by Alex Palmer
A single row of small navy-blue rectangular windows near the ceiling locked out the light on the laneway side of the building. They created darkness, cutting out the sound and sight of the outside world.
A painted Christ was projected onto an ancient film screen at the back of the auditorium. Beams of light from the projection illuminated the slow circling fall of specks of dust. In the unlit room, the figure’s face and garments were luminous and seemed to float above the tiny stage, with hands held out in blessing towards the watcher. White plastic chairs were set in concentric circles in the middle of the auditorium, centred underneath its gaze.
Lucy’s heart beat more quickly as she looked around her. She took off her backpack and placed it on a chair. Then the door next to the stage opened silently and Graeme, dressed in black trousers and a grey striped shirt, came into the room.
‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘I have been so worried about you. I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to see you at all today. I heard it all on the radio. Congratulations. I can’t say it enough: I am so proud of you, I am so very, very proud of you. I knew you had the courage, I knew you could do it. But how are you? You are coping? You do know that now you’ve done this, you’ve nothing to fear?’
He had been walking towards her with his hands held out to take hold of hers, but something in her face made him stop where he was.
‘How am I? I’m fine, Graeme! I just shot two people and I killed one of them, but beside that, I’m just fine. How do you think I am?’
The fury of her emotion came up from a depth of revulsion she only now acknowledged.
He sounded shaken as he replied. ‘You were brave, Lucy. You were very, very brave. You did what had to be done.’
‘Yeah?’
She began to move restlessly through the circles of chairs.
‘Yeah, I was brave. You always say that. I am always so fucking brave.’
She stopped and kicked over a chair and then another and another.
They clattered against the wall. The preacher watched her, unmoving.
‘Just so fucking, fucking brave. You know what? There was some kid there. I don’t know who he was, her kid or something, I don’t know, but he was watching me. He saw everything I did. And nothing’s changed, has it? I thought it would. You said it would. You said everything would change. I’d just feel relief. I’d feel … clean. Well I did, maybe for five minutes, I felt like, yeah, I’m glad I did it. But I don’t feel that any more.
And nothing’s changed. Nothing. The world’s just rolling on and I don’t feel any different. No, that’s not true. I feel like shit!’
‘Lucy …’ he moved towards her slowly, ‘you must calm yourself.
You’re upset, of course you are. An action like this asks so much of you. And it is unpleasant. There’s nothing to rejoice about in carrying out a task like this, no one said there was. But it is a cleansing process and it has to be done — ’
‘You stop right there, Graeme!’
He did stop and she saw his face briefly distort with a passing flash of anger. She registered the emotion with surprise.
‘I said that to Greg, you know? I said to him, it had to be done. And I did it. And you know what he said to me?’ She laughed. ‘Bullshit.
That’s what he said. They put you away for ever for things like this.’
She stopped to draw breath. In her mind, she saw the Turtle’s electronic words: That’s just a wall u put up Nothing real. She closed her eyes.
‘They will never find you, Lucy,’ the preacher was saying. ‘Never.
No one’s ever going to tell them who you are. Except for Greg himself, perhaps. I have no idea why you had to tell him so much about this in the first place. I thought we’d agreed you wouldn’t. Greg is in my charge, Lucy, the government has made him my responsibility. He may be your friend but I know him. How do you know he won’t bring the world in here?’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You don’t know him better than I do. There’s no one in the world I’d trust more than Greg, because, you know, we’re one and one. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about me, he could tell people all sorts of things. Nothing like this though.’
The preacher’s face was very pale, his expression fixed; the sight of it disturbed her. She fell silent and sat down next to her backpack, and then leaned forward, as though her nerve strings were cut. Graeme stood at a distance, hesitating.
‘What did you do with the car?’ he asked eventually.
‘It’s where it’s supposed to be, it’s in the garage. I left everything there, like you said, the jacket and the gloves, the whole thing. But I lost the gun.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that. That was very careless of you.’
‘It’s in that back lane somewhere, I don’t know exactly. I guess they’ve found it by now. I tripped. I didn’t remember at first. I ripped my gloves.’ She looked down at her grazed hands and then up at him. ‘I want you to give me another gun now, Graeme. Now I’ve lost that one.
I like having it. I didn’t think I would, but I do. It makes me feel safe.’
‘That was a very special gun, Lucy. You shouldn’t have lost it. I don’t know if it can be replaced just like that.’
‘Well, you’d better find me one. Because I want it.’
The preacher took another hesitant step towards her.
‘Guns are fine so long as you use them for righteous purposes, Lucy.
But not if you don’t. You should remember that.’ He paused. ‘I’ll see what I can do for you.’
She was no longer listening. She was leaning forward, staring at the floor, chewing a fingernail. Then she looked up at him.
‘You know something? I wish I’d never done it. I told myself just what you said, that I had to do this. And I know it sounds really mad but I still believe that. I still believe something like this had to happen.
But now that I’ve done it … Blood’s all the same colour. It’s all just the same, it doesn’t matter if it’s mine or theirs.’
