Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘No, I don’t, Dad. You can sleep on that.’

It was as much as she could say to him but it was enough.

‘I knew that’s what you thought in your heart of hearts. I knew you understood me. Everything between us, it didn’t matter. It was normal, you know that. I knew you’d get over the blame game one day,’ he said.

‘Yeah, okay, Dad. It is all over. I’ll go now,’ she said, needing to be out of there.

He nodded, his eyes were closing. At the door Melanie caught her by the hand briefly.

‘Thanks for doing that,’ she said.

Lucy smiled without meaning it and was gone. She went downstairs, out of the back door and found the dog sitting in her kennel. ‘Come on, girl,’ she said and the dog followed her, down into the garden, to the escarpment.

Lucy stopped part of the way down to look at a camellia bush: the blossoms were a pale pink and damp with the night’s rain, the leaves shining in the sun. It had been one of her grandmother’s favourites for the colour and the shape of the flower. Lucy looked at it without any words in her head to describe it; it became an image fixed permanently in her mind as something solely visual. She had lost the power of speech, of thought based on the use of words. The impressions in her mind were of images, of what was felt and seen only, her knowledge of language had been washed out of her. She stood there for some moments before walking down through the garden and then into the bushland. Eventually, she stopped to sit at the edge of the stream and, in this space, to forget the world existed until she went out into it again. She would sleep at the house tonight and then, in the very early dawn, she would be gone.

I don’t doubt that. I hope indeed you find him very soon.

The preacher’s voice was touched with rhetoric even in conversation. The tape of the prayer meeting finished and the incident room became quiet.

‘That must have been a fun two hours for you, Boss,’ Trevor commented, as the assembled team began to shift and stretch in the relieved silence.

‘You are not joking. Don’t cry on my shoulder today, I’ll have rheumatism for the rest of my life after sitting through that,’ Harrigan replied.

‘We are in the darkness, you and I. Come with me and I’ll show you the way to the light,’ Grace said in her own clear voice. ‘He can really project, he goes out after you. He could probably sing pretty well if he wanted to. It’s such a pure voice.’

There was an edge to her words. Harrigan looked at her. Sometime during the morning while he had been out, she had disappeared back into her regulation dress and make-up. She was watching with the others as Ian pinned to the corkboard pictures of the photographer and the gadfly who had ambushed her outside the Whole Life Health Centre clinic a little over eight months ago. Both had been photographed as they left the prayer meeting that morning and now were being posted to the board for display, observation, dissection.

‘Can you tell that just by listening to him, Gracie?’ Ian asked.

‘It’s one of the things that makes him so easy on the ear. If you can forget the garbage he’s talking at you.’

‘I’m glad you said that, Gracie. The shit those people were talking would turn your stomach,’ Trevor said.

‘Okay, Ian. What can you tell us about these two acolytes?’

Harrigan asked, stymieing any possible discussion on the nature of opinions which, to his knowledge, were not so very far removed from those of some people in the room.

‘Enough to know they’ve missed their calling — they should be on this job,’ he replied. ‘They’re regular protesters outside the Whole Life Health Centre clinics, they travel from clinic to clinic. How do they track the clients down? They buy confidential information from government sources and we’re pretty sure we know who their contact is. They get an ID first and they chase it up. Sometimes they follow the women back to their cars and get their registration numbers, sometimes they do it some other way. There have been break-ins at the clinics and some medical records have been stolen. They work at it, it gives them something to do with their lives.’

‘That lump of lard isn’t the Firewall,’ Louise grumbled, staring at the picture of the woman Bronwyn. There’s no sign of a mind in that face.

It takes a mind to put the Firewall’s website together, twisted or not.’

‘Well, we know she’s not,’ Ian replied, ‘but she’d send the doc her hate mail and like doing it. These two, they do what they’re told. For them, it’s how high do I jump, where’s the cliff?’

‘What about the preacher?’ Harrigan said, moving things along.

‘What do we know?’

Trevor walked forward and laid down a folder of papers on the metal table, then smoothed down his short black hair with one hand, collecting his thoughts.

‘It wasn’t that easy to track him down. We started with the resume he gave Family Services and, give him his due, he’s what he says he is, a travelling preacher. He says he studied theology at the Freedom World Theological College, Illinois. That’s a joke, folks. Freedom World is a trailer park out of Chicago. Send money and the postbox will send you the piece of paper. They’ll even fax it to you if you’ve got a tight deadline the way we did and don’t mind paying for it. We got one for Ian for his birthday. Happy Birthday, mate, you’ve got a whole new life in front of you. Congratulations.’

There was laughter throughout the room as Trevor pinned an ornate degree awarded in Ian’s name onto the corkboard next to a photograph of the preacher. He stood with his hands on his hips.

‘Okay. You’re skint and you’re cooling your heels at Mascot for the first time in twenty-five years. Who are you going to call? Auntie Yvonne Lindley. She puts you up. Why not? She’s sitting at home all alone in that mausoleum of hers out at north St Ives. Glad to have the company. Want a recommendation to the Family Services Commissioner for your community care refuge? Auntie Yvonne will get you one written on the Minister’s letterhead. She even lets you have a couple of her buildings rent-free, courtesy of the Lindley Family Property Trust.’

‘She’s eighty plus, isn’t she?’ Ian said. ‘She must be past it by now.’

‘Sharp as the day she was born, Ian,’ Louise croaked, ‘and with about as much sense.’

‘Careful what you say,’ Trevor continued, ‘the family will have you round signing forms to have her carted away. Word is she wants to write her kiddies out of her will and write the preacher in. This is where you get told to stop pushing the envelope and fuck off, mate.

Geoff Lindley tells you to butt out or he will close you down. Result?

Mother bars son from house. Check. Elizabeth Lindley lets everyone know that poor dear old Mum’s lost it, it is just so sad, folks, maybe it’s time to call in the family doctor and get her declared mentally unfit.

Checkmate. End of the current state of play. Life is not as rosy as it was in the land of Lindley.’

‘Does he have any money of his own?’ Harrigan interrupted. ‘He must have some somewhere, surely.’

‘Nothing that we can find and, believe me, we’ve looked,’ Trevor said. ‘So if the supply gets cut here, what does he fall back on? We don’t know.’

‘It’d be good to cut the supply and find out. Make him sweat,’ Ian said.

‘If he can sweat. Maybe he can’t,’ Louise reflected.

‘Let’s go over to the States,’ Trevor said. ‘Why go there in the first place? There’s no answer to that one. Your parents are dead. You spend a little time here studying to be a minister but you don’t finish it. Nothing to keep you round here. But why the States? Because it meant not being here? Because there you can buy yourself a piece of paper and it makes you a preacher? He’s the only one who can tell us that. Meanwhile … ’