Mercy m-1

by Rebecca Lim

  You bought me nothing.’ Ryan’s face darkens. ‘Yeah?’ he sneers. ‘How?’ I’m lost for a minute. Should I tell him? It’s new for me, this feeling of wanting to confide in somebody, to reach out. Though I couldn’t have created a better person to want to reach out to.

  It’s as if I conjured him up out of my lonely subconscious. Though I must prefer blonds, mustn’t I?

  Or rather, the blond to beat all blonds. But Ryan’s still just about perfect for me. Every time I look at him, I wonder if he’s real. There’s the sense of the earth falling away at my feet, the dizzying precipice. I knew a man once, whose name I can no longer recall, who maybe had it pegged. He used to argue that what we perceive is wholly unreliable. How I railed against that. Because to someone like me, that’s a one-way ticket to bedlam. All I perceive is all I have.

  But I digress.

  For me, wariness is second nature. I wouldn’t know where to start with the whole trust thing. Best to go on as I mean to continue, right? Where would it all lead, getting close to someone like Ryan only to wake one morning to find that I’m not in Kansas any more?

  Heartache and pain, begin again, chants that little voice inside my head.

  ‘Still trying to work that part out,’ I say finally, and he can tell from the strange expression on my face that it’s the truth. He wants to know how I got out of that house under my own steam, I can tell. But he doesn’t push it, he’s a gentleman, and for that I’m grateful.

  ‘I still think it’s got something to do with Lauren being a singer, a soprano,’ I say stiffly.

  Ryan’s tone is dismissive. ‘You think I hadn’t considered that already? Her choir stuff was a whole bunch of dead ends. I kept tabs on the people from Paradise High she mentioned spending time with. They were squeaky clean. All of them.’ Not much I can say to that, so I don’t. But it’s important, and I don’t think he’s worked all the angles on that.

  After a moment, he sighs. ‘What are we fighting about?’

  ‘You call this fighting?’ My tone is slightly derisive but he doesn’t rise to the bait.

  ‘You still want to help?’ he says tentatively.

  I shrug. ‘If you think it will do any good.’ His voice is quiet. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have someone … believe you for a change.’ He looks like he wants to say something else, but changes his mind, looks down at the floor. I almost reach out and touch him, think better of it. Sit on my hands for good measure.

  ‘I’m tired, could I sleep now?’ I say finally.

  I don’t really want him to leave. But we’re going nowhere. And I need to do something.

  ‘Sleep,’ he says with a fleeting smile, ‘you’ve earned it. We’ll try a different tack tomorrow, yeah?’ He shuts Lauren’s bedroom door gently behind him.

  I lie down on Lauren’s bed fully clothed and turn my face to the wall. There’s someone I need to talk to.

  The hanging garden couldn’t be more beautiful tonight.

  I smell neroli, jasmine, white magnolia, orange blossom, a thousand different blooms that no human hand could possibly have put together. It is an apology, of a kind, for the last time. He comes to me out of a living bower of flowers, a smile in his eyes, his hands curled loosely by his sides, no threat. Like a sun god when he walks. In robes of white so luminous, I can’t make out the detail.

  As if to mock me.

  I want nothing but an answer to my question. Which I am certain he already knows, has already read from my mind. Still I give it utterance. It is my dream, after all.

  ‘Who is he?’ I demand waspishly. ‘You’re even dressed like he was; you don’t always wear white. It’s not your best colour. Don’t lie.’ In an instant, the garden vanishes and we stand in a flesh-rending hail of sand, at the heart of a devouring cyclone. Anyone else would be torn to shreds, but not we two. In sleep I am invincible, for I am under his protection. It is all for show, has ever been thus. I used to find it exhilarating, what he could do, what he was capable of. Now, I realise suddenly, it’s getting a little bit tired.

  ‘Look!’ he screams into the teeth of the storm, throwing his arms wide, head back, displaying himself to best advantage. ‘I have remade the world for you.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject,’ I snap.

  The night garden rematerialises around us, new shoots breaking the soil at our feet, vines climbing, twining sinuously about our ankles. The fragrance of a thousand blossoms intensifies. Everything hyper-real, hyper-beautiful.

