this. But he’s not. He’s just going to lie there and jerk himself off and not give a shit. Anyway, it’s too fucking dangerous. They put you away for ever for things like this.’
There was a silence in which they looked at each other.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t Graeme. It’s me. All right? It’s me.’
‘
The boy threw his own cigarette on the ground. She looked around, not knowing what to say. For the first time, she thought she might cry.
‘When am I going to see you next?’ he asked.
‘Later on. This evening. I’ll see Graeme and I’ll come by Wheelo’s later. I might sleep there if that’s okay.’
‘Yeah, that’s okay. I’ll see you there. I’m not going back to the refuge now. There’s no way I’m going to stay at Preacher Graeme’s community fucking refuge ever again after this. I don’t care if I am supposed to be living there. I don’t care what you say about him, that guy just fucking scares me so much, I don’t like going near him anyway. But I am never going anywhere near him again after this. You shouldn’t have let him do this to you, Luce. Not ever.’ He was shaking his head angrily. ‘You promise me you’ll be there tonight?’
‘Yeah, I promise.’
‘Okay.’
He rubbed his face. The anger had gone out of his voice, now he was only sad.
‘Fuck you, Luce, the things you do. You be there. We’ve got to work out what we’re going to do now.’
‘I’ll be there.’
She walked away, back across the park to the street, turning to wave goodbye to him as she went, and saw him, still seated and waving back to her, as she waited to cross the road.
3
In Railway Square the traffic flowed in a solid roar and the rainy air smelled of petrol. Lucy, lost in her thoughts, barely saw the crowds around her. No, Greg, it’s not just Graeme. You should know that, you know me, we’ve been together for a while now. We’ve slept in doorways, under bridges, anywhere there was a bit of warmth. You and me hanging on to each other with nothing but old clothes and newspapers between us. You’ve seen me when I’m wasted and the only thing I want to feel is nothing. When the only thing that keeps me going is the blood pumping through my veins because I can’t fucking stop it. Sometimes I want that blood to run down the nearest drain and take me with it. But it’s not just mine any more, it’s someone else’s as well. I think it must be painted all over the sky.
She looked up, breaking out of her trance; the expanse of sky above the station was grey. The roadway opened into George Street, taking the traffic past the verdigris steeple of Christ Church St Laurence before moving on towards the harbour. She was travelling in the opposite direction, past the ugly, squared tower of the University of Technology. In the last year, she had spent hours inside its student computer rooms, out of the heat or the chill of the day, opening up new worlds through a false student account. Knock on the right door at UTS after hours and someone who was just a boy, white-faced and quietly spoken, would give you a log-on ID and a password for nothing, with no questions asked. Lucy had not tried to guess his reasons for doing this; she no longer asked herself why anyone did what they did. That question had been replaced in her mind a long time ago by others. Are there any limits to what people do? Why do they like to be so cruel to each other? When she asked this aloud, people laughed and called her stupid.
The questions drove her as she gained skill in using the software and built her own website, both in the computer rooms and on her own stolen machine. Everything she fashioned worked around this insoluble puzzle, which never gave ground to her. Duplicating the things she had met with in her life and seen out on the Sydney streets
— beatings, robberies, rape — and fixing them as electronic impulses on a screen, she transformed them into something she could suspend out of time. She was safe in the computer rooms and the events she recreated on her website were controlled, they could not hurt her. She studied the images she built, remaking them if she needed to, trying to understand what it must mean to hurt someone or to shoot them dead.
Today she did not stop, her restless, jerky energy drove her on past the pubs, restaurants and takeaway bars to the serrated wall of the Carlton brewery. Further up Broadway, close to the park, stood two old, ornate buildings with elaborate clock towers supporting translucent spheres like fragile crystal worlds. In the middle distance, Lucy saw what she had come to find. The usually swift flow of traffic down Broadway was forced to slow before negotiating a hazard marked by a string of plastic blue police ribbons snapping in the wind.
Access to a particular side street had been cordoned off and police cars were parked on the road and the footpath.
Although she had been waiting to see it, she stopped abruptly to lean against the rough wall of the brewery and wait until the blood had stopped pounding in her head. Images from her website began to surge through her mind. In her electronic world, the counterfeit Lucy pulled the trigger, the woman doctor died under the gun, and once that switch was thrown, catastrophe was initiated. The buildings around the doctor began to burn, the sky was split open to rain down green fire, nuclear flame burst out onto Broadway and all the buildings that surrounded Lucy where she stood now, exploded. A fireball roared the breadth of the roadway and ate up stick figures and toy cars.
Outside of her head, in the ordinary daylight, she watched the world move on routinely around her. She was alien to everyone passing her by, someone the crowds would turn on if they knew what she had done.
She held the contrasting visions side by side in her head but the electronic images were her true reference points. What existed around her — these buildings, everyday life, tangible things and immovable structures — were hollow, they had no reliable substance. They hid something that stank to her, something that was dead and rotting.
She crossed against the traffic to the other side of the road, just another student from one of the universities. A small crowd had gathered opposite the police cordon, watching and talking underneath the yellow sign outside of St Barnabas’s Church that told the passing parade, ‘Forgiveness means not having to pretend any more.’ Lucy stopped amongst them, looking on, listening.
‘Two of them. Someone shot two people. And their boy was there watching.’
The words were taken up by the crowd and spread like an echo from an uncertain source.
That was me. I shot her. I waited for her inside that empty shop and then I went out into the street and I shot her. I shot the both of them.
No one turned on her for her unspoken words. The surrounding buildings were unchanged from their daily aspect. The uniformed police guarding the street looked around at the crowd, their faces expressionless with boredom. She could walk up to them and say, ‘You want me. I did that.’ Why didn’t she? They might only laugh at her, or even become angry, and then wave her on her way. Lucy waited for a few moments longer and then, there being nothing else to do, walked on.
She sat on a bench in Victoria Park, her backpack propped beside her, and stared at the ornamental ponds where the seagulls and ducks huddled in close to the shore. Brief sunlight brought a drab flush of yellow to the thin grass. Lucy glanced back towards Broadway, to the wide intersection where City Road fed its vehicles into the traffic. As the sunlight faded and the weather became dreary and dark, she saw the sporadic glow of headlights from the passing cars and the occasional gleam of neon from the shop fronts on the far side of the road. These lights were the only brightness to touch her; her visionary other-world had grown drab, its vivid dye had bled out of her into the watery air. From here she could see nothing of the police ribbons. She was isolated here. She could pretend that the shooting had never happened; and then, curiously, understood that she did not want to let her act of execution go, however bloody it had turned out to be.
The noise of surrounding traffic hung in suspension. The preternatural quiet held her in a sense of anticipation, she waited as the atmosphere became strangely claustrophobic, strangely lonely. She was chasing another memory down this emptiness. There was sunlight warming her, the sound of magpies carolling in the background, and Graeme’s voice as he spoke to her, rich as honey. They were sitting opposite each other at a picnic
