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 cafe. 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.
But I can’t be, can I? Because I’m suffering a spectacular case of — what was the word that the internet story about Carmen Zappacosta used? That’s right: amnesia. Only, I can still remember what Lucy’s horrible high- rise apartment looked like; recall the exact scent of the headache-inducing perfume that Susannah’s mother liked to wearI even have memories from the lifetime before Susannah, when I managed a bookshop and learned how to knit. But I get nothing from my time as Carmen, no matter how gingerly I probe. It’s a complete blank.
That’s when I feel it. Like an energy, at once hot and cold, hair-raising, like a hum, like vinegar in my bones. Distant, but moving closer at a speed faster than I can credit, because the strange maelstrom of sensation I’m feeling is strengthening all the time.
I look around wildly for the source and my eyes pass over the face of the middle-aged woman behind me, fanning herself resignedly with the edge of a glossy brochure, her other hand on the bag on her lap. She’s just past her fifties, I’d say. Thick, wavy wheat- coloured hair cut into the kind of short, easy-care style unanimously favoured by European royalty in the 1980s. She’s plump, rounded, of average height, in a Liberty-print, short- sleeved blouse, round tortoiseshell glasses, tomato-red lipstick. Even from here I can smell freesias and face powder. She’s wearing a tag with the name June written on it and she’s looking out the window.
Whatever it is, it’s not in the bus with us.
I scan the passing streetscape and that’s when I see it. A smear of light, a small, dirty patch of luminosity, of ambient energy, streaking across the surfaces of parked cars, bouncing off street signs and shopfront windows, sometimes outpacing our vehicle, then falling back as if keeping the bus in sight.
No, I realise with a start. Keeping me in sight.
I’ve got my nose pressed up against the grubby window, trying desperately to follow the thing with my eyes, until I suddenly comprehend that it doesn’t intend for me to lose it. I’m supposed to see it. And that gingery, eggshell feeling in my skull keeps building and intensifying until all I can hear is the sharp zing, zing of its impossibly fast movements as it ricochets off the physical world outside.
Like something metallic, that noise, almost unbearable, worse than fingernails on a blackboard, of steel on steel, and yet the bus driver’s slump-shouldered position hasn’t changed at all, and neither has the other passenger’s. She’s still fanning herself, lost in the view out her window, lost in her thoughts. They don’t see it, feel it, hear it. How can that be?
I think I’m going to scream. Or throw up.
Qualis es tu? I think, gritting my teeth. What are you?
And, in that instant, the smudge of gravity- defying light vanishes with a noise like a sonic boom in my head. I am, literally, reeling backwards in my seat when I feel hot breath on the back of my neck.
Te gnovi, something growls into the space inside my head. I know you.
Chapter 6
You need to understand something about me. I am not often afraid, or lost for words. Those two things are part of the bedrock of me: like how I know that I’m essentially strong; that I never feel the cold, though I crave the sun, the light, with a feeling like worship. They are things that can’t be erased, even if the higher-order parts of myself — like my name, my memories, my emotions — are somehow open to being tampered with. But at this moment? I am literally frozen with terror. I can’t turn around, can’t speak.
And the creature feels my fear, because it laughs, and the sound has sharp edges to it, makes me want to claw at my eardrums.
I see rapid movement at the edges of my sight and the woman from three rows back slides into the seat beside me. The world around us, even time itself, seems to stand still in that instant. That dirty cloud of light that was keeping tabs on me from outside the bus? It’s inside her now.
Soror, the thing beneath the woman’s skin addresses me inside my mind. Sister. Its true voice is bestial. I can scarcely comprehend what it’s saying.
‘You must have me confused with someone else.’ I have to force my lips to move; saying the words aloud seems an act of defiance.
The creature laughs, a grating sound, like steel on steel. Through the woman’s lips it replies, ‘You know as well as I do that there’s always one way to know for sure . . .’
The thing wearing June’s face grabs both of Lela’s hands in hers and instantly I recoil as if I’ve been slugged with a bullet to the brain. All I can hear is white noise, see only snow and static, the end of the world. There is the sense that I am the only still point in a spinning, screaming universe. My left hand grows excruciatingly hot, begins to . . . burn.
But something’s happening to the creature, too, because its borrowed skin is flaming with an answering fire and it can’t hold on to me, though it tries, shrieking in pain and confusion. Between us has flared a curtain wall, a force field of intense luminescence, as if a star has been let loose inside the bus, we two at its heart.
Then it lets go, and just as suddenly there’s silence and we’ve fallen away from each other, panting. And I remember why I hate being touched. In an unguarded moment, I can read anyone through their very skin: their thoughts and emotions, even their memories, become like an open book to me.
It’s a two-way street. If a person knew how to do it, they could read me, too. Which is what this creature has just tried to do. But something went wrong. Something neither of us expected to happen.
I jam my left hand beneath my right armpit in quiet agony. The creature inside June stares at her red and scalded hands, her breathing ragged and uneven.
‘Who are you?’ it rasps. ‘What has been done to you?’
An ancient intelligence burns in the ordinary grey eyes of the middle-aged woman and I realise with a jolt
