Ashort time after the Firewall had stopped talking to Turtle, Louise placed a transcript of their conversation on Harrigan’s desk. He read it over and said he would keep it. Once Louise had left, he rang Susie and asked her how Toby was.
‘Tim’s with him at the moment,’ she said, ‘I’ll check.’
Eventually she was back on the line.
‘He’s okay, Paul. He is upset but he doesn’t want to talk to anyone about it.’
‘I’m coming over to see him now,’ he said.
‘No, don’t.’ She spoke quickly. ‘He said you would do that and he doesn’t want you to. I have to tell you that.’
There was a brief silence in which Harrigan did not trust himself to reply.
‘Paul — if you can just accept this. We can look after him from our end. He’s not going into spasm or anything like that. But he needs his own space. You have to give him his space.’
‘You tell him from me, I’ll be there tomorrow morning no matter what. Unless he wants to get in touch with me beforehand and ask me to come earlier. But I’ll be there tomorrow regardless.’
‘I’ll tell him that, that’s not a problem.’
‘Good.’
He hung up and sat reading over the transcript.
I am not my father. Did I ever say you were, Toby? I’ve only ever wanted you to be yourself. I must have told you that.
The only cure for this investigation was to pass it to someone else
— which he would not do because there was no one he trusted — or to solve it as soon as he could. In his experience, the emotions were usually deadened by fatigue, and constant work almost always resulted in lasting fatigue. On this thought he went back to work, reviewing, checking, reporting, requesting follow-ups, driving his team the way he drove himself.
He was relieved when the phone call from the hospital came through to Grace later that afternoon. She appeared in his doorway to say that she was on her way and they went in their separate cars. Out on the streets, peak hour was in full flow, the traffic edged along. The Firewall’s website had infected him, it muscled in on his sensibilities at the end of the day. He had the sense that the roads were crowded with people fleeing the city. He joined in with them, feeling as much at a loose end as anyone else.
At St Vincent’s, the bright corridors and the murmur of noise gave some sense of activity to this end-of-world feel on a chill winter’s day.
Grace was waiting for him. When Harrigan appeared, she thought the lights had over-painted his face with a sheen curiously like the stage make-up she used to wear. Why not? To her observation, he spent a fair amount of his time performing for others. Together they went upstairs to the intensive care ward, where Matthew was waiting for them in the ante-chamber.
Harrigan, seeing him for the first time since the shooting, took in the shorn hair and the black mourning.
‘Hello, Matthew. How are you?’ he said.
‘You said you’d catch her,’ Matthew replied, his arms folded.
‘We will. That’s a promise.’
‘You haven’t yet. But if you don’t, I will. And then she’ll pay, she’ll really pay. That’s a real promise, that’s not just a wank.’
‘You won’t have to do that because we will find her. But right now we’re here to see your mother. Every bit helps. Every step’s a step along the way.’ Harrigan had no other reply.
‘If I were you, I wouldn’t have the nerve to tell people that sort of shit. I’d be too fucking embarrassed,’ Matthew said, and walked away.
Harrigan watched him go, expressionless.
‘Bear with me while I remember your reports,’ he said to Grace. ‘Is he like that towards you?’
‘He’s not that aggressive with me but it’s the same thing. He lashes out at everyone and he won’t let anyone reach him. He can’t last, one day he has to break.’
Harrigan thought that when that happened he did not want to see it.
In the glass room, Dr Agnes Liu lay in her high hospital bed on a mass of pillows which her nurse was rearranging carefully.
‘Whatever Agnes thinks,’ her doctor was saying to Grace, ‘she’s not up to any marathon sessions. If I have to, I’m going to close it down.
I’m warning you in advance.’
‘I’ll take it very gently,’ she replied.
Harrigan stood a little out of range of Agnes Liu’s vision, waiting and watching.
Inside the room the nurse nodded to Grace and then sat to the side.
A human odour, of injury and sickness, and another, of antiseptic, filled the room. Grace sat beside Agnes Liu, the speaker to her miniature cassette recorder affixed to her lapel.
‘How are you, Agnes?’ she said.
‘I think that everybody worries too much,’ the woman replied. ‘But I’m not used to being the patient.’
She took Grace’s hand as she spoke and Grace leaned forward.
Shock had worn Agnes Liu’s face, a fine mix of Anglo-Australian and Chinese descent, to its constitutive bones. She was in her early forties.
