Exile m-2 Read online

  I take a deep breath and look up, revelling in the sun on my face. The quality of the light here is different from anything I’ve seen before; it seems harsher, at once translucent and yet intense. The smell of the air is like burnt butter, already hot in the back of the throat, in the lungs. It’s going to be a warm day. No, a searing one. The sky seems wide and endless, with barely a cloud. And I realise that wherever I am now, it’s summer.

  It was winter, where I was … before.

  My eyelid begins to twitch as I struggle to put some definition around the word. It’s as if I’m carrying a cloud around inside me where my memories should be; my mind feels like a dull knife blade.

  The strange thing is, I may only have been Lela for an hour or so but I’m moving easily. And I know that’s something new. My heart isn’t racing out of control, I’m not in pain or seeing things, hearing voices, falling over things that aren’t even there because my arms and legs won’t do what I tell them to. That’s the usual scenario when I ‘wake’ as someone else. Physically, I’ve never felt better; it’s almost as if, finally, I’ve begun to adapt. Lela and I seem to be functioning as a single organism and I know, without knowing how, that it’s never, ever been this … simple. If you can use a word like that in the context of soul-jacking a living body that doesn’t actually belong to you.

  Soul-jacking — that’s my shorthand for this situation, which has happened before, and keeps on happening. The people I have … been — I don’t like the word possessed, it has such an unwholesome ring — stretch back in an unbroken chain farther than I can remember, although I’ve deleted the specifics, or maybe they’ve been reprogrammed out of me. Where they go, these souls I temporarily send into exile inside their own skins, is a mystery I’m still working on.

  And before you ask, I don’t know what I did to deserve this. Why I pay and must keep on paying. You know almost as much about me as I do, and that’s the sad truth. I’m like a body-snatcher, an evil spirit, a ghoul, literally clothed in a stranger’s flesh. I try not to think about it too much because it gives even me the creeps.

  Those people who say there is nothing new under the sun? They don’t know what they’re talking about.

  I stare hard at that bleached-out, blinding sky and then it hits me, finally. That I’m in another country.

  Where?

  On the other side of the world, answers my inner demon, always one beat ahead of my waking self.

  As if to drive the words home, there is a sudden explosion of carolling birdsong from the powerlines above: drawn out, impossible for a human throat to replicate, beautiful, wholly unique. I’ve never heard its like, though it seems at once necessary to this sky, these strange and straggly trees with their gloriously scented leaves, this streetscape of single-storey bungalows in muted, pastel colours, with wire fences, cement driveways and handkerchiefsized front lawns. A street of living relics from the last century. I study the black and white bird perched high overhead. I don’t recall ever seeing one before, although that’s no proof of anything. It’s the size of a crow, and looks down at me below it on the street with a sharp, beady eye before it suddenly takes wing and flies away.

  I know there’s something I’m forgetting — something important — and I feel the beginnings of a headache, a dull thump starting up inside my borrowed skull, as I try to mine my faulty memory for traces of that glittering, elusive dream. Perhaps it’s a migraine, like the ones I had when I was … Lucy.

  The name causes a little catch in my breathing.

  I worry away at the edges of that thought and get a string of fragments — recovering drug addict, sick baby, skipped town — which lead to another name: Susannah.

  That yields up a new set of unrelated words and pictures — rich girl, hypochondriac mother, college far, far away — which leads to … Carmen Zappacosta.

  With that name comes a searing moment of white noise and red-hot neural overload: whining in my ears, darkness in my eyes, a pervasive sense of nausea, landmines going off in my cerebral cortex. No words, no images, just a piercing sensation of rage, pain, blood, and that’s it. It’s as if there’s some kind of tripwire in my head. When I cease trying to pry loose any memory associated with Carmen Zappacosta, the edges of the world take on colour again, normal sounds and vistas resume around me, the thumping in my skull fades away.

  And I know that the ground rules have somehow changed again. My time as Carmen is off limits and I don’t know why.

