On 22 June 1954, Pauline Parker, sixteen, and Juliet Hulme, fifteen, battered Pauline's mother to death. The three had been out walking in the Victoria gardens, a reserve on one of the hills encircling the very flat, very English city of Christchurch, New Zealand. The two girls attempted to explain Mrs Reiper's death as an accident but they were quickly implicated in the murder: betrayed by the blood on their clothes, the half brick left by the body and- what the police and the public found most stupefying- the discussion in Pauline's diary anticipating the killing.

Peter Jackson's movie Heavenly Creatures has as its penultimate scene the murder of Mrs Reiper, whose hands clutched uselessly over her ruined and bloody head signify the pity of a trust so absolutely misunderstood and then betrayed. But it is the movie's final scene which conveys a sense of finality that the murder itself, surprisingly, cannot convey. The girls reach out for each other, but the ship sails and they are separated forever. The graphic scene of the murder, its queasy verisimilitude, stands side by side with the fantastic; and yet it is the fantastic that determines, in the end, the dreadful reality of separation that Pauline and Juliet had plotted to avoid.

Much has been written about the Parker-Hulme case; Heavenly Creatures is but the most widely known of the works based on the murder. The recent resurgence of interest has led to the discovery of Juliet Hulme, now living on an island off the coast of Scotland, pseudonymously writing Victorian murder mysteries in an alarmingly generic mould. There are also persistent rumours that Pauline Parker works in a Catholic bookshop in Auckland, that she is a little mad and wholly converted. In a recent Australian Woman's Day, an interview with the reclusive Hulme showed her ageing, adult self posed on a Scottish hillside, complete with dog sitting obediently by her Wellington-booted feet. Both Hulme and Parker are a long way away from their adolescent selves. from the girls that murdered Mrs Reiper. The adult Hulme has bundled herself, all the worldliness, the imaginative dash, the polish and promise of her youth, into the small package of 'Ann Perry'. One imagines an even more radical reduction for Pauline Parker, whom one schoolmate described as being, at fifteen, 'a mature beauty...very aggressive...a withdrawn, smouldering sort of person', while another thought she was 'wild' and 'very proud'.1

One aspect of the case, or perhaps I should say the lives, of Parker and Hulme that has been consistently misunderstood or overlooked is that of their imaginary game, an interior landscape that Heavenly Creatures , alone of all the representations, attempts to sketch with some integrity. When Fran Walsh was researching the script for Heavenly Creatures her explicit interest was the intense, romantic friendship of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme. The film, which draws on the same materials as previous accounts- the transcripts of Pauline's diary produced for the trial, the reports of the defence and prosecution psychiatrists- succeeds where other analyses have failed precisely because it portrays this relationship not as pathological, but as the freaky end of a normal continuum.

Once in custody, both girls were interviewed by psychiatrists for evidence of their refractory or psychotic nature. The defence, naturally, was hoping to mitigate the girls' responsibility for a murder to which they'd already confessed by finding them legally insane. The Crown had little difficulty in accepting the majority of the defence's expert psychiatric testimony, for it went to prove that the girls' 'grand fancies' had led them to flout convention and choose evil for its own sake. Thus, when the principal defence psychiatrist, Dr Reginald Medlicott, diagnosed the girls as suffering from a 'paranoia of the exalted type', exaggerated by the fact of its being shared in the folie a deux, he cast Pauline and Juliet as separate mouthpieces of a single delusive nature.

According to Medlicott folie a deux, or communicated insanity, 'is induced by a stronger character, the inducer, upon the weaker, the inducee (folie imposee), but delusions may occur simultaneously by reciprocal influence in predisposed associated individuals (folie simultanee)'.2 Though originally mounted as part of a defence that failed utterly to save the two girls (their age alone kept them from hanging), Dr Medlicott's analysis was extraordinarily persuasive. His characterization of the girls as 'excitable', 'self-willed' and in the grip of 'megalomaniac' fantasies led him to argue that their delusions of grandeur has estranged them from the real world and alienated whatever vestiges of 'natural' feminine compassion they possessed. Even the sentencing of the girls reflected the powerful, if completely spurious, image of the folie a deux. One of the parole conditions, rigorously enforced by the Minister of Justice, forbade any contact between the girls, either during the term of their imprisonment or after. Separation was not just part of their punishment, it was a condition of their rehabilitation.