Her eyes were dark, her skin ivory-pale. Her black hair had been lately washed and brushed out to display silver-grey lights curling back from her forehead.
‘Where’s Matthew? He’s very angry with me for talking to you. I told him it has to be done.’
‘He’s outside. I spoke to him just now.’
‘How is he?’
‘He’s all right. He’s coping. He’s a very strong boy.’
Agnes spoke each phrase as something short and measured, the careful apportioning of a limited strength. ‘Yes, he is. But he doesn’t know how to hide things yet. You have to realise, I was taught never to let inconvenience make me lose my composure. My mother met my father at university. She fell in love and they married. In 1955. She was eighteen. It was a scandal, her family didn’t speak to her again for decades. My grandmother, my father’s mother, she was as bad. She refused to welcome her. We always had to keep up appearances no matter how we felt. Matthew doesn’t know how to do that yet. When I’m better, I’ll talk to him.’
She stopped.
‘Do you know what I remember most about the morning I was shot? That girl. How we looked at each other. I turned and she was there on the street. Just there. Just in front of me. With a gun. I remember thinking, oh, that’s so small. And I looked at her. We were looking each other in the eyes. And I knew she was going to kill me. I knew it so naturally. Oh, here’s someone for an appointment, I thought it like that. I was looking her in the eyes when she fired. I thought, I know you.
‘I’ve been lying here thinking it over ever since. Thinking, how can you know who someone is when all you can see of them is their eyes?
But I remembered other things as well and I thought, yes, it’s her. About four months ago, someone called. My home number. I don’t give that to anyone. None of us do. But this person had it. She said, do you know who I am? I said, no. How could I? She was just a voice. She said, I am the butcher’s daughter. Did I remember now? No, I didn’t, not then. She said I was a murderer and one day I would die for what I had done. She was crying. I hung up at once. We got a new phone number. I put it out of my mind. I have to put that sort of thing out of my mind.’
She paused, everything became still.
‘I can’t remember every detail. There are gaps. But I can remember this. One day — when Matthew was nine, I think, around then — one very hot day, I remember everyone saying how hot it was. The air conditioning could barely cope. This woman brought her daughter into one of the clinics. It was late morning. They didn’t have an appointment. This child, she looked so ill, and so young. I said I would see her right away. And then she miscarried, almost immediately, right there in the reception. There was so much blood, I … There were women there, they had brought their children in for check-ups, older women, they saw it all. We called an ambulance. I said to this woman
— do you want to drive your own car? Or do you want to go in the ambulance? They didn’t have a car. They’d come by train, and bus.
Some extraordinary distance. I said to this woman, I don’t know how your daughter survived the trip. Couldn’t you see how sick she was?
Why did you come here? It’s so far away. Someone told me about you, she said. I didn’t know what else to do. But if the only way to get to hospital was to go in the ambulance, then she would go in the ambulance. We were all shocked. She was so unmoved. In the end one of my staff drove her. I thought, that poor child.’
Again there was a pause. Grace glanced up at the nurse.
‘I want to keep talking,’ Agnes Liu said, and they waited.
‘Agnes,’ Grace spoke quietly, ‘can you remember where they lived?
Just the suburb?’
‘I’ve tried to but I can’t — I have a blank.’
‘The clinic?’
‘No. I travel, you see. I go from clinic to clinic. I want to make sure things are being done in the right way. I can’t picture where I was. I know these things happened but I can’t picture any of it.’
Include five possibilities out of five clinics, Harrigan thought, standing outside.
‘I rang the hospital that evening to see how she was. She was already home, they said. Her father had come to get her. I was furious with them. I said, she needed care. Oh, they were so busy. There was no staff, no one had realised. They had no address for her. Or not one that made any sense. There was nothing I could do. But I was distressed. I thought, why was any of that necessary? Then one day -
quite a few months later, I’m not sure how long — this woman, she came to the clinic again. They had an appointment with me but I didn’t know the name. I think it was a different name, I can’t remember what it was. She wanted to see me.
‘I spoke to her in my office. The first thing she said was, we have a car this time. I didn’t quite know what to say. Her daughter was pregnant again, she said. She wanted an abortion, she was waiting outside in the car now. Would I do it? I was flabbergasted. I said, why have you come to see me again? Oh, she said, I didn’t know where else to go. I said, what does your daughter want? Oh, this is what she wants. And then the woman said — I didn’t know if she was being deliberately stupid — my daughter’s uncontrollable. My husband wants her to go on the pill so this doesn’t happen again. He doesn’t like it.
