In Railway Square the traffic flowed in a solid roar and the rainy air smelled of petrol. Lucy, lost in her thoughts, barely saw the crowds around her. No, Greg, it’s not just Graeme. You should know that, you know me, we’ve been together for a while now. We’ve slept in doorways, under bridges, anywhere there was a bit of warmth. You and me hanging on to each other with nothing but old clothes and newspapers between us. You’ve seen me when I’m wasted and the only thing I want to feel is nothing. When the only thing that keeps me going is the blood pumping through my veins because I can’t fucking stop it. Sometimes I want that blood to run down the nearest drain and take me with it. But it’s not just mine any more, it’s someone else’s as well. I think it must be painted all over the sky.
She looked up, breaking out of her trance; the expanse of sky above the station was grey. The roadway opened into George Street, taking the traffic past the verdigris steeple of Christ Church St Laurence before moving on towards the harbour. She was travelling in the opposite direction, past the ugly, squared tower of the University of Technology. In the last year, she had spent hours inside its student computer rooms, out of the heat or the chill of the day, opening up new worlds through a false student account. Knock on the right door at UTS after hours and someone who was just a boy, white-faced and quietly spoken, would give you a log-on ID and a password for nothing, with no questions asked. Lucy had not tried to guess his reasons for doing this; she no longer asked herself why anyone did what they did. That question had been replaced in her mind a long time ago by others. Are there any limits to what people do? Why do they like to be so cruel to each other? When she asked this aloud, people laughed and called her stupid.
The questions drove her as she gained skill in using the software and built her own website, both in the computer rooms and on her own stolen machine. Everything she fashioned worked around this insoluble puzzle, which never gave ground to her. Duplicating the things she had met with in her life and seen out on the Sydney streets
— beatings, robberies, rape — and fixing them as electronic impulses on a screen, she transformed them into something she could suspend out of time. She was safe in the computer rooms and the events she recreated on her website were controlled, they could not hurt her. She studied the images she built, remaking them if she needed to, trying to understand what it must mean to hurt someone or to shoot them dead.
Today she did not stop, her restless, jerky energy drove her on past the pubs, restaurants and takeaway bars to the serrated wall of the Carlton brewery. Further up Broadway, close to the park, stood two old, ornate buildings with elaborate clock towers supporting translucent spheres like fragile crystal worlds. In the middle distance, Lucy saw what she had come to find. The usually swift flow of traffic down Broadway was forced to slow before negotiating a hazard marked by a string of plastic blue police ribbons snapping in the wind.
Access to a particular side street had been cordoned off and police cars were parked on the road and the footpath.
Although she had been waiting to see it, she stopped abruptly to lean against the rough wall of the brewery and wait until the blood had stopped pounding in her head. Images from her website began to surge through her mind. In her electronic world, the counterfeit Lucy pulled the trigger, the woman doctor died under the gun, and once that switch was thrown, catastrophe was initiated. The buildings around the doctor began to burn, the sky was split open to rain down green fire, nuclear flame burst out onto Broadway and all the buildings that surrounded Lucy where she stood now, exploded. A fireball roared the breadth of the roadway and ate up stick figures and toy cars.
Outside of her head, in the ordinary daylight, she watched the world move on routinely around her. She was alien to everyone passing her by, someone the crowds would turn on if they knew what she had done.
She held the contrasting visions side by side in her head but the electronic images were her true reference points. What existed around her — these buildings, everyday life, tangible things and immovable structures — were hollow, they had no reliable substance. They hid something that stank to her, something that was dead and rotting.
She crossed against the traffic to the other side of the road, just another student from one of the universities. A small crowd had gathered opposite the police cordon, watching and talking underneath the yellow sign outside of St Barnabas’s Church that told the passing parade, ‘Forgiveness means not having to pretend any more.’ Lucy stopped amongst them, looking on, listening.
‘Two of them. Someone shot two people. And their boy was there watching.’
The words were taken up by the crowd and spread like an echo from an uncertain source.
