Читать книгу Exile - Rebecca Lim - Страница 9

Chapter 4

It doesn’t really get quiet until after 10.30 am. I know, because I’m watching the clock, dispirited by the smells, the noise, the sheer barefaced rudeness of the people that constantly wash in and out of this place. Let’s just say that there’s a twitch in Lela’s left hand that wasn’t there earlier. If the purpose of me being here is that I gain some kind of empathy for this girl and her miserable existence, hey, it’s working. I hate her life as much as she does already.

‘I think nice people like nicer surroundings, you know?’ the barista says with a shrug when she finally gets a moment to wipe down the surfaces of her machine. ‘We get all kinds here. Mostly not so nice.’

‘You’ll think this is really . . . odd,’ I say carefully, ‘but you’re going to have to remind me who that man is.’ I point to the silent, glowering giant in the kitchen, massive shoulders bunched over lunch prep. ‘And who the woman is who went outside for a “ciggie break”, uh, well over two hours ago.’

The barista girl makes a clicking sound through her teeth. ‘You not joking, right? You really can’t remember? You been here over four months already. You not pulling my leg?’

I shake my head, looking at her expectantly, and she says finally, ‘His name is Sulaiman, North African man, he start working here last month. Nice man, very quiet, like to pray. The devil woman is Reggie. The old cook, he quit. Said Reggie push him too far. I’m Cecilia, originally from Cebu.’

She can almost see the gears of my brain grinding sluggishly into motion and takes pity on me. ‘In the Philippines.’

‘Oh, right,’ I say, still troubled by the gaping hole in my recall. Just probing the name Carmen Zappacosta is enough to bring on a shock wave of mental anguish. It’s as if that past identity comes with an added electrical charge, is ringed around, in my mind, by fire. And I know, without knowing how, that it has something to do with my dream. The dream that had seemed so real and so beautiful, which I hadn’t wanted to wake from and can’t now remember.

Cecilia misinterprets my expression and gives me a reproachful look. ‘You like me, but you don’t like her. You say Sulaiman just okay. That’s what you tell me before.’

I give her what I’m hoping is an apologetic smile. ‘It’s the drugs,’ I say.

Cecilia shakes her head. ‘You university students all into weird shit. Bad for you brain.’ She starts putting her tiny universe into some kind of order before the next onslaught of caffeine hounds: cups over here, spoons over there, sugar, cocoa sprinkler, new bottle of soy milk, new bottle of skinny milk, new bottle of regular milk, dishcloths for spillages.

I laugh at the indignation in her voice. ‘No doubt. Uh, the woman that was here before, with me . . . Justine?’ I ask. ‘Do I know her, too?’

Cecilia is silent for a while, just looks at me with her solemn, liquid eyes. ‘You for real?’ she says. ‘She one of them exotic dancers from the Showgirls Lounge.’

When I screw up my face in confusion, Cecilia clicks her tongue. ‘You know, she dance for men for money. In a club. Don’t ask me what else she do in there.’

Well, that explains a lot. Like why, in her down time, Justine dresses to hide her shape, making herself plainer and more ordinary than she needs to be. The ‘hooker’ comment had probably hit a little too close to home.

Cecilia adds, ‘She got ex-boyfriend trouble — he follow her everywhere, won’t leave her alone. She leave him because he beat her so badly she go to hospital one time. But every time she move club, he find her again. She move house, he find her, too. No one take her seriously, but you. Not even the police. You let her hide in Mr Dymovsky’s office once, when he not there, remember? Justine crying, say she gonna die.’

There’s disbelief in Cecilia’s eyes that I could forget something like that. I don’t blame her — I wouldn’t believe me, either. Justine begged Lela for shelter once from an abusive stalker? Christ. No wonder she thought I was playing a sick joke on her before.

The way Justine looks and carries herself makes total sense to me now. It’s always men doing it to women, I find. Crimes of passion? There’s never any passion about it from the female point of view. Here’s hoping she manages to outrun the creep and find herself a healthier line of work.

Cecilia’s made me a coffee while we’ve been talking, and I try to drink it because it’s a kind gesture and probably the last thing she wants to make in her spare time. But I’m no fan of the stuff — doesn’t take me long to work that out — and I shove it discreetly to one side.

Everything in this place is as antiquated and plug ugly as the coffee machine. The refrigerated soft- drinks cabinets; the air-conditioning unit with pieces missing from the control panel; the two ceiling fans that are wobbling away at full tilt; the tables, all with wads of folded-up paper jammed beneath the legs to keep them even; the speckled linoleum-tiled floor; the mismatched chairs; the rounded, green plastic light fixtures, like so many space helmets; the pink-framed pictures of lovely Slavic destinations that probably no longer exist, replaced by car parks and shopping malls. It’s a hideous place, the Green Lantern coffee shop, and I can’t understand why the well-dressed young man sitting alone at a table with an open laptop in front of him would want to work here.