‘There are times when I’m talking to people, when I’m watching their faces. I looked at this woman and I wondered, is this stupidity or cunning? I don’t know. But it’s evil, whatever it is. I said I wasn’t prepared to do that. Her daughter was young, I think she was only fifteen. It’s not good to go on the pill at that age. I asked her to bring the girl in. I spoke to her privately, I insisted. I asked her about her boyfriend. She gaped at me. I asked her about her father. She didn’t seem to know what I meant. She said he was a butcher. Yes, I thought.
I asked was this what she wanted? She said, yes. What else could she say? The mother was waiting outside my office. And she looked at me.
I can only say I knew — I was certain from the look on her face — that this child’s father was the father of her child. I thought, yes, this is cunning. You want to implicate me. This is your way of shifting the blame. If I know, it’s not your fault, is it? It’s mine. I felt ill.
‘What should I have done? Call the police? Throw them out? I thought, I have an obligation. I have to protect this child from injury.
I can perform this abortion and then I know it will be done properly, not some bungled thing. I wouldn’t have trusted the woman not to do something dreadful. I said to her that I needed family details, would she fill out a form? She did. I performed the abortion. And when it was over, the child began to cry. I thought she would never stop. I didn’t wait. I went and I called the police. But when I was on the phone, I saw the woman dragging her daughter out of the recovery room. I didn’t know what to do.
‘I put the phone down and I went after them. Out to the car park.
I stopped them leaving. The girl was in the back seat, curled up. Still crying, I think. The car door was locked. I said to the woman through the window, she can’t have sexual relations with anyone for at least a fortnight. They had to know that. It was all I could do for the girl. This woman just drove away. She almost knocked me down. I rang the police. Then I found out from them — every detail this woman had given me was false. Of course. I was so naive to think otherwise. I still don’t know if I did the right thing.’ She stopped, closing her eyes. ‘I think, that girl crying in the back seat — was she someone who hated me for what I did? I don’t know.’
There was a pause.
‘Could you describe her to us, Agnes? Would that be possible?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure — her face is there but I don’t know how to … She was so young … ’
Standing outside, the doctor signalled to the nurse.
‘That’s it. You’re putting too much pressure on her,’ he said to Harrigan. ‘We’re finished.’
The nurse touched Grace on the shoulder. Grace nodded. She began to disengage her hand.
‘I’ll leave it there, Agnes. Don’t feel you have to think about it any more. Thank you for giving us that. That information’s very important.’
‘Wait,’ Agnes said, in a voice that was too soft to be heard by anyone else, ‘come closer.’
Grace bent down, the woman whispered in her ear.
‘I know you. You came to a clinic. This mad woman was bothering us. You threw her out.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘You look better. Much better than you did.’
Her hand slipped away and Grace found herself outside the room with Harrigan, watching the doctor and nurse bend over the bed.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to Harrigan and took refuge in the Ladies, holding tissues under her eyes to stop the tears from brimming down her cheeks. Mascara flickered fine black speckles onto the white paper.
Holding herself in grip, she repaired her make-up and then went outside to find Harrigan waiting for her in the corridor.
‘The doc’s okay,’ he said, studying her face. ‘She’s out to it but she’s okay. We’ve been told we can go home now. How are you?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Do you want me to buy you a cup of coffee? Since you don’t drink.’
‘A cigarette is what I really need,’ Grace replied, letting a chink of her feelings out.
‘Why don’t we try for both?’ he said. ‘Let’s take half an hour off.
We can spare each other that much time.’
In a coffee shop nearby, where you could sit in an individual booth unwatched by the crowd, Harrigan ordered at great expense a short black and a strong flat white from a silver-studded waiter. Grace lit a cigarette and inhaled the poisonous smoke with gratitude. She forced a shiver down her spine, releasing tension, and came back to the present to find Harrigan watching her from the other side of the table.
‘That was a nasty story,’ she said.
There was no sympathy for the Firewall in Harrigan at that moment. ‘You can say that,’ he replied. ‘I can tell you I’ve heard worse.
It’s not a new story.’
