Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Mel stopped short as Lucy appeared in the doorway, and turned away. Stevie was sitting at the table, smoking. He greeted Lucy with the faintest shrug. She stood there, awkward, wishing that she was carrying the gun and could feel its metal pressing against her waist. For a brief moment anger seethed in her head.

You shouldn’t talk about me like that, Mel, it’s not fair. I couldn’t do anything back then. If anyone tried to hurt you now, I’d kill them.

I would. Then you wouldn’t be able to say that about me.

‘Sit down and eat your breakfast,’ Melanie said to her without turning around.

The silence weighed on them all as Lucy and Stephen ate slowly.

Two thirds of the way through the meal, Lucy stopped.

‘I can’t eat any more,’ she said. ‘My throat feels like it’s full of broken bones. I’ve got to go and sleep.’

‘Are you all right?’ Stephen asked.

‘Yeah. I’m just really tired.’

She got to her feet. At the door, she turned to look at them, Melanie with her angry face, and Stephen’s, with his guard let down, showing intense exhaustion.

I can’t tell either of you what I’ve done, I’ll never be able to tell you.

‘I’ll see you later,’ she said.

In her room, her sense of fear returned powerfully. She slipped her gun under the pillow and then pushed a chair against the door. Forcing herself to make the effort, she sat on the bed and made her call to Ria.

The woman answered almost immediately, over a line that shifted and roared with static.

‘Yes,’ she said, in a crackling voice.

‘It’s Luce, Ria.’

There was a pause.

‘What do you want?’

The woman spoke sharply through the interference.

‘I’ve got a message for Greg. The police have got him, haven’t they?’

Lucy heard the woman laugh angrily.

‘Your information’s good. Yeah, they have, they just rang me. I wish I could keep track of him the way you do … ’

The line broke up. In the crackling, Lucy heard the words ‘can’t believe’, which faded and then came back strongly as ‘accessory’ and

‘murder’. Hearing this, Lucy spoke softly to the airways with a twist of bitterness in her voice.

‘Well, they wouldn’t know anything, would they? They’d just pick on whoever they could find. They never get the real killers.’

‘What’s your message, Lucy?’

The woman’s voice came through suddenly clear, sounding wary and disturbed.

‘You tell him from me that whatever he does, he can’t go back to the refuge. That’s all. He’s not to go anywhere near it again, ever. He’ll know what I mean.’

There was silence.

‘Lucy,’ the woman said, ‘I don’t want you to say anything else to me.

I’m hanging up on you now. Whatever you do, don’t ring me again.’

Lucy said nothing else. She turned off her phone and tossed it onto her old desk. She crawled into bed exhausted, without undressing, and slept with one hand holding onto her gun.

In the winter morning light, Paul Harrigan was countermanding his own instruction that the job took precedence over everything and nothing else mattered. He drove against the traffic to make the short journey from Birchgrove to Cotswold House at Drummoyne, stealing the first hour before work to see his son. He may not get the chance again for some time.

Toby was the product of a briefly sweet marriage, contracted when Harrigan was barely twenty-one, while he had been wandering the countryside, working as a boxer and a fruit picker. His marriage had had the unusual effect of leaving him holding the baby while his wife had disappeared, rejecting a child permanently injured during the hours of his birth, a tiny baby left weighted down for life with the medical terms choreoathetosis and dysathria. Her action was truly unforgivable in Harrigan’s eyes. They’d divorced years ago; Sara lived in Western Australia now with some other man. He did not give her a voluntary thought, she had never tried to see her son. She had never even sent money, although if she had, he would not have taken it. She was another figure he had excised ruthlessly from his past.

This morning, as he crossed the Iron Cove Bridge, Harrigan watched his night thoughts disappear in the dawn over the harbour to become the daylight certainty that there were possibilities for happiness after all. Among other things, life had its pleasures in the early glitter of the sun on the harbour and the sight of the black cormorants fishing from their perches on the old wooden piers. At Cotswold House, built on the shore overlooking Cockatoo and Spectacle Islands with their disused shipyards, he was let in and greeted by the house manager, Susie Pavic.

‘Good morning, Paul,’ she said. ‘We all sat with Toby and watched you on TV last night. What a terrible thing.’

‘Yeah, it is. But we’re working on it. We’ll get there.’

Although he liked Susie, he spoke to stop the conversation, with a quick smile, not wanting work to come between him and his son.

Down a short shining hallway, he saw Toby being wheeled out of his room by his therapist.

‘Paul. I didn’t think you were going to make it today.’

Toby’s therapist, Tim Masson, fussed too much in Harrigan’s opinion.

‘No, I’m right on time as far as I know. I’m here now, that’s what matters. Hi, Toby. How are you?’

Using his one good hand, Toby squeezed his father’s offered hand for a few moments. Masson withdrew to the activity room to make them all coffee, while Harrigan left his coat and tie in his son’s room.

He took hold of the chair and set off down the corridor to the bathroom, a large room with walls and floor covered with shining white tiles and a wide spa bath with chrome fittings. Toby stubbornly pulled one-handed at his nightclothes as his father knelt by the tub, turning on the taps, swirling the water around. Steam began to rise in clouds, the noise of running water concealing their mutual silence.

‘Let me help you,’ Harrigan said, standing up.

He felt the night warmth of his son’s body as he carefully removed the unresisting garments. Toby’s dysfunctional body and his inability to speak connected Harrigan to his son, body to body, human to human.

Sex did not necessarily give him this closeness. Toby was made in his father’s image: his height, the shape of his body, the paleness of his skin, could have been — would have been — Harrigan’s own. Their physical capacities were different, only that. Harrigan carried this sense of loss as something that was as unchanging as Toby’s disability; his feelings made him gentle with his son. He dropped the side rail on the chair, slid one arm around his son’s shoulders, another under his knees, and lifted Toby, an action which these days took all his strength. One day, very soon, he would not be able to lift him at all.

‘I’ve got you,’ he said. ‘Here we go.’

He lowered his son into the wide bath and let the warm water bubbling up from the light spa support and ease his body. Toby slid out to almost his full length in the water, his fixed arm crooked at an angle across his breastbone, one leg hooked a little over the other.

‘Are you comfortable there?’ Harrigan asked, and saw Toby’s silent response, the yes flicker of the fingers of his good hand.

Toby could speak a little, and sometimes did, but it took much effort to get out even a single word. His words lived as thoughts, or became bits of light which he tapped out one-handed onto a computer screen. Their conversations were silent, today expressed through the movement of Harrigan’s hands as he washed his son’s hair and felt the weight of Toby’s head in his hands in reply. He massaged his son’s shoulders, working at the unyielding muscle with slow, patient hands before washing the rest of his body. He began to soap around his son’s genitals, which were partially erect. They had their own young boy’s perfection and were pale as the skin on the rest of his body. As he did so, he felt Toby hitting him on the arm with his good hand.