by Alex Palmer
Shit! Lucy thought. ‘When?’
‘I dunno. A while ago now. But I think the pigs got Greg, because some of them came sniffing around here for Wheelo just this little while back. Mick told me to stay out of the way but I think that’s what I heard them saying. So if they got Greggie, that means he’s going back in again.
So you can’t get him. Unless you want to go and see him up at Kariong.’
Lucy was silent.
‘You still there, Luce?’ said the voice.
‘When you see Wheelo, you tell him from me that I rang looking for Greggie, okay? And if he sees Greggie, he should tell him that he’s got to be careful. Really careful. Tell him he’s not to go back to the refuge ever again, okay? Tell him exactly that. Just say it’s not safe.’
Jade sounded surprised. ‘Yeah, if you want.’
Lucy did not believe Jade would remember to do any of this. She cut the connection without another word. She had no energy left and her head was bathed in sweat.
Back to the cells for you now, Greggie. I can’t get to you there, it’s too dangerous. Just believe I’m thinking about you in there. They’ll shave your head again and they’ll take away your beanie and, if you’re lucky, they’ll give it back to you when they let you go again. Whenever that is.
Graeme won’t be able to get you out of there this time. This time, for the first time, you might even be safer in there. Just for now anyway.
Someone would tell Graeme what had happened; it wouldn’t be her.
The woman from Family Services, Ria, would call him if no one else.
Or the police. He would be angry when he was told, very angry.
Thinking of this, she almost smiled. Then a giddiness took hold of her and she leaned back against the wall. She felt cold, a residual wave of the drug was travelling through her bloodstream. The telephone slipped out of her hand and fell to the ground. Having nowhere else to put it, she pushed her gun into the outer pocket of her backpack and buttoned her jacket tightly around her, hugging herself. She wanted to run but could only sit there unable to move, feeling her eyes closing against her will. She had no strength.
She was breathing deeply and was part way between waking and unconsciousness when, even in the dark, she became aware that there was a shadow across her face and someone was leaning over her. She could hear and then feel their breath. She forced herself awake, not quite screaming, plucking desperately at her pack.
‘Luce! What do you think you’re doing? It’s only me.’
Stephen’s voice and her perception of who it was were simultaneous.
Unnerved, she sat up slowly.
‘Stevie, please don’t ever do that to me again,’ she said. ‘I was so frightened just then.’
‘You frightened me too.’
He smiled nervously and hunkered down close to her. The empty park and the dark streets of Newtown stretched around them.
‘Shit, Luce. Look at you. What have you done to yourself?’ he said, and touched her forehead which was damp with perspiration. ‘Are you all right? You look like — I thought you were clean. Has that all changed, has it?’
She did not immediately answer him. She tried to smile but could not.
‘No,’ she said, ‘this was something I really didn’t want to take.’
This particular truth sounded strange in her mouth, like the taste of metal on the tongue.
‘God, Luce, you take some risks. I never know what I’m going to hear about you next.’
‘I do, don’t I?’ she said a little shakily. ‘Chasing me around, are you?’
‘I must be.’ He spoke quietly, looking around them. ‘You know that guy you told me about, the preacher? I went and saw him yesterday evening but he said you weren’t around. He threw me out, I thought he was going to break my wrist. Where were you?’
Lucy said nothing. She swallowed some leftover fear and shook her head. Stephen’s glasses had slipped down over the bridge of his nose.
He pushed them back.
‘When you came out of there,’ he said, ‘you were running so fast. I tried to get after you in the car but you just ran. I thought I saw — did you have something in your hand? I didn’t know if … ’
He stopped.
‘No. That was just me being me,’ Lucy said. ‘I was being paranoid.
I get like that.’
‘I heard — I don’t know … Did you hear a shot or something? Was I dreaming? Did you hear — ’
‘I didn’t hear anything, Stevie. I wasn’t listening.’
