in some surprise.
Grace felt the warmth of Harrigan’s physicality in the fabric of his jacket, the cotton of his white shirt, with all the closeness of aftershave and ordinary human odour. Crossing the line to connect to the body beneath the fabric had slipped past the bounds of possibility. All the sexual need she still felt for him had led her into grief, not much else, but this was usual. It was better to ask why she might want to put herself into the poisonous situation of having an affair with her boss.
He looked at the empty street, waiting for Lucy Hurst to appear any moment out of the dark. A degree of control had returned to his face.
‘You should have told me all of that sooner than now, Grace,’ he said.
‘None of the things you’ve done tonight have been very professional.’
She did not know how to interpret the disappointment in his voice.
‘I’m just starting out. I’ll toughen up in time, the way I’m supposed to,’ she said, without looking at him. ‘I’ll see you back there.’
She left him standing in the doorway of the cafe and ran through the rain to her car.
‘Yeah. Probably you will. You’ve probably got that in you somewhere,’ he said quietly to himself, watching her go.
Grace breathed in solitude as freedom. No one need know she was letting herself slide badly enough to cry as she drove back to the office, the tears grudgingly squeezing out for her. Out on the streets it was still pouring rain. Lightning strikes split the sky.
33
The lightning crashed down over the bell curve of the sky and, for an instant, illuminated Lucy in her car, driving away from the Whole Life Health Centre at Randwick. She knew this building from her own experience: she had been taken there twice without wanting to go there, and then had passed it by when she went to and from the garage. Mostly, however, like the others in its chain, it had been studied for some months by the others in Graeme’s inner circle. It had been photographed, notes taken of its interior layout, and its possible destruction discussed at the Temple. Discussed, as most of these things were between Graeme and Bronwyn and the select few. As something wanted desperately, the way people she knew out on the streets talked about who they had last fucked or how much money they would get once they had done this one job, this single deal. Destruction was a fantasy never achieved by any of them.
Lucy was here for another reason; she had her own point to make.
‘Alarms ring back at base’, the signs on the building said. Lucy treated them with scepticism and, with practised skill, entered through a narrow back window into a toilet, out of weather that was harsh enough to keep anyone inside. Not that she cared, she was happy to let the rain chill her to the bone. She had kept the device she had made dry by wrapping it in plastic around her body, and delivered it whole to the building, placing it next to the electrical circuits, unconcerned for the danger she was putting herself in. She only needed enough charge and accelerant to start a fire that would gut the inside of the building and she knew how that could be done. She was the only one in the darkened building, so what did it matter if it did go up and she went with it? As she left, she considered that if the alarms had rung back at the base, then no one had bothered to answer them. They must all be watching TV and saying how bad the weather was.
She dumped her car on the other side of Central Station, leaving it to be cannibalised. She had come to her final place of sanctuary, a former garment factory in Surry Hills marked for redevelopment, the owners now bankrupt, the ground-floor windows broken and boarded up. Inside, scraps of material, broken sewing needles, clothing racks and parts of discarded dressmaker’s dummies covered the floors. The space had been appropriated by the needy and the homeless, and accommodated another community, a shifting body of artists who wanted the light that came through the wide windows overlooking the street on the second floor. The upper storey room was filled with their leftover works. Soft sculpture and collage, paintings and unfinished objects were spread across the open space amidst the pink, plastic limbs of the dummies.
Lucy trod quietly through these plastic things and sidestepped the prone figure of someone sleeping in the midst of the debris. She went up to the top floor, to a small dog’s leg of a room opposite a filthy bathroom. She had barricaded this room against invasion by others with her own locks. It had a narrow bed, a limited view and a curtainless window where the rain had covered the glass like a crystal frosting. There was a very weak light in the room, something to push back the shadows a little. She dumped her backpack against the wall and took out her gun, which she left on the bed. She dried herself as well as she could and then sat on the bed with the gun in her hands and waited. She looked at the dial on her watch, luminous in the darkling room. Just on midnight. Time was ticking down.
The same storm caught the preacher as he crossed a deserted suburban park somewhere on the upper north shore, a lightning flash briefly revealing the isolated figure in the darkness. He hurried through the sparse trees, huddled in his coat, head down, intent on where he was going. He pulled his hood further over his face as he ran towards a waiting car on the far corner of the park, near a house where an outside light was burning. He got in, greeting the driver, and the car pulled away from the kerb. Some minutes afterwards, the outside lights of the nearby house were extinguished.
The rain had been hammering down but as they drove it began to cease gradually. They travelled the backstreets towards North Sydney.
Here the preacher left the first car to claim another which had been left waiting for him in a twenty-four-hour car park. He drove into the city between the tower blocks that surrounded the approach to the steel coat hanger and then over the curve of the bridge misty in the lighter rain.
It was just after midnight. In the near distance, the office towers of the city appeared as hazy pillars of electric light. The preacher saw them as hollow structures floating in profound darkness, a prelude to the day when time would stop and there would be only light everlasting. On that day, he hoped to satisfy his own hunger as a collector of souls. His hunger never let him rest; it pushed him now to meet with someone he was quite sure would be waiting to greet him with a loaded gun.
He parked not far from the garment factory in Surry Hills and went inside. By now the rain had almost stopped. As he approached the room on the third floor, he wondered whether she had yet arrived but when the unlocked door opened to him he knew that she was there to meet him. He stepped inside and, in the half-shadows, saw Lucy sitting on the bed aiming a gun at him. She said in her familiar voice, ‘Stop right there, Graeme. Don’t move. Just sit on the floor.’
The preacher closed the door and sat with his back against it.
‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘it’s nice to see you again.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she said, smiling.
‘It is. You should believe me. I have been looking forward to this meeting very much. We have a great deal to talk about.’
Lucy laughed.
‘There are times when I don’t believe you. You could walk into anything. You don’t even look worried.’
‘Why should I be? If God puts his cloak around you, why should you be afraid? God has his cloak around you at the moment, Lucy. You should realise you don’t have a reason to be frightened of anything.’
He spoke smoothly. She shook her head, trying to shield herself from the immediate hypnotism of his voice.
‘Fuck you, Graeme. I didn’t come here to listen to you talk shit to me. I want you to tell me about Greggie. I want to know what you did.’
‘I did nothing. Greg overdosed and he overdosed because Bronwyn is too stupid to lock a cupboard door properly. You should talk to her. The woman’s a fool. I sometimes wonder what dimension she really inhabits.’
Lucy rested her gun on her knees and laughed again.
‘You did nothing. You never fucking do, do you? Not because you didn’t want to. In case you’ve forgotten, I was there when you were talking about helping both me and him to the afterlife.’
‘Those were only words, Lucy. The afterlife is all around us but we don’t realise it. Now listen to me. What do
