In the winter morning light, Paul Harrigan was countermanding his own instruction that the job took precedence over everything and nothing else mattered. He drove against the traffic to make the short journey from Birchgrove to Cotswold House at Drummoyne, stealing the first hour before work to see his son. He may not get the chance again for some time.
Toby was the product of a briefly sweet marriage, contracted when Harrigan was barely twenty-one, while he had been wandering the countryside, working as a boxer and a fruit picker. His marriage had had the unusual effect of leaving him holding the baby while his wife had disappeared, rejecting a child permanently injured during the hours of his birth, a tiny baby left weighted down for life with the medical terms choreoathetosis and dysathria. Her action was truly unforgivable in Harrigan’s eyes. They’d divorced years ago; Sara lived in Western Australia now with some other man. He did not give her a voluntary thought, she had never tried to see her son. She had never even sent money, although if she had, he would not have taken it. She was another figure he had excised ruthlessly from his past.
This morning, as he crossed the Iron Cove Bridge, Harrigan watched his night thoughts disappear in the dawn over the harbour to become the daylight certainty that there were possibilities for happiness after all. Among other things, life had its pleasures in the early glitter of the sun on the harbour and the sight of the black cormorants fishing from their perches on the old wooden piers. At Cotswold House, built on the shore overlooking Cockatoo and Spectacle Islands with their disused shipyards, he was let in and greeted by the house manager, Susie Pavic.
‘Good morning, Paul,’ she said. ‘We all sat with Toby and watched you on TV last night. What a terrible thing.’
‘Yeah, it is. But we’re working on it. We’ll get there.’
Although he liked Susie, he spoke to stop the conversation, with a quick smile, not wanting work to come between him and his son.
Down a short shining hallway, he saw Toby being wheeled out of his room by his therapist.
‘Paul. I didn’t think you were going to make it today.’
Toby’s therapist, Tim Masson, fussed too much in Harrigan’s opinion.
‘No, I’m right on time as far as I know. I’m here now, that’s what matters. Hi, Toby. How are you?’
Using his one good hand, Toby squeezed his father’s offered hand for a few moments. Masson withdrew to the activity room to make them all coffee, while Harrigan left his coat and tie in his son’s room.
He took hold of the chair and set off down the corridor to the bathroom, a large room with walls and floor covered with shining white tiles and a wide spa bath with chrome fittings. Toby stubbornly pulled one-handed at his nightclothes as his father knelt by the tub, turning on the taps, swirling the water around. Steam began to rise in clouds, the noise of running water concealing their mutual silence.
‘Let me help you,’ Harrigan said, standing up.
He felt the night warmth of his son’s body as he carefully removed the unresisting garments. Toby’s dysfunctional body and his inability to speak connected Harrigan to his son, body to body, human to human.
Sex did not necessarily give him this closeness. Toby was made in his father’s image: his height, the shape of his body, the paleness of his skin, could have been — would have been — Harrigan’s own. Their physical capacities were different, only that. Harrigan carried this sense of loss as something that was as unchanging as Toby’s disability; his feelings made him gentle with his son. He dropped the side rail on the chair, slid one arm around his son’s shoulders, another under his knees, and lifted Toby, an action which these days took all his strength. One day, very soon, he would not be able to lift him at all.
‘I’ve got you,’ he said. ‘Here we go.’
He lowered his son into the wide bath and let the warm water bubbling up from the light spa support and ease his body. Toby slid out to almost his full length in the water, his fixed arm crooked at an angle across his breastbone, one leg hooked a little over the other.
‘Are you comfortable there?’ Harrigan asked, and saw Toby’s silent response, the yes flicker of the fingers of his good hand.
Toby could speak a little, and sometimes did, but it took much effort to get out even a single word. His words lived as thoughts, or became bits of light which he tapped out one-handed onto a computer screen. Their conversations were silent, today expressed through the movement of Harrigan’s hands as he washed his son’s hair and felt the weight of Toby’s head in his hands in reply. He massaged his son’s shoulders, working at the unyielding muscle with slow, patient hands before washing the rest of his body. He began to soap around his son’s genitals, which were partially erect. They had their own young boy’s perfection and were pale as the skin on the rest of his body. As he did so, he felt Toby hitting him on the arm with his good hand.
