by Alex Palmer
Her father used to tell her in the afternoon what he intended to do that evening. When he walked into her room, he simply said, ‘Strip.’ It was the only thing he said to her, from the first moment to the last, from the first time to the last. There was another memory: about ten days after she had become too sick to eat in the mornings, her mother saying to her, ‘Hurry up, we’re going into the city now. He’ll give us a ride to Hornsby and we’ll get the train from there.’
Lucy spoke aloud, to herself, ‘You don’t want to worry. It’s what Turtle said — he ought to be frightened of you now. So should she.’
She was on the verge of something that was not quite panic. She sat on the bed, holding herself and rocking backwards and forwards. She took her gun out of her pack and held onto it tightly, breathing deeply, drawing on its security.
‘I’ll keep you with me,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll be okay.’
In the bathroom, Lucy locked the door behind her and placed the gun on the basin within reach. In the shower, she felt the warm water ease her spine and watched as her own blood was washed into its spiral at her feet. She shook her head at the peculiarity of having a body that felt and bled. She dried her clean skin, drawing each of her limbs into existence as she polished herself with the towel, reconnecting her nerve endings. She saw herself in a full-length mirror, in a small pool of white light. Her body had gained strength since she had broken with her addiction. Despite her lean diet, it was wiry rather than thin and she had acquired some cushioning softness and muscle. She saw a body that — without her noticing — had gained some womanliness. ‘That’s me,’ she said with a compelling sense of dislocation. After she had dressed, she looked at herself again. She saw her reflection silvered in light, a figure made of metal, clean as purified air.
‘I couldn’t have stayed here,’ she said to her reflection, ‘I couldn’t have. What else was I going to do but go?’
She smoothed her wet hair back from her forehead. Her face in the mirror and the light were extinguished at the same moment.
Reluctantly, she put the gun back in her pack before she went downstairs. It had grown light when she came back to the kitchen. There, she heard Stephen and Melanie arguing. Mel’s voice was quick, breathless and angry. Lucy stopped to listen until she did not want to hear any more.
‘I don’t see why I have to be nice to her,’ Melanie was saying. ‘She was a bitch. She went off and left me, she didn’t care, she didn’t wait around. Now she’s out there all the time, doing whatever she wants to do, and I stay here and I have to wash for him and I have to wash him as well and I cook for him and I look after him while all Mum does is sit around and watch TV all day. And then she just comes back here when she wants to and you say to me I have to be — ’
Mel stopped short as Lucy appeared in the doorway, and turned away. Stevie was sitting at the table, smoking. He greeted Lucy with the faintest shrug. She stood there, awkward, wishing that she was carrying the gun and could feel its metal pressing against her waist. For a brief moment anger seethed in her head.
You shouldn’t talk about me like that, Mel, it’s not fair. I couldn’t do anything back then. If anyone tried to hurt you now, I’d kill them.
I would. Then you wouldn’t be able to say that about me.
‘Sit down and eat your breakfast,’ Melanie said to her without turning around.
The silence weighed on them all as Lucy and Stephen ate slowly.
Two thirds of the way through the meal, Lucy stopped.
‘I can’t eat any more,’ she said. ‘My throat feels like it’s full of broken bones. I’ve got to go and sleep.’
‘Are you all right?’ Stephen asked.
‘Yeah. I’m just really tired.’
She got to her feet. At the door, she turned to look at them, Melanie with her angry face, and Stephen’s, with his guard let down, showing intense exhaustion.
I can’t tell either of you what I’ve done, I’ll never be able to tell you.
‘I’ll see you later,’ she said.
In her room, her sense of fear returned powerfully. She slipped her gun under the pillow and then pushed a chair against the door. Forcing herself to make the effort, she sat on the bed and made her call to Ria.
The woman answered almost immediately, over a line that shifted and roared with static.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a crackling voice.
‘It’s Luce, Ria.’
There was a pause.
‘What do you want?’
The woman spoke sharply through the interference.
