He surprises us all when he yells in white-hot fury, ‘Stupid? Stupid is a dead-end waitressing job in a shithole excuse for a coffee shop!’
He jams his laptop and doodads into his computer bag and storms out of the cafe.
‘Touchy,’ I say.
‘He didn’t even get his second coffee,’ Cecilia adds in wonder.
‘What did I tell you?’ Mr Dymovsky says to me, shaking his head ruefully.
Sulaiman just gives me one of his unfathomable stares and heads back into the kitchen.
Right on cue, the lunch rush starts and doesn’t wind down until after two thirty.
‘Okay if I go now?’ I ask Mr Dymovsky about ten minutes later.
‘It’s okay, Mr Dymovsky,’ Cecilia urges. ‘Sulaiman say he clean up for Lela today. You should let her get back to her mother.’
‘Go, go!’ Mr Dymovsky says mock angrily, making a shooing gesture with his big, beefy hands.
As I shrug on Lela’s backpack, preparing to step out into the heat of the afternoon, he places something into my hands. It’s a plastic bag containing a large oblong plastic container of rice with odds and ends ladled over the top.
‘You share this with your mother,’ he says, already half-turning away sheepishly. ‘You eat, and you come back tomorrow and do what I pay you for, okay?’
I turn at the door and give them a wave and the three of them wave back, each in their own place, each in their own way so kind that, for a moment, I look at their faces and think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be a waitress in a shithole excuse for a cafe in a gritty-pretty city at the bottom of the world.
But then I remember that Ryan is coming for me in two days.
Two days.
And I know that once we’re together again, all this is going to seem like a distant dream and I won’t want to be anywhere else except where he is because I’ll be one step closer to being free.
Chapter 14
I find myself walking faster as I round the corner beneath that ceremonial arch, the air so hot that it’s coming off the pavement in waves and making the plain black cotton shirt and skirt I threw on this morning stick to’s Irish skin.
I tell myself that I’ve got it all under control, that it’s cool, that I’m just checking my messages, keeping to the plan. But deep down, I’m praying for Ryan to be there, even if it’s just in that disembodied, virtual way that I still can’t get my old-school head around. So that we might occupy the same space, the same time, touch each other’s minds, if only for a brief moment.
Not for the first time, I think how this truly is an age of miracles.
Followed quickly by the realisation that I am actually setting Luc’s plan into motion. Operation Get Me Outta Here is truly about to begin. The sudden burst of happiness I feel inside is as hot as the sun on the top of Lela’s head.
The same guy is on duty behind the bulletproof glass at the Magic 888 Internet Cafe, which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with coffee at all. Only computers. But that’s what I’m here for, so I slide my fiver across the counter and he gives me the token in return, without any sign that he recognises me from yesterday.
I head to a computer away from the three boys in identical dark green school uniforms clustered noisily together around one terminal, away from the Chinese lady in her sixties with the tightly permed hair and maroon short-sleeved pants suit who is watching a live-streaming Hong Kong lifestyle program on her terminal and taking notes in a symbolic kind of language I can’t read.
I log in quickly and click on my chat screen.
Hello, beautiful, he types, as if he’s been waiting for me, and I can’t help a wide smile breaking across Lela’s little face.
And I write: Friday can’t come soon enough. There’s room at my place if we can’t leave straightaway, but don’t go reading anything into it, buddy.
He just sends me back two symbols . . .
;)
. . . which takes me a little while to figure out. But when I do, I can’t help a kooky grin from breaking out all over my face all over again.
I ask:
Do your parents know? About me?
Ryan replies:
No. So you’ll have to pretend you’ve never met them before in your life. But they do know that I’ve invited the Australian girl I’ve been writing to online to stay for a while. They’re anxious about it, of course. But kind of happy that I’m back being interested in girls and not getting into trouble with the law.
That makes me smile harder.
I write:
How many people know about me — the real me?
The fewer people who know about me being in Paradise, the better. Especially if Luc’s planning on the two of us doing a vanishing act from there. Until Luc arrives, I’ll need to lie lw. Part of me is more than a little uneasy about treating Ryan’s home as a hideout, but I have no other options. I know it’s cowardly, but I don’t want to think too hard right now about how I’m going to explain it all to Ryan down the track. I’m just going to live in the moment and pray that his feelings don’t get hurt when Luc arrives on the scene.
Today, I tell myself, is all about the silver lining, not the cloud.
As I was hoping, Ryan replies:
Your secret’s safe. Only me, Lauren, Jennifer Appleton know about you. That’s it.
I sit back, relieved. They’re all people I think I can trust. They already know that I’m way freaky, so if I suddenly disappear again, they’ll just put it down to that.
I’m about to type something else when Ryan gets in first.
You might already have seen this, because it’s been leading all the news bulletins, here and overseas. But if you haven’t, you should catch the YouTube footage of this guy walking on water. Kid you not. He reminds me a lot of Lauren’s description of you. The person who posted the video says that she and her BF were making out in a car by a lake in Scotland and all of sudden they saw a glow on the water and saw a guy at least seven feet tall, dressed all in white, just gliding across the surface for a couple of minutes before he vanished.
Instantly, I feel a chill.
I type, breathing unevenly:
Where? Where do I find it?
A moment later Ryan pastes a URL into the chat screen.
Over a million people have already looked at this, and it’s only been a couple of days. Anyone you know??
I open another window and copy and paste the URL into the bar at the top of the screen. There’s only one minute and forty-six seconds of footage but it’s possibly enough to make even the biggest sceptic believe there might be something more to life than just the facts.
The man drifting across the surface of the loch is tall, pale, broad-shouldered, like something out of a classical painting. He has brown eyes, brown hair, every single strand straight, even and perfectly the same, worn a little too long for fashion; and a strong face that is all angles and planes, with a straight nose, lips set in a stern line. White raiment so blinding that its outline is indistinct. Like a living statue, a being of pure fire, youthful in aspect, yet ageless. A living flame is cupped in one hand. By its light, his eyes are searching the depths of that dark water, looking for something. Or someone.
The camera work is understandably unsteady but I could swear it’s Uriel. So much like me in looks, if not in personality. We last came face to face when I was Carmen and he refused to help me find Lauren, or to set me
