Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (5 page)

The questions drove her as she gained skill in using the software and built her own website, both in the computer rooms and on her own stolen machine. Everything she fashioned worked around this insoluble puzzle, which never gave ground to her. Duplicating the things she had met with in her life and seen out on the Sydney streets

— beatings, robberies, rape — and fixing them as electronic impulses on a screen, she transformed them into something she could suspend out of time. She was safe in the computer rooms and the events she recreated on her website were controlled, they could not hurt her. She studied the images she built, remaking them if she needed to, trying to understand what it must mean to hurt someone or to shoot them dead.

Today she did not stop, her restless, jerky energy drove her on past the pubs, restaurants and takeaway bars to the serrated wall of the Carlton brewery. Further up Broadway, close to the park, stood two old, ornate buildings with elaborate clock towers supporting translucent spheres like fragile crystal worlds. In the middle distance, Lucy saw what she had come to find. The usually swift flow of traffic down Broadway was forced to slow before negotiating a hazard marked by a string of plastic blue police ribbons snapping in the wind.

Access to a particular side street had been cordoned off and police cars were parked on the road and the footpath.

Although she had been waiting to see it, she stopped abruptly to lean against the rough wall of the brewery and wait until the blood had stopped pounding in her head. Images from her website began to surge through her mind. In her electronic world, the counterfeit Lucy pulled the trigger, the woman doctor died under the gun, and once that switch was thrown, catastrophe was initiated. The buildings around the doctor began to burn, the sky was split open to rain down green fire, nuclear flame burst out onto Broadway and all the buildings that surrounded Lucy where she stood now, exploded. A fireball roared the breadth of the roadway and ate up stick figures and toy cars.

Outside of her head, in the ordinary daylight, she watched the world move on routinely around her. She was alien to everyone passing her by, someone the crowds would turn on if they knew what she had done.

She held the contrasting visions side by side in her head but the electronic images were her true reference points. What existed around her — these buildings, everyday life, tangible things and immovable structures — were hollow, they had no reliable substance. They hid something that stank to her, something that was dead and rotting.

She crossed against the traffic to the other side of the road, just another student from one of the universities. A small crowd had gathered opposite the police cordon, watching and talking underneath the yellow sign outside of St Barnabas’s Church that told the passing parade, ‘Forgiveness means not having to pretend any more.’ Lucy stopped amongst them, looking on, listening.

‘Two of them. Someone shot two people. And their boy was there watching.’

The words were taken up by the crowd and spread like an echo from an uncertain source.

That was me. I shot her. I waited for her inside that empty shop and then I went out into the street and I shot her. I shot the both of them.

No one turned on her for her unspoken words. The surrounding buildings were unchanged from their daily aspect. The uniformed police guarding the street looked around at the crowd, their faces expressionless with boredom. She could walk up to them and say, ‘You want me. I did that.’ Why didn’t she? They might only laugh at her, or even become angry, and then wave her on her way. Lucy waited for a few moments longer and then, there being nothing else to do, walked on.

She sat on a bench in Victoria Park, her backpack propped beside her, and stared at the ornamental ponds where the seagulls and ducks huddled in close to the shore. Brief sunlight brought a drab flush of yellow to the thin grass. Lucy glanced back towards Broadway, to the wide intersection where City Road fed its vehicles into the traffic. As the sunlight faded and the weather became dreary and dark, she saw the sporadic glow of headlights from the passing cars and the occasional gleam of neon from the shop fronts on the far side of the road. These lights were the only brightness to touch her; her visionary other-world had grown drab, its vivid dye had bled out of her into the watery air. From here she could see nothing of the police ribbons. She was isolated here. She could pretend that the shooting had never happened; and then, curiously, understood that she did not want to let her act of execution go, however bloody it had turned out to be.

The noise of surrounding traffic hung in suspension. The preternatural quiet held her in a sense of anticipation, she waited as the atmosphere became strangely claustrophobic, strangely lonely. She was chasing another memory down this emptiness. There was sunlight warming her, the sound of magpies carolling in the background, and Graeme’s voice as he spoke to her, rich as honey. They were sitting opposite each other at a picnic table someone had set out on the back lawn of a small private hospital.

