The Trophy Taker. Lee Weeks

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       22

      Lucy stumbled off the Macau ferry in a daze, right at the start of the morning rush hour. The bright sun stabbed at her eyes and the car fumes caught in the back of her throat. The walk home was tortuously slow. All she could do was keep her head down, shuffle along the crowded pavement, and pray that soon she would find some respite from the raw guilt she felt. One minute her heart beat so fast she couldn’t breathe, and she thought she would pass out; the next it slowed down so much that she thought she must be walking in a dream.

      Lucy was in shock, in mourning. She had squatted in the gutters of Macau and aborted all her dreams, and not just hers … All the years she had protected her sister from harm and kept her off the streets, made sure she could follow her dream and become a nurse. Now all those dreams would be shattered. Both their lives would be ruined if she couldn’t think of a way to pay back what she owed – a triad debt was a family debt. The pain of retribution would be shared. In fact, Lucy knew that it would be Ka Lei they would come after first, just to teach Lucy a lesson.

      After an hour of shuffling along pavements she finally reached home. She turned the key to the apartment door as quietly as she could and crept inside. There was not a sound in the stagnant gloom of the flat except the plonk plonk of the leaky kitchen tap. Ka Lei had already gone to work and Georgina was still asleep. Lucy listened to the droning of the air-conditioning unit coming from her cousin’s bedroom.

      She tiptoed into her room and sat on the edge of the bed, scared to move, frightened to make a sound in case she woke Georgina and then she might have to tell what she’d done. She couldn’t do that. She definitely couldn’t do that.

      As the hours passed she stared at the blacked-out windows of the adjacent building, seeing nothing, reliving the events of the previous evening. The light in the room changed hue. Shadows lengthened and altered shape. Somewhere outside, the sun arced in the sky, the earth turned, the universe existed, the day completed its rota. Inside the room Lucy went over the process of self-recrimination countless times. She relived the events that had led to her destruction over and over until she became quite exhausted by the process. She hovered above herself and watched herself lose and lose again. Why had she continued? She knew why. She just couldn’t leave, not then, not when she was so down. She just needed to stay in the game, like she always did. It had happened that way so many times before: lose a lot, win a lot more. She had always come out on top – but not this time. Lady Luck had stabbed her in the back last night. Now Lucy must find a way not just to bear it, but to end it.

      Gradually, over the course of the following day, the shock subsided, until, by reworking the events in her mind, they changed shape and became something of far less consequence. She began to reassess the situation. She had survived worse – she would survive this. But now her survival was out of her hands. Lucy had unwittingly made a pact with the devil.