Lucy Hurst raised her head from her pillow in a darkened room made strange by the streaked glow of streetlights through the open louvre windows above the bed. She sat up slowly to see a face in the wardrobe mirror opposite shadowed to a dull, luminous white, bloodless as silicate and surrounded by a stiff mix of dark tentacled curls. She touched her hair and saw the figure in the mirror do likewise. Some event, impossible and unavoidable, that she could not immediately remember, was pressing in on her. The room was empty of any hint of what this might be or why she was here. It was a territory without reference points, static in its unfamiliarity.
She remembered. It was the first time that she had had to remember, a vision possessing a precise and surreal clarity, as indifferent to her as it was to the other three figures at the heart of it. In her mind, silently as a dream, she saw the woman and the man falling one after the other to the roadway, saw the stain on the woman’s blue jacket, the man’s unshakable stillness, his face, and the boy so close, staring at her. She saw this with a shock of unreality, with only the ordinary room, and its arrangement of an ancient wardrobe, chair and bedside table, to remind her how real it was. She stared at the image in her mind, sickened at heart, unbelieving.
She lay back, actually winded, and then felt that the bed was damp.
She touched the warmth in which she was lying and raising her hand into the white light saw a dark liquid on her hands. It was her menstrual blood, not the blood of a wound. It was darker and flowed less freely but had still soaked through her clothes into the bed. She could not understand it, she had not bled for months, had been pleased that she had not bled for months. She had short-circuited her cycle, spiking it with a thin diet and nervous energy, feeling its connective, circular rhythm replaced by the equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, a perfect and disinfected emptiness without the need or the capacity for change. She pushed back the bedclothes and sat up again, scrunching the sheets with her hand to clean it, uncertain what she should do. A giddiness took hold of her. She shook off the mists of sickness, noticed the sour aftertaste of a drug in her mouth, and remembered why she was in this bed.
She had to get out of here. Moving as quickly as she could, she got up, put on and laced up her shoes. As she put on her coat, she again saw the image of the three people in her mind and this time took possession of it angrily, holding onto the fact in its impossibility and extremity. I did that, she told herself. Never forget that. I took those people apart like that. That’s mine, I’m never going to forget that. She looked at the bed with its blankets pulled back to display blood splashed between the ribs of light, dark butterflies on the white sheets.
Like the action of a narcotic, she felt a numbness set in, a severance from the surrounding world. She left the room but then was forced to go into the bathroom next door. She sat on the throne, acutely aware of various wastes purging themselves out of her body and feeling the ache of menstrual cramps. She did not know why she should need to bleed when she had schooled every other need — food or warmth or shelter — down to its fundamentals. She cleaned herself as well as she could when she was finished but could only find a hand towel to soak up the flow of her blood. She washed herself again, almost compulsively, and then, badly dehydrated, drank copious handfuls of water from the tap.
She had no perception of what time it might be, she only wanted to find her backpack and then leave the Temple as soon as she could. She left the bathroom and went down the stairs. Silence was diffused like an undisturbed sleep throughout the darkened building, she could not even hear cockroaches scuttling. She tried the back door but it was locked. The Temple was difficult to get into or out of once the doors were shut against you: it was a place of thick walls, barred windows and strong locks. She stopped outside the office and listened for any sound to suggest there might be someone in there, but heard nothing.
Opening the door carefully, she saw by the streetlights through the bare windows that the room was empty. She found her pack, placed out of sight inside the tiny windowless kitchen. It was open and had been searched, the contents disturbed. As she looked around, she saw a blister packet emptied of all its tablets on the bench next to the sink.
She picked it up. Rohypnol 2 mg. She did not quite laugh as she stared at it. She thought: I need a gun.
She knew things that Graeme did not realise she knew. Under the floorboards in his office, she found his own insurance as he called it: a solitary gun and a good supply of ammunition. She took both, putting the ammunition into her pack after loading the gun with the expertise he had taught her. It was larger and heavier than the one he had originally given her. She weighed the gun in her hand and felt an immediate relief to have it, knowing that, of all things, it was something she could rely on. Because if you can use a gun once, then you know how to use it again. This last thought was a negative whisper in her mind.