That was me. I shot her. I waited for her inside that empty shop and then I went out into the street and I shot her. I shot the both of them.
No one turned on her for her unspoken words. The surrounding buildings were unchanged from their daily aspect. The uniformed police guarding the street looked around at the crowd, their faces expressionless with boredom. She could walk up to them and say, ‘You want me. I did that.’ Why didn’t she? They might only laugh at her, or even become angry, and then wave her on her way. Lucy waited for a few moments longer and then, there being nothing else to do, walked on.
She sat on a bench in Victoria Park, her backpack propped beside her, and stared at the ornamental ponds where the seagulls and ducks huddled in close to the shore. Brief sunlight brought a drab flush of yellow to the thin grass. Lucy glanced back towards Broadway, to the wide intersection where City Road fed its vehicles into the traffic. As the sunlight faded and the weather became dreary and dark, she saw the sporadic glow of headlights from the passing cars and the occasional gleam of neon from the shop fronts on the far side of the road. These lights were the only brightness to touch her; her visionary other-world had grown drab, its vivid dye had bled out of her into the watery air. From here she could see nothing of the police ribbons. She was isolated here. She could pretend that the shooting had never happened; and then, curiously, understood that she did not want to let her act of execution go, however bloody it had turned out to be.
The noise of surrounding traffic hung in suspension. The preternatural quiet held her in a sense of anticipation, she waited as the atmosphere became strangely claustrophobic, strangely lonely. She was chasing another memory down this emptiness. There was sunlight warming her, the sound of magpies carolling in the background, and Graeme’s voice as he spoke to her, rich as honey. They were sitting opposite each other at a picnic table someone had set out on the back lawn of a small private hospital.
‘Why, Lucy? Why do you need to go and live on the streets the way you do? You’ve been to school, you have an education. You’re an intelligent girl. Why do this to yourself?’
‘I’m playing a game. I call it dancing with death. I like doing that.
Didn’t you know that?’
‘Why death? Why not life?’
‘Why anything? I can do anything I like, you know.’
There was no other reason why she should have been at that tiny private hospital on the northwestern edge of the city, Greenwood Convalescent, a run-down place with few patients and an ageing doctor. She had been living rough and bingeing, deliberately chancing her luck with heroin. Pushing it, marrying lethal exhilaration with the thought that this rush might be her last chance to see daylight.
Grinning to herself each time that she came back to the light and thought, well, I’m still here, maybe next time I won’t be. I won’t know, will I? Do I care?
Detox was an option forced on her by Greg with the help of Ria, the woman from the Family Services Commission. Greenwood was the only place where she had been able to find Lucy a bed at short notice, tracked down after endless frantic phone calls to unresponsive agencies, none of whom had any space available. Lucy had agreed to go there on the fall of a coin.
Even so, Greenwood was a strange place in which to come to earth.
When Graeme introduced himself to her as her counsellor, he was the first normal-looking person she had met. He sat with her when she was in the throes of cold turkey while she told herself this was all the same roller coaster ride, the same coin, just another side, and she could get through it, she could survive anything. The underlying rule of Lucy’s game was that she took the consequences of her actions full on.
She hung on to every ache and sweat, every gripping pain, as a gift.
Pain was a gift, something in the fibre of her body which could be relied upon to assert her existence when everything else had deserted her. On the streets, anything was a currency and pain could be traded along with everything else. Plenty of people dealt in pain for the pleasure of it, looking for people to hurt, setting traps in public toilets and on empty beaches, boasting later, did you see what I did to them?
She’d never had the stomach for that. Her pride lay in what she could endure. If you couldn’t give pain, you took it: took it without showing you felt it and that made you as good as anyone else.
When the mists cleared and her roller coaster ride came to an end, she began to spend time with Graeme in the hospital garden, an overgrown place shaded by white eucalyptus trees. She was shaky from the brutal process, groggy with tranquillisers, smoking cigarettes one after the other. Graeme sat on the other side of the table, smiling as they talked. She watched him cynically through the spirals of cigarette smoke.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, insolently throwing back his own questions. ‘Why should you give a shit about me? You’re being paid to care, aren’t you? Because Ria sent me here from Family Services. You get paid for it.’
