As Bailey babbles to a concerned parent that he only gave me one or two soft drinks before I passed out — ‘I have no idea what’s wrong with her, I swear to God’ — I hear Ryan’s voice as he shoulders his way through the onlookers and takes charge.
‘I’ll get her home, Mr Barry,’ he says firmly.
‘She needs to see a doctor,’ Laurence Barry insists stubbornly. He continues to hold my upper body off the floor as if I am made of sugar and spun glass. For a brief moment, his grip tightens and the side of my face is crushed into the felt underside of his dusty black lapel. I almost struggle and give the game away. I force myself to stay floppy and take shallow, laboured breaths, though the smell of camphor laced with old-man body odour, coffee breath and hair oil is intense.
‘No, really,’ Ryan insists. ‘She’s on serious medication for her, uh, bad skin condition. She’s probably just had a mild reaction to something she’s eaten or drunk.
Nothing sleep won’t fix. She warned my parents all about it before we left the house tonight. It’s no biggie.’ Though Ryan wins out, I can feel Laurence Barry’s strange reluctance to let me go as I’m finally passed from one to the other. To kick up the believability a notch, I allow my head to loll backwards and Ryan must hastily prop it against one broad shoulder. The leather of his jacket is cold and supple and I resist the urge to turn my face further towards him and breathe in his addictive clean, male smell.
Carmen’s heart takes off again, and for a moment all I can hear is the pounding of her blood.
‘She’s just trying to spoil it for me!’ I hear Tiffany snipe into the microphone, cut off mid-crescendo, mid- chorus. ‘She’s always been a jealous little bitch. This is another stunt, I tell you.’
‘Hurry back, Ry!’ Brenda wails. ‘Why does this always happen to me?’ As we stride through Mulvany’s, leaving hubbub and consternation in our wake, Ryan breathes curiously into my closed eyelids, ‘Now what was all that in aid of, pipsqueak?’
‘Put me down! Ry,’ I hiss as we hit the icy car park.
I kick a little for emphasis.
‘Not a chance,’ he answers good-humouredly. ‘One, because you’ve still got an audience — you’ve really managed to get on that Tiffany’s chest, haven’t you? — and two, you don’t weigh anything. I’m kind of enjoying your helpless maiden act. It makes a change from the usual cold front you put on.’ He eases me into the front passenger seat and I freeze as a deep male voice I don’t recognise says behind him, ‘How’s your mother, Ryan? We don’t see her out and about as much as we used to. Betty’s been worried about her.’ Ryan shuts the door firmly on me and I slide down in the seat and face away from the window where a man is peering inwards at my prone figure. I make sure I lie on my hands, and let my hair fall a little further all over my face so that no part of my skin is clearly visible, the very picture of wayward teen drunkenness.
‘She’s fine, Mr Collins,’ Ryan replies lightly, moving to block his view of me. The neon light advertising Mulvany’s, Mulvany’s, Mulvany’s in a constant, epilepsy-inducing staccato diminishes in the car’s interior. ‘As much as can be expected anyway.’
‘No new developments?’ continues the man earnestly. ‘You know, we’ve told your father over and over, if there’s anything we can do to help …’
‘Thanks, Mr Collins,’ Ryan says, shaking the man’s hand and moving around the car towards the driver’s seat to end the conversation. I watch him through my slightly cranked open eyelids. ‘You know how difficult Dad can be …’ He slides into the car and tips the man a wave.
I clearly pick up the man’s reply, ‘Half his trouble…’, as Ryan starts the car and begins to pull out of the car park.
When Mulvany’s is a distant blur in the driver’s mirror, I slide into a sitting position and push Carmen’s hair out of her eyes, tuck it behind her ears, with faintly glimmering hands. Ryan shoots me a quick look, his expression quizzical, before it’s eyes front again.
‘You don’t really need your stomach pumped out, do you?’ he laughs. ‘Bailey seemed convinced you’d had eight bourbon and Cokes.’
