Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (32 page)

‘Take it easy, mate,’ Trevor said quietly to Harrigan after they had both gone. ‘Watch your blood pressure. We need you to protect us from Marvin.’

Harrigan did not immediately reply. He was watching Grace pull her long brown hair into a ponytail as she stood by her desk talking to Ian, and wondering who she had been making herself available to at four in the morning. She hadn’t been interested in his company.

‘Don’t worry about it. All I need is some fresh air and a change of scenery,’ he said and collecting his coat went in search of both.

How are u dad?

Harrigan should have expected his son to take the initiative. He looked at the computer screen.

‘How are you, more to the point?’ he asked.

I’m okay dad I’m still here I don’t know that I want 2 talk 2 much
about wot happened yesterday U didn’t tell me how u were

‘I’m fine.’

U don’t look it

Harrigan sat down beside his son. He almost smiled. He did not quite know what to say. He hadn’t come here to talk about women in general, only one in particular. A population of one that did not include Grace. He looked from the screen to his son.

‘You love her.’ It was something he felt he had to say.

She knows what I look like She says she loves me I believe her Still
think she does

Harrigan waited.

Thought she’d understand but she didn’t She didn’t listen I don’t
know Maybe she’ll come back and talk 2 me again

‘She owes it to you, Toby. You’ve given her more than anyone else has.’

His son flickered his good hand, that ‘oh yeah’ gesture.

‘Why her, Toby? I know you don’t want to talk about it. But do you want to tell me that much, so I understand?’

Why do u think??? Because She talked 2 me I can’t do anything dad
Like I tell everyone I’m a turtle on its back That’s me Girls don’t talk
2 me They don’t even want 2 look at me Why would they want 2 She
did She knew what I looked like & she didn’t care I said 2 her we’re
both fucking cripples She said yes we are & we are 2 dad That’s why

‘You aren’t like her, Toby. You couldn’t even think about doing something like that.’

I might U don’t know I’m locked in this chair She’s locked in her
head That’s why she did wot she did Don’t know wot I’d do if I wasn’t
in a chair

‘You live in the real world. She doesn’t.’

I live in my head dad I live in a screen Nowhere else I can go
without someone helping me

‘You don’t just live through a screen. You’ve got me for the rest of my life. You’ve got Ronnie, you’ve got Carolyn, there’s your cousins.

They love you, mate. You can’t say we haven’t shown that.’

Not the point, is it, dad? Wot girl wants 2 have sex with me????

Harrigan sat there silent.

‘There are alternatives,’ he said finally.

Are there?

‘Yeah.’

Pay someone u mean??? Is that what u did?

‘No, it wasn’t,’ he said eventually.

Wot did u do?

‘I had a girlfriend. First time we did it, we were on the back seat of her brother’s car. In the garage. He was a petrol-head too, I don’t know if he ever found out what happened to the upholstery. God, it was uncomfortable.’

Better than 0

In retrospect, not so very much. Things had improved after his girlfriend, through some obscure arrangement, had borrowed the keys to the flat her university student sister shared with a moving company of friends.

‘It’s whatever you want, Toby. You just have to ask me and I will organise what you want. That’s all you have to do.’

Not someone who cares about me

‘Toby, if you just ask me, I will do the very best I can for you. There are people out there who are better than others. I can find them for you.’

Toby flickered ‘oh, yeah’ with his good hand once again. Harrigan stood up.

‘I have to go back to work now,’ he said. ‘I have to be somewhere.

If you want anything, you just ask me. You tell me what you want.’

U know what I’m going 2 do??? I’m going out looking for her
Maybe she’ll talk 2 me again

‘Maybe she will. In the meantime, you remember — I’m here if you want anything.’

