The Gospel According to Luke (26 page)

He was a trained social worker, but he had never practised, and he had no confidence in his ability to be either impartial or perceptive. He was quite good at gardening and cleaning. He could run really fast. Recent reports indicated he was a talented kisser, but he doubted one could make a living from that. Public speaking used to be his forte, but he had nothing left to say. All of his speaking and teaching and leading and counselling, all of his everything, had been for God. Nothing seemed worth doing, if not for Him. Nothing seemed worth striving for now He had turned away.

Luke closed the car boot and leant against it, taking a last look at the cabin he used to call home. It looked so small and disconnected. He found he was not sad about leaving it behind. He had an inkling that sometime in the future he might be happy with Aggie and Honey and the child. That the large, sad house could one day feel crowded and joyous. He understood that God was not in the faux-timber cabin. If Luke was ever to find Him again, it would not be here.

He parked his car next to Aggie's and did not turn as he walked toward the clinic. As soon as he saw her, slouching against the edge of her desk, twisting the phone cord around her hand, he felt stronger, surer.

‘Butler.' Malcolm stepped in front of Luke and held a meaty hand up in front of his face. ‘Just a sec.'

‘Hello, Malcolm. How was your holiday?'

‘Notice all those protesters outside?'

‘There aren't any protesters outside.'

‘Exactly. First day in over a month the footpath hasn't been crawling with them. At first I was thinking, fan-bloody-tastic, you know?'

Luke looked over Malcolm's shoulder. Aggie rolled her eyes and gestured to the phone. ‘One minute,' she mouthed.

‘But then Aggie comes in and tells me that you've moved out of the fundy house and into hers and I can't help thinking –' Mal stepped forward so his chin was level with Luke's nose, ‘– that maybe the two are somehow linked.'

Luke took three steps backward. ‘Your logic escapes me.'

‘Well, logic isn't a minister's strong point, is it? I'll spell it out. You called off the attack dogs because you and Aggie are fucking. Sent 'em to harass some other poor health worker.'

‘Listen to me for a minute. I –'

‘Hey, sweetie, how'd you go?' Aggie slid into the space between the two men. She kissed Luke and ruffled his hair, then before he could answer she turned and slapped Malcolm's arm. ‘I heard everything you said, you big bully. You know he had nothing to do with all that.'

‘It's a coincidence. That's all I was saying.'

‘Why d'ya have to be so bloody negative? It's a happy day, Mal! Luke and Honey are free. I've got
all the company I could want and – icing on the cake – the protesters have gone away. It's a happy, happy, happy day. Right?'

Mal shrugged, turned away. Aggie laughed and threw her arms around Luke. ‘He'll come around. I was worried about you. I thought they might talk you into staying.'

‘No.' Luke did not tell her that not one of them had spoken to him. That they all stood in a line and watched him pack his things and when he had finished, they went inside and closed the door.

‘Brave boy.' Aggie kissed him again. ‘Everything's going to be okay, you know that, right?'

‘I don't know it, not for certain, anyway. But I love you and I think that if I can –'

‘This is a place of business,' Mal barked. ‘Go and emote elsewhere.'

Aggie stuck her tongue out. ‘Fine. Come on, let's leave grumpy bum here alone.'

‘Honey's meeting us here. She should be along any minute now.'

‘We'll wait in the park. All the cool kids go there to make out with their boyfriends, you know?' Aggie grabbed her bag from the hook near the back door, ran to Malcolm's desk and kissed his forehead, then grabbed Luke's hand.

With the money Luke gave her, Honey bought a black-and-white plaid babydoll dress, a red mini-skirt with
a stretchy tummy panel, a black sleeveless T-shirt, an electric blue stretch jacket and a big bucket of chocolate-coated honeycomb.

The other thing she bought at Kmart was a hardcover book of baby names. She read it as she walked up Koloona Street, trying to imagine what her son would look like, what name would suit him. She would like to call him Luke, because that was the name of the only really nice man she had ever known.

The park bench was dripping wet, and so Aggie and Luke could not sit on it and make out like teenagers. Instead they held hands and walked around the circumference of the park, talking about the future, reassuring each other that everything was going to be wonderful. They talked about taking a trip together. Aggie was appalled to learn that Luke had never left the country. She told him she would take him anywhere he wanted to go.

‘I've always wanted to visit Jerusalem,' he said.

‘Jerusalem it is.'

‘No.' Luke caught her around the waist and pulled her close to him. ‘Let's go somewhere else. Somewhere we won't have to worry about getting blown up the whole time. Canada or Greece, maybe. We'll go to Jerusalem when things settle down. That's if you still want to take me in fifty years or so.'

The world smelt new and earthy, like trampled autumn leaves and freshly turned soil. As they passed
under a low-hanging branch, a gust of wind sprinkled them with raindrops which clung to Aggie's curls and slid over Luke's cheeks like tears.

Aggie saw Honey first. She waved, but the girl had her head stuck in a book and did not see. ‘She's gone in. We better go save her from Mal's bad mood.'

‘I'll wait here, thank you very much. I have no desire to tempt fate by placing myself within striking distance again.'

‘Back in a sec, you big wuss.'

Aggie was barely out of the park and onto the footpath, when an ear-splitting noise lifted her off the ground. The air was suddenly opaque, choking. Landing hard, she tasted blood. She tried to see but there was only smoke, black and thick. Bands of pain squeezed her chest and ribcage. There was a terrible, inhuman roar, which might only have been the sound of her own shattered eardrums. She tried to breathe, but the pain in her chest stopped her lungs from expanding. Her mouth and nostrils were filled with smoke and grit and soot but not air. There wasn't any air.

