Harrigan waited.
‘She owes it to you, Toby. You’ve given her more than anyone else has.’
His son flickered his good hand, that ‘oh yeah’ gesture.
‘Why her, Toby? I know you don’t want to talk about it. But do you want to tell me that much, so I understand?’
‘You aren’t like her, Toby. You couldn’t even think about doing something like that.’
‘You live in the real world. She doesn’t.’
‘You don’t just live through a screen. You’ve got me for the rest of my life. You’ve got Ronnie, you’ve got Carolyn, there’s your cousins.
They love you, mate. You can’t say we haven’t shown that.’
Harrigan sat there silent.
‘There are alternatives,’ he said finally.
‘Yeah.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ he said eventually.
‘I had a girlfriend. First time we did it, we were on the back seat of her brother’s car. In the garage. He was a petrol-head too, I don’t know if he ever found out what happened to the upholstery. God, it was uncomfortable.’
In retrospect, not so very much. Things had improved after his girlfriend, through some obscure arrangement, had borrowed the keys to the flat her university student sister shared with a moving company of friends.
‘It’s whatever you want, Toby. You just have to ask me and I will organise what you want. That’s all you have to do.’
‘Toby, if you just ask me, I will do the very best I can for you. There are people out there who are better than others. I can find them for you.’
Toby flickered ‘oh, yeah’ with his good hand once again. Harrigan stood up.
‘I have to go back to work now,’ he said. ‘I have to be somewhere.
If you want anything, you just ask me. You tell me what you want.’
‘Maybe she will. In the meantime, you remember — I’m here if you want anything.’
If it was what Toby wanted, the possibility of paying someone for sex had crossed Harrigan’s mind on several occasions before. It was not something he viewed with any great satisfaction. The idea that there would be a negotiated price to pay filled him with distaste; the idea had always left him with that feeling. People smiled at you when they took your money, they manipulated you whether you paid them or they paid you. Either way they bought you out. It was just that for Toby, it was either do that or leave him to pictures on the Net, that was just the way things were. You don’t want to worry about it too much, Toby. Decent women are like hen’s teeth and if the two of you just want to unwind, who gives a shit what they do with their lives?
What does it matter? Just think about it like that.
Harrigan walked out into the bright morning feeling a strong sense of bleakness and the need for solitude. It wasn’t something he had the time to indulge in just now. He had places to go.
Harrigan parked near the New Life Ministries Temple as the first prayer meeting for the day was about to start. A small crowd had gathered in the street outside, waiting for the doors to open, just as they might have done when films were shown here. Once the picture theatre had closed, it might have become a suburban boxing ring, the kind his father had taken him to when he was a boy. Later still, they might have held dog or cock fights here. He thought of the soiled bank notes passing from hand to hand among the watchers as the animals were set against each other in the pit.
The preacher, wearing a cheap dark suit and tie, opened the doors to the church and welcomed the crowd in. ‘I am so pleased you could come,’ he said to each of the newcomers. ‘Good to see you again,’ to the regulars. He knew each one of them by name, and if he did not, he made sure they told him who they were. Harrigan was the last to present himself.
‘Paul. This is a surprise. Good morning. Are you here to tell me you’ve found Greg?’
‘No, Graeme, I’m afraid I have to say we haven’t. But we’re still out there looking for him. I guess he hasn’t come back here or you would have let us know. You haven’t seen him at all? Talked to him?’
What do you know, Harrigan thought as he watched him.
‘No, he hasn’t come home, unfortunately,’ the man replied, words Harrigan could read any way he wished. ‘I always live in hope but so far I am without that singular reward. So you are here for our prayer meeting?’
‘I thought I’d like to come along since you were generous enough to invite me. You don’t mind if I sit in?’
‘I’m sure we’ll be very happy to have you amongst us, Paul. There’s no reason why we should not. You won’t mind if I ask you to participate? It’s something I ask of everyone who comes here. My door is open to everyone provided they come with an equally open heart.’
It could hardly be worse than his monthly management meetings at Area Command with the Tooth.
‘Happy to,’ he replied.
‘Please, come in.’
He followed the preacher through double glass doors into a tiny foyer and then into the auditorium where the sound of his footsteps echoed and the room was bright with unshaded lights. The preacher locked the glass doors to the street and then closed and locked two thick wooden fire doors between the foyer and the auditorium.
Harrigan noticed this with some surprise.
‘Don’t you let your latecomers in, Graeme?’
‘There is only a very narrow opening for us in this world, Paul.
People must come on time or they will be shut out.’
Abandon all hope, Harrigan thought ironically, glancing at the solid barrier the doors formed against the outside world. His backup would have a hard time getting in here. He hoped he wouldn’t need them.
The congregation sat in chairs arranged in wide concentric circles like the white stubby petals of a plastic flower. There was a song sheet on each chair. Harrigan took a seat at the back, near the door, watching. There were more people at this gathering than he would have expected, they had filled the rows to brimming. Families, men with their wives and children, people he assumed were unemployed since it was a work day. Older couples in cheap clothes. Individuals, a man in his late twenties, his features sharp and protruding, his skin the colour of ageing milk, twisting his long hands together. An older woman with grey square-cut hair, in a sombre suit and a pink blouse buttoned to the neck. A drab woman of about forty-five with large glasses and wearing a blue tracksuit. People you would barely notice in any crowd. Perhaps he should have sent Trevor down there after all; he knew that his 2IC went to mass regularly with his partner, a fact which had surprised Harrigan when he had first found it out.
