She walked in and placed a hessian carry bag on his kitchen table.
‘It’s a nice place you’ve got here,’ she said.
‘Are you going to ask me how I can afford it?’
‘No,’ she said, surprised.
‘People ask me that question. It was in the family, I inherited it.’
She shrugged.
‘It’s not my business. Why should I care?’
He walked up to her and stroked her cheek.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long day and I must be feeling got at. It’s nice to see you.’
‘Yeah.’
They kissed for some moments in the middle of the kitchen. Then he held her. She felt him relax against her, draw breath.
He put bowls on the table, she emptied the contents of the carry bag onto the kitchen bench, a collection of white plastic containers, together with whole limes and bottles of soda water.
‘For fresh lime and soda,’ she said. ‘That’s what I said I’d have if I got out of that place alive yesterday. So I am. That’s for me. But you really need white wine for this dish.’
‘What about beer?’ he said.
‘Yes. Beer is good.’
‘What can I contribute to this?’ he asked as he set out glasses for them both.
‘Nothing,’ she said shaking her head, ‘this is from me.’
They ate in his dining room, a white-painted, high-ceilinged room with bare polished floorboards. She set the meal out and said how it should be eaten. He sipped cold light beer while he ate, and relaxed.
They spoke little at first, there seemed to be no need for it.
‘I like your mirror,’ she said, after one of their silences.
He looked up at the wide mirror above the fireplace. It reflected the room they sat in, the hallway through the door and then the wide white room that he’d had built for Toby. The frame was a plainly carved reddish-gold timber.
‘It was my aunt’s,’ he said. ‘No one knows what sort of wood that is. But you look at it and it’s beautiful. I’ve never seen it anywhere else.’
‘Has it always been there?’
‘Yeah, it has. She used to say it was hanging there when she was a girl. It arrived with the house, I think.’
‘Looking back in time,’ Grace said. ‘Everyone in your family has been reflected in that mirror at some time or another.’
‘That’s true,’ he said, glancing back up at it.
Things he would prefer not to think about or ever to see again.
‘This is good food,’ he said, ‘I don’t usually eat this well.’
‘Yeah, they are good cooks. They know what they’re doing.’
They had both finished eating but she did not ask to smoke. She sent a shiver down her spine, releasing tension, a gesture he was beginning to recognise. He thought of the shape and the line of her back. It was his turn to suggest that they should go to bed. He wanted to make love to her but he also needed the comfort of her body at the end of a rough day. He cleared the dishes into the ancient dishwasher while she stopped to scratch the cat’s head.
‘What an ugly-looking thing you are,’ she said, as Menzies batted his lumpy head ecstatically against her hand.
‘He’s another heirloom,’ Harrigan said.
He turned out the lights and they went upstairs to bed.
In the darkness of the early morning, while his father slept with Grace, Toby Harrigan dreamed electronic words in his sleep.
In her cell, Lucy turned in her bunk, thinking not of the end of the world but of the beginning of time. Time starts for me now, Turtle, I have to find the ways to deal with what happens now, whatever that is. With knowing where I’ve been, what I’ve done, all that weight. I have to do that. You wait, Turtle. I’ll do it because I’ve got no choice.
Grace herself woke suddenly, as though she had heard these very words when they were spoken in Lucy’s mind, and drew in a quick, shallow breath at the memory of a young girl facing her with a gun in her hand. She felt the warmth of Paul’s body next to hers and listened to her heart beating strongly with fright. She sat up. There was no one in the room other than themselves and nothing to fear. She looked at Paul, where he slept beside her. You don’t have to be afraid of this closeness either, she told herself. Not all men are sleeping demons. She lay down beside him and slept again.