The office computer, a powerful and expensive machine, had been left on; its tiny orange lights were intermittent pinpricks in the dark as the monitor slept in power-saving mode. She glanced towards the open door but saw and heard no one. The whole building had a sense of abandonment. Holding onto her gun, she woke the screen and went out on the Net, quickly.
Turtle, are you out there? It’s the Firewall. Are you there?
Firewall??? I’ve been waiting 4 HOURS 2 hear from u Where areu???
You don’t want to know. Out here. With a gun in my hand. For real.
I’m holding it right now. I’m holding it because I think I might need to use it. It’s just so strange to know that.
U can’t do that U just can’t
I don’t know what else to do now. I need the protection.
Who from???? They should be afraid of u!!!
There are worse people than me out here, Turtle. And yeah, I am frightened of them. You can believe I am.
I wish I wasn’t stuck here I would help u if I could but I’m stuck Wotare u up 2 now? Can’t I do something?
No, this is not you, this is me. I don’t want you to take this on. But I don’t know. I really don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got nowhere to go now.
U can go 2 the police
I said before, there’s no point in doing that. Anyway if you do go to the police, all they do is bash you up.
They don’t all do that
The ones I know do. No, I’ve got nowhere to go. Except maybe …
Except maybe where????
Home? It’s the only place left on earth now, isn’t it? And it’s the worst place to be. My brother rang me the other day. He wants me to come home. But if I do go back there now it’s because everything I’ve done has taken me back there, not for any other reason.
You don’t have to go back there do u?
Maybe. If they want me, maybe I will. I was just thinking about it really, that’s all. There just isn’t anywhere else now.
I’ve been thinking all day I don’t believe it was u who did that U
pulled the trigger but your head was somewhere else It has 2 be U
just couldnt do that
No, Turtle. I did do it. And I did it because I thought she was evil. But I woke up just now and all I could see in my head was all that blood and what those people looked like. And I think — I have to think this, don’t I — if that’s what she is, then what about me? Aren’t we both the same now? Aren’t we both killers? I don’t want to be like her. But I am.
So what does that mean? I don’t know where my head is any more.
Everything u say — it all says that u aren’t like that OK??? I knowits not u When I talk 2 u — U are not like that It was some mad thingbut not u
But that mad thing is me. I wonder, would I feel like this if I’d only shot her and not that man? I just don’t know what to think.
As she typed this, Lucy looked up to see the refuge van, with its lights dimmed, drive across the open space at the back of the picture theatre and come to a halt in the shadow of the building.
Got to go. Love you, she added quickly.
No wait Firewall dont do anything stupid U cant Lucy shut down the connection. She saw Graeme’s figure pass the window and knew that she did not have time to get out of the back door. She moved quickly into the auditorium, hoisting her pack and holding the gun ready. Leaving the door slightly ajar, she stood watching through the crack.
The back door opened and he appeared there in silhouette. He was looking, it seemed, straight at her. She was certain that he had seen her and raised her gun, waiting for him to come towards her. He did not.
He shut and locked the door behind him and walked quickly up the stairs, to his room. In the half light she could see that he was carrying a small white paper bag, something round and compact. A fit, was Lucy’s instinctive thought, the kind you get free and anonymously from the needle exchange. She was certain that it was intended for her.
She did not wait. She went to the back door and shot the lock open, stepped out into the cold night air and sprinted down the alleyway towards the street, still holding onto her gun. As she reached the end of the lane, she heard what seemed to be a shout behind her, a strange guttural sound, but she did not stop to look back. She cut her way breathlessly past narrow rows of terraced houses, sprinting silently on the tips of her toes. As she ran, she heard a car behind her, its engine suddenly engaged. Its lights caught her briefly as she ran and she sped up, reaching the Peace Park on Church Street, coming through a small grove of eucalyptus trees to the sandstone wall bordering the cemetery at St Stephen’s Church. There she lost the strength to run any further.
She collapsed on the ground, dropping her pack, and leaned against the wall, curling into the stone out of the light.
She crouched there, gathering breath and looking back at the small grove of trees but no one appeared after her. Her lungs were burning.
Still on the edge of panic she thought of Greg, and putting down her gun she reached into an outside pocket of her pack for her mobile phone. Her hands shaking she rang Wheelo’s, more out of hope than expectation that Greg would be there. She looked around at the empty park with its sparse lights as she waited for someone to answer her call. Someone would answer sometime, they always did. Someone was always awake. With her free hand, she held onto the butt of her gun.
