Blood Redemption hag-1

by Alex Palmer

  It’s that simple.

  I had 2 do it I had 2 do it That’s just a wall u put up. Nothing realU just say that because u can’t tell me why u did do it No, it did have to be done. It was horrible, okay? And it was. It was horrible. But it had to happen. But that isn’t it, that’s not what I wanted to tell you. Because I did something that really was wrong.

  Something I should never have done ever. And I don’t know what to do about it now.

  Wot could be worse???

  Shooting someone else as well. He was right there in front of me.

  He was so close. Almost as close as my computer is now. I guess he wanted my gun, I didn’t think about that before. I just fired. I didn’t even know I had. But his face — Turtle, he looked — I didn’t think it would look like that. I’m asking, what have I done?

  Wot did u think it would look like????? Wot are u saying this 4??

  There was a kid there. He saw everything. I don’t know, Turtle.

  What do I do?

  Go 2 police Now

  I’m not doing that. What’s the point of that? Everything I’ve done would be wasted.

  It’s wasted anyway Nothing but waste U can’t say it’s anything elseIt doesn’t matter wot u do now Firewall This is never going away 4 u Well, maybe I don’t care. Maybe what I did to that man and that boy is not so bad because maybe they deserved it. They knew what she did.

  Bullshit U stop U stop right there U think I deserved being likethis??? U want me 2 say that u deserved everything that’s happened2 u?? Do u want people 2 say that about u??? What do u thinkthey’re going 2 say u deserve right now?

  I didn’t say that. I’d never say you deserved what happened to you, Turtle. You can’t think that. It isn’t fair.

  I said I know u Firewall U amp; me are both fucking cripples, right??

  So fucking wot??? Doesn’t mean we have 2 do things like this Do uwant me 2 hate u for this? And say u deserve that? I could do thatbut I won’t

  It fucking is not the same. Anyway they’re both dead now so what’s the point of saying that?

  Firewall u cant do this amp; walk away U cant I can’t keep talking now, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get out into the air. I’m going but I’ll be back. Love you, Turtle, love you always.

  Lucy cut the connection before Turtle could reply and left her final words hanging in cyberspace.

  ‘I have to get out of here.’ She spoke aloud to the small room as she disconnected and folded up the notebook. She could not breathe, the quietness had begun to jangle. This place was haunted by her own ghosts, she could never come back here again. She pushed her sleeping bag and computer, her mobile phone, all her acquired and stolen things into her backpack. She walked out of the disused office quickly, leaving her stained clothes in a heap on the floor, and let herself out of the garage by a side door without once glancing at the stolen and now abandoned car.

  She was ordinary, no one would look at her twice. Just a small young woman, nineteen perhaps, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, wearing a black hooded raincoat and lace-up shoes like a schoolgirl’s, carrying a compact backpack. Stepping out into ruined streets where the houses had been demolished to make way for a new housing development.

  Walking through the rain past the cyclone wire fences, turning the corner towards the bus stop on Anzac Parade, passing a white-painted brick building sandwiched between a three-storey block of flats and a takeaway food bar. She paused to look at the white building as she went by, checking the red and white sign: The Women’s Whole Life Health Centres Inc., Randwick Clinic . Then she was just anyone else, a student perhaps, catching the bus to Central Railway Station on a winter’s day.

  She sat next to a large woman in an orange coat who declared a boundary dispute by wedging her shopping basket against Lucy’s legs.

  The skin of ordinary life settled over her like a muzzling cloth. The bus was full, the air steamy from the passengers’ wet clothing, their tangled hair. The sound of the bus driver’s radio fought against the noise of traffic and the softer voices of the packed-in travellers. Lucy listened to the talkback show host’s relentless patter as the bus edged forward in the slow traffic. Her breathing was suspended as he began to announce in his clipped and angry voice: Well, folks, this has justbeen put in front of me. I want you to know what sort of society we’reliving in today. A sick society, that’s what. A man has just been shotdead outside a women’s health clinic in Chippendale. And his wife,seriously, critically injured. So a man goes to work, with his wife, andsomeone decides to walk up to him out of the blue and shoot himdead. What sort of a sick person does that? Do you think gaol’s toogood for someone who does that? Or maybe just this once we shouldbe trying to make the punishment fit the crime? You ring and tell me.