She stared at him, trying to give voice to what was in her mind.
‘The thing is, I didn’t know what it was going to be like. I didn’t really know what they’d look like when I’d shot them. But when I say that, I think well, why didn’t I know that?’ Her voice rose to a shout.
‘It’s not forgivable, not to realise how it was going to look when I did it. I should have known that all along. Before I even thought about doing it. Just so I knew what it meant.’
‘I don’t understand you, Lucy. What should you have known? That there was going to be blood? That woman lived in blood. Your blood, for one. You can’t let these details get in your way. You have to push them out of your mind.’
‘You didn’t see them. You didn’t see what that man looked like.
You know what I want to do? I want to go down there now and say to the police, I did that. I almost did it. I walked past them on my way here and I thought, I just have to go over there and say to those police,
“It was me. I’m sorry I did it, but I did. So where do we go from here?”
And I almost did do that. Except you can’t turn time back, can you? I wish I could. I can still hear the shots, you know. I’ll never forget that.’
In her electronic world, the shots were a trigger. Once they were fired, time stopped and the world was split apart, burned and broken, to be remade as something clean. Out in the real world, the shots had stopped time for her and the three other people who had been there with her. She and the two survivors were fixed in those split seconds, connected to each other for as long as their memories survived. Only the dead man had got away.
She chased these thoughts, slippery as fish in her mind, absorbed in a prolonged silence while the preacher stood quite still in the half dark watching her. When he spoke, his voice had acquired its usual gentleness.
‘And if you do do that, Lucy, if you do go to the police, what happens to everyone here? What happens to me?’
> She shrugged, looking away. ‘Well, everyone’s got to make up their own mind, don’t they? They’ve got to live with themselves too. I’m not going to dob anyone in. You don’t have to worry about that.’
‘You’ll still bring the world in here, Lucy. There will be no way of avoiding that.’
She shook her head. ‘No, that wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t let it,’
she said.
The preacher sat on a chair and they faced each other in the obscurity. He leaned forward.
‘Lucy, you poor child. I am so sorry. We have asked too much of you. I should never have let you go out there alone, I should have realised what it would demand of you. I am sorry, I am so very sorry that I have done this to you. You need to rest. Because what you’re feeling — I’ve seen it before, often. This is a war and you are a soldier.
And the fighting is hard and sometimes you have to do things that you wish you’d never had to do at all. You need to rest and then to wake in the morning and see how you feel then. And by then I think these things will look very different to you.’
‘Rest?’ Lucy leaned back in her chair. ‘I am tired. I’m really tired.
But I don’t see that’s going to make any difference. How can it?
Because I did this, okay? All right, we talked about it. But I did it. You didn’t. I know what I’m feeling, Graeme. I just don’t know where to go from here. I know I can’t leave it like this. I’m going to have to do something. I’ll tell everyone why I did it. I’ll stand up and I’ll tell them why so at least they’ll know that much.’
‘What makes you think they’ll understand you?’
‘I don’t give a shit if they understand me! They’ll know. They’ll have to, because they won’t be able to pretend this didn’t happen.
Then maybe they won’t want to hang me from the nearest tree — ’
She had got to her feet and was roaming about in a small space; she stopped now to stand with her hands on her hips, and shook her head.
‘They’ll know,’ she repeated. ‘They’ll know that I never really wanted to hurt anyone. I just wanted — a bit of peace, I suppose -
something … ’
‘Lucy.’
The preacher’s voice called her back to herself.
‘Lucy, you are exhausted. When did you last have anything to eat and drink? Tell me that.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Wait here,’ he said.
She sat down as he left the room. He returned shortly afterwards with a mug of coffee from the jug that he always kept brewing in his office. It was thick with milk.
‘I’ve sweetened it,’ he said, ‘I think you need the energy. Drink it.
You need something.’
She did not argue. She sat in her chair, sipping the warm milky liquid.
‘Lucy, we have to try and focus on the necessities. Those at least we can deal with. You need rest, you need food. Then we work out what we do next.’
‘I don’t think I can eat.’
‘Come and try. You need food, Lucy. God created us that way, in case you hadn’t noticed. Eat and rest and then we’ll see what we can do. Come into the office and I’ll get you something to eat.’
He was close to her now. She finished her coffee quickly. He took the mug from her, she collected her backpack and followed him through to his office behind the auditorium. It was a small room, heated by a two-bar radiator close to his desk. He sat her down in a chair near the heater.
‘You get warm while I make us something to eat.’
He went into the tiny makeshift kitchen behind the office. She heard the sounds of food being prepared as she waited. He called out to her, his voice a little muffled.
‘Lucy, you must trust me on this. Things will look very different to you tomorrow. Whatever you think now.’
Lucy was looking at a poster on the wall that displayed the image of a pale pink foetus floating in the womb. Its sightless eyes were closed and its small hands were curled up to its mouth. The poster was stamped with the words: Abortion is Murder.