‘No, Lucy. I’m not being paid by anyone. You being here is a purely private arrangement. I actually do care what happens to you,’ he replied. ‘But if you want to know, I’m rebuilding my life as well. I’m just back from many happy years in the United States, the last few in California. The sun gets to you there, it wears you out a little. It’s a bit like here. But, of course, this is home.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said indifferently.
California was a mythical location for her, some gaudy place on the other side of the ocean made up of names known to her through television shows but whose physical reality was indistinct: Santa Monica Beach, Beverley Hills, Sunset Strip. Out of some strange ghost of politeness, she named these places to him and he smiled again.
‘Yes. I’ve been to all those places. Santa Monica’s a beautiful beach.
Perhaps you’ll go there one day.’
‘Yeah, one day maybe I will.’
She looked at him with contempt for the suggestion.
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Why shouldn’t you?’
She did not bother to reply. She stubbed out her cigarette, and then lit another.
‘You didn’t answer my question, Lucy. Why are you out there?’
She shrugged. ‘Because the world’s a piece of shit? Because everyone lives off everybody else? What does it matter what I do? So fucking what.’
‘Do you mean that, Lucy? Is that what you really think?’
‘Yeah. Don’t you think that way sometimes? Don’t you want to smash things up?’
She stopped, suddenly energyless. He waited for some moments after she had finished talking, looking at her.
‘Yes, Lucy, I do. There are many times when I feel like that.’
‘Do you?’
His reply sent a jolt of white anger into her head. ‘Well, I do it.
Smash things. You can do a fucking lot with a brick if you’re aiming it at a car. And it’s even better if you can get hold of a bit of metal pipe.
What do you do? Anything?’
‘In my own way, I do quite a lot of things,’ he replied. ‘I’ve dedicated my life to it. I know what you mean when you say the world is empty. I understand that.’
‘I didn’t say empty. I said shit.’
‘The meaning doesn’t change. The world is rotten. Its decay reaches up to Heaven. It’s that decay you smell, all the stench that is the world’s corruption.’
She shrugged again, surprised, uncertain how to reply.
‘And you are out there, Lucy, because the world is shit, as you call it?’
‘Yeah, I am,’ she said, very softly.
Her cigarette was finished again. She rubbed her eyes before lighting another. There was a pause and she began to talk as she rarely did.
‘I get sick of being out there though. You get hungry. I don’t stay out there all the time now, I come and go. I get rooms to live in, sometimes I can get the dole. And I work too. I’ve had jobs. Even me.’
She laughed cynically. ‘But you know how I mostly live? I steal. It’s the only thing I am good at. I’ve never been caught. I get tired though. I keep thinking, why am I out here, what am I going to do now?’
There was silence as she smoked.
‘In the end I just go back there. I keep going back because there isn’t anywhere else. I think that really is where I’m supposed to be.’
‘There’s something you’re not telling me, Lucy. Why are you so badly hurt? What happened to you?’
He seemed to speak out of genuine concern. Lucy had a test for people who said they were concerned for her, she knew how to prove they were liars. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and took out a small plastic wallet which contained a square of shiny dark blue material. She unwrapped the material and placed on the table a torn scrap of letterhead.
Because of this. Because this was the day. When she had thought, this is the end of the world for me, they can’t do this to me any more.
‘You really want to know about me?’ she asked. ‘Okay. You look at this. And you go and work it out. If you know so much.’
She pushed the piece of paper towards him and he picked it up.
‘You be careful with it,’ she snapped.
Her words, deliberately cryptic, were intended to make it clear to him that he couldn’t know, he couldn’t understand. No one could; it was knowledge privileged to her. No one could have the gall to pretend they knew. She looked at him. Go on. I dare you. I just fucking dare you.