  ‘Must we talk about him?’ Luc sighs, winding his arms about me like the devouring plants. ‘I hate it when we fight. Our time together is so short.’ He rests his chin on the crown of my head and for a moment I close my eyes, the gesture so familiar I can almost feel it across a hundred human lifetimes. The bass note of my messed-up existence.

  You wouldn’t catch me saying this, but it’s nice being held by someone who claims to know me better than I know myself, by someone whose entire, festering inner life does not become an open book to me at first touch.

  But I’m getting sidetracked by the moment.

  ‘Who is he?’ I repeat.

  Luc pushes me away gently, considers me at arm’s length.

  ‘He is a portent, an omen,’ he says finally. ‘A Dog of War. Heed my advice. Do nothing. Do nothing and we shall be reunited in good time, sooner than you think.

  Act unwisely and you risk certain destruction. I cannot be clearer than that, my love.’ Understanding seizes me like a lightning strike.

  ‘One of the Eight then,’ I say in wonder.

  Finally, They make themselves known.

  ‘One of the Eight.’ Luc’s face is grim. Light seems to bleed from him for an instant, then he is gone.

  Chapter 11

  The next morning, Mr Masson tries a different tack, too, breaking the choir up into sections and assigning each group a different practice room, a different teacher.

  He calls it workshopping, but it’s really meant to put a stop to the furtive speed-dating that is threatening to derail the concert.

  The elderly, black-suited music director of Little Falls makes a move in our direction, but the lean, handsome, golden-haired young teacher from Port Marie’s music program smoothly intervenes. ‘I’ll take the sopranos today, Laurence,’ he says pleasantly. The elderly man stops, frowns and introduces himself to the remaining group of female singers in the room, the altos. As they straggle out of the assembly hall behind him, they murder us with their eyes, every one.

  ‘I’m Paul Stenborg,’ our choirmaster smiles, teeth white and perfectly even. ‘Call me Paul. Sopranos, follow me, if you please.’ Most get up with indecent haste and file after him, chattering, into an adjoining building. There is a vague scuffle for the good seats. Near him, near the piano. By sheer force of will, the St Joseph’s girls come out on top.

  Tiffany makes sure she’s front and centre to the action, taking me with her.

  The man is tall, slim, Nordic-looking. Late twenties or early thirties, with ruffled, sunlit hair and a bohemian edge to the way he dresses. Dark cords and scuffed workboots, artfully layered poor-boy shirts and a vintage waistcoat hanging open beneath a battered single-breasted jacket, a thin, striped scarf. Steel-framed glasses, electric blue eyes, just a hint of stubble.

  Everything just so. A picture. Vain, then. I know I have come across his type before, somewhere.

  All the girls sit up straighter in their chairs, eyes bright, colour high. ‘This is more like it,’ Tiffany says with satisfaction.

  Paul shoots her a quick look under his extravagant lashes, a lingering smile guaranteed to stop her breathing — I know, because I hear the catch, the re-engagement — then he says brightly, ‘Let’s take it from Figure 1, shall we, soprani?’ He seats himself at the piano stool, begins to play with his beautiful, long-fingered hands. There is a flutter of movement as the front row — me in its midst — congratulates itself on its foresight.

  As Paul runs the general chorus through their paces, I b
ide my time, learning the music, learning the faces, watching the clock, waiting — reluctant and on edge — for Figure 7. Just miming along, because I’m still not sure if what I have in mind is going to work.

  It’s stop and start. There are plenty of hands this morning as Paul patiently answers every stupid question the girls dream up just to get him to look at them. Like, ‘Ah, Paul, isn’t that supposed to be a demi semiquaver?’

  (‘No, it isn’t, Mary-Ellen, but you’ve raised a good point there.’) For Tiffany, he has extra time and attention, asking her to demonstrate a bar here, a phrase there, over and over, with great charm and the flash of white teeth, until the other girls in the room are openly mutinous. But Tiffany laps it up, shooting me sly glances, playing with the ends of her sleek side pony, blowing us all away with her big, Italianate voice. Such a standout, such a talent, it’s obvious what Paul thinks. He grins when he hears her putting the rest in the shade, his approval clear.

  There is electricity in the air between them.

