‘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.
10
In the winter morning light, Paul Harrigan was countermanding his own instruction that the job took precedence over everything and nothing else mattered. He drove against the traffic to make the short journey from Birchgrove to Cotswold House at Drummoyne, stealing the first hour before work to see his son. He may not get the chance again for some time.
Toby was the product of a briefly sweet marriage, contracted when Harrigan was barely twenty-one, while he had been wandering the countryside, working as a boxer and a fruit picker. His marriage had had the unusual effect of leaving him holding the baby while his wife had disappeared, rejecting a child permanently injured during the hours of his birth, a tiny baby left weighted down for life with the medical terms choreoathetosis and dysathria. Her action was truly unforgivable in Harrigan’s eyes. They’d divorced years ago; Sara lived in Western Australia now with some other man. He did not give her a voluntary thought, she had never tried to see her son. She had never even sent money, although if she had, he would not have taken it. She was another figure he had excised ruthlessly from his past.
This morning, as he crossed the Iron Cove Bridge, Harrigan watched his night thoughts disappear in the dawn over the harbour to become the daylight certainty that there were possibilities for happiness after all. Among other things, life had its pleasures in the early glitter of the sun on the harbour and the sight of the black cormorants fishing from their perches on the old wooden piers. At Cotswold House, built on the shore overlooking Cockatoo and Spectacle Islands with their disused shipyards, he was let in and greeted by the house manager, Susie Pavic.
‘Good morning, Paul,’ she said. ‘We all sat with Toby and watched you on TV last night. What a terrible thing.’
‘Yeah, it is. But we’re working on it. We’ll get there.’
Although he liked Susie, he spoke to stop the conversation, with a quick smile, not wanting work to come between him and his son.
Down a short shining hallway, he saw Toby being wheeled out of his room by his therapist.
‘Paul. I didn’t think you were going to make it today.’
Toby’s therapist, Tim Masson, fussed too much in Harrigan’s opinion.
‘No, I’m right on time as far as I know. I’m here now, that’s what matters. Hi, Toby. How are you?’
Using his one good hand, Toby squeezed his father’s offered hand for a few moments. Masson withdrew to the activity room to make them all coffee, while Harrigan left his coat and tie in his son’s room.
He took hold of the chair and set off down the corridor to the bathroom, a large room with walls and floor covered with shining white tiles and a wide spa bath with chrome fittings. Toby stubbornly pulled one-handed at his nightclothes as his father knelt by the tub, turning on the taps, swirling the water around. Steam began to rise in clouds, the noise of running water concealing their mutual silence.
‘Let me help you,’ Harrigan said, standing up.
He felt the night warmth of his son’s body as he carefully removed the unresisting garments. Toby’s dysfunctional body and his inability to speak connected Harrigan to his son, body to body, human to human.
Sex did not necessarily give him this closeness. Toby was made in his father’s image: his height, the shape of his body, the paleness of his skin, could have been — would have been — Harrigan’s own. Their physical capacities were different, only that. Harrigan carried this sense of loss as something that was as unchanging as Toby’s disability; his feelings made him gentle with his son. He dropped the side rail on the chair, slid one arm around his son’s shoulders, another under his knees, and lifted Toby, an action which these days took all his strength. One day, very soon, he would not be able to lift him at all.
‘I’ve got you,’ he said. ‘Here we go.’
He lowered his son into the wide bath and let the warm water bubbling up from the light spa support and ease his body. Toby slid out to almost his full length in the water, his fixed arm crooked at an angle across his breastbone, one leg hooked a little over the other.
‘Are you comfortable there?’ Harrigan asked, and saw Toby’s silent response, the yes flicker of the fingers of his good hand.
Toby could speak a little, and sometimes did, but it took much effort to get out even a single word. His words lived as thoughts, or became bits of light which he tapped out one-handed onto a computer screen. Their conversations were silent, today expressed through the movement of Harrigan’s hands as he washed his son’s hair and felt the weight of Toby’s head in his hands in reply. He massaged his son’s shoulders, working at the unyielding muscle with slow, patient hands before washing the rest of his body. He began to soap around his son’s genitals, which were partially erect. They had their own young boy’s perfection and were pale as the skin on the rest of his body. As he did so, he felt Toby hitting him on the arm with his good hand.
‘I hurt you, did I? I’m sorry, I thought I was being careful. That hurts, does it? Okay, I won’t do that.’
Harrigan rinsed the soap away and saw no sign of injury or inflammation. Some minor infection? The ache you get when there isn’t any means of relief? Or is it that you don’t want me washing you any more, you’re too old? I have to, Toby, it’s the only way we can do this.
He stopped and looked at his son. His hand was resting on the edge of the bath and Toby took hold of it. He held on to Harrigan with a tight grip. What is it? Harrigan thought. Tell me what’s locked in your head. Used to this silence between them, Harrigan was unaware that he had said nothing. They held onto each other for some moments and then his son let go. The connection broken, Harrigan went to get the bath towels, to get Toby out of the bath (an action which would require Tim Masson’s help, Harrigan had to admit this) and then dried and dressed.
‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘I could use some breakfast myself.’
As he looked back, he saw Toby looking at him, an odd, indefinable expression in his eyes. He did not know whether it was his son’s helplessness as he lay there in the water or some other quality that he could not define, but the expression left him troubled. He dried Toby, dressed him, dried and brushed his hair, and in the dining room fed him and wiped his mouth clean. Toby sucked orange juice through a straw out of the drinking receptacle Harrigan held for him. I’m here, Toby. I’m always here.
‘What’s on your mind, Toby?’ he said. ‘Something’s bothering you.
I’ve got to go to work now but I’ll drop by again as soon as I can. I’ll see if I can’t get here tonight. You can tell me then if you want.’
Toby flickered ‘okay’ with his good hand, a gesture that was neither inviting nor repelling. They said goodbye in their mutual silence, with Toby squeezing his hand.
He went to see the house manager in her office on his way out.
Susie, plump and fair-haired, sparkled in the sunlight through the windows, her make-up rainbow-like.
‘Do you need to worry?’ she said. ‘His health is good, he’s eating well. His school marks are very good, he’s up there with the best of them, Paul. He has been spending a bit of time on the Net lately, but I don’t see that’s a bad thing. It all takes him out of himself. He’s doing really well. I feel we should be pleased.’
‘No, Susie.’ Harrigan shook his head. ‘There’s something troubling him. I want to know what it is. Now either you or Tim should be able to tell me that.’ That’s what I pay you for. He let the words hang in the air unspoken.
