by Alex Palmer
U don’t have 2 feel for him
But that’s it. I wish I could. I know what you’d feel if your father died.
That’s different That’s way different
I know that. That’s what I want to ask you about. Didn’t you tell me once he taught you how to talk?
‘Mate,’ Trevor spoke quietly to Harrigan, ‘is this okay with you?
We can do this more privately.’
‘This is work, Trev,’ Harrigan replied. ‘Just keep watching.’
He didn’t teach me 2 talk because I can’t really talk. I learned whatwords were from him. He always kept talking 2 me when I was ababy and he kept the radio on. He took me to see Auntie Ronnie andLyn all the time and they never do anything but talk. He just kepttalking words at me so I’d know what they were Why did he do that?
Coz they said I couldn’t have a mind. Because of the way I was.
He said, fuck u, I’ll show u he does. He got people to teach me toread, there’s special ways u can do that. Why?
Grace looked towards Harrigan, wondering how he could bear seeing this on the screen. He was watching her but it was impossible to know what was in his head. Her sense of loss was too strong for disguise. She turned away.
I just have to know, that’s all. Do you ever meet anyone he works with?
Sometimes Why????
What are they like? Are they like everybody else?
Just people Why????
I missed you, Turtle.
Me 2
Nothing was typed. The computer room was silent as everyone waited.
Do you think your father is watching us talk?
Probably. He wants to find u, Lucy. He’s going to do that. Why???
Wotzup?
I’ve done something else, Turtle. I have to tell people about it.
‘Here we go,’ Trevor said.
Lucy u haven’t killed someone?? Please tell m u didn’t No. Not yet anyway. This is something else. In about twenty minutes, this building is going up in smoke. I was doing it because someone who mattered to me killed himself and I couldn’t cry for him either. I wanted people to know what happened to him. But I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. But someone said to me, what if the other buildings around it go up as well and people do get hurt? I don’t want that to happen. All I want is for everything to be cleaned away so we can start again. Why can’t I just make that happen, Turtle? What do I do now?
Where is it?? U tell me
‘Yeah,’ Harrigan said to the silent room, ‘where is it? Tell me.’
Randwick.
Call the police Call them now
Harrigan pointed to Trev. ‘Fire Brigade. Now. I’ll call the top brass.
Lou, email my son. Tell him we know. You stay here and keep me informed. The rest of you, go now.’
In the release of activity the office was cleared and, in a shorter time than Harrigan had hoped for, every available officer was heading in the same direction, speeding through the streets of Surry Hills on dangerously slippery roads. They came down Anzac Parade in convoy behind the fire engines and the emergency services, sirens sounding in a stretched linear movement. Close to one of Harrigan’s most loved places on earth, Royal Randwick, Trevor was about to say, ‘We’re there,’ when, near the corner of the block on the other side of the road, a white brick building began to produce in a manner almost surreal flickers of fire out of its roof and, smashing outwards through the windows, sheets of red and yellow flame.
‘Fuck,’ Harrigan said. Far away so close. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, she had been one step ahead of him.
What do I do now, Turtle?
U call them
They know already. They were watching, I know they were. No, I meant about everything else. You have choices, don’t you? Don’t you think, Turtle?
Everyone can choose Lucy, wot do u mean???
It’s just the choice I’ve got to make. What do I do now?
Whatever u do don’t hurt anyone Including yourself I’ve gone too far for that. I haven’t got that sort of choice now. It’s one way or the other, that’s what I’ve got to pick.
Wot are u going 2 do??
I think I’m going to go away. Far, far away. I’ve got to say goodbye to everyone I care about first. That’s almost just you now.
U don’t have 2 say goodbye 2 me We can talk If I went away, I would have to say goodbye to you.
I don’t understand Wherever u go everything is the same U arestill u I’m still me that doesn’t change Wot u did won’t change Wotabout those people u shot Have u forgotten them??
No, I haven’t forgotten them. I’m never going to forget them. You know what I think is one of the worse things?
Wot???
That woman couldn’t see me when I shot her because I had my face covered. She didn’t know who I was. She had a right to know. I should have had the courage to look her in the face. You shouldn’t do what I did to her if you don’t have the courage to look someone in the face.
Lucy No no no no no u don’t do it simple I said 2 u its wrong It’s wrong if you don’t face up to what you’ve done.
Wrong anyway It doesn’t matter wot
Yeah. Love you, Turtle. See you sometime, I hope.
U aren’t going 2 talk 2 me again??? Is that wot this means????
She cut the connection.
In another building not so far away, Louise took a mouthful of whisky from her silver hip flask in the luxury of solitude, and decided that whatever chaos the boss was surrounded by at the moment, he needed to know this. She called him.
In her room, Lucy sat on the bed holding the picture of the woman, Grace. She could not see the face clearly in the light. She checked her watch and thought, yes, the building’s gone by now, and whatever else might have been burned because of it. They would be out there picking up the bits, all of them, including Turtle’s father. Lucy left the picture on the bed, took the phone and her gun and went out, to Belmore Park.
She felt afraid of nothing as she walked through deserted streets flooded with sheets of water. She crossed the wide intersection on Elizabeth Street and walked through the underpass to Eddy Avenue.
