Lyrebird

by Cecelia Ahern

  There’s a glass in her face, she doesn’t recognise the man. He’s trying to make her drink it. She doesn’t want it. There’s no one else around, the music is so loud, she can barely hear what he’s saying. She’s heard about people drugging drinks. He’s pushing it in her face and his arms are wrapped tightly around her. She doesn’t want it. She knocks it out of his hand and it smashes on the floor. The anger on his face. Laura is confused. She’s led along the corridor by the man, looking around but it’s all a blur, she can barely focus on any one thing. She can’t see, she can’t hear, she can’t think. She wants Solomon, she needs him, she can’t think of anyone else.

  Suddenly she’s outside the club and the angry man leaves her there alone. He comes back to give her her coat and she realises he wasn’t trying to abduct her or drug her. He’s security. She’s freezing and she puts her coat on. ‘Sorry,’ she says quietly, but he’s not interested. His suit is wet, he disappears inside, telling her to wait there.

  He returns with Rory, who’s putting his jacket on, confused at first, but then when he sees her he grins. ‘What did you get up to? They couldn’t get me out of there fast enough.’

  Laura’s head spins, she needs to get away. She turns to leave and sees a crowd of people who are trying to get into the club. She tries to step aside to let them pass but they don’t, they form a wall in front of her. She realises they have cameras, they’re taking photos of her. She can’t see the ground in front of her, she can barely see with all the flashes. She stumbles and falls to the ground. She doesn’t feel any pain but it takes her a moment to gather herself. Rory is there, hands under her arms. She hears him laughing, and he pulls her up.

  She doesn’t think this is funny. He can’t stop laughing.

  She tries to walk straight but feels herself go the other way. Rory chuckles and grabs her tightly. She feels sick.

  This is all wrong. They’re in an alleyway, she can’t see through to the other side, which makes her feel claustrophobic. There is no space in this city. There are too many people. She retches.

  ‘No, not here,’ Rory says, not laughing now. ‘Laura,’ his tone is darker, warning, as they’re completely surrounded by paparazzi. Laura is slipping from his grasp, her body and legs are practically like jelly. She’s taller than him, he struggles to keep her up.

  ‘Move back,’ Rory shouts at the photographers.

  They reach the main street and there’s a crowd of people standing by, wondering what all the scuffle is about, waiting to see which celebrity is leaving the nightclub.

  ‘Lyrebird, Lyrebird,’ she hears from lips, all whispering around her like the wind blowing through the leaves on her mountain. But she’s not on the mountain, she’s here, camera phones pointed in her face. Autograph books and pens extended.

  A group of boys start making cuckoo sounds. The sounds chase her down the road. Rory gets them to the first taxi they see in the nearby queue. Laura falls inside and leans her head back, eyes closed. Cameras bump against the glass of the car, continuing to take photographs of her. She closes her eyes, takes deep breaths, trying not to vomit as her head swirls.

  ‘Where to?’ the taxi driver asks, bewildered as his car is surrounded by photographers.

  ‘Solomon,’ Laura says, her eyes closed, head on the headrest.

  The cameras bang against the window.

  ‘Hey, where to?’ the taxi man asks, agitated. ‘Watch my bumper!’ he yells to the photographers, lowering his window. They continue to bang against the side of his car, the taxi driver clambers out and confronts them. Cameras continue to flash as Lyrebird’s taxi driver is involved in an altercation, Lyrebird passed out in the back seat.

  ‘Fuck,’ Rory says, as they sit in the back seat with no driver, completely surrounded. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Solomon,’ she says again, sleepily.

  ‘Uh, no, not Solomon. Okay, Laura, new plan.’ He shakes her, trying to wake her. He opens his door and goes around to her side. He pulls her out, tries to stand her up but now she’s both exhausted and intoxicated. The cameras ignore the taxi driver’s altercation and follow Laura and Rory.

  ‘Hey! Where are you going?’ the taxi driver yells.

  ‘I’m not sitting there while you argue,’ Rory yells back.

  ‘This is because of you, who do you think you are?’ The taxi driver yells a load of abuse at him as he half-carries, half-pulls Laura away. The taxis have all left the queue. ‘I’ve missed a load of fares because of you!’