  You know the number to call.

  The woman beside Lucy stirred, snorted and muttered angrily to herself.

  ‘People like that deserve anything they get. Useless, this government is. Why didn’t Howard bring back the death penalty when he got in?

  None of them are good for anything. If they asked us what we wanted, we’d have it back today.’

  Lucy raised her chin and stared at the back of the head of the passenger in front of her, a mass of damp black curls. What would they know? What would any of them know?

  The bus had stopped near the Elizabeth Street entrance to Central Station. The woman was trying to get off and pushed vigorously against Lucy. ‘Aren’t you going to move?’ she said.

  Ignoring her, Lucy left the bus. The centres of her hands were wet, her grazed palms stung. A line of watchers sat on the low wall near the corner of Eddy Avenue, out-of-towners, the unemployed, derelicts.

  Near them, a busker sat with his back against the sandstone wall darkened by traffic fumes. His fair hair was tied back in a long ponytail and he played sweet tunes on a trumpet for the passers-by and the unending traffic.

  Lucy walked past their collective watchful gaze, through the brown sandstone columns of the station entranceway, down into the concourse towards the ticket offices and the public toilets. People flowed either side of her. She felt that she had opened a door onto a room where someone should have been waiting for her but which in reality was so empty she might have been the very first person to step inside it. Her skin was scorched. The children’s voices came rushing back into her head, their soft cries touching her cheek like the brush of tiny insects’ wings before stinging her with their sharp acidic bites. She walked, weighted by this impossible duress, the noise in her head, fear and the constrictions of time binding her to this body, this place.

  Her head cleared. The concourse, with its shifting crowds, came back to a washed-out reality. She was at the start of the open walkway that led past the florists, newspaper sellers and fast-food merchants down to Eddy Avenue. Indifferent commuters glanced at her as they made their way through the scrappy weather to the suburban trains.

  She remembered why she had chosen to come here. She went down to the roadway and crossed over to Belmore Park.

  She saw who she was looking for in the gazebo under the Moreton Bay fig trees. A group of hungry boys who had climbed up onto the railings and were perched there, barely out of the weather, a chorus of ragged crows watching over the people who walked through the park.

  One of them, maybe fifteen and wearing a khaki coat and a dark red beanie over his straggling hair, climbed down as she walked towards them and came hurrying to meet her.

  ‘Luce,’ he said, quietly and urgently, ‘where’ve you been? I was wondering if you were going to show up here. Look, I heard these two people got shot down near Broadway. You didn’t do it, did you?’

  ‘I did. Maybe a couple of hours ago? I don’t know when. Yes, I did do it.’

  Her voice shook as she spoke. She took hold of him instinctively and he caught her by the shoulders. They hung on to each other desperately in the grey weather.

  ‘Oh, Lucy, you didn’t! Why? What did you come back here for? It’s so close to where
it happened. What if the pigs see you?’

  ‘They don’t know who I am. You’re not going to tell them. I wanted to see you. I’ve got to sit down. I feel like I’m going to fall over.’

  They sat on a bench at the edge of the open grass, close to each other in the damp cold. Lucy hugged her backpack, burying her face into it for a few short moments.

  ‘It was just supposed to be her, Greg. But there was some man there and I shot him too.’ She looked up at him, almost whispering. ‘I didn’t plan to do that but I just did. I don’t know how. And he’s dead now.’

  He stared at her and then at the ground.

  ‘Luce. Shit! Why did you? What are you going to do now?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. And there was this kid there. Staring at me. I can still see him. And she isn’t dead, that woman. I heard it on the radio. She’s not dead.’

