Angie has reason to believe that Steve still loves me, Gemma thought, and the idea filled her with cautious joy.
The two steaming dishes arrived and Gemma picked up her fork, hoping this time she might be able to eat her meal and have it stay down. She tested a mouthful, the hateful, terminal fight with Steve still haunting her memory, the food almost tasteless because of her preoccupation.
‘It’s so bloody ironic,’ she said, putting her fork down, ‘that I have to actually lose the man I love before I really get to learn how destructive jealousy is.’
‘Come on,’ said Angie, ‘don’t cut yourself up about it. Eat up, sweetheart. The opera’s not over –’
‘Till the fat lady goes into labour,’ Gemma interrupted.
‘And that’s why you’ve got to tell Steve. My feeling is he’d come back.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just know, okay?’
‘There’s something odd about this conversation, Angie. What’s going on?’
‘What’s going on? I’ll tell you! Here’s a woman who still loves her boyfriend heaps but won’t tell him that she’s going to have his baby. That’s what’s going on. You should have told him ages ago.’
‘Angie! I’m starting to feel verballed!’
Angie lowered her voice. ‘It is Steve’s, isn’t it?’
‘For God’s sake, Angie! Of course it is!’
‘What about that tacky misbehaviour you told me about some time back – in the front seat of Mike Moody’s car after you’d had too many cocktails?’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Nothing?’ Angie’s plucked eyebrows vanished under her fringe, which shone copper under the downlights.
‘Nothing pregnancy inducing.’
Gemma considered a moment. If Steve comes back, she thought sadly, I want it to be for me – because he loves me and wants to be with me. ‘I wouldn’t want him back,’ she said, ‘if he was just coming back for the baby.’
‘It’d be for you too,’ said Angie.
‘Oh come on, Ange. You can’t know that.’
‘It’d give him a great way to get back with you. It gives him the chance to be noble. To do the right thing.’
‘What else did he say?’ asked Gemma, acutely aware that the conversation with Steve had made a very big impact on Angie.
‘Sorry, Gemster. I’ve already said too much. Message ends.’
Gemma felt both admiration and frustration at Angie’s discretion. It was always difficult to negotiate a friendship with both people involved in a break-up and respect confidences as well.
‘I wish I’d never heard of bloody Lorraine Litchfield. She’s such a non-issue now.’
‘She always was, you silly chook,’ said Angie. ‘She was just part of a job to him.’
‘But she’s so beautiful!’
‘Yeah. Beautiful like a box jellyfish. You took it too damn seriously.’
‘I could say the same thing about you and a certain TRG guy, Ange,’ Gemma said, unable to resist, recalling Trevor, the ex-tactical response group operative, who wrote Angie very bad poetry and failed to mention that he was married.
‘Don’t remind me,’ said Angie. ‘Although memories of my revenge still give me a thrill.’
Gemma smiled. Angie, dressed in dominatrix black leather and studs, had love-cuffed Trevor to a hotel bed and taken out her whip. Trevor had discovered too late that the fluffy pink covers on the cuffs concealed not easily snapped play-cuffs but steely, non-negotiable police issue handcuffs. The whip, too, had been real.
‘And his wife arrived on the scene to find him like that,’ Gemma said, ‘only moments after you’d left.’
‘I heard afterwards that she picked up the whip and took over where I’d left off.’
Angie’s face was suddenly serious. ‘Funny you should mention Trevor . . .’
‘Oh?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You know, despite all our problems, Steve and I were always on the same wavelength,’ Gemma mused, returning to her preferred subject. ‘I remember once we were driving to Nelson Bay, and I’d been about to say something but changed my mind, then Steve turned to me and asked: “What was it?” He heard me changing my mind!’
Angie’s mobile interrupted her reminiscence. ‘This’ll be Jaki,’ Angie said, fishing the phone out of her briefcase and putting it to her ear, ‘with some pathetic version of the big brown dog story.’
The big brown dog appeared on numerous police incident reports and insurance claims as the cause of car accidents.
Gemma took a mouthful of fettuccine. This time she could taste it and, cautiously, she took another.
‘It should be someone from Ku-ring-gai anyway,’ Angie was saying. ‘Not Central Area Command. Where are all your people?’
Another pause while Angie frowned in concentration.
‘Yeah, I know it’s a huge area. They all are these days. What about Julie Cooper?’ Angie was saying. ‘She’s rostered on. She should be going.’
Gemma twirled a little more fettuccine around her fork, hoping her stomach would behave.
‘If she’s off sick then you’ll have to ask Paulette Heath,’ said Angie after another pause, then, ‘So? We all work one out most of the time. She might be new in town, but she’s after all the overtime she can get.’
Another long pause. ‘What about that new guy – David? He’s just transferred from up that way. And by the way, Julie Cooper, Sean Wright and I aren’t the only crime scene people in Sydney for God’s sake!’
Gemma recalled Sean Wright, who’d had a crush on her in the days she’d been in the job, and Julie Cooper, a quiet, efficient young woman with wide dark eyes and dark glossy curls, almost ringlets, that formed a swirling cloud around her pretty, girlish face. Gemma touched her tawny hair, depressingly flattened by neglect and hormones. Paulette Heath was a name new to her.