‘Yeah?’ a female voice eventually said.
‘I was looking for Greg,’ she replied.
‘Yeah, who’s this?’
‘It’s Luce. Is that Jade?’
‘Yeah. He’s not here, Luce. He went out with Wheelo. He said he was going for a joy ride, he knew this car he could get hold of. They were going to torch it, I think. That’s what I thought I heard them say, anyway.’
Shit! Lucy thought. ‘When?’
‘I dunno. A while ago now. But I think the pigs got Greg, because some of them came sniffing around here for Wheelo just this little while back. Mick told me to stay out of the way but I think that’s what I heard them saying. So if they got Greggie, that means he’s going back in again.
So you can’t get him. Unless you want to go and see him up at Kariong.’
Lucy was silent.
‘You still there, Luce?’ said the voice.
‘When you see Wheelo, you tell him from me that I rang looking for Greggie, okay? And if he sees Greggie, he should tell him that he’s got to be careful. Really careful. Tell him he’s not to go back to the refuge ever again, okay? Tell him exactly that. Just say it’s not safe.’
Jade sounded surprised. ‘Yeah, if you want.’
Lucy did not believe Jade would remember to do any of this. She cut the connection without another word. She had no energy left and her head was bathed in sweat.
Back to the cells for you now, Greggie. I can’t get to you there, it’s too dangerous. Just believe I’m thinking about you in there. They’ll shave your head again and they’ll take away your beanie and, if you’re lucky, they’ll give it back to you when they let you go again. Whenever that is.
Graeme won’t be able to get you out of there this time. This time, for the first time, you might even be safer in there. Just for now anyway.
Someone would tell Graeme what had happened; it wouldn’t be her.
The woman from Family Services, Ria, would call him if no one else.
Or the police. He would be angry when he was told, very angry.
Thinking of this, she almost smiled. Then a giddiness took hold of her and she leaned back against the wall. She felt cold, a residual wave of the drug was travelling through her bloodstream. The telephone slipped out of her hand and fell to the ground. Having nowhere else to put it, she pushed her gun into the outer pocket of her backpack and buttoned her jacket tightly around her, hugging herself. She wanted to run but could only sit there unable to move, feeling her eyes closing against her will. She had no strength.
She was breathing deeply and was part way between waking and unconsciousness when, even in the dark, she became aware that there was a shadow across her face and someone was leaning over her. She could hear and then feel their breath. She forced herself awake, not quite screaming, plucking desperately at her pack.
‘Luce! What do you think you’re doing? It’s only me.’
Stephen’s voice and her perception of who it was were simultaneous.
Unnerved, she sat up slowly.
‘Stevie, please don’t ever do that to me again,’ she said. ‘I was so frightened just then.’
‘You frightened me too.’
He smiled nervously and hunkered down close to her. The empty park and the dark streets of Newtown stretched around them.
‘Shit, Luce. Look at you. What have you done to yourself?’ he said, and touched her forehead which was damp with perspiration. ‘Are you all right? You look like — I thought you were clean. Has that all changed, has it?’
She did not immediately answer him. She tried to smile but could not.
‘No,’ she said, ‘this was something I really didn’t want to take.’
This particular truth sounded strange in her mouth, like the taste of metal on the tongue.
‘God, Luce, you take some risks. I never know what I’m going to hear about you next.’
‘I do, don’t I?’ she said a little shakily. ‘Chasing me around, are you?’
‘I must be.’ He spoke quietly, looking around them. ‘You know that guy you told me about, the preacher? I went and saw him yesterday evening but he said you weren’t around. He threw me out, I thought he was going to break my wrist. Where were you?’
Lucy said nothing. She swallowed some leftover fear and shook her head. Stephen’s glasses had slipped down over the bridge of his nose.
He pushed them back.
‘When you came out of there,’ he said, ‘you were running so fast. I tried to get after you in the car but you just ran. I thought I saw — did you have something in your hand? I didn’t know if … ’
He stopped.
‘No. That was just me being me,’ Lucy said. ‘I was being paranoid.
I get like that.’