Scriptwriters Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson had somehow to decode the fatal bond of the simultaneously 'mad' and 'bad' girls. When Medlicott determined that Juliet and Pauline were suffering from folie simultanee- that is, from delusions mutually induced by two 'predisposed' like minds- he was unintentionally commenting on both the age and gender of Parker and Hulme. Their adolescence and their femininity were determining characteristics. The relationship of the girls continues to be cast not as one of dominance but of mutuality: they were both just girls.

One of the things that hits you about Jackson's film is its stylized quality. It is both manic and mannered, gesturing in tone to the self-consciousness and exhibitionism of the teenager. Yet Heavenly Creatures exhibits none of the profound suspicion toward and fear of adolescence that motivated so many earlier analyses of the case. When Dr Bennett mouths the word 'homosexuality' the camera focuses on his primly disapproving lips. But he is quick to reassure the horrified Mrs Reiper that her daughter is likely to grow out of her affliction. The dark humour of the scene is vital: adolescence is simultaneously pathological and normal, like 'crushes', a dangerous stage one passes through in the process of maturation.

Pauline and Juliet presented to contemporary commentators the worst possible projection of latent fears about adolescence in general, and girlhood in particular. In Juliet's case instability was correlated with maturation by Dr Medlicott, who noted that her 'onset of menarche' coincided with the first symptoms of the various abnormalities that would later predispose her to take her part in the shared delusions. The diagnosis of folie simultanee was based on the girls apparent inability to distinguish fantasy from reality, a confusion evinced both by their incessant game-playing and by their lack of respect for authority of all kinds. Pauline's and Juliet's disdain for religion, school and the advice of their parents suggested to contemporary experts an unhealthy and unfeminine self-sufficiency, an arrogant precocity. Medlicott wrote of Pauline:

as a small child [she] would shut herself off in her room with her dolls...Seven years ago she had played for some time a fantasy game with one friend in which they dressed up and imagined they had a secret staircase at a nearby museum.

And of Juliet:

she appears to have been excitable, self-willed [and] demanding...full of fantasy and [she] found it difficult to stop play-acting games, and liked to remain a fairy or some sort of fantasy creature long after her playmates had become bored with the game.3

Analysts were baffled as they tried to unravel the 'game' set out in the diaries, transcribed in novels and discussed by the girls when interviewed by psychiatrists. Reading as they did with the fact of the murder in mind, the examining psychiatrists and lawyers tended to attribute to the banal a morbid significance. Medlicott wrote that, from early 1954, Pauline's 'fictional family intruded into the diary with bewilderingly frequent and tangled escapades'. His decision to term Pauline's characters a 'family' is significant; after all, Pauline was turning away from her real family. For Pauline and Juliet, however, the term 'family' was shorthand for the complex cast of characters related by ties of blood and fealty and known to them as the Court of Borovnia.

One psychiatrist told the court that the girls 'had delusions of grandeur, formed a society of their own, and lived in it'.4 Medlicott complained of the melodrama and violence of the Borovnian saga: the 'bewilderingly frequent and tangled escapades; there were bedroom scenes, highway robberies and often more than one violent death a day'. Pauline's fantasy world, according to Medlicott, gained a febrile strength as the date of the murder neared:

Pauline's fictional characters behaved even more aggressively than usual...within a paragraph [of the diary] Roland slaps Carmelita's face when she turns his proposal of marriage down because she's engaged to Roderick. The horse, 'Vendetta', kills Gianina the night before her marriage to Nicholas. On the ledge of 'Satan's Hollow' 'Vendetta' crashes down on to Nicholas, and with a wild scream turns into the sunset, his revenge complete.5

To Medlicott, the passage suggested Pauline's 'close association of megalomaniac ideas' with her 'preoccupation with murder'. He failed completely to understand both the genre of the adolescent diary (which records only the high points of the action) and the admittedly more difficult genre of the imaginary game. Pauline's diary entry probably compressed the details of either an extended bout of narrated play between her and Juliet or part of one of their novels.

