by Rebecca Lim
And I know it for a truth.
I rise unsteadily and head to the kitchen.
Maybe it is all inside me, everything I need to get the real me back, but I’m like someone who has to relearn how to walk, talk, eat. The connections are missing, or badly compromised. And I have so much lost ground to cover. But I’m a fast study. I’m awake now, more than I have ever been before. Body and soul are beginning to synchronise. Overnight, something in me has begun to regenerate, to lay down new wiring.
The blockages inside me are dissolving, so that I remember, too, how, when I was Carmen, I was able to call on unexpected powers that I still can’t explain. Like how if I’m ticked off enough, I have the ability to hurt people with my bare hands.
Paul’s eyes? His ears? I did that. The knowledge makes me go cold inside.
I study the refrigerator door and locate the telephone number, cross to the wall phone to dial it. The woman who answers promises that a member of the palliative care team will be over shortly.
I hurry down the hallway to Lela’s bedroom, dig a random tee-shirt out of a pile of clothes lying on a chair, put it on. Pull on a pair of shorts. It’s like I’m colour blind thing I 14; the top’s sky blue; the shorts are pumpkin-coloured, baggy and ill-fitting. But I don’t care. I know what I have to do now, and it’s as if a fire has been lit within.
I wait impatiently until a kind-faced woman called Abby arrives to help out until Georgia can get here.
‘Georgia brought me up to speed on what happened yesterday,’ Abby whispers as she sets down her medical kit near Mrs Neill’s bed. ‘We’ll call you if there’s any change.’
I practically fly down the footpath, feel like vaulting the fence. Want to grab the steering wheel out of the bus driver’s nicotine-stained fingers so that we ignore all the stops, all the angry people, and reach the city faster. Because Luc’s got it so right. He can’t find me, and I’ve had a lousy time of finding him, but Ryan Daley’s mortal. He has a physical body and a physical location. I’ve touched the guy, broken bread with him, called his cell phone, even stayed at his home. Met his parents, for Christ’s sake, and his bitch of an ex-girlfriend. He lives in a small town called Paradise, on a coastline somewhere; the ugliest place you’re ever likely to see, a complete misnomer. But that’s the point: there can’t be too many places like it. I know I can find it again.
Luc, on the other hand, I’ve never seen outside the realms of sleep this century or the last. I’ve lost count of how many years it’s been since we were in the same place together, flesh and spirit. I’ve never been able to track him down, not even after all this time, not even after all the hints he keeps dropping like crumbs from a benevolent god. Until I began to fathom what had happened to me, I’d taken Luc for a figment of my diseased imagination, a recurring dream, a vision of glory sent to blight my rest.
Though there are still holes in my recall big enough to steer a whole fleet of cruise ships through, maybe some things are finally beginning to . . . stick. Because something happened to me last night. Whatever it is that keeps me this way — caged inside another; doomed to play the ghost-in-the-machine — something changed when I saw Ryan Daley again in my dreams.
And what’s more, none of the Eight, not even Luc himself, has any idea of the extent to which I’m back.
I’m feeling something I haven’t felt in a long time. Hope so raw, it’s akin to pain.
Lela’s boss, Mr Dymovsky, is back behind the till this morning and I nod in his direction before throwing myself into the breakfast rush. I’m snappier than usual as I bag the orders and shovel them out in a steady stream; even Reggie’s in awe of the way I’m handling the jerks and losers, the downtrodden women and born-to-rule types that filter in here looking for sustenance.
Maybe I’m overdoing it, allowing too much of my own personality to shine through, because Mr Dymovsky says shrewdly in his Russian-accented English, ‘Maybe you forget to take care of yourself. Something about you, about your face, looks different, I think? Thinner, maybe. Sharper. You up to this? Because if you not, I find another girl to do the job, okay? Because we no need another Reggie here. One Reggie, she’s plenty.’