Sunlight falls upon his light brown hair, which has a slight wave to it, cut short. He has blue eyes, straight brows, a pale complexion, and the faint lines on his face give him a perpetually stern, slightly cold expression. He’s just above six feet in height, with poor posture that makes his suit look a little too big on him. He has a bad habit of leaning his head and neck into his computer screen, like a turtle or a duck. He’s probably shortsighted, but in denial. A normal-looking guy. Not ugly, exactly, but no dreamboat either. Not like . . .

There’s that neural sizzle again as my recall inconveniently hits the wall; I clutch at my forehead briefly in renewed pain, before the feeling passes.

What the hell is wrong with me? It’s like there are no-go areas in my brain that I keep trespassing on by accident; like I’ve been deliberately tampered with.

D’uh, I hear you say.

Well, more so than usual, okay?

As if the young man feels my thoughts on him, he looks up and meets my gaze. ‘Did Andy ever ask you out?’ he says, taking a sip of his coffee out of a heavy, ivory-coloured mug.

Lela’s eyebrows snap together, me doing it. It’s an unexpected question, and kind of personal, I would’ve thought. But he’s talking to someone who doesn’t respect boundaries either, so I decide I’ll humour him.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, moving around the counter and walking across the dining area so that I can see into his face. I stop beside his table, arms crossed. ‘Do I know you?’

I’m in favour of the direct approach. Beating around the bush takes way too long and way too much energy.

Do I imagine that his eyes seem to blaze for an instant before his expression evens out and he replies, ‘Ranald, remember? I’ve only been coming here almost every morning for a year to get my caffeine hit from Cecilia. She does better coffee than anyone I know — and I’ve tried everything for at least three blocks in both directions. This place is like my offsite office these days, right?’ He turns and looks in Cecilia’s direction.

She nods, gratified. ‘Two double espressos, no milk, no sugar. Served exactly an hour apart. The first one at 10.45, the second at 11.45.’

‘See?’ He smiles, though I sense hurt in his tone. ‘I’m what you’d class as a die-hard regular.’

And borderline OCD, I think. But I make sure the blandly polite smile I’m wearing doesn’t falter.

‘I was here the day you started work,’ he adds. ‘Everything was going wrong that morning, then there you were. You served me coffee and a raspberry friand, slightly warmed up, no cream. I’ve only asked you out about five times since, and you’ve always said no, or pretended you haven’t heard me. In the nicest possible way, of course.’

I’m sure my smile of polite interest has congealed on Lela’s face. Just my luck to get talking to another regular who could actually tell there’s something badly off about Lela today. Luckily, I lie like a pro.

‘I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately,’ I say with a vague air. ‘Mum and everything. Haven’t been sleeping, worried out of my brain. It’s made me pretty . . . forgetful. And not much in the mood for . . . outings.’

Ranald nods. ‘Dmitri said as much. I asked him why you always seem so . . . preoccupied. And busy.’

‘What are you working on?’ I say, changing the subject deliberately. His eyes flash again and I know that he knows what I’m doing. He’s a smart guy, that’s evident.

I move behind him so that I can see his open laptop, curious about what the machine can do. I mean, I’m no relic from the dark ages — I know computers practically rule the world these days — but I’ve never been this close to one before. But, in one smooth move, Ranald closes the window he was working on and an anonymous screen takes its place, the cursor blinking softly within an empty box.

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘top secret. I’d have to kill you.’ He laughs a little to show that he’s joking.

I notice that he has quite feminine-looking hands and that his fingernails are chewed to the quick. They look so ragged that I’m guessing he has a very high pain threshold.

‘It’s nothing you’d find remotely interesting,’ he adds. ‘But if there’s anything you want to know or get in to have a look at,’ he gestures expansively at his computer screen, ‘I’m your man.’

When I don’t reply straightaway, he twists his head around to look up at me where I’m standing just behind his left shoulder. ‘Andy was messing you around, you know. He wasn’t good enough for you. From the way you spoke about him, I could tell. You deserve better. Someone who’ll take care of you. Especially now.’

‘Oh?’ I reply, a small crease between my brows. ‘Well, it’s kind of you to say that.’

Was Lela close to this guy? I have no way of knowing. That journal I scanned from cover to cover didn’t mention any guy other than Andy. So what do I do — kill a budding romance stone dead, or encourage it? What would Lela want me to do?

Lela? I say inside her head. There’s no reply. There never is. Not even a muscle twitch. I’ll take my cue from that.

‘You seem a lot less unhappy today,’ Ranald adds, studying my face. ‘Less . . . angry. And you look nice.’

He glances down shyly, ragged fingernails still poised above the keyboard.

‘I’ve come to terms with things,’ I reply. ‘I’m making the best of a difficult situation.’

The words are generic, but they seem to satisfy him.

‘That’s great,’ he says, then boasts, ‘Go on, try me. Ask me any question you’ve always wanted an answer to. I’ll find it for you. I mean it. I can find anything. Nothing’s safe from me.’

‘Carmen Zappacosta,’ I say so suddenly that it catches us both off guard. ‘Find out what you can about her and I’ll be in your debt forever.’