‘I’ve got a message for Greg. The police have got him, haven’t they?’
Lucy heard the woman laugh angrily.
‘Your information’s good. Yeah, they have, they just rang me. I wish I could keep track of him the way you do … ’
The line broke up. In the crackling, Lucy heard the words ‘can’t believe’, which faded and then came back strongly as ‘accessory’ and
‘murder’. Hearing this, Lucy spoke softly to the airways with a twist of bitterness in her voice.
‘Well, they wouldn’t know anything, would they? They’d just pick on whoever they could find. They never get the real killers.’
‘What’s your message, Lucy?’
The woman’s voice came through suddenly clear, sounding wary and disturbed.
‘You tell him from me that whatever he does, he can’t go back to the refuge. That’s all. He’s not to go anywhere near it again, ever. He’ll know what I mean.’
There was silence.
‘Lucy,’ the woman said, ‘I don’t want you to say anything else to me.
I’m hanging up on you now. Whatever you do, don’t ring me again.’
Lucy said nothing else. She turned off her phone and tossed it onto her old desk. She crawled into bed exhausted, without undressing, and slept with one hand holding onto her gun.
10
In the winter morning light, Paul Harrigan was countermanding his own instruction that the job took precedence over everything and nothing else mattered. He drove against the traffic to make the short journey from Birchgrove to Cotswold House at Drummoyne, stealing the first hour before work to see his son. He may not get the chance again for some time.
Toby was the product of a briefly sweet marriage, contracted when Harrigan was barely twenty-one, while he had been wandering the countryside, working as a boxer and a fruit picker. His marriage had had the unusual effect of leaving him holding the baby while his wife had disappeared, rejecting a child permanently injured during the hours of his birth, a tiny baby left weighted down for life with the medical terms choreoathetosis and dysathria. Her action was truly unforgivable in Harrigan’s eyes. They’d divorced years ago; Sara lived in Western Australia now with some other man. He did not give her a voluntary thought, she had never tried to see her son. She had never even sent money, although if she had, he would not have taken it. She was another figure he had excised ruthlessly from his past.
This morning, as he crossed the Iron Cove Bridge, Harrigan watched his night thoughts disappear in the dawn over the harbour to become the daylight certainty that there were possibilities for happiness after all. Among other things, life had its pleasures in the early glitter of the sun on the harbour and the sight of the black cormorants fishing from their perches on the old wooden piers. At Cotswold House, built on the shore overlooking Cockatoo and Spectacle Islands with their disused shipyards, he was let in and greeted by the house manager, Susie Pavic.
‘Good morning, Paul,’ she said. ‘We all sat with Toby and watched you on TV last night. What a terrible thing.’
‘Yeah, it is. But we’re working on it. We’ll get there.’
Although he liked Susie, he spoke to stop the conversation, with a quick smile, not wanting work to come between him and his son.
Down a short shining hallway, he saw Toby being wheeled out of his room by his therapist.
‘Paul. I didn’t think you were going to make it today.
’
Toby’s therapist, Tim Masson, fussed too much in Harrigan’s opinion.
‘No, I’m right on time as far as I know. I’m here now, that’s what matters. Hi, Toby. How are you?’
Using his one good hand, Toby squeezed his father’s offered hand for a few moments. Masson withdrew to the activity room to make them all coffee, while Harrigan left his coat and tie in his son’s room.
He took hold of the chair and set off down the corridor to the bathroom, a large room with walls and floor covered with shining white tiles and a wide spa bath with chrome fittings. Toby stubbornly pulled one-handed at his nightclothes as his father knelt by the tub, turning on the taps, swirling the water around. Steam began to rise in clouds, the noise of running water concealing their mutual silence.
‘Let me help you,’ Harrigan said, standing up.
He felt the night warmth of his son’s body as he carefully removed the unresisting garments. Toby’s dysfunctional body and his inability to speak connected Harrigan to his son, body to body, human to human.