‘Why, Lucy? Why do you need to go and live on the streets the way you do? You’ve been to school, you have an education. You’re an intelligent girl. Why do this to yourself?’

‘I’m playing a game. I call it dancing with death. I like doing that.

Didn’t you know that?’

‘Why death? Why not life?’

‘Why anything? I can do anything I like, you know.’

There was no other reason why she should have been at that tiny private hospital on the northwestern edge of the city, Greenwood Convalescent, a run-down place with few patients and an ageing doctor. She had been living rough and bingeing, deliberately chancing her luck with heroin. Pushing it, marrying lethal exhilaration with the thought that this rush might be her last chance to see daylight.

Grinning to herself each time that she came back to the light and thought, well, I’m still here, maybe next time I won’t be. I won’t know, will I? Do I care?

Detox was an option forced on her by Greg with the help of Ria, the woman from the Family Services Commission. Greenwood was the only place where she had been able to find Lucy a bed at short notice, tracked down after endless frantic phone calls to unresponsive agencies, none of whom had any space available. Lucy had agreed to go there on the fall of a coin.

Even so, Greenwood was a strange place in which to come to earth.

When Graeme introduced himself to her as her counsellor, he was the first normal-looking person she had met. He sat with her when she was in the throes of cold turkey while she told herself this was all the same roller coaster ride, the same coin, just another side, and she could get through it, she could survive anything. The underlying rule of Lucy’s game was that she took the consequences of her actions full on.

She hung on to every ache and sweat, every gripping pain, as a gift.

Pain
was
a gift, something in the fibre of her body which could be relied upon to assert her existence when everything else had deserted her. On the streets, anything was a currency and pain could be traded along with everything else. Plenty of people dealt in pain for the pleasure of it, looking for people to hurt, setting traps in public toilets and on empty beaches, boasting later, did you see what I did to them?

She’d never had the stomach for that. Her pride lay in what she could endure. If you couldn’t give pain, you took it: took it without showing you felt it and that made you as good as anyone else.

When the mists cleared and her roller coaster ride came to an end, she began to spend time with Graeme in the hospital garden, an overgrown place shaded by white eucalyptus trees. She was shaky from the brutal process, groggy with tranquillisers, smoking cigarettes one after the other. Graeme sat on the other side of the table, smiling as they talked. She watched him cynically through the spirals of cigarette smoke.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, insolently throwing back his own questions. ‘Why should you give a shit about me? You’re being paid to care, aren’t you? Because Ria sent me here from Family Services. You get paid for it.’

‘No, Lucy. I’m not being paid by anyone. You being here is a purely private arrangement. I actually do care what happens to you,’ he replied. ‘But if you want to know, I’m rebuilding my life as well. I’m just back from many happy years in the United States, the last few in California. The sun gets to you there, it wears you out a little. It’s a bit like here. But, of course, this is home.’

‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said indifferently.

California was a mythical location for her, some gaudy place on the other side of the ocean made up of names known to her through television shows but whose physical reality was indistinct: Santa Monica Beach, Beverley Hills, Sunset Strip. Out of some strange ghost of politeness, she named these places to him and he smiled again.

‘Yes. I’ve been to all those places. Santa Monica’s a beautiful beach.

Perhaps you’ll go there one day.’

‘Yeah, one day maybe I will.’

She looked at him with contempt for the suggestion.

‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Why shouldn’t you?’

She did not bother to reply. She stubbed out her cigarette, and then lit another.

‘You didn’t answer my question, Lucy. Why are you out there?’

She shrugged. ‘Because the world’s a piece of shit? Because everyone lives off everybody else? What does it matter what I do? So fucking what.’

‘Do you mean that, Lucy? Is that what you really think?’

‘Yeah. Don’t you think that way sometimes? Don’t you want to smash things up?’

She stopped, suddenly energyless. He waited for some moments after she had finished talking, looking at her.

