Lucy sat out on the back doorstep smoking, wrapped in her old coat, thinking that nothing existed except this time and this place.
She would just take each minute as it was now, give it no other meaning than the sight of the light in the sky, each breath she took, each beat of her heart.
She was waiting to see her father. As the time came closer, she wondered why she wanted something quite so much as this. Her memory of him clung to her with the strength of a baby’s grip. She wanted to cut him loose and then just to live, in each instant, without any connection to the past or the future, without weight. Just to exist in pure, unending light. When her phone rang, she thought, someone is chasing me. Why? I haven’t anything to give them. I have nothing.
All I do is exist.
‘Lucy,’ the preacher said in an angry voice. ‘How are you?’
‘I told you not to call me, Graeme,’ she replied, uninterested. ‘I said I’d call you.’
‘I had to call you, Lucy,’ he said, ‘I have some very bad news for you.’
‘What?’ She was suddenly frightened.
‘I can’t get there tonight. You will have to wait until tomorrow when I can put some other arrangements in place.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I am being watched by the police.’
‘How do they know about you?’ she asked.
‘Through Greg, Lucy. How else? You had to tell him what you’d done. And because of that, they are at my door. They believe I’m involved. Which is all they need to think to make themselves troublesome.’
‘Well, you are involved, aren’t you, Graeme? So they’re not wrong there,’ Lucy replied with a grin. ‘Anyway, how do you know they’re watching you?’
‘Because one of them came down here today. He sat in the congregation, he insulted everyone, he was so much better than the rest of us. He thinks he is so clever. He will find out that he is not. He has no power, whatever he thinks. You go and find yesterday’s paper, Lucy.
You’ll see him in there. Swollen with arrogance like the sons of Belial.’
Lucy’s hands were shaking, she swallowed fear.
‘In the paper,’ she said, mechanically.
‘Yes. You look at that face and you’ll see the son of the devil.’
‘You don’t know that. He could be anyone. He could be someone’s father for all you know.’
‘It doesn’t matter who this person is, Lucy, he is still our enemy. He is someone who does not deserve to live. You know who people are when you see who they consort with. Now you listen to me, I am telling you this.’ Lucy was silenced by the fury that came across the line. ‘I have seen who they are. I have been there. I have walked into their den, I have sat and talked with them. I have seen who works there. I met one and I knew her. I knew her face, I knew that name. Because I know who these people are, I make it my business to know. And when I got back to the Temple I searched our catalogue of witches and yes, there she was. That is who we are dealing with, Lucy. With the — ’
‘I don’t care about any of that just now, Graeme.’
She cut him off ruthlessly.
‘There’s only one thing I care about now and that’s Greg. I’ve got a car now and some money and I just want to get hold of Greg and go north, go away, wherever. So you don’t have to worry about anything, because I am just going to go away and forget about you all. And you had better let me do that. Because I really don’t care what happens to me. But I bet you care what happens to you. I’ll see you tomorrow night. You be there. You can do it.’
‘Lucy, there are certain things you should think about first.’ The preacher’s voice had become calm. ‘Wherever you go, the police will find you. And what are you going to do then?’
‘How are they going to find me? They don’t know who I am. They can’t prove anything. No one’s going to tell them about me. You won’t. Greg won’t.’
Neither would Stephen, he would just pretend that he had never known in the first place. Despite this, Lucy’s confidence was shaken.
‘No,’ the preacher replied in his usual voice, ‘that’s very true. Greg will not betray you, Lucy, now or ever. I’ll see you tomorrow night in that case. I’m sure we have a great deal to talk about. Goodbye.’
He was gone more quickly than she expected. She was sitting there wondering why he had cut the line so abruptly when Melanie touched her on her shoulder.
‘Do you want to see Dad now?’ she asked. ‘He’s awake and he’s looking rested at the moment.’
‘Yeah, okay. I’ll just get myself together first.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll tell him you’ll be a couple of minutes.’
This early July afternoon, the door to her father’s room was open to her. As Lucy approached, she smelled the coldness and cleanliness of the outside air. The windows had been opened, the smell of sickness was being cleaned out, if only temporarily. The room looked out over the national park, Lucy could see the high white clouds in the wide curve of a pale sky and the sea of trees reaching to the horizon.
Her father sat up against his pillows, his arms resting on floral sheets. As she stood hesitantly in the doorway, he spoke to her.
‘My little girl,’ he said.
She did not reply. She looked around. Melanie was sitting in a chair near the window.
‘Come on in. Come and talk to your old man. Come and give me a kiss,’ he said.
She stood at the end of the bed. It was old-fashioned with a slatted wooden bedhead and she rested her hands on it, looking at him. She was seeing him in x-ray, every impurity had been burned away by sickness, only a faint pale fire remained inside him which was consuming itself.
The man she had known four years ago no longer existed. Only the voice was the same, that cajoling voice persuading you to what he wanted, to believe what he said. Seeing him, she realised she did not have to tell him that she had nothing to forgive him for. There was no compulsion on her to do so. She could walk out of here now and it would all be over soon in any case; Melanie and Stephen would be released.
‘Don’t just stand there, Lucy. Come and give your old man a kiss.’
She realised with a faint shock that she could do this. She went up to him and kissed him on the forehead and, for a short moment, felt the dry texture of his skin, something she had known well, something she had tried to scrub away, sometimes ferociously. She found herself shrugging the memory away as something finally used up, a cicada’s shell, brittle and transparent.
‘We’ve got nothing to blame each other for, have we? You’re going to tell me that, aren’t you, Luce?’
‘I used to have, Dad,’ she said, speaking at last. ‘But I don’t any more. You say you don’t blame me for leaving you and Mum and not telling you where I was going. And now I don’t care about what’s happened between us. I can’t hurt you any more and you can’t hurt me. You can’t do anything to me ever again. So I am just going to walk away from you all.’
‘Luce … ’
Melanie spoke fearfully, leaning forward in her chair, her body tensed, but their father was not quite listening.
‘You don’t have anything to hold against me,’ he said. ‘You said that.’
She opened her mouth to say that she did and he should know that; it was just that she was finishing with him. But she did not speak it.
She looked at him. The man lying in bed before her had been reduced to the fragility of a broken spider’s web.
‘No, I don’t, Dad. You can sleep on that.’
It was as much as she could say to him but it was enough.
‘I knew that’s what you thought in your heart of hearts. I knew you understood me. Everything between us, it didn’t matter. It was normal, you know that. I knew you’d get over the blame game one day,’ he said.
‘Yeah, okay, Dad. It is all over. I’ll go now,’ she said, needing to be out of there.
He nodded, his eyes were closing. At the door Melanie caught her by the hand briefly.
‘Thanks for doing that,’ she said.
Lucy smiled without meaning it and was gone. She went downstairs, out of the back door and found the dog sitting in her kennel. ‘Come on, girl,’ she said and the dog followed her, down into the garden, to the escarpment.
Lucy stopped part of the way down to look at a camellia bush: the blossoms were a pale pink and damp with the night’s rain, the leaves shining in the sun. It had been one of her grandmother’s favourites for the colour and the shape of the flower. Lucy looked at it without any words in her head to describe it; it became an image fixed permanently in her mind as something solely visual. She had lost the power of speech, of thought based on the use of words. The impressions in her mind were of images, of what was felt and seen only, her knowledge of language had been washed out of her. She stood there for some moments before walking down through the garden and then into the bushland. Eventually, she stopped to sit at the edge of the stream and, in this space, to forget the world existed until she went out into it again. She would sleep at the house tonight and then, in the very early dawn, she would be gone.