‘I hurt you, did I? I’m sorry, I thought I was being careful. That hurts, does it? Okay, I won’t do that.’
Harrigan rinsed the soap away and saw no sign of injury or inflammation. Some minor infection? The ache you get when there isn’t any means of relief? Or is it that you don’t want me washing you any more, you’re too old? I have to, Toby, it’s the only way we can do this.
He stopped and looked at his son. His hand was resting on the edge of the bath and Toby took hold of it. He held on to Harrigan with a tight grip. What is it? Harrigan thought. Tell me what’s locked in your head. Used to this silence between them, Harrigan was unaware that he had said nothing. They held onto each other for some moments and then his son let go. The connection broken, Harrigan went to get the bath towels, to get Toby out of the bath (an action which would require Tim Masson’s help, Harrigan had to admit this) and then dried and dressed.
‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘I could use some breakfast myself.’
As he looked back, he saw Toby looking at him, an odd, indefinable expression in his eyes. He did not know whether it was his son’s helplessness as he lay there in the water or some other quality that he could not define, but the expression left him troubled. He dried Toby, dressed him, dried and brushed his hair, and in the dining room fed him and wiped his mouth clean. Toby sucked orange juice through a straw out of the drinking receptacle Harrigan held for him. I’m here, Toby. I’m always here.
‘What’s on your mind, Toby?’ he said. ‘Something’s bothering you.
I’ve got to go to work now but I’ll drop by again as soon as I can. I’ll see if I can’t get here tonight. You can tell me then if you want.’
Toby flickered ‘okay’ with his good hand, a gesture that was neither inviting nor repelling. They said goodbye in their mutual silence, with Toby squeezing his hand.
He went to see the house manager in her office on his way out.
Susie, plump and fair-haired, sparkled in the sunlight through the windows, her make-up rainbow-like.
‘Do you need to worry?’ she said. ‘His health is good, he’s eating well. His school marks are very good, he’s up there with the best of them, Paul. He has been spending a bit of time on the Net lately, but I don’t see that’s a bad thing. It all takes him out of himself. He’s doing really well. I feel we should be pleased.’
‘No, Susie.’ Harrigan shook his head. ‘There’s something troubling him. I want to know what it is. Now either you or Tim should be able to tell me that.’ That’s what I pay you for. He let the words hang in the air unspoken.
Susie’s opalescent blue fingernails glinted in the light. In reply, she spoke with the care of someone who made a living walking tightropes.
‘Well, I don’t think you need me to tell you any of this. He’s seventeen at his next birthday. In some ways he’s older than most boys his age, but he’s a lot younger in others. If he doesn’t want you washing him any more, I’d say that’s probably all there is to that. He does need to feel his body’s his own. But he needs his head space more. That’s where he lives.
You know better than anyone, Paul, he’s got people around him all the time, he has to have. Usually he’s never alone except in his head. We don’t have the right to intrude in there without him letting us. If there’s something on his mind, he’ll tell you when he’s ready to.’
He did not reply, her words had left him almost breathless. They looked at each other across her desk.
‘He still needs me, Susie. He’s always going to need me.’
‘Yes, he will. But that isn’t what I said.’
He stood up.
‘We’ll have to talk about this some other time. I can’t hang around here now, I should have been at work half an hour ago. I didn’t really have the time to come here in the first place. I’m only here for him.’
She smiled at him professionally in reply. He walked out without thanking her or saying goodbye. Did she think she knew his son better than he did? He could not talk to her, he could not look at her.
Harrigan went out into the morning sunlight and stopped by his car. Toby was with his therapist in the activity room, sitting in the sun and watching him through the wide windows. He waved and saw the flicker of Toby’s fingers in reply. As things were now, Toby was with him for life. Oh, there was money enough. Harrigan had sued the hospital where Toby had been born for everything he could think of, taking their drunk and incapable doctor through every level of appeal.
