Josephine
Pennicott : Birthing the Demons
Josephine Pennicott was born in Tasmania, and spent her early childhood in Papua New Guinea. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a major in painting, and is a graduate of the Australian College of Journalism. Both Josephine's paintings and writings reflect her interest in myth, magic, fairytales, dreams, death and transformation. She has travelled widely throughout Europe, India and Asia. Josephine recently had her first book, Circle of Nine the first of a dark fantasy trilogy published by Simon & Schuster. Her following two books, Bride of the Stone, and A Fire in the Shell will be published in 2002 and 2003. She is a Scorpio, who loves animals and is happiest when she is home writing.
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.- William Ross Wallace, What Rules the World
We're still blaming mothers
- Joyce Flint (Jeffrey
Dahmer's mother)
There is no escape.
When you realize that fact there is a small measure of acceptance. A
slight, cooling breeze of relief... No escape. No escape. No escape.
Tears can flow then. Anger can escape at different times, but at least
these states are preferable to the early shock. The numbing denial.
No escape. Even the night is not a friend. Odd little memories come
creeping, whispering malevolently into your ear, waking you up screaming.
I'm as much as prisoner as he is.
Jim refuses to discuss it with me, as he has refused to discuss so many
things over the years, but I know that the same demons embrace him in the
night. I've heard the agonised sobbing into the pillow in the early hours
before dawn.
Last night I walked into a room. It felt like a room from my childhood,
but it was not familiar to me. Fresh flowers were in the vase, there was a
fire in the grate. The hearth, there was something on the hearth, cold, dark
and wet. An icy wet communication spurts in my veins. I know, I know what
the horrible thing is. Her. Bits of her. Skull and hair and brains and
blood, all over my nice clean hearth. Then I wake up with a rush and I begin
to cry quietly. But not quietly enough, for Jim hears. "Leave it, Evie," he
says wearily. I spend the rest of the night listening to the sounds of
traffic gradually increase, cats fighting on the roof next door, a light
shower of rain around 4am. Then light, gradually breaking.
No escape.
I lie there, trying not to cry, trying not to think, to remember her.
Him. Her. Her. Him.
I wait for dawn.
It is hard to believe that one act can alter so many people's lives,
that your routine can change so quickly overnight. And how, after that one
act all the old rules of the game have been replaced, but nobody has told
you the new ones. Yesterday, I walked into the butcher's on High Street,
thinking that Jim might like a nice roast. I couldn't remember the last time
I had cooked him a proper meal. There was once a time that I wouldn't have
gotten away with that. If a clean cloth wasn't on the table, butter in the
butter dish, fresh bread rolls and a cooked meal with four veg, he would
have been complaining. Now he doesn't seem to notice or care. We sit with
trays on our knees in front of the TV, eating scrambled egg, fish fingers,
finger food.
In the butcher's the conversation ceased as soon as I entered. Enid
McKillop and Rita Davies were there. I went to school with Rita. They said
hello. Their faces had that half interested, half embarrassed look, and they
hurried out together, clutching their bundles of white-papered meat, as if I
was a bad smell.
I cooked the lamb and vegetables. They were too soggy, and we ate on
trays in front of the TV. Once, I looked over at Jim, and he was sitting
there quietly crying.
That night I stood in the darkened sunroom, looking out the window at
the house across the street. Shadows surrounded it. The For Sale sign, dim
in the moonlight, mocked me of the change to come. I watched the shadows
move silently around the house for hours, remembering another distant night,
when those shadows had come to life and entered that house...
I asked the house for answers, for I had long given up on asking God. I
could feel the lamb sitting heavily in my stomach. I would have to take some
Normacol before I went to bed tonight. Steam from my breath frosted the
glass, and for a wild moment I thought I saw Joy sitting on her floral
outdoor sofa, a pile of glossy magazines beside her. She would often cut out
little recipes for me that she imagine that we would like to try. "Here's an
easy recipe for Thai coconut soup, Evie. Do you think that they will carry
the ingredients for it down at Warrens?"
"Bloody interfering old busybody," Jim never failed to complain.
"Probably only hoping for a free feed at our house." But I enjoyed the
little ritual, that small attention. My parents had long retired to the
warmth of a Queensland retirement village, and Joy's little clippings had
made me feel nurtured.
