Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Lucy cut the connection before Turtle could reply and left her final words hanging in cyberspace.

‘I have to get out of here.’ She spoke aloud to the small room as she disconnected and folded up the notebook. She could not breathe, the quietness had begun to jangle. This place was haunted by her own ghosts, she could never come back here again. She pushed her sleeping bag and computer, her mobile phone, all her acquired and stolen things into her backpack. She walked out of the disused office quickly, leaving her stained clothes in a heap on the floor, and let herself out of the garage by a side door without once glancing at the stolen and now abandoned car.

She was ordinary, no one would look at her twice. Just a small young woman, nineteen perhaps, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, wearing a black hooded raincoat and lace-up shoes like a schoolgirl’s, carrying a compact backpack. Stepping out into ruined streets where the houses had been demolished to make way for a new housing development.

Walking through the rain past the cyclone wire fences, turning the corner towards the bus stop on Anzac Parade, passing a white-painted brick building sandwiched between a three-storey block of flats and a takeaway food bar. She paused to look at the white building as she went by, checking the red and white sign: The Women’s Whole Life Health Centres Inc., Randwick Clinic . Then she was just anyone else, a student perhaps, catching the bus to Central Railway Station on a winter’s day.

She sat next to a large woman in an orange coat who declared a boundary dispute by wedging her shopping basket against Lucy’s legs.

The skin of ordinary life settled over her like a muzzling cloth. The bus was full, the air steamy from the passengers’ wet clothing, their tangled hair. The sound of the bus driver’s radio fought against the noise of traffic and the softer voices of the packed-in travellers. Lucy listened to the talkback show host’s relentless patter as the bus edged forward in the slow traffic. Her breathing was suspended as he began to announce in his clipped and angry voice: Well, folks, this has justbeen put in front of me. I want you to know what sort of society we’reliving in today. A sick society, that’s what. A man has just been shotdead outside a women’s health clinic in Chippendale. And his wife,seriously, critically injured. So a man goes to work, with his wife, andsomeone decides to walk up to him out of the blue and shoot himdead. What sort of a sick person does that? Do you think gaol’s toogood for someone who does that? Or maybe just this once we shouldbe trying to make the punishment fit the crime? You ring and tell me.

You know the number to call.

The woman beside Lucy stirred, snorted and muttered angrily to herself.

‘People like that deserve anything they get. Useless, this government is. Why didn’t Howard bring back the death penalty when he got in?

None of them are good for anything. If they asked us what we wanted, we’d have it back today.’

Lucy raised her chin and stared at the back of the head of the passenger in front of her, a mass of damp black curls. What would they know? What would any of them know?

The bus had stopped near the Elizabeth Street entrance to Central Station. The woman was trying to get off and pushed vigorously against Lucy. ‘Aren’t you going to move?’ she said.

Ignoring her, Lucy left the bus. The centres of her hands were wet, her grazed palms stung. A line of watchers sat on the low wall near the corner of Eddy Avenue, out-of-towners, the unemployed, derelicts.

Near them, a busker sat with his back against the sandstone wall darkened by traffic fumes. His fair hair was tied back in a long ponytail and he played sweet tunes on a trumpet for the passers-by and the unending traffic.

Lucy walked past their collective watchful gaze, through the brown sandstone columns of the station entranceway, down into the concourse towards the ticket offices and the public toilets. People flowed either side of her. She felt that she had opened a door onto a room where someone should have been waiting for her but which in reality was so empty she might have been the very first person to step inside it. Her skin was scorched. The children’s voices came rushing back into her head, their soft cries touching her cheek like the brush of tiny insects’ wings before stinging her with their sharp acidic bites. She walked, weighted by this impossible duress, the noise in her head, fear and the constrictions of time binding her to this body, this place.

Her head cleared. The concourse, with its shifting crowds, came back to a washed-out reality. She was at the start of the open walkway that led past the florists, newspaper sellers and fast-food merchants down to Eddy Avenue. Indifferent commuters glanced at her as they made their way through the scrappy weather to the suburban trains.

She remembered why she had chosen to come here. She went down to the roadway and crossed over to Belmore Park.

She saw who she was looking for in the gazebo under the Moreton Bay fig trees. A group of hungry boys who had climbed up onto the railings and were perched there, barely out of the weather, a chorus of ragged crows watching over the people who walked through the park.

One of them, maybe fifteen and wearing a khaki coat and a dark red beanie over his straggling hair, climbed down as she walked towards them and came hurrying to meet her.

‘Luce,’ he said, quietly and urgently, ‘where’ve you been? I was wondering if you were going to show up here. Look, I heard these two people got shot down near Broadway. You didn’t do it, did you?’

‘I did. Maybe a couple of hours ago? I don’t know when. Yes, I did do it.’

Her voice shook as she spoke. She took hold of him instinctively and he caught her by the shoulders. They hung on to each other desperately in the grey weather.

‘Oh, Lucy, you didn’t! Why? What did you come back here for? It’s so close to where it happened. What if the pigs see you?’

‘They don’t know who I am. You’re not going to tell them. I wanted to see you. I’ve got to sit down. I feel like I’m going to fall over.’

They sat on a bench at the edge of the open grass, close to each other in the damp cold. Lucy hugged her backpack, burying her face into it for a few short moments.

‘It was just supposed to be her, Greg. But there was some man there and I shot him too.’ She looked up at him, almost whispering. ‘I didn’t plan to do that but I just did. I don’t know how. And he’s dead now.’

He stared at her and then at the ground.

‘Luce. Shit! Why did you? What are you going to do now?’

She shrugged.

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. And there was this kid there. Staring at me. I can still see him. And she isn’t dead, that woman. I heard it on the radio. She’s not dead.’

‘Shit, Luce,’ the boy said again. ‘This ambulance went by here a while back and it was screaming ! You don’t reckon — ’

They looked over towards the traffic on Eddy Avenue and the dark yellowish-brown facade of the railway colonnade on the other side of the road. The line of trees and the castle-like stone edifice of the station blocked out the grey sky.

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. It was horrible, you know. There was all this blood and it was on me. It was just so horrible.’

‘Fuck!’ The boy was frightened. ‘You get a car? Anyone see you?’

‘No, that’s okay, I did all that. And I got back to the garage okay. I left the car there and everything, like I said. But I lost the key to the garage, it fell out of my hand. It went in the pit. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was really strange. It was horrible but it was just so easy as well. You know, you just do it and it happens, and that’s it, it’s over.