Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

She dumped her car on the other side of Central Station, leaving it to be cannibalised. She had come to her final place of sanctuary, a former garment factory in Surry Hills marked for redevelopment, the owners now bankrupt, the ground-floor windows broken and boarded up. Inside, scraps of material, broken sewing needles, clothing racks and parts of discarded dressmaker’s dummies covered the floors. The space had been appropriated by the needy and the homeless, and accommodated another community, a shifting body of artists who wanted the light that came through the wide windows overlooking the street on the second floor. The upper storey room was filled with their leftover works. Soft sculpture and collage, paintings and unfinished objects were spread across the open space amidst the pink, plastic limbs of the dummies.

Lucy trod quietly through these plastic things and sidestepped the prone figure of someone sleeping in the midst of the debris. She went up to the top floor, to a small dog’s leg of a room opposite a filthy bathroom. She had barricaded this room against invasion by others with her own locks. It had a narrow bed, a limited view and a curtainless window where the rain had covered the glass like a crystal frosting. There was a very weak light in the room, something to push back the shadows a little. She dumped her backpack against the wall and took out her gun, which she left on the bed. She dried herself as well as she could and then sat on the bed with the gun in her hands and waited. She looked at the dial on her watch, luminous in the darkling room. Just on midnight. Time was ticking down.

The same storm caught the preacher as he crossed a deserted suburban park somewhere on the upper north shore, a lightning flash briefly revealing the isolated figure in the darkness. He hurried through the sparse trees, huddled in his coat, head down, intent on where he was going. He pulled his hood further over his face as he ran towards a waiting car on the far corner of the park, near a house where an outside light was burning. He got in, greeting the driver, and the car pulled away from the kerb. Some minutes afterwards, the outside lights of the nearby house were extinguished.

The rain had been hammering down but as they drove it began to cease gradually. They travelled the backstreets towards North Sydney.

Here the preacher left the first car to claim another which had been left waiting for him in a twenty-four-hour car park. He drove into the city between the tower blocks that surrounded the approach to the steel coat hanger and then over the curve of the bridge misty in the lighter rain.

It was just after midnight. In the near distance, the office towers of the city appeared as hazy pillars of electric light. The preacher saw them as hollow structures floating in profound darkness, a prelude to the day when time would stop and there would be only light everlasting. On that day, he hoped to satisfy his own hunger as a collector of souls. His hunger never let him rest; it pushed him now to meet with someone he was quite sure would be waiting to greet him with a loaded gun.

He parked not far from the garment factory in Surry Hills and went inside. By now the rain had almost stopped. As he approached the room on the third floor, he wondered whether she had yet arrived but when the unlocked door opened to him he knew that she was there to meet him. He stepped inside and, in the half-shadows, saw Lucy sitting on the bed aiming a gun at him. She said in her familiar voice, ‘Stop right there, Graeme. Don’t move. Just sit on the floor.’

The preacher closed the door and sat with his back against it.

‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘it’s nice to see you again.’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said, smiling.

‘It is. You should believe me. I have been looking forward to this meeting very much. We have a great deal to talk about.’

Lucy laughed.

‘There are times when I don’t believe you. You could walk into anything. You don’t even look worried.’

‘Why should I be? If God puts his cloak around you, why should you be afraid? God has his cloak around you at the moment, Lucy. You should realise you don’t have a reason to be frightened of anything.’

He spoke smoothly. She shook her head, trying to shield herself from the immediate hypnotism of his voice.

‘Fuck you, Graeme. I didn’t come here to listen to you talk shit to me. I want you to tell me about Greggie. I want to know what you did.’

‘I did nothing. Greg overdosed and he overdosed because Bronwyn is too stupid to lock a cupboard door properly. You should talk to her. The woman’s a fool. I sometimes wonder what dimension she really inhabits.’

Lucy rested her gun on her knees and laughed again.

‘You did nothing. You never fucking do, do you? Not because you didn’t want to. In case you’ve forgotten, I was there when you were talking about helping both me and him to the afterlife.’

‘Those were only words, Lucy. The afterlife is all around us but we don’t realise it. Now listen to me. What do you think you’re going to do now?’

She thought how easily he changed the conversation. Nothing fazed him. She glanced at her watch. ‘Don’t know,’ she replied.

‘I can help you — ’

‘To Paradise? Yeah.’

‘I can. I can get you out of this building. I can give you money. Do you want to go to California? You can go to California. It costs money but the money is there and it can be done. If I think it’s worth it.’

‘If you think it’s worth it? Graeme, I’m the one who’s holding the gun.’

‘But I’m the one who has the means. You have to ask yourself: what do you want?’

She smiled pure steel. ‘I ask myself that all the time. At the moment there’s nothing for me to want. I’ll tell you something. You know the clinic on Anzac Parade?’ He nodded. ‘It’s going up in a little while.’

He was not quite laughing as he replied. ‘You never joke about these things, do you?’

‘No, I do what I say I’m going to do. I’m the only one who does.

It’s for Greggie. Nothing else is going to make anyone take any notice of him. And then maybe I’ll just ring the pigs and say, hi, here I am.

Blow me away if you want. I don’t care.’

‘You’re going to put yourself in the hands of the police?’ He sounded contemptuous.

‘What does it matter if I do? They can beat the shit out of me. You take it if you have to. How can things be worse than they are now?’

His face had an odd look, not quite triumph, not quite joy.

‘You’ll find out in gaol, won’t you, Lucy? You’ll have the rest of your life in there to think about it. And for you, that’s a very long time indeed.’

‘I’d be careful, Graeme.’ Her voice was shaking. ‘I might blow you away for saying that.’

‘But you won’t. Because you once told me you wished you never fired the gun in the first place. Isn’t that how you feel?’

‘I can use this on you if I have to, Graeme. Don’t worry about that.’

The threat was unconvincing even to her. ‘But, yeah. I do wish I’d never shot that woman and that man. But that’s different to now, it’s way different.’

He laughed.

‘Oh, yes. It’s very different, Lucy. Think about it. The woman you shot brought death to thousands, including you, ultimately brought death to her husband and ruined her son’s life. But you blame yourself.

She should be accused, not you.’

‘Graeme, I pulled that trigger. It was me, not her.’

‘Do you know what you’re doing when you say that? You’re taking this woman’s guilt on yourself. You’re inviting her to injure you for a second time.’

You don’t know! Lucy screamed the words in her head. She stared at him.