Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘You shouldn’t have let her bait you,’ he was saying with that detached look of his. ‘You stay out of any games they want to play.

You don’t give them anything.’

Grace felt a little more heat in her cheeks underneath her make-up.

‘Maybe not,’ she replied, ‘but it is his life. He should still be on suicide watch, whatever she says.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes, I do. I meant that.’

‘All right, if that’s what you think, we’ll look into it. I don’t want a dead witness. I’ll get Trev to call them, they should pay attention to him.’

It was not a put-down. She had no clout, she knew it.

‘Do I get to talk to him again?’ she asked, as they walked down the corridor.

‘Yes, you do. You got to him and we need to make use of that. That was a good start, we’ll see how we go from here. It’ll be easier the next time around. For one thing, you probably won’t have her breathing down your neck. I think you’ll get it out of him.’

He seemed pleased at the thought and pleased with her. I got to him, Grace thought but did not say. Is that really all I was doing in there? Nothing else? Didn’t that boy matter more than that? She would have liked to ask Harrigan the question but she did not want to push her luck. Right now, she only wanted to escape for a desperately needed cigarette.

Afternoon light was coming in through the chinks in the curtains covering the small square window when Lucy woke. She was surprised to find herself once again in her own bed. She lay watching the patterns of light on the wall, remembering, once again remembering.

This time, the shootings of the previous day and the past events that had occurred in this room coalesced in her mind, without forming a single, clear picture. For a few moments, she felt detached from them both. The memory of her father was part of her, it had been for some time. The memory of the shooting was becoming part of her as well, or she was becoming part of it. With her head buried in the pillow, she thought: this is who I am. I own this, this is my action, this is me.

Lying there, she began to feel afraid in a quiet sort of way. There was a sense of expectation in the quietness, the beginning rustle of voices in her mind like sounds heard behind a heavy curtain. She lay without moving, trying to find protection in stillness. As she did, she tightened her grip on something hard and metallic under her pillow.

This metallic object came into being as a handgun and she sat up slowly, still holding onto it. She let it fall onto the bed and stretched her hand which was cramped and stiff. She sat with her head in her hands, emptying her mind until her thoughts were quiet.

She felt a compulsion to clean herself and went to the bathroom and washed. She dressed herself in different clothes, jeans and a T-shirt under a loose and heavy sweatshirt that came down past her hips. She pushed her gun awkwardly into the waistband of her jeans. In the mirror, she looked like a small, lumpy child.

When she came down the stairs she heard the television in the lounge room, the sound turned up high, and guessed this was where she would find her parents. She did not go in there, she did not have the stomach. She walked through to the kitchen, where she made herself instant coffee and ate leftovers from the refrigerator. Melanie appeared just as she finished eating. They looked at each other and did not speak. Melanie went to the bench where she began sorting medications before crushing tablets with the back of a spoon.

‘Are they for Dad?’ Lucy asked, swallowing both food and trepidation.

‘Who else do you think they’re for?’ Melanie replied. ‘Don’t you want to go and talk to him? He’s in the lounge room with Mum, they know you’re here. Stevie told them.’

‘No, not yet,’ Lucy said, cold at the thought.

Melanie shrugged.

‘Where’s Stevie?’

‘He’s at work. He spent the whole night out looking for you but he still had to go to work today. I don’t suppose you care about that.’

‘It’s not my fault, Mel,’ Lucy said.

‘I didn’t say anything was your fault,’ Mel replied. ‘Anyway, I can’t talk to you now, I’ve got things I’ve got to do. I had to leave school, you know, so I could look after Dad. So I’ve got to do that.’

‘They didn’t do that,’ Lucy said, shocked.

‘Yes, they did. So I’ve got work to do.’

‘Why didn’t you just say no? Why didn’t Stevie say no?’ Lucy asked, immediately furious.

‘Because no one else was going to do it. Mum wasn’t, that’s for sure. She was just going to let him die.’

‘We could pay someone, couldn’t we?’

‘You think Dad is going to spend his money like that? Don’t be stupid! He won’t do that even now he’s dying. He and Mum are never going to do that, not while they can get me to do it for nothing. Why should you care? You left when you didn’t even have to.’

Melanie walked out of the kitchen, carrying a tray of medications, without waiting for a reply.

‘I did have to,’ Lucy said softly.

Lucy walked out to the back garden, where the air was still fresh from yesterday’s rain, needing the relief of some open space. She stopped to let the dog off the chain, rubbing her head and noticing how the fur on her neck had been worn thin by her collar. Dora hesitated at the entrance to her kennel and then pushed forward, uncertain that she was free. She came and sat beside Lucy who stood looking down the slope of her father’s block of land towards the boundary of the national park.

‘Let’s go, girl,’ she said to the dog. ‘Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go check things out.’

There had once been a garden on this slope, brought into life by Lucy’s grandmother. Granny Hurst had been a big woman, with her fingernails split and ingrained with earth. Lucy remembered that she had always been there, ever since Lucy was small, although she rarely spoke and never seemed to talk to anyone directly. She never looked at Lucy when she talked to her but kept her gaze focused on a point in the distance, somewhere past her granddaughter’s head. Over the years, Granny Hurst had shaped the ground into a series of shallow terraces linked by wooden steps and brick paths. She had grown gardenias, azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons, their flowers ivory white, dark crimson, cerise and shell pink; cultivated beds of blue and white English violets, snow-in-summer and pale yellow bearded iris.

Lucy used to follow her through the garden, spending hours with her, watching and helping her. They had, in this silent way, been very close to each other. If for some reason Lucy was not there on some days, her grandmother would come looking for her, always speaking to that same distant point behind her and saying, ‘Where were you today? I was waiting for you and you didn’t come.’ Lucy collected the flowers as her grandmother cut them and then carried them up to the house.

She put them into jars of water, stroking the petals gently, fascinated by their colours and the softness of their textures.

At other times, her grandmother used to sit on the step of the uppermost terrace, wearing her ugly brown and orange dress, her legs set comfortably apart, smoking menthol cigarettes and talking to the three of them, Stephen, Lucy and Melanie. She told them about her own grandfather who had cleared this block of land of its original forest. ‘There were big trees here,’ she said, ‘the biggest he ever saw before he cut them down.’ He had worked first as a blacksmith, and then kept dairy cows, and had then grown cabbages, but had never made any money, not even from selling the original timber from his land. Her own father had been the one who made the money, starting out by selling second-hand clothes at the Haymarket, holding on to every penny he got his hands on. ‘Just like my son,’ she said, meaning Lucy’s father, ‘he won’t spend a cent either. But he doesn’t sell clothes, he’s a meat dealer. That’s what he likes.’ Her slightly acid voice was still clear in Lucy’s mind, she saw her sitting on the step dropping her cigarette butts into a tin rather than let them litter her garden.