EXILE

REBECCA LIM

To my father, Yean Kai, and my mother, Susan, and to Ruth and Eugenia, with love.

And if I die before I learn to speak Can money pay for all the days I lived awake But half asleep?

Primitive Radio Gods (1996)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Acknowledgments

Also by Rebecca Lim

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

I’m alone in the infinite darkness, the endless vacuum of space. There’s nothing to give form to the place I occupy — no up, no down, no sense of distance — nothing except the bright, white light coming off my skin.

I am weightless. My feet don’t touch the ground. There is no ground. Just a breathless, waiting void.

Then, as I watch, I see another light — like me? — wink into being. And another, and another, until all around there are hundreds of lights — no, upwards of a thousand — scattered across the abyss. Like fireflies, like diamonds. All waiting.

And then a giant breath sweeps through us, past us, lifting my hair, ruffling the edges of my drifting garments.

Be, it seems to say. Live. And, as I watch, planets, stars, suns, moons explode into being, in every colour, in every shade, as if rendered by a painter’s hand. Greater and lesser bodies fly by; comets, black holes, supernovae, strange fissures in time and space, twist and curl overhead like a painted, yet living, ever-changing dome.

And I know where I am, and my shining form seems to grow brighter, as do all the others like me out there. Our hearts swelling.

We’re home.

Home.

It must be over, over at last.

No more fear, no more uncertainty.

I’m free.

And my sudden joy is so fierce that it seems more than I can contain. I lift my hands to my face in awe, in praise, and feel tears spring to my eyes, feel them course freely down my cheeks.

And that’s when I realise that something is wrong.

Because I cannot cry. Was not formed to cry tears.

Only humans cry tears, and I’m not human, am I?

This is a dream.

Instantly, everything vanishes and it’s dark again, bitterly dark. But I’m not alone this time.

‘Hello, my love,’ he says, the two of us soaring towards each other, ghostly, in the void.

Luc.

My beloved.

The most beautiful being in creation. Golden- skinned, golden-haired, broad-shouldered, snake- hipped, long and lean. With eyes as pale as living ice, like broken water. He’s heart-stopping.

Even now, in my dream, when I look at him and then look at me, I can’t understand how we were together, what he saw in me in the first place.

Luc places his hands around my waist and turns me about in the weightless dark, the better to see me, to see my face.

As I cry, ‘Where have you been? Why won’t you save me? I’ve been so lost,’ I am disgusted at myself for saying the words, for acting like a clingy girlfriend when I never was before.

In answer, he laughs and pulls me close and rests his chin atop my hair, the gesture so familiar, so longed for, that I close my eyes and let the tears fall and keep falling.

‘Don’t do this to me,’ I sob. ‘Don’t show me the things I can’t have. I want to go home. I want things to be the way they used to be.’

‘I can’t save you,’ he answers gently, cupping my face with his hands. ‘Only you can do that. And I can’t restart the clock — that time is over and everything has changed and cannot be remade. But I can help you. This time I know I can help you. But you have to do one thing for me.’

I’m instantly still in his arms, listening.

His voice is low and urgent, as if he fears being overheard. ‘The Eight have made it impossible for me to find you. They shift you again and again, into an unbroken chain of strangers — geography, culture, language, all of it random, without pattern. Many times I’ve almost caught up with you but then They’ve cast you into some new form amongst the billions that teem upon the earth — and so the chase begins again. It’s why I am only ever able to reach you in your sleep, in your dreams — where I beg for you to find me. But you never have.’

He laughs, but I feel his towering frustration.

‘It’s not your fault,’ he says. ‘I don’t blame you. They’ve corrupted you, made you less than you are. But now you need to try to remember something — do you think you can do that?’

His arms tighten around me and it feels as if I am touching eternity, touching absolute power. Though what is truly at the heart of Luc is walled off from me, as it ever was. He’s beautiful, yes. Dearer to me than life itself, undoubtedly. But he’s always been unknowable. A mystery.

He puts a finger to my lips before I can say anything.

‘I almost caught up with you the last time, did you know that? When you were Carmen Zappacosta.’

When he says the name, the blank void around us lights up for an instant with a blinding flash — brighter than magnesium when it burns, than lightning come down to earth — and I cringe.

Then the dark surrounds us once more and he whispers, ‘I was so close that I almost placed my hands on you through that girl’s skin. We were almost together again. In the same place. After all this time.’

I shiver at the implication.

‘I don’t remember being . . . her,’ I whisper, fearful of the heavens bursting into flame around us again if I utter the girl’s name.

‘They won’t want you to remember,’ he replies, tightening his arms around me. ‘That’s why I’m here. Before They shifted you out of her body, I saw a way for us to be together again. I saw the boy’s eyes when he looked at Carmen — it was love for you in them. He knows you and loves you for yourself, and that is something we may use to our advantage. I have found a way to free you at last, for us to be together again.’

I stare at Luc, confusion on my face. Someone else loves . . . me?

‘Remember this,’ Luc urges. ‘Just this thought. When you wake, I want you to find Ryan Daley and return to Paradise, the place where he lives, and wait for me there. Do you think you can do that?’

‘Ryan Daley?’ I repeat, relieved when the universe does not burn at the mention of the name.

Luc nods. ‘I may be prevented from finding you, but you’re strong, you’re resourceful — you’ve survived this long without losing your mind. Find the boy, escape the Eight and return to the godforsaken place he calls home. There we shall be reunited at last. When you are under my protection once more, the Eight shall never touch you again.’

I stare up at Luc’s incomparable profile, wondering why he is asking me to find some human boy that I can’t even remember.

‘Who is he?’ I ask. ‘How will I know him?’

Something flares in Luc’s pale eyes for a split second as he gazes at me, his fingers tightening on my waist like talons. For a moment, I’m almost afraid. When he looks like that, he’s capable of . . . anything.

