Exile

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 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 fly-struck 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 can 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.

Justine Hennessy murmurs at my side, ‘Hey, it’s okay, I can skip the coffee today. You’re obviously very busy.’

‘Wait!’ I tell the brassy blonde, indicating Justine. ‘She needs a coffee for services rendered.’

The blonde barks, ‘No freebies!’ before turning and snapping in a customer’s face, ‘So is it butter or tomato sauce? Make up your mind, I haven’t got all day!’ All the while she’s still passing out coffees and shovelling fried things into paper bags without pause, though it isn’t exactly service with a smile.

Justine tries to pull away from me but the gentle-looking barista says to her in lilting, accented English, ‘How do you take it?’ without looking up from the three takeout cups she’s filling from a silver jug.

‘Flat white, one sugar,’ Justine says hesitantly. ‘But it’s all right, I can wait. I’ll pay, it’s no problem.’

The girl gives her a fleeting smile and grabs one of the just prepared coffees and a stick of sugar and hands them to Justine with a plastic spoon. ‘Shhh, don’t tell,’ she says out of the corner of her mouth, making a shooing motion with one hand.

‘Hey!’ some old guy shouts. ‘We’re waiting here. Since when do the hookers get served first?’

Justine, her cheeks suddenly stained a brilliant red, stares so haughtily at the guy that he finally looks down, flustered. He’s a fat, short, ruddy-cheeked man with the full catastrophe of beard, moustache and receding ginger hair worn a little too long over the ears. Sure, he’s dressed in an expensive-looking suit, custom-tailored to fit his stocky, truncated frame, and shiny Italian shoes, but he’s hardly in a position to judge anybody.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ I say mildly.

The man’s cheeks grow even ruddier. He does not meet my eyes.

The faux blonde’s over-plucked brows draw together sharply at my words and she snarls, ‘Get to work!’ in my direction, then glares at the barista for good measure.

The girl’s gentle smile disappears and she gets on with pouring the next three shots of coffee into three more identical waxed paper cups that she’s set up in a neat line.

‘You!’ the blonde says to Justine disdainfully. ‘You’ve got your free coffee, now get out.’

Justine dances forward as if she’d like to take a swing at the woman behind the counter, but I drag her towards the door. ‘Thanks again,’ I say, ignoring the blonde’s evil eye from across the room. ‘You’ve really helped me out. I forget things all the time. Some days are better than others. Actually, today’s a good day, would you believe?’

Justine’s colour is still high but she gives me a tight smile and murmurs, ‘Anytime. It’s not like you haven’t helped me out before, hey?’

Her womanly figure, broad through the shoulders and hips, cuts back through the crowd and is gone before I can ask her what she means. We are once more sealed off from the outside world by the ancient glass-fronted door, that disgusting plastic curtain.

I drift back towards the coffee machine and the drag-queen blonde grabs the back of my apron and yanks me into motion.

‘Deal ’em out,’ she orders, taking off her own apron and throwing it over a mop and bucket propped in one corner. She heads towards the narrow corridor that runs past the cramped galley kitchen towards the toilets. ‘Ciggie break,’ she calls out with relish, her fingers doing the universal victory sign understood by smokers everywhere. ‘And it’s gonna be a long one. So hold the fort. If you can.’

The short-order cook glances up at us both for a moment.

‘Quit staring at me, you Muslim fundamentalist,’ the blonde snaps as she passes the serving hatch. ‘Haven’t you seen a real woman before?’

He looks down unhurriedly, keeps chopping.

‘Who’s next?’ I say coolly into at least a dozen ticked-off faces, the angry corporate gnome among them, as the barista girl shakes her head and keeps on pouring shots of coffee.

Thanks to my preternaturally good eyes and ears and a weird mnemonic ability with words, most of the patrons I serve this morning probably won’t even notice that I’m only a rough facsimile of the girl who’s served them before.

Chapter 4

It doesn’t really get quiet until after 10.30 am. I know, because I’m watching the clock, dispirited by the smells, the noise, the sheer barefaced rudeness of the people that constantly wash in and out of this place. Let’s just say that there’s a twitch in Lela’s left hand that wasn’t there earlier. If the purpose of me being here is that I gain some kind of empathy for this girl and her miserable existence, hey, it’s working. I hate her life as much as she does already.

‘I think nice people like nicer surroundings, you know?’ the barista says with a shrug when she finally gets a moment to wipe down the surfaces of her machine. ‘We get all kinds here. Mostly not so nice.’

‘You’ll think this is really . . . odd,’ I say carefully, ‘but you’re going to have to remind me who that man is.’ I point to the silent, glowering giant in the kitchen, massive shoulders bunched over lunch prep. ‘And who the woman is who went outside for a “ciggie break”, uh, well over two hours ago.’

The barista girl makes a clicking sound through her teeth. ‘You not joking, right? You really can’t remember? You been here over four months already. You not pulling my leg?’

I shake my head, looking at her expectantly, and she says finally, ‘His name is Sulaiman, North African man, he start working here last month. Nice man, very quiet, like to pray. The devil woman is Reggie. The old cook, he quit. Said Reggie push him too far. I’m Cecilia, originally from Cebu.’

