Blood Redemption hag-1 Read online

  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 a
nd 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.