Then he laughs and this time there’s genuine amusement there. ‘As to who he is? I will leave it up to you to find out. You’re a smart girl, you’ll manage it. As to what he looks like . . .’

Luc propels himself away from me, up into the airless void, turning and turning with his arms outstretched until he is a shining blur, then a pinpoint of light that suddenly vanishes from view. And before me stands his human double, wearing a beat-up leather jacket, faded navy tee, blue jeans and scuffed boots. Physically he’s everything Luc is: tall, lean, beautiful, strong. But dark-haired, dark-eyed, fair- skinned, as night is to day. And mortal.

There’s something vulnerable in his expression, something Luc has never been and never will be. And then I see it, too. There’s love in the boy’s eyes. For me.

I shift closer to the tall, achingly familiar young man, incredulous that I could have forgotten someone so beautiful; someone who so obviously adores me even though he can’t ever have actually seen me, the real me.

Ryan moves closer, too, our fingertips meeting between us.

Something feels as if it is giving way inside me. As if buried memories are struggling to the surface; as if the ground is shifting beneath my feet.

Except there is no ground, no up, no down. No light, save for the illumination that’s burning off my skin, that’s bleeding from me in little drifts, in errant curls of pure energy.

And suddenly I’m alone again, except for Luc’s voice, which seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

‘Find him.’ The words reverberate in the impenetrable dark. ‘Find him and wait for my return.’

Chapter 2

‘Lela? Lela, darling? You’ve fallen asleep in the chair again, honey. If you don’t hurry, you’re going to be late for work.’

I frown, and the last remnants of my dream — vivid, hyper-real — flee and do not return, although I try to hold on to them.

Even before I open my eyes, I can smell eucalyptus oil and sandalwood incense, but the intense aroma is unable to mask the smell of sickness in the overheated room: the odour of charred flesh; a chemical residue that is offensive to my senses. There’s the whirr of a machine, also; some kind of medicated inhalant in the air.

Even before I open my eyes, it’s obvious to me that some kind of alchemy has taken place again. I’ve been pulled out of wherever I was before, the life I was living before, the body I was in before, and dumped into . . . Lela’s. Finnegan, begin again, chants that little voice inside my head. Though even it has begun to sound kind of weary.

Because my real name’s not Lela.

It’s not even Mercy, which is the name I’ve given myself in the absence of the real thing. I have no name and no memory, you see. Or rather, there are holes in my memory you could sail a cruise ship through. But if I think hard about myself, really hard, I get that one word. Mercy. So it’s what I call myself these days, for want of something better. Because if you have a name, you must exist, right? It’s something I tell myself a lot. And it sure beats, Hey, you.

I open my eyes and see a woman lying in the double bed in front of my armchair. She has sallow, shiny skin, deep lines running between her mouth and nose, dark circles beneath her dark blue eyes, the whites of which are the palest yellow in colour, and a cheerful scarf tied tightly around her bald head.

Cancer, whispers my inner voice immediately. Chemotherapy. Radiotherapy.

I look across the room at the tri-fold mirror on top of the battered dressing table and see three reflections staring back, though there are only two people physically in the room. I’m unable to suppress the chill flash that races across my skin as I take stock of the third face I see there — which has no connection to Lela, or to the woman in the bed.

It’s my face. Oval in shape, with brown eyes, pale skin, a mouth with lips that are neither too thin nor too wide, a long, straight nose. It’s a ghost’s face, a palimpsest of a face, framed by shoulder-length brown hair, each strand straight, even and perfectly the same, without flaws, without highlights.

I’m taller than she is, than Lela. Broad through the shoulders. Long-limbed. Stern-faced.

Lela is almost the physical opposite of me: petite, but with a womanly figure, curves where there should be curves. Her baggy red plaid pyjamas can’t hide that. Her thick, red-brown hair is clean and unruly and cut in a choppy bob. She has navy blue eyes and fine, Irish skin, snaggly teeth, elegant ankles, trim wrists, tiny hands and feet. A friendly face, I decide. A friendly-looking person. Pleasant; no great beauty.

‘I’m sorry I woke you,’ the woman says, and sighs against her pillows. ‘But you said you can’t afford to upset Mr Dymovsky again, and if you don’t get the 7.08 bus you’re not going to make it. That’s what you told me.’

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I say without hesitation. If the woman beneath the bed covers were not so thin and ill, prematurely aged and drawn, she and Lela would be the image of each other, save thirty years apart.

I stand and bend over her, give her the briefest of kisses on her paper-dry cheek, wrinkling my nose at the burnt-flesh-chemical smell of her. I twitch straight her garishly bright headscarf, pull the bedclothes back up over her brittle collarbones. All these actions are Lela’s impulses, done before I realise I’m doing them. Lela loves her mother, and some things, I’ve found, the body simply remembers.

‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ the woman whispers. ‘Now go. Remember to eat. I’ll be fine. Georgia will be here for her usual shift and the council carer is coming in the afternoon to do some cleaning and help bathe me. I’ve got the pump, and I’m as comfortable as can be expected. Father Davey rang to say he’ll pop in, though goodness knows why. I’m not at death’s door.’ She gives me the ghost of a smile.

She is, though. Both she and I know it.

She closes her pain-shadowed eyes. ‘I’ll see you after five, darling bud. Love my girl.’

I pause, sorry to draw her back to me, but I have no idea where to start living Lela’s life, how to walk purposefully out into Lela’s day.

‘If I wanted to call him, Mum,’ I say, shaking her gently by the shoulder, ‘where would I find his card?’

She frowns weakly, no energy left even to open her eyes. ‘Card?’ she murmurs. ‘What card?’

‘Mr Dymovsky’s card,’ I reply, the syllables awkward on my tongue. ‘I should call ahead. He won’t be so angry if I call ahead.’