  A taxi stops for them in the middle of the road. The light is out. There are people inside. A door opens. ‘Get in.’

  Rory looks in and recognises two guys from the club. He puts Laura in the front seat, trying to pull down her dress that’s rising up her long lean legs; that’s a tartan shirt, with black Doc Martens, and walking socks beneath. He gets in the back, squishing in beside the two men.

  ‘Where are you going?’ one asks. Rory thinks his name is Niall, a property guy, or was that someone else? As he looks at him, he wonders if he met him in the club at all.

  ‘Anywhere,’ Rory says, blocking his face from the cameras pushed up against the glass.

  The men laugh. The taxi drives off.

  29

  Laura wakes up in darkness. Her head, her throat, her eyes, everything aches. There’s a buzzing sound, the familiar vibrating of a phone and she thinks of Solomon. She looks around and sees light coming from a shoe. The phone is vibrating inside a trainer. It buzzes one more time, then makes the sound of a flat battery before dying, the light gone. It’s like witnessing another death. The dull headache that arrived in Galway and worsened in Dublin, but disappeared after her first two glasses of wine, has now returned and is worse than ever. It hurts for her to lift her head, gravity appears to have intensified and pulls her down. She’s afraid, she doesn’t know where she is and so she sits up. She’s on a couch, next to a double bed. There’s a figure over the covers and a shape beneath it.

  She smells vomit, realises it’s in her hair, and on her clothes and the smell brings her back instantly, like a flashback to her head over a toilet bowl, a dirty toilet bowl with shit still stuck on the side. Somebody is holding her hair out of the way. There’s lots of laughter, girls beside her and around her. A voice close to her ear is telling her she will be okay. A kind voice. A female voice. She remembers Rory, the nightclub, the man who attacked her. Being brought outside. The camera flashes, the taxi, another taxi, feeling sick.

  She doesn’t remember this place that she’s in. She doesn’t remember getting here, how she got to this room or who she’s with. She looks at the pair of Converse with the dead phone and she recognises it as Rory’s. So he’s here, quite possibly the person lying on the bed. He brought her here. She can’t blame him for what happened, she can only blame herself. She’s twenty-six years old and she should have known better. She’s so ashamed of herself for losing control, for such irresponsibility, for allowing others to see her like that, she can’t bring herself to wake Rory. She’s still wearing her boots, she doesn’t care about finding her jacket, she just wants to get out of there.

  She stands up and steadies herself as her head swirls. She takes a moment for the dizziness to pass, takes long deep breaths as silently as possible so as not to stir the sleeping others. The room is hot and stuffy. It smells of alcohol and hot bodies, which turns her stomach. She steps over the shoes and bottles, falling over and catching herself on the wall. She bangs against the wall and hears somebody stir behind her, waking as if in fright. She doesn’t look back, she keeps walking, she knows she needs to get out of there before they wake.

  Out of the bedroom she finds herself in a corridor. She sees the main door. The next door is the bathroom, then the front door. She passes an open-plan living and kitchen area, more bodies on floors and couches, a couple slowly kissing on the couch, his hand moving around inside her top as she makes soft breathy sounds.

  She thinks of Solomon and Bo in the hotel when they were making love and she mus
t have made a sound, given herself away, because suddenly the couple stop kissing and look up. A head pops out from the kitchen.

  ‘What the fuck was that noise?’ the girl asks.

  ‘The bird,’ the guy on the couch says.

  ‘Lyrebird,’ she says, giggling.

  ‘Whatever. Hi,’ he says and she thinks she recognises him. She remembers him from the nightclub. He was friendly, offering to buy her drinks, giving out to somebody for accidentally shoving her as he passed. Getting the barman’s attention faster than the others. Whispering in her ear. Did he kiss her ear? Her neck? He’s the one who held her arm tightly when she stumbled.

  ‘I’m Gary, I’m an actor. Our premiere was tonight at the festival,’ he says. She remembers being impressed, she’d never met an actor before. Not a professional one anyway, as it turned out.

