Mercy (10 page)

As he turns to look at me, Brenda tugs hard at his hand and says brightly, ‘Come on, Ry! This may turn out to be fun, after all.’

We pass some seedy-looking, middle-aged punters at the bar, who check Brenda out with more than a little interest, as we head towards a private function room 109

out the back. It’s decked out cheesily with coloured helium balloons and two twirling disco balls that fleck the walls and ceiling with broken light. The space is dominated by a wall of video screens in front of which is a small, maroon velveteen-bedecked stage. Two of the kids from Paradise High are half-turned towards the bank of televisions, crooning sickeningly at each other:
my … endless … love
. There is good-natured snickering and heckling from the tightly packed crowd of drink-clutching teens at their feet.

In the way that I sometimes have of seeing too much, too quickly, I pick out a tight knot of adults clustered across the room, Miss Fellows, Miss Dustin, Gerard Masson and Laurence Barry among them, together with a few watchful parents whose eyes narrow collectively and speculatively as they alight on Ryan Daley’s tall figure. Other kids begin to point, stare and murmur as they spot him, too. Clearly, Ryan was never one of the choirboys.

Brenda practically drags him around the room on a victory lap. His eyes search for mine and he throws me an apologetic look.

There must be almost a hundred people here. I zero in on Tiffany Lazer, surrounded by the St Joseph’s 110

faithful, and Brenda’s two henchwomen, Tod and Spotty Boy standing nearby. Spotty Boy hasn’t yet seen me, and I duck my head down and push through in the opposite direction, happy to stand on my own.

The lights are so bright in here I can relax on that score. I clock that there’s only one way in and one way out, and hope fiercely that, if no one sees me, I can hightail it out of here at the earliest opportunity. But I see another victim step up to the mike after a round of lazy applause greets the grating finale of the endless lovers, and I
know
I’m in trouble when a boy I don’t recall meeting thrusts a drink and a plastic-covered song list into my hand and says, ‘Where
were
you? We were all waiting. You’re almost up next. So choose already.’

I quickly scull the contents of my plastic cup, and the boy gives me a huge grin and two thumbs up. There’s something in the cola, I realise, because he’s making a secretive
tippy tippy
manoeuvre with his hand, his back to the adults across the room. Before I can say
no
to another, I’ve got a new cup in my hand and he’s standing there with expectant eyes, willing me to finish it.

‘Right under their noses,’ he says with satisfaction, tapping the side of his
nose. ‘I’m Bailey, by the way.’

The taste of the adulterated cola isn’t unpleasant 111

and, as I thumb through the sticky pages of the song list, I down three more drinks, thanks to sheer, fearful adrenaline. The guy’s eyes are wide with wonder as he melts away to keep me supplied with more.

I look up sharply as Tiffany begins to sing. It’s a song with a big, thumping chorus about survival and heartache with a driving, insistent beat. It’s a crowd-pleaser with the girls in particular — they’re all throwing their hands in the air and screaming along with the words, every single one of which they seem to have committed to memory. Of course, being me, I have no recollection of this song and remain unmoved in the heaving, thrusting bedlam.

Tiffany’s
beat that
stare finds me over the heads of the throng as she continues to belt out the words, and that cold feeling in my spine returns, the sense of being balanced on razor wire over the shrieking abyss.

Everything a freakin’ contest.

‘Man, you can put that shit away!’ shouts Bailey admiringly as he watches me crush yet another empty plastic cup in my hand.

That gives me an idea, and a moment later, I let my eyes roll back in my head as I fall to the ground. Like a tree crashing to the forest floor.

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A girl nearby screams, ‘Oh — my — GOD!’ as the boy, Bailey, shouts above me, ‘Shit, shit,
shit
! Someone help me here!’

I keep my eyes resolutely shut as a swirl of activity takes place over and around Carmen’s prone body.

‘How much did you give her to drink, Bails?’

someone hisses.

Bailey’s panicky whisper confirms I chugalugged eight bourbon-spiked colas in one sitting.

‘She’s probably in a freakin’
coma
,’ exclaims a girl nearby. ‘She’ll need her stomach pumped out
for sure
.’

