by Alex Palmer
They stay with me. Sometimes I think they are me.’
He smiled at her and closed the file.
‘I know of others who have been tormented like that. They don’t let you rest, do they? We’ll find a way to make them go away. You see, Lucy, here you are with people who understand you. Sit there. Try and relax your spine.’
He stood behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. He began to massage her neck, working at the tight knot of muscles. She felt his closeness, the human warmth, the imprint of his reassuring hands.
‘Listen to me. Those voices in your head. They are the voices of your heart as you say. But they’re your children as well.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘they didn’t ever exist. I don’t want them to.’
‘But they did exist. They were living. They were your children and they are still living. You and they are indivisible, it’s their grief that you’re hearing.’
‘I just wish they weren’t there. I want them to leave me alone, that’s all.’
‘No, Lucy. Listen to them. They are asking you to give them rest. You can do for them what was never done for you: you can give them redress.
Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. You have a right to vengeance, Lucy.’
He continued the slow massaging for some moments, then stopped and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders.
‘We know who Agnes Liu is, Lucy. We’ve known about her for a long, long time. It’s not chance that’s brought you here. This is ordained.
You came here to be made clean and you will be. You came here for peace of mind and you will find it. Now you wait here. You just wait.’
When he came back, he placed a gun, compact and metal blue, on the table in front of her. She looked at it for some moments. She shook her head to say she did not understand.
‘Have you ever fired a gun before?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I know about them being out there and all that, and people getting hold of them. But I’ve never had to do that.’
He picked up the gun and loaded it with two bullets.
‘This is a very special gun. It’s one that I had made. I want you to try and use it. Come with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you how to fire it.’
He led her to the centre of the lawn and stood behind her as he folded both her hands around the gun. He was not a tall man and her body fitted against his without discomfort, his strength seemed to cushion her. In this serenity and the closeness of his human presence, she had felt a suspension of time, a sense of the peacefulness he had promised. She let her body relax.
‘When you’re ready,’ Graeme said to her soothingly. ‘No one can hear us out here. Call on your strength. And then fire. Twice. You can do it.’ He stepped away from her.
The shots crashed out, she rocked on her feet. Graeme did not quite laugh as he watched her trying to shake the ringing sound out of her head.
‘It’s a little noisy but you get used to it,’ he said. ‘Let’s sit down and talk, Lucy.’
They had sat down on a stretch of grass much more lush than the winter-starved turf that surrounded her now in the public park. The blue metal finish of the gun lying between them gleamed in the sun.
Graeme was a young-looking man with clear brown eyes but as she looked at him Lucy had thought that maybe he was older than he liked to appear. This did not worry her, he had a good-looking face, a comfortable face, and dark hair which had not yet turned grey. She had picked up the gun and weighed it in her hand.
‘You have to understand, Lucy, that when you have that gun in your hands, the way you do now, you have the power. No one else owns it, it belongs to you. And then you control whatever happens to you, not the reverse. You need to remember that.’
She did remember, both that and the strange lightness of spirit she had felt in counterbalance to the weight in her hand. He had continued to speak as she held the pistol balanced in her palm.
‘You can take this gun and find redress for the sins committed against you, against your unborn children. You, Lucy, are a very strong young woman. You take this gun and you will show the world how strong you are.’
She had sat holding the gun for some moments longer.
‘Do you want to load it for me again?’ she asked.
‘And if I do, what will you do?’
‘I’ll shoot at that tree.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘What else am I going to do?’
‘Guns are there to be used, Lucy. That’s why they were created.
But you have to use them carefully. They have their designated targets. Your target has already been chosen for you, but I think you know that.’
He reloaded the gun. She looked at the tree and imagined the doctor at the car door, speaking to her mother. She emptied the gun into both imaginary figures, firing as quickly as she could, feeling the force of the bullets as they thudded into the tree.
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ she said, once the gun was empty. ‘I don’t like hurting people.’
‘You won’t be hurting anyone,’ he replied. ‘She’ll feel nothing at all, there will be none of the pain she has inflicted on you. You will be cutting a thread, it will be clean and merciful. Blood will wash away blood. You will be left clean. When it’s over you will feel nothing except the most blessed relief. The voices of your children will be silent for ever. They, and you, will be at peace.’
She held the gun, unable to prevent herself from feeling a faint emotional rush at possessing it, a sense of swelling that she had somehow grown stronger.
‘It’s empty again,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘So I can’t use it on myself then?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Please don’t do that, Lucy,’ he said in his softest voice, smiling at her. ‘I care about you. Please don’t do that to me.’
On the park bench beside the pools of cold water, Lucy’s thoughts momentarily gained clarity. No, that would have spoiled everything, wouldn’t it? That would have put the kybosh on everything.
The quiet was shaken by a blast from the horn of a truck rumbling past University Hall. The noise shattered the glass shell containing Lucy and her thoughts. She got to her feet and hoisted her backpack on her shoulders, turning her back against the chill wind.
I’ve used that gun now, Graeme, just like you showed me. Now I’m going to come and talk to you about it, and maybe you can tell me for a second time why I did it.