‘No, Graeme, I don’t think it will. Because right now I can’t see how it’s any different. What that woman did and what I just did. It’s the same thing when you come down to it. It’s murder.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Oh, I’m sure.’
She was sitting upright, her arms tight about her midriff, when he came back into the room carrying a tray of sandwiches. He put them in front of her on the desk and then poured a mug of coffee for himself. ‘Do you want another?’ he asked, and she shook her head.
On the wall behind him was another poster, this one of the sun glowing through clouds over the sea with the legend: You must be reborn in the spirit. At the sight of this, she felt equal amounts of anger and revulsion.
‘Eat,’ he said.
She took a tiny bite out of a sandwich, chewed and swallowed it with difficulty, then put the sandwich back down on the plate.
‘Can’t eat. My throat — it’s really tight. I don’t want it, Graeme.
I’m so tired all of a sudden.’
‘Lucy, you ask so much of yourself. Did you sleep at all last night?
I told you you’d need to. You can’t do these things without being at your fullest strength.’
She smiled grimly before replying. ‘No, I didn’t sleep much. I tried to but…’ She shrugged. ‘I was so scared and I just kept thinking about her. I kept seeing her in my head. It was weird. She looked so real somehow, she was so powerful. And when I saw her today, I thought — is that really her? She doesn’t look like anybody. She didn’t look real.’ Lucy closed her eyes, shaking her head. ‘That man — the one who was there — I thought you said it was only ever her. I don’t even know why I fired at him. I must have just kept firing. Why?’
‘I said you should be prepared for anything. This man, he was her accomplice. He was as guilty as she is. What difference does it make if you did shoot him?’
‘It makes a big difference to me.’
‘Why? He knew who and what his wife was. He watched her go off to do what she did every day. He lived on her money. Why is he any less guilty than she is? You tell me that, Lucy.’
‘It isn’t them, Graeme. It’s me. I’m the one who did this. It isn’t who they are. It’s what I did that’s in my mind.’
They faced each other, angry, stubborn.
‘This was an execution, Lucy, clean and merciful. That’s the only way you need to see it.’ He sounded irritated.
‘No, it wasn’t, it wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t clean, that’s for sure.’
She shook her head and opened her mouth to say something else, but as she did, she felt the grip of some kind of drug travelling her veins, a numbing sensation growing stronger by the second. She stared at his expressionless face opposite her.
‘You … Did you … Is that … ’
Her voice seemed to dry up. She leaned forward on the desk to support herself, shaking her head.
‘Why did you do that — you didn’t need to…’ she managed to say before falling back in her chair.
He put his mug down and stood up. He was businesslike. Nothing unusual was happening, this was just the daily round.
‘We’ll take you upstairs, Lucy. You need to rest. You’ve overdone it, as usual. You can use my room, no one will bother you up there.
However, there is just one thing I need from you first … ’
He searched her pockets for her keys to the building. Finding them, he smiled at her. He dropped them into his own pocket before pulling her upright to take her upstairs. She tried to fight him but could only flop about like a landed fish.
His room was on the mezzanine level behind the auditorium, just above the office. Its louvred windows, covered by steel security grilles, looked over the patch of ground where the two houses had been demolished and to the street the beyond. He sat her on the bed and pulled back the blankets for her.
‘Graeme,’ s
he forced out, ‘you didn’t have to … ’
‘It’s all right, Lucy. Just rest easy.’
He took off her shoes, put them neatly to the side, and manoeuvred her into the bed and covered her with blankets. She could not stop him, her body was rubbery. The ache of the drug came bearing down on her as her head fell back on the pillow and her eyes began to close.
‘No, you can’t…’ she said, and then slipped away into an airless darkness. She seemed to dream that she was back at her father’s house on the northern edge of the city, standing behind the disused sleep-out on the edge of the small escarpment that was the shared boundary between her father’s block of land and the national park. She was looking out to the north where the eucalyptus forest began its descent over sandstone rock to the Hawkesbury River. The sky was a clear blue; she felt cold wind on her face and heard the drawn-out whistling of currawongs. ‘I’m safe here,’ she said in her dream, so vividly she believed she had spoken aloud.
Her eyes opened onto the small bedroom. She felt her back and her neck cold with sweat, her body paralysed and her breath shallow. In this swimming nausea, she saw Graeme looking down at her in that gentle way of his, his face unsmiling but not unkind. There was a roaring in her ears and then, as the roaring stopped, she heard him say clearly, ‘Yes, you are safe here. You always have been. Soon you’ll be safe for ever, Lucy, you’ll reach a home that’s not on the streets of this city but on the streets of the city of eternal life. Greg can join you there, you can be happy together, you and he can be as one in Christ for ever. I promised you that you’d find peace and I’m going to keep my promise. I always do. The river of death is cold but it is narrow, and once you’re there you will be at peace. You can rest.’
‘You can’t…’ she heard herself say before there was a noise from a distance, the phone downstairs ringing. He left the room.