It surprised Grace to find that Toby Harrigan was still on the board when she came in after a brief lunch, presumably because Harrigan had been locked in his office since the meeting, kept there by constant demands from the Tooth. She looked at the boy and thought that he had Harrigan’s face, twenty or so years back. Harrigan was not the only one with someone he loved in a wheelchair, she had someone there herself. Someone who was both a one-time lover and a friend, who found himself confined to the same means of transportation by fate, bad luck, call it what you like, a disease in the genes he had grown into without knowing it. Grace thought of the clock running backwards for her friend as his nerve strings were cut one by one, bringing him to a common meeting point with Harrigan’s son.
At the age of not quite thirty, Grace had acquired a lasting sense of uncertainty, she lived every day with the anticipation of insecurity. At any time, something might happen that would blow you out of the water and you would never know it. In her imaginings, the Bondi Pavilion could easily have doubled as the deserted cantina from some spaghetti western where the roofs were open to the skies, drifts of sand massed in the corners of deserted rooms and bird shit painted the walls. One day, those same white walls might crumble into the sea, leaving behind broken archways in silhouette against a hot blue Sydney sky. Wistful dreams compared to the visions on the Firewall’s website, imaginings of annihilation which reduced Grace’s own to a production which (she had to admit) was strictly amateur night.
She stopped to look at the Firewall and Toby Harrigan in their imagined embrace in the hallway of what looked like a prison, a space which gave the impression of airlessness. Briefly, she touched the two figures. You can’t see her but you love her. She knows who you are and she loves you. You’re both down there together in her eyes. That’s why she wants to get you to your feet and save you. Save you and save herself.
‘Who do you love?’ Grace sang softly to herself.
‘Are you curious about my boy, Grace? Do you want to know something about him? I can give you all the textbooks you like. They have open days where he lives if you’re interested. Come along and have a look one day, you don’t have to be shy.’
Harrigan appeared beside her and removed the photograph of his son from the board, sliding it into a folder.
‘No, that’s not why I’m here,’ she said at once. ‘I came in here to think, it’s the only place where it’s quiet enough to. He looks like you, that’s all that was in my head.’
He shrugged, apparently embarrassed by what he had said. There were lines of strain around his eyes.
‘Yeah, you could say that. Same face if you like. Poor kid.’
He spoke more quietly.
‘I was really thinking about her,’ she said, changing the subject, glancing at the anonymous figure in the photograph. ‘I’m trying to work her out. She didn’t go out looking for blood. She wasn’t doing it for kicks.’
‘I almost wish she had been, I’d find her easier to understand. I don’t cotton on to killing people for fantasies like this.’
‘This is so extreme, I almost don’t know where to start with it,’
Grace said, glancing along the board. ‘You look at it and there are no holds barred at all. Where do you have to come from to see the world this way?’
‘Nowhere we want to go. I don’t care what makes her what she is, Grace. I want her off the streets before she does something to someone else. You put a gun in the hands of someone who thinks like this and they will use it, it goes with the territory. Why are you asking yourself that question?’
‘It’s one way of getting her off the streets, isn’t it? Working out who she is, what she might do next.’
He glanced along the corkboard. ‘You look at this and you say to yourself, this is who she is,’ he said. ‘And the answer is, so what? Some people have no problem killing, they like to do it for fun or profit.
Other people do it because they’re away with the pixies. We know that. The rest is just work.’
‘Don’t we have to out-think them?’ Grace replied, looking at the slender and unknown girl in the photograph talking to Greg Smith.
‘Isn’t that the point? Apart from anything you might feel for the people they’ve damaged. Doesn’t that make you want to ask those questions?’
She said this last not as an argument, but as an expression of something felt.
‘Yeah, the people involved do matter,’ he said. ‘As it happens, Grace, I ask myself those questions all the time. I read all the books as well. Every time a new one comes out, I get hold of it and I think, maybe this one is going to tell me something. What I’m saying is, I don’t see that it amounts to very much in the end to know what makes her what she is. It won’t be a blinding insight into anything.’
Unconsciously, Grace flicked a stray strand of her long brown hair back from her face, an unexpectedly elegant gesture to Harrigan’s observation.
‘You have to be one step ahead of them whatever you do,’ she said, unwillingly seeing in her mind the man who had raped her and whose body was still imprinted on her own however much she wanted to scour it away. ‘People can play all kinds of games with you at a distance. You can’t let them do that.’
Harrigan, looking at her, did not reply for a few moments.
‘That’s a good way of seeing things if you want to do this job,’ he said. ‘Are you taking that picture with you when you go to see that boy?’
They both glanced at the photograph taken in Belmore Park.
‘Yeah, I’ve got it already. I’d better go, it’ll take me a while to get there.’
‘Why don’t you come and see me when you get back? I’d like to hear what he’s got to say before you write it up. And don’t forget to ring me if you get any spectacular information.’
‘Sure,’ she said.
She smiled at him and left the room. He walked out after her. Come and see me and then we’ll go out and eat together somewhere. No, let’s not do that, that really will give everyone something to talk about.
There were enough whispers doing the rounds at the moment without adding something like that to them.
At that moment, Harrigan was called back into his office to take yet another phone call from the Tooth’s personal assistant, a woman who possessed the perfect up-your-arse voice, demanding yet more information on what they’d spent, what they’d achieved. Trapped at his desk, he watched Grace readying to leave. She wouldn’t want to spend her time with him anyway. Would she? As the idiot woman rabbited on in his ear, he watched Grace walk out of the office — a nice light movement, full of ease — and wondered.
As soon as Harrigan had escaped from his telephone call, he quietly shredded the photograph of his son. Jeffo was going to regret his little joke. All the signs were there: Harrigan was being undermined from both the outside and the inside, and if he wanted to survive he’d have to watch every step he took. It was the worst possible time to think of something so scandalous and stupidly suicidal as sleeping with his most junior officer. He had much better keep his eye focused on things that were likely to have more reliable benefits. Such as hanging onto his career and making sure that too many knives didn’t go thud between his shoulderblades.
Out on the road, Grace drove nimbly through the traffic, pleased with her freedom. She sang to herself as she drove, hits on the airwaves and remnants from songs she had sung during her own short career. She felt restless, something which usually ended in her dusting off her shiny clothes and high-heeled shoes and going out to party. She was good at living it up, Sydney people generally were, they knew how to party. There was Bondi with its tarted-up strip on the edge of the beach and the shining sea, and the city itself, bright in a sunlight with an ancient, hard clarity to it. It was a city lazy in the sun, casual and brash with its eye on the good times, thorough in the execution of its corruption, the way it went about everything that mattered. She never wanted to live anywhere else.
She overtook the slower cars on the expressway, approaching the river, speeding down the descent towards Brooklyn and the Hawkesbury River Bridge. Almost fourteen years ago she had travelled this same distance in the reverse direction, at that time by train, leaving home to work in the city, with a sense of freedom she had never again felt with such intensity. The railway line had twisted (still did) along the backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, past disused oyster beds and decaying blue and green fibro houses isolated in the midst of the eucalyptus forest on the water’s edge. The train had picked up speed as it climbed through the tunnels approaching the river crossing and had then come roaring out of the dark onto the bridge. She had felt that the sky had opened out around her, that she was flying. To the east of the railway she had seen the grey pylons of the old bridge, the green river between the tree-covered hills as it flowed to the sea, and the town on the south bank beneath her, a pastiche of