She walked across the park towards City Road and King Street, a small figure overshadowed by the university buildings crowded onto the perimeter of the parklands. Unnoticed by almost everyone.
4
There were certain things Grace knew she could never do. The sectioning of the dead was one of them, even though the postmortems she had attended were always such matter of fact events. It was only this remaking of dissection as an everyday occurrence which made it bearable for her. Today, that this was just regular, paid work for them all, had the opposite effect, she did not know why.
She watched the attendant wheel Henry Liu to the stainless-steel table then saw him jerk his thumb at the corpse and ask it to get up on the table now if it didn’t mind, mate, because they were all in a hurry.
Grace felt the joke was on her. She glanced at Harrigan beside her but did not see a flicker of reaction in his face. How did he do it?
The pathologist appeared, Kenneth McMichael, shambling angel of death, a massive man in his surgical gown. Dressed and groomed by St Vinnie’s, his coke bottle glasses were flecked with flakes of dandruff from his oily black hair. He leaned over the corpse and took its head in his huge, dexterous hands, turning it this way and that as he studied the wound, as delicately as if he were holding a child.
‘Now,’ he said, and the word was almost a sigh, ‘this is not something you’d be expecting when you got out of bed this morning.
Are we dealing with a regular firearm here?’ His voice was soft and dry like the crunch of fine sand.
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‘No, we’re not, Ken,’ Harrigan replied matter of factly. ‘This is very much a one-off. Specially modified to do the maximum amount of damage close up.’
‘You can put it down as succeeding in that case,’ the pathologist said, with a slightly ironic raising of his eyebrows. ‘All right. Let’s start.’
Harrigan’s expression did not change but Grace was surprised to notice him suppress a recoil to this comment.
On the steel table, technicians stripped the body of its clothes, peeling it to indiscriminate nakedness before charting its fragile geography by x-ray.
‘He’s not going out dancing tonight,’ one said, removing the shirt.
‘Not without a makeover,’ the other replied.
The pathologist grinned as they spoke and briefly hummed cha-cha-cha. With gentle finesse, he welcomed his subject into its permanent silence by sectioning it down to piecework, his soft voice speaking his findings into a cassette recorder. As Henry Liu’s body was opened out into its layered complexity, Grace smelled a pervasive odour she had never noticed so vividly before: old blood. It stank, there was no other word for it. She stepped back, giddy on her feet, swallowing. Briefly she thought she would faint.
‘Are you all right? Leave if you have to,’ Harrigan said.
‘No, I’m okay. I’ll stay.’
‘Is your companion feeling this, Harrigan?’
McMichael was looking at her, unsmiling, for some reason angered.
She shook her head.
‘Yes, you are,’ he said. ‘Now why is that? You could even say this is beautiful.’
He gestured to the open cavity of skull on the table in front of them, where the interior bloomed pink and grey into the open air. The attendants were also watching her.
‘He was murdered,’ she replied. ‘People do feel for the dead.’
‘Do they?’ he asked and leaned on the table, supporting himself with both hands. He smiled at her. ‘Autopsy. From the Greek. Auto, self. Optes, witness. Navel-gazing in other words.’ He straightened up and gestured to the corpse with his large hands. ‘This is all of us, madam. Remember that, because you’ll be here soon enough. You are looking at yourself, that’s what’s bothering you.’
Grace felt another sickness at the memory of events that might well have placed her here on a table like this, but which, in their final washup, had not. She was alive and standing, but she was also cold to the bone in this steel and tile room where the living mixed with the dead. She stared back at the pathologist: And what would you know about people who can still breathe?
‘Ken, we’re not in one of your lectures now. Give my officer a break, thanks,’ Harrigan interrupted testily. ‘Let’s move on. We’ve only got so much time.’
The pathologist smiled as he went back to work in silence. Grace stood still. When McMichael and his assistants were finished, the dead man lay naked on the table, his palms upwards, his eyes still open and staring at the ceiling. What had to be presented to the living had been stitched back together with an easy skill. He had become a figure which, other than to be disposed of, was finished with in every sense. Grace could not make any of the usual connections. If these pieces were not living now, how had they ever been alive? Why couldn’t Henry Liu get up, get dressed and walk away? Briefly, the fact of death did not make sense to her, she could not understand it.
‘We’re finished,’ McMichael said. ‘Something you can tell your lady friend, Harrigan. We don’t do anything wonderful like getting people back on their feet again. Sorry to disappoint her.’
Harrigan was unruffled. ‘Thanks, Ken. I’ll need your report ASAP, you know that. I’ll be waiting on it.’
‘I’ll see you outside,’ Grace said.
She was gone so quickly she left Harrigan slightly confused. He followed her out into the hallway and found himself in the less than congenial position of loitering outside the door to the women’s toilet.
He stopped a female technician in the corridor.
‘I think my officer is in there and she’s probably feeling a little light on her feet. Could you check for me if she’s okay? Tell her I’ve gone to the cafe to get something to eat. She can catch up with me there when she feels up to it.’
‘I can do that,’ the woman replied, smiling sympathetically.
Grace was holding onto the white porcelain basin for support and looking into the mirror when the technician opened the door and asked her if she was all right.
