Thought Crimes (20 page)

When Major Crime Squad detectives questioned Nick and Kylie about baby Trish, both swore they were the child's natural parents. The lies they'd told the doctor were purely to keep the baby's existence secret from hyper-religious grandparents.

In order to buy time, Nick played a bluff hand, volunteering his blood for DNA analysis. Since the right to grant permission for a sample to be taken from the child was germane to the issue at hand, police had to proceed with caution.

Releasing the pair without charge, the inspector warned that there would be further investigation, and Nick and Kylie should expect to be contacted by Hampton detectives.

Though some recipients imagined themselves to be chosen, they understood that God's elect tend to be vilified by those who can't imagine a deity that would exclude them. Knowing that it never pays to advertise a special relationship with God, the recipients smeared Vegemite on rusks, and pushed discretion to the limit.

Danielle was too young to know what she was taking on when she married Tom, a man left paraplegic by a head-on smash that killed his father and sister when he was nineteen. There was a hole in her life that not even Tom's charm could fill. If Tom had said that she couldn't keep Ingrid, Danielle would have left him on the spot; but Tom knew, from the moment he gazed into the child's eyes, that he needed to love her more than he needed anything else in the world.

Sooner or later, police were bound to ask Kylie's sister Fiona if she knew about an infant niece named Trish. Detectives thought Kylie's oddness about the child might pertain to a surrogacy pact.

The sister was extraordinarily nervous when the police arrived at her door. Once they said that Kylie had a child, Fiona couldn't contain herself. ‘My God, it's happened to her as well.'

The early theories linked these babies to cult activity. The detectives thought tests would reveal the foundlings had the same father, an ego-monster who'd brainwashed his sex-slaves. Extortion or madness would prove to be the motivating factor.

The DNA tests on Kylie and Nick's baby, Trish, and Fiona and Greg's child, Declan, did uncover genetic commonalities. But the last thing police analysts expected were commonalities stemming from the fact that Kylie and Fiona were sisters. So far as science could establish, the recipients were the natural parents of their foundlings.

Once rumours of this story began to leak to the press, more recipients gained the confidence to introduce their babies to the world. Grandparents were notified, and christenings arranged. When the Bayside Council wanted to list baby epidemics among Hampton's distinctive features, the finders lobbied against publicity. Believing these children to be aliens, troubled types had already threatened to abduct them. Bad seeds. Sleepers. Incubi … Everything a disturbed mind could imagine.

All the while, these babies looked and behaved just like babies.

Lisa and I couldn't love Stephen any more if we'd attended his birth, or spent six years trying to conceive him. I'm not bothered that the boy resembles his mother's father more than he resembles me. I'm sure he'll have the good grace to adopt my personality flaws as his own.

We're thankful Stephen keeps us so busy. Otherwise, we'd have time to consider questions of justice: why we received this blessing when so many more deserving couples didn't. My mother-in-law, Pam, has a theory that the babies bypassed the people who knew they wanted them to find people who had no idea how much they needed them.

According to Lisa, Stephen and his miraculous cousins embody the Control Paradox. The more choice we have, and the more we strive to preclude accident and error, the more we stand to be subverted by contradictions at the heart of orderliness. Since vulnerability and conflicted emotion are essential to our humanity, control alone can never make us superior beings.

If I look closely, I see my face reflected in the boy's eyes. And maybe my one hope of seeing myself truly is through those eyes. Or through the eyes of an equally miraculous sibling.

Lisa didn't need to speak for me to know that she was expecting our second child. We kissed, smiled broadly, and wondered where the money would come from. We then promised to remove the words convenient and inconvenient from our vocabulary.

The babies are settling down, settling in. They're just a little unsettling, too. All through Hampton, you can hear the babies bubbling and burbling. Becoming.

MAGNETIC

After four reds over lunch, James was dull-witted, and Hampton wasn't a suburb he knew well. Seeing a young woman striding down the hill, he crossed the street to ask if she could direct him to the station. Though she was willing to help him, the woman's manner compelled James to ask why she was so nervous.

‘My husband …'

‘Is there something wrong with him?'

‘If … If my husband sees us together, he'll …'

James considered the nervous woman beautiful, but he couldn't imagine that she and he were together in a way that could provoke even the most jealous spouse. When pressed further, the woman became hysterical.

‘He'll … He'll swallow his tongue, and he'll fall to the ground convulsing, and he'll make growling noises, terrible growls, and he'll become magnetic … Cars and metal things will slide across the road and clunk against his skin … And then, when he's magnetic, the sky will open above him, and he'll see angel choirs, and … And the sky will open above him. With angels clunking against his skin, convulsing magnetic angels.'

Taking the woman by the hand, James rubbed her palm with his thumb, before asking, ‘So?'

Grasping his meaning, she protested. ‘But … convulsions, magnetic convulsions and sliding cars … Angels, growling angels, and my husband magnetic …'

Looking deep into the woman's eyes, James asked if she'd want any of that to obstruct the course of love.

Her fear now passing, the woman said she wouldn't want that. Nothing should obstruct the course of love. Clasping James's hand, she led him up the street in the direction of the railway station.

As this dreamy couple set out on their shared adventure, neither saw that their departure had been witnessed by a man whose legs turned to jelly as his long pursuit faltered. Nearly breathless, his voice strained to call, ‘M-Marny! … No! Please don't! …
M-Marny!
'