‘I heard — I don’t know … Did you hear a shot or something? Was I dreaming? Did you hear — ’
‘I didn’t hear anything, Stevie. I wasn’t listening.’
He looked at her where she sat against the wall, her jacket pulled around her, then sat on the grass beside her, stretching out his damaged leg. The glow of the park lights touched on his pronounced forehead, his straight dark hair.
‘I’ve got to deal with Dad, Luce. And he’s dying. I don’t have the energy for anything else. You have to tell me that you’re not in any sort of trouble and there’s nothing that’s going to make the shit hit the fan.
I can’t deal with it if there is.’
‘Dad?’ Lucy interrupted him. ‘He sent you running around town looking for me? Wouldn’t you know it? He wasn’t going to come looking for me himself.’
‘He can’t, Luce. He can hardly move. He says he wants to see you before he dies. He keeps at it, he won’t let it go. If you don’t come, it’ll be the last thing he ever says to anyone. We’ll all be standing around and the only thing he’ll say is that you’re not there.’
‘What does he think he’s going to say to me?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think he knows either. He wants to see you.
That’s all he’s told me.’
‘And what if it had been me that was dead instead of him? It could have been. It almost was once or twice. What was he going to do then?
Was he going to worry about me? Or was he just going to say, oh, she didn’t come and see me before she died?’
‘I don’t know, Luce. Okay? I can’t answer that question. You want me to tell you the truth? I’m here because it’s going to make things easier for us if you do come home. And I’m at the point where I just can’t handle much more.’
Her father had never come looking for her when he had been well, why should she expect him to now? She looked down the slope of open grass to the narrow streets below, where the small houses and white factory buildings slept on in a pattern of streetlights. The scene was so still; it seemed that no world existed beyond the reach of the streetlights, only darkness without end on the other side of a wide glass bowl.
‘All right, I’ll come home,’ she said after some moments. ‘I’ll talk to him. Because I want to talk to him.’
Twenty-four hours ago nothing would have made her go home, but yesterday, just after dawn when she had fired those shots, she had slipped between a hair space in time. Every thought she had, everything she did, dragged her back to that moment. Her mother and father were waiting for her there, like two spectators in the cheap seats, eating popcorn. Thoughts formed in her mind like words spoken out of the shadows to those two expressionless figures, munching as they watched her. I want to see you. For the first time I want to see you, I want to ask you something. She wanted to look at her father and her mother and ask if either of them had ever woken in the night, the way she just had, and thought: I did that, what am I going to do now that I’ve done something as horrible as that? She wanted to ask them: don’t you feel like that, just a bit? For what you did to me? Give me an answer, because you owe me one.
‘Will you promise me you won’t fight with him?’ Stephen asked, pushing his glasses back on his nose again. ‘Because if you do, he’ll just take it out on everybody else.’
‘No, it’ll be okay, Stevie. If he doesn’t say what I want to hear, I’ll just go again.’
She spoke with a false bravado. Stephen’s relief was all too obvious.
He stood up quickly.
‘Let’s get out of here then, I don’t like it here. Have you got everything? You don’t have to go back and get any stuff out of that place?’
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the Temple.
‘Oh, no,’ she replied.
No, she wasn’t going back in there.
‘Is this yours?’ he asked.
He had as good as trodden on her mobile phone and was holding up the shiny blue object.
‘Yeah, I must have dropped it.’
Even in the half dark, his face expressed the question that he was never going to ask her: where did you get it?
‘Does it work?’ he asked instead.
‘Used to,’ she said, with something of a smile.
‘Do you mind if I use it?’ he asked. ‘I should call Mel, just to let her know we’re coming.’
‘Keep it if you want.’ She was dismissive. ‘It’s just a bit of nothing.
It’s never hard to get hold of bits of nothing like that.’
‘It’s okay, Luce. You can have it back when I’ve finished.’
She stood up slowly, looking around her. Her head was still bathed in sweat and she did not know if this was because she had been drugged or because she was afraid. She had the perception that they were being watched, and that the person out there watching them was dangerous.
‘Hi, Mel, it’s Stevie. I’m sorry I got you out of bed. No, I’ve found her, she’s coming home. Yes, I know — it’s okay. Could you get something ready for us, something to eat? I’m starving and I don’t know when Luce last ate anything. And can you get some clean clothes or something for her? She needs them. And some … napkins, whatever … I don’t know.