‘Yes,’ she replied, trying to smile but otherwise unable to move. ‘I’m just redoing my face, that’s all.’
‘Your boss said to say he’s gone over to the Street Cafe to get something to eat and you might want to join him when you feel like it.’
‘Thanks. I’ll be there in a little while.’
She spoke with effort, her cheeks pale beneath her facade. The young woman smiled at her in the mirror and went out again.
‘Why do I do this?’ Grace said to herself, shaking her head and leaning on the basin. She had refused to faint but she had been sick.
She looked into the mirror to check her face. Another mirror behind her returned the reflection: she saw the white mask of her make-up repeated in a series of ever diminishing images until it disappeared into the dark. Pulling herself upright, she and the other reflections faced each other as she drew a careful line around her mouth with her dark red lipstick.
‘Just look the world in the eye, okay, Gracie? Walk tall,’ she said, mocking her own melodrama. She straightened her jacket to give the final touch to her armour and then went out to find the cigarette machine, her coat and the boss, in that order, with that priority.
He must never leave that mobile phone alone. All the way here, he had been talking to somebody or other. Now he was on the phone to someone else again as she walked up to him with a cup of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other. His coffee was cooling on the table in front of him, a half-eaten roll beside it.
‘How are you?’ he asked, returning the persistent object to its holder on his belt. She wondered if he ever thought of turning it off or throwing it away.
‘I’m okay,’ she replied. ‘Do you mind if we sit outside so I can have a cigarette? I know it’s a bit cold.’
‘You smoke, do you? We’re in the right place for you then, you must have a death wish. No, I don’t mind just so long as you don’t want to smoke in the car. My car’s been a cigarette-free zone ever since I gave them away myself.’
I wouldn’t dream of it, boss, she thought.
They found a table under an awning, out of the scattered rain and sheltered from the wind which harried litter in small gusts across the tiny stretch of open ground.
‘Did you pass out?’ he asked as they sat down.
‘No.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it if you did. It’s going to happen to you at least once if you’ve got half a brain.’
He sounded almost sympathetic. Grace, on the other hand, was reminded of the last few hours and felt an immediate return of nausea.
She put down her sandwich and drank coffee instead.
‘I’m not lying, I didn’t pass out,’ she said. ‘I felt a little queasy, that’s all. I just needed something to eat.’
He drank his own coffee and watched her force her way through the leftovers of her sun-dried tomato and ham sandwich.
‘I’m sure you did,’ he said when she had finished. ‘But want me to tell you the reason you’re feeling it now? You saw something of the man. Everything about that boy made his father more real to you.
You’ve got to remember, it’s not a person you’re dealing with. Whoever they were, they don’t exist any more, it’s good night for them. A body’s nothing, it’s a throwaway. See it that way and it can’t hurt you.’
He spoke dispassionately, a giver of useful advice. A brief shower of rain fell on the awning, a sound like a hush as Grace brushed away the crumbs and lit her first cigarette of the day with relief. She glanced out at the passing rain and fel
t cold at heart.
‘Do you have to see it like that?’ she replied. ‘A body isn’t just nothing. Not to the people who cared about him.’
‘You’re not those people and you can’t afford to think like that. Not in there.’
‘No? Because if I do, the pathologist will stick the knife into me instead? “This is all of us, madam. Remember that, because you’ll be here soon enough.”’ She heard herself mimicking McMichael’s soft dry voice with savage accuracy. ‘What a horrible creep he was! Is he always like that?’
To her surprise, Harrigan laughed, much more than what she had said called for. She wondered how much tension he had stored away in there.
‘Yeah. He is. A horrible creep,’ he said, still laughing. ‘And yes, he is always like that. I don’t know how often I’ve heard him give that little speech. He’s got a filthy temper. He’s reliable, that’s the only thing you can say about him. You wouldn’t ask him round for dinner.’
He wiped his eyes.
‘You’ve had quite a day, haven’t you? We didn’t even have to organise it for you. We just tossed you in at the deep end.’
‘It’s okay, it’s not a big deal. This isn’t my first job.’
This solicitude embarrassed her, she wanted to brush it away.
‘Either way, I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ve handled it well.’
‘Thanks,’ she replied concisely, blushing faintly under her make-up.
She had always dealt badly with praise. Unconsciously, she touched the raised line of a scar on her neck, a straight thread-like mark beginning with a fish hook near her pulse and finishing above the line of her breast bone. It was a habit all her self-discipline could not suppress. The touch of her fingers wanted to soothe away both the scar and the indelible physical memory of the cut itself. She saw his gaze follow the movement of her hand and, realising what she was doing, stopped. She wondered if he would ask her about it, people did from time to time. There was no point in Harrigan asking her anything: she had no explanations to give, not to anyone, ever. Eight years ago, an ex-lover had held her down and cut that scar into her neck in a few short moments which she had thought would be her last on this earth. She had carried the impression of his body ever since: first inside her, brutally, as he raped her and then his fist in her face until she lost consciousness. He was her personal demon. Time after time she unpeeled him from her memory, only to find him back again when she least expected him, dragging that smell of old bad blood after him, the same odour she had smelled in the dissection room.