Mercy

MERCY

REBECCA LIM

To my husband, Michael Liu, who makes it all possible.

With love always.

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

There’s something very wrong with me.

I can’t remember who I am or how old I am, or even how I got here. All I know is that when I wake up, I could be any age and anyone, all over again. It is always this way.

If I get too comfortable, I will wake one morning and everything around me will have shifted overnight. All I knew? I know no longer. And all I had? Vanished in an instant. There’s nothing I can keep with me that will stay. It’s made me adaptable.

I must always re-establish ties.

I must tread carefully or give myself away.

I must survive.

I must keep moving, but I don’t know why.

I am my own worst enemy; that much I’ve figured out.

You know almost as much about me as I do.

I look sixteen. Sometimes I even feel it.

Me? The real me? I’m tall. Though I only have a sense of that.

I’m pale, like milk, but I never get sunburn. Don’t ask me how I know this, seeing as I don’t seem to occupy any physical space at the present time, but I just know.

My hair is brown. Not a nice brown or an ugly one, just brown. It’s weird, but it has no highlights. It’s all the same colour, every single strand straight, even and perfectly the same. It hangs down just past my shoulders and frames my face nicely, which is oval and okay, I suppose. I have a long, straight nose, lips that are neither too thin nor too wide, and perfect eyesight. I can see for miles, through sunshine or moonlight, rain or fog. Oh, and my eyes? They’re brown, too. And I never feel the cold, ever.

When I look in the mirror, I see this face—mine, I have learnt to recognise it, a palimpsest of a face, a ghost’s face—within another’s, a stranger’s. Our reflections co-existing. I am her and she is me, and we, together, inhabit the same body.

How is this possible? I do not know. We are two people with nothing in common, nothing that ties us together, except that I am currently the reason she—whoever she is—can talk and move and laugh, go through the very motions of her life. I am like a grave robber, a body-snatcher, an evil spirit. And she? My zombie alter ego who must do as she is told.

If I think hard about myself, really hard, I get the one word: Mercy. It’s what I’ve taken to calling myself for want of something better. It might even actually be my name, but your guess is as good as mine.

My only real solace? Sleep. In the absence of an explanation for anything, for everything, I live for it and what it can bring.

Though I seem continually reborn, in this fogbound life I still have a kind of compass, a touchstone. He reminds me to call him Luc and appears to me only in my dreams.

His features are more familiar to me than my own. For I have traced them in my head and with my heart, such as it is. And perhaps once—though memory can be a treacherous thing—even with my hands when they were real, made of flesh and bone and blood and not of the insubstantial air.

He has hair of true gold cropped close, with sleek, winged brows of a darker gold, pale eyes, golden skin. He is tall, broad-shouldered, snake-hipped, flawless as only dreams can be. Like a sun god when he walks. Save for his mouth, which can be both cruel and amused. He tells me not to give up, that I must keep searching, find him. That one day it will all make sense. And all this? Will have seemed merely a heartbeat. An inconvenience.

‘I am only a little ahead,’ he laughs as we sway together on a narrow precipice, high above a desert valley floor, the whole sleeping world spread out before us. ‘A little ahead.’

His hand is steady beneath my elbow. If he were not here, I would surely fall, and even in dreams, die. Though my true name always eludes me—like him, it is always just a little ahead—my fear of heights does not. Why this is, again, I do not know.

As always, Luc warns of others looking for me: his erstwhile brothers, eight in number. That if They find me, They will destroy me. And that save for him, They are the most powerful enemies one may have in this world.

‘If They catch you,’ he cautions, ‘They will surely kill you. And that, my love, is no dream.’

He whispers these awful-beautiful things with his familiar half-smile, before light seems to bleed from him for an instant. Then he is gone.

I wake with his warnings in my ears.

I wake now, sitting 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.

CHAPTER 2

‘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 flesh.

I narrow my eyes. It is the teacher with the grey hair and hatchet face speaking. She shakes her head before continuing sourly, ‘House rules are no drinking, no smoking, no sleeping with any member of the host family. Over the years of this little “cultural exchange” program, we’ve had stealing, people going “native”, emergency hospitalisations, immaculate conceptions. Miscreants will be dealt with ruthlessly. And do try to remember why it is that you’re here—as representatives of St Joseph’s Girls’ School. You’re here to sing and that is all. Am I clear, or am I clear?’