He smoothed the torn paper flat onto the table. A scrap Lucy had ripped from a doctor’s note pad when no one was looking. Dr Agnes Liu. MB, BS (Syd.), FRACOG, MRCOG. The Women’s Whole Life Health Centres Inc.
‘I know this woman,’ he said eventually. ‘I know her very well.’
‘You can’t.’
‘But I do, Lucy. Why shouldn’t I? I know what this woman is, better than most. But not, I think, better than you. She’s an abortionist. A murderer. And someone took you to her, didn’t they? You didn’t go yourself. Someone took you there for the slaughter, Lucy. Because that’s what it was. A dual murder. You and your child. Isn’t that what happened?’
His clear eyes had become almost expressionless as he spoke to her.
She had nodded, unable to speak at first. She thought that she was feeling nothing.
‘My mother. Dragged me there. Twice. Didn’t even tell me where we were going. The first time they sent me on to hospital because I had this miscarriage right there in the reception. The second time round I worked out for myself what was going to happen.’
It was as much as she could say to begin with. He waited for her to continue. She spoke again, quickly, her words tripping over each other, as unstoppable and irretrievable as the gush of opened veins.
‘It was my dad. Did it to my little sister as well. Tried to anyway. I couldn’t stop him. Stevie did though. He’s my brother. He’s not as big as Dad so he didn’t help me. But when I left and he worked out what Dad was trying to do to Mel, he said he couldn’t handle it. He knocked Dad right out of the door, said he’d kill him if he touched her. He told me Mum just stood there with her mouth open. Dad’s a coward, you know. He never went near Mel again.’
Lucy laughed with relief as she talked.
‘Do you know my dad’s got cancer now? Did I tell you that? Stevie told me he hasn’t got that long to go. He’s playing around with dying too now. I can say to him, hey, Dad it’s you and me now. We’re both at the same game. How do you feel about that?’
Her voice was shaking.
‘And your mother took you to this woman.’ Graeme tapped the piece of paper. ‘And she helped your mother and your father hide from the world what he had done to you. Because that is what this woman is. Someone who has no conscience. Let me tell you what happened to you in there, Lucy, in that clinic — and let’s give it its true name, a Hellhole. She raped you once more. That’s what happened to you there. An evil, evil thing.’
The words entered her memory, fixing themselves as unconditional and unshakable truth, as tangible to her as the scrap of paper she always carried with her. The images of her memory converged. The fixed injury impressed onto her by her father — still felt, to the point that she wanted sometimes to scrub away her skin — coalesced into its parallel remembrance, the entry of steel into her vagina.
‘Yeah. That’s exactly what she did. You don’t know what happens in there. They hook you up, she cleans you out — it’s like you’re fucking nothing. And no one cared. They didn’t give a shit. How could she do that?’
Lucy had taken back the scrap of paper and begun folding it up, compressing it. Her actions were repetitive, compulsive. She did not cry.
Relief was spilling through her, her heart had opened out. She felt a strange lightness, an intoxication. Her mouth was open, her breathing sharp and shallow, breath that did not get down into her lungs.
‘Do you know what she said to my mum when we were driving away? She came out after us — Mum said she almost ran her down in the car park. Do you know what she said?’ She was staring at the piece of paper that she had folded small. ‘About me. She said to my mother, she can’t have sex for a fortnight. I thought, fuck you. No one is ever coming near me again, I don’t care what you say. I was gone after that.
As soon as I got home and I could get out of there. I was gone.’
‘Let me have that piece of paper, Lucy,’ he said to her gently. ‘You can trust me with it. I promise.’
She held it, her hands still shaking, feeling that to give it away was to give up some essential piece of herself. Even so, she handed it to him as he had asked.
‘You’ve got to be careful with that,’ she said. ‘The second time I was there, at that clinic, I took it. It’s to remind me that’s when I said, I’m out of here, I’m gone for ever. You can’t lose it.’
‘I will be careful with it. This is a very precious piece of paper, Lucy.
