Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘I hurt you, did I? I’m sorry, I thought I was being careful. That hurts, does it? Okay, I won’t do that.’

Harrigan rinsed the soap away and saw no sign of injury or inflammation. Some minor infection? The ache you get when there isn’t any means of relief? Or is it that you don’t want me washing you any more, you’re too old? I have to, Toby, it’s the only way we can do this.

He stopped and looked at his son. His hand was resting on the edge of the bath and Toby took hold of it. He held on to Harrigan with a tight grip. What is it? Harrigan thought. Tell me what’s locked in your head. Used to this silence between them, Harrigan was unaware that he had said nothing. They held onto each other for some moments and then his son let go. The connection broken, Harrigan went to get the bath towels, to get Toby out of the bath (an action which would require Tim Masson’s help, Harrigan had to admit this) and then dried and dressed.

‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘I could use some breakfast myself.’

As he looked back, he saw Toby looking at him, an odd, indefinable expression in his eyes. He did not know whether it was his son’s helplessness as he lay there in the water or some other quality that he could not define, but the expression left him troubled. He dried Toby, dressed him, dried and brushed his hair, and in the dining room fed him and wiped his mouth clean. Toby sucked orange juice through a straw out of the drinking receptacle Harrigan held for him. I’m here, Toby. I’m always here.

‘What’s on your mind, Toby?’ he said. ‘Something’s bothering you.

I’ve got to go to work now but I’ll drop by again as soon as I can. I’ll see if I can’t get here tonight. You can tell me then if you want.’

Toby flickered ‘okay’ with his good hand, a gesture that was neither inviting nor repelling. They said goodbye in their mutual silence, with Toby squeezing his hand.

He went to see the house manager in her office on his way out.

Susie, plump and fair-haired, sparkled in the sunlight through the windows, her make-up rainbow-like.

‘Do you need to worry?’ she said. ‘His health is good, he’s eating well. His school marks are very good, he’s up there with the best of them, Paul. He has been spending a bit of time on the Net lately, but I don’t see that’s a bad thing. It all takes him out of himself. He’s doing really well. I feel we should be pleased.’

‘No, Susie.’ Harrigan shook his head. ‘There’s something troubling him. I want to know what it is. Now either you or Tim should be able to tell me that.’ That’s what I pay you for. He let the words hang in the air unspoken.

Susie’s opalescent blue fingernails glinted in the light. In reply, she spoke with the care of someone who made a living walking tightropes.

‘Well, I don’t think you need me to tell you any of this. He’s seventeen at his next birthday. In some ways he’s older than most boys his age, but he’s a lot younger in others. If he doesn’t want you washing him any more, I’d say that’s probably all there is to that. He does need to feel his body’s his own. But he needs his head space more. That’s where he lives.

You know better than anyone, Paul, he’s got people around him all the time, he has to have. Usually he’s never alone except in his head. We don’t have the right to intrude in there without him letting us. If there’s something on his mind, he’ll tell you when he’s ready to.’

He did not reply, her words had left him almost breathless. They looked at each other across her desk.

‘He still needs me, Susie. He’s always going to need me.’

‘Yes, he will. But that isn’t what I said.’

He stood up.

‘We’ll have to talk about this some other time. I can’t hang around here now, I should have been at work half an hour ago. I didn’t really have the time to come here in the first place. I’m only here for him.’

She smiled at him professionally in reply. He walked out without thanking her or saying goodbye. Did she think she knew his son better than he did? He could not talk to her, he could not look at her.

Harrigan went out into the morning sunlight and stopped by his car. Toby was with his therapist in the activity room, sitting in the sun and watching him through the wide windows. He waved and saw the flicker of Toby’s fingers in reply. As things were now, Toby was with him for life. Oh, there was money enough. Harrigan had sued the hospital where Toby had been born for everything he could think of, taking their drunk and incapable doctor through every level of appeal.

The exercise had got him the law degree he was supposed to have had a decade earlier, and while it had taken years, in the end they had paid, had been forced to pay, much more than he had ever expected or hoped for. Money was no longer the point. He does need me, Susie.

Who else is going to love you, Toby, the way I do?

There was never an escape. Trevor Gabriel tracked him down on his mobile phone as he loitered in the traffic on his way back into the city, worrying at his concerns for Toby in the no-man’s land between work and not-work, almost as if he was unemployed.

‘Morning, Boss,’ Trevor said cheerily. ‘Good news, we’ve found the car. A couple of juveniles were caught trying to torch it in the wee small hours down near Macdonaldtown Station. We’ve got one of them in custody now.’

‘Just the one? What happened to the other?’

‘Still in full cry. He went up a wall and over the train lines and away.’

‘Yeah?’ Harrigan tried to picture it. ‘Lucky he didn’t get smacked by the state rolling stock. Who have we got?’

‘Ours is a Greg Smith. He’s fifteen and he’s got a file the size of a phone book down at Family Services. And another one at Juvenile Justice to go with it.’

Harrigan manoeuvred through the traffic as he traversed the steel spider’s web of what he still called the new Glebe Island Bridge. On his left, the Balmain peninsula looked like an island in a glittering mirror of water, edged in a scattered green amongst the container wharves.

The Romanesque colonnaded church tower of St Augustine’s, the tallest of the towers and steeples, was outlined against the clear air.

‘Have we checked any known associates for this other boy?’

‘The patrol went around knocking on a few doors early this morning but they didn’t find anybody. I’ve got a couple of the guys out looking at the moment.’

‘Is anyone with the car? Do we know anything about it?’

‘Ian should over be there by now. The owner is a Christine Van Aalst. She reported it missing from outside of her house in Enmore at 7.08 a.m. yesterday. She checks out. I’d say she was just unlucky.’

‘I’ll go over there now and take a look. In the meantime, don’t let anyone pester this boy. Keep him on ice till I get there.’

‘No rush,’ Trevor replied. ‘The boy’s in the care of some character called the Preacher Graeme Fredericksen, whoever he is. We can’t raise him from anywhere, he’s not at home and he’s not answering any of his phones. And we’re still waiting for the case worker from Family Services to get here. I don’t know what she’s doing with herself but she’s bloody slow too.’

While Trevor spoke, Harrigan was watching the glass walls of the city’s office towers ranged in the near distance with the pale sky behind them. The sunlight glanced off the sides of the buildings with the sharpness of new steel.

‘Nobody wants this boy,’ he said. ‘Check up on that preacher or whatever he is, would you? He should be there if no one else is. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

He began to drive with purpose, making a detour through the city’s arterial roads to the other side of Newtown. At the scene, a small group of bystanders had gathered to watch on a nearby street corner. They looked at him curiously as he let himself in under the blue ribbons. The houses roundabout were the same as the one he’d grown up in near White Bay: narrow single-storey cottages with a lone front window opening onto a tiny porch. These ones had been painted in bright colours and had second storeys extended into the roof line, with bars placed over the windows for security. Trees had been planted along the street to shade them, bottle brush and jasmine lined the laneways close by. In summer, these plants would provide the illusion of coolness.