The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender
Page 17
Annihilated by men making their own history. Men who uprooted trees to decorate their edifices, levelled people’s homes to construct monuments to themselves, concrete and glass monuments reflecting their own images.
As long as the innocent bystanders were untouched we turned a blind eye to it. But the bystanders are touched. And we are not innocent. Secretly we admire men like Lavender. We cut down tall poppies but we let the cancer run rampant.
The big fish get away.
Slip and slide in the waters that nourish them.
‘CLAUDIA!’
It was Collier, calling me back to his desk.
‘It’s coming through now. You’ve missed the dedication.’
To the child who would inherit this beautiful corrupt city.
I was watching the computer. A dull click like something shuffling into gear, then the high-pitched whirr of the printer, the machinery so much a part of Harry Lavender’s city.
I dream of funerals. My own. It is a state occasion and am laid out in the open box moving slowly through the streets of Sydney. The buildings are tall reflective glass. It is my image that is reflected in that glass.
My eyes followed the dots, eating, devouring them, the dots that became letters that became words that became sentences, paragraphs that became The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender.