Читать книгу Mercy - Rebecca Lim - Страница 8

Ryan rocks back on his heels. ‘I’m going to ignore what you just said and ask what the hell you’re doing here!’ he says after a shocked pause. ‘This bedroom is off-limits.’

‘Ry-an!’ exclaims Mrs Daley, who’s just joined us and overhears the last part.

‘Ry-an,’ repeats his father, who moves to stand in front of me protectively. ‘Carmen is a guest in this house. We’ve talked about it. You know it’s long past time.’

What is he? I wonder, my eyes still fixed on Ryan in fascination. About eighteen? Nineteen?

I don’t bother to engage with any of them because I’m still checking him out and no one can make me rush something I don’t want rushed. I can be stubborn like that. I mean, life’s too short already and I haven’t seen anyone who looks like Ryan Daley in my last three outings, at least. Luc aside—and there’s really no putting Luc to one side—Ryan is quite spectacular.

When I continue to say and do nothing, Ryan turns and snarls in his mother’s face, ‘She’s still alive, you know, alive! What are you doing even letting her come in here? Have you both lost it?’

Then he’s gone, followed swiftly by his father. The door slams twice in rapid succession and the house is quiet.

Mrs Daley sits down shakily on the pristine bed while I quickly shove a tee-shirt from out of Carmen’s sports bag over my head and put some underpants on under the towel before laying it on a chair to dry. Not that I care about the proprieties, but I can see that she does, that they are the only things keeping her from flying into a million pieces. I dig around in the bag a bit more and locate some jeans. They look like something a little boy would wear. I am amazed when they fit perfectly.

‘Stewart says they told you,’ Mrs Daley murmurs softly. ‘About us, I mean. Did they?’

I shake my head. But it’s pretty clear to me that we have a missing girl on our hands and that it was someone’s bright idea to assign me her bedroom. I’m not sure what to make of it, and neither is Carmen’s face, so I blunder into the closet, pretending to look for something, while Mrs Daley clears her throat.

‘We haven’t, ah, hosted anyone since our daughter, Lauren … went away,’ she says, then corrects herself in a tight, funny voice. ‘Was taken.’

I shoot her a quick glance across the room. Her eyes are bright red in her chalky face and I’m afraid of what she’ll do next. Emotion is such a messy thing, apt to splash out and mark you like acid. I look away, refocusing hastily on Carmen’s sports bag, the motley collection of belongings that sits on top. Weird stuff she thought it important to bring—like a frog-shaped key ring and a flat soft toy rabbit, grey and bald in places, that has clearly seen better days. There’s even a sparkly pink diary with a lock and key. Little girl’s things to go with the little boy’s clothes.

When Mrs Daley’s agonised voice grinds into gear again, I begin to unpack in earnest, putting Carmen’s belongings, her religiously themed songbooks, into the spaces allotted for her in Lauren’s closet.

‘We’re trying to … normalise things for the first time in almost two years,’ Mrs Daley whispers to Carmen’s profile. ‘We used to host students all the time. Lauren loved meeting people from your school. She has … had I should say, a lot of Facebook friends from St Joseph’s.’

‘Oh?’ I say. Do I know what a facebook is? It rings no bells with me.

‘Ryan,’ she continues, ‘is having trouble letting go. We’ve almost come to terms with … I mean, you never really stop wondering … if she suffered, what really happened, how we could have prevented it … but we—Stewart and I—don’t think of her as being … present any more, in the sense that you and I are. Though Ryan insists—despite all the evidence to the contrary—that she’s still alive. It’s become something of an obsession with him. He says he can still feel her. He’s …’ She hesitates and looks away. ‘He’s been arrested a couple of times for following “leads” no one else can prove. But it’s impossible. There was a lot of … blood.’

Mrs Daley, eyes welling, is staring at something on the floor between us that I cannot see. I wonder what she used to get the carpets so white again.

‘She must have put up such a fight, my poor baby …’

The woman lets slip a muffled howl through the clenched fingers of one fist and then she is no longer in the bedroom. A door clicks loudly along the hallway. I don’t know why she bothered shutting it because the sound of her weeping rips through the upper storey of the house like a haunting. Habit, I guess, the polite thing.

Only sinew, thread and habit, I decide, is holding Lauren’s mother together. What kind of house is this?

Maybe, I think, I won’t enjoy waking up here in the mornings, after all.

There’s no discernible pattern to the Carmens, the Lucys, the Susannahs that I have been and become. All I know is that they stretch back in an unbroken chain further than I can remember—I can sense them all there, standing one behind the other, jostling for my attention, struggling to tell me something about my condition. If I could push them over like dominoes, perhaps some essential mystery would reveal itself to me; but people are not game pieces, much as I might wish it. And there is nothing of the game about my situation.

When I ‘was’ Lucy, I was a twenty-six-year-old former methadone addict and a single mother with an abusive boyfriend. I think I left her in a better place than where she was when our existences became curiously entwined, but it has all become hazy, like a dream. I think, together, we finally booted the no-hoper de facto wife basher for the last time and got the hell out of town with the under-nourished baby and a swag of barely salvageable items of no intrinsic worth. I still wonder how she’s doing, and if she managed to keep clean, now and forever, amen.

And Susannah? She was finally brave enough—with a little push from yours truly—to get out from under her whining heiress mother’s thumb and accept a place at a college a long, long way from home, but that’s where the story ends. For me, anyway.

I wish them both well.

The other girl? The one whose life I ended up liking but whose name now escapes me? She finally came up with a reason to escape an arranged marriage, change her name, find work in a suburban bookstore and love at her new local—thanks in no small part to me.

I liked that part. Love. It was uncomplicated, sweet. So unlike my own twisted situation. But the details are fraying around the edges and soon she’ll be gone, like all the rest. Doomed to return only in prismatic flashes, if ever.

Carmen looks and acts a lot younger than her three predecessors. Apart from her unfortunate skin condition, she doesn’t appear unhappy or abused in any way. She really does seem to be here just to sing. It’s the family she’s been placed with that has the terrible history. And that’s something that’s got me wondering. Memory is an unreliable thing, but this seems new to me—an unexpected twist, an irregularity, in the unbroken arc of my strange existence to date. It does not feel like anything I have ever encountered before, though I may be wrong. I’m going to have to watch my step.

Once I have the mechanics of someone’s life under my control, the thought always returns—that maybe someone is doing this to me. That I am some kind of cosmic, one-off experiment. Maybe it is the so-called ‘Eight’? But then I wonder, are They even real? Is Luc? Perhaps all this is in the nature of a lesson. But one so obscure I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be learning.

The unpalatable alternative is that maybe I’m somehow doing this to myself, that I’m some sort of mentally ill freak with a subconscious predilection for self-delusion, impermanence and risk. If that is the case, the real truth—and I pray that it isn’t—there would be nothing left to stop me from topping myself, I swear to God. I almost don’t want to know the answer.

And you need to ask why I call myself ‘Mercy’?