basher for the last time and got the hell out of town with the under-nourished baby and a swag of barely salvageable items of no intrinsic worth. I still wonder how she’s doing, and if she managed to keep clean, now and forever, amen.
And Susannah? She was finally brave enough —with a little push from yours truly — to get out from under her whining heiress mother’s thumb and accept a place at a college a long, long way from home, but that’s where the story ends. For me, anyway.
I wish them both well.
The other girl? The one whose life I ended up liking but whose name now escapes me? She finally came up with a reason to escape an arranged marriage, change her name, find work in a suburban bookstore and love at her new local — thanks in no small part to me.
I liked that part. Love. It was uncomplicated, sweet.
So unlike my own twisted situation. But the details are fraying around the edges and soon she’ll be gone, like all the rest. Doomed to return only in prismatic flashes, if ever.
Carmen looks and acts a lot younger than her three predecessors. Apart from her unfortunate skin condition, she doesn’t appear unhappy or abused in any way. She really does seem to be here just to sing. It’s the family she’s been placed with that has the terrible history. And that’s something that’s got me wondering. Memory is an unreliable thing, but this seems new to me — an unexpected twist, an irregularity, in the unbroken arc of my strange existence to date. It does not feel like anything I have ever encountered before, though I may be wrong.
I’m going to have to watch my step.
Once I have the mechanics of someone’s life under my control, the thought always returns — that maybe someone is doing this to me. That I am some kind of cosmic, one-off experiment. Maybe it is the so-called
‘Eight’? But then I wonder, are They even real? Is Luc?
Perhaps all this is in the nature of a lesson. But one so obscure I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be learning.
The unpalatable alternative is that maybe I’m somehow doing this to myself, that I’m some sort of mentally ill freak with a subconscious predilection for self-delusion, impermanence and risk. If that is the case, the real truth — and I pray that it isn’t — there would be nothing left to stop me from topping myself, I swear to God. I almost don’t want to know the answer.
And you need to ask why I call myself ‘Mercy’?
Chapter 5
I have barely closed my eyes when he is with me again.
My own personal demon.
But tonight there are to be no perfumed midnight gardens, no bleak rocky outcrops of strange and savage beauty or shifting desert landscapes beneath unbroken moonlight — scenes engineered to enchant and caress the senses; some kind of reward for past injustices meted out. It is just a swirling, buzzing dark with us two at its heart. I sense Luc is angry and I feel a stirring of faintly remembered … fear?
Even so, his golden presence sings through my nerves, makes me feel more alive than any substitute life ever could. I want to touch him as badly as I wanted to touch Ryan Daley, but he holds me apart from him effortlessly, without even moving.
‘Of course I’m real,’ he retorts, as if we are continuing a conversation that started long ago. ‘Do not doubt that. And you know who’s caused this. You’ve never been stupid, so don’t start now. The knowledge is in you despite everything that’s been done to you.’ I know now that I have always been quick-tempered, and his words bring forth an answering fury as he continues to hold me away when all I want him to do is wrap me in his arms.
‘You think I don’t know that?’ I spit. ‘That somehow I’ve misplaced my life, my self, somewhere? What more do you expect me to do, the circumstances being what they are?’ I do not like the whining note in my voice. It is unbecoming. I’ve always preferred to think of us as equals, even if he is a longstanding figment of my diseased imagination.
He laughs, the darkness ringing with genuine amusement, and his anger banks, though he moves no closer. He still holds us apart as if he were a being of pure energy.
‘I expect you to do nothing as it concerns your … hosts,’ he smiles, ‘and yet everything to do with finding me. So far, you’ve failed. You’ve got everything the wrong way around.’ I frown. That may be, but how else am I supposed to survive the Lucys, the Susannahs, even the Carmens?
Some of their existences are like little hells and yet I am supposed to endure them as they are?
‘But that’s just it,’ I snap, and in the cold dark my left hand aches again with that inexplicable pain. ‘I don’t know how to find me, so I sure as hell don’t know how to find you. And anyway, I’m not even certain you’re worth it any more.’ This last said to wound.
His beautiful mouth curves up in a half-smile. My hand aches harder. I’m lying, of course — he’s the very core, the heart, of my floating world, my floating life — but it still feels good saying it. I was not always this defiant with him and I sense surprise, displeasure, beneath the diverted expression.
‘ Do nothing,’ he says again, ‘and in doing so, find me.’ There is a loud crack, like thunder, and I wake alone in Lauren’s pristine bed. The fierce dawn winds blow great sheets of grit through the parched streets and gardens of Paradise like a parody of rain, like the feeling in my borrowed heart.
‘So how was it?’ says the rat-faced blonde from the bus in her hard-as-nails voice.
We’re at the first collective Monday morning choir rehearsal of our fortnight’s ‘cultural exchange’ with Paradise High. It’s supposed to culminate in massed, youthful voices belting out Part 1 of Mahler’s Symphony No 8 in E flat major to an appreciative audience of local farmhands, fishermen, small-business owners and parents. I only know this because I spent an hour last night after a tense dinner with the Daleys senior — Ryan’s absence itself a presence — flicking through Carmen’s belongings for clues as to what she was meant to be doing here. The piece is a pretty big ask, given that most of the students seem to be here under some form of duress and a good number of them are likely to be tone deaf. Plus, we seem to have misplaced an entire, uh, symphony orchestra somewhere.
One thing I’m sure of: Mahler is definitely not for sightseers. Carmen’s score is dense with her own handwritten notes and symbols I don’t even recognise.
I’d way lost interest in it long before I’d even figured out where the choir’s supposed to come in. Proposed course of action? Just pretend to sing for the next two weeks and hope no one notices. I figure it can’t be too hard to lose yourself in a crowd.
And it is a crowd. It’s eight in the morning and there are more people gathered in the assembly hall than I would have expected. Paradise doesn’t look like it could possess fifty reasonably musical offspring, let alone the roughly two hundred teenagers I see here, checking each other out brazenly. It’s like a meat market, and Carmen’s group is giving as good as it gets. The air is practically sizzling.
‘Are you having another mental attack?’ says Rat-face suspiciously when I don’t answer her right away.
I dart a look at the cover of her score, which bears the name Tiffany Lazer in a cloud of hearts and flowers.
It suits her. It’s fluffy and deadly, at the same time.
‘Nope,’ I reply casually. ‘Just scoping for, um … hotties, uh, Tiff.’ It’s the right thing to say because Tiffany relaxes immediately. ‘Speaking of which, so how was it? I hear Ryan Daley looks all male-modelly super-gorgeous but is pretty much a psycho, nut-job disaster waiting to happen. I was soooo jealous at first when I found out who you’d got, but now I’m so glad it’s not me!
You’re practically in the middle of an ongoing murder investigation — how twisted is that?’ Silently, I thank Carmen for her diary, which lays out the equal parts longing, equal parts hatred she feels for Tiffany Lazer and her snobby circle of friends. From what I can tell, everything between Carmen and Tiffany is some kind of weird contest for supremacy, though they seem to have nothing in common but the singing thing.
I notice a few of the other St Joseph’s girls hanging off every word Tiffany says, giving me the once-over