Our son Leslie had never taken to her. "She's a snob," he'd say if I
tried to encourage him to do chores for her. "She has evil eyes," he would
add. A part of me knew what he meant. Joy did have unusual eyes. Vivid blue,
hardly the eyes of an old woman approaching her 84th birthday. Perhaps there
had always been some ominous warning in those young girl's eyes that I had
failed to see. Then a darker thought. A memory I had once - for I had been
there - but had blocked out. What did those eyes look like when they had
found her? Were they open or closed?
It had been the flies that had warned me. A great swarming mass of
them. I could hear them as I stood behind the screen door. "Joy?" Jim had
been furious at me for not listening to him, for ignoring his commands to
stay home and not cross the street to see if Joy was alright. I hadn't seen
her for days. Jim sulked in front of one of his wildlife specials; gorillas
in the wild, or chimps, some monkeys anyway. Leslie had screamed at me when
I voiced my concerns out aloud. "Leave it Evie!" he said. "Don't go
interfering and encouraging the old bitch. You do too much for her now!" He
hadn't forgiven me for telling Joy that he would mow her lawns and do some
handiwork around the house. He'd been sulking for weeks over that one. Jim
and Leslie were like two peas in a pod at times. It was depressing...
It had been the flies on that hot summery day. I could hear them
buzzing as I wondered what to do. "Joy? I've made you some caramel slice," I
called, trying to balance the slice and the weekly magazines I had finished
with. The door behind the screen was ajar. Without thinking, I pushed it
open and stepped into the cool hallway I had been in a thousand times
before. There was a faint smell. Something rotten. Oh, God. I had been
preparing myself for this for years. I had always known when I had
befriended Joy there would come a day when I would visit her to find her
lifeless body in the bath, or in bed.
"Joy?" The flies buzzed angrily back at me. I could hear the loud
annoying tick of Joy's antique grandfather clock. I walked into the small
loungeroom, placing the plate of caramel slice down carefully on the table.
God, the place was such a mess. Drawers were pulled out, a broken glass lay
on the fire hearth. I pulled my cotton t-shirt up over my nose. I knew, but
I had to see. The rotten smell intensified as I approached the bedroom.
I had often sat, looking at the television, eyes fastened on the pages
of a book, trying to trace meaning and reason in my mind. If I hadn't nagged
him to help out next door. If I hadn't befriended Joy. If I hadn't sent him
to the local high school. If I had taken more attention of the reports from
his primary school of behavioural problems, of his fights with other
children. If he had not made friends with Jude Ward and Timothy Bailey. IF,
IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF. The word had seared into my brain.
IF I had bought him more pets. IF I had fed him less meat. IF I had been
able to have another child. IF we had never hit him to discipline him. IF we
had hit him harder when he was caught shoplifting. IF I had monitored his
television viewing, his Internet access. But there was one IF that I
inevitably returned to, l a one-way nightmare ending in a dirty truth. IF I
had never given birth to him. IF I had never conceived him.
The pregnancy had been far from easy. I had vomited constantly, head
always over a toilet bowl. That was how I remembered most of my pregnancy.
The smell, and the off-white colour of the porcelain. Even back then it was
as if my body had somehow known and tried to eject the dangerous seed it
nurtured. Then there were the nightmares. I would wake screaming, bathed in
sweat, the sheets soaked and Jim trying to calm me. My hands would be on my
stomach, my body stretched flat and rigid and tremors rippling through my
body. Mine was never the glowing, radiant pregnancy I had dreamed of. My
body had seemed alien to me. Death filled my head with fear, and death had
lingered in my nostrils and in my mouth. I became convinced I was going to
die in childbirth. I often dreamt a black seed was sprouting within me,
filling my body with dark hairy roots, with dark octopus tentacles. Then
there were the dreams I felt too ashamed to discuss with well-meaning
friends who smiled benignly and gave me coloured booties and stuffed
animals. I knew my dreams were not normal. If only I had said something. IF,
IF, IF, IF.
The birth was agony. A baptism of pain. I had longed for death, for
oblivion. I hated everyone for concealing the pain of delivery from me, and
when they had cut the cord I felt only relief that the thing inside me was
free. Jim cried over the fact that it was a boy, but I had remained weirdly
detached. Between shit and piss we are born. My grandmother liked to cackle
that phrase before my mother had her committed to the nursing hospital. It
used to hurt and anger my mother when she said it, but now I knew what she
meant.
Over time, I gradually recovered from the crippling depression that had
filled me when Leslie was born. My initial rejection of him was replaced by
an intense love that rippled through every facet of my life. His first
steps, his first tooth, his first Christmas. These were all symbolic
milestones to be treasured. Time now contained a depth it had always lacked.