He’s a perceptive man, Dmitri Dymovsky, which you’d never know if you simply took him at face value. Because who would ever wear a cartoon tie with a striped, short-sleeved shirt? And the way he’s tucked both into the waistband of a pair of tight brown slacks gives him the rear profile of a boiled egg. He has wispy grey hair that seems to be trying to float off his head, a thin moustache, and big pouches under his pale blue eyes. He might be anywhere between fifty-five and seventy-five. He looks like a kind fool, put upon from many and diverse angles. But to misjudge him would be a mistake. I like him.
‘Sorry, Mr Dymovsky,’ I say as I slap together bacon and egg rolls with lettuce, bacon and egg rolls with cheese, bacon and egg rolls hold the barbecue sauce. ‘I’ll tone it down.’
‘Good girl,’ he says mildly. ‘Oh and Lela, next time wear black, okay?’
I nod like I mean it, but I’ve got one eye on the door the whole time waiting for Ranald to arrive.
Mr Dymovsky puts on a battered straw fedora, lifts it in our direction, then heads out to the market to do his weekly shop for bargain tomatoes, smallgoods, cheese, lettuce and fruit by the boxload.
At 10.42, like clockwork, Ranald’s batting aside the sticky plastic curtain and practically falling through the front door with his laptop bag, toobig suit jacket and his serious expression. It’s 10.45 on the dot by the time he sets up his computer and Cecilia’s sliding the first heart-starter of the day his way. Time for me to get what I came for: information.
When I walk up to his table, Ranald closes the window he’s working on and smiles. ‘Did you want me to find out more about Carmen Zappacosta for you?’
I shake my head. ‘The focus of my enquiry has shifted slightly. I need to find Ryan Daley, the brother of one of the abductees. I need to contact him in real time but all I have is a mobile number and no country code. Find him for me and I’ll be in your debt forever.’
‘You mean that?’ Ranald says, surprise and eagerness warring in his expression. ‘I’m going to hold you to it — dinner and a movie, if I get you what you want.’
‘Deal,’ I shoot back, not intending to stick around long enough to have to go through with anything. This time it’s about me. It’s my time now, and if I have to climb over the bodies of lovelorn IT guys to get the answers I’m seeking, then so be it.
Ranald types Ryan’s name straight into the search engine and gets ten pages of search results. He shakes his head, unprepared to wade through random fishing blogs and heavy metal’s all-time greatest hits lists generated by schmucks called Ryan Daley.
‘Let’s narrow it down a little more,’ he says. ‘Mobile number?’
I give it to him, and feel a jolt when my eyes settle on the first item that comes up on the first page of new search results.
‘What is that?’ I breathe, leaning in closer to the screen and running my finger along the string of letters and numbers beneath Ryan’s name and mobile number.
Ranald’s voice is dismissive. ‘It’s the URL for his page on a social networking website for show ponies, fake friends and stalkers. How do you know this guy again?’
I almost can’t speak for the sudden rapid pounding of Lela’s heart in my ears. ‘Someone I lost contact with. An old friend that I’ve been meaning to look up for a long time but the whole Carmen thing flared up. He should be a lot more . . . receptive to contact from me now.’
Ranald’s looking at me suspiciously.
‘That’s why I needed the background info you dug up the other day,’ I say hastily. ‘I had to know if I had the right guy, and I do. Can you . . . click on this?’
‘Sure,’ he says, lips pursed as if the action is distasteful.
A web page fills the screen almost instantly, with a heart-stopping photo of Ryan in the top left corner. It’s a moody black and white shot, and he’s
looking away from the camera, but I’d know the planes of his face, the curve of his mouth, that fall of black hair, anywhere.
Just seeing him again like this brings back the sound of his voice, the way he holds a steering wheel, the way I wanted to hold his hand but didn’t trust myself to, because me getting involved with someone like him — where would it lead?
The page asks politely if I would like to add Ryan Daley as a friend or send Ryan Daley a message. I feel a surge of that sea that I carry around inside.
‘You found him,’ I say, placing my hands on Ranald’s shoulders in gratitude. ‘You found him.’
My defences are down, as they always seem to be where Ryan is involved. So I’m unprepared when Ranald takes his hands off the keyboard and places them over mine where they rest on his shoulders. Before I have the sense to rip my hands away, I see, I see —
— a dead bird nailed to a tree by its wings.
