Mercy

Little do they know how long. A whole lifetime away, a whole world.

My voice is rusty, hesitant. Accents on all the wrong places, accents where there shouldn’t be any. Not the mellifluous voice of someone who is here to sing, not at all. I watch them warily, waiting for them to spot the one thing in the room that doesn’t belong. But they notice nothing and withdraw gently, still murmuring kind words of welcome.

At least I’m looking forward to waking up here in the mornings. Every time I opened my eyes at Lucy’s, I wanted to be someone else, somewhere else, so desperately that it hurt. So long as I don’t let these people touch me again, maybe things will work out fine.

I finally remember to breathe out.

I wander around the bedroom and bathroom at will and wonder what’s behind the other closed doors on the landing, all of which are painted white and identical.

After my shower, I study myself in the giant wall-to-wall mirror. If her busty, acne-plagued companions on the bus are anything to go by, Carmen is supposed to be nearing the end of high school, right? But she looks about thirteen, with thin shoulders, no curves to speak of, and arms and legs like sticks. Way below average height. Her head of wild, curly hair seems almost too big, too heavy, for her scrawny frame. Carmen’s eczema is really severe, making her naked body look leprous and blotchy. Not a bikini-wearer, then. I can imagine her being a confidante of that bossy blonde on the bus only because she poses no threat to anyone whatsoever. Not in looks or popularity or force of will.

Within the girl’s underwhelming reflection, I discern my own floating there, the ghost-in-the-machine. Somehow weirdly contained, yet wholly separate.

‘Hi, Carmen,’ I say softly. ‘I hope you don’t mind me soul-jacking your life for a while.’

I hear nothing, feel nothing; hope it’s likewise.

Soul-jacking. That’s my own shorthand for whatever this situation is. I mean, like it or not, they’re kind of my hostages and I can make or break them if I choose to. It’s just me at the wheel most of the time. It’s entirely up to me how I play things, however fair that may seem to you, but I try to tread gently. Though in the beginning, when I must have been wild with confusion, rage, pain, pure fear? I am sure I was not so kind.

I’m back in Lauren’s room, wearing only a white towel, when I hear a commotion on the stairs, a heavy, running tread. I hear Mrs Daley shout, ‘Knock before you go in there, Ryan, for heaven’s sake!’ then the door bursts open and I’m face to face with a young god.

Carmen’s heart suddenly skids out of control at the instance of shocked recognition at some subterranean level of me, though I am certain that neither she nor I have ever met him before. Yet he seems so familiar that I almost lift my hands to stroke his face in greeting. And then it hits me—he could be Luc’s real-world brother, possessing the same careless grace, stature, wild beauty. And for a moment I wonder if it is Luc, if he has somehow found a way out of my dreams; an omen made flesh.

Yet everything about the young man towering over me is dark—his hair, his eyes, his expression; all negative to Luc’s golden positive. Like night to day.

No sleeping with any member of your host family.

I suddenly recall the words and it brings a lopsided smile to my face. I mean, it wouldn’t exactly be a chore in this instance. He’s what, six foot five? And built like a line-backing angel.

Just my type then, whispers that evil inner voice. I’ve always loved beautiful things.

‘What the hell are you smiling about?’ Ryan—it must be Ryan—roars.

Carmen’s reaction would probably be to burst into noisy tears. But this is me we’re talking about.

I look him up and down, still smiling, still wearing my towel like it’s haute couture. The need to touch him is almost physical, like thirst, like hunger. But I’m afraid of getting burnt again and there’s a very real possibility of that. There’s a good reason I don’t like being touched, or to touch others. It invites in the … unwanted.

So instead, I plant a fist on each hip and stare up at him out of Carmen’s muddy, green-flecked eyes. ‘I was just thinking,’ I say coolly, ‘about what you’d be like in bed.’

CHAPTER 4

Ryan rocks back on his heels. ‘I’m going to ignore what you just said and ask what the hell you’re doing here!’ he says after a shocked pause. ‘This bedroom is off-limits.’

‘Ry-an!’ exclaims Mrs Daley, who’s just joined us and overhears the last part.

‘Ry-an,’ repeats his father, who moves to stand in front of me protectively. ‘Carmen is a guest in this house. We’ve talked about it. You know it’s long past time.’

What is he? I wonder, my eyes still fixed on Ryan in fascination. About eighteen? Nineteen?

I don’t bother to engage with any of them because I’m still checking him out and no one can make me rush something I don’t want rushed. I can be stubborn like that. I mean, life’s too short already and I haven’t seen anyone who looks like Ryan Daley in my last three outings, at least. Luc aside—and there’s really no putting Luc to one side—Ryan is quite spectacular.