She’s a mess. Forty minutes? There’s no traffic. Okay. I’ll see you.’
He handed the phone back to her. She switched it off and stowed it away, then hoisted her pack, swaying on her feet under its weight.
‘You all right? Do you want me to carry that?’
‘No,’ she said. You don’t get to carry this, Stevie, I do.
‘You look like death, Luce,’ he said, his own face grey in the unnatural light.
Yes.
The park seemed deserted as they walked back to Stephen’s car in a nearby street, near the small grove of trees and opposite the blue and yellow swirls of a mural painted with the caption ‘Simultaneous Lovin’, Baby’. As the car turned an arc, she thought she saw the outline of a figure in the dark, Graeme standing in the shadows of the trees. It was only a glimpse but she looked away quickly nonetheless.
They drove through the empty streets, out onto the highway. She curled up in the corner of the seat but was too jangled to sleep. The electric outlines of the city came to meet them: high-rise, shop fronts, service stations, the curve of the Gladesville Bridge over the dark river.
As they passed, the array of ghostly structures faded away either side of the thin white line. She began to feel icy cold as they drove further and further towards the edge of the urban sprawl; the substance Graeme had given her had left her body embalmed in a chill sweat.
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
Stephen glanced at his watch. ‘Twenty past four. Almost time to get up.’ Then, ‘That guy at the theatre — he doesn’t know where home is?
He wouldn’t try and come looking for you out here, would he?’
Lucy looked at Stephen and decided not to ask why this possibility might worry him.
‘Graeme?’ She felt uneasy simply saying his name. ‘No, I never told him where I came from. He never asked. We didn’t really talk that much about me after a while,’ she added, in an oddly halting voice.
‘What are you saying?’
She shook her head. ‘Just what we talked about, that’s all.’
No, their months of conversation, one on one, had been fixed towards another point completely. Everything she had said to him, he had directed elsewhere, away from her — something which in itself had been a relief at the time — towards a single action. That of her firing a gun at the specified target he had presented to her. In her mind, these actions were reduced to their sharp outlines, recall came in disconnected flashes: Graeme’s smiling face, the recoil of the gun as she fired it at a tree, the recoil as she fired it at a person. Then all the players were caught in her act of execution, the woman and the man and finally the boy, staring at her with horror in his face. She asked herself how often she was going to see this. She glanced at Stephen next to her. What would you think about me if you knew, Stevie? What’s it going to do to you when you find out?
You and Mel? I never asked myself. I didn’t even ask myself that.
When she considered the preacher, she realised she no longer had a way of describing him to herself. The image in her mind was of the man standing over her, watching her with his gentle and serene gaze while she was in the grip of the drug, saying that he intended to kill both her and someone she loved.
You can’t get to me, Graeme, and anyway I can look after myself. And you can’t get to Greg, and that’s really all that matters. But just to make sure, I’m going to ring Ria. She can warn Greg, even if no one else can.
‘What are you thinking about, Luce?’ Stephen asked, a strange tone in his voice.
‘Nothing,’ she replied, unaware of the expression on her face or the shiver that went down Stephen’s spine as he looked at her. He sped up, accelerating past a convoy of trucks rumbling northwards along the highway, a monstrous force tricked out in a delicate rigging of many-coloured lights, taking on the force of their jet stream, passing them at speed.
They had reached the streets close to home, the far northern edge of the city. There was no moon. Lucy looked out at large houses newly built in the old bushland, where occasional groves of trees had been left behind for decoration. All were pale silver in the reflected light of the city.
‘None of this was here before,’ she said.
‘They just keep subdividing. There won’t be anything left soon.
We’ve got houses almost up to our front door now. We get real-estate agents ringing us all the time. If you want to sell, we’ll get you a goodprice. I feel like telling them, you don’t know what you’re buying, mate. You don’t have that much money.’
Their double-storey ninety-forties brick house came into view, built by their grandfather several years after he had been demobbed. In the photographs that Lucy had seen, there had once been a four-roomed, wooden tongue-and-groove house in this place, one that her great-grandfather had built here not long after he had cleared the original forest. Their grandfather had told them how he had demolished it and built this pile in its place, going up in the world.