  My breathing slows and the fingers of my hands uncurl. I look sharply at the woman and the skater boy flanking me; judging by her closed-off expression and his enthusiastic air guitar solo, neither noticed my little mental episode.

  Eyes still watering from the lightshow in my head, I balance Lela’s backpack on my knee and rifle through it with shaking hands for clues as to what I’m supposed to be doing here. I can’t help it, can’t keep still. Can’t just go with the flow, let shit happen. It’s not my way. I need to have a purpose for being, even if I have to make it up as I go along.

  Inside the body of the rucksack, my fingers find the hard edges of a leather wallet, a box of mints, a small bunch of keys, a ball of crumpled tissues, a ragged paperback novel, a small mobile phone, an empty drink bottle; dird those and settle on a … notebook.

  I draw it out. It’s held shut by a self-securing band of black elastic, the cover made out of a stiff, recycled cardboard. It’s small, brown, spiral-bound. There’s a plastic ballpoint pen jammed into the band around it. I pull the pen out and throw it back into the bag, release the elastic and spread the book open to the sight of dense writing, page after page, heavily scored in places, every few pages headed by a date. The last in the book is 1 December. The first is 23 August. It’s Lela’s journal.

  I begin to read: You’re born dreaming of every possibility. Then you wake one day and you’re nineteen years old, and you haven’t been anywhere, seen anyone or done anything that’s worth anything. Andy didn’t kiss me when I told him I was leaving and now it’s too late. He hasn’t called, he hasn’t tried to send a message through Daniela, nothing, even though he knows how I feel. Felt, the shit. I’m never going to see him again, and I don’t know how I’m going to stand it. I didn’t expect to end up like this — selling coffee and spring rolls to suits, cab drivers, strippers, backpackers, homeless guys. This is not how I saw things turning out. I think I’m drowning. I think that what I’m feeling is me dying inside my own body, a bit more each day.

  The next page is dated 24 August: I need to rob a bank. And after I rob that bank? I need to have someone come in and watch over Mum so that I can have my old life back.

  August 28: I love her so much and I’m too scared to imagine life without her. But I’m so angry at her, too. It’s all her fault this happened, and I will never forgive her for any of it. I almost wish she’d die because I can’t do this any more and I don’t think she can either. What am I saying?!?

  I flick through several more entries in the same vein. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Lela’s frustrated by the direction her life has taken, and that she’s frequently angry and self-pitying — and for good reason. There may only have been one fatal diagnosis, but two lives have been taken apart in the process.

  The bus draws up with signage that reads City via Green Hill above the driver’s window. I get on behind the blowsy brunette and the grimy skater boy, halting on the top step and holding up Lela’s bus pass like a robot. It says, Lela Neill, 19 Highfield Street, Bright Meadows.

  Human place names never cease to amaze me. Bright Meadows? Well, yeah, sure, maybe once. When the earth was created.

  ‘Morning, darl,’ says the stocky female driver. Her thick ginger hair is cut into an unattractive shag and she stinks of the ghosts of cigarettes past. She looks at me curiously through her tinted driving lenses when I don’t move on straightaway like the others do. Guess hardly anyone ever stops to chat.

  ‘Can you tell me when we reach the Green Lantern?’ I say halt
ingly. ‘It’s a café. In the city.’

  The woman nods, giving me an odd look. ‘Sit down, love. You feeling all right? Don’t look yourself today.’

  I give her an approximation of a friendly smile and take a seat just behind her. As the doors close and the bus lurches away in a choking cloud of diesel, I dip back into Lela’s journal.

  What I get from page after page of closely written, desperate, loopy copperplate is that she dropped out of first-year university several months ago when her mum’s cancer returned and the money ran out. And that Andy broke what was left of her heart.

  There’s no dad in the picture — he moved ‘up north’ with a much younger, ‘gold-digging floozie’ years before. The terminology brings a frown to Lela’s forehead, me doing it. The words she uses throughout her journal are as unfamiliar to me as the way these people speak; the way Lela herself speaks: with broad, drawn-out vowels, lots of stress on the second syllables of words, truncations, slang, the works.

