Afternoon light was coming in through the chinks in the curtains covering the small square window when Lucy woke. She was surprised to find herself once again in her own bed. She lay watching the patterns of light on the wall, remembering, once again remembering.
This time, the shootings of the previous day and the past events that had occurred in this room coalesced in her mind, without forming a single, clear picture. For a few moments, she felt detached from them both. The memory of her father was part of her, it had been for some time. The memory of the shooting was becoming part of her as well, or she was becoming part of it. With her head buried in the pillow, she thought: this is who I am. I own this, this is my action, this is me.
Lying there, she began to feel afraid in a quiet sort of way. There was a sense of expectation in the quietness, the beginning rustle of voices in her mind like sounds heard behind a heavy curtain. She lay without moving, trying to find protection in stillness. As she did, she tightened her grip on something hard and metallic under her pillow.
This metallic object came into being as a handgun and she sat up slowly, still holding onto it. She let it fall onto the bed and stretched her hand which was cramped and stiff. She sat with her head in her hands, emptying her mind until her thoughts were quiet.
She felt a compulsion to clean herself and went to the bathroom and washed. She dressed herself in different clothes, jeans and a T-shirt under a loose and heavy sweatshirt that came down past her hips. She pushed her gun awkwardly into the waistband of her jeans. In the mirror, she looked like a small, lumpy child.
When she came down the stairs she heard the television in the lounge room, the sound turned up high, and guessed this was where she would find her parents. She did not go in there, she did not have the stomach. She walked through to the kitchen, where she made herself instant coffee and ate leftovers from the refrigerator. Melanie appeared just as she finished eating. They looked at each other and did not speak. Melanie went to the bench where she began sorting medications before crushing tablets with the back of a spoon.
‘Are they for Dad?’ Lucy asked, swallowing both food and trepidation.
‘Who else do you think they’re for?’ Melanie replied. ‘Don’t you want to go and talk to him? He’s in the lounge room with Mum, they know you’re here. Stevie told them.’
‘No, not yet,’ Lucy said, cold at the thought.
Melanie shrugged.
‘Where’s Stevie?’
‘He’s at work. He spent the whole night out looking for you but he still had to go to work today. I don’t suppose you care about that.’
‘It’s not my fault, Mel,’ Lucy said.
‘I didn’t say anything was your fault,’ Mel replied. ‘Anyway, I can’t talk to you now, I’ve got things I’ve got to do. I had to leave school, you know, so I could look after Dad. So I’ve got to do that.’
‘They didn’t do that,’ Lucy said, shocked.
‘Yes, they did. So I’ve got work to do.’
‘Why didn’t you just say no? Why didn’t Stevie say no?’ Lucy asked, immediately furious.
‘Because no one else was going to do it. Mum wasn’t, that’s for sure. She was just going to let him die.’
‘We could pay someone, couldn’t we?’
‘You think Dad is going to spend his money like that? Don’t be stupid! He won’t do that even now he’s dying. He and Mum are never going to do that, not while they can get me to do it for nothing. Why should you care? You left when you didn’t even have to.’
Melanie walked out of the kitchen, carrying a tray of medications, without waiting for a reply.
‘I did have to,’ Lucy said softly.
Lucy walked out to the back garden, where the air was still fresh from yesterday’s rain, needing the relief of some open space. She stopped to let the dog off the chain, rubbing her head and noticing how the fur on her neck had been worn thin by her collar. Dora hesitated at the entrance to her kennel and then pushed forward, uncertain that she was free. She came and sat beside Lucy who stood looking down the slope of her father’s block of land towards the boundary of the national park.
‘Let’s go, girl,’ she said to the dog. ‘Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go check things out.’
There had once been a garden on this slope, brought into life by Lucy’s grandmother. Granny Hurst had been a big woman, with her fingernails split and ingrained with earth. Lucy remembered that she had always been there, ever since Lucy was small, although she rarely spoke and never seemed to talk to anyone directly. She never looked at Lucy when she talked to her but kept her gaze focused on a point in the distance, somewhere past her granddaughter’s head. Over the years, Granny Hurst had shaped the ground into a series of shallow terraces linked by wooden steps and brick paths. She had grown gardenias, azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons, their flowers ivory white, dark crimson, cerise and shell pink; cultivated beds of blue and white English violets, snow-in-summer and pale yellow bearded iris.
Lucy used to follow her through the garden, spending hours with her, watching and helping her. They had, in this silent way, been very close to each other. If for some reason Lucy was not there on some days, her grandmother would come looking for her, always speaking to that same distant point behind her and saying, ‘Where were you today? I was waiting for you and you didn’t come.’ Lucy collected the flowers as her grandmother cut them and then carried them up to the house.
She put them into jars of water, stroking the petals gently, fascinated by their colours and the softness of their textures.