What could be worse? Grace found herself unexpectedly shaken by this reply.
‘No,’ she said and then was silent, staring at the tablecloth, drawing on her cigarette. When she looked up, Harrigan saw an expression of extraordinary sadness cross her face.
‘We don’t even know it’s her, do we? The doc could be talking about someone else who’s got nothing to do with this,’ she said.
‘She could be, that’s possible. I don’t think it’s very likely but it’s possible.’
‘Well, if it is her, then why? Why take it out on the doc? Why not just go and shoot your own rubbish father if he’s done something like that to you? Or your idiot mother. Now, that would be justifiable homicide. I wouldn’t convict her.’
She drew down more smoke, an angry glint in her eye. Harrigan found himself laughing dryly.
‘Good question. We can assume she’s been manipulated in some way. But I wouldn’t say that explained her.’
The waiter brought their coffees. After a few seconds’ hesitation, Harrigan ordered a neat whisky. He looked at Grace to see if she wanted anything else as well but she shook her head.
‘If you look at everything about her,’ she said, ‘she’s such a wild card. How far can you manipulate someone like that?’
‘I think our friendly neighbourhood preacher would consider it a challenge,’ Harrigan said. ‘Now there’s someone who wouldn’t like some upstart girl getting up his nose if she wasn’t doing what he wanted.’
He was tapping his fingers on the table top as he spoke.
‘He’d get a kick out of doing that? Putting a gun in her hand and saying, go out and use it?’ Grace asked.
‘He’d love it.’ Harrigan was musing. ‘Take a good look at him the next time he comes in. I don’t think I’ve met many people more cold-blooded than he is.’
‘No? Haven’t you dealt with some really choice characters — serial killers, people like that?’
‘No one worth talking about. People like that are nothing, Grace.
They’re an empty space. Their only quality is how dangerous they are.
Someone like that is strictly business. You run them to earth, you put them away, you forget their existence. They’re not worth one second of your time.’
The waiter placed a shot glass containing a thimbleful of whisky on the table. He amended the bill before returning to drape himself decoratively over the bar. Harrigan glanced at the sum charged and wondered if he should not have taken out a mortgage on his house before deciding he needed an evening heart-starter.
‘Then she’s not like the preacher,’ Grace said. ‘If that’s what he is, she isn’t like that.’
‘How do you know she’s not?’
Grace ashed out her cigarette and wanted to light another but did not.
‘She was raped,’ she said to Harrigan, looking at him directly, preventing her voice from shaking. ‘I’m not saying it justifies anything, but it does give her a reason for what she did.’
‘A reason? Her reason for shooting down two bystanders is that she was raped?’
Grace’s back was immediately bathed in a cold sweat. ‘You don’t think that matters?’
‘No, that’s not what I said. And it’s not what I think either.’
‘You heard the story,’ she said, with forced detachment. ‘It wasn’t exactly straightforward. Not that I think it’s ever straightforward.
Why wouldn’t it be a reason?’
‘Do you think reason is the word you want to use?’
Grace folded her arms and leaned a little forward, resting on the table.
‘Maybe it is. It’s a reason to her even if it’s not for us. Compulsion, if you think that’s a better word. Maybe I do want to get into her head so I know why she does what she does.’
‘You want to be her?’
‘For a little while maybe. Just to get the insight.’
‘Grace, could you shoot down two people in cold blood?’
‘I don’t think she did act in cold blood. But no, if you’re asking me.
I hope I couldn’t.’
She gave in and lit another cigarette.
‘Then you can’t be her. For the exact same reason you say you want to. She’s got no insight into what she’s doing, she can’t have.
And you do.’
‘I want to know that she’s human. I want to treat her like she is.’
‘Why does someone like you want to get down in the dirt with someone like her?’ he asked.
Why does your son? To have asked him this question would have been unforgivable.
‘Is it dirt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, if that’s what it is, we’re all down in it, aren’t we? One way or another. It’s all just people doing what they do to each other all the time. Lovely, lovely people.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t see myself down there. And there’s no way I’d ever see you down there. Not for one second.’
‘I can’t see it as hard and fast as that,’ she said. ‘It’s like a spectrum, we slide up and down it.’
‘Maybe. But some people like it down there, Grace, they like being in the dirt. They do things, they leave devastation behind them, and they walk away like it’s never happened. They don’t care. They’ll give you any excuse why they don’t have to think about what they’ve done.