The coach is a sea of rolling eyes of every colour as people rise excitedly to get their things. I watch to see what remains and then take it, stumbling after the others as if the bus is a pitching sailboat.

On the way out, I catch the driver’s eyes—like burning holes beneath his meticulous comb-over—and he sees that somehow I know, because he looks away and will not look at me again, even though I stare and stare. Can no one else see it? That misery that envelopes him like a personal fog.

‘Call me when you get over your little episode,’ hisses the frosty blonde over her shoulder as I fall down the stairs behind her under the weight of Carmen’s loaded sports bag, almost landing on my new host father. I register that he is a strong-jawed, dark-haired man of unusual height dressed in khaki pants, a casual shirt and dark blazer. Nice looking. What is the adjective I am looking for? That’s right. Handsome.

I know he is waiting for me because I’m the last girl to get off the bus. All of the other girls are already shrugging off their blazers, letting their hair down,making eyes at their host brothers, sussing out the situation.

‘So this is Paradise!’ I hear the blonde girl exclaim flirtatiously.

If I were to be truly convincing, I should probably be doing the same, but I’m no good at flirting—there’s no sweetness in me—and it is a simple triumph just to stand vaguely upright. I am aware that I am listing slightly and make appropriate, but subtle adjustments to my posture.

The man Carmen has been entrusted to does not notice; he maintains his kind smile, his steady, patient expression. Neither does he notice the indefinable distance between himself and all the other people gathered in the parking lot. Eyes dart his way constantly, there is talk, talk, talk, mouths opening and closing, sly laughter, disapprobation, but he does not see it. Or chooses not to. Instead, he takes Carmen’s bag out of my dead grasp and shoulders it easily.

I follow him numbly, just putting one foot in front of the other; every step I take upon the surface of the world imprinting itself upon my borrowed bones.

CHAPTER 3

After stowing Carmen’s bag in the trunk of his car, the tall stranger opens the front passenger door and gallantly sees me settled before taking the driver’s seat.

When he puts out his bear-like hand and says kindly, ‘Hello, I’m Stewart Daley,’ I must remind myself to do the same. Not observing the conventions can make you seem like an alien.

‘Uh, hi, uh, Carmen, um, Zappa … costa,’ I mutter awkwardly, searching for the girl’s name in my recently laid-down memory.

If he wonders why I’m having trouble pronouncing my own name, he’s polite enough not to show it.

But the instant my hand meets his, I absorb a sensation like liquid grief, a kind of drowning. It is completely at odds with the man’s friendly exterior and fills the space between us like floodwater surging to meet its level. A wild thing has suddenly been let loose in the car, a wordless horror, screaming for attention, and I cannot help but pull back as if the man is on fire.

Then the car’s mockingly ordinary interior reasserts itself. I clock the leaf-shaped air freshener hanging from the mirror. The slightly smoky tint of the windscreen. The leather bucket seats, faux wood-grain dash, the ragged road map in the passenger side pocket. My breathing evens out, my left hand no longer burns with that strange phantom pain.

Whatever it is, this feeling, this horror, this secret, it lingers about him like a detectable odour, a familiar on his shoulder gnawing at his flesh. I wonder that I didn’t see it before, the man far more adept than the bus driver at hiding the cancer in his soul. It is only discernible through touch. Interesting.

‘I suppose you’ve heard,’ he says, withdrawing his hand quickly. He looks away, blinks twice, before starting the car. ‘This is a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. They probably worded you up already. Can’t say I blame them. I’d want that for my own kid.’

We head out of the parking lot in the man’s comfortable family wagon and head at determined right angles through the town, through the main street with its charcoal chicken shops, mini-marts, laundromat, family diners, bars. We don’t speak again until he stops the car outside a white-painted, double-storey, timber family home with prominent gables, a two-car garage, picket fence, bird feeders on the lawn. The place is neat, well maintained, like the man himself.

Unlike its neighbours, the house comes complete with three giant guard dogs, Dobermans, all sleek black-and-tan muscle. Two lie across the footpath to the front door, the other on its back on the lawn, all three languid and deadly. Something about their presence tugs at me, won’t come clear.

‘You’ll want to stay in the car a moment,’ Mr Daley says gently.