At other times, her grandmother used to sit on the step of the uppermost terrace, wearing her ugly brown and orange dress, her legs set comfortably apart, smoking menthol cigarettes and talking to the three of them, Stephen, Lucy and Melanie. She told them about her own grandfather who had cleared this block of land of its original forest. ‘There were big trees here,’ she said, ‘the biggest he ever saw before he cut them down.’ He had worked first as a blacksmith, and then kept dairy cows, and had then grown cabbages, but had never made any money, not even from selling the original timber from his land. Her own father had been the one who made the money, starting out by selling second-hand clothes at the Haymarket, holding on to every penny he got his hands on. ‘Just like my son,’ she said, meaning Lucy’s father, ‘he won’t spend a cent either. But he doesn’t sell clothes, he’s a meat dealer. That’s what he likes.’ Her slightly acid voice was still clear in Lucy’s mind, she saw her sitting on the step dropping her cigarette butts into a tin rather than let them litter her garden.
Her garden had gone to seed in the years since she had died of diabetes, when Stephen had been fourteen, Lucy thirteen and Mel just ten. Only the camellias and the rhododendrons in her garden continued to flower, all the rest had been reduced to a tangle of dead and living plants, small crowns of green on otherwise dead branches.
Lucy pushed down through this tangle, following the dog, finding the old paths and steps, reaching the small sleep-out near the escarpment that looked out over the park. Her grandmother had lived in this sleep-out during the last four years of her life, after their grandfather had died, unconcerned by the winter weather and happy, she had said to them, with the sight of her garden and the bush outside her windows. From here, it was possible to see where small stands of flowering eucalyptus and mustard yellow acacias had begun to push their way back over the boundary of the park, even in the short time since Lucy had left.
The sleep-out had been abandoned since Granny Hurst had died, its sliding aluminium doors left jammed open to the weather. Lucy went to look inside a building that now smelled of fresh earth. Dora nosed past her, leaving a trail of paw prints on the dusty floor. Camellia bushes that had grown up close to the external walls pressed their dark leaves against the windows, leaving the pattern of their shape on glass filmed with rain-washed dirt and spiders’ webs. Camellia flowers had drifted through the open doorway, leaving behind pale scatterings of detached pink and red petals. Lucy walked into a pool of silence, following the footfall of the old dog. In the bathroom, soft dirty cobwebs covered the face of the cabinet mirror, while leaves and imperfect flowers had filled the white plastic bathtub to a shallow depth. The bathroom was dry.
The taps shuddered when Lucy turned them on but no water flowed out. It was a place cracking open under the slow crush of the plants that surrounded it, they strangled it with root and branch as it subsided into the ground. Lucy drank in the silence.
‘Hi, Gran,’ she said to no one.
She walked back outside into the afternoon light and listened to the clear sounds of the birds calling to each other in the surrounding bushland. Small waterfalls from the previous day’s rain flowed down over the honeycomb-coloured rock into a gully at the foot of the escarpment. The dog preceded her through the ferns down the short slope and then along a track that bordered a creek. After a short walk, Lucy crossed the stream to a rock overhang opposite, where the shadows and faint outlines of hand prints had been painted onto the sandstone. Their grandmother had told them they had been put there a long time ago by the blacks.
‘There were blacks around here when your great-granddaddy came here,’ she had said to them once, ‘he gave them work clearing the land.
They lived along the river in shacks, so it wasn’t that far for them to come up here. We used to play down there together when we were kids.’
Gran had painted her own hand on the rock when she was a child, with a date and her initials. Once, she had taken the three of them to see it and they had painted their own hands among the others on the rock face. Lucy found the child’s drawing of her hand and covered it over with her adult palm. The dog came and sat near her. Leaning against the rock, Lucy emptied her mind of any thoughts, listening to the rhythm of her breathing and nothing else.
Four months after her grandmother’s funeral, and not long before Lucy’s fourteenth birthday, her father had walked into her bedroom one evening for the first time. When he left, Lucy’s bedsheets were dirtied with blood. The next day at breakfast, Lucy had looked up at her mother, uncertain whether she should tell her that they needed to be washed. Her mother refused to meet her eye and Lucy stayed silent.
She went to school as usual and came home to find that there were clean sheets on her bed. Nothing was said. Always, the sheets were changed with nothing being said. Except for those times when Lucy’s mother had taken her to visit the clinic on the other side of the city, everything had gone on as usual. Until the day Lucy had picked up her pack and walked out of the door. And today, when she had come back.
Just then, Lucy felt that there was no other world in existence anywhere, that this stretch of land was the only place that was real.
This place here on the edge of the park, where her family were caught in a house with a tangled garden, where everything was detached and out of whack. As she leaned against the rock, she felt the gun pressing into her waist. It was a reality of a kind, bringing her back to the present. She sat by the side of the creek, gathering strength, fighting fear. The dog stayed with her, until something in the nearby scrub attracted her attention and she got to her feet and disappeared into the bush, leaving Lucy by herself. Lucy took her gun out of her waistband and aimed it at the shrubs on the opposite bank, firing pretend shots.
It was a long time, and had grown dark and cold, before she felt brave enough to go back into the house.