can’t afford to upset Mr Dymovsky again, and if you don’t get the 7.08 bus you’re not going to make it. That’s what you told me.’
‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I say without hesitation. If the woman beneath the bed covers were not so thin and ill, prematurely aged and drawn, she and Lela would be the image of each other, save thirty years apart.
I stand and bend over her, give her the briefest of kisses on her paper-dry cheek, wrinkling my nose at the burnt-flesh-chemical smell of her. I twitch straight her garishly bright headscarf, pull the bedclothes back up over her brittle collarbones. All these actions are Lela’s impulses, done before I realise I’m doing them. Lela loves her mother, and some things, I’ve found, the body simply remembers.
‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ the woman whispers. ‘Now go. Remember to eat. I’ll be fine. Georgia will be here for her usual shift and the council carer is coming in the afternoon to do some cleaning and help bathe me. I’ve got the pump, and I’m as comfortable as can be expected. Father Davey rang to say he’ll pop in, though goodness knows why. I’m not at death’s door.’ She gives me the ghost of a smile.
She is, though. Both she and I know it.
She closes her pain-shadowed eyes. ‘I’ll see you after five, darling bud. Love my girl.’
I pause, sorry to draw her back to me, but I have no idea where to start living Lela’s life, how to walk purposefully out into Lela’s day.
‘If I wanted to call him, Mum,’ I say, shaking her gently by the shoulder, ‘where would I find his card?’
She frowns weakly, no energy left even to open her eyes. ‘Card?’ she murmurs. ‘What card?’
‘Mr Dymovsky’s card,’ I reply, the syllables awkward on my tongue. ‘I should call ahead. He won’t be so angry if I call ahead.’
She’s silent for so long I wonder if she’s fallen asleep. Perhaps I’ll have to get the answer I want some other way. I glance out the door into the dim hallway of this stranger’s house and wonder how many rooms there are, and whether the information would even be here in physical form. Maybe it’s just inside Lela’s head. Things are stacked everywhere, there’s dust on almost every surface, and I sense that the older woman’s illness has stopped time in this place. Nothing is more important than making sure she is comfortable; keeping vigil over her life.
I know the woman’s dying, that the treatments have failed. Not only can I detect the sickness in her, I smell the medication seeping out of the pores of her skin. There’s no part of her body that does not carry the taint of both, co-mingled.
I wonder if Lela knows how serious it is. If she truly understands.
When the woman at last replies, her voice is very quiet. ‘I don’t know about any card, love, but it’s in the book.’
She coughs and keeps coughing for several minutes.
Once she’s still again, I say with genuine puzzlement, ‘What book?’
A tiny crease appears between her closed eyes. ‘The phone book, Lela. The Green Lantern’s in the phone book, isn’t it? And it’s in the kitchen where it’s always been, unless you’ve gone and moved it. Tell Reggie to tell Mr Dymovsky if you don’t want to speak to him yourself. You’ve stood up for her often enough, Lord knows why . . .’
For a while, I watch the shallow rise and fall of the woman’s chest as her breathing evens out into sleep.
Time to get this show on the road, I tell myself grimly, wishing I, too, was still asleep, wishing that the dream I can no longer recall would go on forever, taking me with it.
Lela’s eyes meet mine in the dresser mirror as I place her feet into the worn scuffs beside the armchair.
It’s 7.27 am by the time I leave the house with Lela’s backpack over one shoulder, her annual bus pass clutched in one hand. The bus stop is less than one hundred metres from the house; I see a bus pulling away as I walk up to it.
There are two other people standing there, both isolated from me by their audio equipment. One is a tall, broad-shouldered, heavy-eyed woman in tracksuit bottoms and a loose white blouse, her mass of wavy dark brown hair caught up in a tight, messy ponytail, her feet in a pair of cheap slides, a black leather handbag slung over one shoulder. She’s young, and her face is free of make-up, but there’s an expression on it that’s hard or wary and makes her look far older than she really is. Inside her strangely shapeless get-up, she’s practically slouching to make herself seem even more shapeless. What’s that word men use both to praise and to objectify? That’s right, hourglass. She has an hourglass figure, killer curves, under there.
The other is a male — late teens? early twenties? — with sandy dreadlocks pulled back into a thick ponytail. He’s wearing a washed-out band tee and long shorts, a stained messenger bag slung across his body, the reflector strip across the bottom grimy in the daylight; one hand on the edge of a skateboard. He checks me out quite openly as I walk towards him, only looking away hastily when he appears to recognise who I am. It’s clear he’s seen Lela before; I can tell from the complicated expression on his face. He must live in one of the houses nearby. See her around, and often.
I guess I move differently from the way Lela usually does. And I’m dressed like a car crash — in a bright green tank top with diamantés spelling out the word Starlet and a floral skirt scattered with big, red, splashy blooms, red flat shoes. It was the only vaguely matching full outfit I could pull together quickly in Lela’s messy bedroom. Clothing was literally spilling out of her battered, old, two- door wardrobe, most of it too heavy for a day like today. It looked to me like she’s been sleeping in that armchair next to her mother’s bed, rather than in her own room. There was a mummified apple core on her paper-strewn desk that had to be at least a month old.
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