She’s silent for so long I wonder if she’s fallen asleep. Perhaps I’ll have to get the answer I want some other way. I glance out the door into the dim hallway of this stranger’s house and wonder how many rooms there are, and whether the information would even be here in physical form. Maybe it’s just inside Lela’s head. Things are stacked everywhere, there’s dust on almost every surface, and I sense that the older woman’s illness has stopped time in this place. Nothing is more important than making sure she is comfortable; keeping vigil over her life.

I know the woman’s dying, that the treatments have failed. Not only can I detect the sickness in her, I smell the medication seeping out of the pores of her skin. There’s no part of her body that does not carry the taint of both, co-mingled.

I wonder if Lela knows how serious it is. If she truly understands.

When the woman at last replies, her voice is very quiet. ‘I don’t know about any card, love, but it’s in the book.’

She coughs and keeps coughing for several minutes.

Once she’s still again, I say with genuine puzzlement, ‘What book?’

A tiny crease appears between her closed eyes. ‘The phone book, Lela. The Green Lantern’s in the phone book, isn’t it? And it’s in the kitchen where it’s always been, unless you’ve gone and moved it. Tell Reggie to tell Mr Dymovsky if you don’t want to speak to him yourself. You’ve stood up for her often enough, Lord knows why . . .’

For a while, I watch the shallow rise and fall of the woman’s chest as her breathing evens out into sleep.

Time to get this show on the road, I tell myself grimly, wishing I, too, was still asleep, wishing that the dream I can no longer recall would go on forever, taking me with it.

Lela’s eyes meet mine in the dresser mirror as I place her feet into the worn scuffs beside the armchair.

It’s 7.27 am by the time I leave the house with Lela’s backpack over one shoulder, her annual bus pass clutched in one hand. The bus stop is less than one hundred metres from the house; I see a bus pulling away as I walk up to it.

There are two other people standing there, both isolated from me by their audio equipment. One is a tall, broad-shouldered, heavy-eyed woman in tracksuit bottoms and a loose white blouse, her mass of wavy dark brown hair caught up in a tight, messy ponytail, her feet in a pair of cheap slides, a black leather handbag slung over one shoulder. She’s young, and her face is free of make-up, but there’s an expression on it that’s hard or wary and makes her look far older than she really is. Inside her strangely shapeless get-up, she’s practically slouching to make herself seem even more shapeless. What’s that word men use both to praise and to objectify? That’s right, hourglass. She has an hourglass figure, killer curves, under there.

The other is a male — late teens? early twenties? — with sandy dreadlocks pulled back into a thick ponytail. He’s wearing a washed-out band tee and long shorts, a stained messenger bag slung across his body, the reflector strip across the bottom grimy in the daylight; one hand on the edge of a skateboard. He checks me out quite openly as I walk towards him, only looking away hastily when he appears to recognise who I am. It’s clear he’s seen Lela before; I can tell from the complicated expression on his face. He must live in one of the houses nearby. See her around, and often.

I guess I move differently from the way Lela usually does. And I’m dressed like a car crash — in a bright green tank top with diamantés spelling out the word Starlet and a floral skirt scattered with big, red, splashy blooms, red flat shoes. It was the only vaguely matching full outfit I could pull together quickly in Lela’s messy bedroom. Clothing was literally spilling out of her battered, old, two- door wardrobe, most of it too heavy for a day like today. It looked to me like she’s been sleeping in that armchair next to her mother’s bed, rather than in her own room. There was a mummified apple core on her paper-strewn desk that had to be at least a month old.

I take a deep breath and look up, revelling in the sun on my face. The quality of the light here is different from anything I’ve seen before; it seems harsher, at once translucent and yet intense. The smell of the air is like burnt butter, already hot in the back of the throat, in the lungs. It’s going to be a warm day. No, a searing one. The sky seems wide and endless, with barely a cloud. And I realise that wherever I am now, it’s summer.

It was winter, where I was . . . before.

My eyelid begins to twitch as I struggle to put some definition around the word. It’s as if I’m carrying a cloud around inside me where my memories should be; my mind feels like a dull knife blade.

The strange thing is, I may only have been Lela for an hour or so but I’m moving easily. And I know that’s something new. My heart isn’t racing out of control, I’m not in pain or seeing things, hearing voices, falling over things that aren’t even there because my arms and legs won’t do what I tell them to. That’s the usual scenario when I ‘wake’ as someone else. Physically, I’ve never felt better; it’s almost as if, finally, I’ve begun to adapt. Lela and I seem to be functioning as a single organism and I know, without knowing how, that it’s never, ever been this . . . simple. If you can use a word like that in the context of soul-jacking a living body that doesn’t actually belong to you.

Soul-jacking — that’s my shorthand for this situation, which has happened before, and keeps on happening. The people I have . . . been — I don’t like the word possessed, it has such an unwholesome ring — stretch back in an unbroken chain farther than I can remember, although I’ve deleted the specifics, or maybe they’ve been reprogrammed out of me. Where they go, these souls I temporarily send into exile inside their own skins, is a mystery I’m still working on.

And before you ask, I don’t know what I did to deserve this. Why I pay and must keep on paying. You know almost as much about me as I do, and that’s the sad truth. I’m like a body-snatcher, an evil spirit, a ghoul, literally clothed in a stranger’s flesh. I try not to think about it too much because it gives even me the creeps.

Those people who say there is nothing new under the sun? They don’t know what they’re talking about.

I stare hard at that bleached-out, blinding sky and then it hits me, finally. That I’m in another country.

Where?

On the other side of the world, answers my inner demon, always one beat ahead of my waking self.