‘You mean it?’ he says eagerly. ‘Like you and me might finally go out for that meal?’

‘If that’s what it takes,’ I say, deliberately keeping things vague. ‘I guess, maybe.’

It’s worth a shot. I mean, I can’t remember the faintest thing about Carmen Zappacosta apart from her name, but maybe information about her exists somewhere outside my heavily compromised brain.

Ranald looks at his screen then up at me. ‘You’re sure that’s it? You just want me to look up some girl?’

He sounds disappointed, like what I’ve asked for is too easy. The computer nerd wants a challenge? Wonder how well he’d go with: Find out what my real name is. Tell me the real reason why I keep waking up in other people’s bodies with no memory of how I got there and no idea why it’s even necessary. Or how it’s even possible.

Instead, I nod. ‘That’s it.’

Small steps, small steps and patience are required here. Work out what it is about Carmen Zappacosta that I’m not supposed to know, and the rest will follow. I have to believe that.

Ranald begins by typing Carmen’s name straight into the empty box on his screen. I don’t need to correct the spelling; he gets it first time. There are eighteen pages of ‘search results’, and when Ranald clicks on the first reference — a newspaper report complete with colour photos — I have to remind myself to shut my mouth at what I’m seeing. I hadn’t known stuff like this was out there, capable of being organised, gathered, found.

Ranald gives a short laugh when he sees my expression. ‘You have to know what you’re looking for on the internet, and take it all with a huge grain of salt.’

Still, I’m fascinated, and I lean forward to scan the article. As far as I can tell, Carmen Zappacosta is a scrawny sixteen-year-old kid with a great set of pipes who recently survived being snatched by some kiddy-fiddling choirmaster with a prior history of stalking young girls in his care. It’s a sad story and my heart bleeds for her, really it does. But human nature being what it is, it’s hardly surprising.

For a long moment, I study a close-up of Carmen’s face. Pale and patchy complexion; dark, bruised-looking eyes; dark hair like a mushroom cloud of ringlets, almost too wild and heavy for her small, fine-boned head. The picture was taken at the hospital just after she suffered a devastating bout of post-traumatic amnesia. One minute she’d been actively co-operating with the police, the article said, giving lucid and damning evidence against her attacker, and the next she claimed to have lost all her recent memories, as if they’d been . . . erased.

That gets my attention.

When I’m done reading I nod, and together Ranald and I navigate the rest of the search results on the page, reference by reference. They don’t seem to be in any kind of chronological order.

‘Why did they give Carmen the keys to the town of . . . Paradise?’ I wonder, before I realise that I’m talking aloud. ‘Where is that?’

Why do I suddenly feel so . . . uneasy?

‘Would Paradise,’ when I repeat the word, one eyelid begins to jump again, ‘even require keys?’

Ranald shrugs, clicks in and out of a few other sites while I look over his shoulder.

‘I remember that case now,’ he exclaims as he skims a web page he’s just opened. ‘The place where it all happened didn’t look particularly, uh, Paradise-like from the news footage, but I think the town rolled out the red carpet for Carmen because she managed to free two other girls that the guy was keeping prisoner in this dungeon beneath his house.’

‘What were the names of the other girls?’

Ranald closes the page we’re looking at and clicks in and out of a couple more before replying, ‘Jennifer Appleton and Lauren Daley.’

The words are barely out of his mouth when, inexplicably, I see Luc before me. So vividly that he might be standing right here with us, in this room. His beautiful mouth is both cruel and amused, the way he looks when he’s playing a joke on someone, or setting them an impossible task. I grasp at the air with my hands, unable to hold onto the golden vision of my lost love, knowing that I am suffering some sort of waking dream, a hallucination. It’s a message to myself, a reminder. Of what?

Luc, my love, what am I supposed to remember? Help me.

Ranald’s still peering at his screen and hasn’t noticed my strange reaction. ‘Lauren was imprisoned the longest, just over two years. She was the one from Paradise. The whole town — almost two thousand people, it says here — turned out to welcome her home when she was discharged from hospital. They had the ceremony honouring Carmen the same day.’ Ranald’s eyes flick up to me then back to the screen. ‘You wouldn’t believe she could do that, would you? Save herself and two other people. She blinded the guy as well. He’s never going to see again, they say.’

A voice calls out, ‘Lela?’ from the back of the shop; it’s slow, deep, heavily accented, unfamiliar.

I turn, see that it’s Sulaiman the cook speaking. A guy who hasn’t bothered to address me with anything more than a flick of his eyes or a grunt since I got here hours ago. I meet his dark, steady gaze through the serving hatch separating the kitchen from the front counter, raise an eyebrow at the interruption.

‘You are needed in the kitchen,’ he rumbles.

I stare at him. Since when? Why now, when there isn’t another soul in the joint? He stares back unblinkingly.

‘Excuse me,’ I say tightly to Ranald.

He nods, looking down, and takes another sip of his coffee. I can tell he’s disappointed. But after I walk away, he opens up a new window and begins working again, intently.