Someone bends to check I have a pulse. A touch so brief, there isn’t time for me to make a connection, and for that I am truly grateful. From the ambient smell of 113

mothballs, however, I’m guessing it’s Laurence Barry who has taken it upon himself to gather me into his arms, cradling my head and shoulders off the floor. I continue to play dead for safety.

As Bailey babbles to a concerned parent that he only gave me one or two soft drinks before I passed out — ‘I have no idea what’s wrong with her, I swear to God’ — I hear Ryan’s voice as he shoulders his way through the onlookers and takes charge.

‘I’ll get her home, Mr Barry,’ he says firmly.

‘She needs to see a doctor,’ Laurence Barry insists stubbornly. He continues to hold my upper body off the floor as if I am made of sugar and spun glass. For a brief moment, his grip tightens and the side of my face is crushed into the felt underside of his dusty black lapel. I almost struggle and give the game away. I force myself to stay floppy and take shallow, laboured breaths, though the smell of camphor laced with old-man body odour, coffee breath and hair oil is intense.

‘No, really,’ Ryan insists. ‘She’s on serious medication for her, uh, bad skin condition. She’s probably just had a mild reaction to something she’s eaten or drunk.

Nothing sleep won’t fix. She warned my parents all about it before we left the house tonight. It’s no biggie.’

114

Though Ryan wins out, I can feel Laurence Barry’s strange reluctance to let me go as I’m finally passed from one to the other. To kick up the believability a notch, I allow my head to loll backwards and Ryan must hastily prop it against one broad shoulder. The leather of his jacket is cold and supple and I resist the urge to turn my face further towards him and breathe in his addictive clean, male smell.

Carmen’s heart takes off again, and for a moment all I can hear is the pounding of her blood.

‘She’s just trying to spoil it for me!’ I hear Tiffany snipe into the microphone, cut off mid-crescendo, mid-chorus. ‘She’s always been a jealous little
bitch
. This is another
stunt
, I tell you.’

‘Hurry back, Ry!’ Brenda wails. ‘Why does this always happen to
me
?’

As we stride through Mulvany’s, leaving hubbub and consternation in our wake, Ryan breathes curiously into my closed eyelids, ‘Now what was all that in aid of, pipsqueak?’

‘Put me down!
Ry
,’ I hiss as we hit the icy car park.

I kick a little for emphasis.

‘Not a chance,’ he answers good-humouredly. ‘One, 115

because you’ve still got an audience — you’ve really managed to get on that Tiffany’s chest, haven’t you? —

and two, you don’t weigh anything. I’m kind of enjoying your helpless maiden act. It makes a change from the usual cold front you put on.’

He eases me into the front passenger seat and I freeze as a deep male voice I don’t recognise says behind him, ‘How’s your mother, Ryan? We don’t see her out and about as much as we used to. Betty’s been worried about her.’

Ryan shuts the door firmly on me and I slide down in the seat and face away from the window where a man is peering inwards at my prone figure. I make sure I lie on my hands, and let my hair fall a little further all over my face so that no part of my skin is clearly visible, the very picture of wayward teen drunkenness.

‘She’s fine, Mr Collins,’ Ryan replies lightly, moving to block his view of me. The neon light advertising
Mulvany’s
,
Mulvany’s
,
Mulvany’s
in a constant, epilepsy-inducing staccato diminishes in the car’s interior. ‘As much as can be expected anyway.’

‘No new developments?’ continues the man earnestly. ‘You know, we’ve told your father over and over, if there’s anything we can do to help …’

116

‘Thanks, Mr Collins,’ Ryan says, shaking the man’s hand and moving around the car towards the driver’s seat to end the conversation. I watch him through my slightly cranked open eyelids. ‘You know how difficult Dad can be …’ He slides into the car and tips the man a wave.

I clearly pick up the man’s reply, ‘Half his trouble

…’, as Ryan starts the car and begins to pull out of the car park.

When Mulvany’s is a distant blur in the driver’s mirror, I slide into a sitting position and push Carmen’s hair out of her eyes, tuck it behind her ears, with faintly glimmering hands. Ryan shoots me a quick look, his expression quizzical, before it’s eyes front again.

