The garage doors slid shut with the crash of sheet metal echoing into an empty space. Lucy Hurst listened as their reverberations stilled in an intensified silence. Around her, from the transom windows set up high in the brick walls, intermittent sunlight streaked dusty diamond shapes across the pearl-grey shadows. The thinned-out light touched on the stained concrete floor, the white Mazda she had parked in the centre of the deserted garage, and was then reflected as an oily, metallic brilliance as it passed over a deep trench of water near the car.
Rain, seeping in under the wide metal doors, had flowed down the ramp to fill the garage pit over time. Lucy stopped beside the trench, calming her breathing.
As she stood there, the key to the garage doors slipped unhindered, almost unnoticed, from her hand and fell into the black water. The silence deepened as the barely perceptible sound of the splash faded.
She stared down into the pit, watching as the obscure reflection of her own face was broken apart by the spreading concentric circles of water. Her breathing slowed as time stopped. The noise of distant traffic on Anzac Parade, several streets away, existed in another world.
She listened, waiting. Under the continuous rumbling of the trucks and buses grinding their way through the city’s external arteries, she heard another sound, a soft, pervasive sound, the faint calling voices of young children crying. It silenced every vibration, every other sound.
She answered their crying in the silence of her own thoughts. I’m listening to you. Listen to me back. Listen to this. Listen to it. In her memory, the roar of the shots she had fired faded into stillness.
Now, in this drab place, even the shadows became comforting to her. She felt them fold about her as peaceably as a blanket, not necessarily soft or warm, but giving succour in the absence of any other shelter. She could breathe in the quiet, even with the smell of the dust and diesel. She felt an easing of her constrictions, the bindings which were usually pulled tight like a length of swaddling cloth or a shroud around her chest began to loosen and unwind. Briefly, she felt a sense of lightness new to her, a cleanness, the feeling that her body had dissolved.
Lucy drew in breath the way thirsty people drink water and walked towards the back of the garage. Here, a set of temporary offices had once been fashioned out of partitions made from grey painted wood and frosted glass. She went into one of these small rooms and turned on the bare light bulb. Opposite she saw a face in the pock-marked mirror above a washbasin, the likeness of some other unknown girl staring at her with fierce eyes. There were dark streaks on her forehead, across her eyebrows and into the line of her hair. Lucy brushed her fingers across her own forehead, watching as the reflection did likewise, and felt those dried, crumbling ridges in wonderment. She remembered, the flash of an achromatic image, her recall reducing blood to the texture of oil. The man’s ruined face, his blood instantaneously on her face and clothes, touching her with the same sensation as warm viscous water. With a broken fingernail, she scratched at the dust this blood had become and stared at herself.
She was uncertain how long it was before she went to the basin and turned on the tap. Her hands hurt as she did so, both were grazed, she did not know how this had happened. Cold, rusty water came pouring out; she bent her head underneath the icy flow and let it wash the thin streaks of blood into the iron-coloured stream. In the mirror, water dripped from a face white as a carving out of bone.
I don’t have a gun any more. Her thought was loud in the silence.
Something essential to her was missing. She remembered. She had hurt her hands when she lost the gun; she had tripped on her way back to her car, landing heavily and tearing her cheap gloves. The gun had slipped out of her hand and skidded out of reach across the lane, the metal sparking on the rough bitumen, and she had not stopped to pick it up. It was there still, waiting for someone else to find it. She closed her eyes at the realisation and expunged all thoughts from her mind.
She pushed her short wet reddish-brown hair back from her high forehead and turned away. She had things to do, things she had to do.
She sat on her crumpled sleeping bag on a pallet on the floor and changed her clothes, stripping away the outward signs of the shooting, leaving blood-stained shoes, torn jeans, her jacket in a crumpled heap on the floor, emerging in clean clothes to display a small body that possessed an elastic thinness. Work. She focused on this single word and looked at the table, where a stolen slimline notebook computer, with means to connect to the Internet through a mobile telephone, waited to be used. This was what she had come here to do: not to hide but to work. Things which were unfinished had to be cleaned up, closed off.
She sat down in front of the computer, hesitated and then hit the space bar. At the touch of a few keys, bright expensive software danced across the screen and Lucy began to re-energise her virtual world. She was travelling inwards, to a place of her own making, whose existence and shape, even the trajectory by which she reached it, had been fabricated by her alone. Light from the screen’s radiance played on her face as she opened up onto the screen her kaleidoscope of moving shapes and colours. This world absorbed her, its geography was her visionary endgame. She had created it, building up its structures, moving the pieces about in patterned strategies whose outcomes she had known from the beginning.