She tried to work out where she was. She knew she had covered some distance in the air and landed somewhere hard. The footpath? The road? Someone, surely, would be along soon to pick her up. She could stop trying to move, stop trying to call out, stop trying to breathe. She could stop.

The service was held in the city church. Pastor Riley conducted the sermon, Belinda spoke and Leticia sang. Luke did not cry. He stared at the cross over the pulpit. Its only meaning was in its resemblance to the one Honey had worn around her neck. It was a symbol and a girl's dead throat was what it symbolised.

The funeral was well-attended; maybe three hundred people, most of them under twenty, about half of them from the NCYC. Honey's mother looked just like Honey. Luke spoke only to Will, who was there to support him, just as Luke had supported Will through Malcolm's funeral yesterday. Each man would have preferred Aggie be there, but she was unreachable
because of a wall of doctors and a pump filled with morphine.

They went to St John's after the funeral, to sit and drink burnt coffee and wait for Aggie to wake or worsen or improve.

‘We can't burden her with it until she's strong,' said Will. Luke nodded his agreement.

Will had arranged the funerals, contacted the relatives, slept on Aggie's sofa so he would be there to cook for Luke and drive him to and from the hospital. And he talked and talked and talked. ‘My way of grieving,' he explained, ‘is to articulate every last damn thing that I'm feeling and thinking. You, on the other hand, grieve by going into a coma. That's cool. We've each gotta deal in our way.'

‘How am I supposed to live another thirty or forty years,' Luke said, ‘when it takes everything I've got in me just to make it from one moment to the next?'

‘Oh, man, I know, I know.' Will reached across the table and grasped Luke's hands, wrapping them in his own. ‘I've been pummelled by death, Luke,
hammered
by it. Back in the eighties there were years when I went to two or three funerals a month. With each one I felt I couldn't take another death, not one more. Every time I had to put on my damn black suit and tie again, I thought, this is it; this is the absolute limit of my endurance. But I'm still here and I'm still living large, falling in love and getting hurt so badly that if I talked for twenty years without stopping, I still wouldn't be
able to describe it.' He stopped and closed his eyes, working his lips in a silent prayer. He swallowed loudly and opened his eyes. ‘The world is unbearable, Luke, but we bear it. You just have to keep going. Concentrate on breathing. Just focus on that one thing.'

Luke breathed in and out. His lungs expanded and contracted. His chest rose and fell. Honey would not have felt a thing, they said. She would have been dead within half a second of detonation.

‘Luke?'

He looked up at Carrie Grey, the woman whom he had imagined as cold and loveless, but who had not left Aggie's side for more than a minute at a time, and who showered beer-scented kisses on him at every opportunity.

‘She's awake. She's asking for you.'

Aggie was propped up on a pile of pillows, a big, bald Frankenstein's monster. She smiled a crazy smile. ‘They shaved my head.'

‘Looks like someone slipped with the razor.' A line of thick black stitches started above her left eyebrow and zigzagged its way across her forehead and up over her skull, ending at the nape of her neck. Small patches of three or four stitches were sprinkled over her shiny, tight-skinned face. The right eye was swollen shut, the left remarkably clear and undamaged. He kissed her there, on the tiny miracle of her unharmed eyelid.

‘Are you in a lot of pain?'

‘Not so much. I guess I'm drugged, because I snuck a look at my stomach just now and most of it seems to be missing, but all I can feel is the itching of my damn leg under the plaster.'

‘Aggie, I –'

‘Sit down, Luke. Here, next to me. Hold my hand while you tell me.' He did as she asked, careful not to touch the sticky plaster attaching the drip to the top of her hand. ‘The clinic blew up, didn't it?'

‘Rubbish bin full of explosives. There was another one due to go off in Liverpool but the police got tipped off in time. The girl who rang them had helped blow your place up and was freaked out by . . . apparently, she thought the explosion would just shut the clinic down. She said she hadn't wanted to . . .'

‘Kill anyone?'

He nodded.

‘Mal?'

‘I'm so sorry, Ag.'

She sucked her breath in through her nose. Her open eye filled with water, and she gasped as a tear dropped onto a patch of stitches. ‘How's Will?'

‘He's coping. He's here if you want to see him.'

‘Yeah. Soon. Can you wipe my face for me?'

Luke took a tissue from the box by the bedside and carefully mopped up the tears. She didn't wince when he accidentally touched her stitches, but she did gulp when he kissed her eyelid.

‘Is that it?' she said.

‘You should rest.'

She closed her eye, sighed. ‘How long have I been in here?'

‘Almost a week.'

‘That's a lot of rest.'

‘Ag, I –'

‘Luke, please, I'm fine. Well, okay, obviously I'm not fine, but I'm here and I'm going to recover, but I can't do that until the injuries have all been inflicted. You know?'

‘Yes. Okay.' He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with antiseptic. ‘Honey was right in the doorway when . . . She's dead, Ag, her and the boy. How's that for wicked irony?'

‘Oh, God, Luke. Oh, God, baby, I'm so sorry.'

Luke laid his head on her bandaged chest and wept until the nurse came and told him it was time to leave.

He drove Will's car back to the house and gathered together Aggie's yellow slippers, her favourite pyjamas and some books. He made a bouquet of red and yellow roses from her garden and wrapped the stems in the yellow headband she used to wear. Last week's rain had caused the garden to explode in colour. He was beginning to understand something. It had to do with the garden and the grass and the little tufts of hair sprouting from Aggie's shaved scalp. It had to do with resurrection.