by Alex Palmer
‘Oh, you are my beautiful boy, aren’t you?’ His aunt’s unnaturally cooing voice sounded in his head. He had never said yes to her question, not even as a child when she sat him up on her knee and dug her bony fingers into his ribs. An unmarried woman with her fiance dead in the war and a compulsive churchgoer, she had talked about his becoming a priest, something that he’d never wanted to be. ‘We have to make sure he has a good education. You don’t want him to work on the docks, Ellie. You don’t want him to be like Jim,’ he had listened to her tell his mother. ‘I will get him into St Ignatius for you. I will pay the entry fees. But you will have to contribute.’
‘I will. You wait and see,’ his mother had replied, condemning herself to work at two jobs morning and night for years to keep him there. She’d finally had the reward of seeing him through a year at university, returning to her old haunt in the parlour of the West End on Mullens Street to boast to her friends over a cigarette and a gin that her son wouldn’t work on the docks, he was studying law.
Don’t you want to ask me what I want? As the two women had decided his fate, he had said nothing. Silence which had left him for six years in a place where he had learned to survive as an outsider, watching everything he said and did. A privilege for which his two sisters still had not forgiven him, both of whom had been packed off at fifteen to work for Woolworths and earn their keep. Life had changed since then. These days, he often saw boys in the Iggie’s uniform crossing Birchgrove Park. Back then he had been the only pupil at the school with this address. In another way, life remained the same. He was still a survivor in an institution with fixed rules that could make him feel unwelcome when it wanted to.
‘Paulie was always Mum and Auntie’s Maeve’s fave,’ his oldest sister, Ronnie, liked to say at family gatherings, scruffing up his hair boisterously. ‘That was a curse, Ronnie,’ he’d reply. ‘You shouldn’t worry. You haven’t done too badly for yourself.’ Life in a waterside mansion on the Georges River should be as good as living on Snails Bay.
When his aunt had died, just after his sixteenth birthday, she had left him the house, to be held in his mother’s trust until he was eighteen. His father never forgave his sister for the public insult and refused to attend her requiem mass. He was an atheist in any case, a union man, a member of the Communist Party, all good reasons for her to disinherit him. The day they had all moved in, he had gone from room to room, cursing her ghost. Her insult festered in the house for years, provoking arguments between his parents so savage Harrigan had wished they would both die. He assumed that this was what his aunt had intended, she’d done enough damage for it to be premeditated. When he laid out the blame for his mother’s death, he put his aunt there (among others) as surely as if she’d loaded the bullet herself.
Harrigan walked in the gate to his back garden and looked up at the darkened windows of his house. All their ghosts were gone, he had excised them, making the place his own. He had gutted it in his spare hours, removing the room in which his mother had died, working his own carpentry. He painted the walls a smooth pale texture, like the unbroken membrane on the interior of an egg, which magnified and softened the light and made the space appear larger. He walked into this space now as someone relieved to be home, although the expanse of room and freedom had not been intended just for him. He had built it as much for his own son, in the inverse shape of Toby’s body, which was not straight but twisted and which had locked a good mind into a wheelchair and kept his boy in care all his life. He did not have the energy to think about his son tonight. He was tired, tomorrow would do, tomorrow he would go and see him.
He went into the kitchen to mix himself a whisky and water and saw that his ancient cat had struggled up onto the table, settling itself down on the papers he had left there. No one knew how old the cat was, it had walked in off the street one day when his father was still alive, a scabrous, savage, yellow tom who fought with every other cat in the street and littered the neighbourhood with kittens. His father thought it was ugly and nasty and named it Menzies as a posthumous insult to a man he’d hated all his life. Now Menzies was toothless, too decrepit to do more than flex claws which were no longer sharp. He hissed impotently as Harrigan moved him aside, then sank back into sleep.
As Harrigan sipped his drink, Grace’s resume, her smiling photograph, looked up at him from the table. He had read it before but now sat down to look it over with more interest. The daughter of a very senior army officer, she had spent her early life in New Guinea and was boarding-school-educated before the family had returned to the Central Coast when she was about fourteen. She had left school not long after, at sixteen, for life in Sydney, eventually working as a singer. Or so the resume said: Gracie Riordan amp; Wasted Daze. Really?
So who were they? In his working life, he had met a lot of women who called themselves singers. She hadn’t returned from that stratosphere until she had taken herself off to university in her mid twenties.
Harrigan knew the Central Coast, his father used to take him fishing up there when he was a boy. He remembered him marooned among the mangrove swamps in the sun, an unsuccessful fisherman but happy for being on neither shore nor sea. Grace hadn’t been a surfer girl if she’d left it all behind that quickly. Here it was: Member, Eastern Suburbs Pistol Club. Winner, Combined Clubs Trophy, Open Category, two years in a row. That’s how she got the job, never mind the degree. Not many women shoot well enough to earn trophies two years in a row. Now that he’d met her, he would never have thought she was the type.
Handguns. He sat back in his chair. She’d been there today, she knew what a handgun could do. Why do you shoot? he wanted to ask her. Don’t tell me it’s a thrill for you. He had his own handgun, not his service revolver but the Smith amp; Wesson.38 that had killed his mother, hidden down in his tiny cellar behind a loose sandstone block.
