Exile m-2

by Rebecca Lim

  There is a flurry of plastic ribbons then the front door pushes open. Warm air from the street mingles with the Siberian conditions in here.

  ‘Ranald!’ Mr Dymovsky cries heartily. ‘Welcome, welcome! Your usual, my friend?’

  Ranald nods happily, gives us all a little wave. He sets his laptop bag down on his usual table, rips open pocket after pocket and takes out a raft of electronic devices I am incapable of naming.

  ‘He likes that,’ Mr Dymovsky says to me under his breath, ‘that we know him, know his habits. He’s very complicated, very peculiar. Smart, you know?’ He taps one temple with the middle finger of his left hand. ‘But almost like a child in many ways. If you get it wrong …’ He lifts his eyes to the ceiling, lifts his shoulders and hands in a Heaven help you gesture. ‘Still, the customer is always right, eh?’

  He steps forward, picks up a steel ladle and fluffs up the fried rice warming in a rectangular receptacle beneath the lights of the hot-food counter; moves on to rearranging the fried snacks in neat, family groupings with a pair of tongs, while Cecilia starts grinding a new batch of coffee beans for Ranald’s coffee.

  Ranald sees me at a loose end and beckons me over, smiling with such genuine warmth and pleasure when I approach that his usually reserved, slightly cold demeanour is transformed.

  ‘Thanks for setting up my profile,’ I say. ‘You really helped me out. I wouldn’t have known where to begin.’

  Which is the honest truth. Sulaiman might believe that computers are somehow within God’s contemplation, but I’m not so sure.

  ‘I wish everything was that easy,’ Ranald says with a grin, picking at the ragged thumbnail on one hand. ‘But my reasons were purely selfish. I’m calling in that debt — the dinner date you promised me, remember? Now you can’t say no. Or pretend you didn’t hear me.’

  ‘Dinner?’ I repeat, disconcerted. ‘When?’

  I hadn’t actually promised him anything concrete but it seems churlish to remind him of that now. I’d been on fire to get a message out to Ryan, would probably have promised Ranald the earth, the moon, the stars for his help if I’d had to.

  ‘How about this Friday?’ he replies. ‘Just something easy and casual. There’s a place I like that’s only a couple of blocks away.’

  ‘Uh, sure,’ I say uncertainly. ‘Friday sounds okay.’

  By 5 pm on Friday, if it all goes to plan, Ryan and I will be as far away from here as it’s possible to get. I’ve just got to keep on lying like I mean it, until I can disappear Lela right out of her life.

  I refocus on Ranald with difficulty.

  ‘Bring your prettiest dress in,’ he’s saying eagerly, ‘and we’ll head straight out after you knock off. I’ll run you home later in my car.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say again neutrally, ‘that would be great.’

  ‘Yeah, it will be,’ Ranald says, inserting some kind of square, portable device into his machine, his head bent over one of the small, rectangular slots in the side. ‘But you’re sure you don’t have anything else on?’

  ‘Nope, nothing that can’t wait,’ I reply without missing a beat.

  I glance up as someone else comes in from the street. Franklin Murray — in the same business suit, shirt and tie as yesterday. He doesn’t look wild-eyed or edgy today. Just numb.

  Cecilia takes one look at him and abandons the coffee she’s making for Ranald. She hurries into the kitchen, where I can see her peering through the serving hatch from behind one of Sulaiman’s muscular, black-clad shoulders.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Mr Dymovsky roars. ‘I will call the police!’

  ‘I came to apologise,’ Franklin mumbles, eyes downcast, mouth trembling slightly. ‘And to get a coffee and a chicken salad sandwich. My wife thinks I left early for the office. I’ve been walking around for hours. I’ve got nowhere else to go. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what came over me.’

  I do, but I don’t say a thing, because who’d believe me?

  Beside me, Ranald is curiously still, watching the interplay between the two older men.

  Mr Dymovsky is red in the face. ‘No one shoots up my place and my people and gets away with it!’ he shouts.