‘Yes, Lucy, I do. There are many times when I feel like that.’

‘Do you?’

His reply sent a jolt of white anger into her head. ‘Well, I do it.

Smash things. You can do a fucking lot with a brick if you’re aiming it at a car. And it’s even better if you can get hold of a bit of metal pipe.

What do you do? Anything?’

‘In my own way, I do quite a lot of things,’ he replied. ‘I’ve dedicated my life to it. I know what you mean when you say the world is empty. I understand that.’

‘I didn’t say empty. I said shit.’

‘The meaning doesn’t change. The world is rotten. Its decay reaches up to Heaven. It’s that decay you smell, all the stench that is the world’s corruption.’

She shrugged again, surprised, uncertain how to reply.

‘And you are out there, Lucy, because the world is shit, as you call it?’

‘Yeah, I am,’ she said, very softly.

Her cigarette was finished again. She rubbed her eyes before lighting another. There was a pause and she began to talk as she rarely did.

‘I get sick of being out there though. You get hungry. I don’t stay out there all the time now, I come and go. I get rooms to live in, sometimes I can get the dole. And I work too. I’ve had jobs. Even me.’

She laughed cynically. ‘But you know how I mostly live? I steal. It’s the only thing I am good at. I’ve never been caught. I get tired though. I keep thinking, why am I out here, what am I going to do now?’

There was silence as she smoked.

‘In the end I just go back there. I keep going back because there isn’t anywhere else. I think that really is where I’m supposed to be.’

‘There’s something you’re not telling me, Lucy. Why are you so badly hurt? What happened to you?’

He seemed to speak out of genuine concern. Lucy had a test for people who said they were concerned for her, she knew how to prove they were liars. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and took out a small plastic wallet which contained a square of shiny dark blue material. She unwrapped the material and placed on the table a torn scrap of letterhead.

Because of this. Because this was the day. When she had thought, this is the end of the world for me, they can’t do this to me any more.

‘You really want to know about me?’ she asked. ‘Okay. You look at this. And you go and work it out. If you know so much.’

She pushed the piece of paper towards him and he picked it up.

‘You be careful with it,’ she snapped.

Her words, deliberately cryptic, were intended to make it clear to him that he couldn’t know, he couldn’t understand. No one could; it was knowledge privileged to her. No one could have the gall to pretend they knew. She looked at him. Go on. I dare you. I just fucking dare you.

He smoothed the torn paper flat onto the table. A scrap Lucy had ripped from a doctor’s note pad when no one was looking. Dr Agnes Liu. MB, BS (Syd.), FRACOG, MRCOG. The Women’s Whole Life Health Centres Inc.

‘I know this woman,’ he said eventually. ‘I know her very well.’

‘You can’t.’

‘But I do, Lucy. Why shouldn’t I? I know what this woman is, better than most. But not, I think, better than you. She’s an abortionist. A murderer. And someone took you to her, didn’t they? You didn’t go yourself. Someone took you there for the slaughter, Lucy. Because that’s what it was. A dual murder. You and your child. Isn’t that what happened?’

His clear eyes had become almost expressionless as he spoke to her.

She had nodded, unable to speak at first. She thought that she was feeling nothing.

‘My mother. Dragged me there. Twice. Didn’t even tell me where we were going. The first time they sent me on to hospital because I had this miscarriage right there in the reception. The second time round I worked out for myself what was going to happen.’

It was as much as she could say to begin with. He waited for her to continue. She spoke again, quickly, her words tripping over each other, as unstoppable and irretrievable as the gush of opened veins.

‘It was my dad. Did it to my little sister as well. Tried to anyway. I couldn’t stop him. Stevie did though. He’s my brother. He’s not as big as Dad so he didn’t help me. But when I left and he worked out what Dad was trying to do to Mel, he said he couldn’t handle it. He knocked Dad right out of the door, said he’d kill him if he touched her. He told me Mum just stood there with her mouth open. Dad’s a coward, you know. He never went near Mel again.’