For one thing, they don’t know where to find him.
There are some places I know about where they might take him. But I think what they’ll probably do is move him around. I’m not really sure.
Oh, yeah. There’s more than one person out there, Turtle.
Why are you so sure that’s the right thing to do?
You don’t know that. Anyway, I’m not frightened of them, I don’t care what they do to me. That’s not what I’m thinking about. I could go looking for my friend myself if I had a car. Maybe that’s what I should do. I need a car. I could -
I could take my gun and go and see the people who’ve got him.
Say to them I’ve got a gun, they’ve got to do what I want or I’ll use it on them this time. But for all I know, they might be waiting for me to do that. I’m not the only one with a gun. Maybe I’ll just end up getting shot myself. That’s what I’m expecting to happen really, when I think about it.
No, I haven’t forgotten them. I don’t think I ever will. It’s like they’re always there, it doesn’t matter what I do. They’re with me all the time.
I wake up in the morning and it’s like, ‘Oh, hi, guys, it’s you again.’
They never go away. I am going to see those people and hear those shots for the rest of my life. I’ve got to go and think now. I’ll be back, okay? Talk to you later. Love you, Turtle, love you always.
I’ll think, Turtle.
She closed down and then, feeling the enclosure of the room, opened the door. As she sat on the bed looking out into the hallway, she saw Melanie go past in the direction of her father’s room, carrying a tray of medications. A little afterwards, she saw Stephen come back the other way, limping on his bad leg.
‘Stevie,’ she called.
‘Yeah. What do you want, Luce?’
‘How’s Dad?’
‘He’s as sick as a dog. Why? Are you going to go and see him? He was just asking if you were still here and I said you were.’
Lucy stood in the doorway, glanced down towards the closed door of her father’s room.
‘What does Mel do in there?’ she asked.
‘What do you think she does? She washes him. She feeds him. She gives him his pills and his shots. Listens to him whenever he’s raving on about something. I don’t know how she does it.’
‘What about you?’ she asked, suddenly sharper. ‘How are you?
How’s your knee? Do you still get that pain the way you used to?’
‘Don’t worry about my knee, Luce. I can deal with it.’
‘Oh, yeah. You can deal with it. We can all fucking deal with it.’
‘He’s in real pain. You haven’t seen it.’
‘Good,’ she said.
‘No, it’s not good. You haven’t seen what it means. It’s horrible, it doesn’t matter if it is him,’ he replied, angrily.
‘No, he deserves it,’ she snapped back. ‘Why are you doing this anyway?’
‘I’m doing it for Mel. And because it’s going to be over and done with soon. And after that I’m going to clear everything I can out of this place. We’re going to clean it from top to bottom, I’m going to paint it and it’s going to be like new. And that’ll be the end of it. They’re the only reasons I’ve got. I don’t want to talk about it any more. Can you give it a rest for the moment?’
‘Stevie, I’ve got to ask you about a — ’
‘Not now!’
He walked away.
She went back into her room and then thought she could not stay in there. She went downstairs and followed the sound of the television to the lounge. Her mother was in there as usual. Lucy stood in the doorway, her mother looked up at her and did not speak. She pulled her cardigan close about her and turned her attention back to the television. Wrapped up in her old windcheater, Lucy went and stood out on the back lawn, walked to the edge of her grandmother’s garden and looked across the national park. It was late in the afternoon, not long before dark. In the distance, she saw the house lights that marked the edge of the suburban sprawl begin to appear. The sky was overcast and the contours of the tree tops in the distance were the colour of fresh-cut coal.
Hugging herself in the growing dusk on the edge of the woodland, she shook her head against the furies rising in her mind, the sounds in her head. ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t,’ as the familiar cries of her own personal ghosts came back to haunt her. She sat down on the damp grass, holding her head in her hands.
When she came back to herself, she heard the dog’s chain clinking as Dora moved around. ‘Fuck you, Dad,’ she said, looking up at the ragged sky, and went and let the dog off her chain. With a strength drawn out of anger, she ripped the chain away — it came easily away from the rotten wood of the kennel — and threw it out into the tangle of the garden. She pulled her windcheater off and stood out there in the bitter cold, letting the chill freeze her body. She felt the gun pressed into her waist grow cold against her skin and did not care if anyone saw that she had it. She waited until ice seemed to take hold of her and she felt nothing.
She needed a car. Even if she went to the police, she would still need a car. She would ask Stevie in the morning if he could help her. She rang the preacher’s mobile telephone number but only reached the answering machine. ‘Graeme,’ she said into the mechanical emptiness,
‘it’s Lucy. I’m going to call you tomorrow in the morning. I should know if I’ve got a car by then. Okay? You had better be there, Graeme.
And remember what I said to you about when we’re on the phone. It’s not just you I want to talk to. So don’t call me, I’ll call you. You make sure you wait for me to call.’
She went back inside the house, to her room. She had stopped in the hallway to look at the door to her father’s room when the door opened and Melanie appeared, carrying a tray of dirty dishes and utensils. The tray was heavily laden and she walked awkwardly. She stopped near her sister’s room and leaned the tray on the railing at the top of the stairs.
‘Do you want me to help you or something?’ Lucy asked, feeling powerless.
For a few moments, Melanie stood with her eyes closed out of tiredness.
‘No, it doesn’t matter,’ she said, shaking her head, and then, ‘Well, yeah. If you do want to help? Go in there and tell him you don’t care, you don’t give a shit what he did to you. Because he’s still punishing me for what you said to him the other day. Me and Stevie together.
You want to make it easier, you can do that for us.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Lucy said with steel in her voice, and shut her door.
She logged back on to her computer, asking herself again, what would Turtle say she should do? He wasn’t out there. She logged off again, disappointed. Driven by hunger, she went down to the kitchen to find something to eat, before going back to her room and working on her creation of the celestial city, the only place she knew where she did not feel like a stranger.