  We don’t get to Figure 7, and I’m relieved. Maybe it won’t be today.

  When Paul finally says it’s time to rejoin the rest of the choir, there are audible groans.

  ‘God, I hope we get him again tomorrow,’ Tiffany says fervently. ‘What a total honey.’ Then she gives me a piercing look. ‘You up to it?’ Everything a contest. I shrug. ‘I guess. Wait and see.’ We file back into the main assembly hall and throw ourselves into our chairs. Mr Masson exhorts us feverishly to ‘Take it from the top!’, the orchestra blares back into disembodied life and the whole room rips into it. And though the basses are off, and the altos keep missing their entries, and the tenors can’t keep the time, there’s a growing sense that things may just come together. You can see the amazement in people’s eyes.

  It’s beginning to sound kind of like … music.

  All the smug St Joseph’s girls around me are poised like hawks for Figure 7. I’m packed in tight — Tiffany on one side, Delia on the other, girls at front and back — like there’s been some secret directive to not let me escape, to block all the exits. Miss Fellows follows me with her dark eyes, ready to breathe fire at a single misstep, a single fluffed demisemiquaver or whatever.

  There is a moment of doubt, a tiny breath of uneasiness in me, a catch in my ribcage — Carmen? Can we do this? We can do anything, right? — as Mr Masson looks straight at me, beats me in, drills the air in front of him with a closed fist so that I can’t miss the entry point.

  Everyone is looking my way. And it’s now, now.

  And then I am singing the words I should have sung yesterday morning, the music I should have known yesterday morning, but committed wholly to memory in one desperate hour before Mrs Daley called out that dinner would shortly be served.

  The room bursts into open speculation, Mr Masson beaming with pleasure — two sudden spots of high colour appearing on his cheeks — Miss Dustin holding her chunky, ring-infested hands to her jowly face. For some kind of alchemy is taking place. It is Carmen’s body doing all the work, her musculature, her impossibly tiny frame, her breathing, but I am the animus, the reason, the force.

  And I have remembered every word; sing every word as if it is a language that I alone have created. Together, we are sublime, I know it. Some things the body just remembers.

  I see the dark-suited, old music teacher’s undisguised excitement, Miss Fellows nodding tightly, Paul Stenborg’s suddenly mesmerised expression, as everyone strains to hear my instinctive phrasing, my superlative attack, my entries, my exits, the clean, lyrical beauty in my voice. Not too big, not too showy, not Italianate. Something else altogether. Something almost otherworldly. Sweetness with power. The cadences rising and falling towards the ceiling, single notes hanging there, suspended, as if they have their own lives, are made of lambent crystal.

  I’m leaving them all behind. They are singing, the other soloists — the girls of St Joseph’s, the quavery tenor, the hopeless bass and so-so baritone — but they may as well be miming now. Tiffany is furious. Her face is lit up like a Christmas tree with ill will and bad choler as she tries to outsing me, but fails. A lark striving to catch a burning phoenix arcing skyward. The whole room is listening so hard that the entire chorus, almost two hundred people, fails to come in after Figure 10 and I sing on alone for what feels like an eternity, and I wonder how much of this glorious sound is Carmen and how much of it, if any of it, is me.

  Mr Masson abruptly shuts off the sound system and I stumble to a halt, my last word ringing in the air.

  Creasti shimmers there. Created.

  ‘Well, let’s leave it there for now. We’ll reconvene at four this afternoon,’ says Mr Masson delightedly, eyes shining, as the room erupts into noise and movement.

  ‘We might have a concert on our hands, boys and girls, we just might. Good work, Carmen. Superb.’ He gives a nod in my direction.

  Beside me, Tiffany lets loose a long breath, like a hiss.

  ‘Beautiful,’ declares Miss Dustin, clapping me so hard between the shoulderblades with one of her man-hands that I almost fall off my chair. ‘Really wonderful, Carmen. There was a quality in your voice today I don’t think I’ve ever heard before.’ I’m speechless, still grateful that my gamble has paid off. Turns out I have some kind of weird mnemonic memory for music and lyrics, and Carmen has a set of lungs to write home about. Who knew? It’s some kind of lucky break.