He looked at her where she sat against the wall, her jacket pulled around her, then sat on the grass beside her, stretching out his damaged leg. The glow of the park lights touched on his pronounced forehead, his straight dark hair.
‘I’ve got to deal with Dad, Luce. And he’s dying. I don’t have the energy for anything else. You have to tell me that you’re not in any sort of trouble and there’s nothing that’s going to make the shit hit the fan.
I can’t deal with it if there is.’
‘Dad?’ Lucy interrupted him. ‘He sent you running around town looking for me? Wouldn’t you know it? He wasn’t going to come looking for me himself.’
‘He can’t, Luce. He can hardly move. He says he wants to see you before he dies. He keeps at it, he won’t let it go. If you don’t come, it’ll be the last thing he ever says to anyone. We’ll all be standing around and the only thing he’ll say is that you’re not there.’
‘What does he think he’s going to say to me?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think he knows either. He wants to see you.
That’s all he’s told me.’
‘And what if it had been me that was dead instead of him? It could have been. It almost was once or twice. What was he going to do then?
Was he going to worry about me? Or was he just going to say, oh, she didn’t come and see me before she died?’
‘I don’t know, Luce. Okay? I can’t answer that question. You want me to tell you the truth? I’m here because it’s going to make things easier for us if you do come home. And I’m at the point where I just can’t handle much more.’
Her father had never come looking for her when he had been well, why should she expect him to now? She looked down the slope of open grass to the narrow streets below, where the small houses and white factory buildings slept on in a pattern of streetlights. The scene was so still; it seemed that no world existed beyond the reach of the streetlights, only darkness without end on the other side of a wide glass bowl.
‘All right, I’ll come home,’ she said after some moments. ‘I’ll talk to him. Because I want to talk to him.’
Twenty-four hours ago nothing would have made her go home, but yesterday, just after dawn when she had fired those shots, she had slipped between a hair space in time. Every thought she had, everything she did, dragged her back to that moment. Her mother and father were waiting for her there, like two spectators in the cheap seats, eating popcorn. Thoughts formed in her mind like words spoken out of the shadows to those two expressionless figures, munching as they watched her. I want to see you. For the first time I want to see you, I want to ask you something. She wanted to look at her father and her mother and ask if either of them had ever woken in the night, the way she just had, and thought: I did that, what am I going to do now that I’ve done something as horrible as that? She wanted to ask them: don’t you feel like that, just a bit? For what you did to me? Give me an answer, because you owe me one.
‘Will you promise me you won’t fight with him?’ Stephen asked, pushing his glasses back on his nose again. ‘Because if you do, he’ll just take it out on everybody else.’
‘No, it’ll be okay, Stevie. If he doesn’t say what I want to hear, I’ll just go again.’
She spoke with a false bravado. Stephen’s relief was all too obvious.
He stood up quickly.
‘Let’s get out of here then, I don’t like it here. Have you got everything? You don’t have to go
back and get any stuff out of that place?’
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the Temple.
‘Oh, no,’ she replied.
No, she wasn’t going back in there.
‘Is this yours?’ he asked.
He had as good as trodden on her mobile phone and was holding up the shiny blue object.
‘Yeah, I must have dropped it.’
Even in the half dark, his face expressed the question that he was never going to ask her: where did you get it?
‘Does it work?’ he asked instead.
‘Used to,’ she said, with something of a smile.
‘Do you mind if I use it?’ he asked. ‘I should call Mel, just to let her know we’re coming.’
‘Keep it if you want.’ She was dismissive. ‘It’s just a bit of nothing.
It’s never hard to get hold of bits of nothing like that.’
‘It’s okay, Luce. You can have it back when I’ve finished.’
She stood up slowly, looking around her. Her head was still bathed in sweat and she did not know if this was because she had been drugged or because she was afraid. She had the perception that they were being watched, and that the person out there watching them was dangerous.
