ANGELS LOVE BAD MEN

At dusk, I am standing at the bedroom window of our rented, furnished house on Gould Street, Canterbury, Sydney. As I am drawing the curtains against the night, I notice a car driving very slowly past our house. I recognize the driver as a barman from the local hotel. He is staring at our letter box. I think, how strange. Was he checking the number of our house?

The next morning, 18 June 1966, I wake with a feeling of impending doom. I have this depressed feeling I always get when something bad is going to happen. Waking from a deep sleep, I hear a female voice telling me to tell my boyfriend to get out of the house. I hear a voice telling me he has to go now. I jump out of bed and take a few steps to the window. Glancing behind the heavy curtains and through the lace net curtains, I see a car parked outside the house next door. There are two men in the car. I instantly know they are coming for my boyfriend.

I yell to my boyfriend, Glen, "Get out of the house! Go now." He is instantly awake. He always sleeps naked, and now he quickly dresses in trousers and shirt. Grabbing his shoes from beside the bed, he runs through the house and out the back door.

"I'll get in touch with you through my uncle," he tells me. "I love you, baby."

"I don't know his phone number," I quickly tell him.

"He is in the phone book. His surname is S——" he replies. Then he is off across the back yard, sprinting for the back fence.

From the kitchen window I watch him jump over our back fence onto the neighbour's property. I glance at my watch. It is five thirty a.m. I hear hurried footsteps coming around the side path, and simultaneously there is a thunderous knocking on the front and back doors. He only escaped by seconds.

"Open up! It's the police," a loud voice shouts.

Although I am closer to the back door, I choose to walk to the front door, which is near our bedroom. I take my time walking to the door. As I open the door, I am rudely shoved against the wall as the two detectives I had seen sitting in the unmarked car come into the hallway. The redheaded one walks straight through the house and opens the back door to two other men. They search the house, pulling out drawers, looking in cupboards, and tipping stuff out.

"Where is Mervyn Harlum?" the tallest detective shouts at me.

For a minute I feel hopeful. He must have the wrong person. I thought they were looking for Glen Newell.

"You have the wrong house," I say. "There is no Mervyn Harlum here."

"We have the right house," he sneers at me. "Mervyn Harlum lives here."

I still think he is wrong; my boyfriend of nearly three years is called Glen Newell.

"Come in here and sit down. We need you to answer some questions," he barks at me.

I follow him into the kitchen, and we sit at the wooden kitchen table. He pulls out some papers from a folder and places them on the table. There is a sheet of paper with Glen's photo on it and the name Mervyn Lee Harlum written beneath. I am stunned. The detective tells me my boyfriend is a criminal and makes me look at the paper he puts in front of me. I read that Mervyn Lee Harlum was born 31 December 1934. It says he stole five hundred chickens and two sheep. I read that he spent eight months in Maitland Gaol for sheep stealing. He did time in Long Bay Gaol.

I cannot read any more. My head is spinning. I have been with Glen for nearly three years, and I thought he was Glen Lee Newell, born in 1936. I met him when I was sixteen, and now I am nineteen. For two years and ten months I have been living with someone I don't really know, someone who has lied to me about his name and his age. It was hard enough when I found out he was married with children. I discover with shock that there are now more lies. When our son Mark was born, I had written to his parents to tell them about him. I had called them Mr and Mrs Newell. I had given the letter to my boyfriend to enclose with a letter he had written to them. He did not tell me their name was Harlum. Now in hindsight I wonder if he even sent my letter. The few times I have met his parents they have always called Glen by the name of Sonnie, which is his childhood nickname.

While Detective Marvin is interrogating me in the kitchen, the other detective who came in the front door is searching in the sitting room. He is a redhead like me, but his hair is a darker red than mine. My red hair inherited from my mother is lighter, bleached by the sun. Detective Red Hair appears in the kitchen doorway with a long gun case.

"What do you know about this?" he asks me.

"Glen borrowed it from an old man he worked for," I reply.

That is what Glen told me when he put the gun case behind our sofa in the sitting room. Glen told me not to touch it. I don't even know what the gun looks like. I have never looked inside the case.

"Is this what this is all about?" I ask. "He didn't steal it; he told me he borrowed it. Can we not just return the gun to the man?"

At this stage I am thinking that maybe it is all about the gun. Suddenly I think did he steal it? I feel scared. This is too big for me. There is too much I don't understand. Detective Red Hair looks at me strangely, and I feel scared. Something big is happening. Something bad is happening. It feels surreal, like I am in a dream. I feel like I am in a bad dream. In the bedroom, my two year old son, Mark, is crying. He has been woken by the men who came in the back door and are now searching the bedroom. Everything has happened so fast that I had forgotten him. I jump up from my hard wooden chair and hurry to him.

Detective Marvin follows me into the bedroom. The two men leave the room and say to him as they pass that there was nothing in there. What does that mean? What do they expect to find? The bedside drawers have been emptied onto the floor beside the bed.

I am changing Mark's nappy when the detective points to the open wardrobe where all of Glen's shirts are hanging. Glen has twenty shirts. Most of them are long-sleeved white shirts. He has more shirts than I have total clothes. When I first started living with him I was surprised that one person owned so many shirts, especially as most are white. To me it seems strange that someone would own lots of shirts of the same colour when the shirt can just be washed and worn again. My father probably only owns half a dozen shirts. Glen was wearing a suit the night I first met him, and he often dresses in his dark grey suit. He likes to dress in his suit with a white shirt and likes to wear a hat. My father only wears a...