  ‘You certainly showed us,’ Miss Fellows snipes nastily before moving away to speak with Mr Masson, who keeps stealing glances at me as if I might dematerialise.

  I think what Miss Fellows really means is showed off.

  I speak subliminal messaging better than most people.

  Around me, Tiffany and some of the other girls stand up abruptly, clutching their scores to their chests like armour plate.

  ‘I’m Laurence Barry,’ interrupts the elderly music director of Little Falls, moving forward with his right hand held out. Not scowling at me today, not at all.

  ‘Have you considered —’ Someone else cuts in before the old man can finish his sentence or touch me, which I’m grateful for. ‘Paul Stenborg,’ he says, as if he hadn’t ignored me all morning, his light, luminous eyes looking over and past Carmen Zappacosta’s nondescript head, her nondescript features.

  ‘Though of course you know that already. Certainly hiding your light under a bushel there, young woman, extraordinary, so unexpected …’ I feel eyes on my back and turn. Catch the back view of Tiffany tossing her side pony over her shoulder.

  She leads the other St Joseph’s girls away to first period without a word and I know from the way she’s holding herself that she thinks I’ve engineered all this deliberately to give myself a bigger profile.

  Someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s the spotty tenor who’s been following Tiffany around like a whipped dog for the last few days. By the weirdly attentive look in his eyes, it seems he may now have switched his unnerving allegiance to me. Behind him stands the bulky, dark-haired bass singer, Tod, and three local girls, the witchy Brenda — Ryan’s ex — among them, all watching me closely.

  ‘That was fan tastic,’ the boy breathes, and I have to move back subtly or risk being engulfed by partially digested Spanish onion. ‘So are you coming tonight, or what?’ I feel Carmen’s forehead wrinkle up, me doing it. If something’s on tonight, Tiffany and her posse haven’t bothered to keep me informed, which is typical because Carmen always finds out about the good stuff way after it’s already happened.

  ‘Uh, I …’ I draw out the syllables hesitantly to give someone a chance to fill me in on the details.

  ‘You have to come,’ purrs one of the girls standing beside Tod, a horsy-faced dirty blonde in tightly layered tops and even tighter jeans, with impossibly long and perfect peach-coloured nails. ‘If only to put that Tiffany Lazer of yours in her place.’

  ‘She’s getting on our … nerves,’ adds the other girl I don’t know, a crop-haired, biker-chick brunette wearing way too much h
eavy navy eyeliner.

  ‘Thinks she’s better than all of us,’ the flame-haired Brenda interjects waspishly. ‘When clearly she’s not.’

  ‘So will you come?’ Spotty Boy leans forward expectantly. I watch his Adam’s apple slide up and down as I step back a fraction.

  ‘Um, sure,’ I say, assuming a polite smile. ‘How do I get there again?’

  ‘Brenda will pick you up,’ replies Tod quickly. ‘Won’t you, Bren?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Brenda, with a sidelong look at the girls she’s standing with. ‘It’s not like I don’t know the way to where you’re staying.’ Her laughter is forced. ‘Eight thirty, then.’ She smiles in a way that doesn’t reach her extraordinary violet eyes.

  ‘Eight thirty,’ I agree, not sure what it is I’ve agreed to, but I’m no coward. Bring it on.

  We leave the assembly hall in formation, all of them flanking me as if I might somehow change my mind and do a runner.

  Chapter 12

  It’s eight thirty, and Ryan’s escorting me out through the front gates after dinner, following the usual elaborate ritual of imprisoning the dogs behind the steel side gate so they don’t rend me limb from limb like an ancient Roman sacrifice. He tackles the padlock and chain and we’re finally standing outside his house on the footpath.

  All this time I’ve been conscious of his hand at my back. He’s looking the goods in a beat-up dark leather jacket, faded tee and lean indigo jeans. But I give good poker face, and he has no way of knowing what I’m thinking. Carmen’s heart feels like it’s just broken sub-nine seconds on the 100-metre sprint.

  ‘You don’t have to stay,’ I tell him tightly, looking up and down the street for Brenda’s car.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me either way,’ Ryan drawls.

  ‘Stand under the streetlight, yeah?’ We move under it just as Brenda pulls up in a sleek hard-top convertible in an unmissable bright yellow.