Ghost Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the system, which means you had to compose the yarn as you went, trying to remember what you’d already said, and trying to think where the comma ought to go. So, yeah, I would have got into a phone box, I would have balanced the handset on my shoulder – it would have been one of those black bastards that weighed a tonne – andI’d have dialled with my pen and gone through my notebook, writing the piece on the hoof, and reading it out, and then reading the graffiti on the walls while I was waiting on the line for the editor to tell me it was all good, and all received.
    The editor told me that if I got back by nine, he’d hold the press and get it on the front page, so that’s what we did, me driving and the photographer stressing out, because it was his pictures of the kid that everybody was waiting on.
    I have to say, I’m still pretty pleased with what we achieved that day. I’ve got the clipping in my scrapbook, so I must have been pretty proud of myself at the time, too.
    ‘MAN BASHES BOY.’ That was the headline. It ran across the top of the front page. I tried to get a touch of outrage into the copy. ‘A five-year-old boy was savagely bashed by a man as he walked through his own schoolyard near his home,’ I wrote.
    ‘Police say Jacob Cashman was sent by his mother to the shops to get cigarettes.’
    Now, you see, most parents could relate to that. Send the kids to the shop, you assume it’s all safe, you live in the neighbourhood, you know all the neighbours, and look what happens.
    ‘The boy’s brother, Harley, who witnessed the beating, said Jacob was knocked to the ground, kicked in the head and the stomach,’ I wrote.
    ‘Little Jake is now fighting for his life in the Children’s Hospital.’
    The rest of it was pretty standard: police were appealing for witnesses. Neighbours were all upset and wondering whether to keep the doors locked. Inside the paper, we had the commentary from the mayor and the priest, both of them blaming television.
    ‘There’s too much violence on the box,’ the mayor said. ‘People see a murder every other day and they don’t realise it’s not real.’
    We ran the picture of the kid right across the front, six columns (the seventh was always reserved for sport, like a footballer with a groin injury or something). Even though the picture was black and white, you could still see that the kids were pretty surreal-looking, and I wasn’t the first to notice. One of the neighbours told me that the Cashman kids were known around the Barrett Estate as the ‘Ghost Children’.
    When I’d asked some of the other neighbours who were standing around whether they were good kids, they mostly said yes, but then one guy, he spun me out a bit. He said, ‘Actually, mate, I’ve always found them a bit weird. You know, with that white hair scraped back. When you see them all together it’s like the Village of the Damned .’
    And that was actually dead on. That’s exactly how they looked, and it must have stuck in my mind because I can’t find it in the paper. Obviously I left it out of thestory. Whether that was because of space, or because in the circumstances that would have been pretty inappropriate, I don’t recall.

Mrs Margaret Cooper, Portrait Maker
    The moment I saw the photograph of the young Cashman children on the front of The Sun, I recognised it as one of my own. I’d better explain: my name is Margaret Cooper – everybody calls me Marg – and from the years 1980 until 1987, I worked as a portrait photographer at the Barrett Regional Shopping Centre, on the Barrett Estate. It was a late-blooming career for me. I was already in my fifties when I took it up. You see, I was born in 1923 and educated at a Catholic girls’ school in Kew in Melbourne’s east at a time when photography wasn’t really something that a young woman would consider a suitable profession. It wasn’t quite right, somehow. Photographers were mostly men. Perhaps that was because