I longed for another child, quickly forgetting the pain of birth, but Jim
already had two grown up children in a previous marriage and balked at the
idea. If we had had more children, would things have been different? IF, IF,
IF, IF.
There had been no signs. That was another detail I had tormented myself
with. He had always seemed happy enough. I knew he worried about his weight
and had been depressed over Bill and Cynthia's daughter rejecting him. But
most teenage boys went through things like that, didn't they? I found it
difficult to recall my youth, but I was sure I had copped my fair share of
rejection. I knew he could be antisocial and didn't make friends easily, but
I just put that down to shyness. I could be like that myself. That was why
Joy's friendship was so important to me. Was important to me. Then there
were the times he had sat staring into space for hours on end, vacant-faced
like a zombie, his mind seemingly void of thoughts. Jim blamed
Leslie's friends for what happened, but I wasn't convinced. "They needed a
bullet between the eyes," he said once, his voice low and intense, his hands
shaking. From what I had been able to gather from the different policemen
who had spoken to me over the weeks, all of the three boys were equally
responsible, and each had taken their turn mutilating the body. But there
had been no signs! I had read in the newspaper a list of symptoms that you
were meant to observe: bedwetting, fire-starting, cruelty to animals. There
had been nothing, nothing, well nothing that had stood out, so I felt
cheated of even those small signs from God that might have helped me.
Lavender and roses. That was the overriding impression when I closed my
eyes and thought of Joy. The sweet fragrances of crabtree and evelyn. It
would have been Crabtree and Evelyn that she liked to annoint herself with I
thought. Not just any old supermarket floral talc or spray like I'd put in
my shopping trolley. No, Joy was about quality. I wasn't used to luxuries -
there'd never been enough money for too many extras when I grew up - but
there was no mistaking the sheer quality of Joy's possessions. The fine bone
china crockery, the simpering china figurines, the gold fountain pen that
she wrote her shopping list with, in flowing copperplate script.
I could see Joy now, in her smart brown slacks and her cream silk
blouse, immaculately pressed. She'd peer through her tortoiseshell glasses,
carefully considering each item on her list, then open the wooden camphor
chest from Thailand where she kept her large green purse and count out her
money for me to take to the shops for her. I loved to visit that house. Its
mellow, measured tones spoke of other, exciting lifetimes, of people who
thought nothing of eating out in restaurants, of reading books by Proust and
Jane Austen which had bindings of red leather. Around the house there were
large black-and-white photographs of Joy and James when they had been young
and glowing with health. On safari in Africa, outside the Eiffel tower.
These places were as remote to me as the Moon. Joy looked like a young Jane
Russell with her shoulder-length, dark crimped hair and her bright lipstick,
and James was a fair-haired Clark Gable. But time was cruel. James had died
years ago of bowel cancer, and now Joy... Joy, or what had remained of her,
had been carried from her home by faceless paramedics. As the covered
stretcher disappeared into a vehicle I floated in a tranquillized haze,
where pain lurked like the neighbours twitching behind their curtains.
Joy wasn't a local. She had moved to the quiet little seaside community
of Oricheno on the central coast from Sydney. Many of the locals had thought
her too uppity for the town, and watched with resentful eyes when she would
make her way up our street with the tortoiseshell walking stick she had
bought in Italy. They had used that walking stick to... I had to fight to
control the mental picture I knew would follow. I was local, but it was me
that the locals had turned on like a pack of rabid dogs. Just a few days
after it happened I went to the shop for some milk. The stares, the
comments, the people who I had known all my life crossing the street to
avoid me! Then Jilly Edwards - she always was a dirty slag - had stepped up
to me and spat at me in front of everyone.
"You're responsible!" she hissed. "You gave birth to that creep!" She
pushed me suddenly and I stumbled into the gutter.
"Leave her alone!" A man's voice called, and slowly the spectators
drifted away to gossip about it behind closed doors. Jilly waddled into the
schoolyard and I had watched her fat bottom disappearing whilst I had
attempted to pick myself up. A part of me wanted to go after her and engage
in a screaming match in front of the whole town, but it was useless. I was
defeated and I knew it. For I agreed with her. I felt responsible. I was the
one who had birthed him. Between shit and piss we are born. I could feel my
grandmother cackling triumphantly over me.