As if to drive the words home, there is a sudden explosion of carolling birdsong from the powerlines above: drawn out, impossible for a human throat to replicate, beautiful, wholly unique. I’ve never heard its like, though it seems at once necessary to this sky, these strange and straggly trees with their gloriously scented leaves, this streetscape of single- storey bungalows in muted, pastel colours, with wire fences, cement driveways and handkerchiefsized front lawns. A street of living relics from the last century. I study the black and white bird perched high overhead. I don’t recall ever seeing one before, although that’s no proof of anything. It’s the size of a crow, and looks down at me below it on the street with a sharp, beady eye before it suddenly takes wing and flies away.

I know there’s something I’m forgetting — something important — and I feel the beginnings of a headache, a dull thump starting up inside my borrowed skull, as I try to mine my faulty memory for traces of that glittering, elusive dream. Perhaps it’s a migraine, like the ones I had when I was . . . Lucy.

The name causes a little catch in my breathing.

I worry away at the edges of that thought and get a string of fragments — recovering drug addict, sick baby, skipped town — which lead to another name: Susannah.

That yields up a new set of unrelated words and pictures — rich girl, hypochondriac mother, college far, far away — which leads to . . . Carmen Zappacosta.

With that name comes a searing moment of white noise and red-hot neural overload: whining in my ears, darkness in my eyes, a pervasive sense of nausea, landmines going off in my cerebral cortex. No words, no images, just a piercing sensation of rage, pain, blood, and that’s it. It’s as if there’s some kind of tripwire in my head. When I cease trying to pry loose any memory associated with Carmen Zappacosta, the edges of the world take on colour again, normal sounds and vistas resume around me, the thumping in my skull fades away.

And I know that the ground rules have somehow changed again. My time as Carmen is off limits and I don’t know why.

My breathing slows and the fingers of my hands uncurl. I look sharply at the woman and the skater boy flanking me; judging by her closed-off expression and his enthusiastic air guitar solo, neither noticed my little mental episode.

Eyes still watering from the lightshow in my head, I balance Lela’s backpack on my knee and rifle through it with shaking hands for clues as to what I’m supposed to be doing here. I can’t help it, can’t keep still. Can’t just go with the flow, let shit happen. It’s not my way. I need to have a purpose for being, even if I have to make it up as I go along.

Inside the body of the rucksack, my fingers find the hard edges of a leather wallet, a box of mints, a small bunch of keys, a ball of crumpled tissues, a ragged paperback novel, a small mobile phone, an empty drink bottle; discard those and settle on a . . . notebook.

I draw it out. It’s held shut by a self-securing band of black elastic, the cover made out of a stiff, recycled cardboard. It’s small, brown, spiral-bound. There’s a plastic ballpoint pen jammed into the band around it. I pull the pen out and throw it back into the bag, release the elastic and spread the book open to the sight of dense writing, page after page, heavily scored in places, every few pages headed by a date. The last in the book is 1 December. The first is 23 August. It’s Lela’s journal.

I begin to read:

You’re born dreaming of every possibility. Then you wake one day and you’re nineteen years old, and you haven’t been anywhere, seen anyone or done anything that’s worth anything.

Andy didn’t kiss me when I told him I was leaving and now it’s too late. He hasn’t called, he hasn’t tried to send a message through Daniela, nothing, even though he knows how I feel. Felt, the shit.

I’m never going to see him again, and I don’t know how I’m going to stand it.

I didn’t expect to end up like this — selling coffee and spring rolls to suits, cab drivers, strippers, backpackers, homeless guys. This is not how I saw things turning out.

I think I’m drowning. I think that what I’m feeling is me dying inside my own body, a bit more each day.

The next page is dated 24 August:

I need to rob a bank.

And after I rob that bank? I need to have someone come in and watch over Mum so that I can have my old life back.

August 28:

I love her so much and I’m too scared to imagine life without her. But I’m so angry at her, too. It’s all her fault this happened, and I will never forgive her for any of it. I almost wish she’d die because I can’t do this any more and I don’t think she can either.

What am I saying?!?

I flick through several more entries in the same vein. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Lela’s frustrated by the direction her life has taken, and that she’s frequently angry and self-pitying — and for good reason. There may only have been one fatal diagnosis, but two lives have been taken apart in the process.

The bus draws up with signage that reads City via Green Hill above the driver’s window. I get on behind the blowsy brunette and the grimy skater boy, halting on the top step and holding up Lela’s bus pass like a robot. It says, Lela Neill, 19 Highfield Street, Bright Meadows.

Human place names never cease to amaze me. Bright Meadows? Well, yeah, sure, maybe once. When the earth was created.

‘Morning, darl,’ says the stocky female driver. Her thick ginger hair is cut into an unattractive shag and she stinks of the ghosts of cigarettes past. She looks at me curiously through her tinted driving lenses when I don’t move on straightaway like the others do. Guess hardly anyone ever stops to chat.

‘Can you tell me when we reach the Green Lantern?’ I say haltingly. ‘It’s a café. In the city.’

The woman nods, giving me an odd look. ‘Sit down, love. You feeling all right? Don’t look yourself today.’

I give her an approximation of a friendly smile and take a seat just behind her. As the doors close and the bus lurches away in a choking cloud of diesel, I dip back into Lela’s journal.

What I get from page after page of closely written, desperate, loopy copperplate is that she dropped out of first-year university several months ago when her mum’s cancer returned and the money ran out. And that Andy broke what was left of her heart.

There’s no dad in the picture — he moved ‘up north’ with a much younger, ‘gold-digging floozie’ years before. The terminology brings a frown to Lela’s forehead, me doing it. The words she uses throughout her journal are as unfamiliar to me as the way these people speak; the way Lela herself speaks: with broad, drawn-out vowels, lots of stress on the second syllables of words, truncations, slang, the works.