There was almost no traffic. At Central Station, yellow lights glowed under the colonnade where people slept like bundles of dirty clothing in alcoves and niches. No one looked at her. With her hood pulled over her head, she was as anonymous and ragged as anyone here. Further along the colonnade, a woman and two men began to fight. One man and the woman beat the other man and tore at his clothes. Their voices echoed harshly at a distance but she could not understand what was being said, all she heard were curses. Soon the police would come by to break them up. The possibility caused Lucy no concern. She felt that nothing could touch her, in her mind she walked through this place unseen, less than a ghost.
She crossed into Belmore Park and stood in the middle of the open space between the Moreton Bay fig trees where she had last seen Greg.
The gazebo had a dull fluorescence in the city’s partial darkness. She looked up and thought she saw a flying fox outlined against the sky.
She waited with the world in balance, believing that in the next second, at the next turning of the earth’s curvature, it might tip into nothing.
Time might really end and there would be a way out of this without her having to do anything more. There seemed to be a cessation of all movement. There was only the sound of rain dripping from the trees, then quietness. The voices of the people on the other side of the road were silenced. Instinctively, she thought that it had happened, that this was the quiet that comes before the world is broken open and there is no more time. She waited, hardly breathing. She was light, floating.
Then the gap closed around her and time returned. A car driven too fast along Eddy Avenue came to a halt at the traffic lights at Pitt Street, skewed to one side. A night train rumbled past on the tracks which spanned the overhead bridge. Across the road under the colonnade she saw two police officers weigh
ing into the fight she had seen start and heard the shouts and curses once again. She smiled sardonically. There was only this time and this place to be dealt with.
She walked out of the park and across the road, turning her back on the police almost within their sighting distance, and went back to her sanctuary. She looked at her watch. Soon it would be dawn and the start of that brand new day Graeme had promised her.
The blue and red lights of the fire engines flashed on the wet roads while firemen spread their hoses out around the white building, dousing the flames. The takeaway shop next door was flaming greasy fire and its window crashed outwards from the heat. The smoke had driven the residents from the block of flats on the other side of the clinic out into the street. Some had had to be evacuated, to their confusion. Huddles of dazed, damp people found themselves marooned on the wet streets, wrapped in blankets over their nightclothes while the media circled them like hungry dogs. They had got here at speed, as they always did; Harrigan wished his people could be as efficient. The television crews were unpacking their goods on the other side of the fire engines, their stand-up comics were getting ready for their routines in front of the cameras. The scene was a mess of umbrellas and damp people bumping against one another.
‘Keep them out of the way. I don’t want to have to worry about those clowns,’ Harrigan grumbled to the uniformed officers before going in search of the senior sergeant in charge of the local patrol.
‘Where were the security guards?’ he asked her. ‘My information was that this clinic was under twenty-four-hour surveillance.’
‘So was mine. Don’t know where they were, but they weren’t here, that’s for sure,’ she replied sharply. She glanced across the road. ‘Look at that mess, will you? They should put the scum who did that in gaol and throw away the key.’
‘If we hadn’t got here when we did, we’d have had deaths,’
Harrigan said. ‘You can tell them that at Area Command. You can tell them it came from me, personally.’
‘I will. No probs.’ She grinned with pleasure at the prospect and walked away.
On the other side of the road, all traffic was being diverted to the southbound lane and waved on its way by uniformed police. It was dawn, the morning snarl was beginning to build, already stretching towards the beach suburbs in the south and the city in the north. It grew light on a snake-like mess of fire hoses, burnt-out buildings still smouldering in the damp weather, and convoys of vehicles taking those left homeless to temporary shelter. Harrigan watched his team stop for takeaway coffee, saw Grace light a cigarette and roll her shoulders wearily. He wanted to speak to her but did not know what he could say. It was twenty-four hours since any of them had had any real sleep other than a stolen hour or two.
In the midst of this, he took a phone call from the surveillance team watching the Temple to hear that the preacher had arrived home on foot. He told them to leave the man alone and hung up, wondering what Fredericksen had done with his time between midnight and dawn, or what he might have been able to tell them about the scene surrounding him now. He was then surprised to take a phone call from the Commissioner’s Office. When he had finished talking, he went looking for Trevor.
‘I’ve got to take the car, mate. I’ve been summonsed by God, he wants to have breakfast with me. I’ll see you all back in town.’
‘Have fun, Boss. Don’t forget to say g’day to the Commissioner for me while you’re there. What does he want with us anyway?’
‘Who knows? I’ve been told it might take a while. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.’
Why did they want him? Presumably to explain why he had permitted a firebombing to occur in the middle of a state election campaign, not a very clever thing to do. He got into the car with the premonition that events were about to become more complicated than they already were. As he drove away, he saw a dark blue van come to a slow stop on the other side of the road near the blue and white ribbons.
Acme Security. We’re there for you. He looked at the car’s digital clock: seven forty-five a.m. Daylight hours. Welcome to the job, boys. Ask me for a reference one day.
