by Alex Palmer
She went to school as usual and came home to find that there were clean sheets on her bed. Nothing was said. Always, the sheets were changed with nothing being said. Except for those times when Lucy’s mother had taken her to visit the clinic on the other side of the city, everything had gone on as usual. Until the day Lucy had picked up her pack and walked out of the door. And today, when she had come back.
Just then, Lucy felt that there was no other world in existence anywhere, that this stretch of land was the only place that was real.
This place here on the edge of the park, where her family were caught in a house with a tangled garden, where everything was detached and out of whack. As she leaned against the rock, she felt the gun pressing into her waist. It was a reality of a kind, bringing her back to the present. She sat by the side of the creek, gathering strength, fighting fear. The dog stayed with her, until something in the nearby scrub attracted her attention and she got to her feet and disappeared into the bush, leaving Lucy by herself. Lucy took her gun out of her waistband and aimed it at the shrubs on the opposite bank, firing pretend shots.
It was a long time, and had grown dark and cold, before she felt brave enough to go back into the house.
13
The message that hit Harrigan’s desk later that afternoon summed up the day for him. Greg Smith would not be available for further questioning until the Department of Juvenile Justice had completed its own urgent psychiatric assessment of the boy. It was the price they had to pay for requesting earlier that day that he be put on a suicide watch.
It was not failure, only frustration; something that stretched all their energies a little further. Controlling either time or events in Harrigan’s business was a war of attrition: you had to know when to wait and when to let things happen. If he let the anger he felt drive his work, then he could put everything at risk. In the interval, he needed to break the tension.
He walked out of his office and announced to his people that it was time for a refresher. A brief hour at the Maryborough, money on the bar from the social club matched by an equivalent amount from Grace, to welcome her to the team before they all got back to it again. It might be the last time they had the chance for some days or even weeks.
‘Just don’t let Marvin get wind of this,’ he said to everyone as he made his announcement. ‘If he does, he’ll be burning my ears about it from now until doomsday.’
There was a ripple of laughter as people collected their coats. It was all very amiable but Harrigan also had some unfinished business of his own.
At the Maryborough, the publican, on notice from Harrigan, would reserve the back bar for him and his team. They arrived in a group to take possession of it.
‘What’ll you have?’ Harrigan asked Grace, as she put her money down according to tradition.
‘Lime and soda,’ she replied with a smile, abstinence that he noted but decided not to comment on.
‘Get the lady what she wants,’ he said to the barman. ‘I’ll have a whisky and water.’
In the initial melee around the bar, Ian had already ordered a schooner of Old. As she waited for her drink, Grace watched the white froth ooze down the glass while the smell filled the air around her like a wash. She felt an undercurrent of nausea, a prickle of sweat at the back of her neck.
‘Don’t you drink?’ Ian asked her.
‘No, mate,’ Trevor intervened unsubtly, shoving up against the bar.
‘No vices for my mate here. Just the occasional fag, hey, Gracie.’
‘Plenty of them around here,’ Jeffo observed sotto voce, a bait which Trevor ignored. ‘Hey, Gracie,’ he said then, flashing her a toothy grin,
‘I hear you had fun with that kid today. But you don’t need all that half-arsed psychology. With a kid like that, all you need is a couple of phone books and half an hour and he’ll tell you everything you want to know.’
Grace returned Jeffo a glacial smile but could not be bothered answering. He was winding up for another comment when Harrigan snapped in his ear.
‘Spare us the sparkling wit, mate. No one’s in the mood, including me.’
Drink in hand, he moved away from the bar while Jeffo made a face at his back.
‘That’s a bitch, you not drinking.’ Louise appeared and ordered gin.
She was a chunky woman with greying hair flaring back from her forehead and broken veins across her cheeks. ‘I was hoping we might have a few sessions together. Us girls should stick together.’
Louise, fifty-something, was a software engineer of repute. She drained her glass of gin with slightly shaking hands. Her fingers were heavy with ornate rings, red and white stones serving as glittering knuckle-dusters alongside her wedding band. Grace heard the empty gin glass chink down on the counter as she asked immediately for a second. Grace did not drink, not any more. Alcohol had once flooded her veins with its metallic, poisonous edge, irritating a portion of her mind to unpredictable furies and mawkish self-pity. She turned away, lime and soda in hand, to find Ian lying in wait for her.
‘I hear you used to be a rock star,’ he said. ‘Is that really what you used to do?’
‘Me?’ she laughed. ‘No, I wish I had been, I’d never have to work again. All I did was sing with a band for a little while. All we ever did was work really hard for almost nothing and deal with lowlifes who just wanted to rip us off all the time.’
‘And you liked it so much, you joined the force so you could keep doing it,’ he said.
‘That’s right, I’m right back where I started from. That’s life. I’m just going to go and find the cigarette machine,’ she replied.
She found the machine in the hallway past the gaming room and hummed to herself as she punched in her coins. She reflected with black humour on various episodes of disaster in her not so overwhelmingly successful career in rock and roll, from broken-down vans to audiences so frightening she had been reduced to climbing out the back window of the women’s toilet to escape them. What was so fearsome about this job?
