Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Her garden had gone to seed in the years since she had died of diabetes, when Stephen had been fourteen, Lucy thirteen and Mel just ten. Only the camellias and the rhododendrons in her garden continued to flower, all the rest had been reduced to a tangle of dead and living plants, small crowns of green on otherwise dead branches.

Lucy pushed down through this tangle, following the dog, finding the old paths and steps, reaching the small sleep-out near the escarpment that looked out over the park. Her grandmother had lived in this sleep-out during the last four years of her life, after their grandfather had died, unconcerned by the winter weather and happy, she had said to them, with the sight of her garden and the bush outside her windows. From here, it was possible to see where small stands of flowering eucalyptus and mustard yellow acacias had begun to push their way back over the boundary of the park, even in the short time since Lucy had left.

The sleep-out had been abandoned since Granny Hurst had died, its sliding aluminium doors left jammed open to the weather. Lucy went to look inside a building that now smelled of fresh earth. Dora nosed past her, leaving a trail of paw prints on the dusty floor. Camellia bushes that had grown up close to the external walls pressed their dark leaves against the windows, leaving the pattern of their shape on glass filmed with rain-washed dirt and spiders’ webs. Camellia flowers had drifted through the open doorway, leaving behind pale scatterings of detached pink and red petals. Lucy walked into a pool of silence, following the footfall of the old dog. In the bathroom, soft dirty cobwebs covered the face of the cabinet mirror, while leaves and imperfect flowers had filled the white plastic bathtub to a shallow depth. The bathroom was dry.

The taps shuddered when Lucy turned them on but no water flowed out. It was a place cracking open under the slow crush of the plants that surrounded it, they strangled it with root and branch as it subsided into the ground. Lucy drank in the silence.

‘Hi, Gran,’ she said to no one.

She walked back outside into the afternoon light and listened to the clear sounds of the birds calling to each other in the surrounding bushland. Small waterfalls from the previous day’s rain flowed down over the honeycomb-coloured rock into a gully at the foot of the escarpment. The dog preceded her through the ferns down the short slope and then along a track that bordered a creek. After a short walk, Lucy crossed the stream to a rock overhang opposite, where the shadows and faint outlines of hand prints had been painted onto the sandstone. Their grandmother had told them they had been put there a long time ago by the blacks.

‘There were blacks around here when your great-granddaddy came here,’ she had said to them once, ‘he gave them work clearing the land.

They lived along the river in shacks, so it wasn’t that far for them to come up here. We used to play down there together when we were kids.’

Gran had painted her own hand on the rock when she was a child, with a date and her initials. Once, she had taken the three of them to see it and they had painted their own hands among the others on the rock face. Lucy found the child’s drawing of her hand and covered it over with her adult palm. The dog came and sat near her. Leaning against the rock, Lucy emptied her mind of any thoughts, listening to the rhythm of her breathing and nothing else.

Four months after her grandmother’s funeral, and not long before Lucy’s fourteenth birthday, her father had walked into her bedroom one evening for the first time. When he left, Lucy’s bedsheets were dirtied with blood. The next day at breakfast, Lucy had looked up at her mother, uncertain whether she should tell her that they needed to be washed. Her mother refused to meet her eye and Lucy stayed silent.

She went to school as usual and came home to find that there were clean sheets on her bed. Nothing was said. Always, the sheets were changed with nothing being said. Except for those times when Lucy’s mother had taken her to visit the clinic on the other side of the city, everything had gone on as usual. Until the day Lucy had picked up her pack and walked out of the door. And today, when she had come back.

Just then, Lucy felt that there was no other world in existence anywhere, that this stretch of land was the only place that was real.

This place here on the edge of the park, where her family were caught in a house with a tangled garden, where everything was detached and out of whack. As she leaned against the rock, she felt the gun pressing into her waist. It was a reality of a kind, bringing her back to the present. She sat by the side of the creek, gathering strength, fighting fear. The dog stayed with her, until something in the nearby scrub attracted her attention and she got to her feet and disappeared into the bush, leaving Lucy by herself. Lucy took her gun out of her waistband and aimed it at the shrubs on the opposite bank, firing pretend shots.

It was a long time, and had grown dark and cold, before she felt brave enough to go back into the house.

The message that hit Harrigan’s desk later that afternoon summed up the day for him. Greg Smith would not be available for further questioning until the Department of Juvenile Justice had completed its own urgent psychiatric assessment of the boy. It was the price they had to pay for requesting earlier that day that he be put on a suicide watch.

It was not failure, only frustration; something that stretched all their energies a little further. Controlling either time or events in Harrigan’s business was a war of attrition: you had to know when to wait and when to let things happen. If he let the anger he felt drive his work, then he could put everything at risk. In the interval, he needed to break the tension.

He walked out of his office and announced to his people that it was time for a refresher. A brief hour at the Maryborough, money on the bar from the social club matched by an equivalent amount from Grace, to welcome her to the team before they all got back to it again. It might be the last time they had the chance for some days or even weeks.

‘Just don’t let Marvin get wind of this,’ he said to everyone as he made his announcement. ‘If he does, he’ll be burning my ears about it from now until doomsday.’

There was a ripple of laughter as people collected their coats. It was all very amiable but Harrigan also had some unfinished business of his own.

At the Maryborough, the publican, on notice from Harrigan, would reserve the back bar for him and his team. They arrived in a group to take possession of it.

‘What’ll you have?’ Harrigan asked Grace, as she put her money down according to tradition.

‘Lime and soda,’ she replied with a smile, abstinence that he noted but decided not to comment on.

‘Get the lady what she wants,’ he said to the barman. ‘I’ll have a whisky and water.’

In the initial melee around the bar, Ian had already ordered a schooner of Old. As she waited for her drink, Grace watched the white froth ooze down the glass while the smell filled the air around her like a wash. She felt an undercurrent of nausea, a prickle of sweat at the back of her neck.

‘Don’t you drink?’ Ian asked her.

‘No, mate,’ Trevor intervened unsubtly, shoving up against the bar.

‘No vices for my mate here. Just the occasional fag, hey, Gracie.’

‘Plenty of them around here,’ Jeffo observed sotto voce, a bait which Trevor ignored. ‘Hey, Gracie,’ he said then, flashing her a toothy grin,

‘I hear you had fun with that kid today. But you don’t need all that half-arsed psychology. With a kid like that, all you need is a couple of phone books and half an hour and he’ll tell you everything you want to know.’