Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘Nothing,’ she replied, unaware of the expression on her face or the shiver that went down Stephen’s spine as he looked at her. He sped up, accelerating past a convoy of trucks rumbling northwards along the highway, a monstrous force tricked out in a delicate rigging of many-coloured lights, taking on the force of their jet stream, passing them at speed.

They had reached the streets close to home, the far northern edge of the city. There was no moon. Lucy looked out at large houses newly built in the old bushland, where occasional groves of trees had been left behind for decoration. All were pale silver in the reflected light of the city.

‘None of this was here before,’ she said.

‘They just keep subdividing. There won’t be anything left soon.

We’ve got houses almost up to our front door now. We get real-estate agents ringing us all the time. If you want to sell, we’ll get you a goodprice . I feel like telling them, you don’t know what you’re buying, mate. You don’t have that much money.’

Their double-storey ninety-forties brick house came into view, built by their grandfather several years after he had been demobbed. In the photographs that Lucy had seen, there had once been a four-roomed, wooden tongue-and-groove house in this place, one that her great-grandfather had built here not long after he had cleared the original forest. Their grandfather had told them how he had demolished it and built this pile in its place, going up in the world.

Stephen turned off the engine to slide noiselessly down the gentle slope of their driveway, halting just before the garage.

‘You’re home,’ he said.

Yes.

In the pale light, they walked across a rectangle of spongy couch grass. A dog came out of her kennel, her chain rattling. Lucy knelt beside her, rubbing her head.

‘Hello, Dora. Hello, girl. Look, she remembers me. Why is she chained up? She never used to be.’

‘It’s just something that’s happened. Dad said to chain her up. The neighbours don’t like her. They say she’s dangerous, she bails up their kids.’

‘She wouldn’t do anybody any harm. Poor old thing.’

At the back door Lucy hesitated. She stood listening to the rustle of the bushland around the house, too frightened to walk inside.

‘It’s okay,’ Stephen said. ‘Mum’s asleep and Dad’s out to it just about every night these days. It’s only Mel. Come on.’

The kitchen, a large room, smelled of toast, coffee and milk, a comforting and safe smell. In the bright fluorescent light, Mel was putting breakfast dishes on the table. She looked at her older sister without smiling, her face seemed deliberately emptied of emotion.

Short like her brother, she stood bare-legged in a tight denim skirt and sweatshirt, her hair tightly curled and dyed a pale red.

‘Hi, Mel,’ Lucy said, with half a smile.

Mel looked back at her, still unsmiling, refusing a greeting. Her eyes were sleepy.

‘I made your bed up. Do you want to go and have your shower now? You need one, you look awful. There’s some napkins in the bathroom if you want them. When you’ve finished, can you put your dirty clothes in the laundry for me right away because I’ve got to get them washed and dry as soon as I can. I’ve got to wash Dad’s sheets every day so I haven’t got time to do your washing as well.’

With this, she went back to the bench where she was preparing breakfast. Lucy said nothing. She turned away but then stopped at the doorway that led into the rest of the house.

‘It’s okay, Luce.’ Stephen said. ‘Want me to walk you in?’

Lucy looked back and saw that Mel was watching this concern with contempt.

‘No,’ she said to him, holding tightly onto her pack. ‘I’m all right.’ In the hallway, and on the stairs up to her room which were lit by a night-light, everything was as it had always been. The house was rambling, a collection of airless rooms with small windows, all stacked with an accumulation of things. Lucy’s mother, Vera, never threw anything out. In her thinking, everything, if kept long enough, might one day have a use, and if broken might one day be repaired. Ancient leftovers were buried in the permafrost of the freezer; old clothes and toys were crammed under the beds; newspapers, cardboard boxes, aluminium cans were stacked in the hallways. Lucy walked along the upstairs hallway that smelled of naphthalene and used goods, a bite of mould and cobwebs, odours which were only dispelled in the heat of summer when the house baked in the sun.

‘It hasn’t changed. Nothing’s changed,’ she said to herself, almost in bewilderment.

Opening the door to her bedroom and turning on the light, she was surprised by its unfamiliarity, how faded it was at first glance. She shut the door softly behind her and put her backpack next to the bed, then looked around her uneasily. The walls were covered with posters torn from magazines: pop stars she had forgotten about, golden-eyed tigers swimming in tropical rivers. The ceiling was painted blue, the skirting boards and cornice, silver. The arc of gold stars she had glued onto a window was still there. It was a world with nothing on its surface to indicate the events which had once occurred regularly in here.

Her father used to tell her in the afternoon what he intended to do that evening. When he walked into her room, he simply said, ‘Strip.’ It was the only thing he said to her, from the first moment to the last, from the first time to the last. There was another memory: about ten days after she had become too sick to eat in the mornings, her mother saying to her, ‘Hurry up, we’re going into the city now. He’ll give us a ride to Hornsby and we’ll get the train from there.’

Lucy spoke aloud, to herself, ‘You don’t want to worry. It’s what Turtle said — he ought to be frightened of you now. So should she.’

She was on the verge of something that was not quite panic. She sat on the bed, holding herself and rocking backwards and forwards. She took her gun out of her pack and held onto it tightly, breathing deeply, drawing on its security.

‘I’ll keep you with me,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll be okay.’

In the bathroom, Lucy locked the door behind her and placed the gun on the basin within reach. In the shower, she felt the warm water ease her spine and watched as her own blood was washed into its spiral at her feet. She shook her head at the peculiarity of having a body that felt and bled. She dried her clean skin, drawing each of her limbs into existence as she polished herself with the towel, reconnecting her nerve endings. She saw herself in a full-length mirror, in a small pool of white light. Her body had gained strength since she had broken with her addiction. Despite her lean diet, it was wiry rather than thin and she had acquired some cushioning softness and muscle. She saw a body that — without her noticing — had gained some womanliness. ‘That’s me,’ she said with a compelling sense of dislocation. After she had dressed, she looked at herself again. She saw her reflection silvered in light, a figure made of metal, clean as purified air.

‘I couldn’t have stayed here,’ she said to her reflection, ‘I couldn’t have. What else was I going to do but go?’

She smoothed her wet hair back from her forehead. Her face in the mirror and the light were extinguished at the same moment.

Reluctantly, she put the gun back in her pack before she went downstairs. It had grown light when she came back to the kitchen. There, she heard Stephen and Melanie arguing. Mel’s voice was quick, breathless and angry. Lucy stopped to listen until she did not want to hear any more.

‘I don’t see why I have to be nice to her,’ Melanie was saying. ‘She was a bitch. She went off and left me, she didn’t care, she didn’t wait around. Now she’s out there all the time, doing whatever she wants to do, and I stay here and I have to wash for him and I have to wash him as well and I cook for him and I look after him while all Mum does is sit around and watch TV all day. And then she just comes back here when she wants to and you say to me I have to be — ’