Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

At home, she stripped, washed, changed, shook out her hair, brushing it until it shone, but even so, in her tiny lounge room the walls closed in. She switched off the main lights and sat on her couch, looking out at the streets below, to the small scrape of beach in the near distance. On her lap, she held a red silk box fastened with an ivory catch. After a while, she opened the box and set out its contents on the coffee table. Saucers, miniature cups with elegant handles, an ornamental teapot, a sugar bowl, all removed from their pockets of faintly yellowing white silk. A tea set, her grandfather’s gift to her when she was nine, something pretty and delicate, bought in Hong Kong when he was twenty. The very first time she had taken these pieces out to look at them, she had cracked the fragile bowl. Her grandfather had comforted her as she cried. ‘Don’t worry, Gracie,’ he said, laughing at her softly, cuddling her, ‘nothing is for ever.’

Even in the soft light, this faintest of hairline cracks threw a shadow on the fine china, an indelible discoloration of age. If she turned the bowl towards a certain fall of the light, she could not see the crack, only a courtesan’s face and dark hair in a soft surrounding cloud. The bowl sat in Grace’s hands as she might have held a tiny living child, a child whose watching eyes looked out at the world from a perspective no one else could reach, but who could not speak. This was her own thought child, the child Grace chose not to have. Its brief existence lived on in her as an only twin might carry somewhere in her body the partially formed foetus of her brother or sister, knowing it is there, curled and sleeping, that it could have grown and separated but has not done so. A ghost fixed as a part its mother’s being, as something not quite living and not quite dead.

I am not sorry, she thought. I cried then and I think about it now but I am not sorry. All I felt when it was over was relief. That’s all I feel now.

Nothing is for ever. She set the pieces of china out in a pattern on the coffee table. Moonlight and streetlight streamed in through the windows. In this light, the fine white china was almost radiant, its delicate shapes formed into a pattern of partial shadows fitted against a pale transparency. Grace’s mind was making images, of a mother and daughter sitting side by side on a train or a bus, both of them silent, both of them looking straight ahead at nothing perhaps, the young girl uncertain of their destination and left wondering if she was going to live long enough to reach it. What would they say to each other, sitting side by side like that? Nothing. Nothing at all.

She could not stay in this room, it was too small. Grace phoned her old lover and asked him for sanctuary.

‘Come on around, sweetheart. You’re always welcome. I’ll put some music on. I’ll even indulge you in some Elvis Costello. Christ!’ he said.

Grace laughed.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Will I pick up some takeaway for us?’

‘Yeah, do that. You can help me eat it.’

‘Okay. We can share it with some apple juice.’

She heard him laugh on the other end of the line.

‘Not what we used to do,’ he said.

‘No. See you soon anyway.’

Grace binned her cigarettes and then dropped her beeper into her bag but made sure that her mobile phone was turned off for the duration. She stopped at a takeaway place, a glass window on the street that sold experimental mixtures of cuisine, and bought solace for herself and her old lover with the plastic containers. In her first months of abstinence from alcohol, the world had settled into a dry balance. Her mind had taken on something resembling clarity and she had rediscovered appetite and taste, qualities she had thought were lost for ever. Her brother, Nicholas, was a cook, an unexpected occupation for an army officer’s son. He had taught her how to eat in those first days, practising his cooking on her while they had shared a house together, where she had recovered and he had learned his art.

Now, if we were ever to have sex, Paul, I’d cook for us first, or I’d want us to eat somewhere nice, because food’s important. She and Harrigan would never do so, so the possibilities did not matter.

She drove up the coastline to the northern beaches, to Whale Beach.

The stars were distant out over the sea, made pale and small by the reflection of the city’s lights. She sang ‘Time after Time’ softly to herself as she drove.

By the time she arrived and could hear the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, she felt she could be herself. The outside light was on and the door was open and waiting for her. She didn’t come here often enough any more, not the way she’d used to. Another life was taking her over, pushing the old one to the side.

‘Hi, Frankie. How are you?’ she called out, walking in the door.

‘Hi there, Grace. Pretty good tonight.’

He was waiting for her in a wheelchair in the centre of a wide white room with polished floorboards and windows that looked out over the sea. A big man, even in his chair, with thick black curly hair and a bright red shirt covering his broad chest. He glided towards her. She put her collection of plastic tubs down on a table.

‘You look good,’ she said, leaning down to kiss his cheek, hugging him from where she stood.

‘How are you, more to the point?’ he said, looking at her shrewdly.

‘I could be better. I need a break from work, it’s getting to me. I need to get back into the real world for a little while.’

‘What do you do that fucking awful job for? Why don’t you do something civilised with your life? Somewhere where you’d meet people with minds? You know. Cleaning railway station toilets or something like that.’

‘You know me, Frankie. I have to know. I have to keep pushing to see what’s next. Why else?’

He laughed. He had turned on the music; she went to the kitchen to put the food in the microwave, to get forks and spoons, a drinking cup that did not spill its contents when the drinker’s hands shook.

‘Where’s Phyllis tonight? Did you give her the night off?’ she asked when she reappeared with a tray, wondering where Frankie’s live-in nurse had got to.

‘Yeah, I gave her a break. I thought she might like some time to herself.’

‘Yeah. She probably would. We can have some to ourselves now as well.’

Tonight, Grace and her old life and her old lover would be just comfort enough for each other. Nothing much else was necessary.

Grace left Whale Beach as the waves were crashing in on the headlands and the wash was spreading out across the sand. The swell rolled in, its faint streaks of white water glimmering in the pre-dawn darkness. She was heading home, in her mind choosing the day’s outfit. She phoned in to check if there were any messages on her answering machine and because of what she heard recorded there did not go home but drove straight to work instead. In the office sleepy people, the first arrivals, were setting polystyrene cups of steaming coffee on their desks. She knocked on Harrigan’s door where he was sitting working out the day’s business with Trevor and Ian. He looked up, unable to prevent himself from taking in the full sight of her without make-up and in casual dress finished off with a worn leather jacket. She was wearing the midriff and navel look, as he called it. He tried not to look at the bare skin between her too short T-shirt and the line of her jeans.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ she said to him.

‘You’re dressed for work, are you? What is it?’

He was frowning. He himself was casually dressed, which meant that he was without his garrotte for the day, a tie.

‘I haven’t been home yet to get dressed,’ she replied. ‘This was on my answering machine when I rang in this morning to check.’