  But Cecilia, Sulaiman and I act instinctively. Cecilia comes out of the kitchen and begins brewing Franklin a coffee, while I seat him at a table near the door. Sulaiman abandons lunch prep for a moment and brings out a small bowl of freshly shredded iceberg for the man’s sandwich.

  ‘You’re all mad!’ Mr Dymovsky blusters. ‘Get him out!’

  ‘Lightly toasted?’ I ask Franklin in a neutral voice.

  He doesn’t look at me, just stares straight ahead and says softly, ‘Yes, thank you.’

  His suit jacket is hanging a little awkwardly, and as I move around the table I spy the grip of the handgun jammed into its inside breast pocket like it was yesterday. The guy’s still a walking situation. But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be treated like a human being. We’ve all been there. It’s just that most of us haven’t resorted to firearms.

  As I pass Ranald’s table, he whispers to me conspiratorially, ‘Is he still packing a gun?’

  I nod almost imperceptibly.

  I fetch Franklin his sandwich and coffee. ‘There won’t be any charge today,’ I murmur, placing them down in front of him.

  There are tears in his eyes as he answers with dignity, still not meeting my gaze, ‘I can pay.’

  I shrug. ‘You decide.’

  Mr Dymovsky gives an audible snort and heads into his cramped little office off the corridor that leads to the poorly ventilated toilets at the back of the Green Lantern. From the stubborn angle of his head and shoulders, the way he’s muttering to himself in Russian, he’s probably planning to give the police a heads-up anyway.

  Cecilia looks at me uneasily as Franklin openly cries between bites of his sandwich and sips of his coffee. He’s got his back to us, but we can all see his shoulders shaking, hear the small animal noises he makes as he mops at his face with the backs of his hairy hands.

  Ranald frowns at his computer, like an irritable turtle. ‘People are trying to work here,’ he growls at Franklin’s back, stabbing at his keyboard ill-temperedly.

  I can tell he hasn’t forgotten Franklin’s jibe about him being a low-level functionary.

  Franklin doesn’t respond. He just keeps sobbing and eating, sobbing and drinking, making those awful wounded noises that he thinks we can’t hear.

  A few coffee orders blow in and out, looking at him curiously as they go by. When I tidy up some loose newspapers sitting on top of the counter by the front window I see that the guy’s face is a mess. I slide a paper napkin dispenser across the table at him on my way back to the kitchen. He ignores it.

  Mr Dymovsky comes back, mouth in a stern line. He gestures at me.

  ‘Move him on!’ he says fiercely when I return to the front counter. ‘I don’t want any troubles with this guy. He is like the time bomb. No good for business, crying custr. Tell him to cry somewhere else, okay?’

  I walk back towards Franklin’s table.

  Ranald looks up as I pass him. ‘It’s about time you guys did something.’ His voice is sulky and he’s actually pouting. ‘I can’t work in these conditions.’

  Standing just behind Franklin’s left shoulder, I can see that he’s finished his sandwich and there’s only a couple of mouthfuls of coffee left.

  ‘Franklin?’ I say quietly. ‘I’m going to have to clear the table now, because we’re about to get really busy.’ What I say next surprises even me; is the exact opposite of what I intended to say. ‘But you’re welcome to finish up your coffee and come again tomorrow. Do you hear me? What you did yesterday — nobody holds it against you.’

  Behind me, Ranald gives a loud exhalation of disbelief.

  I hesitate, then place a hand on one of Franklin’s pinstriped shoulders, hoping he won’t try and touch me like Ranald did. He doesn’t. But by his sudden silence, his stillness, I know that I have his full
attention.

  ‘Just don’t do it again, okay? Mr Dymovsky doesn’t want to have to involve the police. Spare your family that, at least. Just tell them what happened with your job and maybe you can figure out together what the next course of action should be? I think they’ll surprise you. Give them that chance. There’s a reason you’re a family.’

  I hear Ranald snort again and feel irritated. Doesn’t the guy possess a modicum of empathy? It’s almost as if he wants to push the other man into doing something desperate in a public place.