Wait here for me. Trust me.’
After he had gone, she lit another cigarette. Her hands continued to shake. When he came back, he placed a file on the table and took out of it a photograph of a woman’s face, scrawled with the word
‘Murderer’ and splashed with a translucent red dye.
‘This is her, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, it is.’
He smoothed out the torn paper and attached it to the photograph on the file, then set the documents between them.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this piece of paper is very important. You see, Lucy, this woman and you, you are connected. And that connection is indissoluble. This is her fate, Lucy, this scrap of paper. This paper is her crime against you, against God, against the world, and it is also her fate.’
He spoke as though they were two old friends who had always understood each other and who alone knew the real truth. He tapped the stains on the photograph.
‘Do you see the blood on this woman? This is your blood. She can’t escape you now because you know what she is. A mass murderer. A serial killer. You are one of her survivors. You can accuse her. You can stand up before the world and say, this woman is my murderer.
Someone who is paid to kill and takes pleasure in it. Someone who smiles each time another victim walks out of her abortuary carrying the same scars that torment you now. But she doesn’t care. It was your blood that she spilt, Lucy, your blood and the blood of your child. But she doesn’t care.’
The vehemence with which he spoke surprised her.
‘It was my dad too. And my garbage mother. It wasn’t just her.’
‘But your mother is a weak and foolish woman. And your father has been accounted for now, hasn’t he? He will answer for what he has done to you very soon. But not this woman. She is still out there, still free and practising her trade. On young girls like you.’
Lucy said nothing. Her cigarette hung from her fingers, burning, ash falling on the table.
‘She could have been worse,’ she said after a while. ‘Tried not to hurt me, I guess.’
‘That isn’t the point, is it?’
No, it wasn’t. Lucy looked at the rough surface of the picnic table.
Cruelty. This was her word, she sought it out and repeated it to herself, it carried the weight of her memory. The doctor asking her all those so-what questions. Is this what you want? How do I fucking know?
She had said only the quietest word in reply. Yes. She just wanted it over with.
She did not say any of this. She sat there shaking these thoughts out of her head while he watched her. She dropped her cigarette to the ground and did not crush it out. She could not speak, she sat with her hands in front of her mouth. He looked at her with his clear and gentle eyes.
‘I hate her, you know, for what she did to me. I hate them all. Mum, Dad. You shouldn’t do that sort of thing to people.’
‘She does what she does, Lucy, because she’s a murderer, pure and simple. She killed your child and tried to kill your spirit. But in your strength, you survived to bear witness. She should fear you. Because you know her.’
‘You know what I hear sometimes?’ Lucy said after a few moments.
‘I don’t know why. Kids crying, little kids. I hear them in my head.
They stay with me. Sometimes I think they are me.’
He smiled at her and closed the file.
‘I know of others who have been tormented like that. They don’t let you rest, do they? We’ll find a way to make them go away. You see, Lucy, here you are with people who understand you. Sit there. Try and relax your spine.’
He stood behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. He began to massage her neck, working at the tight knot of muscles. She felt his closeness, the human warmth, the imprint of his reassuring hands.
‘Listen to me. Those voices in your head. They are the voices of your heart as you say. But they’re your children as well.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘they didn’t ever exist. I don’t want them to.’
‘But they did exist. They were living. They were your children and they are still living. You and they are indivisible, it’s their grief that you’re hearing.’
‘I just wish they weren’t there. I want them to leave me alone, that’s all.’
‘No, Lucy. Listen to them. They are asking you to give them rest. You can do for them what was never done for you: you can give them redress.
Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. You have a right to vengeance, Lucy.’
He continued the slow massaging for some moments, then stopped and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders.
‘We know who Agnes Liu is, Lucy. We’ve known about her for a long, long time. It’s not chance that’s brought you here. This is ordained.
You came here to be made clean and you will be. You came here for peace of mind and you will find it. Now you wait here. You just wait.’
