Grace left the overhead light switched off in her tiny flat near Bondi Beach and trod her way across its small square of living space by the light of the street lamps outside. Newly renovated studio apartment, the advertisement had said, living and bedroom in one.
Grace thought that radical austerity combined with New Age squalor was a better description, with the harsh green carpet ruffed up with steel wool as a matching design feature. She had her priorities, accommodation was not one of them. This was somewhere to sleep, to get dressed in. She was here for the scenery outside, for the sight of the headlands with their white and orange buildings and the strip along the beach front just at dawn, both momentarily transformed in a clean wash of light. To drink takeaway coffee on the beach and watch the sea, a cold, marbled green at this time of year, and feel the salt air on her face before she was obliged to paint on the day’s make-up.
Her flat had other useful attributes which were not to be sneezed at: a secure car park you needed a keycard to get into, doors which were programmed to your own personal combination lock. Her ex-lover, her own personal demon, made his reappearance in her life (as well as in her memory) from time to time. She saw him trailing behind her in the street sometimes, or standing at a distance from her building, watching her windows. She had taken some discreet steps for her own protection, obtaining a handgun illegally, something that would not bear examination in her current line of work. There was no other defence she could rely on. Tonight, there was no one out there on the cold and misty street, which proved that even personal demons can be driven away by bad weather. Relieved, she sat at her table, put down her bag and lit a cigarette, kicking off her shoes.
‘I am so tired,’ she said aloud to the rustle of the undrawn curtains.
‘I am so tired.’
In this moment of sudden relaxation, the vision of Henry Liu naked on a steel table came into her mind. She saw him with a handkerchief over his face and then without, and remembered the stink of old blood which had attached itself to her during the autopsy. In her memory, the smell had the same vividness and she felt, briefly, the same sickness. She swallowed. In the clinic, Dr Liu’s hands had been gentle, she had comforted Grace while she sat in the recovery room unexpectedly crying once her abortion was over. Agnes Liu did not carry that smell of blood, nothing like it, she was not the thing those people said she was.
Grace put her cigarette in the ashtray and closed her eyes. She pressed her head between her hands, stretching and then arching her backbone against the chair before relaxing again. She pushed her fingers into her hair and squeezed her scalp. I want, she thought, loosening the knots in her spine, I want. Body warmth to push that cold and ugly picture out of her head. Some sex, now that would be nice. To come home to some beautiful man, thin and muscular, with smooth skin and a smooth stomach, who could make her forget what she had seen during the day. The thought made her smile. She should be so lucky. These days, when she had no one serious to concern herself with, she chose to be casual about it. Keeping sex for when the impulse, the fancy, took her, rarely inviting anyone here into her plain sanctuary.
She shook the appetite away, expunging it. Grace was inclined, from time to time, to move from abstinence to indulgence and back again.
She was in no mood for either state just now, or for the emotional press that went with wanting someone a bit too hungrily. She only wanted to keep her thoughts to herself, on her work, to see how long she could persist in her job among the minefields the Tooth kept laying for her. It was just a game, Survival at Work, where the rules spelled out that you took no prisoners. She did not have to keep playing if it came to that; she could walk away whenever she wanted to.
She allowed herself a few more moments of rest as she finished her cigarette, before the pleasure of stripping away the day’s make-up and letting out her hair.
On the other side of the city, Harrigan stood on the pier in Snails Bay and looked out over the black water towards the lighted span of the Harbour Bridge. He was there in the hope of emptying out his mind and feeling the constraints which cramped his body during the day disappear. Often he did not sleep and, if he lay in bed, could spend hours filling the shadows with his night thoughts, phantasms of failure, scraps of bad memory, old grief. This was a hazardous chemistry for his waking dreams at any time: depression followed after them like a promise. On his dangerous white nights, he came out here where he could think freely. Caught up in the quietness of the night noises, and watching the movement of the lights on the water, he might eventually relax enough to be able to sleep as soon as he lay down.