‘I did,’ I reply.
Ryan whistles. ‘You sure?’ I nod. ‘But I’m fine.’
‘You shouldn’t be.’ His eyes flick to me, then back to the road. ‘You really should be in a coma the way Bailey mixes his drinks. Approximately nine parts bourbon to one part Coke — if you were lucky.’ Whatever that ‘bourbon’ stuff was, it hardly signified.
I felt it evaporate quickly along Carmen’s nerve endings like accelerant poured on a bonfire, quickly burned off.
Leaving hardly an aftertaste.
‘The drinks were pleasant but not unduly … troubling,’ I say, and shrug.
Ryan lets loose another uneasy laugh. ‘Why the fainting act, anyway? From what Tod and Clint were telling me back there, you would’ve blown Tiffany away.
Why didn’t you sing?’ So Spotty Boy’s name is Clint. I wonder if he and Ryan used to be friends. Whether the three girls and three boys used to triple date, or whatever it is that small town youth do around here.
‘I don’t know any popular music,’ I reply after a moment.
Which is true. I don’t. Apart from the Mahler I’ve only recently committed to memory, I don’t recall any music at all. Just another failing of my diseased mind.
Maybe something expurgated to keep me safe. Or off balance.
Ryan shoots me a disbelieving stare before refocusing on the road. ‘You’re shitting me, right?’
‘Nope,’ I say casually, as we pull up to the Daleys’ chained front gates. ‘I guess I just like Mahler.’ Ryan lets the engine idle for a moment, turns to face me. ‘You are unreal,’ he mutters. He pops his seatbelt, then the door, and adds, not looking at me, ‘Sometimes … it’s like you’re two different people, you know?’ I watch as he enacts the usual ritual that entails getting into the Daleys’ place these days — unlock the heavy padlock that anchors the chain, unwind the heavy chain that anchors the gates, open the gates, return to the car, drive it forwards, then do it all over again, except in reverse. I can see what Stewart Daley was thinking when he came up with the new security measures, but that saying about horses having already bolted springs to mind. Neither the dogs nor the chains will bring Lauren back.
When the car finally stops, I open the front passenger door; the dogs catch my scent and whine, then begin snarling and howling in earnest. Barrelling into the barred side gate repeatedly with their bullet-shaped heads, their hard, muscular bodies, as if they have temporarily lost their minds.
‘Welcome home, honey,’ Ryan says, helping me down out of his car.
We head up the stairs towards Lauren’s bedroom. Apart from a dim nightlight on the upstairs landing, the house is in darkness and very quiet. All the bedroom doors, each blank white and identical, are neatly closed, as they have been each time I’ve returned to this house from school. I imagine Mrs Daley’s silent figure daily cleaning, cleaning. Putting everything but the thing she most desires, most longs for, back in its proper place.
‘You aren’t too tired to, uh, talk?’ Ryan asks as he follows me across the landing to Lauren’s bedroom door.
I’m in no mood for questions, but part of me is glad to have his company. Too glad. It could get to be a habit, and the thought makes me sound churlish as I snarl, ‘I’m rarely tired.’ He takes that as the ungracious yes it’s supposed to be. But it’s true. I don’t sleep very well. Still, it doesn’t slow me down any.
I turn the doorknob with one faintly glowing hand.
As the door swings wide and I turn on the light, I see — — Mr Daley standing in the middle of his daughter’s bedroom, holding a short, white nightgown that must have belonged to her against his cheek. He is crooning softly, the sound making goose flesh rise instantly across the surface of Carmen’s skin.
Chapter 14
‘Christ, Dad,’ Ryan hisses, darting a look down the hallway at his parents’ closed bedroom door. ‘What are you doing here? Jesus.’ Stewart Daley’s eyes are open and there are traces of tears on his cheeks, but there’s a slackness in his features that isn’t ordinarily there. I wave one hand in front of his face as he continues to make that soft, awful sound, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. I circle him a couple of times to make sure.