Gemma noticed the frown on Angie’s face deepen, then give way to resigned capitulation. She’s lost this round, Gemma thought, as Angie pulled out her notebook and pen.
‘Okay, okay,’ Angie finally said. ‘Give us the details.’
At the table behind them, a loud male voice delivered the punchline of a joke and the rest of his group shrieked with laughter.
‘It’s going to take me an hour or so,’ Angie said, flinching against the raucous noise and interrupting her scribbling to cover her other ear. ‘I’ll have to swing past work first and pick up my gear. Are the local detectives at the scene?’
Angie grunted and rang off, slipping the mobile back into her briefcase. She gathered up her notebook and pen and stowed them too.
‘A thousand bloody detectives around the place and they have to pick on me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Gemster, but I’m going to have to go.’
‘I’d worked that much out,’ Gemma said. ‘They can’t get anyone else out to attend a crime scene?’
‘Julie Cooper’s rung in sick. Sean’s out of range somewhere. And there’s been a major incident – a multiple shooting scene in a house at Killara.’
‘Killara? What is it with those northern suburbs lately?’ Gemma asked. ‘They seem to be having a mini crime wave. Wasn’t there a murder at Lindfield this morning?’
‘Just a routine domestic,’ said Angie. ‘Murder–attempted suicide. The guy shot his wife after twenty years of fighting. Then turned the gun on himself and shot his ear off. All the ends wrapped up and all over except for the paperwork. Paulette’s been out there most of the day. She’ll just have to gear up and go out again. She won’t mind.’
Angie took a few more hurried mouthfuls of her meal, put her fork down and pulled out her wallet. She extracted a twenty and a five. ‘Sorry to do this to you. Here’s my share,’ she said, getting up. ‘Don’t look so damn miz
. Here, I’ll buy yours too.’ She pulled out another twenty. ‘We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow. Somewhere private. Give me a ring?’
Gemma picked up the money, too dejected to resist. She angled her face up as Angie leaned in and pecked her on the cheek. ‘Promise I’ll make up for this,’ Angie added, straightening up. ‘Soon as I can.’
Gemma watched with a touch of envy as her girlfriend hurried out of the restaurant, briefcase in one hand, pulling her suit jacket into line around her slender figure with the other. Angie wasn’t unexpectedly pregnant, nor did she have to struggle with the demands of a small business. And twice a month, no matter how many or how few jobs Angie attended, a pay cheque landed in her bank account without fail.
Gemma signalled the waitress and asked for a take-away container for the fettuccine. As she picked up her jacket and the remainder of her meal, she thought that this must be the saddest celebration dinner she’d ever experienced.
As she stepped outside, the heavens opened and heavy rain pelted her as she ran for her car.
•
On the drive homewards, the radio playing softly through her thoughts, windscreen wipers clearing the steady rain, Gemma brooded over Angie’s report of her conversation with Steve. There had definitely been something odd about it. Angie had been pressuring her. But she’d been guarded as well, simultaneously revealing and concealing information – about Steve, about something important. Gemma whispered his name under her breath, and in the following moments became aware of the words Rose Tattoo was singing. She joined in with ‘Bad Boy For Love’, but her throat constricted and she snapped the radio off, angry that tears again stung her eyes.
In the last few weeks, almost without her noticing, an imaginary balance seemed to tilt either towards having the baby or away from it. In this moment, the scales, which had been leaning towards termination, tipped the tiniest distance the other way, buoyed by the thought that all might not be lost for her and Steve.
Please, she prayed to nowhere in particular, please let it be true. Let Steve still love me. Because if he does, I can have this baby. And we could be a family. The power of this phrase shocked her so much that she almost started to weep.
Two
Gemma pulled up outside her place and sat a few moments in the car, listening to the sea. Through the darkness of the rain, far out on the ocean, the lights of a distant ship twinkled like stars. This tiny light made the blackness beyond her apartment seem immense, and Gemma felt helpless and alone, at the mercy of forces and tides beyond her control. She put her hand over her belly and felt her blood beating there, startled to realise she was now a player in an evolutionary process reaching back millions of years, before recorded history, a series of huge, generational waves that had very little to do with one individual called Gemma Lincoln and everything to do with the expanding universe, with Life itself. The idea terrified her.
She hastened down the wet stone stairs, slowing only to check the mailbox, pulling out a handful of bills and letters. She ducked past the two sculptures she’d made in clay, copies of the lions of Delos, running through the rain to the front door of the apartment she’d bought just before prices became astronomical. No time for sculpture these days, Gemma thought, as she let herself into her flat, one of four asymmetrical apartments created from an old Victorian mansion by a 1960s developer.
Taxi cat came running at the sound of the front door opening, claws clicking on the floorboards, but he skittered away when she tried to pick him up.
She locked the security grille behind her, disarmed the alarm and paused near the door of her office, then put the light on in the operatives office, opposite her own. Once, she’d been boss of a small but successful and very busy security firm, Phoenix Security Services, employing three other people, spending time in whatever studio space she could grab, working with clay, going out with her girlfriends or her sister, enjoying an exciting, long-term relationship with the man she adored. That was all finished. These days, there was no time for anything except work.