So there’s only the two of them then, mother and daughter, fighting an unseen war together on the wages of a waitress at a dingy city café. Lela’s essentially a good person, I decide. Because, no matter how much she might complain her heart out in that little brown notebook, there’s that strong tide of grief flowing beneath everything. Still, it’s ten thousand variations on the theme I hate my life and I shut the journal, slip the elastic band back around it, and stare out the window as street after street of old- style, medium-density housing slides by, mixed in with light industrial areas, train crossings and local shopping strips that all look the same — pharmacies, banks, bakeries and places where you can eat, drink and gamble at the same time. Handy.

People get on and off constantly. As I glance back down the bus, I see that those in casual wear are slowly being replaced by those in more formal attire, and the expressions are gradually getting tighter. Sunlight pierces the dirty windows, making pretty patterns on the bus’s rubbish-strewn floor.

The Green Hill we eventually pass through also looks nothing like its name. As the suburbs give way to the city fringe and the traffic around us begins to choke and snarl, the bus’s rhythm changes to stop-start, stop-start. The skater boy lopes past me and takes up position just by the doors, removes the earbuds of his portable music player, props his skateboard up against his leg and takes a momentous deep breath. I turn my head to face him, knowing that the heartfelt exhalation that follows has something to do with me.

‘How’s yer mum?’ he says, shoving his mass of lumpy dreads back over one shoulder, fidgety as all hell. ‘Bad she’s sick, eh?’

‘Awful,’ I reply distantly, wondering where all this is going.

I see him lick his lower lip until it is pinkly shiny, wipe his palms on the front of his long shorts. Nervous? He should be nervous.

I wait silently, without blinking, and he flushes a slow and brilliant red beneath my scrutiny. Then the bus doors swing open and he’s off like a shot, skateboard under one arm, messenger bag bouncing on his hip.

‘Lookin’ great,’ he mumbles as he hits the pavement. ‘You should wear colours more often. Might even ask you out, then. If you’re lucky. Catch ya.’

For a moment, I think I’m hearing things. The door shuts behind him and the bus takes off and I can’t help breaking into a small smile. Wouldn’t have thought I was his type. Couldn’t be sure what his type would actually be.

‘Reckon he’s sweet on you, love,’ the driver says over her shoulder, loud enough for the front half of the bus to hear. She gives me a wink in the driver’s mirror.

No, really? evil me whispers dryly, though I meet her eyes in the mirror and nod and smile.

See, I tell Lela, not sure she can hear me, but addressing her anyway because it’s only polite. Things are looking up already, sweetheart.

I sit back, still holding her journal. Maybe that’s supposed to be my mission this time, should I choose to accept it. Getting the girl a date.

What’s that figure of speech that amuses me so much? I’ll take that.

Well, I would. It’d make a change from life and death.

But the memory of Lela’s mother’s pinched face and laboured breathing wipes the smile from my borrowed features. With my track record, life and death will be the least of it.

Chapter 3

The curvy brunette with the hard, tired eyes stops by the door. ‘You wanted the Green Lantern, right?’ she says to me. ‘It’s across the road from the stop where I get off. I heard you talking to the driver. Buy my coffee there almost every morning and most afternoons. And you’ve, uh, served me, like, heaps of times.’

I shove Lela’s journal back into her bag, pull tight the drawstring and clip the flap shut. ‘Degenerative brain disease,’ I reply without missing a beat, my eyes serious, my face solemn.

The woman gives me a sharp look, decides I’m not having her on. I watch her features soften.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she says, expertly bunching the end of her messy ponytail through the band and turning the whole thing into a fat, wobbly bun.

The doors of the bus open and we disembark alongside four lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, separated in the middle by a row of parallel-parked cars punctuated at regular intervals by stunted and malformed plane trees.

As the lights change again, the woman shouts, ‘You kind of have to step out and take your life in your hands. Now!’

She grabs a handful of my tank top from the side and hauls me between a taxi that has just pulled into a double park in front of us and a speeding van swerving around it with a blare of horns. We pause for breath at the rank of parked cars in the middle then throw ourselves into the two lanes of traffic going the other way. We manage to avoid a couple of drag-racing sedans but almost get collected by a motorbike coming up on the outside that neither of us had seen.

‘Now you see why I need that coffee,’ the woman says ruefully, letting go of my top and shoving her fingers through her already messy hairdo as we step up onto the kerb outside the Green Lantern. ‘I’m Justine Hennessy. Most people call me Juz. Or Jugs.’ She rolls her eyes.

‘I’m Lela Neill,’ I reply. ‘And I’m really late. Let me get you that coffee. It’s the least I can do.’

Before we step inside under a tattered, green canvas awning, I take a mental snapshot of my surroundings. The Green Lantern occupies the ground floor of a multistorey building that was constructed out of a series of ugly, utilitarian concrete slabs sometime in the late 1970s. The large front window, with its over-painted and peeling border in an unattractive dark green, is fly-struck and streaked with grime; and multicoloured plastic strips hang down over the entrance in a continuous, sticky curtain. A long bench with bar stools beneath it runs across the inside of the front window, and two men in shirt- sleeves are seated at opposite ends, heads bent over their newspapers, bald spots levelled at passers-by. I can see a number of small tables and chairs arranged farther back inside the café, all filled. Beside the door is a large, gimmicky carriage lantern missing several panes of glass, also green.

Okay, I think. We get it.

The covered drainage point outside the café smells faintly of human waste and rotting food, and a narrow laneway that separates the café from the equally brutal-looking building next door features a couple of rusty mini-skips piled high with rubbish. I’m beginning to understand where Lela’s self-pity is coming from. A sensitive kid with aspirations in life would be buried alive in a place like this. It’s an unhygienic dump packed with angry-looking patrons at least three deep at the counter. There’s barely any elbow room, let alone space to hope.

Justine’s already through the sticky plastic curtain ahead of me when something catches my eye. A gleaming blur, like a mobile patch of sunlight, drifting erratically between the straggly trees dividing the centre of the road. Maybe that’s all it is, because when I try to focus on it, there’s suddenly nothing there.