He gets out and engages in an elaborate ritual of unlocking a heavy-looking chain and padlock set-up he’s got going on his front gates that would make visiting the Daleys a pretty interesting exercise. When he’s finally swung the gates open, he slips through, whistling for his dogs to follow. But one suddenly lifts its head and breaks rank, then they all do. And without warning, they’re through the gates and circling the car, snarling and spitting. They scratch at the doors, snapping on hind legs, seeking a way in, a way to get to me.

I feel Carmen’s brow furrow, realise I am doing it. Then I remember.

Dogs, more than any other creature, sense me, fear me. Perhaps even see me trapped inside a body that isn’t mine. Where I’ve recalled this from, when, escapes me. All I know is, it’s made Carmen’s time in Paradise a lot more complicated.

‘Come!’ Stewart Daley roars, perplexed when the dogs refuse to obey.

When they continue to ignore him, bent on somehow eating their way through the car door to me, he drags them away by the collar, one by one, and locks them behind a head-high side gate. The dogs continue to howl and froth and claw at the chain-link, barbed-wire-topped fence with their front paws as if they are possessed. It is a scene out of the horror movies Lucy used to live for, as if her own life weren’t horrible enough.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mr Daley says, breathing heavily as he opens my car door. ‘I can’t understand it. I mean, they bark from time to time. But that? Well.’

I shrug Carmen’s thin shoulders—easier than forming words of explanation—and get stiffly out of the car.

When he tries to put a hand on my shoulder to usher me into the house, I cannot stop myself from flinching away. I can almost feel the man’s hurt as he moves ahead, still toting Carmen’s bag.

But I’m grateful for the distance he’s put between us. Several times, like someone in the grip of a dangerous palsy, an incurable illness, I trip over things that aren’t there and I’m glad he doesn’t see it. The walk from the car to the house may as well be measured in light years, aeons. I am perspiring heavily, though the day is overcast and very cool.

His wife suddenly appears at the painted white front door and I stumble to a standstill. It is surprise that does it. Seeing the two of them together like—what is that saying?—chalk and cheese.

‘Carmen?’ she calls out warmly. ‘Welcome, dear, welcome.’

Mrs Daley is an impeccably groomed woman who used to be very beautiful, and still dresses as if she were, with great care and attention to detail. But she has a secret, too, and it is eating away at her soul, has taken up residence in her face, which is all angles, lines, hollows and stretched-tight skin beneath her sleek, dark fall of hair. She wears her grief far less lightly than her husband does, or he is much better at dissembling. Whatever the reason, she looks to me like the walking dead.

I am completely unprepared when she surges out of the house and wraps one of my hands in hers. It is all I can do not to wrench myself away and flee—back past the killer dogs, the unlovely school, the bus driver whose heart has already been removed from him, still beating. There is the sense that I am the only still point in a spinning, screaming world. What resides beneath her skin is a manifold amplification of the horror beneath her husband’s; a charnel-house.

I break contact hastily on the pretence of tying a shoelace and, mercifully, the noise, the shrieking, is cut off. She stands over me silently like an articulated skeleton in cashmere separates and pearl-drop earrings and yet all that is happening beneath the surface of her,behind her eyes. What a pair they make. What kind of place is this? What am I doing here?

‘This way, dear,’ says Mrs Daley calmly as her husband precedes us up the stairs to the bedrooms, Carmen’s bag in hand.

He pushes open a white-painted door to the immediate left of the lushly carpeted staircase. It is clearly a girl’s room, filled with girl’s things—an overflowing jewellery box; posters of heart-throbs interspersed with ponies, whales and sunsets; a vanity unit teeming with glitter stickers and photos of a very pretty blonde girl chilling with a host of friends more numerous than I can take in. Popular, then. There’s a single bed and cushions everywhere, one of which spells out the name Lauren in bright pink letters. Like the house, the room is neat and clean and white, white, white. I wonder where she is, this Lauren.

‘I’m sorry that our son, Ryan, couldn’t be here to greet you,’ Mrs Daley says, shooting a quick look at her husband. Her skeletal hands sketch the air gracefully. ‘We’ve made some space for you in the wardrobe, and you can have the bathroom next door all to yourself. That was—’

Mr Daley half-turns towards the door, says quietly, ‘Louisa …’

His wife smoothly changes tack. ‘It’s entirely free for your use, Carmen. There’s a shower and a bath, hair dryer, toiletries. You’ll find fresh towels in the open shelving unit beside the sink.’

I nod my head. ‘I might use it now, if that’s okay with you, Mrs … Daley, Mr … Daley. It was a very long, uh, trip.’