (Note: I use the term ‘home’ in quotes as it was never my home.) Drayne was reading the newspaper, Foxglove was sipping her tea. Drayne read out an article about a local man on trial for incest. At this Foxglove tut-tutted and said, ‘Well, I know that no one in our social circle would be capable of anything like that’. My mouth opened, I didn’t plan or think, my kamikaze mouth full of Semtex spit opened and it said, ‘What about Uncle Phil?’ I was horrified by what I had said and awaited the bellows of abuse, even physical retribution. I waited. Nothing happened. Dead air! Everything went very still, nobody moved—a cone of silence descended over the breakfast table—Foxglove’s tea-cup halfway to her mouth, Drayne as if carved in stone. Then Foxglove said, ‘This tea’s gone cold. I think I’ll make another pot’. A frantic refrain caroused through my brain, ‘This tea’s too hot. This tea’s too cold. But this tea is just right’.
The only inference Dr Mourn and I can deduce from this—they knew! And the totally unacceptable corollary—they took us to that house every year knowing what was going on there.
Evidence 6? (Sidebar)
There is only one story and a couple of photographs of me as an infant. The one baby story Drayne ever told me was he left me with Uncle Phil one morning and, when he came back, he found me screaming inconsolably. He said nothing would calm me and he went on to say I was never the same child after that. There was always something heavy-laden (guilt-ridden?) in the way he told that story, repeated that story, as if it were an open question, as if he was looking for some answer that had always evaded him, as if I could provide that answer. (I have become a baby whisperer. I ask questions of that empty baby grave. I propose scenarios. I cajole. I implore. But there is never any response at all, never a cry, never a murmur, never a body.)
The two or three black-and-white Kodak happy-snaps from my infancy show me surrounded by my brother, sister and cousins. Everyone, except me, is smiling those fat-happy, say ‘cheese,’ 50s smiles-for-the-camera. I’m never smiling. I’m looking straight and belligerent into the camera behind which crouches Uncle Phil. My face seems to be saying, ‘There is something wrong with this picture and I don’t want to be in it’.
Evidence 7
Goldilocks 1 and Goldilocks 2 have both suffered addiction issues, eating disorders, relationship breakdowns and indulge in extremely promiscuous behaviour. Both have had to get special dispensation from Church and State to marry close relatives.
Evidence 8
After much soul-searching and many years with dear Dr Mourn we formulated a question together that gave me courage enough to pick up the phone and ask it. Calmly and softly I asked it of Dolores. I said, ‘I want to ask you a question. You don’t have to answer and if you do you only have to say “yes” or “no”. It is something that has been worrying me for years. We never need mention this ever again but I have strong memories of something untoward happening between your father and your sisters’.
Dead air!
Then she said, ‘“Yes!” and “Yes!” on both counts’. And then, mumbling a long-held hurt, ‘I always wondered why Daddy never got me to sit on his lap’.
Evidence 9
I visited the cemetery in the country town where Uncle Phil and The Family had lived for generations.
I visited Phil’s grave. He was what we used to call a wowser and loathed alcohol, cigarettes, bad and blasphemous language. I took a stubbie of Four X and a packet of Peter Stuyvesant with me. I stood over his grave. I drank half the stubbie and poured the rest onto his grave. I smoked a couple of ciggies and stubbed them out on his grave. ‘Rot to shit in Hell you bloody old paedophile bastard’. I prayed. Then I pissed on it. I bathed in the steam that rose as if it were holy smoke from frankincense and myrrh.
Evidence 10
The headstone did not read ‘Beloved husband and father’ it simply stated birth and death dates.
Evidence 11
One night, very late, the phone rang and it was Dolores—tanked as usual. She was crying and distraught and said, ‘You’ve got to tell my husband what we talked about—about Daddy. I have been trying to but I can’t’. So I had to disclose what I knew and what we’d spoken of, to her kindly and decent husband. He was sobbing, well and truly in his cups, when he said, ‘I loved that old man. I always respected him so much. I loved him. What am I going to do now?’
He put Dolores back on the phone and she told me her doctor wanted to have her committed to a psych ward for a while. I said, ‘You were groomed to hold it all together, to hold The Family together and take on your mother’s role. Sometimes you just have to let everything fall apart. Sometimes things need to just fall apart. Talk! Tell everybody everything. You have to stop pushing the poor old world around all by yourself’.
She has never rung me again but I occasionally find happy-family snaps of birthdays, anniversaries, wedding parties of her with her smiling sisters on Facebook.
Evidence 12? (Sidebar)
Foxglove was many years younger than Phil. They grew up together in a ‘close’ Family situation. Knowing what we now know of paedophiles’ predatory behaviour and the numbers of victims they abuse throughout their lifetimes, was Foxglove one of his first victims?
All the evidence has been collected, documented and forensically examined. I rest my case.
A Note about This Excerpt:
At a Mardi Gras event in Sydney in 1990, a lesbian who had read Working Hot asked me breathlessly, ‘Now that you have written the definitive lesbian erotica, what’s next?’ My mouth opened with nary a thought to protecting my niche market. I replied, ‘The definitive heterosexual erotica, I guess’.
The story published here is an excerpt from Fallon’s unpublished manuscript Love Zombie/Mattress Actress: The Definitive Heterosexual Erotica, which comprises four ‘reports from the trenches’—‘Subfuscus’, ‘Renford Raped Me?’, ‘Lucked-out with a Man Called Lucky’ and ‘Shark and the Making of the Mask’. Imagine it’s been written by Kathy Acker and James Joyce’s love child, on ecstasy—or, more probably, suffering the K-hole effects of ketamine: a knife in one hand, a pen in the other. By comparison, Fifty Shades of Grey looks like it was written by a super-groomer: an emotional and sexual misogynistic imbecile. Inspired by William Burroughs’ autobiographical vignettes in Naked Lunch, Love Zombie/Mattress Actress is a blackout tattoo taking up Pasolini’s extreme writing in Petrolio and repudiation of ‘the good story’. Instead he determined to construct ‘a form consisting simply of “something written”’. With Pasolini Fallon agrees: ‘Give me anything but that God of Boredom’s shibboleth, Good Writing’. Interrogating the definition of ‘female’ and its corollary—the impossibility of female sexuality—the subtextual question Love Zombie/Mattress Actress asks is: do women all suffer Stockholm Syndrome?