Paul F. Verhoeven - Loose Units

Paul F. Verhoeven is a writer, broadcaster and entertainer. A mainstay on the Australian media landscape, he has written for ABC News Online, IGN , Smith Journal and Yen Magazine , and has spent years working extensively as a games journalist. After beginning his career hosting Weekend Breakfast on Triple J, he went on to host and write Steam Punks on ABC TV, and currently co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast 28 Plays Later.

The following is based on true events. In order to make this into a good read, some cases have been played with, stitched together, mashed into one another or blown apart for the sake of making them into actual tellable stories. Some names and locations have been changed to protect identities and organisations. Some stories told to the author were unfathomably threadbare, and the author was given permission to fill in the blanks carte blanche, which was initially vexing, especially as the author is convinced his father has no idea what carte blanche means. All of these events happened, in short, but time has a way of playing with ones recollection of the specifics. The authors father would also like to apologise for the repeated references to The Thorn Birds .

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First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2018

Text copyright Paul F. Verhoeven, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Cover design by Adam Laszczuk Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

Cover photograph by Bo Zaunders/Getty Images

penguin.com.au

ISBN 978-1-760-14336-7

I was seven years old when I saw my first dead body.

It took me a moment to register what I was looking at. I distinctly remember feeling very sick, then very cold all over. The body was a womans. Her eyes were still open, her pale hand was extended, and one of her legs was twisted under her body at a strange angle. Her blouse was torn, and there was a lot of blood.

At seven I was a small, skinny, generally cheerful kid. On this particular night I strayed from a dinner party my parents were throwing to go spelunking in a large walk-in closet at the back of our home. Before you get the wrong impression, there wasnt a body in the closet itself, this isnt going to be one of those stories. Id simply reached an age where the length of my limbs, when splayed outwards, perfectly corresponded with the width of the closet. And given that I had unusually large feet and hands, and given that the walls had a certain degree of stick to them, and given that our ceilings were unreasonably high, it wasnt uncommon for me to wedge my arms outwards, Samson-style, and then shimmy up the walls until I was flush with the closets ceiling.

The first time my parents came looking for me in there, with me pinned against the roof, and them standing directly underneath me with a puzzled innocence, I felt a sense of intense elation. I had suckers for hands and nothing could bring me down.

This giddy triumph was marred slightly after they left, when the sweat of adrenaline that had been collecting on my palms broke the bond between me and the walls, sending me plummeting, like a freshly felled Hans Gruber, down, down, down. And right onto a stack of boxes.

Though the option of a full ceiling wedge remained attractive, on this night it was these boxes I instead decided to dive headlong into, both figuratively and literally. The dinner party continued in the living room, with my parents making loud, muffled jokes. Id brought a small flashlight with me, wanting to keep my presence covert. Even then I liked to imbue everything I did with a sense of needless intrigue. And the second I pulled the lid of the first box away, my flashlight beam fell upon a large, glossy black-and-white photo of a crime scene. It was of a womans body. I took a moment to process what I was seeing. The body was upsetting, and I quickly shoved it away, not wanting to stare death in the face. There, I thought, I did it. The four-second rule at work.

But beneath the first photo was another. This one... this one had something wrong with it. There was a mass of blood in the centre of a room. Burnt fragments of hair and skin clung to the floorboards. I could see the feet of someone standing in the corner of the photo, presumably a police officer. Wordlessly I replaced the lid, snuck back to bed, turned off the lights and eventually drifted into unconsciousness.

My parents informed me the next morning that Id been screaming in my sleep all night.

I didnt tell them what Id seen.

The picture of the body bothered me, true. But the second picture seized me with a kind of existential dread. Because I didnt get a great look at it, and because I was coursing with adrenaline and looking at it in a poorly lit closet, it began to evolve. The photo was vague enough, and the memory of it hazy enough, for my mind to fill in the blanks with nightmarish details. Suddenly, every blank space, every spare corner of my growing mind was populated with blood, fear and death, and I began having night terrors on a regular basis. The photos werent even that full-on, but my brain hadnt been exposed to anything violent or graphic up until this point; it was like an Amish youth on Rumspringa, one minute weaving baskets and whistling to itself, the next, doing ice in a wheelie bin. It was a violent gear-shift, and it completely knocked me off course.