Rebecca Lim: Exile

She nods, gratified. ‘Two double espressos, no milk, no sugar. Served exactly an hour apart. The first one at 10.45, the second at 11.45.’

‘See?’ He smiles, though I sense hurt in his tone. ‘I’m what you’d class as a die-hard regular.’

And borderline OCD, I think. But I make sure the blandly polite smile I’m wearing doesn’t falter.

‘I was here the day you started work,’ he adds. ‘Everything was going wrong that morning, then there you were. You served me coffee and a raspberry friand, slightly warmed up, no cream. I’ve only asked you out about five times since, and you’ve always said no, or pretended you haven’t heard me. In the nicestpossible way, of course.’

I’m sure my smile of polite interest has congealed on Lela’s face. Just my luck to get talking to another regular who could actually tell there’s something badly off about Lela today. Luckily, I lie like a pro.

‘I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately,’ I say with a vague air. ‘Mum and everything. Haven’t been sleeping, worried out of my brain. It’s made me pretty . . . forgetful. And not much in the mood for . . . outings.’

Ranald nods. ‘Dmitri said as much. I asked him why you always seem so . . . preoccupied. And busy.’

‘What are you working on?’ I say, changing the subject deliberately. His eyes flash again and I know that he knows what I’m doing. He’s a smart guy, that’s evident.

I move behind him so that I can see his open laptop, curious about what the machine can do. I mean, I’m no relic from the dark ages — I know computers practically rule the world these days — but I’ve never been this close to one before. But, in one smooth move, Ranald closes the window he was working on and an anonymous screen takes its place, the cursor blinking softly within an empty box.

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘top secret. I’d have to kill you.’ He laughs a little to show that he’s joking.

I notice that he has quite feminine-looking hands and that his fingernails are chewed to the quick. They look so ragged that I’m guessing he has a very high pain threshold.

‘It’s nothing you’d find remotely interesting,’ he adds. ‘But if there’s anything you want to know or get in to have a look at,’ he gestures expansively at his computer screen, ‘I’m your man.’

When I don’t reply straightaway, he twists his head around to look up at me where I’m standing just behind his left shoulder. ‘Andy was messing you around, you know. He wasn’t good enough for you. From the way you spoke about him, I could tell. You deserve better. Someone who’ll take care of you. Especially now.’

‘Oh?’ I reply, a small crease between my brows. ‘Well, it’s kind of you to say that.’

Was Lela close to this guy? I have no way of knowing. That journal I scanned from cover to cover didn’t mention any guy other than Andy. So what do I do — kill a budding romance stone dead, or encourage it? What would Lela want me to do?

Lela? I say inside her head. There’s no reply. There never is. Not even a muscle twitch. I’ll take my cue from that.

‘You seem a lot less unhappy today,’ Ranald adds, studying my face. ‘Less . . . angry. And you look nice.’

He glances down shyly, ragged fingernails still poised above the keyboard.

‘I’ve come to terms with things,’ I reply. ‘I’m making the best of a difficult situation.’

The words are generic, but they seem to satisfy him.

‘That’s great,’ he says, then boasts, ‘Go on, try me. Ask me any question you’ve always wanted an answer to. I’ll find it for you. I mean it. I can find anything. Nothing’s safe from me.’

‘Carmen Zappacosta,’ I say so suddenly that it catches us both off guard. ‘Find out what you can about her and I’ll be in your debt forever.’

‘You mean it?’ he says eagerly. ‘Like you and me might finally go out for that meal?’

‘If that’s what it takes,’ I say, deliberately keeping things vague. ‘I guess, maybe.’

It’s worth a shot. I mean, I can’t remember the faintest thing about Carmen Zappacosta apart from her name, but maybe information about her exists somewhere outside my heavily compromised brain.

Ranald looks at his screen then up at me. ‘You’re sure that’s it? You just want me to look up some girl?’

He sounds disappointed, like what I’ve asked for is too easy. The computer nerd wants a challenge? Wonder how well he’d go with: Find out what my real name is. Tell me the real reason why I keep waking up in other people’s bodies with no memory of how I got there and no idea why it’s even necessary. Or how it’s even possible.

Instead, I nod. ‘That’s it.’

Small steps, small steps and patience are required here. Work out what it is about Carmen Zappacosta that I’m not supposed to know, and the rest will follow. I have to believe that.

Ranald begins by typing Carmen’s name straight into the empty box on his screen. I don’t need to correct the spelling; he gets it first time. There are eighteen pages of ‘search results’, and when Ranald clicks on the first reference — a newspaper report complete with colour photos — I have to remind myself to shut my mouth at what I’m seeing. I hadn’t known stuff like this was out there, capable of being organised, gathered, found.

Ranald gives a short laugh when he sees my expression. ‘You have to know what you’re looking for on the internet, and take it all with a huge grain of salt.’

Still, I’m fascinated, and I lean forward to scan the article. As far as I can tell, Carmen Zappacosta is a scrawny sixteen-year-old kid with a great set of pipes who recently survived being snatched by some kiddy-fiddling choirmaster with a prior history of stalking young girls in his care. It’s a sad story and my heart bleeds for her, really it does. But human nature being what it is, it’s hardly surprising.

For a long moment, I study a close-up of Carmen’s face. Pale and patchy complexion; dark, bruised-looking eyes; dark hair like a mushroom cloud of ringlets, almost too wild and heavy for her small, fine-boned head. The picture was taken at the hospital just after she suffered a devastating bout of post-traumatic amnesiae minute she’d been actively co-operating with the police, the article said, giving lucid and damning evidence against her attacker, and the next she claimed to have lost all her recent memories, as if they’d been . . . erased.

That gets my attention.

When I’m done reading I nod, and together Ranald and I navigate the rest of the search results on the page, reference by reference. They don’t seem to be in any kind of chronological order.

‘Why did they give Carmen the keys to the town of . . . Paradise?’ I wonder, before I realise that I’m talking aloud. ‘Where is that?’

Why do I suddenly feel so . . . uneasy?

‘Would Paradise,’ when I repeat the word, one eyelid begins to jump again, ‘even require keys?’

Ranald shrugs, clicks in and out of a few other sites while I look over his shoulder.

‘I remember that case now,’ he exclaims as he skims a web page he’s just opened. ‘The place where it all happened didn’t look particularly, uh, Paradise-like from the news footage, but I think the town rolled out the red carpet for Carmen because she managed to free two other girls that the guy was keeping prisoner in this dungeon beneath his house.’

‘What were the names of the other girls?’

Ranald closes the page we’re looking at and clicks in and out of a couple more before replying, ‘Jennifer Appleton and Lauren Daley.’

The words are barely out of his mouth when, inexplicably, I see Luc before me. So vividly that he might be standing right here with us, in this room. His beautiful mouth is both cruel and amused, the way he looks when he’s playing a joke on someone, or setting them an impossible task. I grasp at the air with my hands, unable to hold onto the golden vision of my lost love, knowing that I am suffering some sort of waking dream, a hallucination. It’s a message to myself, a reminder. Of what?