‘Why do you think that call’s related to your work?’ Harrigan asked when she’d finished.
‘I don’t know for sure. But I was followed home from my op tonight.’ She took a breath, knowing this simple confidence was breaking the rules. ‘All the way to Darling Street by someone who wanted me to know they were there. Whoever they were, they were trying to frighten me.’
‘Are you supposed to tell me that?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Was it Newell?’
‘No, I don’t think so. He couldn’t know I’d be there at that time.’
Harrigan reflected that he often didn’t know where she was or what she was doing either.
‘Is that what this operation is?’ he asked. ‘Dangerous?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You should have told me, babe. I need to know if you’re in danger. It’s not just me. There’s Ellie as well.’
‘I know that. I never stop thinking about it. Since Clive’s been there, it’s been impossible,’ she said. ‘You can’t tell anyone the simplest thing.’
‘He’s a control freak. Forget him. It’s late.’
They went to bed and, in defiance of the phone call, made love. Grace’s thought was that she needed this to feel human, needed the comfort. Just to let the physical pleasure cleanse her of what had happened that day and bring her back to herself. She felt the warmth of his body and was never more at ease with herself.
Harrigan thought of this as his fundamental territory; something he had that no one else could touch. If everything else was gone, this exclusiveness would still exist between them. This closeness was a refuge for them both, somewhere they needed no disguises and where no one could threaten either of them. The room, like the house, was their own world, safe, inviolable. Later, he lightly traced out her face.
‘You’re lovely,’ he said. ‘You have a face like the Madonna.’
‘And what kind of face does she have?’
‘Like yours. Clean. Dark, beautiful eyes.’
‘She’s more peaceful than me, she must be. I’m not a peaceful person.’
‘I just want you the way you are,’ Harrigan replied.
Harrigan woke in the early morning feeling a deep sense of unease. He couldn’t go back to sleep; the phone call had jangled him too much. By the radio clock, it was 3:15 am. After a while he got up, pulled on his tracksuit and went to check the house. First, he looked in on Ellie. Her long, dark-fair hair was tousled over the pillow. She turned over just after he looked through the open doorway but kept on sleeping. Very quietly he shut the door in case she should wake and hear him moving around. He stood in the darkness of the hallway, thinking.
His house was secure; his history with the police made that essential. He had a drawerful of death threats against him and his family, some more lurid than others. It wasn’t only criminals who wanted him harmed or dead; there were police, some still serving and some not, who had scores to settle with him. There were bars on his windows, security doors on all the entrances, and an alarm system installed. There was a number to ring at police headquarters if he or his family needed protection. His car was always parked in the single locked brick garage, the only one there was room for on his block. Grace’s car was kept behind the locked gate at the front of the house. The wall that ran between his garden and Birchgrove Park was higher than he would have liked but he had no choice. Maybe one day, when people were dead or had worn out their passions, these locks and bars could go, but not now.
He went downstairs and checked the doors, front and back, including those that led out onto the deck. The old exotic trees that had been planted in the backyard decades ago were beginning to die. Soon they would need to be replaced. Their mostly bare branches were black against the pale glow of the city lights in the night sky. In this partial light, he saw two possums, mother and offspring, sitting on the rail of the deck, silhouettes against the lighter shadows. Suddenly they were gone. Harrigan tensed, waiting, but saw no one.
Throughout much of his life, on and off, Harrigan had lived in this house. Originally, it had been an inheritance from his aunt when he was fifteen, held in trust until he was of age. A single, church-obsessed woman, she had left it to him as an insult to his father, her brother, whom she’d hated. It had been left to her by an uncle, who’d also disapproved of his father, adding to the depth of the bitterness between them. Family loathings had given him an enviable address. The Harrigans had lived on the Balmain peninsula for several generations but, other than the uncle, they had never owned a house. His father had been a wharfie who had drunk and gambled too much and, until they had come here, Harrigan had grown up in rented accommodation near White Bay.
The house wasn’t only his home. It was memory and experience, each room reminding him of the events, some of them violent, that had shaped his life.
Harrigan had another child from a long-ago marriage, Toby, who was disabled with cerebral palsy and had always had to live in care. His mother had abandoned both him and Harrigan almost as soon as he’d been born and then disappeared from their lives. Now Toby was a twenty-year-old university student studying pure mathematics. His body kept him in a wheelchair but his mind ranged freely. Harrigan had built the room in which he now stood-during the day, a large, light-filled space-for his son, combining the two smaller rooms that had once been here. It was a place for Toby to come in his chair and feel at home. But he had not only been creating a space for his son. Harrigan had been expunging the past, in its place building something he valued, something that had meaning for him. Once these walls had been painted a drab green. One night, when he was eighteen, he had seen his mother’s blood splashed all over that green paint, when his father had fatally shot her in the face.
Jim Harrigan had supplemented his income on the wharves by petty thievery, and from there moved into more dangerous company dealing in heroin. One night he had brought home a gun he’d been told to hide. Harrigan remembered hearing his parents arguing furiously over the gun before being sickened by the sound of the shot. He remembered-could not forget-his mother lying against the wall with no face. His father said she’d grabbed at the gun. Maybe she had, but those words had no meaning for him. ‘Kill me,’ Jim Harrigan said to his son. Blinded by rage, his hands shaking, Harrigan fired wildly, almost unaware that he had, but only wounded his father. ‘That won’t do it. Try again,’ Jim Harrigan demanded. But Harrigan couldn’t shoot for a second time, and the memory stayed with him as a marker between what he could and couldn’t do. No events could have torn a hole in his life so powerfully. No one would ever harm anyone he cared about like that again.
He went upstairs and, giving up on the possibility of sleep, went into his study. Despite his unease, a deep reluctance prevented him from taking his gun out of the safe with his daughter sleeping just down the hall.
He sat down at his desk in the dark. A little to the side stood a picture of Grace seated on a blanket in Birchgrove Park, with Ellie, dressed in a white froth of baby clothes, cuddled in her arms. She was laughing and saying to her daughter, ‘Wave to the camera.’ He remembered the day when, to her shock, Grace had found out she was pregnant. They had set up house together but not married; they had never once talked about marriage. It might have been the memory of his first marriage, or his parents’ savage arguments, that prevented Harrigan from suggesting it. He rejected the possibility at a deeper level than he brought into his conscious mind. His only experiences of marriage had been destructive.
Maybe Grace understood this about him and that was why she never spoke of it herself. He left the subject alone for fear of breaking the balance between them, the easy way they accepted each other. But he still remembered sitting with her and his daughter on the blanket that day and thinking that whatever they might do, he’d never leave either of them. Toby’s photograph stood next to Grace and Ellie’s, taken the day he had received his final examination results, which he was holding in his one good hand. All three were so much a part of his life he could not imagine himself existing without them.