‘You don’t really need your stomach pumped out, do you?’ he laughs. ‘Bailey seemed convinced you’d had eight bourbon and Cokes.’

‘I did,’ I reply.

Ryan whistles. ‘You sure?’

I nod. ‘But I’m fine.’

‘You shouldn’t be.’ His eyes flick to me, then back to the road. ‘You really
should
be in a coma the way Bailey mixes his drinks. Approximately nine parts bourbon to one part Coke — if you were lucky.’

117

Whatever that ‘bourbon’ stuff was, it hardly signified.

I felt it evaporate quickly along Carmen’s nerve endings like accelerant poured on a bonfire, quickly burned off.

Leaving hardly an aftertaste.

‘The drinks were pleasant but not unduly …

troubling,’ I say, and shrug.

Ryan lets loose another uneasy laugh. ‘Why the fainting act, anyway? From what Tod and Clint were telling me back there, you would’ve blown Tiffany away.

Why didn’t you sing?’

So Spotty Boy’s name is Clint. I wonder if he and Ryan used to be friends. Whether the three girls and three boys used to triple date, or whatever it is that small town youth do around here.

‘I don’t know any popular music,’ I reply after a moment.

Which is true. I don’t. Apart from the Mahler I’ve only recently committed to memory, I don’t recall any music at all. Just another failing of my diseased mind.

Maybe something expurgated to keep me safe. Or off balance.

Ryan shoots me a disbelieving stare before refocusing on the road. ‘You’re shitting me, right?’

‘Nope,’ I say casually, as we pull up to the Daleys’

118

chained front gates. ‘I guess I just like Mahler.’

Ryan lets the engine idle for a moment, turns to face me. ‘You
are
unreal,’ he mutters. He pops his seatbelt, then the door, and adds, not looking at me, ‘Sometimes …

it’s like you’re two different people, you know?’

I watch as he enacts the usual ritual that entails getting into the Daleys’ place these days — unlock the heavy padlock that anchors the chain, unwind the heavy chain that anchors the gates, open the gates, return to the car, drive it forwards, then do it all over again, except in reverse. I can see what Stewart Daley was thinking when he came up with the new security measures, but that saying about horses having already bolted springs to mind. Neither the dogs nor the chains will bring Lauren back.

When the car finally stops, I open the front passenger door; the dogs catch my scent and whine, then begin snarling and howling in earnest. Barrelling into the barred side gate repeatedly with their bullet-shaped heads, their hard, muscular bodies, as if they have temporarily lost their minds.

‘Welcome home, honey,’ Ryan says, helping me down out of his car.

119

We head up the stairs towards Lauren’s bedroom. Apart from a dim nightlight on the upstairs landing, the house is in darkness and very quiet. All the bedroom doors, each blank white and identical, are neatly closed, as they have been each time I’ve returned to this house from school. I imagine Mrs Daley’s silent figure daily cleaning, cleaning. Putting everything but the thing she most desires, most longs for, back in its proper place.

‘You aren’t too tired to, uh, talk?’ Ryan asks as he follows me across the landing to Lauren’s bedroom door.

I’m in no mood for questions, but part of me is glad to have his company. Too glad. It could get to be a habit, and the thought makes me sound churlish as I snarl, ‘I’m rarely tired.’

He takes that as the ungracious yes it’s supposed to be. But it’s true. I don’t sleep very well. Still, it doesn’t slow me down any.

I turn the doorknob with one faintly glowing hand.

As the door swings wide and I turn on the light, I see —

— Mr Daley standing in the middle of his daughter’s bedroom, holding a short, white nightgown that must have belonged to her against his cheek. He is crooning softly, the sound making goose flesh rise instantly across the surface of Carmen’s skin.

120

‘Christ, Dad,’ Ryan hisses, darting a look down the hallway at his parents’ closed bedroom door. ‘What are you
doing
here? Jesus.’

Stewart Daley’s eyes are open and there are traces of tears on his cheeks, but there’s a slackness in his features that isn’t ordinarily there. I wave one hand in front of his face as he continues to make that soft, awful sound, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. I circle him a couple of times to make sure.

‘He’s not, uh,
here
,’ I murmur after a moment.