Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Grace returned Jeffo a glacial smile but could not be bothered answering. He was winding up for another comment when Harrigan snapped in his ear.

‘Spare us the sparkling wit, mate. No one’s in the mood, including me.’

Drink in hand, he moved away from the bar while Jeffo made a face at his back.

‘That’s a bitch, you not drinking.’ Louise appeared and ordered gin.

She was a chunky woman with greying hair flaring back from her forehead and broken veins across her cheeks. ‘I was hoping we might have a few sessions together. Us girls should stick together.’

Louise, fifty-something, was a software engineer of repute. She drained her glass of gin with slightly shaking hands. Her fingers were heavy with ornate rings, red and white stones serving as glittering knuckle-dusters alongside her wedding band. Grace heard the empty gin glass chink down on the counter as she asked immediately for a second. Grace did not drink, not any more. Alcohol had once flooded her veins with its metallic, poisonous edge, irritating a portion of her mind to unpredictable furies and mawkish self-pity. She turned away, lime and soda in hand, to find Ian lying in wait for her.

‘I hear you used to be a rock star,’ he said. ‘Is that really what you used to do?’

‘Me?’ she laughed. ‘No, I wish I had been, I’d never have to work again. All I did was sing with a band for a little while. All we ever did was work really hard for almost nothing and deal with lowlifes who just wanted to rip us off all the time.’

‘And you liked it so much, you joined the force so you could keep doing it,’ he said.

‘That’s right, I’m right back where I started from. That’s life. I’m just going to go and find the cigarette machine,’ she replied.

She found the machine in the hallway past the gaming room and hummed to herself as she punched in her coins. She reflected with black humour on various episodes of disaster in her not so overwhelmingly successful career in rock and roll, from broken-down vans to audiences so frightening she had been reduced to climbing out the back window of the women’s toilet to escape them. What was so fearsome about this job?

Turning to go back, she saw Harrigan standing just inside the door to the gaming room, catching up on the last race for the day, watching as on the big screen the barriers were opened and the horses were away. He was alone, absorbed by the sight, his whole attention focused on the race, his body tense with excitement. ‘Yes!’ he was saying as the horses came in, hitting one fist into his palm. Then he turned and saw her there watching him.

‘Do you bet?’ she asked, caught out.

‘I don’t bet that much as it happens, Grace. I just like to pick them.

What about you?’

He picked up his drink from a nearby table and walked out to join her.

‘I don’t even know how to read the form guide,’ she replied.

‘No? In this business, that could be a serious deficiency. A lot of things go on down at the track.’

‘But do you need to know how to read the form guide to work them out?’

‘Not always. It depends on what your interest is. How the horses are running. How they ought to run. Who’s betting.’ He was smiling as he spoke to her, relaxed in a way that he usually was not. ‘Haven’t you ever been to the races? Racing’s life.’

‘Is it? Why?’

‘It’s a magic moment watching them come down the straight just before the finish. Just the sound they make when their hooves hit the ground. It is, it’s magic. There’s nothing like it. Horses are beautiful to watch when they’re racing well.’

Harrigan had been going to the track since he was a boy, it had been his passion ever since. On race day, his mother used to get out her good dress with the shoes and the hat and the make-up. And those heavy clip-on earrings that made her ears throb by the end of the day, which she would slip off on the bus home and drop into her handbag with a sigh of relief. She would dress him up as well and they would go out together for the day. It was her indulgence; he thought she was happiest there. Her favourite bookies always greeted her by name. Hello, Helen, how are you betting today? How’s your boy? To a couple of the old-timers out at Royal Randwick, he was still Helen Harrigan’s boy, even if these days he frequented the Members’ Bar as well as the track side.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever put a bet on in my life. Not even on Melbourne Cup Day,’ Grace was saying, an odd tone in her voice. ‘My father used to, though. He used to take my mother to the races.’

She was somewhere else, remembering a childhood in New Guinea, a place dreamlike and beautiful in her memory. A road in the highlands one hot day, sitting beside her father as the Land Rover made its slow way along the dirt road, through its stream of villagers going about their business. An ancient, worked landscape stretching up into the hills, thin, sharp, irregular picket fences surrounding thatched houses. An intricate pattern of vivid greens; she had not realised how vivid until she again saw the parched and bled out grasslands when she was on her way back to Brisbane for the start of the school year. Another world. Yes, it was magic.

‘You should come along sometime during the Spring Carnival. You might enjoy it,’ Harrigan was saying to her.

‘I should. I might need the relaxation if I get to deal with any more people like Ria Allard.’

‘Yeah, you might,’ he said, looking at her. ‘Glad you found me, Grace. Come and talk to me.’

‘What about?’ she asked.

‘Nothing dramatic,’ he replied as they walked back into the bar.

‘Just the way you did that interview today.’

‘Yeah, I wanted to ask — have we got hold of the Preacher Graeme Fredericksen yet?’

She spoke lightly, full of foreboding for what he might want to say to her.

‘No, we haven’t. He’s too elusive for my taste. He should have been knocking on our door first thing, not the other way around. I’ll be glad when we run him to earth. That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. Did you know that Greg Smith’s not available until the Department does its own psychiatric assessment?’

He was sipping whisky. She smelled the odour of the spirit as something almost sweetish, all pervasive, bringing back to her the memory of a stale alcoholic sweat on her numbed skin, a counterpart to liquid the colour of caramelised onions in the glass. She lit a cigarette to cover the smell, he stepped back a little from her smoke.

‘Is that a problem?’ she said. ‘Like you said, we can’t talk to him if he’s dead.’

‘No,’ he said, not quite grinning at her reply. ‘No, it’s not a problem. It just adds to the time, that’s all. What I want to know is, what did you think you were doing in there today? Can you keep that up, putting yourself out the way you did for that boy?’

‘I wasn’t putting myself out,’ she said. ‘As far as I was concerned, it was just him and me talking to each other.’

‘Yeah, that got to be pretty obvious. But it’s not just him and you.

There’s a whole apparatus out there that you can’t ignore and the only place it’s going to take him in the end is Silverwater. And one day, it could be your business to put him there. He knows that, he told you so. So do you want the information he’s got? Or do you want to save his life? What makes you think the two go together in the first place?’

‘Then what do I do?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t this Catch-22? You say to me, coax it out of him. So I do. I go and talk to him from where he’s coming from, because that’s the only way I can do that. But now you say I’m putting myself out too much. That doesn’t leave me any room.’

‘You weren’t talking to him from where he was coming from. You were talking to him from some place in your own mind. And you wanted him in there with you, that’s what you were doing.’