Turning to go back, she saw Harrigan standing just inside the door to the gaming room, catching up on the last race for the day, watching as on the big screen the barriers were opened and the horses were away. He was alone, absorbed by the sight, his whole attention focused on the race, his body tense with excitement. ‘Yes!’ he was saying as the horses came in, hitting one fist into his palm. Then he turned and saw her there watching him.
‘Do you bet?’ she asked, caught out.
‘I don’t bet that much as it happens, Grace. I just like to pick them.
What about you?’
He picked up his drink from a nearby table and walked out to join her.
‘I don’t even know how to read the form guide,’ she replied.
‘No? In this business, that could be a serious deficiency. A lot of things go on down at the track.’
‘But do you need to know how to read the form guide to work them out?’
‘Not always. It depends on what your interest is. How the horses are running. How they ought to run. Who’s betting.’ He was smiling as he spoke to her, relaxed in a way that he usually was not. ‘Haven’t you ever been to the races? Racing’s life.’
‘Is it? Why?’
‘It’s a magic moment watching them come down the straight just before the finish. Just the sound they make when their hooves hit the ground. It is, it’s magic. There’s nothing like it. Horses are beautiful to watch when they’re racing well.’
Harrigan had been going to the track since he was a boy, it had been his passion ever since. On race day, his mother used to get out her good dress with the shoes and the hat and the make-up. And those heavy clip-on earrings that made her ears throb by the end of the day, which she would slip off on the bus home and drop into her handbag with a sigh of relief. She would dress him up as well and they would go out together for the day. It was her indulgence; he thought she was happiest there. Her favourite bookies always greeted her by name. Hello, Helen, how are you betti
ng today? How’s your boy? To a couple of the old-timers out at Royal Randwick, he was still Helen Harrigan’s boy, even if these days he frequented the Members’ Bar as well as the track side.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever put a bet on in my life. Not even on Melbourne Cup Day,’ Grace was saying, an odd tone in her voice. ‘My father used to, though. He used to take my mother to the races.’
She was somewhere else, remembering a childhood in New Guinea, a place dreamlike and beautiful in her memory. A road in the highlands one hot day, sitting beside her father as the Land Rover made its slow way along the dirt road, through its stream of villagers going about their business. An ancient, worked landscape stretching up into the hills, thin, sharp, irregular picket fences surrounding thatched houses. An intricate pattern of vivid greens; she had not realised how vivid until she again saw the parched and bled out grasslands when she was on her way back to Brisbane for the start of the school year. Another world. Yes, it was magic.
‘You should come along sometime during the Spring Carnival. You might enjoy it,’ Harrigan was saying to her.
‘I should. I might need the relaxation if I get to deal with any more people like Ria Allard.’
‘Yeah, you might,’ he said, looking at her. ‘Glad you found me, Grace. Come and talk to me.’
‘What about?’ she asked.
‘Nothing dramatic,’ he replied as they walked back into the bar.
‘Just the way you did that interview today.’
‘Yeah, I wanted to ask — have we got hold of the Preacher Graeme Fredericksen yet?’
She spoke lightly, full of foreboding for what he might want to say to her.
‘No, we haven’t. He’s too elusive for my taste. He should have been knocking on our door first thing, not the other way around. I’ll be glad when we run him to earth. That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. Did you know that Greg Smith’s not available until the Department does its own psychiatric assessment?’
He was sipping whisky. She smelled the odour of the spirit as something almost sweetish, all pervasive, bringing back to her the memory of a stale alcoholic sweat on her numbed skin, a counterpart to liquid the colour of caramelised onions in the glass. She lit a cigarette to cover the smell, he stepped back a little from her smoke.
‘Is that a problem?’ she said. ‘Like you said, we can’t talk to him if he’s dead.’
‘No,’ he said, not quite grinning at her reply. ‘No, it’s not a problem. It just adds to the time, that’s all. What I want to know is, what did you think you were doing in there today? Can you keep that up, putting yourself out the way you did for that boy?’
‘I wasn’t putting myself out,’ she said. ‘As far as I was concerned, it was just him and me talking to each other.’
‘Yeah, that got to be pretty obvious. But it’s not just him and you.
There’s a whole apparatus out there that you can’t ignore and the only place it’s going to take him in the end is Silverwater. And one day, it could be your business to put him there. He knows that, he told you so. So do you want the information he’s got? Or do you want to save his life? What makes you think the two go together in the first place?’
‘Then what do I do?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t this Catch-22? You say to me, coax it out of him. So I do. I go and talk to him from where he’s coming from, because that’s the only way I can do that. But now you say I’m putting myself out too much. That doesn’t leave me any room.’
‘You weren’t talking to him from where he was coming from. You were talking to him from some place in your own mind. And you wanted him in there with you, that’s what you were doing.’
‘That boy’s on the edge. He’s not going to talk to me if I don’t get down there with him.’
He looked past her to the crowd behind her.
