‘What has been done to you will one day be made right. There will be an accounting. Until that day, Lauren Daley, I take your pain, I take your suffering, I will bear your burden. And I am sorry, sorrier than you will ever know, that we were not there when you needed us, that evil was done to you.’
Then he’s gone, too, and Lauren is moving like a sleepwalker towards her bed. She pulls the covers over her wasted, pain-racked body and in moments she is asleep.
I turn left unerringly, past Lauren’s bathroom, making for Ryan’s bedroom. I open the door tentatively and see that he’s asleep too, his short, spiky hair standing up all over his head, contrasting with the stark white of his pillowcase. He’s bare-chested and smells of clean, male skin and soap. The covers are drawn up to his waist, and I slip beneath them, lie down beside him.
He’s so tired that he does not stir, does not waken. All I can do is hold him and let his energy, his life force, wash over me, through me, one last time, like the strains of a familiar love song.
23
It’s still dark when we leave the Daleys’ house, Ryan, Lauren and I. None of us touching each other, keeping our distance. Lauren’s dressed in a shapeless navy parka over a pink sweatshirt and baggy jeans, her hair plaited back so tightly that her face looks skull-like. But she seems less jittery today, less defensive. I can tell by the way she’s moving.
I’m wearing my ‘human’ travelling face and the deeply unsexy outfit that I wore across half the world, which Ryan has probably grown to hate. He’s still got on his torn and stinking leather jacket, over a fresh long-sleeved tee and jeans, as if it’s a talisman that will somehow bring him luck. He hasn’t said a word to me since he woke alone in his bed, probably never knowing I’d even been there.
Out on the street, beside the nature strip, Richard Coates jumps out of the cab of his rusting, red, two-door truck. In the open tray there are a couple of mud-splattered bikes — one green and white, the other blue and yellow — anchored with black and yellow cables. He starts moving them down onto the road, and Ryan hurries to help him after he’s rechained the front gates to his parents’ house and pocketed the key, for no good reason except maybe habit.
Wordlessly, Richard hands Ryan the key to the green and white machine, and takes a bunch of helmets out of the cab of the truck. He hands a couple to Ryan before shoving one on his head, then beckoning Lauren over and placing a helmet carefully over her plaited hair. He reaches back into the truck one last time and takes out a long, cylindrical black bag that he clips to the back of the blue and yellow machine. He swings his leg over the saddle, then turns and helps Lauren up behind him. I see her hesitate before she closes her arms around his waist, tightly.
‘Ready?’ Ryan mutters, handing me a red helmet and putting a black one on over his head. We look at each other from behind the visors like two blank-eyed aliens, before Ryan swings onto his machine and waits for me.
I get on behind him and wrap my arms around his waist and we roar off through the silent streets, down the main drag with its faded front-window displays screaming
We hit the deserted coast road heading away from Paradise down towards Port Marie, drawing closer and closer to Coronado Beach, which I’ve only ever seen in dreams, in the thoughts of others. As we pass the abandoned military base that’s halfway out of town — miles of rusting steel fence ending in a set of chained gates at least twenty feet high — Richard and Lauren pull out from behind us with a roar, putting on such a clean burst of speed that they are soon lost to sight.
We catch up with them at the turn-off for the oil refinery. In the distance, across the salt plains that run right up to the refinery gates, the towering concrete chimney stands still and silent, belching neither flame nor smoke today.
‘Coronado Beach!’ Ryan yells, turning his helmet towards me briefly, as we take a right at the next crossroads, Richard and Lauren leading the way.
We see the trees first, a long stand of them, like sentinels upon the crest of a steep hill, their dark, twisted, leafless boughs raised to the slowly lightening sky. Then the road goes down over the hill, long grass waving in the stiff breeze on either side, and ends in a small car park. A set of stairs leads down to the beach below.
Neither Richard nor Ryan stops as we hit the car park. There’s a rev of engines — like the buzz of multiple chainsaws — and both bikes sweep down the stairs, onto the damp sand of the beach.
Richard does a complicated set of wheelies for the sheer hell of it on the wet sand near the water’s edge, before burning to a stop in front of Ryan and me where we’ve parked high up the beach, near the staircase.
Ahead of us, the water is grey and tempestuous, pierced by jagged rocks that rise up beyond the shallows like claws. As I gaze back, I see the stand of gnarled black trees in the far distance, the undulating line of stark and beautiful cliffs that hug the perimeter of the beach. It seems prehistoric, even primeval, here. A fitting arena of battle.
We all take off our helmets, and Ryan moves towards his sister, who’s still laughing and breathless from doing wheelies on the back of Richard’s bike.
‘Hey,’ he says, his expression softening. ‘It’s good to see you like this,’ he adds uncertainly, half-raising a hand to touch Lauren before thinking better of it and letting it drop.
Lauren tips her small face up to the strong breeze that’s blowing off the water, straight tendrils of pale hair whipping around her face, her skin almost translucent.
‘It’s good to be out,’ she says, sounding surprised. She looks at me, then down at the sand. ‘I’m feeling better today, kind of … lighter.’
We four stand there awkwardly, like the first people ever created. Ryan’s got his hands in his pockets and he’s scuffing the sand at his feet like he doesn’t want to know me. The wind picks up, sending the sand stinging against our faces. The sky begins to lighten, just a little, at the horizon.
Suddenly, pain bursts into life behind my eyes, almost bringing me to my knees. And I know that Luc’s searching for me, that he’s close and gaining, trying to force that strange mental connection we’ve always shared but which I no longer welcome.
Luc knows me well enough to be sure I would want to be here, personally, to ensure Raphael’s freedom. For I did love Raphael, once, and deeply, as one would love a brother. And I owe him a debt that cannot be repaid. I owe him for this life, for gifting me Ryan.
Ryan sees me buckle and catches me easily before I crumple to the ground. He holds me tightly, keeping me on my feet, as the noise that no one else can hear intensifies so that I feel as if I’m made solely of pain.
I want to shriek my agony at the leaden sky as Luc murmurs in my head, his voice dark and low and seductive,
When he feels no flowering of contact with me, no acceptance, no acknowledgment, everything around us changes in an instant, as if we are players on a stage and someone has changed the script, the set, the backdrop, the lighting, without any warning.
There must be fault lines running below our feet in every direction, for the ground begins to roll beneath us as if it’s alive, as if the fearsome tremors are merely a physical manifestation of Luc’s anger. We fall to the sand beneath a sky that is as black as pitch. It’s like the sky from my dream: when I stood here with Luc in the very centre of a perfect storm and gazed at vast waves breaking over the reef that he called the ‘Crowned One’. Heavy rain pours down as if Luc would drown us where we lie.
The sea turns against us, too, the waves reaching four or five feet in height before smashing onto the beach, surging inland. They drag Lauren back towards the sea, sucking her into an angry whirlpool of boiling white water. The storm is so loud that although I see her mouth moving, I can’t hear her cries for help.