Tonight, nothing could shift the memory of the professor’s face or Matthew’s Liu’s dazed confusion. They touched him more than the thought of Agnes Liu in St Vincent’s Hospital, surviving on the faint lines of green light generated by her life support system. He wondered who else might be dying out there in the luminous darkness of the city.
He could be called out at any time to deal with any stranger’s death.
To resolve it, if it could be resolved, for whoever wanted to know; sometimes for no one other than himself.
He kept this simple word why in his mind as he worked through whatever case he had to hand, even if the why, when discovered, had no sense to it. He always questioned where any death might lead you, ever since his father had shot his mother and handed Harrigan the gun with shaking hands saying: ‘Shoot me, Paulie. I don’t want to live.’ He had fired once, knocking his father back into a chair, to hear him say, ‘That won’t do it. Shoot me again.’ Harrigan had discovered that he could not pull the trigger for a second time, a notch in his mind marking what he could and couldn’t do. His father had taken responsibility for the gunshot wound on himself, pleading a botched suicide attempt. Once again, the court had believed him.
Years ago, Harrigan had gone up-market with everybody else, moving from White Bay across to the inner harbour, just up and over Darling Street — which ran like a spine along the Balmain peninsula -
and down the other side of the hill. Not so very far from his boyhood home, a distance you could walk. These days, it was another world altogether. As he walked along the edge of Birchgrove Park under the Moreton Bay fig trees, he looked up at his house not far from the water’s edge, a pale brick two-storeyed terrace more than a century old with an apron of white lace on the upstairs veranda. ‘How did you afford that, mate?’ A question often asked with the implication, ‘since you’re only a copper?’ ‘By the sweat of my brow,’ he always replied with a grin. It had belonged to his aunt, his father’s sister, a relationship soured by years of arguments too rancorous to be forgiven. She had inherited it from an uncle, much to his father’s chagrin, who had expected that it would come to them both. Harrigan had earned it: she had made him pay for it with sweat and blood in more ways than one.
‘Oh, you are my beautiful boy, aren’t you?’ His aunt’s unnaturally cooing voice sounded in his head. He had never said yes to her question, not even as a child when she sat him up on her knee and dug her bony fingers into his ribs. An unmarried woman with her fiance dead in the war and a compulsive churchgoer, she had talked about his becoming a priest, something that he’d never wanted to be. ‘We have to make sure he has a good education. You don’t want him to work on the docks, Ellie. You don’t want him to be like Jim,’ he had listened to her tell his mother. ‘I will get him into St Ignatius for you. I will pay the entry fees. But you will have to contribute.’
‘I will. You wait and see,’ his mother had replied, condemning herself to work at two jobs morning and night for years to keep him there. She’d finally had the reward of seeing him through a year at university, returning to her old haunt in the parlour of the West End on Mullens Street to boast to her friends over a cigarette and a gin that her son wouldn’t work on the docks, he was studying law.
Don’t you want to ask me what I want? As the two women had decided his fate, he had said nothing. Silence which had left him for six years in a place where he had learned to survive as an outsider, watching everything he said and did. A privilege for which his two sisters still had not forgiven him, both of whom had been packed off at fifteen to work for Woolworths and earn their keep. Life had changed since then. These days, he often saw boys in the Iggie’s uniform crossing Birchgrove Park. Back then he had been the only pupil at the school with this address. In another way, life remained the same. He was still a survivor in an institution with fixed rules that could make him feel unwelcome when it wanted to.
‘Paulie was always Mum and Auntie’s Maeve’s fave,’ his oldest sister, Ronnie, liked to say at family gatherings, scruffing up his hair boisterously. ‘That was a curse, Ronnie,’ he’d reply. ‘You shouldn’t worry. You haven’t done too badly for yourself.’ Life in a waterside mansion on the Georges River should be as good as living on Snails Bay.
When his aunt had died, just after his sixteenth birthday, she had left him the house, to be held in his mother’s trust until he was eighteen. His father never forgave his sister for the public insult and refused to attend her requiem mass. He was an atheist in any case, a union man, a member of the Communist Party, all good reasons for her to disinherit him. The day they had all moved in, he had gone from room to room, cursing her ghost. Her insult festered in the house for years, provoking arguments between his parents so savage Harrigan had wished they would both die. He assumed that this was what his aunt had intended, she’d done enough damage for it to be premeditated. When he laid out the blame for his mother’s death, he put his aunt there (among others) as surely as if she’d loaded the bullet herself.