At its heart was the foundation image, the centre onto which she had grafted all her other images of expanding complexity. Lucy had half believed that by some strange transference of events, Dr Liu might have been erased from the website as she, Lucy, had erased her from life that morning. Instead, the doctor remained where Lucy had placed her from the beginning, lying in a replica of the street she had lain in that morning in Chippendale, shot dead. In this familiar screen image, the buildings around the prone woman were burning and the street was littered with debris from a shattered landscape, everything shining with the green-ant glow of nuclear poison.
There were images missing from this crossover world, unforeseen events which Lucy had encountered in the actual world less than an hour ago. Events which she needed to build into her website to allow her electronic vision to replicate actuality, to ease the memory by binding them into a pictogram. The man with the ruined face also lying dead beside the woman on the roadway, and a boy, staring at her from a distance close enough for her to touch him. As she drew on this memory it took control of her, flooding her thoughts. Her hands on the keyboard became weighted, frozen in action.
She had intended to kill the woman. She had not thought she would ever have to use the gun on anyone else, she did not remember how she had. No one else was supposed to be there. The sound of the first shot had deafened her and she was caught in an airlock, breathless and vacant with the shock, staring at the red stain soaking into the woman’s blue jacket. Then the man was there in front of her without warning, so close that he was almost in her face. As she stared at him, his face was suddenly and almost immediately unmade. She did not remember feeling the recoil of the gun.
She dropped a curtain in her mind over the memory. With a jerky, clumsy movement, she hit the close button and watched her other world fold back into its icon on the screen, collapsing inwards like a magician’s stream of silk scarves. Its absence left behind a clear blue light which shone out of the computer like a benediction.
Lucy dived into the light, out onto the web, desperate.
Turtle, it’s the Firewall. Are you out there? If you are, please talk to me, I need to talk turtle with you if you’re there. Please say you are.
I’m here like I’m always here Firewall Wotzup??? Early 4u For some few moments, Lucy did not type anything.
Firewall????
I did it.
U did wot???!!! Firewall u are joking U must beNo, I’m not.
U have 2 tell me u did not U are lying 2 me!
No, I did.
I don’t believe u. It’s not possible U couldn’t do that I did. Surf in and find out if you don’t believe me because it’s probably on the web by now. But I did it. In Chippendale, just like I said I would. And if you don’t believe me, I can tell you things about it they probably won’t want to tell you. But I did do it.
I don’t get u. Why?????
I’ve already told you why. You don’t have to ask me that.
I don’t mean all that wild stuff u talk all the time I mean why? 4 real Someone had to do it. That was me. It isn’t any more complicated than that.
Bullshit!!! I know u I know wots in your head ok??? U didn’t have2 do this No way did u have 2 do this
Lucy sat staring at her keyboard, rubbing her forehead hard with her hands before typing again.
You say that but it’s not true. It was something I had to do. All last night, I was here in my sleeping bag and I saw it so clearly in my mind. You know better than anyone what it’s like to see things so clearly in your head like that. It was like that woman was standing in front of me in this blue light and I saw her for what she was. She was evil. I knew what I had to do. Your head takes you everywhere. But I can move, I can walk, and that means I have to do things. I have to go out into the world and I have to do things. I had to do what I did.
It’s that simple.
I had 2 do it I had 2 do it That’s just a wall u put up. Nothing realU just say that because u can’t tell me why u did do it No, it did have to be done. It was horrible, okay? And it was. It was horrible. But it had to happen. But that isn’t it, that’s not what I wanted to tell you. Because I did something that really was wrong.
Something I should never have done ever. And I don’t know what to do about it now.
Wot could be worse???
Shooting someone else as well. He was right there in front of me.
He was so close. Almost as close as my computer is now. I guess he wanted my gun, I didn’t think about that before. I just fired. I didn’t even know I had. But his face — Turtle, he looked — I didn’t think it would look like that. I’m asking, what have I done?
Wot did u think it would look like????? Wot are u saying this 4??
There was a kid there. He saw everything. I don’t know, Turtle.
What do I do?
Go 2 police Now
I’m not doing that. What’s the point of that? Everything I’ve done would be wasted.
It’s wasted anyway Nothing but waste U can’t say it’s anything elseIt doesn’t matter wot u do now Firewall This is never going away 4 u Well, maybe I don’t care. Maybe what I did to that man and that boy is not so bad because maybe they deserved it. They knew what she did.
