Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘Oh, you are my beautiful boy, aren’t you?’ His aunt’s unnaturally cooing voice sounded in his head. He had never said yes to her question, not even as a child when she sat him up on her knee and dug her bony fingers into his ribs. An unmarried woman with her fiance dead in the war and a compulsive churchgoer, she had talked about his becoming a priest, something that he’d never wanted to be. ‘We have to make sure he has a good education. You don’t want him to work on the docks, Ellie. You don’t want him to be like Jim,’ he had listened to her tell his mother. ‘I will get him into St Ignatius for you. I will pay the entry fees. But you will have to contribute.’

‘I will. You wait and see,’ his mother had replied, condemning herself to work at two jobs morning and night for years to keep him there. She’d finally had the reward of seeing him through a year at university, returning to her old haunt in the parlour of the West End on Mullens Street to boast to her friends over a cigarette and a gin that her son wouldn’t work on the docks, he was studying law.

Don’t you want to ask me what I want? As the two women had decided his fate, he had said nothing. Silence which had left him for six years in a place where he had learned to survive as an outsider, watching everything he said and did. A privilege for which his two sisters still had not forgiven him, both of whom had been packed off at fifteen to work for Woolworths and earn their keep. Life had changed since then. These days, he often saw boys in the Iggie’s uniform crossing Birchgrove Park. Back then he had been the only pupil at the school with this address. In another way, life remained the same. He was still a survivor in an institution with fixed rules that could make him feel unwelcome when it wanted to.

‘Paulie was always Mum and Auntie’s Maeve’s fave ,’ his oldest sister, Ronnie, liked to say at family gatherings, scruffing up his hair boisterously. ‘That was a curse, Ronnie,’ he’d reply. ‘You shouldn’t worry. You haven’t done too badly for yourself.’ Life in a waterside mansion on the Georges River should be as good as living on Snails Bay.

When his aunt had died, just after his sixteenth birthday, she had left him the house, to be held in his mother’s trust until he was eighteen. His father never forgave his sister for the public insult and refused to attend her requiem mass. He was an atheist in any case, a union man, a member of the Communist Party, all good reasons for her to disinherit him. The day they had all moved in, he had gone from room to room, cursing her ghost. Her insult festered in the house for years, provoking arguments between his parents so savage Harrigan had wished they would both die. He assumed that this was what his aunt had intended, she’d done enough damage for it to be premeditated. When he laid out the blame for his mother’s death, he put his aunt there (among others) as surely as if she’d loaded the bullet herself.

Harrigan walked in the gate to his back garden and looked up at the darkened windows of his house. All their ghosts were gone, he had excised them, making the place his own. He had gutted it in his spare hours, removing the room in which his mother had died, working his own carpentry. He painted the walls a smooth pale texture, like the unbroken membrane on the interior of an egg, which magnified and softened the light and made the space appear larger. He walked into this space now as someone relieved to be home, although the expanse of room and freedom had not been intended just for him. He had built it as much for his own son, in the inverse shape of Toby’s body, which was not straight but twisted and which had locked a good mind into a wheelchair and kept his boy in care all his life. He did not have the energy to think about his son tonight. He was tired, tomorrow would do, tomorrow he would go and see him.

He went into the kitchen to mix himself a whisky and water and saw that his ancient cat had struggled up onto the table, settling itself down on the papers he had left there. No one knew how old the cat was, it had walked in off the street one day when his father was still alive, a scabrous, savage, yellow tom who fought with every other cat in the street and littered the neighbourhood with kittens. His father thought it was ugly and nasty and named it Menzies as a posthumous insult to a man he’d hated all his life. Now Menzies was toothless, too decrepit to do more than flex claws which were no longer sharp. He hissed impotently as Harrigan moved him aside, then sank back into sleep.

As Harrigan sipped his drink, Grace’s resume, her smiling photograph, looked up at him from the table. He had read it before but now sat down to look it over with more interest. The daughter of a very senior army officer, she had spent her early life in New Guinea and was boarding-school-educated before the family had returned to the Central Coast when she was about fourteen. She had left school not long after, at sixteen, for life in Sydney, eventually working as a singer. Or so the resume said: Gracie Riordan amp; Wasted Daze. Really?

So who were they? In his working life, he had met a lot of women who called themselves singers. She hadn’t returned from that stratosphere until she had taken herself off to university in her mid twenties.

Harrigan knew the Central Coast, his father used to take him fishing up there when he was a boy. He remembered him marooned among the mangrove swamps in the sun, an unsuccessful fisherman but happy for being on neither shore nor sea. Grace hadn’t been a surfer girl if she’d left it all behind that quickly. Here it was: Member, Eastern Suburbs Pistol Club. Winner, Combined Clubs Trophy, Open Category, two years in a row. That’s how she got the job, never mind the degree. Not many women shoot well enough to earn trophies two years in a row. Now that he’d met her, he would never have thought she was the type.

Handguns. He sat back in his chair. She’d been there today, she knew what a handgun could do. Why do you shoot? he wanted to ask her. Don’t tell me it’s a thrill for you. He had his own handgun, not his service revolver but the Smith amp; Wesson.38 that had killed his mother, hidden down in his tiny cellar behind a loose sandstone block.

The gun was memory made real, something in the order of a personal gravestone, a means of holding onto the event and seeking for some solution to it when the actual memory was too painful to recall. There had been occasions when he’d thought about eating it. Occasions not so long after he’d had his jaw broken, when he spent his spare time sitting in a drab hotel room in the country town they had sent him to, playing Russian roulette in the early hours. It was a gamble that had excited him in a way not much else had back then. Not any more. It wasn’t what he wanted, if it ever had been. He hankered for a bit of life, not the reverse.

He closed Grace’s resume and decided to try his luck at sleeping. He turned out the light and went upstairs to bed.

As usual, he lay there thinking. There was a black hole at the heart of that resume, something she wasn’t telling anyone, two or three dead years starting when she was just twenty-one. That was young to end up nowhere. How was she living then? The dole? Some other way? He told himself to stick to the tangibles; recruitment had passed her.

People have gaps in their lives, he had a few of his own. The real question was: could he trust her, could she do the job? Nothing else mattered. On this thought, he drifted away to sleep.

Lucy Hurst raised her head from her pillow in a darkened room made strange by the streaked glow of streetlights through the open louvre windows above the bed. She sat up slowly to see a face in the wardrobe mirror opposite shadowed to a dull, luminous white, bloodless as silicate and surrounded by a stiff mix of dark tentacled curls. She touched her hair and saw the figure in the mirror do likewise. Some event, impossible and unavoidable, that she could not immediately remember, was pressing in on her. The room was empty of any hint of what this might be or why she was here. It was a territory without reference points, static in its unfamiliarity.