When he came back, he placed a gun, compact and metal blue, on the table in front of her. She looked at it for some moments. She shook her head to say she did not understand.
‘Have you ever fired a gun before?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I know about them being out there and all that, and people getting hold of them. But I’ve never had to do that.’
He picked up the gun and loaded it with two bullets.
‘This is a very special gun. It’s one that I had made. I want you to try and use it. Come with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you how to fire it.’
He led her to the centre of the lawn and stood behind her as he folded both her hands around the gun. He was not a tall man and her body fitted against his without discomfort, his strength seemed to cushion her. In this serenity and the closeness of his human presence, she had felt a suspension of time, a sense of the peacefulness he had promised. She let her body relax.
‘When you’re ready,’ Graeme said to her soothingly. ‘No one can hear us out here. Call on your strength. And then fire. Twice. You can do it.’ He stepped away from her.
The shots crashed out, she rocked on her feet. Graeme did not quite laugh as he watched her trying to shake the ringing sound out of her head.
‘It’s a little noisy but you get used to it,’ he said. ‘Let’s sit down and talk, Lucy.’
They had sat down on a stretch of grass much more lush than the winter-starved turf that surrounded her now in the public park. The blue metal finish of the gun lying between them gleamed in the sun.
Graeme was a young-looking man with clear brown eyes but as she looked at him Lucy had thought that maybe he was older than he liked to appear. This did not worry her, he had a good-looking face, a comfortable face, and dark hair which had not yet turned grey. She had picked up the gun and weighed it in her hand.
‘You have to understand, Lucy, that when you have that gun in your hands, the way you do now, you have the power. No one else owns it, it belongs to you. And then you control whatever happens to you, not the reverse. You need to remember that.’
She did remember, both that and the strange lightness of spirit she had felt in counterbalance to the weight in her hand. He had continued to speak as she held the pistol balanced in her palm.
‘You can take this gun and find redress for the sins committed against you, against your unborn children. You, Lucy, are a very strong young woman. You take this gun and you will show the world how strong you are.’
She had sat holding the gun for some moments longer.
‘Do you want to load it for me again?’ she asked.
‘And if I do, what will you do?’
‘I’ll shoot at that tree.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘What else am I going to do?’
‘Guns are there to be used, Lucy. That’s why they were created.
But you have to use them carefully. They have their designated targets. Your target has already been chosen for you, but I think you know that.’
He reloaded the gun. She looked at the tree and imagined the doctor at the car door, speaking to her mother. She emptied the gun into both imaginary figures, firing as quickly as she could, feeling the force of the bullets as they thudded into the tree.
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ she said, once the gun was empty. ‘I don’t like hurting people.’
‘You won’t be hurting anyone,’ he replied. ‘She’ll feel nothing at all, there will be none of the pain she has inflicted on you. You will be cutting a thread, it will be clean and merciful. Blood will wash away blood. You will be left clean. When it’s over you will feel nothing except the most blessed relief. The voices of your children will be silent for ever. They, and you, will be at peace.’
She held the gun, unable to prevent herself from feeling a faint emotional rush at possessing it, a sense of swelling that she had somehow grown stronger.
‘It’s empty again,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘So I can’t use it on myself then?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Please don’t do that, Lucy,’ he said in his softest voice, smiling at her. ‘I care about you. Please don’t do that to me.’
On the park bench beside the pools of cold water, Lucy’s thoughts momentarily gained clarity. No, that would have spoiled everything, wouldn’t it? That would have put the kybosh on everything.
The quiet was shaken by a blast from the horn of a truck rumbling past University Hall. The noise shattered the glass shell containing Lucy and her thoughts. She got to her feet and hoisted her backpack on her shoulders, turning her back against the chill wind.
I’ve used that gun now, Graeme, just like you showed me. Now I’m going to come and talk to you about it, and maybe you can tell me for a second time why I did it.
She walked across the park towards City Road and King Street, a small figure overshadowed by the university buildings crowded onto the perimeter of the parklands. Unnoticed by almost everyone.