Sex did not necessarily give him this closeness. Toby was made in his father’s image: his height, the shape of his body, the paleness of his skin, could have been — would have been — Harrigan’s own. Their physical capacities were different, only that. Harrigan carried this sense of loss as something that was as unchanging as Toby’s disability; his feelings made him gentle with his son. He dropped the side rail on the chair, slid one arm around his son’s shoulders, another under his knees, and lifted Toby, an action which these days took all his strength. One day, very soon, he would not be able to lift him at all.
‘I’ve got you,’ he said. ‘Here we go.’
He lowered his son into the wide bath and let the warm water bubbling up from the light spa support and ease his body. Toby slid out to almost his full length in the water, his fixed arm crooked at an angle across his breastbone, one leg hooked a little over the other.
‘Are you comfortable there?’ Harrigan asked, and saw Toby’s silent response, the yes flicker of the fingers of his good hand.
Toby could speak a little, and sometimes did, but it took much effort to get out even a single word. His words lived as thoughts, or became bits of light which he tapped out one-handed onto a computer screen. Their conversations were silent, today expressed through the movement of Harrigan’s hands as he washed his son’s hair and felt the weight of Toby’s head in his hands in reply. He massaged his son’s shoulders, working at the unyielding muscle with slow, patient hands before washing the rest of his body. He began to soap around his son’s genitals, which were partially erect. They had their own young boy’s perfection and were pale as the skin on the rest of his body. As he did so, he felt Toby hitting him on the arm with his good hand.
‘I hurt you, did I? I’m sorry, I thought I was being careful. That hurts, does it? Okay, I won’t do that.’
Harrigan rinsed the soap away and saw no sign of injury or inflammation. Some minor infection? The ache you get when there isn’t any means of relief? Or is it that you don’t want me washing you any more, you’re too old? I have to, Toby, it’s the only way we can do this.
He stopped and looked at his son. His hand was resting on the edge of the bath and Toby took hold of it. He held on to Harrigan with a tight grip. What is it? Harrigan thought. Tell me what’s locked in your head. Used to this silence between them, Harrigan was unaware that he had said nothing. They held onto each other for some moments and then his son let go. The connection broken, Harrigan went to get the bath towels, to get Toby out of the bath (an action which would require Tim Masson’s help, Harrigan had to admit this) and then dried and dressed.
‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘I could use some breakfast myself.’
As he looked back, he saw Toby looking at him, an odd, indefinable expression in his eyes. He did not know whether it was his son’s helplessness as he lay there in the water or some other quality that he could not define, but the expression left him troubled. He dried Toby, dressed him, dried and brushed his hair, and in the dining room fed him and wiped his mouth clean. Toby sucked orange juice through a straw out of the drinking receptacle Harrigan held for him. I’m here, Toby. I’m always here.
‘What’s on your mind, Toby?’ he said. ‘Something’s bothering you.
I’ve got to go to work now but I’ll drop by again as soon as I can. I’ll see if I can’t get here tonight. You can tell me then if you want.’
Toby flickered ‘okay’ with his good hand, a gesture that was neither inviting nor repelling. They said goodbye in their mutual silence, with Toby squeezing his hand.
He went to see the house manager in her office on his way out.
Susie, plump and fair-haired, sparkled in the sunlight through the windows, her make-up rainbow-like.
‘Do you need to worry?’ she said. ‘His health is good, he’s eating well. His school marks are very good, he’s up there with the best of them, Paul. He has been spending a bit of time on the Net lately, but I don’t see that’s a bad thing. It all takes him out of himself. He’s doing really well. I feel we should be pleased.’
‘No, Susie.’ Harrigan shook his head. ‘There’s something troubling him. I want to know what it is. Now either you or Tim should be able to tell me that.’ That’s what I pay you for. He let the words hang in the air unspoken.
Susie’s opalescent blue fingernails glinted in the light. In reply, she spoke with the care of someone who made a living walking tightropes.