‘That’s what you have to learn, Grace. To make him open up without doing that. Because you’ve got no business getting down there with him. You don’t take on what other people bring into the interview room. That’s the road to hell. You don’t go where they are.
What you do is draw a line.’
‘Maybe it’s not like that for me,’ she replied. ‘Maybe I am just talking to people one on one, without taking it on the way you say I am. I can do that without it hurting me, I can meet them there. Maybe that’s a difference between us.’
He looked down into his drink, smiling in an odd way.
‘Do you know you get to people? You’re good at it. I think that every time I see you talk to someone. You let that woman bait you today and then five minutes later you got right back into her.’
Without even trying, you can pick on all the right nerve points just like you know exactly where they are, he could have said to her. You must have x-ray vision.
‘People say I get to them,’ she replied, shaking her head and moving her plait of thick brown hair from one shoulder to the other. ‘I don’t try to do it.’
‘You don’t have to. I’ve got a son, you know,’ he said suddenly,
‘there’s only me to look after him, his mother dumped him. He’s got cerebral palsy. Can’t walk, can’t talk. He’s got a really good mind but he’s stuck in a wheelchair. He will be all his life. He just wants to live.
You have that kid there, and even with everything that’s against him, he could still do something with his life. He just wants to throw it away. I don’t like seeing people dead, Grace. But some people — you can’t save them, they don’t want to be saved. If you go after them, they just want to take you with them. That kid is one of them, he doesn’t want to be saved. He told you that too.’
‘I heard him say that. I don’t like throwing people away. I get stubborn.’
She was embarrassed by his confidence, moved by his description of his son. She threw her cigarette butt into a nearby ashtray. Harrigan put his empty glass on a table.
‘I didn’t know any of that about your son,’ she said, feeling that she owed Harrigan this courtesy at the least. ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to find anything out. I don’t do that.’
‘I didn’t think you were. I don’t usually talk about it. No one talks about it,’ he replied, looking past her, avoiding her gaze. They might have thought, mutually, that it was the sole thing not discussed exhaustively by the team.
‘Well, I won’t say anything to anyone,’ she said quickly, wanting to move on. ‘So — are you in this job to draw that line? Is that what you do every day?’
‘Me?’ It was unusual to find himself on the other end of the question. He grinned. ‘No, I’m here because I couldn’t think of anything else to do with my life. I needed a job to support my son and this was the only thing I thought I could stick at for more than a fortnight. Sixteen years later I’m still here.’
It was the truth as far as it went, a diversionary tactic rather than a lie. His presence here was the result of a half-formed thought brought into being by his father’s irritated gibe one night in the kitchen: ‘Why don’t you be a fucking walloper? You’re always telling people what to do.’ Not long afterwards, a serving policeman, an old mate of his father’s, had called him with an offer.
‘It’s chance sometimes, isn’t it,’ Grace replied. ‘You never know where your life is going to take you.’
He smiled in agreement; she smiled back in the same way.
‘You are stubborn,’ he said quietly. ‘What are you really trying to do here?’
‘I’m brave and foolish,’ she said, sending herself up. ‘I’m trying to make a difference.’
‘You did make a difference today. You’re the only one here who could have talked to that boy and got anything out of him except four-letter words.’
She shrugged and smiled again. ‘Thanks for saying it.’
They found themselves looking at each other in silence, both searching for something else to say. Grace felt the kick inside, the unexpected jag of attraction, and wished she hadn’t; it was the last thing she needed just now.
‘You’re on the TV, Boss. You too, Gracie,’ Ian called out.
They turned and separated by an unspoken agreement, and then gathered around the bar with everyone else. The barman turned up the sound on the early evening news. The team watched Matthew Liu, flanked by both Harrigan and Grace, make a plea for anyone to come forward with any information that would help them find the girl who had shot both his parents.
‘You are so photogenic, Gracie. They’re going to like that up top,’
Trevor said, smiling at her indulgently as the clip ended.
Grace thought she might say that it was just the bad lighting and then decided to leave it where it was.
‘Okay, folks, I think that’s it,’ Harrigan called out, breaking up the party. ‘Back to it.’ He ignored the groans as he led the way back to work.
Back at the office, he found that the time out had not refreshed any of them; there was a sense of languor throughout the room. Harrigan glanced at Grace as she worked her way through Greg Smith’s files, considering her scruples as he did so. He thought about his own son.
He felt the compulsion to go and see him and make sure that he was safe. The office was acquiring an unusual sense of enclosure, he wasn’t sure he could breathe in here for much longer. He reached for the phone to call Cotswold House, but did not pick up the handset.
Finally, when the day shift was going home and the graveyard shift was settling in, he got to his feet and went in search of Trevor.
‘I’m taking an hour, Trev,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going to see my boy.
I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Okay, Boss. I’ll call you if anything happens.’
Harrigan collected his jacket and found himself at the lift at the same time as Grace. Caught a little awkwardly, he stopped and let her get in first.
‘Did you see that?’ Ian asked. ‘Are they going out together somewhere?’
‘He likes her and she likes him,’ Louise said, breathing out gin. ‘All they did in the pub for an hour was talk to each other.’