The gun was memory made real, something in the order of a personal gravestone, a means of holding onto the event and seeking for some solution to it when the actual memory was too painful to recall. There had been occasions when he’d thought about eating it. Occasions not so long after he’d had his jaw broken, when he spent his spare time sitting in a drab hotel room in the country town they had sent him to, playing Russian roulette in the early hours. It was a gamble that had excited him in a way not much else had back then. Not any more. It wasn’t what he wanted, if it ever had been. He hankered for a bit of life, not the reverse.
He closed Grace’s resume and decided to try his luck at sleeping. He turned out the light and went upstairs to bed.
As usual, he lay there thinking. There was a black hole at the heart of that resume, something she wasn’t telling anyone, two or three dead years starting when she was just twenty-one. That was young to end up nowhere. How was she living then? The dole? Some other way? He told himself to stick to the tangibles; recruitment had passed her.
People have gaps in their lives, he had a few of his own. The real question was: could he trust her, could she do the job? Nothing else mattered. On this thought, he drifted away to sleep.
9
Lucy Hurst raised her head from her pillow in a darkened room made strange by the streaked glow of streetlights through the open louvre windows above the bed. She sat up slowly to see a face in the wardrobe mirror opposite shadowed to a dull, luminous white, bloodless as silicate and surrounded by a stiff mix of dark tentacled curls. She touched her hair and saw the figure in the mirror do likewise. Some event, impossible and unavoidable, that she could not immediately remember, was pressing in on her. The room was empty of any hint of what this might be or why she was here. It was a territory without reference points, static in its unfamiliarity.
She remembered. It was the first time that she had had to remember, a vision possessing a precise and surreal clarity, as indifferent to her as it was to the other three figures at the heart of it. In her mind, silently as a dream, she saw the woman and the man falling one after the other to the roadway, saw the stain on the woman’s bl
ue jacket, the man’s unshakable stillness, his face, and the boy so close, staring at her. She saw this with a shock of unreality, with only the ordinary room, and its arrangement of an ancient wardrobe, chair and bedside table, to remind her how real it was. She stared at the image in her mind, sickened at heart, unbelieving.
She lay back, actually winded, and then felt that the bed was damp.
She touched the warmth in which she was lying and raising her hand into the white light saw a dark liquid on her hands. It was her menstrual blood, not the blood of a wound. It was darker and flowed less freely but had still soaked through her clothes into the bed. She could not understand it, she had not bled for months, had been pleased that she had not bled for months. She had short-circuited her cycle, spiking it with a thin diet and nervous energy, feeling its connective, circular rhythm replaced by the equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, a perfect and disinfected emptiness without the need or the capacity for change. She pushed back the bedclothes and sat up again, scrunching the sheets with her hand to clean it, uncertain what she should do. A giddiness took hold of her. She shook off the mists of sickness, noticed the sour aftertaste of a drug in her mouth, and remembered why she was in this bed.
She had to get out of here. Moving as quickly as she could, she got up, put on and laced up her shoes. As she put on her coat, she again saw the image of the three people in her mind and this time took possession of it angrily, holding onto the fact in its impossibility and extremity. I did that, she told herself. Never forget that. I took those people apart like that. That’s mine, I’m never going to forget that. She looked at the bed with its blankets pulled back to display blood splashed between the ribs of light, dark butterflies on the white sheets.
Like the action of a narcotic, she felt a numbness set in, a severance from the surrounding world. She left the room but then was forced to go into the bathroom next door. She sat on the throne, acutely aware of various wastes purging themselves out of her body and feeling the ache of menstrual cramps. She did not know why she should need to bleed when she had schooled every other need — food or warmth or shelter — down to its fundamentals. She cleaned herself as well as she could when she was finished but could only find a hand towel to soak up the flow of her blood. She washed herself again, almost compulsively, and then, badly dehydrated, drank copious handfuls of water from the tap.
She had no perception of what time it might be, she only wanted to find her backpack and then leave the Temple as soon as she could. She left the bathroom and went down the stairs. Silence was diffused like an undisturbed sleep throughout the darkened building, she could not even hear cockroaches scuttling. She tried the back door but it was locked. The Temple was difficult to get into or out of once the doors were shut against you: it was a place of thick walls, barred windows and strong locks. She stopped outside the office and listened for any sound to suggest there might be someone in there, but heard nothing.
Opening the door carefully, she saw by the streetlights through the bare windows that the room was empty. She found her pack, placed out of sight inside the tiny windowless kitchen. It was open and had been searched, the contents disturbed. As she looked around, she saw a blister packet emptied of all its tablets on the bench next to the sink.
She picked it up. Rohypnol 2 mg. She did not quite laugh as she stared at it. She thought: I need a gun.
