upright in the back of a bus packed with screaming, gossiping girls in matching school uniforms.
As I look down at the grey and dark red weave of the skirt I am inexplicably wearing, I wonder what disaster I am headed for as I try to figure out who the hell I am supposed to be today.
‘Carmen? CARRRRRMEN!’
My ears ring with the word, with the operatically rolled Rs, the sonic after-bite.
I lower my head sharply and peer through an unfamiliar fall of black, curly hair. Momentarily disorientated, before I realise suddenly that it is mine.
The racket is emanating from a sharp-faced, pigeon-chested blonde hanging over the seat back diagonally across the aisle from where I am sitting. I press my knees and hands tightly together to stop them from shaking.
So today, I suppose that must be who I am. Carmen. And the thought that I am no longer Lucy, or Susannah, or even the one before, whose name I can no longer remember, but whose life I liked very much and could have kept on comfortably living, makes my world spin, my breathing grow dangerously fast. I can feel the colour draining out of Carmen’s face as I fight for control of her body.
Everything is suddenly too loud, too bright, dialled up by a thousand. Carmen’s heart feels like it will explode in her chest—ours—and if it does, it will be my fault and I will be forced immediately to quit her lifeless body and take residence—like a ghoul, like a vengeful ifrit—in someone else.
Really, I should know what to do by now. You’d think I’ve had enough practice. But it never gets any easier. Not in those fateful first few days and hours, anyway.
I force my breathing to slow, and focus with difficulty. The muscles of Carmen’s neck, her face, refuse to do as they are told. I am drenched in sweat, sure that Carmen’s features are flushed with a strange, hectic blood.
Whoever the blonde is, she can see my clumsiness, the sudden wrongness in Carmen’s expression, her demeanour, because the blonde’s look sharpens, her already shrill voice rises an octave and she shouts,‘What’s wrong with you today, you dopey bitch? Jesus, you’ve been acting really weird. Like, hello? Is anyone in there for, like, the fifteenth time? Don’t you want to know who Jarrod Daniels is doing now?’
And the whole coach falls silent, every head turning our way.
Dopey bitch? With those two words I feel Carmen’s heart kick into even higher gear, almost whining under the strain of my sudden, white-hot anger. I have a temper then; that’s interesting to know.
Inexplicably, my left hand begins to ache dully, and I cradle it inside my right elbow, against my side, as if I have been recently wounded. Carmen’s skin is now so hot that I know for certain that if I allow this to continue, I will kill her. And she is innocent and that cannot happen. It is as if an edict has arisen in me that I am currently powerless to fulfil.
In the strange manner I sometimes have of taking in too much, too quickly, I register in a split second that there are nineteen other girls present, two teachers—both female, both on the wrong side of old, one with short, iron-grey hair, jangly earrings and a hard face, another with a girly bob and meaty jowls—and a driver who is consumed by the black fear that his wife is about to leave him for another man. It hangs about him like a detectable odour, a familiar on his shoulder, gnawing at his flesh. Is it only me that can see it?
Then the world telescopes, narrows, grows flat, becomes less than the sum of its parts again. Carmen’s heart slows, her breathing evens out. My left hand has ceased to ache and I release it, sit straighter.
Still every eye in the bus is turned on us. Are ‘we’ friends? Who is she to me?
Still struggling to get Carmen’s face under control, I slur, ‘Bad migraine.’
In my last life—well, Lucy’s—I got migraines all the time. For someone like me, who doesn’t feel the cold and never gets sick, not the essential me anyway—it had felt like intermittent war breaking out in my head. As if Lucy’s mind and body kept finding ways to turn on me, determined to finish me off. I don’t miss being Lucy, though I wish her well and hope she’s recovered from my casual trampling upon her life. No doubt, in time, I will forget her, too.
My weak response is enough to satisfy them all, because eyes swing away uninterestedly, the noise level in the bus climbs back up to a jet-engine roar in my ears, and the sharp-faced blonde snaps, ‘That’s soretarded,’ before turning huffily to speak to somebody else and leaving me blessedly alone.
Like a facsimile of a human being, I turn awkwardly to face the window and discern farmland flying by beneath an iron sky, punctuated by dead trees and outbuildings, the occasional chewing cow, ordinary things, the grass by the roadside growing taller and coarser the farther we travel. Red soil gives way to sandy verges, vast stretches of salt plain. I imagine I can smell the sea and wonder where we are. Not Lucy’s domain of smelly high-rises and disgruntled pushers on skateboards. Not Susannah’s toney mansion with the round-the-clock, live-in help and the hypochondriac mother who would never just let her be.
The land is as dry as Carmen’s eczema-covered skin. Without having to think about it too much, I scratch urgently at the rough patch near her right wrist until it begins to bleed steadily onto the cuff of her long-sleeved white shirt.
Some things, I’ve found, the body simply remembers.
We finally pass a sign that says, Welcome to Paradise, Pop. 1503. Beyond it, a hint of dirty grey water, white caps rolling in the distance.
The name causes a little catch in my breathing, though I can’t be certain why. I do not think I have ever been here before, in the way that I can sometimes recall things, impressions really; 16, 32, 48 lives out of context.
Perhaps the town’s misguided civic optimism is something that amuses Carmen. For I get flashes of my girls, my hosts, my vessels, from time to time. They are with me, but quiescent, docile. Maybe they believe they are dreaming and will shortly awaken. Some do occasionally make their way to the surface—like divers who have run out of air, breaking above the waterline clawing and gasping—before simply winking out because the effort is too great to sustain. It makes things only marginally easier that there is not a constant dialogue, a rapprochement, between us. Still, I am very aware that I occupy rented space, so to speak, and it informs everything that I do, everything that I am. I am never relaxed, because I am never wholly comfortable inside a skin that is not mine.
It is so far from it, Paradise, this small, dusty town laid out in a strict grid and set down on the edge of a swampy peninsula, nothing pretty about it,that seems to just peter out into the ocean. The high school we pull into—all low, boxy buildings, cyclone fencing and endlessly painted-over graffiti—sits on the town’s barren outskirts, making no attempt to blend in with the landscape.
The bus shudders to a halt, there is a hiss as the front door releases, and a restive ripple of movement from the people around me, like an animal stirring.
I have not spoken for over an hour, not having trusted myself to form the appropriate words. When someone snaps impatiently for the second time, ‘Carmen Zappacosta’, it is only the blonde girl’s loud, derisive snort that has me raising my head slowly and then my hand. When I let it fall again, it hits my lap with a dull sound, like dead