‘Hi, Mel, it’s Stevie. I’m sorry I got you out of bed. No, I’ve found her, she’s coming home. Yes, I know — it’s okay. Could you get something ready for us, something to eat? I’m starving and I don’t know when Luce last ate anything. And can you get some clean clothes or something for her? She needs them. And some … napkins, whatever … I don’t know.
She’s a mess. Forty minutes? There’s no traffic. Okay. I’ll see you.’
He handed the phone back to her. She switched it off and stowed it away, then hoisted her pack, swaying on her feet under its weight.
‘You all right? Do you want me to carry that?’
‘No,’ she said. You don’t get to carry this, Stevie, I do.
‘You look like death, Luce,’ he said, his own face grey in the unnatural light.
Yes.
The park seemed deserted as they walked back to Stephen’s car in a nearby street, near the small grove of trees and opposite the blue and yellow swirls of a mural painted with the caption ‘Simultaneous Lovin’, Baby’. As the car turned an arc, she thought she saw the outline of a figure in the dark, Graeme standing in the shadows of the trees. It was only a glimpse but she looked away quickly nonetheless.
They drove through the empty streets, out onto the highway. She curled up in the corner of the seat but was too jangled to sleep. The electric outlines of the city came to meet them: high-rise, shop fronts, service stations, the curve of the Gladesville Bridge over the dark river.
As they passed, the array of ghostly structures faded away either side of the thin white line. She began to feel icy cold as they drove further and further towards the edge of the urban sprawl; the substance Graeme had given her had left her body embalmed in a chill sweat.
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
Stephen glanced at his watch. ‘Twenty past four. Almost time to get up.’ Then, ‘That guy at the theatre — he doesn’t know where home is?
He wouldn’t try and come looking for you out here, would he?’
Lucy looked at Stephen and decided not to ask why this possibility might worry him.
‘Graeme?’ She felt uneasy simply saying his name. ‘No, I never told him where I came from. He never asked. We didn’t really talk that much about me after a while,’ she added, in an oddly halting voice.
‘What are you saying?’
She shook her head. ‘Just what we talked about, that’s all.’
No, their months of conversation, one on one, had been fixed towards another point completely. Everything she had said to him, he had directed elsewhere, away from her — something which in itself had been a relief at the time — towards a single action. That of her firing a gun at the specified target he had presented to her. In her mind, these actions were reduced to their sharp outlines, recall came in disconnected flashes: Graeme’s smiling face, the recoil of the gun as she fired it at a tree, the recoil as she fired it at a person. Then all the players were caught in her act of execution, the woman and the man and finally the boy, staring at her with horror in his face. She asked herself how often she was going to see this. She glanced at Stephen next to her. What would you think about me if you knew, Stevie? What’s it going to do to you when you find out?
You and Mel? I never asked myself. I didn’t even ask myself that.
When she considered the preacher, she realised she no longer had a way of describing him to herself. The image in her mind was of the man standing over her, watching her with his gentle and serene gaze while she was in the grip of the drug, saying that he intended to kill both her and someone she loved.
You can’t get to me, Graeme, and anyway I can look after myself. And you can’t get to Greg, and that’s really all that matters. But just to make sure, I’m going to ring Ria. She can warn Greg, even if no one else can.
‘What are you thinking about, Luce?’ Stephen asked, a strange tone in his voice.
‘Nothing,’ she replied, unaware of the expression on her face or the shiver that went down Stephen’s spine as he looked at her. He sped up, accelerating past a convoy of trucks rumbling northwards along the highway, a monstrous force tricked out in a delicate rigging of many-coloured lights, taking on the force of their jet stream, passing them at speed.
They had reached the streets close to home, the far northern edge of the city. There was no moon. Lucy looked out at large houses newly built in the old bushland, where occasional groves of trees had been left behind for decoration. All were pale silver in the reflected light of the city.
‘None of this was here before,’ she said.
‘They just keep subdividing. There won’t be anything left soon.