But wait. I might not be able to see it any more, but I can still feel it. And it’s coming closer. There’s an energy coming off it, even from a distance: at once hot and cold, hair-raising, like a hum, like vinegar in my bones.

Almost hypnotised by the strange sensation, I’m about to step back into the stream of traffic to pinpoint its source when Justine sticks her head out through the plastic curtain and says, ‘You coming or what?’

I nod in apology, and with that gesture the strange feeling vanishes and the dappled sunlight coming through the branches of the trees seems exactly that and nothing more.

Behind the front counter of the Green Lantern, a tall woman with unnaturally blonde hair piled high on top of her head is handing out lidded waxed paper cups and paper bags furiously, in every sense of the word. When she meets my eyes through the dusty front window of the café, I see her red-painted mouth form the words, ‘Lela Neill, you get in here right now or so help me . . .’

I follow the woman from the bus through the plastic curtain. It’s my turn to grab her by the shirt and steer her around to the coffee machine, bypassing the disorderly queues pressed up against the sweating bain marie display.

‘What are you wearing?’ the tall blonde hisses when I get close enough. ‘You’re an hour late. Start handing out the breakfast specials before I sell you out to Dymovsky! This is your lucky day, Lela, because he called in to say he’s been held up at some Orthodox thingummy, forget what exactly — and you know he never misses a morning shift, ever. He isn’t in till after midday, but I can still arrange it so that you’re out on your ass. You need the money, right? So get cracking, or I’ll dob.’

Dob? I look at her blankly as she hands me a long black apron that swamps Lela’s petite frame and the traffic-light-coloured ensemble I’ve chosen to put her in today.

All the staff — from the sad-eyed Asian barista girl to the towering, dark-skinned cook in the open kitchen at the back — are wearing head-to-toe black. Long sleeves, long pants. Must be some kind of unofficial uniform. Crap.

Justine Hennessy murmurs at my side, ‘Hey, it’s okay, I can skip the coffee today. You’re obviously very busy.’

‘Wait!’ I tell the brassy blonde, indicating Justine. ‘She needs a coffee for services rendered.’

The blonde barks, ‘No freebies!’ before turning and snapping in a customer’s face, ‘So is it butter or tomato sauce? Make up your mind, I haven’t got all day!’ All the while she’s still passing out coffees and shovelling fried things into paper bags without pause, though it isn’t exactly service with a smile.

Justine tries to pull away from me but the gentle-looking barista says to her in lilting, accented English, ‘How do you take it?’ without looking up from the three takeout cups she’s filling from a silver jug.

‘Flat white, one sugar,’ Justine says hesitantly. ‘But it’s all right, I can wait. I’ll pay, it’s no problem.’

The girl gives her a fleeting smile and grabs one of the just prepared coffees and a stick of sugar and hands them to Justine with a plastic spoon. ‘Shhh, don’t tell,’ she says out of the corner of her mouth, making a shooing motion with one hand.

‘Hey!’ some old guy shouts. ‘We’re waiting here. Since when do the hookers get served first?’

Justine, her cheeks suddenly stained a brilliant red, stares so haughtily at the guy that he finally looks down, flustered. He’s a fat, short, ruddy-cheeked man with the full catastrophe of beard, moustache and receding ginger hair worn a little too long over the ears. Sure, he’s dressed in an expensive-looking suit, custom-tailored to fit his stocky, truncated frame, and shiny Italian shoes, but he’s hardly in a position to judge anybody.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ I say mildly.

The man’s cheeks grow even ruddier. He does not meet my eyes.

The faux blonde’s over-plucked brows draw together sharply at my words and she snarls, ‘Get to work!’ in my direction, then glares at the barista for good measure.

The girl’s gentle smile disappears and she gets on with pouring the next three shots of coffee into three more identical waxed paper cups that she’s set up in a neat line.

‘You!’ the blonde says to Justine disdainfully. ‘You’ve got your free coffee, now get out.’

Justine dances forward as if she’d like to take a swing at the woman behind the counter, but I drag her towards the door. ‘Thanks again,’ I say, ignoring the blonde’s evil eye from across the room. ‘You’ve really helped me out. I forget things all the time. Some days are better than others. Actually, today’s a good day, would you believe?’

Justine’s colour is still high but she gives me a tight smile and murmurs, ‘Anytime. It’s not like you haven’t helped me out before, hey?’

Her womanly figure, broad through the shoulders and hips, cuts back through the crowd and is gone before I can ask her what she means. We are once more sealed off from the outside world by the ancient glass-fronted door, that disgusting plastic curtain.

I drift back towards the coffee machine and the drag-queen blonde grabs the back of my apron and yanks me into motion.

‘Deal ’em out,’ she orders, taking off her own apron and throwing it over a mop and bucket propped in one corner. She heads towards the narrow corridor that runs past the cramped galley kitchen towards the toilets. ‘Ciggie break,’ she calls out with relish, her fingers doing the universal victory sign understood by smokers everywhere. ‘And it’s gonna be a long one. So hold the fort. If you can.’

The short-order cook glances up at us both for a moment.

‘Quit staring at me, you Muslim fundamentalist,’ the blonde snaps as she passes the serving hatch. ‘Haven’t you seen a real woman before?’

He looks down unhurriedly, keeps chopping.

‘Who’s next?’ I say coolly into at least a dozen ticked-off faces, the angry corporate gnome among them, as the barista girl shakes her head and keeps on pouring shots of coffee.

Thanks to my preternaturally good eyes and ears and a weird mnemonic ability with words, most of the patrons I serve this morning probably won’t even notice that I’m only a rough facsimile of the girl who’s served them before.

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.