The exercise had got him the law degree he was supposed to have had a decade earlier, and while it had taken years, in the end they had paid, had been forced to pay, much more than he had ever expected or hoped for. Money was no longer the point. He does need me, Susie.
Who else is going to love you, Toby, the way I do?
There was never an escape. Trevor Gabriel tracked him down on his mobile phone as he loitered in the traffic on his way back into the city, worrying at his concerns for Toby in the no-man’s land between work and not-work, almost as if he was unemployed.
‘Morning, Boss,’ Trevor said cheerily. ‘Good news, we’ve found the car. A couple of juveniles were caught trying to torch it in the wee small hours down near Macdonaldtown Station. We’ve got one of them in custody now.’
‘Just the one? What happened to the other?’
‘Still in full cry. He went up a wall and over the train lines and away.’
‘Yeah?’ Harrigan tried to picture it. ‘Lucky he didn’t get smacked by the state rolling stock. Who have we got?’
‘Ours is a Greg Smith. He’s fifteen and he’s got a file the size of a phone book down at Family Services. And another one at Juvenile Justice to go with it.’
Harrigan manoeuvred through the traffic as he traversed the steel spider’s web of what he still called the new Glebe Island Bridge. On his left, the Balmain peninsula looked like an island in a glittering mirror of water, edged in a scattered green amongst the container wharves.
The Romanesque colonnaded church tower of St Augustine’s, the tallest of the towers and steeples, was outlined against the clear air.
‘Have we checked any known associates for this other boy?’
‘The patrol went around knocking on a few doors early this morning but they didn’t find anybody. I’ve got a couple of the guys out looking at the moment.’
‘Is anyone with the car? Do we know anything about it?’
‘Ian should over be there by now. The owner is a Christine Van Aalst. She reported it missing from outside of her house in Enmore at 7.08 a.m. yesterday. She checks out. I’d say she was just unlucky.’
‘I’ll go over there now and take a look. In the meantime, don’t let anyone pester this boy. Keep him on ice till I get there.’
‘No rush,’ Trevor replied. ‘The boy’s in the care of some character called the Preacher Graeme Fredericksen, whoever he is. We can’t raise him from anywhere, he’s not at home and he’s not answering any of his phones. And we’re still waiting for the case worker from Family Services to get here. I don’t know what she’s doing with herself but she’s bloody slow too.’
While Trevor spoke, Harrigan was watching the glass walls of the city’s office towers ranged in the near distance with the pale sky behind them. The sunlight glanced off the sides of the buildings with the sharpness of new steel.
‘Nobody wants this boy,’ he said. ‘Check up on that preacher or whatever he is, would you? He should be there if no one else is. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
He began to drive with purpose, making a detour through the city’s arterial roads to the other side of Newtown. At the scene, a small group of bystanders had gathered to watch on a nearby street corner. They looked at him curiously as he let himself in under the blue ribbons. The houses roundabout were the same as the one he’d grown up in near White Bay: narrow single-storey cottages with a lone front window opening onto a tiny porch. These ones had been painted in bright colours and had second storeys extended into the roof line, with bars placed over the windows for security. Trees had been planted along the street to shade them, bottle brush and jasmine lined the laneways close by. In summer, these plants would provide the illusion of coolness.
The car, a late model white Mazda sedan, had been parked in a narrow lane between the back fences of the houses and the retaining wall bordering the railway line. At first sight, it appeared largely undamaged. There was a fire engine standing close by at the end of the lane. He saw Ian at a short distance from the car, watching the forensic team at work.
‘Hi, Boss,’ he said as Harrigan walked up.
‘Morning, mate. What’s happened here?’
‘The kid we’ve got in custody was splashing petrol around in the boot when he got jumped on by a couple of the locals. Apparently a car got torched down here a while ago and half their garages and the fences along here almost went up in smoke. So the neighbours got together and put in a silent alarm. Lucky they did, that car is fucking drenched. I think it would’ve exploded if anyone had lit it up.’
‘And the one we didn’t get went up that wall?’
Harrigan looked up at the dark-stained and uneven stone wall rising above their heads. A suburban train rattled past at speed on one of the further tracks.