When I continue to say and do nothing, Ryan turns and snarls in his mother’s face, ‘She’s still alive, you know, alive! What are you doing even letting her come in here? Have you both lost it?’

Then he’s gone, followed swiftly by his father. The door slams twice in rapid succession and the house is quiet.

Mrs Daley sits down shakily on the pristine bed while I quickly shove a tee-shirt from out of Carmen’s sports bag over my head and put some underpants on under the towel before laying it on a chair to dry. Not that I care about the proprieties, but I can see that she does, that they are the only things keeping her from flying into a million pieces. I dig around in the bag a bit more and locate some jeans. They look like something a little boy would wear. I am amazed when they fit perfectly.

‘Stewart says they told you,’ Mrs Daley murmurs softly. ‘About us, I mean. Did they?’

I shake my head. But it’s pretty clear to me that we have a missing girl on our hands and that it was someone’s bright idea to assign me her bedroom. I’m not sure what to make of it, and neither is Carmen’s face, so I blunder into the closet, pretending to look for something, while Mrs Daley clears her throat.

‘We haven’t, ah, hosted anyone since our daughter, Lauren … went away,’ she says, then corrects herself in a tight, funny voice. ‘Was taken.’

I shoot her a quick glance across the room. Her eyes are bright red in her chalky face and I’m afraid of what she’ll do next. Emotion is such a messy thing, apt to splash out and mark you like acid. I look away, refocusing hastily on Carmen’s sports bag, the motley collection of belongings that sits on top. Weird stuff she thought it important to bring—like a frog-shaped key ring and a flat soft toy rabbit, grey and bald in places, that has clearly seen better days. There’s even a sparkly pink diary with a lock and key. Little girl’s things to go with the little boy’s clothes.

When Mrs Daley’s agonised voice grinds into gear again, I begin to unpack in earnest, putting Carmen’s belongings, her religiously themed songbooks, into the spaces allotted for her in Lauren’s closet.

‘We’re trying to … normalise things for the first time in almost two years,’ Mrs Daley whispers to Carmen’s profile. ‘We used to host students all the time. Lauren loved meeting people from your school. She has … had I should say, a lot of Facebook friends from St Joseph’s.’

‘Oh?’ I say. Do I know what a facebook is? It rings no bells with me.

‘Ryan,’ she continues, ‘is having trouble letting go. We’ve almost come to terms with … I mean, you never really stop wondering … if she suffered, what really happened, how we could have prevented it … but we—Stewart and I—don’t think of her as being … present any more, in the sense that you and I are. Though Ryan insists—despite all the evidence to the contrary—that she’s still alive. It’s become something of an obsession with him. He says he can still feel her. He’s …’ She hesitates and looks away. ‘He’s been arrested a couple of times for following “leads” no one else can prove. But it’s impossible. There was a lot of … blood.’

Mrs Daley, eyes welling, is staring at something on the floor between us that I cannot see. I wonder what she used to get the carpets so white again.

‘She must have put up such a fight, my poor baby …’

The woman lets slip a muffled howl through the clenched fingers of one fist and then she is no longer in the bedroom. A door clicks loudly along the hallway. I don’t know why she bothered shutting it because the sound of her weeping rips through the upper storey of the house like a haunting. Habit, I guess, the polite thing.

Only sinew, thread and habit, I decide, is holding Lauren’s mother together. What kind of house is this?

Maybe, I think, I won’t enjoy waking up here in the mornings, after all.

There’s no discernible pattern to the Carmens, the Lucys, the Susannahs that I have been and become. All I know is that they stretch back in an unbroken chain further than I can remember—I can sense them all there, standing one behind the other, jostling for my attention, struggling to tell me something about my condition. If I could push them over like dominoes, perhaps some essential mystery would reveal itself to me; but people are not game pieces, much as I might wish it. And there is nothing of the game about my situation.

When I ‘was’ Lucy, I was a twenty-six-year-old former methadone addict and a single mother with an abusive boyfriend. I think I left her in a better place than where she was when our existences became curiously entwined, but it has all become hazy, like a dream. I think, together, we finally booted the no-hoper de facto wife 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 quicktempered, 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 while they’re doing it. I feel a stab of pity for Carmen—why does she care so much about what the others think?

And they say girls don’t like blood sports. My noncommittal, ‘Oh?’ is a little more antagonistic than I intended.

But Tiffany only hears what she wants to hear, and it’s enough to prompt her to spill her guts about how Ryan Daley is this far away from being locked up in a mental institution for turning vigilante and stalking people he thinks might be responsible for his sister’s abduction.