  So there’s only the two of them then, mother and daughter, fighting an unseen war together on the wages of a waitress at a dingy city café. Lela’s essentially a good person, I decide. Because, no matter how much she might complain her heart out in that little brown notebook, there’s that strong tide of grief flowing beneath everything. Still, it’s ten thousand variations on the theme I hate my life and I shut the journal, slip the elastic band back around it, and stare out the window as street after street of old-style, medium-density housing slides by, mixed in with light industrial areas, train crossings and local shopping strips that all look the same — pharmacies, banks, bakeries and places where you can eat, drink and gamble at the same time. Handy.

  People get on and off constantly. As I glance back down the bus, I see that those in casual wear are slowly being replaced by those in more formal attire, and the expressions are gradually getting tighter. Sunlight pierces the dirty windows, making pretty patterns on the bus’s rubbish-strewn floor.

  The Green Hill we eventually pass through also looks nothing like its name. As the suburbs give way to the city fringe and the traffic around us begins to choke and snarl, the bus’s rhythm changes to stop-start, stop-start. The skater boy lopes past me and takes up position just by the doors, removes the earbuds of his portable music player, props his skateboard up against his leg and takes a momentous deep breath. I turn my head to face him, knowing that the heartfelt exhalation that follows has something to do with me.

  ‘How’s yer mum?’ he says, shoving his mass of lumpy dreads back over one shoulder, fidgety as all hell. ‘Bad she’s sick, eh?’

  ‘Awful,’ I reply distantly, wondering where all this is going.

  I see him lick his lower lip until it is pinkly shiny, wipe his palms on the front of his long shorts. Nervous? He should be nervous.

  I wait silently, without blinking, and he flushes a slow and brilliant red beneath my scrutiny. Then the bus doors swing open and he’s off like a shot, skateboard under one arm, messenger bag bouncing on his hip.

  ‘Lookin’ great,’ he mumbles as he hits the pavement. ‘You should wear colours more often. Might even ask you out, then. If you’re lucky. Catch ya.’

  For a moment, I think I’m hearing things. The door shuts behind him and the bus takes off and I can’t help breaking into a small smile. Wouldn’t have thought I was his type. Couldn’t be sure what his type would actually be.

  ‘Reckon he’s sweet on you, love,’ the driver says over her shoulder, loud enough for the front half of the bus to hear. She gives me a wink in the driver’s mirror.

  No, really? evil me whispers dryly, though I meet her eyes in the mirror and nod and smile.

  See, I tell Lela, not sure she can hear me, but addressing her anyway because it’s only polite. Things are looking up already, sweetheart.

  I sit back, still holding her journal. Maybe that’s supposed to be my mission this time, should I choose to accept it. Getting the girl a date.

  What’s that figure of speech that amuses me so much? I’ll take that.

  Well, I would. It’d make a change from life and death.

  But the memory of Lela’s mother’s pinched face and laboured breathing wipes the smile from my borrowed features. With my track record, life and death will be the least of it.

  Chapter 3

  The curvy brunette with the hard, tired eyes stops by the door. ‘You wanted the Green Lantern, right?’ she says to me. ‘It’s across the road from the stop where I get off. I heard you talking to the driver. Buy my coffee there almost every morning and most afternoons. And you’ve, uh, served me, like, heaps of times.’

  I shove Lela’s journal back into her bag, pull tight the drawstring and clip the flap shut. ‘Degenerative brain disease,’ I reply without missing a beat, my eyes serious, my face solemn.

  The woman gives me a sharp look, decides I’m not having her on. I watch her features soften.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she says, expertly bunching the end of her messy ponytail through the band and turning the whole thing into a fat, wobbly bun.

  The doors of the bus open and we disembark alongside four lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, separated in the middle by a row of parallel-parked cars punctuated at regular intervals by stunted and malformed plane trees.

  As the lights change again, the woman shouts, ‘You kind of have to step out and take your life in your hands. Now!’

