Mercy Read online

  Whatever it is, this feeling, this horror, this secret, it lingers about him like a detectable odour, a familiar on his shoulder gnawing at his flesh. I wonder that I didn’t see it before, the man far more adept than the bus driver at hiding the cancer in his soul. It is only discernible through touch. Interesting.

  ‘I suppose you’ve heard,’ he says, withdrawing his hand quickly. He looks away, blinks twice, before starting the car. ‘This is a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. They probably worded you up already. Can’t say I blame them. I’d want that for my own kid.’

  16

  We head out of the parking lot in the man’s comfortable family wagon and head at determined right angles through the town, through the main street with its charcoal chicken shops, mini-marts, laundromat, family diners, bars. We don’t speak again until he stops the car outside a white-painted, double-storey, timber family home with prominent gables, a two-car garage, picket fence, bird feeders on the lawn. The place is neat, well maintained, like the man himself.

  Unlike its neighbours, the house comes complete with three giant guard dogs, Dobermans, all sleek black-and-tan muscle. Two lie across the footpath to the front door, the other on its back on the lawn, all three languid and deadly. Something about their presence tugs at me, won’t come clear.

  ‘You’ll want to stay in the car a moment,’ Mr Daley says gently.

  He gets out and engages in an elaborate ritual of unlocking a heavy-looking chain and padlock set-up he’s got going on his front gates that would make visiting the Daleys a pretty interesting exercise. When he’s finally swung the gates open, he slips through, whistling for his dogs to follow. But one suddenly lifts its head and breaks rank, then they all do. And without warning, 17

  they’re through the gates and circling the car, snarling and spitting. They scratch at the doors, snapping on hind legs, seeking a way in, a way to get to me.

  I feel Carmen’s brow furrow, realise I am doing it.

  Then I remember .

  Dogs, more than any other creature, sense me, fear me. Perhaps even see me trapped inside a body that isn’t mine. Where I’ve recalled this from, when, escapes me.

  All I know is, it’s made Carmen’s time in Paradise a lot more complicated.

  ‘Come!’ Stewart Daley roars, perplexed when the dogs refuse to obey.

  When they continue to ignore him, bent on somehow eating their way through the car door to me, he drags them away by the collar, one by one, and locks them behind a head-high side gate. The dogs continue to howl and froth and claw at the chain-link, barbed-wire-topped fence with their front paws as if they are possessed. It is a scene out of the horror movies Lucy used to live for, as if her own life weren’t horrible enough.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mr Daley says, breathing heavily as he opens my car door. ‘I can’t understand it. I mean, they bark from time to time. But that? Well.’

  I shrug Carmen’s thin shoulders — easier than 18

  forming words of explanation — and get stiffly out of the car.

  When he tries to put a hand on my shoulder to usher me into the house, I cannot stop myself from flinching away. I can almost feel the man’s hurt as he moves ahead, still toting Carmen’s bag.

  But I’m grateful for the distance he’s put between us.

  Several times, like someone in the grip of a dangerous palsy, an incurable illness, I trip over things that aren’t there and I’m glad he doesn’t see it. The walk from the car to the house may as well be measured in light years, aeons. I am perspiring heavily, though the day is overcast and very cool.

  His wife suddenly appears at the painted white front door and I stumble to a standstill. It is surprise that does it. Seeing the two of them together like — what is that saying? — chalk and cheese.

  ‘Carmen?’ she calls out warmly. ‘Welcome, dear, welcome.’

  * * *

  Mrs Daley is an impeccably groomed woman who used to be very beautiful, and still dresses as if she were, with 19

  great care and attention to detail. But she has a secret, too, and it is eating away at her soul, has taken up residence in her face, which is all angles, lines, hollows and stretched-tight skin beneath her sleek, dark fall of hair. She wears her grief far less lightly than her husband does, or he is much better at dissembling. Whatever the reason, she looks to me like the walking dead.

  I am completely unprepared when she surges out of the house and wraps one of my hands in hers. It is all I can do not to wrench myself away and flee — back past the killer dogs, the unlovely school, the bus driver whose heart has already been removed from him, still beating. There is the sense that I am the only still point in a spinning, screaming world. What resides beneath her skin is a manifold amplification of the horror beneath her husband’s; a charnel-house.

  I break contact hastily on the pretence of tying a shoelace and, mercifully, the noise, the shrieking, is cut off. She stands over me silently like an articulated skeleton in cashmere separates and pearl-drop earrings and yet all that is happening beneath the surface of her, behind her eyes. What a pair they make. What kind of place is this?

  What am I doing here?

  ‘This way, dear,’ says Mrs Daley calmly as her 20

  husband precedes us up the stairs to the bedrooms, Carmen’s bag in hand.

  He pushes open a white-painted door to the immediate left of the lushly carpeted staircase. It is clearly a girl’s room, filled with girl’s things — an overflowing jewellery box; posters of heart-throbs interspersed with ponies, whales and sunsets; a vanity unit teeming with glitter stickers and photos of a very pretty blonde girl chilling with a host of friends more numerous than I can take in. Popular, then. There’s a single bed and cushions everywhere, one of which spells out the name Lauren in bright pink letters. Like the house, the room is neat and clean and white, white, white. I wonder where she is, this Lauren.

  ‘I’m sorry that our son, Ryan, couldn’t be here to greet you,’ Mrs Daley says, shooting a quick look at her husband. Her skeletal hands sketch the air gracefully.

  ‘We’ve made some space for you in the wardrobe, and you can have the bathroom next door all to yourself.

  That was —’

  Mr Daley half-turns towards the door, says quietly,

  ‘Louisa …’

  His wife smoothly changes tack. ‘It’s entirely free for your use, Carmen. There’s a shower and a bath, hair 21

  dryer, toiletries. You’ll find fresh towels in the open shelving unit beside the sink.’

  I nod my head. ‘I might use it now, if that’s okay with you, Mrs … Daley, Mr … Daley. It was a very long, uh, trip.’

  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.

  22

  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 an
d 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 23

  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 24

  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.’

  25

  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 26

  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 27

  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 28

  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.

  29

  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 unb
roken 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 30

  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 31

  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.