Free Rocking Horse Road by Carl Nixon

we just acknowledged that there were dreams.
Pete Marshall admitted to being freaked out by them
sometimes ('freaked out' would remain one of Pete's
favourite expressions right into his late twenties). It was
only very recently that we discussed the dreams. As it
turned out we had all had at least a few. In our dreams
Lucy was never a ghost, not in any cliched way. She
was no floating apparition, all see-through and blurry
around the edges. In our dreams Lucy was essentially
the same as she had been before she died, when she
was working behind the counter of the dairy.
    Ray told us that for several weeks in January of
that first year he had a dream where Lucy walked into
his science class. She stood next to Mr Mayer who was
up the front, pointing with a ruler at a diagram of a
volcano. 'I expected Mayer to ask her what she wanted
but he just kept on talking. Everyone just carried on as
normal. After a while I realised that I was the only
one who could see her. She wasn't scary, but in the
dream she just stared at me like she was kinda sad or
something. Eventually I couldn't take it any more and
woke up.'
    We all had dreams that went something like that.
Pete Marshall probably had the dreams most often
that summer, which is understandable considering
he was the one who found her body. He didn't say
anything much at the time but spoke about it to Mark
Murray. In Pete's dream he looked out of his bedroom
window and saw that Lucy was standing over the
road from his house under a flowering cabbage tree.
She was wearing a red dress. She was staring up at
his window, and when she noticed him looking out at
her, she frowned. That was it.
    They weren't nightmares, but they always woke us.
They left us thoughtful and uneasy, unable to slip back
into sleep. We lay in our beds, wrapped in the smell of
rotting sea-lettuce. We listened to the wavesound and
to the occasional cry of a wading bird disturbed on the
estuary. We often lay for hours. It was no wonder that
by the end of January we were all sunken eyed and
edgy and feeling like ghosts ourselves.
    People are usually willing to talk to us. That has been
true right from the beginning. In fact, the people we
interview often seem relieved to be able to talk. They
want to unload what they know on to our shoulders.
Almost inevitably they offer us up small details,
tidbits that do not appear in any police interview or
newspaper report. The details they remember for
us maybe did not seem relevant at the time, or were
thought to be too mundane to be chiselled in to official
documentation. Maybe they sense our need for
anything that will connect us to Lucy; that will enable
us to see her more clearly through the mist that death
(and now, the intervening years) has called down over
her. In that sense, the information they dig out for us
is like a gift for which we are always grateful.
    We find that the unexpected question is the one that
often draws out the truest response. That is why we
approach people in their homes and while they are on
the job. Sometimes they are on their smoko, sandwich
in hand, or pausing to take stock before moving on
to the next task. We have spoken to a housewife as
she hung out wet sheets. We once interviewed the
manager of a courier company on his way to work.
He sat behind the wheel in his driveway, the engine of
his car idling. One interview was even conducted on
the sidelines of a club rugby match (New Brighton 21,
Old Boys 12 — a rare victory for the local club).
    Of course, these days we almost never do
interviews. They've all been done already, completed
and filed down at the lock-up. Occasionally we will
approach someone seeking clarification of some small
point, but that can often be done over the phone. For
years, though, we were the boys who appeared with
pen and paper or — as we became older and more
sophisticated — the young men with a chunky black
tape-recorder lugged around on a shoulder strap. We
have hours and hours of interviews on tape (