Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘What does he think he’s going to say to me?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think he knows either. He wants to see you.

That’s all he’s told me.’

‘And what if it had been me that was dead instead of him? It could have been. It almost was once or twice. What was he going to do then?

Was he going to worry about me? Or was he just going to say, oh, she didn’t come and see me before she died?’

‘I don’t know, Luce. Okay? I can’t answer that question. You want me to tell you the truth? I’m here because it’s going to make things easier for us if you do come home. And I’m at the point where I just can’t handle much more.’

Her father had never come looking for her when he had been well, why should she expect him to now? She looked down the slope of open grass to the narrow streets below, where the small houses and white factory buildings slept on in a pattern of streetlights. The scene was so still; it seemed that no world existed beyond the reach of the streetlights, only darkness without end on the other side of a wide glass bowl.

‘All right, I’ll come home,’ she said after some moments. ‘I’ll talk to him. Because I want to talk to him.’

Twenty-four hours ago nothing would have made her go home, but yesterday, just after dawn when she had fired those shots, she had slipped between a hair space in time. Every thought she had, everything she did, dragged her back to that moment. Her mother and father were waiting for her there, like two spectators in the cheap seats, eating popcorn. Thoughts formed in her mind like words spoken out of the shadows to those two expressionless figures, munching as they watched her. I want to see you. For the first time I want to see you, I want to ask you something. She wanted to look at her father and her mother and ask if either of them had ever woken in the night, the way she just had, and thought: I did that, what am I going to do now that I’ve done something as horrible as that? She wanted to ask them: don’t you feel like that, just a bit? For what you did to me? Give me an answer, because you owe me one.

‘Will you promise me you won’t fight with him?’ Stephen asked, pushing his glasses back on his nose again. ‘Because if you do, he’ll just take it out on everybody else.’

‘No, it’ll be okay, Stevie. If he doesn’t say what I want to hear, I’ll just go again.’

She spoke with a false bravado. Stephen’s relief was all too obvious.

He stood up quickly.

‘Let’s get out of here then, I don’t like it here. Have you got everything? You don’t have to go back and get any stuff out of that place?’

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the Temple.

‘Oh, no,’ she replied.

No, she wasn’t going back in there.

‘Is this yours?’ he asked.

He had as good as trodden on her mobile phone and was holding up the shiny blue object.

‘Yeah, I must have dropped it.’

Even in the half dark, his face expressed the question that he was never going to ask her: where did you get it?

‘Does it work?’ he asked instead.

‘Used to,’ she said, with something of a smile.

‘Do you mind if I use it?’ he asked. ‘I should call Mel, just to let her know we’re coming.’

‘Keep it if you want.’ She was dismissive. ‘It’s just a bit of nothing.

It’s never hard to get hold of bits of nothing like that.’

‘It’s okay, Luce. You can have it back when I’ve finished.’

She stood up slowly, looking around her. Her head was still bathed in sweat and she did not know if this was because she had been drugged or because she was afraid. She had the perception that they were being watched, and that the person out there watching them was dangerous.

‘Hi, Mel, it’s Stevie. I’m sorry I got you out of bed. No, I’ve found her, she’s coming home. Yes, I know — it’s okay. Could you get something ready for us, something to eat? I’m starving and I don’t know when Luce last ate anything. And can you get some clean clothes or something for her? She needs them. And some … napkins, whatever … I don’t know.

She’s a mess. Forty minutes? There’s no traffic. Okay. I’ll see you.’

He handed the phone back to her. She switched it off and stowed it away, then hoisted her pack, swaying on her feet under its weight.

‘You all right? Do you want me to carry that?’

‘No,’ she said. You don’t get to carry this, Stevie, I do.

‘You look like death, Luce,’ he said, his own face grey in the unnatural light.

Yes.

The park seemed deserted as they walked back to Stephen’s car in a nearby street, near the small grove of trees and opposite the blue and yellow swirls of a mural painted with the caption ‘Simultaneous Lovin’, Baby’. As the car turned an arc, she thought she saw the outline of a figure in the dark, Graeme standing in the shadows of the trees. It was only a glimpse but she looked away quickly nonetheless.

They drove through the empty streets, out onto the highway. She curled up in the corner of the seat but was too jangled to sleep. The electric outlines of the city came to meet them: high-rise, shop fronts, service stations, the curve of the Gladesville Bridge over the dark river.

As they passed, the array of ghostly structures faded away either side of the thin white line. She began to feel icy cold as they drove further and further towards the edge of the urban sprawl; the substance Graeme had given her had left her body embalmed in a chill sweat.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

Stephen glanced at his watch. ‘Twenty past four. Almost time to get up.’ Then, ‘That guy at the theatre — he doesn’t know where home is?

He wouldn’t try and come looking for you out here, would he?’

Lucy looked at Stephen and decided not to ask why this possibility might worry him.

‘Graeme?’ She felt uneasy simply saying his name. ‘No, I never told him where I came from. He never asked. We didn’t really talk that much about me after a while,’ she added, in an oddly halting voice.

‘What are you saying?’

She shook her head. ‘Just what we talked about, that’s all.’

No, their months of conversation, one on one, had been fixed towards another point completely. Everything she had said to him, he had directed elsewhere, away from her — something which in itself had been a relief at the time — towards a single action. That of her firing a gun at the specified target he had presented to her. In her mind, these actions were reduced to their sharp outlines, recall came in disconnected flashes: Graeme’s smiling face, the recoil of the gun as she fired it at a tree, the recoil as she fired it at a person. Then all the players were caught in her act of execution, the woman and the man and finally the boy, staring at her with horror in his face. She asked herself how often she was going to see this. She glanced at Stephen next to her. What would you think about me if you knew, Stevie? What’s it going to do to you when you find out?

You and Mel? I never asked myself. I didn’t even ask myself that.

When she considered the preacher, she realised she no longer had a way of describing him to herself. The image in her mind was of the man standing over her, watching her with his gentle and serene gaze while she was in the grip of the drug, saying that he intended to kill both her and someone she loved.

You can’t get to me, Graeme, and anyway I can look after myself. And you can’t get to Greg, and that’s really all that matters. But just to make sure, I’m going to ring Ria. She can warn Greg, even if no one else can.

‘What are you thinking about, Luce?’ Stephen asked, a strange tone in his voice.