The Bat(102)

When Harry returned to Birgitta’s flat it was two in the morning. Lebie was sitting by the radio and watched Harry with sympathetic eyes.

‘Gave it a burl, did ya? No good, eh?’

Burl? It was beyond Harry, but he nodded in agreement.

‘No good,’ he said, crashing down into a chair.

‘What was the mood like at the station?’ Lebie asked.

Harry fumbled for a cigarette before realising he had given them to Joseph.

‘One notch from chaos. Watkins is close to going off the rails, and cars are racing round Sydney like headless chickens, with their sirens on in full-pursuit mode. The only thing they know about White is he left his flat in Nimbin early today and caught the four o’clock flight to Sydney. Since then no one’s seen him.’

He bummed a cigarette off Lebie and they smoked in silence.

‘Nip home and get yourself a few hours’ sleep, Sergey. I’ll stay here tonight in case Birgitta turns up. Leave the radio on, so it can keep me posted.’

‘I can sleep here, Harry.’

Harry shook his head. ‘Get yourself home. I’ll ring you if there is anything.’

Lebie put a Sydney Bears cap on his polished skull. He loitered by the door.

‘We’ll find her, Harry. I can feel it in my bones. So hang in there, mate.’

Harry looked at Lebie. It was hard to say whether Lebie believed what he said.

As soon as he was alone he opened the window and gazed across the rooftops. It had turned cooler, but the air was still mild and mingling with the smell of town, people and food from all corners of the earth. It was one of the planet’s most beautiful summer nights in one of the planet’s most beautiful towns. He looked up at the starry sky. An infinity of small, flashing lights that seemed to pulsate with life if he watched for long enough. All this meaningless beauty.

He tested his feelings. He couldn’t afford to give way to them. Not yet, not now. First, the good feelings. Birgitta’s face between his hands, the traces of laughter in her eyes. The bad feelings. Those were the ones he had to keep at arm’s length, but he entertained them, as if to form an impression of the power they had.

He felt as though he were sitting in a submarine at the bottom of a very deep ocean. The sea was pressing in; around him the creaks and bangs had already started. He could only hope the hull would hold, that a lifetime’s training in self-discipline would finally reveal its worth. Harry thought of the souls that became stars when their earthly shells died. He managed to restrain himself from searching for one star in particular.





50


The Rooster Factor


AFTER THE ACCIDENT Harry had repeatedly asked himself whether he would have exchanged fates if he had been able. So that he would have been the person who had bent the fence post in Sørkedalsveien, who had been given a ceremonial funeral with full police honours and grieving parents, who had a photograph in a corridor at Grønland Police Station and who in time had become a pale but dear memory to colleagues and relatives. Was it not a tempting alternative to the lie he had to live, which in many ways was even more humiliating than accepting the guilt and shame?

But Harry knew he would not have swapped his fate. He was happy to be alive.

Every morning he woke in the hospital, his mind dizzy from pills and void of thoughts, it was with a sense that something had gone terribly wrong. As a rule it took a couple of drowsy seconds before his memory reacted, told him who and where he was and reconstructed the situation for him with relentless horror. His next thought was that he was alive. That he was still on course, it wasn’t over yet.

After being discharged he was given a session with a psychiatrist.

‘In point of fact, you’re a bit late,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘Your subconscious has probably already chosen how it wants to work with what’s happened, so we can’t influence its first decision. It may, for example, have chosen to repress events. But if it has made such a choice we can try to make it change its mind.’

All Harry knew was that his subconscious told him it was a good thing to be alive, and he wasn’t willing to take the risk that a psychiatrist might make him change his mind, so that was the first and last time he went to see him.

In the days that followed he taught himself it was also a bad strategy to fight against everything he felt at once. Firstly, he wasn’t sure what he felt – at least he didn’t have the whole picture, so it was like challenging a monster he hadn’t even seen. Secondly, his chances of winning were better if he divided the war up into small skirmishes where he might gain some perspective of the enemy, find his weak points and over time break him down. It was like inserting paper into a shredder. If you inserted too much at once, the machine panicked, coughed and died with a clunk. And you had to start again.