  ‘Gary, you little shit,’ the girl says, hitting him, jumping up from the couch so quickly she knees him by mistake. He groans. ‘You told her you were a fucking actor? Who are you, Leonardo DiCaprio?’

  ‘I was only messing, babe, chill out.’

  ‘Don’t babe me,’ she wallops him again, which stirs the others, who are sleeping.

  Her voice is familiar. Laura studies her, trying to pinpoint how she knows her. Then she remembers. In the toilet, her head literally in the toilet, trying to ignore the dried shit, hearing laughter, that girl’s voice, looking up between retches to see a camera phone in their hands.

  ‘Stop,’ Laura had said, trying to block her face.

  ‘Get out of here, Lisa,’ another voice had said.

  ‘It’s going on Facebook,’ she says, leaving the bathroom. ‘Lyrebird, dirtbird,’ she says, giggling.

  Laura must have said this all out loud.

  ‘Cara, you put photos of her puking on Facebook?’ Gary asks. ‘And you’re giving out to me?’

  ‘Are you okay?’ a voice says from the kitchen. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  Laura doesn’t recognise her face, but she knows her voice instantly. It was the one that was in her ear. ‘Ssh. Ssh. It’s going to be okay.’

  Laura knows she has repeated this because the girl is smiling. She has a friendly face, it’s nice to see one. She holds a cup of tea out to her.

  Laura shakes her head and keeps walking to the door. She should go into the bathroom to clean herself up, but she knows she must leave, she doesn’t want Rory to wake up, she doesn’t want to have to deal with talking about what happened.

  She has no idea where she is, or where her bags are. She’s in an apartment block somewhere. She heads for the fire escape and runs down five flights of stairs, thinking someone is chasing her, not hearing any footsteps but afraid to stop or look behind her in case they catch her. It’s like a bad dream being played out and she’s the one playing it out with an overactive imagination. She races downstairs, clinging to the rail, hand brushing the metal and feeling splinters from the chipped paint. She thinks she’ll be stuck on that staircase forever, that it will never end, until finally she reaches the ground floor. She passes a wall of grey postboxes, all numbers no address, not that it would mean anything to her anyway. She bursts out on to the street, hoping to see somewhere familiar, one of the places she’s been to with Solomon, Bo, or Rachel, but she doesn’t recognise it. Across from her is an identical building, beside and all around her is the same.

  A loud horn frightens her and she looks up in time to see the city tram headed straight for her. She jumps onto the path, her heart pounding as the driver shouts as he passes.

  When she has calmed herself somewhat, she looks left and right, decides to go left in the direction of the tram, it must be bringing people somewhere. Somewhere is better than the unknown, that same thought pattern she’s had since Bo and Solomon came into her life. Follow them, they’re going somewhere, somewhere is better than nowhere. While she walks she thinks of the sound of the tram that almost stopped her heart. She doesn’t hear herself mimicking it, though she hears its sound, like a song she can’t get out of her head. But people are startled, jumping away, some laughing when she nears.

  Perhaps she’s not making a sound at all, perhaps it’s the sight of her that is so shocking to them and the smell of her. The vomit in her hair, the dried vomit on her boots that she sees now for the first time. She looks a disgrace, she smells even worse. She attempts to tie back her hair, make her appearance neater, especially when a camera phone comes out of a bag. It’s like a tidal effect, once one is out it gives others the permission, the confidence to do the same.

  She feels the beat in her chest of last night’s music, the people shouting, the broken glass, the muffled sounds that blend together into one noisy, disturbing cacophony. She holds her hands to her ears, to block it all out. The people staring at her, the phones are held up, the flashbulbs of the photographers, now she remembers. The photographers. Oh God, people will see her in the newspaper. Would they print such awful pictures? She thinks of Solomon, opening his morning paper. If he sees her, she will never look him in the eye again, such is her embarrassment.

