The Port Fairy Murders Read Online Free Page B

to do, that the water would be cold, but that she wouldn’t send it at him in a rush. Selwyn whimpered, but understood that Aggie was someone he had to obey — and he was hungry. Aggie told him to take off his clothes. He thought she’d meant all his clothes. She’d thought that modesty was a virtue separate from mental acuity. Selwyn stood before her, naked, not knowing that he should cup his genitals against his sister’s sight. He hadn’t yet grown podgy, and his pale body quivered in frightened expectation of the hose. Aggie was transfixed. She stared at him, with shame, horror, embarrassment, and something worse, far worse — excitement — jostling for position. She’d never in her life seen a naked adult male, and Selwyn stood there, his arms by his side. As her eyes darted over him, he was a confusion of muscle, hair, and penis. She glanced at it, and quickly looked at his face. She turned on the hose, not fully, so that the water flowed gently, and approached him. She let water fall over his shoulders, and he flinched.
    ‘Hold up your arms, Selwyn.’
    He did as he was told, and, with her thumb over the end of the hose, she directed a sharp spray into each armpit. She showed him that she wanted him to rub there with his free hand, to help sluice the filth away. She went behind him and sprayed vigorously between his buttocks. Facing him, she sprayed his chest, and he rubbed there with his hands; averting her eyes, she sprayed his private parts, which, having learned now what to do, he also rubbed. His erection so startled Aggie that she dropped the hose and returned to the house. Two hours later, she came outside to find the hose still running, her precious tank water soaking into the ground where Selwyn had outraged decency.
    Aggie waited two months before hosing Selwyn down again. The shock of that first occasion had by now been dulled by Selwyn’s frequent bouts of onanism, which he at least confined to the premises. There were times when Aggie watched him, and her disgust mutated, to her guilty dismay, into something that felt disturbingly like desire. Who would know, she allowed herself to think one morning, who would ever know if … This was as far as that thought went before a rush of nausea sent her to the bathroom. The thought crept back, and each time it did, the punishing nausea diminished until it wasn’t there at all. Eventually, in an astonishing feat of calculated moral and emotional sequestration, Aggie Todd encouraged her brother into her bed — or rather, his bed. She couldn’t bear the idea of him touching her sheets. This happened only twice, and each time their fumbling, mutual uncertainty made the experience clumsy and dull. It was too elaborate and confusing for Selwyn, and when Aggie, fully clothed, straddled him and forced him into her, she was barely able to tolerate the smell that came off him. Afterwards, she explained the incident away as having been the consequence of a vague fear she harboured that a mean-spirited mortician might snigger at his discovery that she was, post-mortem, virgo intacta , and that he might stand back from her elderly, shrunken corpse and say to himself, or to an assistant, ‘Well, after all, who’d want that?’ As time passed, Selwyn grew fat, and Aggie mostly managed to expunge the incidents from her memory.
    No one in Port Fairy would have called Aggie Todd cheerful, but neither would they have called her unpleasant. Dour perhaps, and a little snobbish. She took great pride in owning a highly polished set of silver apostle spoons. People knew about her apostle spoons — real silver, not plate — because they glittered in the saucers under teacups at the occasional morning tea that Aggie organised for the ladies of St Patrick’s. The women who came to these teas did so with some trepidation, knowing, as they did, who lived at the bottom of Aggie’s garden. Selwyn, however, never made an appearance, and he was only ever seen at his station in