The woman beside Lucy stirred, snorted and muttered angrily to herself.
‘People like that deserve anything they get. Useless, this government is. Why didn’t Howard bring back the death penalty when he got in?
None of them are good for anything. If they asked us what we wanted, we’d have it back today.’
Lucy raised her chin and stared at the back of the head of the passenger in front of her, a mass of damp black curls. What would they know? What would any of them know?
The bus had stopped near the Elizabeth Street entrance to Central Station. The woman was trying to get off and pushed vigorously against Lucy. ‘Aren’t you going to move?’ she said.
Ignoring her, Lucy left the bus. The centres of her hands were wet, her grazed palms stung. A line of watchers sat on the low wall near the corner of Eddy Avenue, out-of-towners, the unemployed, derelicts.
Near them, a busker sat with his back against the sandstone wall darkened by traffic fumes. His fair hair was tied back in a long ponytail and he played sweet tunes on a trumpet for the passers-by and the unending traffic.
Lucy walked past their collective watchful gaze, through the brown sandstone columns of the station entranceway, down into the concourse towards the ticket offices and the public toilets. People flowed either side of her. She felt that she had opened a door onto a room where someone should have been waiting for her but which in reality was so empty she might have been the very first person to step inside it. Her skin was scorched. The children’s voices came rushing back into her head, their soft cries touching her cheek like the brush of tiny insects’ wings before stinging her with their sharp acidic bites. She walked, weighted by this impossible duress, the noise in her head, fear and the constrictions of time binding her to this body, this place.
Her head cleared. The concourse, with its shifting crowds, came back to a washed-out reality. She was at the start of the open walkway that led past the florists, newspaper sellers and fast-food merchants down to Eddy Avenue. Indifferent commuters glanced at her as they made their way through the scrappy weather to the suburban trains.
She remembered why she had chosen to come here. She went down to the roadway and crossed over to Belmore Park.
She saw who she was looking for in the gazebo under the Moreton Bay fig trees. A group of hungry boys who had climbed up onto the railings and were perched there, barely out of the weather, a chorus of ragged crows watching over the people who walked through the park.
One of them, maybe fifteen and wearing a khaki coat and a dark red beanie over his straggling hair, climbed down as she walked towards them and came hurrying to meet her.
‘Luce,’ he said, quietly and urgently, ‘where’ve you been? I was wondering if you were going to show up here. Look, I heard these two people got shot down near Broadway. You didn’t do it, did you?’
‘I did. Maybe a couple of hours ago? I don’t know when. Yes, I did do it.’
Her voice shook as she spoke. She took hold of him instinctively and he caught her by the shoulders. They hung on to each other desperately in the grey weather.
‘Oh, Lucy, you didn’t! Why? What did you come back here for? It’s so close to where it happened. What if the pigs see you?’
‘They don’t know who I am. You’re not going to tell them. I wanted to see you. I’ve got to sit down. I feel like I’m going to fall over.’
They sat on a bench at the edge of the open grass, close to each other in the damp cold. Lucy hugged her backpack, burying her face into it for a few short moments.
‘It was just supposed to be her, Greg. But there was some man there and I shot him too.’ She looked up at him, almost whispering. ‘I didn’t plan to do that but I just did. I don’t know how. And he’s dead now.’
He stared at her and then at the ground.
‘Luce. Shit! Why did you? What are you going to do now?’
She shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. And there was this kid there. Staring at me. I can still see him. And she isn’t dead, that woman. I heard it on the radio. She’s not dead.’
‘Shit, Luce,’ the boy said again. ‘This ambulance went by here a while back and it was
They looked over towards the traffic on Eddy Avenue and the dark yellowish-brown facade of the railway colonnade on the other side of the road. The line of trees and the castle-like stone edifice of the station blocked out the grey sky.
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. It was horrible, you know. There was all this blood and it was on me. It was just so horrible.’
‘Fuck!’ The boy was frightened. ‘You get a car? Anyone see you?’
‘No, that’s okay, I did all that. And I got back to the garage okay. I left the car there and everything, like I said. But I lost the key to the garage, it fell out of my hand. It went in the pit. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was really strange. It was horrible but it was just so easy as well. You know, you just do it and it happens, and that’s it, it’s over.
Just like that, it’s all over and done with? It’s
Her voice was shaking as she spoke. He looked at her once; after that they sat for a while in silence, staring at nothing.
‘You want a smoke?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’
He rolled a cigarette for each of them. Her hands were shaking too much to hold the match and he lit it for her. He sat beside her, frowning.
‘Fuck you, Luce, why did you do it?’ The words burst out of him too loudly. She tried to quieten him but he shook her off. ‘Just because Graeme — ’
‘It’s not “just because Graeme”,’ she replied in a tight, bitter voice.
‘It is. Don’t you say that to me. He put you up to this and you let him.’
‘No. He didn’t. I mean that, Greg. He didn’t. I went after this. Me.
I did. You can’t change that.’
‘Fucking bullshit!’
‘No, it’s true.’ Lucy frowned. She dropped her barely smoked cigarette onto the wet ground. ‘I can’t smoke, I can’t do anything. My throat’s so tight, I can’t breathe.’
‘Why don’t you come over to Wheelo’s? You can hide out there for a while. He’ll have something to loosen you up a bit.’
She shook her head.
‘No, I don’t want to do that. I’ve got to go back and have a look.
I’ve got to make sure I really did it. Weird.’
They sat there for a few moments longer. People walking through the park glanced at them then looked away. A woman stared; the boy made a lewd face at her and she hurried on. Lucy stood up quickly, hoisting her backpack.
‘I’ve got to go. And I’ve got to see Graeme as well, I promised him I’d go and see him. He said to me last night, you know, if your courage fails you, don’t worry. You just come back here to me anyway and we’ll talk and we’ll see where we go from there. Well, I am. He’s got to tell me this is okay.’
‘Oh yeah, and it’s got nothing to do with him — ’
‘You don’t understand it.’
‘I don’t want to. You didn’t have to do this. You shouldn’t have, Luce. You’re the one who gets to live with it, not him. You know, for the rest of your life, when you wake up in the morning, you’re always going to know you did