I don’t believe either of us is like that.’
You don’t know who or what I am, Paul, she thought in reply.
There was a brief silence in which they looked at each other.
‘You’re tired,’ he said, thinking aloud.
‘Aren’t we all? So are you,’ she replied, crushing out her cigarette.
He did not answer.
‘That session got to me,’ she said. ‘More than I thought it would.’
‘That’s going to happen, it’s better to admit it upfront. Do you have something you do when you want to unwind?’ he asked.
‘I go and sink myself in music. I can get lost in it for hours. I might do that when I get home.’
‘Probably a good idea.’
Silence.
‘Do you have anything you do?’ she asked.
‘If it’s bad, I go and see my son. He always makes me feel like I’m a human being again. If I want a real break, I go fishing down the coast. I like to hear the sound of the sea. Nothing very exciting.’
Once more, they sat in silence. Why are we sitting talking like this, he thought? Why don’t you let me ask you home? I’ve got a sound system of my own even if the last time I bought a CD was a year ago and I can’t remember what it was. I’ve got a comfortable bed upstairs in my bedroom. I would love to see you sitting naked on my bed with your hair out on your shoulders, your mind as far away from work as it can get. He shook the thoughts out of his head.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I was just thinking about the work I’ve got to do,’ he said, slightly embarrassed, glad she could not see into his mind.
‘Yeah,’ she said, looking at him with that same sadness, ‘I won’t hold you up any longer.’
‘I wasn’t rushing you, Grace. Please don’t think I was.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I’ve got to go anyway. I’ve got work to do as well.
What do I owe you for the coffee?’
She was already on her feet, putting on her coat.
‘This is on me, I told you that. Why don’t you go home if you’re feeling low. Give me the tape and I’ll get it written up.’
‘Yeah, okay. Thanks.’
She set the tape on the table without looking at him and walked out, leaving him with his own company, an unfinished coffee and a half-drunk whisky, asking himself what it had all meant. If it had meant anything at all. He watched her through the window of the coffee shop as she crossed the street, thinking that he had made her a gift of his time when he had none to spare and she had not noticed.
He finished his whisky, left a note on the table to pay and walked out as well, going back to work.
Out on Oxford Street in the bright lights and the moving traffic Grace felt savage, emotional pain, just as she had in the hospital; the cold air woke her to its rawness. Whatever you want, Harrigan, I don’t want you to waste your time with me. I don’t need to feel anything for you that’s just going to go nowhere.
This was an old grief, wasted emotion, possibilities that die at birth.
She worked to put him out of her mind as she stood at the traffic lights.
She might keep Harrigan out of her head but the Firewall stayed on, hooked into her. Grace crossed the wide road with everyone else, pinned between the bright lights of the cars. Your father did rape you, didn’t he?
And your mother stood by and she let him. And then they cleaned you up when they needed to without even talking to you. I know how you feel, I’ve been there once upon a time myself. But it wasn’t your father.
This quiet whisper of fact in Grace’s mind nonetheless held the implication of its reverse: that other fathers did, something scarcely comprehensible to her in terms of her own experience. In terms of her work, it was a simple fact, like a piece of rock which for some reason had a particular shape. It was just the way it was.
At home, she stripped, washed, changed, shook out her hair, brushing it until it shone, but even so, in her tiny lounge room the walls closed in. She switched off the main lights and sat on her couch, looking out at the streets below, to the small scrape of beach in the near distance. On her lap, she held a red silk box fastened with an ivory catch. After a while, she opened the box and set out its contents on the coffee table. Saucers, miniature cups with elegant handles, an ornamental teapot, a sugar bowl, all removed from their pockets of faintly yellowing white silk. A tea set, her grandfather’s gift to her when she was nine, something pretty and delicate, bought in Hong Kong when he was twenty. The very first time she had taken these pieces out to look at them, she had cracked the fragile bowl. Her grandfather had comforted her as she cried. ‘Don’t worry, Gracie,’ he said, laughing at her softly, cuddling her, ‘nothing is for ever.’