Chapter 5

When I reach the kitchen, Sulaiman says without warmth or preamble, ‘Unload the dishwasher.’ He indicates with one hand a big, stainless-steel machine wedged into a back corner of the room.

There’s so little floor space in here that I have to skirt him carefully to avoid touching him. I hate being touched — it’s something instinctive in me; I’m big on personal space, on the whole live and let live thing. And it’s funny, but it feels as if Sulaiman’s giving me a wide berth, too, almost as if he doesn’t want me around even though he was the one who called me in here.

‘That’s all you want me to do?’ I say, stomping bad-temperedly over to the hulking machine, unable to keep the anger out of my voice. ‘Can’t it wait?’

‘No.’ His reply is curt. ‘I need clean dishes. Without them, it is impossible for me to do my work. Everything has its place, everything in its place, or it is chaos, Lela. You should know that. Reggie jokes that you are the dog’s body around here, but it is no joke, I think?’

I don’t bother to answer, just bend to study the machine’s complicated-looking control panel. I finally work out which button is supposed to pop the front door open, and cough as a cloud of steam shoots straight into my face. The dishwasher’s contents are scalding to the touch but I don’t hesitate, grabbing handfuls of side plates, servers, bowls, trays, pots and pans and slamming them into messy piles on the bench closest to the burners, to his big hands. Let him make sense of them all.

‘Lela . . .’ Sulaiman warns.

I ignore him and continue to layer things quickly and haphazardly on top of each other. I have to catch Ranald before he leaves. There’s so much I need to know. There’s something important that I’m missing about Carmen’s story, a whole bunch of somethings. Some clue as to how I got here must be out there inside his machine. The Neills don’t have anything like it at home — I know, because I combed the entire house this morning before I left: from the dust-covered, unlived-in formal rooms right through to the bomb-just-hit-them kitchen and laundry area. There’s nothing more high tech than a wall phone in the place.

Outside in the dining area, a phone rings loudly and insistently for several minutes before it’s picked up. I’m almost done. The dishwasher is almost empty. There’s just a giant basket of cutlery and cooking utensils left.

‘Green Lantern,’ someone barks finally. From the sound of things, Reggie’s returned and her temper hasn’t improved.

‘You’re kidding,’ she snarls, turning to glare at me through the serving hatch.

I see Cecilia wrestle the phone out of Reggie’s grasp and take over the conversation. She shoots me a worried glance before saying, ‘Yes, I understand, thank you.’

She places the receiver back in its cradle as Reggie exclaims, ‘I’m sick of her not pulling her weight! It’s not fair on any of us. He should sack her, find somebody else. This can’t go on.’

‘Reggie!’ Cecilia rebukes the taller woman, who just replies, ‘Well, he bloody well should,’ before turning her back on me and wielding her charmless hospitality on another sweaty punter who’s just wandered in.

I’m extricating the last pair of tongs from the dishwasher when Cecilia materialises inside the swing doors. She wipes her hands nervously on her black apron.

‘Uh, Lela?’ she says carefully. ‘You’re needed at home. Georgia called. Said it was pretty urgent.’ She looks at me strangely when I don’t move straightaway. ‘Your mother? It looks bad.’

‘Oh?’ I frown, then remember. The woman in the bed. Georgia was the shift worker. Some kind of nurse? From the look on Cecilia’s face, I know that my reaction’s off. I should be upset.

I rearrange Lela’s features hastily, then glance at Sulaiman, at the teetering piles of cookware beached there beside him in no kind of useful order.

He shakes his head and sighs. ‘Go to your mother. Take as much time as you need. Cecilia will help me sort this out. Again.’

Cecilia turns me around as if I am a child and unknots my apron strings, then lifts it over my head and hangs it on a nearby hook.

‘Take the side door,’ she says softly, ushering me through the swing doors and pointing down the dark, narrow corridor with the Toilets this way sign on the wall. ‘Go now, while Reggie’s not looking.’

I can’t help pausing for a moment to scan the dining area. Ranald’s already gone. The clock over the clattering refrigeration units says it’s just gone midday.

When I open the side door cautiously, the heat outside hits me like a sucker punch to the head. The stench coming off the waste bins is eye-watering. I stand in the laneway looking out at the road before me and realise I have no idea where to catch the bus home.

I’m moving uphill in the direction of the nearest intersection when someone behind me calls out, ‘Lela?’

I turn, shading my eyes. A tall figure, with long, dark, wavy hair, is walking up the slight slope towards me, the sun at their back and shining full upon them so they seem surrounded by a corona of hot, bright light, their white-clad figure shimmering slightly in the stifling heat. And, for an instant, it seems as if that hot light is inside me, too, and what I’m seeing is a distant memory made flesh again. Disorientated, head suddenly pounding with a terrible anticipation, I walk slowly towards the approaching figure as if hypnotised.

The illusion crumbles and I realise that it’s only Justine Hennessy. At some point during the day, she’s unbound her wild topknot of hair and put curlers through it to make it even wilder. She’s also sporting the heaviest, stagiest glitter eye make-up I’ve ever seen and consequently looks at least ten years older than she did this morning. Her face is a study of weird contrasts — the skin almost geisha white, lips a shiny blood red, brows too prominently drawn in an unnatural shade of kohl. She’s wearing false eyelashes with feathers threaded through them. From the neck up, she’s like a caricature of the woman who got on the bus with me this morning. Her body is covered by a shapeless white shirt worn unbuttoned over a strapless white terry-cloth maxi dress that’s elasticised across the bust, like the kind you’d slip on at a beauty spa. An outfit designed to conceal her form, detract from her natural beauty.

She smiles tentatively, hitching the strap of her nondescript black leather handbag higher on one shoulder. ‘I’m glad I caught you,’ she says. ‘You heading out for a break?’