The persistent desire of the doctors, lawyers and successive generations of true-crime writers to label Juliet and Pauline's complicated but adolescent fantasy game-playing symptomatic of their pathology is misguided, to say the very least. Even Heavenly Creatures succumbs to this mistake. In the scene in which Juliet and Pauline retreat to Pauline's bedroom on the morning of the murder, while Mrs Reiper busies herself downstairs making lunch, we see Juliet's nervous rationalization of the murder and Pauline's complete obliviousness. While Juliet wrings her hands over what a 'miserable woman' Mrs Reiper is, and how she 'doesn't seem to mind' what she miraculously knows is about to happen to her, Pauline is merely preoccupied with Carmelita's refusal of Roland's marriage proposal. The scene takes liberties with the chronology of the game: Carmelita's refusal was already decided long before the morning of the murder. While this bit of imaginative recontextualization is inoffensive in itself, it does tend to suggest a confusion of fantasy and reality sustained, if not created, by the playing of the game.

Some commentators have stressed the importance to the case of a discourse demonizing homosexuality, but the doctors were preoccupied much less with the sexuality of the defendants than with their seduction from reality. One feminist analysis of the case, detailing the 'impact of the case on lesbians', illustrates that for a certain generation of lesbians in New Zealand, the conflation of lesbianism and murder achieved by the scandal-mongering press was inescapable. But among those interviewed, one woman recalled a quite different but equally threatening sense of recognition:

When it happened I was fascinated- one of the most interesting things- I felt I knew them. I really identified with t he fantasy world. A girlfriend and I used to write to each other, pretending we were boyfriends. Also, I used to make up stories for my younger sister for years and years.6

While going on to talk about the case in terms that show she herself had imbibed much of the psychobabble about the folie a deux ('A lot depends on who you meet. They almost became one. They had the same fantasy world'), this respondent's line of identification was not with her lesbianism but with her experience of fantasy game-playing, and more broadly speaking, with the intensity of Parker and Hulme's intellectual and emotional lives.

Folie a deux cannot adequately describe the experience shared by Parker and Hulme. There is a more useful way of looking at the relation between their 'society of their own' and the murder that spelled its destruction, and that is to understand what it means to play an imaginary game, to understand the implications of that strange and compelling shared narrative.

In 1835 Emily Bronte wrote a diary letter, not to be opened for three years. In it she regaled her older self with her most recent and most satisfying adventures:

Anne and I went on our first long journey by ourselves together...Though the weather was broken we enjoyed ourselves very much...And during our excursion we were, Ronald Macalgan, Henry Angora, Juliet Angustina, Rosabella Esmalden, Ella and Julie Egremont, Catherine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the Palaces of Instruction to join the Royalists who are hard-driven at present by the Victorious Republicans.7

Bronte scholars have often been puzzled by the game played by Anne, Emily, Charlotte and Branwell at the times when two or more of them were together. Their game has been written off as part of the 'juvenilia' of Emily and Charlotte, or merely as symptomatic of their creative genius. But that game, played until Emily's death, was no children's project to while away the idle hours of rainy days.

It is difficult to identify, in history, players of multi-narrator imaginary games that involved formulated plots, whole political and religious systems, worlds peopled by characters developed and sustained over years, even decades. Along with the Brontes, I could name Samuel Coleridge, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Fleur Adcock, Marilyn Duckwork and, probably, Antonia Forest. Although that list is far too short to qualify as a sample, it is tempting to conclude several things. Firstly, that imaginary games are played, more often than not, by women; secondly, that they are played by siblings; thirdly, that those who play them often become writers.