‘She was taken right out of her bedroom,’ Tiffany says as Paradise High’s music director, a tired-looking little man with wild hair and eyeglasses called Mr Masson, taps the podium microphone with his stubby fingers. People wince at the vicious feedback he triggers but they keep right on talking. Two spots of hectic colour appear on his cheekbones.

‘No signs of forced entry or anything,’ Tiffany continues airily.

Which would explain the invisible force-field that seemed to surround Mr Daley in the car park the other day. To most of the citizens of Paradise, it probably looks like an inside job. It also goes some way to explaining why Louisa Daley resembles a walking corpse and is on the brink of implosion, like a dying sun. Such a corrosive thing, doubt.

‘Lauren was a soprano, just like we are,’ Tiffany adds. ‘Blonde, incredibly bright, beautiful, too. The whole package.’ She looks me up and down as if to say, everything you’re not, baby.

I wonder again why Carmen wants this bitch to like her so badly.

‘Everyone at Paradise High gives Ryan a wide berth,’ Tiffany says as Mr Masson tries and fails to get our attention once again. ‘He’s a weirdo loner with a hair-trigger temper and a gun. People have seen him pull one. They say there was blood everywhere.’

The two statements are complete non sequiturs unless you draw an unsavoury line between them.

Carmen wrinkles her brow, me doing it. ‘So people think Ryan might be in on it, too?’ I say. ‘The father did it? Maybe the son? Both involved. Some weird psycho-sexual thing? Maybe the mother knows something?’

Tiffany nods enthusiastically. ‘Better watch your step. Sleep with one eye open.’

She grins at the girl sitting on her other side as if I’m not right there. Like anyone would want to jump your bones. It’s clear to me what they’re thinking.

‘Well, thanks for the info,’ I reply coolly, staring down the other girl who looks away uncomfortably. Bet Carmen’s never given her the evil eye before. It feels good doing it. I stare down a few more of the others for good measure and the St Joseph’s sopranos suddenly look everywhere but at me, their eyes scattering like birds.

‘Consider it a community service,’ Tiffany laughs, oblivious to Carmen’s odd steeliness or its weird effect on her posse. Well, she wouldn’t.

‘And can you believe they roped in extra students from Little Falls and Port Marie for this musical “soirée”?’ she adds. ‘It’s still going to sound like shit.’

Mr Masson makes us all jump by abruptly turning on the assembly hall’s ancient sound system loud enough to split our heads open. The vast swell of a massive pipe organ is followed by the sounds of a giant, pre-recorded orchestra and it’s suddenly a mad, page-turning scramble to get to the opening bars of … uh, oh, yes, Hymnus: Veni, creator spiritus. Know it? I’m right with you. The score looks as unfathomable this morning as it did last night. And where did the choir come in again?

I glance sideways at Tiffany and she’s looking straight ahead at Mr Masson, poised to sing. Always ready, always pulled together. Something Carmen wishes she was every minute of her waking life. People want funny things.

I follow Tiffany’s flying finger to the point where her manicured nail leaves off the page and her voice takes over and suddenly, my eyes narrow in shocked recognition. I have seen what I should have seen last night: Part 1 of Mahler’s Symphony No 8 is not in French, or German, or Italian. Languages that casually litter the margins of the score, with which I have little affinity, knowledge or patience.

I should have focused on the title of the opening hymn.

Like the title, the hymn is in Latin. Untranslated Latin.

As the girls of St Joseph’s Chamber Choir begin to blow away the competition with their incredible singing, I realise that I understand every single word they are saying as if it is the language in which I think, in which I dream.

They sing:

Veni, creator spiritus mentes tuorum visita

Come, Creator Spirit visit the minds of your people

Creator Spirit. The words send a lick of lightning down my spine, the repeating crash of the organ causing little aftershocks in my system.

And the music? It’s like there are seraphim in the room with us. Forget about the hair spray, the injudicious use of mascara, face whitener, concealer, eyeshadow, pout-enhancing lip venom. Shut my eyes and I could be sitting amongst angels. The sound is tearing at my soul. It’s so joyous, so sublime, so incredibly fast, loud, complex. Beautiful. If I’d ever heard this music before in my entire benighted existence, I’m sure I would have remembered it.

The girls of St Joseph’s have long since split into two distinct bodies of voices, two choirs, clear, bright and pure, but, stunned by my new comprehension, I do not open my mouth or attempt to keep up. Neither does most of the room. A few brave souls do their own interesting jazz interpretations of Mahler beneath the main action but these are largely lost in the maelstrom of organ, orchestra and Tiffany, whose voice soars, higher, louder, purer than all of them. Heads are craning to get a look at the source.