I had been to visit him only once. Jim had driven me there, but had
refused to come in. Instead he had sat in the car, listening to talkback
radio and munching his way through packets of Quick-Eze. He was so wired up
smoke could have drifted from his body; he looked ready to combust before my
eyes. I had been afraid to insist that he accompany me inside, afraid that
he would erupt into a tirade of abuse, or strike out at me. Although when I
really think about it, anything would have been preferable than his
withdrawal, his half- smothered sobs in the privacy of night.
I was wearing a cotton floral dress I had bought at Katies years ago on
a rare trip to Sydney. I felt underdressed and frumpy as I approached the
prison, or correction centre whatever they called it. I could feel John's
eyes on my back, like twin rays of hate.
"What's happened to us?" I wanted to turn and call. "Once we were young
and in love. You left your wife and kids for me. We dreamt of travel, and we
made love in the afternoon on the sofa. How could it have all gone so
quickly? When did we age?" But I knew the answer. It had all gone when
Leslie was born. Slowly, irrevocably, like a miniature vampire living
amongst us and feeding daily, surreptitiously on our youth, love, lust and
hope.
There were forms to sign, and I was searched. Other friends and
relatives were going through the same degrading procedure. A young, skinny
blonde girl sat chainsmoking outside. Chinese symbols were tattooed on her
fragile arms. A pram sat next to her which she shook violently, screaming
into it in a futile attempt to stop the innecessant crying from inside. She
could have passed for fourteen. A young man was mopping the floor. I avoided
his eyes, fearing that he was one of the inmates. The foyer smelt of lemon
disinfectant, and there were Australian bush scenes on the walls.
I was shocked when he first appeared from behind a door at the rear of
the room and approached the glass where the visitors sat. He looked so
different. Older, fatter. I felt tears come to my eyes at his
transformation.
He sat down and avoided my eyes. 'You shouldn't have come."
I began to cry, feeling that the pain would splinter me into a thousand
pieces. Guards looked on with boredom; they must have seen it all a thousand
times before. The skinny girl was about three chairs down from me, holding
the baby up to the glass. The screaming continued and the child was now red
in the face.
"Where's the old man?" Leslie muttered. The words came filled with
contempt.
"He couldn't face it. He hasn't been well, Les. All the worry about
you. And his work laid him off."
My son, the stranger, looked at me directly. Did I glimpse a momentary
pain in his expression? "He's in the car outside," he sneered.
"Are you eating well?" I asked. He leaned forward, ignoring the inane
question.
"Go home, Evie," he said. "I don't want you here."
"Why, Leslie?" I cried from a terrible place within me. "What made you
do it? Were you drunk? Did those friends of yours make you do it? Was it
something I did? It's not you, Leslie! God, you gave to World Vision! You
hated fights and scenes. Something happened to you! Please talk to me! Make
me understand!"
He laughed. 'You would never understand Evie," he said. "You would
never understand. I did it because she was there, and we could. It just got
out of control."
"What did I do wrong?" I asked again. I desperately needed an answer.
He looked at me with disdain. "Everything, Evie," he said. "Everything. I
wish I had never been born."
In my mind I walk across the road and Joy is waiting for me. She is
smiling as she opens the front door, pushing her hair back from her
forehead. Her young woman's eyes are genuinely delighted to see me. The
sounds of Bach waft from the house, and I hold my arms out to her and
embrace her. I smell her hair which smells of lemon shampoo and I feel her
warm skin and her bones. She is alive and she is filled with the sunshine
that has disappeared from my life.
In darker dreams, I approach my sleeping child's cradle. I tenderly
place a white pillow over his peaceful little face, and hold it tightly. I
take the evil that even now is smouldering inside him. IF. IF. IF. IF.
The truth is so much harder to think about. Leslie had been grudgingly
doing odd jobs at Joy's for a month or so. Mostly it was the heavier tasks
that were too much for her. Sometimes it was a little job inside; adjusting
a mirror, cleaning a chimney. He had come to know the house, her
possessions, where she kept her money. He had waited, shown a patience and
slyness that I would not have guessed him capable of. The police found
emails he sent to Jude and Timothy, detailed plans of what they called
Operation Gaa-gaa. They had entered the house silently while Jim and I slept
oblivious over the road. Then for the next few hours they had given rise to
every perversion they carried within them.