In two published essays, my sister Elizabeth, an established novelist in New Zealand, and I meditated upon the effect of our own imaginary game upon our quite different lives. Both her essay and my reply attempted to analyse the nature of authority in narrative and to speculate upon the process of identity itself.8 Elizabeth wrote: 'What would it mean to be, at once, the reader and writer of a story? To be telling and being told. To be telling and being told a world?' My retort, published two years later, made more wistful her pronouncement that 'for me, the Game is a view backwards'.9 She could look backwards along a continuous trail, its terrain still habitable, for she continued to play the game with a female friend of hers, recruited eight years earlier. I, however, had not played since February 1986. My 'view backwards' was interrupted by ellipses, whole sections of the once familiar terrain obscured or out of focus. The only proper voice I could find for this confusion was that of my main character for many years, whose death had been decreed irrevocable at a time when our playing had ceased supposedly to be 'mere' adolescent entertainment and had become 'art'. Elizabeth quoted my character in her essay to explain a feeling we had all, at one time of another, expressed- a sense of having been left behind, out of step with our narrated lives:

I feel like an empty theatre, or a broken movie projector, packed with the ghosts of images and words, the faces of long dead actors and actresses. Right now, here, I feel like a lost part of a child's puzzle put away after the holidays.10

To which I replied: 'When was "right now"? Where was "here"?'11

The game's origins went back as far as 1970 when I was eight and Elizabeth eleven. Until I was twenty-one and left house I shared with my sister, we played every night till the early hours of the morning and most Saturdays as well. The weekend game involved our next-door neighbour, Carol, who played for seven years between 1970 and 1978, and my oldest sister, Mary, who played, on and off, for twelve years. There were, in fact, two interconnected games that, as time wore on, began to share the same characters and eventually similar, albeit informal, narrative rules. The night-time game, called 'sequences', was purely mine and Elizabeth's , though its main characters peopled, in their own future, the daytime 'saga' played by the four of us. Action in the game was narrated, in present tense, third person exposition and dialogue. When recorded or transcribed it read, effectively, like a novel. The narrated relationships between characters were intense, loving and frankly sexual.

In 1977, Carol went on a trip to Tahiti. While she was gone the game went into abeyance because a number of the characters simply were not there. Elizabeth wrote to her regularly over the six weeks, including in each envelope a letter from her character, Cicilia Jarlson, to his wife (Carol's character), Genevieve. After one such exchange Carol, then fourteen years old, wrote back confidingly to Elizabeth:

Gosh I really love that creation of yours Liz. That really sounds strange to me because I don't feel as if I love you. It seems too much a demanding and telling type of feeling, Cicilia that is. I love his letters and when I finish them I feel such a warm, cuddly feeling in me. It's not Genevieve who loves him but me...I can't explain it, you said you'd never marry a thug like that- to me it would be bliss!

Carol expressed a clear distinction between herself and her character and between Elizabeth and Cicilia. The feeling was real but contained within the world played.

A year later, when Carol got a boyfriend, Genevieve Jarlson had to be killed off. Carol's other characters were forced to emigrate from Avernum so that she herself could leave the game. We were all adolescents then and things seemed to have to be done fully or not at all. Carol could not have an ordinary life and the game as well (given the amount of time we all spent 'playing' this was literally the fact). The death of Genevieve, precipitated by the accidental death of Cicilia, her husband, was a price extorted from Carol by Elizabeth for leaving her (and us). It was, of course, also a punishment. It seemed then that Carol caused Cicilia's and Genevieve's death by her own inattention, her defection. As I recall, we wept the whole way through that six hours of playing. Eight months later, Elizabeth working in her terrifyingly boring job, wrote in her journal: 'It has been hard to stay here- the Inland Revenue and Earth- since Cicilia Jarlson died.'

Without Carol the game went on. We dedicated our existence to it both because it was an art and, most of all, because of the experience of playing itself. As the game was left virtually to me and Elizabeth it became the dominating thing in my life, the richest experience. At eighteen, in my own very intermittently maintained journal, I wrote:

I have too much to say. In 1976 I invented Vlad, much later than his father, Miklos, then Elizabeth, Klara and Lenore. Now I am bound to their existence; their beings etched on my soul...In Cryheron, or in that little North Caracallan village at which they have yet to arrive...Sometimes I see their faces and hear them call to one another. This is the danger. Life has become difficult because, as I grow older, the other minds and lives consume me. I shouldn't want it any other way. I know what love is.