35
Some time after Harrigan had been ushered into the Commissioner’s office, Lucy stood in her room overlooking the alleyway that led from the street, methodically checking her watch. Finally, she put on her coat and slipped her gun into one pocket and her mobile telephone into another. She thought she was weighted to one side, dragged down like someone about to drown themselves. She pulled up her hood to hide her face and went out, leaving everything else behind, hurrying down the back stairs and exiting through a small loading dock.
Standing back and out of sight, she looked into the narrow lane at the cold, steadying rain that came out of a steel grey sky. There was no one there to see her as it came down harder, blown into the loading dock by a strong, cold wind. It seeped through her coat but she felt no discomfort. Her body was impermeable, light and clean. Her throat no longer hurt. She felt a sense of loosening, an expectation of release.
She stepped forward a little and saw a car parked further along the narrow laneway near the back entrance to a discount clothing store. ‘I want to die in the open air. I hope I do,’ she said to herself. A young woman came sprinting through the rain towards the car. Lucy reached the woman just as she had unlocked the car door, she pressed her gun into the woman’s ribs.
‘Don’t say anything,’ she said. ‘Don’t call for help. Just take me where I want to go and you’ll be fine.’
The woman looked at her, recognised her and did as she was told.
They got into the car. Terrified, the woman drove where Lucy directed her: to the New Life Ministries at Camperdown. The sky turned from black to green and there was the sound of thunder. Hailstones the size of cricket balls began to crash down, reducing the visibility to almost nothing.
‘My car,’ the woman gasped when the hail smashed onto the bonnet and cracked the windshield.
‘Keep driving,’ Lucy said. ‘Go faster. Now.’
They came skidding dangerously down the hill towards the Temple.
Lucy told the woman to drive up off the road towards the back of the theatre until she was as close to the back door as possible. She already had her key in her hand. They bounced over the uneven ground of the demolition site and slewed to a stop almost at the door, the tyres torn and useless. Lucy did not speak as she left the car. She was inside the building almost before the woman realised she had gone. While she sat at the wheel, too shocked to move, her car was suddenly surrounded by people.
The door opened.
‘We’re police,’ someone said, ‘come with us. Please don’t be frightened.’
Dazed, the young woman was taken by the arm, pulled out of the car and hurried away. Two officers had raced towards the back door of the Temple after Lucy but they were too late. She had slammed the door and dead-locked it. They were all left outside in the weather while the hail continued to come down around them. Just as quickly, they ran for cover.
Harrigan walked into the office, feeling barely fed after having lost his appetite ten minutes into his meeting with (as it turned out) both the Commissioner and an Assistant Commissioner. He was wondering how to handle what he had to do next when, almost simultaneously, his mobile rang and he was stopped by Trevor. Around him, the office was full of racket and movement.
‘We’ve got her. She’s at the Temple. I think we’ve got a siege on our hands,’ Trevor was saying.
Harrigan gestured him to quiet and took the call. It was his surveillance team at the Temple. He told them to cordon off the area and call in the local patrol. He then rang the Tooth immediately. He needed bodies down there, he said, and the place sealed off immediately. Marvin was amenable, but he had no choice.
‘I’d better be able to rely on that, mate,’ Harrigan said, in a dangerous tone.
‘You can,’ Marvin replied. They both hung up on each other.
‘Everyone, quiet. We’ve got work to do,�
� Harrigan called to the room, desperately pleased to have a perfect excuse to avoid telling them what he otherwise had to say. ‘We take this step by step. I need you all to stay on now, no one goes home. Ian and Trev, I’ll want you in my office to work out what we need to — Whose phone is that?
Grace. Make it quick.’
Grace went to her desk and answered her phone. ‘Grace Riordan.’
‘Is that you, Grace? Since you wouldn’t tell me what your last name was yesterday. Is that who you are? Are you the woman who talked to me yesterday?’
‘Yes, this is me. What would you like me to call you — Lucy or the Firewall? What do you like better?’ Grace replied, turning on her speakerphone and broadcasting to the room. Harrigan walked towards her desk in the now silent office.
‘You can call me Lucy. How are you, Grace?’
‘I’m good, Lucy. Where are you now?’
‘Don’t you know that? I’m at the Temple. I thought you’d be the first people to find that out.’
‘What are you doing there, Lucy? Did you want to see someone there?’
‘I’ve come to see Graeme. You see, Graeme came and saw me last night and he told me I could have a whole new life. A whole new life.
So I’ve come to talk to him about it. Haven’t I, Graeme?’
In the bleak auditorium, Lucy looked at the preacher who sat, white-faced, angry and frightened both, in front of a small crowd of people pushed up against the side wall and huddling together on the floor. Bronwyn, a woman with her small son, an old man and his wife, some few others who had come out even in this terrible weather. The plastic seats had been upended and tossed aside. The hail, which had crashed so loudly on the old roof that it was hard to hear anyone speak, had ceased although the rain continued to come down.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy said, ‘it’s him and me and there are about seven other people here as well. We’re all in here together. They can’t get out because all the doors are locked. And you can’t get in for the same reason. You see, Graeme likes the doors locked. He always keeps them locked. But I thought we could let you in, if you wanted to come in. I thought you might like to come down here and talk to me.’