table someone had set out on the back lawn of a small private hospital.
‘Why, Lucy? Why do you need to go and live on the streets the way you do? You’ve been to school, you have an education. You’re an intelligent girl. Why do this to yourself?’
‘I’m playing a game. I call it dancing with death. I like doing that.
Didn’t you know that?’
‘Why death? Why not life?’
‘Why anything? I can do anything I like, you know.’
There was no other reason why she should have been at that tiny private hospital on the northwestern edge of the city, Greenwood Convalescent, a run-down place with few patients and an ageing doctor. She had been living rough and bingeing, deliberately chancing her luck with heroin. Pushing it, marrying lethal exhilaration with the thought that this rush might be her last chance to see daylight.
Grinning to herself each time that she came back to the light and thought, well, I’m still here, maybe next time I won’t be. I won’t know, will I? Do I care?
Detox was an option forced on her by Greg with the help of Ria, the woman from the Family Services Commission. Greenwood was the only place where she had been able to find Lucy a bed at short notice, tracked down after endless frantic phone calls to unresponsive agencies, none of whom had any space available. Lucy had agreed to go there on the fall of a coin.
Even so, Greenwood was a strange place in which to come to earth.
When Graeme introduced himself to her as her counsellor, he was the first normal-looking person she had met. He sat with her when she was in the throes of cold turkey while she told herself this was all the same roller coaster ride, the same coin, just another side, and she could get through it, she could survive anything. The underlying rule of Lucy’s game was that she took the consequences of her actions full on.
She hung on to every ache and sweat, every gripping pain, as a gift.
Pain
She’d never had the stomach for that. Her pride lay in what she could endure. If you couldn’t give pain, you took it: took it without showing you felt it and that made you as good as anyone else.
When the mists cleared and her roller coaster ride came to an end, she began to spend time with Graeme in the hospital garden, an overgrown place shaded by white eucalyptus trees. She was shaky from the brutal process, groggy with tranquillisers, smoking cigarettes one after the other. Graeme sat on the other side of the table, smiling as they talked. She watched him cynically through the spirals of cigarette smoke.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, insolently throwing back his own questions. ‘Why should you give a shit about me? You’re being paid to care, aren’t you? Because Ria sent me here from Family Services. You get paid for it.’
‘No, Lucy. I’m not being paid by anyone. You being here is a purely private arrangement. I actually do care what happens to you,’ he replied. ‘But if you want to know, I’m rebuilding my life as well. I’m just back from many happy years in the United States, the last few in California. The sun gets to you there, it wears you out a little. It’s a bit like here. But, of course, this is home.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said indifferently.
California was a mythical location for her, some gaudy place on the other side of the ocean made up of names known to her through television shows but whose physical reality was indistinct: Santa Monica Beach, Beverley Hills, Sunset Strip. Out of some strange ghost of politeness, she named these places to him and he smiled again.
‘Yes. I’ve been to all those places. Santa Monica’s a beautiful beach.
Perhaps you’ll go there one day.’
‘Yeah, one day maybe I will.’
She looked at him with contempt for the suggestion.
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Why shouldn’t you?’
She did not bother to reply. She stubbed out her cigarette, and then lit another.
‘You didn’t answer my question, Lucy. Why are you out there?’
She shrugged. ‘Because the world’s a piece of shit? Because everyone lives off everybody else? What does it matter what I do? So fucking what.’
‘Do you mean that, Lucy? Is that what you really think?’
‘Yeah. Don’t you think that way sometimes? Don’t you want to smash things up?’
She stopped, suddenly energyless. He waited for some moments after she had finished talking, looking at her.
‘Yes, Lucy, I do. There are many times when I feel like that.’
‘Do you?’
His reply sent a jolt of white anger into her head. ‘Well, I do it.
Smash things. You can do a fucking lot with a brick if you’re aiming it at a car. And it’s even better if you can get hold of a bit of metal pipe.
What do you do? Anything?’
‘In my own way, I do quite a lot of things,’ he replied. ‘I’ve dedicated my life to it. I know what you mean when you say the world is empty. I understand that.’
‘I didn’t say empty. I said shit.’
‘The meaning doesn’t change. The world is rotten. Its decay reaches up to Heaven. It’s that decay you smell, all the stench that is the world’s corruption.’
She shrugged again, surprised, uncertain how to reply.
‘And you are out there, Lucy, because the world is shit, as you call it?’
‘Yeah, I am,’ she said, very softly.
Her cigarette was finished again. She rubbed her eyes before lighting another. There was a pause and she began to talk as she rarely did.
‘I get sick of being out there though. You get hungry. I don’t stay out there all the time now, I come and go. I get rooms to live in, sometimes I can get the dole. And I work too. I’ve had jobs. Even me.’
She laughed cynically. ‘But you know how I mostly live? I steal. It’s the only thing I am good at. I’ve never been caught. I get tired though. I keep thinking, why am I out here, what am I going to do now?’
There was silence as she smoked.
‘In the end I just go back there. I keep going back because there isn’t anywhere else. I think that really is where I’m supposed to be.’
‘There’s something you’re not telling me, Lucy. Why are you so badly hurt? What happened to you?’
He seemed to speak out of genuine concern. Lucy had a test for people who said they were concerned for her, she knew how to prove they were liars. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and took out a small plastic wallet which contained a square of shiny dark blue material. She unwrapped the material and placed on the table a torn scrap of letterhead.
Because of this. Because this was the day. When she had thought, this is the end of the world for me, they can’t do this to me any more.
‘You really want to know about me?’ she asked. ‘Okay. You look at this. And you go and work it out. If you know so much.’
She pushed the piece of paper towards him and he picked it up.
‘You be careful with it,’ she snapped.
Her words, deliberately cryptic, were intended to make it clear to him that he couldn’t know, he couldn’t understand. No one could; it was knowledge privileged to her. No one could have the gall to pretend they knew. She looked at him. Go on. I dare you. I just fucking dare you.
He smoothed the torn paper flat onto the table. A scrap Lucy had ripped from a doctor’s note pad when no one was looking. Dr Agnes Liu. MB, BS (Syd.), FRACOG, MRCOG. The Women’s Whole Life Health Centres Inc.
‘I know this woman,’ he said eventually. ‘I know her very well.’
‘You can’t.’