We’ve got houses almost up to our front door now. We get real-estate agents ringing us all the time. If you want to sell, we’ll get you a goodprice. I feel like telling them, you don’t know what you’re buying, mate. You don’t have that much money.’
Their double-storey ninety-forties brick house came into view, built by their grandfather several years after he had been demobbed. In the photographs that Lucy had seen, there had once been a four-roomed, wooden tongue-and-groove house in this place, one that her great-grandfather had built here not long after he had cleared the original forest. Their grandfather had told them how he had demolished it and built this pile in its place, going up in the world.
Stephen turned off the engine to slide noiselessly down the gentle slope of their driveway, halting just before the garage.
‘You’re home,’ he said.
Yes.
In the pale light, they walked across a rectangle of spongy couch grass. A dog came out of her kennel, her chain rattling. Lucy knelt beside her, rubbing her head.
‘Hello, Dora. Hello, girl. Look, she remembers me. Why is she chained up? She never used to be.’
‘It’s just something that’s happened. Dad said to chain her up. The neighbours don’t like her. They say she’s dangerous, she bails up their kids.’
‘She wouldn’t do anybody any harm. Poor old thing.’
At the back door Lucy hesitated. She stood listening to the rustle of the bushland around the house, too frightened to walk inside.
‘It’s okay,’ Stephen said. ‘Mum’s asleep and Dad’s out to it just about every night these days. It’s only Mel. Come on.’
The kitchen, a large room, smelled of toast, coffee and milk, a comforting and safe smell. In the bright fluorescent light, Mel was putting breakfast dishes on the table. She looked at her older sister without smiling, her face seemed deliberately emptied of emotion.
Short like her brother, she stood bare-legged in a tight denim skirt and sweatshirt, her hair tightly curled and dyed a pale red.
‘Hi, Mel,’ Lucy said, with half a smile.
Mel loo
ked back at her, still unsmiling, refusing a greeting. Her eyes were sleepy.
‘I made your bed up. Do you want to go and have your shower now? You need one, you look awful. There’s some napkins in the bathroom if you want them. When you’ve finished, can you put your dirty clothes in the laundry for me right away because I’ve got to get them washed and dry as soon as I can. I’ve got to wash Dad’s sheets every day so I haven’t got time to do your washing as well.’
With this, she went back to the bench where she was preparing breakfast. Lucy said nothing. She turned away but then stopped at the doorway that led into the rest of the house.
‘It’s okay, Luce.’ Stephen said. ‘Want me to walk you in?’
Lucy looked back and saw that Mel was watching this concern with contempt.
‘No,’ she said to him, holding tightly onto her pack. ‘I’m all right.’ In the hallway, and on the stairs up to her room which were lit by a night-light, everything was as it had always been. The house was rambling, a collection of airless rooms with small windows, all stacked with an accumulation of things. Lucy’s mother, Vera, never threw anything out. In her thinking, everything, if kept long enough, might one day have a use, and if broken might one day be repaired. Ancient leftovers were buried in the permafrost of the freezer; old clothes and toys were crammed under the beds; newspapers, cardboard boxes, aluminium cans were stacked in the hallways. Lucy walked along the upstairs hallway that smelled of naphthalene and used goods, a bite of mould and cobwebs, odours which were only dispelled in the heat of summer when the house baked in the sun.
‘It hasn’t changed. Nothing’s changed,’ she said to herself, almost in bewilderment.
Opening the door to her bedroom and turning on the light, she was surprised by its unfamiliarity, how faded it was at first glance. She shut the door softly behind her and put her backpack next to the bed, then looked around her uneasily. The walls were covered with posters torn from magazines: pop stars she had forgotten about, golden-eyed tigers swimming in tropical rivers. The ceiling was painted blue, the skirting boards and cornice, silver. The arc of gold stars she had glued onto a window was still there. It was a world with nothing on its surface to indicate the events which had once occurred regularly in here.