the white plastic bathtub to a shallow depth. The bathroom was dry.
The taps shuddered when Lucy turned them on but no water flowed out. It was a place cracking open under the slow crush of the plants that surrounded it, they strangled it with root and branch as it subsided into the ground. Lucy drank in the silence.
‘Hi, Gran,’ she said to no one.
She walked back outside into the afternoon light and listened to the clear sounds of the birds calling to each other in the surrounding bushland. Small waterfalls from the previous day’s rain flowed down over the honeycomb- coloured rock into a gully at the foot of the escarpment. The dog preceded her through the ferns down the short slope and then along a track that bordered a creek. After a short walk, Lucy crossed the stream to a rock overhang opposite, where the shadows and faint outlines of hand prints had been painted onto the sandstone. Their grandmother had told them they had been put there a long time ago by the blacks.
‘There were blacks around here when your great-granddaddy came here,’ she had said to them once, ‘he gave them work clearing the land.
They lived along the river in shacks, so it wasn’t that far for them to come up here. We used to play down there together when we were kids.’
Gran had painted her own hand on the rock when she was a child, with a date and her initials. Once, she had taken the three of them to see it and they had painted their own hands among the others on the rock face. Lucy found the child’s drawing of her hand and covered it over with her adult palm. The dog came and sat near her. Leaning against the rock, Lucy emptied her mind of any thoughts, listening to the rhythm of her breathing and nothing else.
Four months after her grandmother’s funeral, and not long before Lucy’s fourteenth birthday, her father had walked into her bedroom one evening for the first time. When he left, Lucy’s bedsheets were dirtied with blood. The next day at breakfast, Lucy had looked up at her mother, uncertain whether she should tell her that they needed to be washed. Her mother refused to meet her eye and Lucy stayed silent.
She went to school as usual and came home to find that there were clean sheets on her bed. Nothing was said. Always, the sheets were changed with nothing being said. Except for those times when Lucy’s mother had taken her to visit the clinic on the other side of the city, everything had gone on as usual. Until the day Lucy had picked up her pack and walked out of the door. And today, when she had come back.
Just then, Lucy felt that there was no other world in existence anywhere, that this stretch of land was the only place that was real.
This place here on the edge of the park, where her family were caught in a house with a tangled garden, where everything was detached and out of whack. As she leaned against the rock, she felt the gun pressing into her waist. It was a reality of a kind, bringing her back to the present. She sat by the side of the creek, gathering strength, fighting fear. The dog stayed with her, until something in the nearby scrub attracted her attention and she got to her feet and disappeared into the bush, leaving Lucy by herself. Lucy took her gun out of her waistband and aimed it at the shrubs on the opposite bank, firing pretend shots.
It was a long time, and had grown dark and cold, before she felt brave enough to go back into the house.
13
The message that hit Harrigan’s desk later that afternoon summed up the day for him. Greg Smith would not be available for further questioning until the Department of Juvenile Justice had completed its own urgent psychiatric assessment of the boy. It was the price they had to pay for requesting earlier that day that he be put on a suicide watch.
It was not failure, only frustration; something that stretched all their energies a little further. Controlling either time or events in Harrigan’s business was a war of attrition: you had to know when to wait and when to let things happen. If he let the anger he felt drive his work, then he could put everything at risk. In the interval, he needed to break the tension.
He walked out of his office and announced to his people that it was time for a refresher. A brief hour at the Maryborough, money on the bar from the social club matched by an equivalent amount from Grace, to welcome her to the team before they all got back to it again. It might be the last time they had the chance for some days or even weeks.
‘Just don’t let Marvin get wind of this,’ he said to everyone as he made his announcement. ‘If he does, he’ll be burning my ears about it from now until doomsday.’
There was a ripple of laughter as people collected their coats. It was all very amiable but Harrigan also had some unfinished business of his own.
At the Maryborough, the publican, on notice from Harrigan, would reserve the back bar for him and his team. They arrived in a group to take possession of it.
‘What’ll you have?’ Harrigan asked Grace, as she put her money down according to tradition.
‘Lime and soda,’ she replied with a smile, abstinence that he noted but decided not to comment on.
‘Get the lady what she wants,’ he said to the barman. ‘I’ll have a whisky and water.’
In the initial melee around the bar, Ian had already ordered a schooner of Old. As she waited for her drink, Grace watched the white froth ooze down the glass while the smell filled the air around her like a wash. She felt an undercurrent of nausea, a prickle of sweat at the back of her neck.
‘Don’t you drink?’ Ian asked her.
‘No, mate,’ Trevor intervened unsubtly, shoving up against the bar.
‘No vices for my mate here. Just the occasional fag, hey, Gracie.’
‘Plenty of them around here,’ Jeffo observed
‘I hear you had fun with that kid today. But you don’t need all that half-arsed psychology. With a kid like that, all you need is a couple of phone books and half an hour and he’ll tell you everything you want to know.’
Grace returned Jeffo a glacial smile but could not be bothered answering. He was winding up for another comment when Harrigan snapped in his ear.
‘Spare us the sparkling wit, mate. No one’s in the mood, including me.’
Drink in hand, he moved away from the bar while Jeffo made a face at his back.
‘That’s a bitch, you not drinking.’ Louise appeared and ordered gin.
She was a chunky woman with greying hair flaring back from her forehead and broken veins across her cheeks. ‘I was hoping we might have a few sessions together. Us girls should stick together.’
Louise, fifty-something, was a software engineer of repute. She drained her glass of gin with slightly shaking hands. Her fingers were heavy with ornate rings, red and white stones serving as glittering knuckle-dusters alongside her wedding band. Grace heard the empty gin glass chink down on the counter as she asked immediately for a second. Grace did not drink, not any more. Alcohol had once flooded her veins with its metallic, poisonous edge, irritating a portion of her mind to unpredictable furies and mawkish self-pity. She turned away, lime and soda in hand, to find Ian lying in wait for her.
‘I hear you used to be a rock star,’ he said. ‘Is that really what you used to do?’
‘Me?’ she laughed. ‘No, I wish I had been, I’d never have to work again. All I did was sing with a band for a little while. All we ever did was work really hard for almost nothing and deal with lowlifes who just wanted to rip us off all the time.’
‘And you liked it so much, you joined the force so you could keep doing it,’ he said.
‘That’s right, I’m right back where I started from. That’s life. I’m just going to go and find the cigarette machine,’ she replied.
She found the machine in the hallway past the gaming room and hummed to herself as she punched in her coins. She reflected with black humour on various episodes of disaster in her not so overwhelmingly successful career in rock and roll, from broken-down vans to audiences so frightening she had been reduced to climbing out the back window of the women’s toilet to escape them. What was so fearsome about this job?
Turning to go back, she saw Harrigan standing just inside the door to the gaming room, catching up on the