Yeah okay dad Don’t worry so much

If it was what Toby wanted, the possibility of paying someone for sex had crossed Harrigan’s mind on several occasions before. It was not something he viewed with any great satisfaction. The idea that there would be a negotiated price to pay filled him with distaste; the idea had always left him with that feeling. People smiled at you when they took your money, they manipulated you whether you paid them or they paid you. Either way they bought you out. It was just that for Toby, it was either do that or leave him to pictures on the Net, that was just the way things were. You don’t want to worry about it too much, Toby. Decent women are like hen’s teeth and if the two of you just want to unwind, who gives a shit what they do with their lives?

What does it matter? Just think about it like that.

Harrigan walked out into the bright morning feeling a strong sense of bleakness and the need for solitude. It wasn’t something he had the time to indulge in just now. He had places to go.

Harrigan parked near the New Life Ministries Temple as the first prayer meeting for the day was about to start. A small crowd had gathered in the street outside, waiting for the doors to open, just as they might have done when films were shown here. Once the picture theatre had closed, it might have become a suburban boxing ring, the kind his father had taken him to when he was a boy. Later still, they might have held dog or cock fights here. He thought of the soiled bank notes passing from hand to hand among the watchers as the animals were set against each other in the pit.

The preacher, wearing a cheap dark suit and tie, opened the doors to the church and welcomed the crowd in. ‘I am so pleased you could come,’ he said to each of the newcomers. ‘Good to see you again,’ to the regulars. He knew each one of them by name, and if he did not, he made sure they told him who they were. Harrigan was the last to present himself.

‘Paul. This is a surprise. Good morning. Are you here to tell me you’ve found Greg?’

‘No, Graeme, I’m afraid I have to say we haven’t. But we’re still out there looking for him. I guess he hasn’t come back here or you would have let us know. You haven’t seen him at all? Talked to him?’

What do you know, Harrigan thought as he watched him.

‘No, he hasn’t come home, unfortunately,’ the man replied, words Harrigan could read any way he wished. ‘I always live in hope but so far I am without that singular reward. So you are here for our prayer meeting?’

‘I thought I’d like to come along since you were generous enough to invite me. You don’t mind if I sit in?’

‘I’m sure we’ll be very happy to have you amongst us, Paul. There’s no reason why we should not. You won’t mind if I ask you to participate? It’s something I ask of everyone who comes here. My door is open to everyone provided they come with an equally open heart.’

It could hardly be worse than his monthly management meetings at Area Command with the Tooth.

‘Happy to,’ he replied.

‘Please, come in.’

He followed the preacher through double glass doors into a tiny foyer and then into the auditorium where the sound of his footsteps echoed and the room was bright with unshaded lights. The preacher locked the glass doors to the street and then closed and locked two thick wooden fire doors between the foyer and the auditorium.

Harrigan noticed this with some surprise.

‘Don’t you let your latecomers in, Graeme?’

‘There is only a very narrow opening for us in this world, Paul.

People must come on time or they will be shut out.’

Abandon all hope, Harrigan thought ironically, glancing at the solid barrier the doors formed against the outside world. His backup would have a hard time getting in here. He hoped he wouldn’t need them.

The congregation sat in chairs arranged in wide concentric circles like the white stubby petals of a plastic flower. There was a song sheet on each chair. Harrigan took a seat at the back, near the door, watching. There were more people at this gathering than he would have expected, they had filled the rows to brimming. Families, men with their wives and children, people he assumed were unemployed since it was a work day. Older couples in cheap clothes. Individuals, a man in his late twenties, his features sharp and protruding, his skin the colour of ageing milk, twisting his long hands together. An older woman with grey square-cut hair, in a sombre suit and a pink blouse buttoned to the neck. A drab woman of about forty-five with large glasses and wearing a blue tracksuit. People you would barely notice in any crowd. Perhaps he should have sent Trevor down there after all; he knew that his 2IC went to mass regularly with his partner, a fact which had surprised Harrigan when he had first found it out. Perhaps Trev would have understood these people better, whoever they were.