They had woken her. I can only imagine her terror when she opened
those bright eyes to see the three boys looking down upon her. They had
shown her no mercy as they bound her to the bed, taunting her the entire
time. They tortured her. Jim and I had almost frozen with horror in the
court when we heard what they had done to her body. They had taken their
turns raping her, cheering each other on and calling obscenities as they
rode her. They kept her alive for hours, smearing her face with their semen,
destroying her valued items in front of her, breaking her fingers one by one
and using her as a human ashtray for their cigarettes. When they had
finished with their Dionysiac madness, Timothy cut her throat. Then they
dismembered her body, placing her parts in assorted corners around the room
like a grotesque broken doll. I found her head first that day I walked into
her fly-covered room. It sat by itself, obscenely disconnected, in its own
world of blood and gore. At first I thought the shock of that discovery
would kill me. But worse was yet to come.
It is not easy being the mother of a demon. At times I imagine even Jim
is looking at me with suspicion in his eyes, believing that at some crucial
point I must have failed him to create this evil. Jim is excused by the
townspeople; it's my blood they bay for. I think of mothers across history;
Hitler's mother, Judas's mother, Saddam Hussein's mother. I feel for them,
mourn for their innocence lost. We have to bear the shame, the blame. We
have to be the object of outrage and venom spat by people who were once
friends. I remember reading an article by the mother of one of the juvenile
killers of James Bulger, that little boy in England. She said that
everywhere she went she felt as if she had killer engraved into her
forehead.
We are mothers who are mourning death, destruction and chaos, like a
grotesque Pieta statue. We have been judged guilty by societies who fear the
contagion of demons. We are the rotten trees that have sprouted rotten
fruit. I feel like whispering to mothers as I pass them in the street; take
care, take care, take care. Do not think you are indestructible, that it can
never happen to you. Take care, for unknown shadows deep within your silent
soul might one day shift without warning and echo in another.
The house across the street continues to haunt me. I long to move and
start a new life under a new name, but Jim won't hear of it. "We'll take
that bloody house with us," he says with red-rimmed eyes. I sense accusation
in his glance. He had always opposed me befriending Joy, had always been
critical of Leslie working at Joy's. I was convinced that I represented
failure in his life. Kathy, his first wife, had raised his two other
children. One became a doctor, the other a teacher. Kathy hadn't harboured a
killer in her womb, a monster destined become the talk of Australia. The
fruit doesn't fall too far from the tree. There had been some madness in my
family. My mother's mother and her brother had both killed themselves. Had
there been some dark artery running through our family tree that Leslie had
emerged from? Was my son the innocent victim of destructive silent demons
lurking in our genetic closet?
One day a new family would move in over the road, and I dreaded the
day. Their children would play in Joy's garden and their pets would chase
her ghost from the house. I wanted to allow myself to somehow believe she
was still inside the house, looking at her beautiful photographs, gardening,
clipping out recipes for me, smiling peacefully in her refined, genteel
world.
Last visit. Last memory of him. Sitting there fidgeting awkwardly
across from me. There are sleep buds in the corners of his eyes, his hands
are pudgy and there are cuts over them. I hate to think of what his hands
have done. I am crying openly now into a tissue, a million memories flooding
through me. The stranger sitting opposite me is my history. I have cherished
all his birthdays, his early drawings, read him books, scolded him over his
smutty magazines, taken him to the doctor, bandaged his knees, and yelled at
him for a thousand little misdeeds. I know the smell of his sweat, the look
of his dirty underwear. I nervously related the facts of life to him. I
comforted him when he woke screaming from nightmares. "Stop it,
Evie," he says. "Just go. You're just upsetting yourself."
"Why?" I plead again. "What did I do wrong? Or was it something else?
Did something else trigger you?"
"It just happened," he says again. His eyes are wary, not wanting to
have to relive that night. "There doesn't always have to be a reason, does
there? You're as bad as the fucking shrinks." His eyes flicker with a trace
of buried emotion. Is it remorse? Mirth? Anguish? I will never know.
He leaves me quickly, without looking back at me.
I return to Jim, my feet swollen and aching in shoes that I never
normally wear. I can feel a blister beginning to form on my heel and I
welcome any pain that will distract me, punish me. I must deserve some
punishment to have reared this monster from my flesh and blood.
"Ready then?" Jim says. I can sense his curiosity, his anger. He will not
ask. I will not tell. I watch the city streets, the strangers at traffic
lights, all a blur. I can smell rain in the air. A headache is building
within my temples. We are halfway home when the storm breaks and we are
treated to a sudden lightning display over Berries Hill. We journey like
familiar strangers, in silence.
Please note that permission to publish stories from the Scarlet Stiletto Awards 2001 online has been expressly granted to Sisters in Crime Australia Inc. You may not republish, reproduce electronically or in paper form, or otherwise make use of these stories without the permission of the author.