Bullshit U stop U stop right there U think I deserved being likethis??? U want me 2 say that u deserved everything that’s happened2 u?? Do u want people 2 say that about u??? What do u thinkthey’re going 2 say u deserve right now?
I didn’t say that. I’d never say you deserved what happened to you, Turtle. You can’t think that. It isn’t fair.
I said I know u Firewall U amp; me are both fucking cripples, right??
So fucking wot??? Doesn’t mean we have 2 do things like this Do uwant me 2 hate u for this? And say u deserve that? I could do thatbut I won’t
It fucking is not the same. Anyway they’re both dead now so what’s the point of saying that?
Firewall u cant do this amp; walk away U cant I can’t keep talking now, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get out into the air. I’m going but I’ll be back. Love you, Turtle, love you always.
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.
Just like that, it’s all over and done with? It’s so quick. I thought it’d be different. I know Graeme said it’d happen really fast and I shouldn’t worry about that, but I still thought there’d be more to it than that. I didn’t think it would be like that.’
Her voice was shaking as she spoke. He looked at her once; after that they sat for a while in silence, staring at nothing.
‘You want a smoke?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’
He rolled a cigarette for each of them. Her hands were shaking too much to hold the match and he lit it for her. He sat beside her, frowning.
‘Fuck you, Luce, why did you do it?’ The words burst out of him too loudly. She tried to quieten him but he shook her off. ‘Just because Graeme — ’
‘It’s not “just because Graeme”,’ she replied in a tight, bitter voice.
‘It is. Don’t you say that to me. He put you up to this and you let him.’
‘No. He didn’t. I mean that, Greg. He didn’t. I went after this. Me.
I did. You can’t change that.’
‘Fucking bullshit!’
‘No, it’s true.’ Lucy frowned. She dropped her barely smoked cigarette onto the wet ground. ‘I can’t smoke, I can’t do anything. My throat’s so tight, I can’t breathe.’
‘Why don’t you come over to Wheelo’s? You can hide out there for a while. He’ll have something to loosen you up a bit.’
She shook her head.
‘No, I don’t want to do that. I’ve got to go back and have a look.
I’ve got to make sure I really did it. Weird.’
They sat there for a few moments longer. People walking through the park glanced at them then looked away. A woman stared; the boy made a lewd face at her and she hurried on. Lucy stood up quickly, hoisting her backpack.
‘I’ve got to go. And I’ve got to see Graeme as well, I promised him I’d go and see him. He said to me last night, you know, if your courage fails you, don’t worry. You just come back here to me anyway and we’ll talk and we’ll see where we go from there. Well, I am. He’s got to tell me this is okay.’
‘Oh yeah, and it’s got nothing to do with him — ’
‘You don’t understand it.’
‘I don’t want to. You didn’t have to do this. You shouldn’t have, Luce. You’re the one who gets to live with it, not him. You know, for the rest of your life, when you wake up in the morning, you’re always going to know you did this. But he’s not. He’s just going to lie there and jerk himself off and not give a shit. Anyway, it’s too fucking dangerous. They put you away for ever for things like this.’
There was a silence in which they looked at each other.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t Graeme. It’s me. All right? It’s me.’
‘ It fucking is not! ’
The boy threw his own cigarette on the ground. She looked around, not knowing what to say. For the first time, she thought she might cry.
‘When am I going to see you next?’ he asked.
‘Later on. This evening. I’ll see Graeme and I’ll come by Wheelo’s later. I might sleep there if that’s okay.’
‘Yeah, that’s okay. I’ll see you there. I’m not going back to the refuge now. There’s no way I’m going to stay at Preacher Graeme’s community fucking refuge ever again after this. I don’t care if I am supposed to be living there. I don’t care what you say about him, that guy just fucking scares me so much, I don’t like going near him anyway. But I am never going anywhere near him again after this. You shouldn’t have let him do this to you, Luce. Not ever.’ He was shaking his head angrily. ‘You promise me you’ll be there tonight?’
‘Yeah, I promise.’
‘Okay.’
He rubbed his face. The anger had gone out of his voice, now he was only sad.
‘Fuck you, Luce, the things you do. You be there. We’ve got to work out what we’re going to do now.’
‘I’ll be there.’
She walked away, back across the park to the street, turning to wave goodbye to him as she went, and saw him, still seated and waving back to her, as she waited to cross the road.