  She hears the rustle of his morning paper while Bo clicks away on her phone, everything for her on a screen, everything for him to be touched. Rustle, click, tram warning, smash of a glass. An angry taxi man, shouting at her. A rough hand on her arm. She remembers now. She’d thrown up in the taxi, he’d thrown them out. She’d kneeled on the roadside and vomited some more. The lads laughing. Blue Converses standing beside her, splashing the white tip with vomit. More laughter. A hand on her head now and then, an arm around her waist. Not being able to stand, being taken away, a girl, the nice girl asking the owner of the arm around her waist what he thinks he’s doing. Rory telling the man with the hand around her waist to back off. What was he going to do to her? Her cheeks flame with the shame that she allowed herself to end up in that position.

  Then the bathroom. The toilet bowl. The shit stain on the side. A warm blanket. A glass of water. Distant laughter and music.

  She holds her hands over her ears, she sinks to the ground, trying to hide from the cameras. Her mum and Gaga were right to hide her, she’s not able for all of this, she can’t run anywhere. She wishes they’d hide her now.

  As she thinks of them, the noises in her head start to calm. She can think more clearly, as the thoughts quieten she hears herself whimpering, crying, breathless, hiccups. She’s sitting on the ground. A crowd gathers around her. Some people too polite to look directly at her but still they hover nearby. She looks up at the person standing beside her. A garda. A female one. Mam and Gaga said not to trust them. But this garda seems kind. She looks worried. She bends down, gets to her level and smiles, concern in her eyes. ‘Want to come with me?’

  She holds out her hand and Laura takes it. She has nowhere else to go. Somewhere is better than nowhere.

  30

  Laura sits in a corner of the room in the garda station, wrapped in a blanket. Between her hands she holds a mug of hot tea, which has helped to calm her. She waits for somebody to pick her up, she wouldn’t give Solomon or Bo’s name, she doesn’t want them to see her like this, or know anything about what has happened. Her pride has been bruised. She wanted to prove that she could be okay without them and she failed.

  The gardai work around her; opening and closing the hatch to stamp passport forms, and driving licences and whatever else people need. Lots of paperwork; the behind-the-scenes of keeping the law. She feels like she is in a safe area, no nasty robbers being dragged into the cells. If her mum and Gaga knew about this they would be terrified, their worst fears realised, but there’s no sense of terror here, it’s calm. Laura thinks of Gaga and hears the sound of the carving knife being sharpened. Not an appropriate sound to make in a police station; heads turn. Maybe that’s why she does it, because she’s not supposed to. The nerves have gotten to her, or she wants to rebel, she wants to be different, to be seen? These are all the questions Bo asked her when they were alone. Laura thinks about it now, in a way that she never ha
s before, she’s never had to analyse herself so much. She’s not sure why she makes the sounds she makes, not always anyway, sometimes it makes perfect sense. But now, making knife-sharpening sounds in a police station, that’s not smart. When she’s relaxed on the mountain that makes sense, reading a book and a robin is building a nest above her. She can’t help but join in with their sounds then.

  ‘A robin,’ the male garda says suddenly. ‘I recognise that one.’

  ‘Didn’t know you knew anything about birds, Derek.’

  ‘We have a family of them in our back garden.’ He spins around in his chair to talk to his colleague. ‘The daddy bird is vicious enough.’

  ‘They’re very territorial,’ Laura says, remembering.

  ‘That’s it,’ he says, dropping the pen to the table. ‘Those robins would win in a fight against our dog any day. Daisy is terrified of them.’

  ‘I’d say Daisy wouldn’t win in a fight against anyone,’ his colleague says, still rifling through papers. ‘With a name like Daisy.’

  The others laugh.

  As everybody relaxes, the sound of their laughter triggers something. She feels the beat of the music from the nightclub, in her heart.

  Rude stupid bitch. The girl had thought Laura was blocking her ears to avoid a conversation with her, when it was because the sound of the hand-drier had given her a fright. It was all a misunderstanding.

  Misophonia, Bo had explained to her one day. People with misophonia hate certain noises, termed trigger sounds, and respond with stress, anger, irritation and in extreme cases, violent rage. Laura hadn’t felt that it applied to her, but perhaps Bo was right? She thinks of the moment again.

  The girls laughing in the toilet, camera phones held up. The man with his hand around her waist, bringing her somewhere, saying ssh in her ear. The kind girl whispering ssh in her ear, holding her hair, rubbing her back.