  ‘Shit, Luce,’ the boy said again. ‘This ambulance went by here a while back and it was screaming! You don’t reckon — ’

  They looked over towards the traffic on Eddy Avenue and the dark yellowish-brown facade of the railway colonnade on the other side of the road. The line of trees and the castle-like stone edifice of the station blocked out the grey sky.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. It was horrible, you know. There was all this blood and it was on me. It was just so horrible.’

  ‘Fuck!’ The boy was frightened. ‘You get a car? Anyone see you?’

  ‘No, that’s okay, I did all that. And I got back to the garage okay. I left the car there and everything, like I said. But I lost the key to the garage, it fell out of my hand. It went in the pit. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was really strange. It was horrible but it was just so easy as well. You know, you just do it and it happens, and that’s it, it’s over.

  Just like that, it’s all over and done with? It’s so quick. I thought it’d be different. I know Graeme said it’d happen really fast and I shouldn’t worry about that, but I still thought there’d be more to it than that. I didn’t think it would be like that.’

  Her voice was shaking as she spoke. He looked at her once; after that they sat for a while in silence, staring at nothing.

  ‘You want a smoke?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  He rolled a cigarette for each of them. Her hands were shaking too much to hold the match and he lit it for her. He sat beside her, frowning.

  ‘Fuck you, Luce, why did you do it?’ The words burst out of him too loudly. She tried to quieten him but he shook her off. ‘Just because Graeme — ’

  ‘It’s not “just because Graeme”,’ she replied in a tight, bitter voice.

  ‘It is. Don’t you say that to me. He put you up to this and you let him.’

  ‘No. He didn’t. I mean that, Greg. He didn’t. I went after this. Me.

  I did. You can’t change that.’

  ‘Fucking bullshit!’

  ‘No, it’s true.’ Lucy frowned. She dropped her barely smoked cigarette onto the wet ground. ‘I can’t smoke, I can’t do anything. My throat’s so tight, I can’t breathe.’

  ‘Why don’t you come over to Wheelo’s? You can hide out there for a while. He’ll have something to loosen you up a bit.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No, I don’t want to do that. I’ve got to go back and have a look.

  I’ve got to make sure I really did it. Weird.’

  They sat there for a few moments longer. People walking through the park glanced at them then looked away. A woman stared; the boy made a lewd face at her and she hurried on. Lucy stood up quickly, hoisting her backpack.

  ‘I’ve got to go. And I’ve got to see Graeme as well, I promised him I’d go and see him. He said to me last night, you know, if your courage fails you, don’t worry. You just come back here to me anyway and we’ll talk and we’ll see where we go from there. Well, I am. He’s got to tell me this is okay.’

  ‘Oh yeah, and it’s got nothing to do with him — ’

  ‘You don’t understand it.’

  ‘I don’t want to. You didn’t have to do this. You shouldn’t have, Luce. You’re the one who gets to live with it, not him. You know, for the rest of your life, when you wake up in the morning, you’re always going to know you did this. But he’s not. He’s just going to lie there and jerk himself off and not give a shit. Anyway, it’s too fucking dangerous. They put you away for ever for things like this.’

  There was a silence in which they looked at each other.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t Graeme. It’s me. All right? It’s me.’

  ‘ It fucking is not! ’

  The boy threw his own cigarette on the ground. She looked around, not knowing what to say. For the first time, she thought she might cry.

  ‘When am I going to see you next?’ he asked.

  ‘Later on. This evening. I’ll see Graeme and I’ll come by Wheelo’s later. I might sleep there if that’s okay.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s okay. I’ll see you there. I’m not going back to the refuge now. There’s no way I’m going to stay at Preacher Graeme’s community fucking refuge ever again after this. I don’t care if I am supposed to be living there. I don’t care what you say about him, that guy just fucking scares me so much, I don’t like going near him anyway. But I am never going anywhere near him again after this. You shouldn’t have let him do this to you, Luce. Not ever.’ He was shaking his head angrily. ‘You promise me you’ll be there tonight?’