She can almost see the gears of my brain grinding sluggishly into motion and takes pity on me. ‘In the Philippines.’

‘Oh, right,’ I say, still troubled by the gaping hole in my recall. Just probing the name Carmen Zappacosta is enough to bring on a shock wave of mental anguish. It’s as if that past identity comes with an added electrical charge, is ringed around, in my mind, by fire. And I know, without knowing how, that it has something to do with my dream. The dream that had seemed so real and so beautiful, which I hadn’t wanted to wake from and can’t now remember.

Cecilia misinterprets my expression and gives me a reproachful look. ‘You like me, but you don’t like her. You say Sulaiman just okay. That’s what you tell me before.’

I give her what I’m hoping is an apologetic smile. ‘It’s the drugs,’ I say.

Cecilia shakes her head. ‘You university students all into weird shit. Bad for you brain.’ She starts putting her tiny universe into some kind of order before the next onslaught of caffeine hounds: cups over here, spoons over there, sugar, cocoa sprinkler, new bottle of soy milk, new bottle of skinny milk, new bottle of regular milk, dishcloths for spillages.

I laugh at the indignation in her voice. ‘No doubt. Uh, the woman that was here before, with me . . . Justine?’ I ask. ‘Do I know her, too?’

Cecilia is silent for a while, just looks at me with her solemn, liquid eyes. ‘You for real?’ she says. ‘She one of them exotic dancers from the Showgirls Lounge.’

When I screw up my face in confusion, Cecilia clicks her tongue. ‘You know, she dance for men for money. In a club. Don’t ask me what else she do in there.’

Well, that explains a lot. Like why, in her down time, Justine dresses to hide her shape, making herself plainer and more ordinary than she needs to be. The ‘hooker’ comment had probably hit a little too close to home.

Cecilia adds, ‘She got ex-boyfriend trouble — he follow her everywhere, won’t leave her alone. She leave him because he beat her so badly she go to hospital one time. But every time she move club, he find her again. She move house, he find her, too. No one take her seriously, but you. Not even the police. You let her hide in Mr Dymovsky’s office once, when he not there, remember? Justine crying, say she gonna die.’

There’s disbelief in Cecilia’s eyes that I could forget something like that. I don’t blame her — I wouldn’t believe me, either. Justine begged Lela for shelter once from an abusive stalker? Christ. No wonder she thought I was playing a sick joke on her before.

The way Justine looks and carries herself makes total sense to me now. It’s always men doing it to women, I find. Crimes of passion? There’s never any passion about it from the female point of view. Here’s hoping she manages to outrun the creep and find herself a healthier line of work.

Cecilia’s made me a coffee while we’ve been talking, and I try to drink it because it’s a kind gesture and probably the last thing she wants to make in her spare time. But I’m no fan of the stuff — doesn’t take me long to work that out — and I shove it discreetly to one side.

Everything in this place is as antiquated and plug ugly as the coffee machine. The refrigerated soft- drinks cabinets; the air-conditioning unit with pieces missing from the control panel; the two ceiling fans that are wobbling away at full tilt; the tables, all with wads of folded-up paper jammed beneath the legs to keep them even; the speckled linoleum-tiled floor; the mismatched chairs; the rounded, green plastic light fixtures, like so many space helmets; the pink-framed pictures of lovely Slavic destinations that probably no longer exist, replaced by car parks and shopping malls. It’s a hideous place, the Green Lantern coffee shop, and I can’t understand why the well-dressed young man sitting alone at a table with an open laptop in front of him would want to work here.

Sunlight falls upon his light brown hair, which has a slight wave to it, cut short. He has blue eyes, straight brows, a pale complexion, and the faint lines on his face give him a perpetually stern, slightly cold expression. He’s just above six feet in height, with poor posture that makes his suit look a little too big on him. He has a bad habit of leaning his head and neck into his computer screen, like a turtle or a duck. He’s probably shortsighted, but in denial. A normal-looking guy. Not ugly, exactly, but no dreamboat either. Not like . . .

There’s that neural sizzle again as my recall inconveniently hits the wall; I clutch at my forehead briefly in renewed pain, before the feeling passes.

What the hell is wrong with me? It’s like there are no-go areas in my brain that I keep trespassing on by accident; like I’ve been deliberately tampered with.

D’uh, I hear you say.

Well, more so than usual, okay?

As if the young man feels my thoughts on him, he looks up and meets my gaze. ‘Did Andy ever ask you out?’ he says, taking a sip of his coffee out of a heavy, ivory-coloured mug.

Lela’s eyebrows snap together, me doing it. It’s an unexpected question, and kind of personal, I would’ve thought. But he’s talking to someone who doesn’t respect boundaries either, so I decide I’ll humour him.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, moving around the counter and walking across the dining area so that I can see into his face. I stop beside his table, arms crossed. ‘Do I know you?’

I’m in favour of the direct approach. Beating around the bush takes way too long and way too much energy.

Do I imagine that his eyes seem to blaze for an instant before his expression evens out and he replies, ‘Ranald, remember? I’ve only been coming here almost every morning for a year to get my caffeine hit from Cecilia. She does better coffee than anyone I know — and I’ve tried everything for at least three blocks in both directions. This place is like my offsite office these days, right?’ He turns and looks in Cecilia’s direction.