‘Well, I don’t think you need me to tell you any of this. He’s seventeen at his next birthday. In some ways he’s older than most boys his age, but he’s a lot younger in others. If he doesn’t want you washing him any more, I’d say that’s probably all there is to that. He does need to feel his body’s his own. But he needs his head space more. That’s where he lives.
You know better than anyone, Paul, he’s got people around him all the time, he has to have. Usually he’s never alone except in his head. We don’t have the right to intrude in there without him letting us. If there’s something on his mind, he’ll tell you when he’s ready to.’
He did not reply, her words had left him almost breathless. They looked at each other across her desk.
‘He still needs me, Susie. He’s always going to need me.’
‘Yes, he will. But that isn’t what I said.’
He stood up.
‘We’ll have to talk about this some other time. I can’t hang around here now, I should have been at work half an hour ago. I didn’t really have the time to come here in the first place. I’m only here for him.’
She smiled at him professionally in reply. He walked out without thanking her or saying goodbye. Did she think she knew his son better than he did? He could not talk to her, he could not look at her.
Harrigan went out into the morning sunlight and stopped by his car. Toby was with his therapist in the activity room, sitting in the sun and watching him through the wide windows. He waved and saw the flicker of Toby’s fingers in reply. As things were now, Toby was with him for life. Oh, there was money enough. Harrigan had sued the hospital where Toby had been born for everything he could think of, taking their drunk and incapable doctor through every level of appeal.
The exercise had got him the law degree he was supposed to have had a decade earlier, and while it had taken years, in the end they had paid, had been forced to pay, much more than he had ever expected or hoped for. Money was no longer the point. He does need me, Susie.
Who else is going to love you, Toby, the way I do?
There was never an escape. Trevor Gabriel tracked him down on his mobile phone as he loitered in the traffic on his way back into the city, worrying at his concerns for Toby in the no-man’s land between work and not-work, almost as if he was unemployed.
‘Morning, Boss,’ Trevor said cheerily. ‘Good news, we’ve found the car. A couple of juveniles were caught trying to torch it in the wee small hours down near Macdonaldtown Station.
We’ve got one of them in custody now.’
‘Just the one? What happened to the other?’
‘Still in full cry. He went up a wall and over the train lines and away.’
‘Yeah?’ Harrigan tried to picture it. ‘Lucky he didn’t get smacked by the state rolling stock. Who have we got?’
‘Ours is a Greg Smith. He’s fifteen and he’s got a file the size of a phone book down at Family Services. And another one at Juvenile Justice to go with it.’
Harrigan manoeuvred through the traffic as he traversed the steel spider’s web of what he still called the new Glebe Island Bridge. On his left, the Balmain peninsula looked like an island in a glittering mirror of water, edged in a scattered green amongst the container wharves.
The Romanesque colonnaded church tower of St Augustine’s, the tallest of the towers and steeples, was outlined against the clear air.
‘Have we checked any known associates for this other boy?’
‘The patrol went around knocking on a few doors early this morning but they didn’t find anybody. I’ve got a couple of the guys out looking at the moment.’
‘Is anyone with the car? Do we know anything about it?’
‘Ian should over be there by now. The owner is a Christine Van Aalst. She reported it missing from outside of her house in Enmore at 7.08 a.m. yesterday. She checks out. I’d say she was just unlucky.’
‘I’ll go over there now and take a look. In the meantime, don’t let anyone pester this boy. Keep him on ice till I get there.’
‘No rush,’ Trevor replied. ‘The boy’s in the care of some character called the Preacher Graeme Fredericksen, whoever he is. We can’t raise him from anywhere, he’s not at home and he’s not answering any of his phones. And we’re still waiting for the case worker from Family Services to get here. I don’t know what she’s doing with herself but she’s bloody slow too.’
While Trevor spoke, Harrigan was watching the glass walls of the city’s office towers ranged in the near distance with the pale sky behind them. The sunlight glanced off the sides of the buildings with the sharpness of new steel.