  ‘Yeah, I promise.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He rubbed his face. The anger had gone out of his voice, now he was only sad.

  ‘Fuck you, Luce, the things you do. You be there. We’ve got to work out what we’re going to do now.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  She walked away, back across the park to the street, turning to wave goodbye to him as she went, and saw him, still seated and waving back to her, as she waited to cross the road.

  3

  In Railway Square the traffic flowed in a solid roar and the rainy air smelled of petrol. Lucy, lost in her thoughts, barely saw the crowds around her. No, Greg, it’s not just Graeme. You should know that, you know me, we’ve been together for a while now. We’ve slept in doorways, under bridges, anywhere there was a bit of warmth. You and me hanging on to each other with nothing but old clothes and newspapers between us. You’ve seen me when I’m wasted and the only thing I want to feel is nothing. When the only thing that keeps me going is the blood pumping through my veins because I can’t fucking stop it. Sometimes I want that blood to run down the nearest drain and take me with it. But it’s not just mine any more, it’s someone else’s as well. I think it must be painted all over the sky.

  She looked up, breaking out of her trance; the expanse of sky above the station was grey. The roadway opened into George Street, taking the traffic past the verdigris steeple of Christ Church St Laurence before moving on towards the harbour. She was travelling in the opposite direction, past the ugly, squared tower of the University of Technology. In the last year, she had spent hours inside its student computer rooms, out of the heat or the chill of the day, opening up new worlds through a false student account. Knock on the right door at UTS after hours and someone who was just a boy, white-faced and quietly spoken, would give you a log-on ID and a password for nothing, with no questions asked. Lucy had not tried to guess his reasons for doing this; she no longer asked herself why anyone did what they did. That question had been replaced in her mind a long time ago by others. Are there any limits to what people do? Why do they like to be so cruel to each other? When she asked this aloud, people laughed and called her stupid.

  The questions drove her as she gained skill in using the software and built her own website, both in the computer rooms and on her own stolen machine. Everything she fashioned worked around this insoluble puzzle, which never gave ground to her. Duplicating the things she had met with in her life and seen out on the
Sydney streets

  — beatings, robberies, rape — and fixing them as electronic impulses on a screen, she transformed them into something she could suspend out of time. She was safe in the computer rooms and the events she recreated on her website were controlled, they could not hurt her. She studied the images she built, remaking them if she needed to, trying to understand what it must mean to hurt someone or to shoot them dead.

  Today she did not stop, her restless, jerky energy drove her on past the pubs, restaurants and takeaway bars to the serrated wall of the Carlton brewery. Further up Broadway, close to the park, stood two old, ornate buildings with elaborate clock towers supporting translucent spheres like fragile crystal worlds. In the middle distance, Lucy saw what she had come to find. The usually swift flow of traffic down Broadway was forced to slow before negotiating a hazard marked by a string of plastic blue police ribbons snapping in the wind.

  Access to a particular side street had been cordoned off and police cars were parked on the road and the footpath.

  Although she had been waiting to see it, she stopped abruptly to lean against the rough wall of the brewery and wait until the blood had stopped pounding in her head. Images from her website began to surge through her mind. In her electronic world, the counterfeit Lucy pulled the trigger, the woman doctor died under the gun, and once that switch was thrown, catastrophe was initiated. The buildings around the doctor began to burn, the sky was split open to rain down green fire, nuclear flame burst out onto Broadway and all the buildings that surrounded Lucy where she stood now, exploded. A fireball roared the breadth of the roadway and ate up stick figures and toy cars.

  Outside of her head, in the ordinary daylight, she watched the world move on routinely around her. She was alien to everyone passing her by, someone the crowds would turn on if they knew what she had done.