Stephen turned off the engine to slide noiselessly down the gentle slope of their driveway, halting just before the garage.
‘You’re home,’ he said.
Yes.
In the pale light, they walked across a rectangle of spongy couch grass. A dog came out of her kennel, her chain rattling. Lucy knelt beside her, rubbing her head.
‘Hello, Dora. Hello, girl. Look, she remembers me. Why is she chained up? She never used to be.’
‘It’s just something that’s happened. Dad said to chain her up. The neighbours don’t like her. They say she’s dangerous, she bails up their kids.’
‘She wouldn’t do anybody any harm. Poor old thing.’
At the back door Lucy hesitated. She stood listening to the rustle of the bushland around the house, too frightened to walk inside.
‘It’s okay,’ Stephen said. ‘Mum’s asleep and Dad’s out to it just about every night these days. It’s only Mel. Come on.’
The kitchen, a large room, smelled of toast, coffee and milk, a comforting and safe smell. In the bright fluorescent light, Mel was putting breakfast dishes on the table. She looked at her older sister without smiling, her face seemed deliberately emptied of emotion.
Short like her brother, she stood bare-legged in a tight denim skirt and sweatshirt, her hair tightly curled and dyed a pale red.
‘Hi, Mel,’ Lucy said, with half a smile.
Mel looked back at her, still unsmiling, refusing a greeting. Her eyes were sleepy.
‘I made your bed up. Do you want to go and have your shower now? You need one, you look awful. There’s some napkins in the bathroom if you want them. When you’ve finished, can you put your dirty clothes in the laundry for me right away because I’ve got to get them washed and dry as soon as I can. I’ve got to wash Dad’s sheets every day so I haven’t got time to do your washing as well.’
With this, she went back to the bench where she was preparing breakfast. Lucy said nothing. She turned away but then stopped at the doorway that led into the rest of the house.
‘It’s okay, Luce.’ Stephen said. ‘Want me to walk you in?’
Lucy looked back and saw that Mel was watching this concern with contempt.
‘No,’ she said to him, holding tightly onto her pack. ‘I’m all right.’ In the hallway, and on the stairs up to her room which were lit by a night-light, everything was as it had always been. The house was rambling, a collection of airless rooms with small windows, all stacked with an accumulation of things. Lucy’s mother, Vera, never threw anything out. In her thinking, everything, if kept long enough, might one day have a use, and if broken might one day be repaired. Ancient leftovers were buried in the permafrost of the freezer; old clothes and toys were crammed under the beds; newspapers, cardboard boxes, aluminium cans were stacked in the hallways. Lucy walked along the upstairs hallway that smelled of naphthalene and used goods, a bite of mould and cobwebs, odours which were only dispelled in the heat of summer when the house baked in the sun.
‘It hasn’t changed. Nothing’s changed,’ she said to herself, almost in bewilderment.
Opening the door to her bedroom and turning on the light, she was surprised by its unfamiliarity, how faded it was at first glance. She shut the door softly behind her and put her backpack next to the bed, then looked around her uneasily. The walls were covered with posters torn from magazines: pop stars she had forgotten about, golden-eyed tigers swimming in tropical rivers. The ceiling was painted blue, the skirting boards and cornice, silver. The arc of gold stars she had glued onto a window was still there. It was a world with nothing on its surface to indicate the events which had once occurred regularly in here.
Her father used to tell her in the afternoon what he intended to do that evening. When he walked into her room, he simply said, ‘Strip.’ It was the only thing he said to her, from the first moment to the last, from the first time to the last. There was another memory: about ten days after she had become too sick to eat in the mornings, her mother saying to her, ‘Hurry up, we’re going into the city now. He’ll give us a ride to Hornsby and we’ll get the train from there.’
Lucy spoke aloud, to herself, ‘You don’t want to worry. It’s what Turtle said — he ought to be frightened of you now. So should she.’
She was on the verge of something that was not quite panic. She sat on the bed, holding herself and rocking backwards and forwards. She took her gun out of her pack and held onto it tightly, breathing deeply, drawing on its security.
‘I’ll keep you with me,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll be okay.’