Harrigan had always gone to church in the company of women: his beautiful mother, his hard-faced aunt and, until they had rebelled, his two sisters, with himself in the middle, the loved child. His father’s absence had been pure defiance against the church and, Harrigan thought now at a distance of years, this all-enclosing regiment of women and, as Jim Harrigan saw it, their dotage on his son. Like his father, Harrigan had lost faith a long time ago. When he was a small boy, it had a magic for him. He remembered walking up the hill to church on Sunday morning and looking up at the high steeple of St Augustine’s climbing into the sky. He thought it was beautiful. In the church, he had been fascinated by the statues of Mary and Jesus on either side of the white wedding-cake altar, imagining them coming to life, Jesus reaching out his hand, Mary smiling. Visions of Bible stories had filled his head, brightly coloured images that he had taken from the picture books he used to read. Visions which had strangely and paradoxically died — over time, it had taken time — in the rigours of his adolescent education at St Ignatius. The thoroughgoing arguments he worked through diligently in class had turned the words to ash on the page; words were all they were. After this he had gone through the motions, had become a stranger in that particular world. Someone perfectly in disguise but in reality a double agent, something he had been ever since. Any residual belief had been erased by his mother’s death. Almost. When you live with images for that long, they are burned onto the skin from the inside out. They still hold on to you, if only in memory, like everything that comes out of the past.

In this cold and ugly hall, the people were subdued, waiting. There was no need for the preacher to call for quiet. He stood at the centre of the inner circle, at the centre of the seated crowd.

‘Friends,’ he said into the silence, ‘today we are fortunate enough to have some new companions among us. People who, like yourselves, want to find the way to redemption and truth, to a lasting peace of mind. So I would like to ask our new companions to stand up and introduce themselves and tell us why they have come today. Perhaps we could start with you, Martin. You say your wife left you. Do you want to tell us about it?’

Following this initial invitation, people stood one after another to tell stories of intimate and scarifying detail to a room filled with strangers. Harrigan himself listened and waited. He spent his working days with people who were either professional liars or wanted to strip themselves naked like this. On the whole, he preferred the liars. Their agenda were easier to detect.

‘I’m Paul Harrigan,’ he said, when his turn came. ‘I’m here as someone who worries about the fate of our young people. I wanted to see what you might have to offer them, Graeme. Whether it’s some way of life which might give them more hope for the future than many of them seem to have today. I meet a lot of them in my work. I was listening to one of them talk about that just this morning. I wonder what his fate will be.’

‘That’s very admirable, Paul. Yes, our present world destroys all hope, does it not? Do you have children of your own?’

‘I’d like to keep that to myself. This is about me, not anyone else.’

There was a rustle of surprise. The preacher smiled.

‘Normally we have no secrets in this room, Paul. It’s a condition of entry here, as I thought I had told you. But if that is how you see it.

Would you like to tell us what you do for a living?’

‘I’m a law enforcement officer.’

One way of announcing you’re a fucking walloper, as his father had always put it.

‘Thank you, Paul. I don’t think we have any other policemen here today, although we have had in the past. We’ll begin now. Bronwyn?’

In a wholly unexpected move, the woman in the blue tracksuit walked to the back of the auditorium and extinguished the lights.

Harrigan found himself sitting in complete blackness. He became still, listening and waiting, a prickle of apprehension at the back of his neck. There was the collective noise of those in the room breathing, and then a shuffling, scraping noise, the sound of someone who had become disorientated and had dropped something. In the darkness, there was the suspension of any sense of place. Then a woman’s ghostly and untrained voice was heard, singing:
Praise you the Lord in the heavens,

Praise him in the heights,

Praise him all his angels,

Praise him all you stars of light,

Praise him all who live in darkness,

Praise him all who dwell in day,

Let them praise the name of the Lord.

There was silence. Then Harrigan heard the preacher’s voice, disembodied and echoing against the high ceilings of the hall: ‘We are in the darkness, you and I. Come with me and I will show you the way to the light.’