I shake my head, still having difficulty framing any words. Justine had reminded me so strongly of someone I’d once known that I’d almost said that person’s name out loud. Almost. Except, like everything else in my head, it had slipped out of reach before I could utter it.

Lela’s voice, when it finally emerges, sounds weird even to me. ‘Was there . . . something you . . . wanted?’

‘Actually, there was,’ Justine replies, her smile faltering at the look on my face. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning, about your, uh, brain condition?’

I return her gaze warily. ‘Yes?’

She clears her throat. ‘Uh, well, I wanted to help you, even though it’s only a small thing. I’ve never been able to thank you properly. He hasn’t been around since . . . that day. Maybe you’re my lucky charm, eh?’

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ I reply, glad that Cecilia filled me in on Justine’s horrible back story, every woman’s nightmare, to have a person you love turn on you. ‘But that’s great news. I have told you before, haven’t I, to get out of the . . . business?’

Justine’s smile dies altogether. ‘Yeah, you and everybody else. Mum and me don’t talk any more because of what I do. But you don’t need any skills to do this. I’m too old, too stupid and lazy to do anything else.’

‘Believe that, and you really will be,’ I say.

Her answering laugh is brittle. ‘Yeah, well, point taken. Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that you got home safely.’

‘I was just trying to work out how,’ I reply, surprised. ‘You sure someone didn’t send you?’ It’s meant to be a joke, but as I finish saying the words I feel my confusion return.

‘Dressed like this?’ Justine snorts. She slips the elasticised band around the top of her chest down an inch or two and shows me the upper edge of a heavy, tacky-looking bra top that’s covered in multicoloured rhinestones and sequins. ‘It’s meant to be sexy.’ Her laughter is forced. ‘To a drunk old pervert maybe.’ She yanks the elasticised white dress back up under her armpits.

Then I remember something. Luc was there. In my dream. He offered to help me, too. Only I have to do something first. What is it?

Justine clears her throat and my train of thought vanishes like smoke.

‘I came out to grab a bite to eat,’ she says, ‘but I also wanted to show you where the bus stop is for when you go home tonight. I think you should cross at the lights — this old chookie won’t be around to haul you across the road later, and you seem a little confused today . . .’

‘But that’s just it,’ I reply, still troubled. ‘I’m leaving now. So you can walk me there, if you like.’

Justine gives me a sharp look. ‘Something wrong at home?’

I nod, and her face crumples a little in sympathy. She reaches out for one of my hands, but instinctively I take a step back and she does, too. Unwanted touching isn’t something she’s into, either, and she recognises the warning signs.

‘It’s this way,’ she says gently, pointing. I see that her short, natural nails of this morning have been replaced by long, baby pink, acrylic claws with crystals embedded in the tips.

Side by side, we head uphill about eighty metres to a major intersection. Justine points across another four lanes of busy traffic.

‘There’s a bus shelter just outside that hotel on the corner,’ she says. ‘You need to get on there.’ She gives me a quick smile and starts back down the street towards the Green Lantern, moving with unconscious grace, a dancer’s grace.

‘Wait!’ I call out, and she turns, her handbag banging against her hip. ‘If I wanted to find a place where I could access the, uh, internet, where would I find one?’

Justine’s face clears. ‘See that noodle shop on the corner?’ She points downhill in the direction she’s heading, one hand shielding her eyes. ‘Straight past the Green Lantern — the one with the happy bowl painted on it?’

I stare full into the afternoon sun without flinching. Farther down the busy road we’re standing on there’s another intersection, but this time with a narrow, one-way street. As far as I can tell, this city is made up of a regular series of perfectly straight lines. It’s a cakewalk to memorise for someone wired like I am. The Happy Noodle House is on a corner on our side of the one-way street. Facing across from the noodle house on the other side of the narrow thoroughfare there’s a grand but faded theatre, bright lights flashing because a matinee show is on — something by Samuel Beckett playing.

Justine points upwards between the two buildings and I see an archway painted in blues, reds, greens and ochres, with a ceramic tiled roof fashioned to look like the roof of a pagoda. She points back up the one-way street, up the hill away from the theatre, and there’s another archway. A whole series of them.

‘That’s Chinatown,’ she says. ‘You turn the corner at the noodle shop and about halfway down the block there’s an internet café. It’s open all night, like a lot of places around here. But I wouldn’t . . .’ She stops, then says awkwardly, ‘I’m not sure you should, the way you’re . . .’

‘You’re sweet to worry, um, Juz,’ I reply swiftly, ‘but I can take care of myself. I’m much stronger than I look, really. I’ll be fine.’

Justine looks at me doubtfully, but responds to something in my face because her expression clears. ‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’ she says and heads away with one last wave over her shoulder.

I press the button for the pedestrian crossing, the heat of the afternoon sunshine on my skin giving me a moment of visceral joy.

The light turns green, making a rat-a-tat sound like a machine gun firing. And the feeling of well-being vanishes, the magnitude of my predicament comes crashing back in on me.

Luc, my love. Help me. What is it that I am supposed to do?

I remind myself grimly to breathe in, breathe out, as the light turns red before I’m even close to reaching the other side.

This time, when I ask the driver to let me know when we get to Bright Meadows, he doesn’t give me a strange look; he doesn’t look at me at all. He just grunts and waves me away, which I take as assent.

I look out the window as we trundle through the suburbs I crossed this morning, except in reverse. I’m the only person on the bus until we get to Green Hill, and I barely register the presence of the woman who gets on and sits several rows behind me because I’m so absorbed by what I’m seeing. The dirty shopping strips and worn-out housing, the peeling billboards and primary-coloured petrol stations, the lived-in faces of the people we pass, the makes of the cars that eddy around us, even the polluted smell of the hot, stifling air that crowds into the bus through its one jammed-open window. Everything seems at once gritty yet miraculous, as if I’m seeing it all for the first time. As if I am truly . . . awake.

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