  Franklin doesn’t say anything, and still doesn’t look at me as he scrapes back his chair and rises to his feet. I feel more than see everyone tense up when he shoves his right hand inside his jacket, feeling around in there. He holds onto the handgun’s grip for a long moment, as if debating something with himself. But after a minute or two, he lets it go and adjusts the front of his jacket with shaking fingers.

  It was a gesture of self-reassurance more than anything else, I realise, a reflex action. Like he was telling himself that he still has options.

  Without a backward glance, he pulls open the door and bats his way back out through the plastic curtain. ‘I thought he was going to shoot himself this time, I really did,’ Ranald says as I let out the pent-up breath I’d been unconsciously holding.

  Mr Dymovsky — who hadn’t actually heard me invite Franklin to come back again tomorrow — gives me a thumbs up from behind the counter, but his face is pale and the shaken expression on it probably mirrors what’s on Lela’s face. Cecilia, standing close to Sulaiman near the kitchen door, looks equally stunned. Sulaiman, as usual, appears as impassive and immovable as stone.

  It must be nice, I think, to have a faith so strong that a little scene like that doesn’t even cause you to break a sweat.

  I don’t work that way. Fate is there to be meddled with, in my view. Anything else just makes you an observer in your own life.

  ‘It didn’t help, you making those stupid comments from the sidelines,’ I snap at Ranald as I pass him.

  He surprises us all when he yells in white-hot fury, ‘Stupid? Stupid is a dead-end waitressing job in a shithole excuse for a coffee shop!’

  He jams his laptop and doodads into his computer bag and storms out of the café.

  ‘Touchy,’ I say.

  ‘He didn’t even get his second coffee,’ Cecilia adds in wonder.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ Mr Dymovsky says to me, shaking his head ruefully.

  Sulaiman just gives me one of his unfathomable stares and heads back into the kitchen.

  Right on cue, the lunch rush starts and doesn’t wind down until after two thirty.

  ‘Okay if I go now?’ I ask Mr Dymovsky about ten minutes later.

  ‘It’s okay, Mr Dymovsky,’ Cecilia urges. ‘Sulaiman say he clean up for Lela today. You should let her get back to her mother.’

  ‘Go, go!’ Mr Dymovsky says mock angrily, making a shooing gesture with his big, beefy hands.

  As I shrug on Lela’s backpack, preparing to step out into the heat of the afternoon, he places something into my hands. It’s a plastic bag containing a large oblong plastic container of rice with odds and ends ladled over the top.

  ‘You share this with your mother,’ he says, already half-turning away sheepishly. ‘You eat, and you come back tomorrow and do what I pay you for, okay?’

  I turn at the door and give them a wave and the three of them wave back, each in their own place, each in their own way so kind that, for a moment, I look at their faces and think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be a waitress in a shithole excuse for a café in a gritty-pretty city at the bottom of the world.

  But then I remember that Ryan is coming for me in two days.

  Two days.

  And I know that once we’re together again, all this is going to seem like a distant dream and I won’t want to be anywhere else except where he is because I’ll be one step closer to being free.

  Chapter 14

  I find myself walking faster as I round the corner beneath that ceremonial arch, the air so hot that it’s coming off the pavement in waves and making the plain black cotton shirt and skirt I threw on this morning stick to’s Irish skin.

  I tell myself that I’ve got it all under control, that it’s cool, that I’m just checking my messages, keeping to the plan. But deep down, I’m praying for Ryan to be there, even if it’s just in that disembodied, virtual way that I still can’t get my old-school head around. So that we might occupy the same space, the same time, touch each other’s minds, if only for a brief moment.

  Not for the first time, I think how this truly is an age of miracles.

  Followed quickly by the realisation that I am actually setting Luc’s plan into motion. Operation Get Me Outta Here is truly about to begin. The sudden burst of happiness I feel inside is as hot as the sun on the top of Lela’s head.

  The same guy is on duty behind the bulletproof glass at the Magic 888 Internet Café, which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with coffee at all. Only computers. But that’s what I’m here for, so I slide my fiver across the counter and he gives me the token in return, without any sign that he recognises me from yesterday.