In the bathroom, Lucy locked the door behind her and placed the gun on the basin within reach. In the shower, she felt the warm water ease her spine and watched as her own blood was washed into its spiral at her feet. She shook her head at the peculiarity of having a body that felt and bled. She dried her clean skin, drawing each of her limbs into existence as she polished herself with the towel, reconnecting her nerve endings. She saw herself in a full-length mirror, in a small pool of white light. Her body had gained strength since she had broken with her addiction. Despite her lean diet, it was wiry rather than thin and she had acquired some cushioning softness and muscle. She saw a body that — without her noticing — had gained some womanliness. ‘That’s me,’ she said with a compelling sense of dislocation. After she had dressed, she looked at herself again. She saw her reflection silvered in light, a figure made of metal, clean as purified air.
‘I couldn’t have stayed here,’ she said to her reflection, ‘I couldn’t have. What else was I going to do but go?’
She smoothed her wet hair back from her forehead. Her face in the mirror and the light were extinguished at the same moment.
Reluctantly, she put the gun back in her pack before she went downstairs. It had grown light when she came back to the kitchen. There, she heard Stephen and Melanie arguing. Mel’s voice was quick, breathless and angry. Lucy stopped to listen until she did not want to hear any more.
‘I don’t see why I have to be nice to her,’ Melanie was saying. ‘She was a bitch. She went off and left me, she didn’t care, she didn’t wait around. Now she’s out there all the time, doing whatever she wants to do, and I stay here and I have to wash for him and I have to wash him as well and I cook for him and I look after him while all Mum does is sit around and watch TV all day. And then she just comes back here when she wants to and you say to me I have to be — ’
Mel stopped short as Lucy appeared in the doorway, and turned away. Stevie was sitting at the table, smoking. He greeted Lucy with the faintest shrug. She stood there, awkward, wishing that she was carrying the gun and could feel its metal pressing against her waist. For a brief moment anger seethed in her head.
You shouldn’t talk about me like that, Mel, it’s not fair. I couldn’t do anything back then. If anyone tried to hurt you now, I’d kill them.
I would. Then you wouldn’t be able to say that about me.
‘Sit down and eat your breakfast,’ Melanie said to her without turning around.
The silence weighed on them all as Lucy and Stephen ate slowly.
Two thirds of the way through the meal, Lucy stopped.
‘I can’t eat any more,’ she said. ‘My throat feels like it’s full of broken bones. I’ve got to go and sleep.’
‘Are you all right?’ Stephen asked.
‘Yeah. I’m just really tired.’
She got to her feet. At the door, she turned to look at them, Melanie with her angry face, and Stephen’s, with his guard let down, showing intense exhaustion.
I can’t tell either of you what I’ve done, I’ll never be able to tell you.
‘I’ll see you later,’ she said.
In her room, her sense of fear returned powerfully. She slipped her gun under the pillow and then pushed a chair against the door. Forcing herself to make the effort, she sat on the bed and made her call to Ria.
The woman answered almost immediately, over a line that shifted and roared with static.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a crackling voice.
‘It’s Luce, Ria.’
There was a pause.
‘What do you want?’
The woman spoke sharply through the interference.
‘I’ve got a message for Greg. The police have got him, haven’t they?’
Lucy heard the woman laugh angrily.
‘Your information’s good. Yeah, they have, they just rang me. I wish I could keep track of him the way you do … ’
The line broke up. In the crackling, Lucy heard the words ‘can’t believe’, which faded and then came back strongly as ‘accessory’ and
‘murder’. Hearing this, Lucy spoke softly to the airways with a twist of bitterness in her voice.
‘Well, they wouldn’t know anything, would they? They’d just pick on whoever they could find. They never get the real killers.’
‘What’s your message, Lucy?’
The woman’s voice came through suddenly clear, sounding wary and disturbed.
‘You tell him from me that whatever he does, he can’t go back to the refuge. That’s all. He’s not to go anywhere near it again, ever. He’ll know what I mean.’
There was silence.
‘Lucy,’ the woman said, ‘I don’t want you to say anything else to me.
I’m hanging up on you now. Whatever you do, don’t ring me again.’
Lucy said nothing else. She turned off her phone and tossed it onto her old desk. She crawled into bed exhausted, without undressing, and slept with one hand holding onto her gun.