he asked.
‘No, that’s no problem,’ she said. ‘Don’t let him find it out on the news.’
‘Grace,’ he said, as she stood up to go, ‘this has got a very nasty smell to it. You have thought about that?’
‘Yes, I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought about it quite a lot. What are we going to do about it? Go after Gina? Is that what we do now?’
‘I’d like to. I’d like to charge her with withholding information. I’d like to throw the book at her for sitting on that name for all this time.
But no, we don’t do that. I’ll tell someone else about her and maybe they’ll go and look into whatever is going on. If they’ve got the time and the money. In the meantime, watch your back. Make sure you ring in when you’re finished. You’d better get going.’
He went back to his papers, she walked out. Neither of them looked at each other, until the last moment when he looked up to see her walk out the door, just in time to see her glance back at him. Once she had gone, he rang the media unit, advising them he had an identikit on its way over to them to be released for saturation coverage. Then he rang the hospital and asked to speak to Matthew Liu.
25
‘Where do you want to go first, Gina?’ Grace asked as she eased out into the evening traffic.
It had clouded over and begun to rain, just lightly. Gina was lighting one more of Grace’s cigarettes and looking at her side on. She leaned forward, bracing one hand on the dashboard. Her nails were bitten to the quick, her cigarette smoke curled up against the windscreen.
‘Do you want to go to Maccas? I can show you where you can park.’
‘Okay.’
Grace cruised up Liverpool Street. The bright lights of the traffic flowed around her.
The girl hummed a tune which Grace recognised. She sang along quietly.
‘You know it?’
‘Yeah. I used to sing it once. I used to be a singer. That was a while ago now.’
‘It couldn’t have been that long ago. What did you give it away for?’
‘Got sick of it. I wanted to do something else for a change.’
‘It’s my working name,’ the girl said, ‘Corinna. Because I like the song.’
‘Yeah, I do too,’ Grace replied.
‘You’ve got a nice voice,’ Gina said after a little while. ‘I wouldn’t have given it away if I could sing like you. I would have kept going.’
‘Well, I didn’t. I still don’t want to. It wasn’t that much fun after a while. It was just everyone wanting a piece of you.’
‘Everything’s like that, it doesn’t matter what you do,’ Gina replied.
‘What you do now must be like that.’
Grace smiled. ‘Maybe a bit. No, it’s not the same,’ she said. ‘You’re clean now, aren’t you, Gina?’
‘Yeah. I got my mind back. Weird.’
‘How’d you do it?’
‘It was that or gaol, wasn’t it? I don’t really know how, to tell you the truth. Just did, I suppose. I was helping Mike out. I thought maybe he could do something for himself. Stupid. He was never going to do that.’
‘Attached to him, are you?’ Grace said sympathetically.
‘Yeah. You do get attached. People start to mean something to you.’
‘They do. They get to you after a while.’
They get under your skin whether you want them to or not. Even if you’re not sure what to make of them. Or what they think of you.
Gina found Grace a parking spot down towards Rushcutters Bay, near a large run-down terrace, its exterior painted in bright colours. A man sat on a nearby step, his arms tensed, rocking backwards and forwards in the light rain, lost in the drug. Grace looked at him and notched his existence into her mind, an imprint of the outside world.
They walked past him up a narrow, dog-legged road. They went to McDonald’s on Darlinghurst Road where they had hamburgers with everything, fries and hot apple pies.
‘How well did you know Lucy, Gina? Do you want to tell me something more about her?’ Grace asked, ploughing her way through the food.
‘She used to come in here.’
Grace looked up more sharply at this answer. Gina had wiped her mouth clean and was looking around. Her gaze did not seem to have a focus as she stared at the people near her, most of whom looked away, some of them laughing. Her mouth was moving but she did not speak. Grace followed her stare.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’ Gina regained a toughness as she spoke. ‘It’s just that we all used to come in here. We’d sit and we’d talk and that. Just over there in the corner.’ Grace looked at a large table, with seating for about six people. ‘We’d sit in here all afternoon and we’d just laugh.’
‘She really was your friend?’
‘Yeah, she was. For a little while.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing really. Just time. You don’t see people any more for all sorts of reasons. She can’t be my friend now. She’s going to gaol for ever because of me. And I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.’
‘What do you think might happen to you?’
‘I was just saying that. Anything can happen to anyone. You never know what’s going to happen, you could walk under a truck tomorrow.
But we used to come in here. We used to have fun. I wanted to have a look at it again because of that. Because they were good times. She’d say these things, she’d make you laugh. She wasn’t frightened of anything.’
Grace glanced around at the plastic fittings, the bright lights against the light-coloured walls and mirrors.
‘And she liked a hamburger as well?’
‘She did. And a chocolate thickshake. That was her favourite meal.’
Gina was shredding her used napkin into small soft snowflakes of paper.
‘Do you want to go somewhere else and have some coffee? I want to get out of here now. I know a place where they have really nice baklava, they make it themselves. We can smoke in there. I need a cigarette.’
‘That’s fine with me. I could use a smoke too.’
They walked out into the damp, crowded night-time street, full of light and movement. Gina looked around, her mouth moving silently as it had in the restaurant.
‘I used to work back down there a bit. You can get really tired by the end of the night. But I don’t care about that, you know. I love it here. I do. There just isn’t anywhere else for me.’
‘Does there have to be anywhere else for you? If this is what you want,’ Grace asked.
‘I’m just saying it. It’s really nice to be here right now.’ She stretched her backbone, her mouth a little open, drinking in the soiled air. The rain touched her face, she laughed. ‘It’s just being here. That’s all I want. Just for this little while.’
‘I’ve got more time than a couple of hours if you want it, Gina,’
Grace said. ‘If you want help, I can try to help.’
‘No, I’ve got to be somewhere. Let’s go, okay?’
Inside the cafe near the other end of Crown Street the air was blue with cigarette smoke. They sat at a table
