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; discard 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 haltingly. ‘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