She knew things that Graeme did not realise she knew. Under the floorboards in his office, she found his own insurance as he called it: a solitary gun and a good supply of ammunition. She took both, putting the ammunition into her pack after loading the gun with the expertise he had taught her. It was larger and heavier than the one he had originally given her. She weighed the gun in her hand and felt an immediate relief to have it, knowing that, of all things, it was something she could rely on. Because if you can use a gun once, then you know how to use it again. This last thought was a negative whisper in her mind.
The office computer, a powerful and expensive machine, had been left on; its tiny orange lights were intermittent pinpricks in the dark as the monitor slept in power-saving mode. She glanced towards the open door but saw and heard no one. The whole building had a sense of abandonment. Holding onto her gun, she woke the screen and went out on the Net, quickly.
Turtle, are you out there? It’s the Firewall. Are you there?
Firewall??? I’ve been waiting 4 HOURS 2 hear from u Where areu???
You don’t want to know. Out here. With a gun in my hand. For real.
I’m holding it right now. I’m holding it because I think I might need to use it. It’s just so strange to know that.
U can’t do that U just can’t
I don’t know what else to do now. I need the protection.
Who from???? They should be afraid of u!!!
There are worse people than me out here, Turtle. And yeah, I am frightened of them. You can believe I am.
I wish I wasn’t stuck here I would help u if I could but I’m stuck Wotare u up 2 now? Can’t I do something?
No, this is not you, this is me. I don’t want you to take this on. But I don’t know. I really don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got nowhere to go now.
U can go 2 the police
I said before, there’s no point in doing that. Anyway if you do go to the police, all they do is bash you up.
They don’t all do that
The ones I know do. No, I’ve got nowhere to go. Except maybe …
Except maybe where????
Home? It’s the only place left on earth now, isn’t it? And it’s the worst place to be. My brother rang me the other day. He wants me to come home. But if I do go back there now it’s because everything I’ve done has taken me back there, not for any other reason.
You don’t have to go back there do u?
Maybe. If they want me, maybe I will. I was just thinking about it really, that’s all. There just isn’t anywhere else now.
I’ve been thinking all day I don’t believe it was u who did that U
pulled the trigger but your head was somewhere else It has 2 be U
just couldnt do that
No, Turtle. I did do it. And I did it because I thought she was evil. But I woke up just now and all I could see in my head was all that blood and what those people looked like. And I think — I have to think this, don’t I — if that’s what she is, then what about me? Aren’t we both the same now? Aren’t we both killers? I don’t want to be like her. But I am.
So what does that mean? I don’t know where my head is any more.
Everything u say — it all says that u aren’t like that OK??? I knowits not u When I talk 2 u — U are not like that It was some mad thingbut not u
But that mad thing is me. I wonder, would I feel like this if I’d only shot her and not that man? I just don’t know what to think.
As she typed this, Lucy looked up to see the refuge van, with its lights dimmed, drive across the open space at the back of the picture theatre and come to a halt in the shadow of the building.
Got to go. Love you, she added quickly.
No wait Firewall dont do anything stupid U cant Lucy shut down the connection. She saw Graeme’s figure pass the window and knew that she did not have time to get out of the back door. She moved quickly into the auditorium, hoisting her pack and holding the gun ready. Leaving the door slightly ajar, she stood watching through the crack.
The back door opened and he appeared there in silhouette. He was looking, it seemed, straight at her. She was certain that he had seen her and raised her gun, waiting for him to come towards her. He did not.
He shut and locked the door behind him and walked quickly up the stairs, to his room. In the half light she could see that he was carrying a small white paper bag, something round and compact. A fit, was Lucy’s instinctive thought, the kind you get free and anonymously from the needle exchange. She was certain that it was intended for her.
She did not wait. She went to the back door and shot the
lock open, stepped out into the cold night air and sprinted down the alleyway towards the street, still holding onto her gun. As she reached the end of the lane, she heard what seemed to be a shout behind her, a strange guttural sound, but she did not stop to look back. She cut her way breathlessly past narrow rows of terraced houses, sprinting silently on the tips of her toes. As she ran, she heard a car behind her, its engine suddenly engaged. Its lights caught her briefly as she ran and she sped up, reaching the Peace Park on Church Street, coming through a small grove of eucalyptus trees to the sandstone wall bordering the cemetery at St Stephen’s Church. There she lost the strength to run any further.
She collapsed on the ground, dropping her pack, and leaned against the wall, curling into the stone out of the light.
She crouched there, gathering breath and looking back at the small grove of trees but no one appeared after her. Her lungs were burning.
Still on the edge of panic she thought of Greg, and putting down her gun she reached into an outside pocket of her pack for her mobile phone. Her hands shaking she rang Wheelo’s, more out of hope than expectation that Greg would be there. She looked around at the empty park with its sparse lights as she waited for someone to answer her call. Someone would answer sometime, they always did. Someone was always awake. With her free hand, she held onto the butt of her gun.
‘Yeah?’ a female voice eventually said.
‘I was looking for Greg,’ she replied.
‘Yeah, who’s this?’
‘It’s Luce. Is that Jade?’
‘Yeah. He’s not here, Luce. He went out with Wheelo. He said he was going for a joy ride, he knew this car he could get hold of. They were going to torch it, I think. That’s what I thought I heard them say, anyway.’