Small, shrieking rodents set alight in their cages.
A battered cat strung up by its tail, a crossbow bolt through its ravaged body —
I break contact abruptly and the images of those small, tortured creatures leave me and I can no longer smell the winter air, the scent of smoke and accelerant, feel the dry crunch of leaf litter and gravel under my feet. His feet.
‘Jesus God, Ranald,’ I say raggedly. ‘Don’t ever touch me again.’
I’m shaking, but he doesn’t need to know why. Nor do I need to know why he carries such things around in his head, like surface scum. I hate being touched; but this? This was something else altogether. I feel . . . dirty for witnessing something I was never supposed to see.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ranald says, crossing his arms and blinking rapidly. ‘I don’t know why I did that. I hope you didn’t take it the wrong way.’
For a moment, I think he’s talking about the atrocities he carried out when he was a boy. They were wrong. What other way could I take them? But then I realise he’s talking about grabbing hold of Lela’s hands, and the tenderness of that act belies the things I saw inside his mind. Maybe he’s changed. Maybe that’s what boys do — hurt things that are even smaller and more defenceless than they are. I wouldn’t know. In the wider scheme of human history are Ranald’s childhood acts so heinous?
I look at the laptop open to a recent image of Ryan Daley and feel Lela’s heart leap again. I push the hideous squealing of the tortured animals, the smell of burning flesh and fur, to one side — I still need Ranald’s help and I can’t afford to be judgmental. A telephone on its own is no use to me right now; I know because I dialled Ryan’s number this morning before I left Lela’s house — the number I’d memorised when I was Carmen Zappacosta — and all I got was a pre-recorded woman’s voice telling me to Please check the number before trying again. I need access to this seething universe, this internet, that is wholly man-made, and Ranald can provide that. I just need him to show me how it’s done and I can take it from there.
If Ranald’s — how had the bus driver put it? — sweet on Lela, I can milk that. But carefully; I don’t want to mix Lela up in something she can’t back out of later. Engage, get what I want, disengage. I can be ruthless that way.
I pull my fractured thoughts together and reply as calmly as I can manage, ‘Of course I didn’t take it the wrong way, Ranald. And I shouldn’t have touched you, either. It was inappropriate. Overly familiar. I apologise.’
I hope he’s hearing me, because it works both ways, buddy.
‘You don’t need to apologise,’ he says, relieved, and gestures for me to sit down in the seat beside him.
I remain standing.
‘Look,’ he coaxes, ‘you don’t own a computer, right?’
I shake my head.
‘Tell you what, I’ll set up a profile for you and you can message the guy. You choose the password, everything. I’ll just fix you up and step away.’
I drift in a little closer, watching as he clicks a couple of buttons. Ranald fills in Lela’s first and last names, her gender, and makes up a birthday when I decline to provide him with one, his hands flying across the keyboard.
He stands and pushes the laptop across the table in my direction. ‘I’ll let you fill in the email address and password,’ he says. ‘So that you know everything’s private and above board.’
He knows it’s an offer I won’t be able to refuse. He can tell it from the way I can’t take my eyes off the machine, how every line of my body seems to yearn towards it.
As if to underscore his words, he grabs his empty coffee mug and heads towards the service area. ‘Give me another double espresso, Cecilia,’ I hear him say.
‘But it’s too early for your second coffee, Mr Kilkery,’ she says. ‘You always say you like you routine. You sure you want right now?’
I sit down hesitantly in front of the laptop and stare at the keyboard then back at the screen where Lela’s name is already filled in, the cursor blinking at me from the email line.
From across the room, Ranald says, ‘Don’t use your own name, birth date, telephone number or home address as a password, Lela, they’re too easy to crack.’
Easy enough for him to say. Some of that information is locked away in Lela’s brain. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to access them, let alone type them in here.
When I continue to sit there unmoving, Ranald comes back with his double espresso. His distance is deliberate and respectful but his tone is slightly incredulous. ‘You don’t have an email address, do you?’