Harrigan walked in the gate to his back garden and looked up at the darkened windows of his house. All their ghosts were gone, he had excised them, making the place his own. He had gutted it in his spare hours, removing the room in which his mother had died, working his own carpentry. He painted the walls a smooth pale texture, like the unbroken membrane on the interior of an egg, which magnified and softened the light and made the space appear larger. He walked into this space now as someone relieved to be home, although the expanse of room and freedom had not been intended just for him. He had built it as much for his own son, in the inverse shape of Toby’s body, which was not straight but twisted and which had locked a good mind into a wheelchair and kept his boy in care all his life. He did not have the energy to think about his son tonight. He was tired, tomorrow would do, tomorrow he would go and see him.
He went into the kitchen to mix himself a whisky and water and saw that his ancient cat had struggled up onto the table, settling itself down on the papers he had left there. No one knew how old the cat was, it had walked in off the street one day when his father was still alive, a scabrous, savage, yellow tom who fought with every other cat in the street and littered the neighbourhood with kittens. His father thought it was ugly and nasty and named it Menzies as a posthumous insult to a man he’d hated all his life. Now Menzies was toothless, too decrepit to do more than flex claws which were no longer sharp. He hissed impotently as Harrigan moved him aside, then sank back into sleep.
As Harrigan sipped his drink, Grace’s resume, her smiling photograph, looked up at him from the table. He had read it before but now sat down to look it over with more interest. The daughter of a very senior army officer, she had spent her early life in New Guinea and was boarding-school-educated before the family had returned to the Central Coast when she was about fourteen. She had left school not long after, at sixteen, for life in Sydney, eventually working as a singer. Or so the resume said: Gracie Riordan amp; Wasted Daze. Really?
So who were they? In his working life, he had met a lot of women who called themselves singers. She hadn’t returned from that stratosphere until she had taken herself off to university in her mid twenties.
Harrigan knew the Central Coast, his father used to take him fishing up there when he was a boy. He remembered him marooned among the mangrove swamps in the sun, an unsuccessful fisherman but happy for being on neither shore nor sea. Grace hadn’t been a surfer girl if she’d left it all behind that quickly. Here it was: Member, Eastern Suburbs Pistol Club. Winner, Combined Clubs Trophy, Open Category, two years in a row. That’s how she got the job, never mind the degree. Not many women shoot well enough to earn trophies two years in a row. Now that he’d met her, he would never have thought she was the type.
Handguns. He sat back in his chair. She’d been there today, she knew what a handgun could do. Why do you shoot? he wanted to ask her. Don’t tell me it’s a thrill for you. He had his own handgun, not his service revolver but the Smith amp; Wesson.38 that had killed his mother, hidden down in his tiny cellar behind a loose sandstone block.
The gun was memory made real, something in the order of a personal gravestone, a means of holding onto the event and seeking for some solution to it when the actual memory was too painful to recall. There had been occasions when he’d thought about eating it. Occasions not so long after he’d had his jaw broken, when he spent his spare time sitting in a drab hotel room in the country town they had sent him to, playing Russian roulette in the early hours. It was a gamble that had excited him in a way not much else had back then. Not any more. It wasn’t what he wanted, if it ever had been. He hankered for a bit of life, not the reverse.
He closed Grace’s resume and decided to try his luck at sleeping. He turned out the light and went upstairs to bed.
As usual, he lay there thinking. There was a black hole at the heart of that resume, something she wasn’t telling anyone, two or three dead years starting when she was just twenty-one. That was young to end up nowhere. How was she living then? The dole? Some other way? He told himself to stick to the tangibles; recruitment had passed her.
People have gaps in their lives, he had a few of his own. The real question was: could he trust her, could she do the job? Nothing else mattered. On this thought, he drifted away to sleep.