Both of our journals at that time were full of fear of dissolution, betrayal, loss, insanity even. When we were young we felt as if the lives we lived in our characters would somehow drive us quite out of our minds, that we would go into an imaginative sensory overload. For the game was not merely fun, though it could be incredibly fun. Its emotional, intellectual and descriptive terrain was dangerously vast.

In Antonia Forest's young adult novel, Peter's Room, a group of adolescents, inspired by the example of the Brontes, start up a game. Soon the oldest children are worried that the experience of play is too intense, that the players are becoming obsessed- almost possessed- by the game. One of the most proficient and dedicated players explains that it gives him a chance at 'being people who you like better than yourself'. The feeling of sinking into a consciousness, a history, a character that is not you but of you is unlike anything I have done since. When I recently saw Carol, a woman well-heeled and well-adjusted, she told me she could not remember, exactly, what Cicilia looked like, but that she remembered both loving him and being Genevieve loving him.

For me, leaving the game was traumatic, though I had been lackadaisical about playing it for a year or two before my expulsion. Playing, as adults, had become difficult- not that we were any less good at it, but the rules of play had changed and become both more demanding and less satisfying. Elizabeth and 'ambitions to make [the game] more like a fiction, with a dominant theme and direction...excluding from the story all elements of fantasy and wish-fulfilment'.12 The game presumably had to grow up along with its players. I found, quite suddenly, that my everyday life could be made to contain the drama and suspense that once only the game had offered me. And I began to defect, as Carol had years before, wooed away by the will to make flesh a desire only ever before narrated. My exit from the game, also like Carol's, was not a bloodless one, and I was punished more severely. For the game to regain its integrity my characters had to be removed from the centre of narrative action, and for once Elizabeth broke the rule of narrative verisimilitude. My expulsion from the game occurred when I was not present, and my main character, Vlad, was killed off in a piece of play designed, as much as anything, to properly integrate the new player, Elizabeth's friend Madeline, into a changed world. (Vlad dies without saying a word because I am not there to speak for him.) It was a mistake we were both responsible for, a kind of murder and suicide combined. Writing her essay a couple of years later Elizabeth acknowledged this, understanding our anxiety to covert a narrative for which there was no particular cultural place into something with artistic currency. Her acknowledgment of Vlad's anomalous death and her own drive for mimesis came in the only way it fittingly could, from the mouth of her (surviving) major character, Vlad's lover:

then in my mind I was crossing the rocks at the southern end of Veavane bay, at evening, looking at a candle burning in the window of Vlad's and my room at Cryheron. All the time was one time and, as I promised I would never leave Vlad, I knew I could walk back into my own past and displace myself in my own warm body like some lonely demon. Because here was Cryheron, five years back, when everyone was alive and none of us were outlaws...The children were on the beach. Astrella and Kasrhett were coming up the path with silt on their boots from crossing the Shasta. You, Cassandra, were standing in the cabbage bed beside the house, your nose red with cold. This was my magical narrative: I dreamt that I had lost all my people, and all the places I'd live- but woke and went back.

Although this voice is a device, it is also true- truly Starfire's and, in a different way, truly his creator's. Elizabeth contemplates the 'view backward' over a path crossed that cannot, in fact, ever be regained, although the approach looks, to her, direct.

The year after I left the game, Elizabeth wrote in her journal, thinking of the group of people then lost to her (both my characters and those of hers utterly changed by their loss):

In 1974 I remember hearing oystercatchers as I stepped out of the caravan in the early morning after playing, before sleeping. Fifteen years. I loved you all and you are all beside me, exiles, phantoms.

Years later, after Elizabeth was married and we had all learned that one could both live a normal productive life and play an imaginary game, she described the absolute seductiveness of the game. (In the following quote she is analysing the feeling of being one of her characters and his obsession with one of Madeline's characters.)