Of the three desks in the operatives office, only Mike Moody’s showed signs of habitation. Mike, ex-Federal Police and IT expert, once a full-time employee, was on stand-by only these days, in case there was a work surge or a new face was needed for surveillance on a suspicious target. But his services hadn’t been required for some time.
Gemma thought of Mike fondly. He had been very kind to her the day she realised she was pregnant, his response that of any good-hearted man to a woman in trouble. At one stage, she’d been attracted to him. Maybe she still was. She’d certainly found him irresistible one night after too many cocktails. Mike was considerate, reliable and consistent, and once she’d recovered from the awful embarrassment about her behaviour that drunken night, Gemma found him a great ally on her cases. Steve was exciting, unpredictable and, more often than not, because of the nature of his work almost impossible to contact. But she still adored him. Some heart connections are very deep – and mysterious, Gemma reflected.
She switched off the light and closed the door on the operatives office. She went into her own office and dropped the mail onto her desk. She checked her email and the next day’s appointments, and as her messages downloaded she opened the bills and put them in a pile to be paid. Then she picked up the letters and examined a hand-addressed one, turning it over. The name Grace Kingston jumped out at her from the back of the envelope. Grace, the half-sister Gemma had traced and finally contacted through the ICQ program – a web-based system that enabled people to track down long-lost friends and relatives. For the first time that night, Gemma’s spirits lifted. She tore the letter open. Grace had delayed their meeting a few times over the last three months and she’d been expecting contact from her to finally set up their first meeting and, now, here it was. She stood reading it.
She had to read it twice more before its reality started to sink in. Slowly, she walked to her living area, stunned by the letter, reading it yet again:
Dear Gemma,
Things have become clearer to me now and I’ve come to a decision. It’s better that we don’t meet now because of the way my life has changed. In fact, I must insist on it. I’ve decided to become part of a spiritual community called The Group, and with the busy regime involved I believe it’s better to let go of anything from the past. I didn’t really know about you and Kit until your email, and now I’m making a new life here and I hope you can respect this decision. I’m sorry that I initially led you to believe that a meeting and a relationship with me were possible. Things have really changed for me since I found this place. Please forget about me.
Sincerely,
Grace Kingston
Gemma threw the letter onto the dining table, feeling the pressure of tears in her eyes and throat. Automatically, she went to ring Kit, then stopped, remembering. Taxi cat, curled back in his favourite spot on one of the blue leather armchairs, regarded her with his green eyes, but as Gemma picked him up, needing a cuddle, he struggled out of her arms and jumped to the floor, turning his back on her. This was the last straw. Usually, the peaceful emptiness of her apartment was a luxury. But tonight the emptiness seemed tainted with loneliness – even desolation. The whole evening had fallen over, she thought, putting the container of fettuccine in the fridge. Once, a minor upset like this wouldn’t have fazed her. But tonight, and with Grace’s letter to finish the evening off, Gemma felt abandoned. She sank down onto the chair left vacant by the cat.
The words of the newsreader penetrated her misery: ‘In news just to hand,’ the woman said, ‘police are attending the scene of a multiple shooting at Killara in Sydney’s northern suburbs. At this stage, there are two fatalities and a critically injured nine-year-old boy. The boy, the only survivor of what appears to be a family tragedy, is now in intensive care after being found by his mother. More details as they come to hand.’
A nine-year-old boy, Gemma’s mind repe
ated. Found by his mother. A shooting at a house at Killara. This sounded like the scene Angie had been forced to attend earlier.
•
Because she was too restless to go to bed, Gemma sat at her desk. She’d been tempted to make coffee, but had made herself a virtuous herbal tea instead.
Outside, the rain had eased and its steady rhythm was a comfort as Gemma made a list of jobs to do next day. It was good to keep busy, she told herself, and not take the disappointment about Grace personally. Things were difficult enough as it was, without that rejection knocking her ego around.
Restless, she left her office and went down to the living area to stand near the sliding doors, turning the lights off so that she could stare out to sea, listening to the swing and thud of the waves against the cliffs below.
Maybe it was best after all that Grace didn’t contact her. Gemma hadn’t been looking forward to bringing their half-sister up to date with family history. How to explain the tragedy that lay there? Their father, psychiatrist Archie Chisholm, had been a most difficult man – a philanderer and worse. If she and Grace met, she would have to tell Grace the truth about the man who had fathered her.
Gemma went to the drawer in the cedar chest, where her mother’s crystal decanters sat, and took out the long letter she’d had from Grace after their initial email contact a few months earlier. She read it again.
Dear Gemma,
You asked me in your last email to write something of myself and my life and so I’m taking the opportunity while I’m in Sydney tidying up the last of my grandmother’s estate to write to you. I almost rang to organise a visit, but something held me back – a ‘too much too soon’ sort of feeling. I thought a handwritten letter might be a better way for our first conversation.
The handwriting was good, Gemma noted. Much tidier than her own, slanting to the right, balanced and precise. She read on:
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