‘That’s what I’ve been told. Up, up and away. He must have done because no one’s found him yet. You might want to take a look in the boot while you’re here, there’s some interesting things in there.’
Harrigan walked over to the car with Ian and greeted the head of the forensic team. They stopped work and stood aside for him. Tossed inside the boot was a small collection of blood-stained clothes: jeans, jacket, gloves and a scarf.
‘I see what you mean,’ Harrigan said, wrinkling his nose, ‘the sweet odour of petrol.’
‘Can you tell us anything about this?’ he asked the forensic team leader, a middle-aged woman with purple hair.
‘So far?’ the woman replied. ‘Whoever she is, if she got into these clothes, she’s very small. She took a tumble, a bad one. It must have hurt. She landed on her hands and knees and she tore her gloves. I’m fairly certain we should get some skin fragments for you. If we do, we can tie the gun to the glove to the hand without too much argument.
There’s a lot of blood on these clothes as well.’ She smiled at him. ‘An embarrassment of riches.’
‘You could say that,’ Harrigan replied a little dryly. ‘Thank you.’
They moved back, out of the way.
‘That’s how she dropped her gun,’ Ian said, ‘tripped coming out of the shop. Our girl can’t know what she’s doing. I don’t think she could have made any more mistakes if she’d tried.’
‘We know everything we need to know about her except who she is. And she’s still out there,’ Harrigan replied. ‘You’re staying on to see this through?’
‘Yeah, I’ll be here.’
Before leaving the scene, Harrigan stopped once again to look up at the high retaining wall with its sparse toeholds of tenacious vegetation.
The other boy must have been pissing himself to get up there, but fear has a leverage all its own. He knew this from his own experience of sheer terror: the moment in a back alley in Marrickville one night ten years ago, when Michael Casatt had pushed Harrigan’s own gun into his mouth and forced his hand onto it with the succinct words, ‘You’re dead, mate.’ That microsecond of time was set to be his permanent hiatus when it was broken by some brave, brave soul that he had never met and thanked, who had shone their car lights onto them at high beam. The moment had had a depth of emotion Harrigan would not have thought possible if he had not experienced it. His body might have vaporised, he might have already been dead. Then the gun butt hit his jaw and his jaw hit the ground, almost in the same instant. After that, he had felt nothing except atrocious pain, which, for a short space of time, was the most welcome feeling he’d ever had. At least he was still alive.
Maybe this was the reason he had never taken any pleasure from seeing fear work on the people he interviewed in his job, the way some of his colleagues did. He watched his subjects twisting in its grip and felt nothing other than repugnance for the humiliation. He dealt with it by telling himself that fear was like anything that was human. What mattered was how you used it.
He took out his phone and rang Trevor. ‘What have you got Grace doing this morning?’ he asked.
‘She’s doing what you wanted her to do. She’s over at the hospital checking up on Matthew and the doc. Why?’
‘She was good with that boy yesterday. I’d like to see how she might go with this one today. Get her back in for me, would you?’
‘You want Grace? Sure you don’t want Louise? After all, she’s already here. Look, Boss, you don’t want to be sexist about this — you could always get one of the guys.’
‘Louise will breathe stale booze all over him and she’ll scare him.
So will all of the rest of your ugly mugs. Get Grace. Get her to meet me outside the interview room. Tell her I’ll brief her myself and I’m going to sit in on it.’
‘Lucky Grace. I’ll get her right away.’
Ignoring the sarcasm, Harrigan hung up. Yes, get Grace. She can chat to this boy in that nice voice of hers and smile at him with that smile. Sweet-talk him, soothe him down. Maybe even put him off his guard long enough to make him open up.
The forensic team began to remove the clothes from the boot just as he walked away to his car. He always thought that blood, whether it was dried on clothes or walls, had an inconsequential look to it, something that could be brushed off and the slightly more stubborn stains washed away. The boy they had in custody had wanted to burn these rags into non-existence, even at the risk of obliterating himself.
Grace could use this fact to squeeze him in a gentle enough way if she tried. He was curious to see if she would do it, whether she had the backbone. It was a pleasant thought, the idea of spending some time with her to find this out. It was already brightening up his day.