Fernando seeing Ricardo as a black torch before him in a wilderness of light. Fernando is that- a deep draught of death-wish. I savour it, I regret it as it fades throughout the week. Nothing else seems harmful or significant. Fergus [Elizabeth's husband] is just body-warmth. Fame I could take or leave...I know it is for this I am alive. This lust for anger and extinction that I can't live with myself.

Not love, not sex, not drugs, not even (and this comes closest) that point when a book you're writing completely takes you over, none of these things can touch the intensity of game-playing. At any time that intensity can be dangerous, not because game-playing renders you unable to distinguish fantasy from reality but because its own, quite specific mode of 'reality' is totally addictive. When I was sixteen and writing the awful poetry that many adolescents do, I composed one of many poems about the game. In it I addressed my love of my own major character, who seemed then (and now) as real to me as myself. The last lines ran: 'the confusion in my mind/is of one too many lives/and it is my own'.

Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker played a game. Their plots were violent and melodramatic, their pantheon of characters drawn both from their own imaginations and from popular culture. They only had a chance to develop the game for two years, but on the evidence it would seem to have been complex and fully formed. In my experience such a game can be compelling and even addictive. Sustained bouts of play provide both an adrenalin and an endorphin rush. If the girls were lovers as well as co-creators in an imaginary game then the degree of their attachment must have been profound.

Recently, after twelve years of trying not even to think about the game, of occasionally being visited in dreams by Vlad or Carlin (and waking to the feeling that one has seen the ghost of someone loved), I found someone who knew about our game (which I seldom, if ever, talk about) and who wanted to play. This woman had also, incidentally, become a kind of lover. What with one thing and another we got the chance to play for only about three-quarters of an hour. When she departed we left those characters hanging in the terrible limbo of those once, and therefore always, imagined. For weeks afterwards I felt as the masochist does after a sustained beating: gripped by euphoria and, at the same time, a sense of longing. It seemed to me, in those crazy hours just after Vix had gone, that I could imagine killing to keep such a thing. The game my sisters and I played, after all, had narrated lovers, but the players were themselves sisters and friends. The sexuality was, therefore, entirely textual.

It would seem to me that the concept of folie a deux, quite apart from being, like the concept of pathology, problematic in and of itself, is wrongly applied to the situation of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker. They did not enter into a shared delusion, but each girl independently lived intensely the real, if rare, experience of playing a game. being adolescents, they were more vulnerable to the feeling of playing and more isolated with it. Because they killed Mrs Reiper they failed utterly to go on, to grow into a realization that they were not and need not have been, as they put it, 'mad' and utterly different. They did not kill Mrs Reiper because they had become confused about what was real and what was not.

Until recently, murder was winked at on the European continent if it was determined that the killing was a crime of passion. A derangement of the senses brought on by what these cultures coded as a refined and exceptional feeling (like romantic love) was then considered not pathology but tragedy. The register of emotion that governs definitions of morality is very different in such a case. When Ann Perry (Juliet Hulme) now explains that she helped Pauline kill her mother because she had to save Pauline, that she thought it was a choice between killing Mrs Reiper or seeing Pauline kill herself, she is describing a whole set of other potential losses. For Pauline to die, for herself to leave for South Africa, would have meant the loss of the game and all its people. The loss to be averted was, therefore, immeasurable, the thing to be saved vital and rare. Perry, who wished now that she had never crossed, with the murder, a border best reserved for the imagination, exhausted forever her possibilities that spring day in 1954.

Notes

from Meanjin Volume 54 Number 4 1995, Guilt Weddings. "Sara Knox on games girls play..."

Copyright held by the Meanjin (University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052 Australia.

Offsite Links

Origins, Authority & Imaginary Games parts I and II: Articles by Elizabeth and Sarah Knox documenting their lifelong 'imaginary game'. Very rare and unusual to find something like this.
Identity, Inclination & Imaginary Games Sarah Knox's reply to Elizabeth's article, continuing the meta-discussion from her point of view.

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