  She grabs a handful of my tank top from the side and hauls me between a taxi that has just pulled into a double park in front of us and a speeding van swerving around it with a blare of horns. We pause for breath at the rank of parked cars in the middle then throw ourselves into the two lanes of traffic going the other way. We manage to avoid a couple of drag-racing sedans but almost get collected by a motorbike coming up on the outside that neither of us had seen.

  ‘Now you see why I need that coffee,’ the woman says ruefully, letting go of my top and shoving her fingers through her already messy hairdo as we step up onto the kerb outside the Green Lantern. ‘I’m Justine Hennessy. Most people call me Juz. Or Jugs.’ She rolls her eyes.

  ‘I’m Lela Neill,’ I reply. ‘And I’m really late. Let me get you that coffee. It’s the least I can do.’

  Before we step inside under a tattered, green canvas awning, I take a mental snapshot of my surroundings. The Green Lantern occupies the ground floor of a multistorey building that was constructed out of a series of ugly, utilitarian concrete slabs sometime in the late 1970s. The large front window, with its over-painted and peeling border in an unattractive dark green, is flystruck and streaked with grime; and multicoloured plastic strips hang down over the entrance in a continuous, sticky curtain. A long bench with bar stools beneath it runs across the inside of the front window, and two men in shirt-sleeves are seated at opposite ends, heads bent over their newspapers, bald spots levelled at passers-by. I can see a number of small tables and chairs arranged farther back inside the café, all filled. Beside the door is a large, gimmicky carriage lantern missing several panes of glass, also green.

  Okay, I think. We get it.

  The covered drainage point outside the café smells faintly of human waste and rotting food, and a narrow laneway that separates the café from the equally brutal-looking building next door features a couple of rusty mini-skips piled high with rubbish. I’m beginning to understand where Lela’s self-pity is coming from. A sensitive kid with aspirations in life would be buried alive in a place like this. It’s an unhygienic dump packed with angry-looking patrons at least three deep at the counter. There’s barely any elbow room, let alone space to hope.

  Justine’s already through the sticky plastic curtain ahead of me when something catches my eye. A gleaming blur, like a mobile patch of sunlight, drifting erratically between the straggly trees dividing the centre of the road. Maybe that’s all it is, because when I try to focus on it, there’s suddenly nothing there.

  But wait. I might not be able to see it any more, but I cn still feel it. And
it’s coming closer. There’s an energy coming off it, even from a distance: at once hot and cold, hair-raising, like a hum, like vinegar in my bones.

  Almost hypnotised by the strange sensation, I’m about to step back into the stream of traffic to pinpoint its source when Justine sticks her head out through the plastic curtain and says, ‘You coming or what?’

  I nod in apology, and with that gesture the strange feeling vanishes and the dappled sunlight coming through the branches of the trees seems exactly that and nothing more.

  Behind the front counter of the Green Lantern, a tall woman with unnaturally blonde hair piled high on top of her head is handing out lidded waxed paper cups and paper bags furiously, in every sense of the word. When she meets my eyes through the dusty front window of the café, I see her red-painted mouth form the words, ‘Lela Neill, you get in here right now or so help me …’

  I follow the woman from the bus through the plastic curtain. It’s my turn to grab her by the shirt and steer her around to the coffee machine, bypassing the disorderly queues pressed up against the sweating bain marie display.

  ‘What are you wearing?’ the tall blonde hisses when I get close enough. ‘You’re an hour late. Start handing out the breakfast specials before I sell you out to Dymovsky! This is your lucky day, Lela, because he called in to say he’s been held up at some Orthodox thingummy, forget what exactly — and you know he never misses a morning shift, ever. He isn’t in till after midday, but I can still arrange it so that you’re out on your ass. You need the money, right? So get cracking, or I’ll dob.’

  Dob? I look at her blankly as she hands me a long black apron that swamps Lela’s petite frame and the traffic-light-coloured ensemble I’ve chosen to put her in today.

  All the staff — from the sad-eyed Asian barista girl to the towering, dark-skinned cook in the open kitchen at the back — are wearing head-to-toe black. Long sleeves, long pants. Must be some kind of unofficial uniform. Crap.