I look up at him, and I’m sure he sees bewilderment in Lela’s eyes because he says quickly, ‘How about I just fill mine in there and you can change it later, when you create an account for yourself? There are plenty of free webmail providers, it’s no big deal.’
Jargon, jargon, jargon. He lost me after create.
He spins the laptop back his way and inputs a string of numbers and letters, moving the cursor onto the create password slot when he’s done. Then he slides the machine back under my nose.
‘Now this really is something you can take care of on your own,’ he says. ‘Promise I won’t look. Just a word, or a word with numbers. Or just numbers. Something that’s meaningful to you that won’t make sense to anyone else. It’s to prevent people like me seeing what you get up to online.’
He laughs and walks away again, says to Cecilia, ‘Give me one of those salmon cakes, would you? Hold the sweet chilli sauce.’
I raise Lela’s right hand uncertainly, puzzling at the letters in front of me, then type with one finger: misericordia. A row of twelve anonymous dots appears there in place of the actual letters. Misericordia: Latin for ‘mercy’ — get it? The play on words brings a small smile to my lips. It’s an in-joke for an audience of one. You gotta get your laughs where you can.
‘All done?’ Ranald says, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. ‘Then just click sign up and you’re on your way.’
I do what he asks and am faced with a ‘security question’.
ȁWhat does it want now?’ I almost howl. ‘Why is this taking so long?’
Ranald rolls his eyes and flaps one hand at me. ‘Move over, you Luddite,’ he snorts. ‘Let’s do the rest of this together or I’ll never get back to work. Some of us are expected to save the world, you know, day in, day out, one firewall application at a time.’
I shift across to the other seat and he slides himself in front of the machine. He types and clicks, types and clicks.
‘Who do you want to add as a friend?’ he says.
I’m struggling to keep the impatience out of my voice as I peer at the screen. ‘I just want to send Ryan a message. I want to be able to talk to him right now. Is that possible with this . . .’ I use the word hesitantly, ‘website?’
Ranald nods, ‘You can even see if the guy’s online. We’ll check, in a minute.’
He quickly adds himself as a friend before pausing at the profile screen. ‘School, uni, employer?’ he asks.
I look at him blankly and he s
ighs and types Green Lantern café, Melbourne, Australia beside the word Employer.
‘You’re not giving me a whole lot to work with here,’ he says cheerfully. ‘But I can see that you’re about to explode with impatience, so let’s get you a profile picture and you can send that message.’
‘You want a picture of me?’ I wail softly. ‘Where do I get one of those?’
I feel as if Ryan and I are a heartbeat apart, like there’s a gossamer veil between us that I can almost reach up and rip down, but the mechanics and minutiae of ‘connecting’ with him are taking too long. I want to pick up that stupid machine in front of Ranald and throw it onto the ground with an anger so sudden and fierce that my left hand begins to ache. I jam it beneath my right armpit in quiet agony.
‘No sweat,’ Ranald chuckles, misreading my expression of pain for one of impatience. ‘I can take a photo of you with the webcam in my laptop and upload it right now.’
He turns the laptop screen towards me again. ‘Smile for the birdie,’ he says, tapping his finger against a small lens built into the top of the screen. I hitch up the corners of Lela’s mouth unconvincingly, exposing her snaggly front teeth.
Ranald clicks through a couple of extra functions as the manic grin on my face fades away. ‘Done,’ he says with satisfaction.
And just like that, the photo’s taken and Ranald has uploaded it onto the profile page he’s created for me. Welcome, Lela Neill is emblazoned across the top. Lela’s face and head of cropped, brown-red hair fill the entire image, with only a thin corona of brilliant light behind them; I must have moved when the image was captured. She looks blurry and young and gormless. Exactly the opposite of the way I feel inside.
‘We’re in business,’ Ranald says.
I lower my left hand, which no longer seems to ache, and lean forward, excitement flaring. ‘Just find him again,’ I say impatiently.
Ranald performs a few functions and Ryan’s profile fills the screen once more. ‘Send him a message now if you like. Take all the time you need,’ he says, and wanders away to engage Cecilia in further conversation.