  I head to a computer away from the three boys in identical dark green school uniforms clustered noisily together around one terminal, away from the Chinese lady in her sixties with the tightly permed hair and maroon short-sleeved pants suit who is watching a live-streaming Hong Kong lifestyle program on her terminal and taking notes in a symbolic kind of language I can’t read.

  I log in quickly and click on my chat screen.

  Hello, beautiful, he types, as if he’s been waiting for me, and I can’t help a wide smile breaking across Lela’s little face.

  And I write: Friday can’t come soon enough. There’s room at my place if we can’t leave straightaway, but don’t go reading anything into it, buddy.

  He just sends me back two symbols …

  ;)

  … which takes me a little while to figure out. But when I do, I can’t help a kooky grin from breaking out all over my face all over again.

  I ask:

  Do your parents know? About me?

  Ryan replies:

  No. So you’ll have to pretend you’ve never met them before in your life. But they do know that I’ve invited the Australian girl I’ve been writing to online to stay for a while. They’re anxious about it, of course. But kind of happy that I’m back being interested in girls and not getting into trouble with the law.

  That makes me smile harder.

  I write:

  How many people know about me — the real me?

  The fewer people who know about me being in Paradise, the better. Especially if Luc’s planning on the two of us doing a vanishing act from there. Until Luc arrives, I’ll need to lie lw. Part of me is more than a little uneasy about treating Ryan’s home as a hideout, but I have no other options. I know it’s cowardly, but I don’t want to think too hard right now about how I’m going to explain it all to Ryan down the track. I’m just going to live in the moment and pray that his feelings don’t get hurt when Luc arrives on the scene.

  Today, I tell myself, is all about the silver lining, not the cloud.

  As I was hoping, Ryan replies:

  Your secret’s safe. Only me, Lauren, Jennifer Appleton know about you. That’s it.

  I sit back, relieved. They’re all people I think I can trust. They already know that I’m way freaky, so if I suddenly disappear again, they’ll just put it down to that.

  I’m about to type something else when Ryan gets in first.

  You might already have seen this, because it’s been leading all the news bulletins, here and overseas. But if you haven’t, you should catch the YouTube footage of this guy walking on water. Kid you not. He reminds me a lot of Lauren’s description of you. The person who posted the video says that she and her BF were making out in a car by a lake in Scotland and all of sudden they saw a glow on the water and saw a guy
at least seven feet tall, dressed all in white, just gliding across the surface for a couple of minutes before he vanished.

  Instantly, I feel a chill.

  I type, breathing unevenly:

  Where? Where do I find it?

  A moment later Ryan pastes a URL into the chat screen.

  Over a million people have already looked at this, and it’s only been a couple of days. Anyone you know??

  I open another window and copy and paste the URL into the bar at the top of the screen. There’s only one minute and forty-six seconds of footage but it’s possibly enough to make even the biggest sceptic believe there might be something more to life than just the facts.

  The man drifting across the surface of the loch is tall, pale, broad-shouldered, like something out of a classical painting. He has brown eyes, brown hair, every single strand straight, even and perfectly the same, worn a little too long for fashion; and a strong face that is all angles and planes, with a straight nose, lips set in a stern line. White raiment so blinding that its outline is indistinct. Like a living statue, a being of pure fire, youthful in aspect, yet ageless. A living flame is cupped in one hand. By its light, his eyes are searching the depths of that dark water, looking for something. Or someone.

  The camera work is understandably unsteady but I could swear it’s Uriel. So much like me in looks, if not in personality. We last came face to face when I was Carmen and he refused to help me find Lauren, or to set me free. One day, I’m going to hold him to account for that.

  I watch the footage one more time to be sure, then flick back to the other window, the portal behind which Ryan waits patiently.

  ght=“0em” width=“1em” align=“left”>I don’t know what to say, and hesitate over the keyboard.

  Ryan types finally:

  Mercy? Did you see it?

  Galvanised into motion, I type back:

  Yes, turns out he IS someone I know. But I couldn’t tell you what he was doing.

  This time it’s Ryan’s turn to be silent — for so long that I think he’s left the room, fallen asleep, given up on me.