Even in the soft light, this faintest of hairline cracks threw a shadow on the fine china, an indelible discoloration of age. If she turned the bowl towards a certain fall of the light, she could not see the crack, only a courtesan’s face and dark hair in a soft surrounding cloud. The bowl sat in Grace’s hands as she might have held a tiny living child, a child whose watching eyes looked out at the world from a perspective no one else could reach, but who could not speak. This was her own thought child, the child Grace chose not to have. Its brief existence lived on in her as an only twin might carry somewhere in her body the partially formed foetus of her brother or sister, knowing it is there, curled and sleeping, that it could have grown and separated but has not done so. A ghost fixed as a part its mother’s being, as something not quite living and not quite dead.
I am not sorry, she thought. I cried then and I think about it now but I am not sorry. All I felt when it was over was relief. That’s all I feel now.
Nothing is for ever. She set the pieces of china out in a pattern on the coffee table. Moonlight and streetlight streamed in through the windows. In this light, the fine white china was almost radiant, its delicate shapes formed into a pattern of partial shadows fitted against a pale transparency. Grace’s mind was making images, of a mother and daughter sitting side by side on a train or a bus, both of them silent, both of them looking straight ahead at nothing perhaps, the young girl uncertain of their destination and left wondering if she was going to live long enough to reach it. What would they say to each other, sitting side by side like that? Nothing. Nothing at all.
She could not stay in this room, it was too small. Grace phoned her old lover and asked him for sanctuary.
‘Come on around, sweetheart. You’re always welcome. I’ll put some music on. I’ll even indulge you in some Elvis Costello. Christ!’ he said.
Grace laughed.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Will I pick up some takeaway for us?’
‘Yeah, do that. You can help me eat it.’
‘Okay. We can share it with some apple juice.’
She heard him laugh on the other end of the line.
‘Not what we used to do,’ he said.
‘No. See you soon anyway.’
Grace binned her cigarettes and then dropped her beeper into her bag but made sure that her mobile phone was turned off for the duration. She stopped at a takeaway place, a glass window on the street that sold experimental mixtures of cuisine, and bought solace for herself and her old lover with the plastic containers. In her first months of abstinence from alcohol, the world had settled into a dry balance. Her mind had taken on something resembling clarity and she had rediscovered appetite and taste, qualities she had thought were lost for ever. Her brother, Nicholas, was a cook, an unexpected occupation for an army officer’s son. He had taught her how to eat in those first days, practising his cooking on her while they had shared a house together, where she had recovered and he had learned his art.
Now, if we were ever to have sex, Paul, I’d cook for us first, or I’d want us to eat somewhere nice, because food’s important. She and Harrigan would never do so, so the possibilities did not matter.
She drove up the coastline to the northern beaches, to Whale Beach.
The stars were distant out over the sea, made pale and small by the reflection of the city’s lights. She sang ‘Time after Time’ softly to herself as she drove.
By the time she arrived and could hear the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, she felt she could be herself. The outside light was on and the door was open and waiting for her. She didn’t come here often enough any more, not the way she’d used to. Another life was taking her over, pushing the old one to the side.
‘Hi, Frankie. How are you?’ she called out, walking in the door.
‘Hi there, Grace. Pretty good tonight.’
He was waiting for her in a wheelchair in the centre of a wide white room with polished floorboards and windows that looked out over the sea. A big man, even in his chair, with thick black curly hair and a bright red shirt covering his broad chest. He glided towards her. She put her collection of plastic tubs down on a table.
‘You look good,’ she said, leaning down to kiss his cheek, hugging him from where she stood.
‘How are you, more to the point?’ he said, looking at her shrewdly.
‘I could be better. I need a break from work, it’s getting to me. I need to get back into the real world for a little while.’
‘What do you do that fucking awful job for? Why don’t you do something civilised with your life? Somewhere where you’d meet people with minds? You know. Cleaning railway station toilets or something like that.’
‘You know me, Frankie. I have to know. I have to keep pushing to see what’s next. Why else?’
He laughed. He had turned on the music; she went to the kitchen to put the food in the microwave, to get forks and spoons, a drinking cup that did not spill its contents when the drinker’s hands shook.
‘Where’s Phyllis tonight? Did you give her the night off?’ she asked when she reappeared with a tray, wondering where Frankie’s live-in nurse had got to.
‘Yeah, I gave her a break. I thought she might like some time to herself.’
‘Yeah. She probably would. We can have some to ourselves now as well.’
Tonight, Grace and her old life and her old lover would be just comfort enough for each other. Nothing much else was necessary.