Read Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption for Free Online Page B

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 was a gift, something in the fibre of her body which could be relied upon to assert her existence when everything else had deserted her. On the streets, anything was a currency and pain could be traded along with everything else. Plenty of people dealt in pain for the pleasure of it, looking for people to hurt, setting traps in public toilets and on empty beaches, boasting later, did you see what I did to them?
    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