Cecelia Ahern - Lyrebird

A group of boys start making cuckoo sounds. The sounds chase her down the road. Rory gets them to the first taxi they see in the nearby queue. Laura falls inside and leans her head back, eyes closed. Cameras bump against the glass of the car, continuing to take photographs of her. She closes her eyes, takes deep breaths, trying not to vomit as her head swirls.

‘Where to?’ the taxi driver asks, bewildered as his car is surrounded by photographers.

‘Solomon,’ Laura says, her eyes closed, head on the headrest.

The cameras bang against the window.

‘Hey, where to?’ the taxi man asks, agitated. ‘Watch my bumper!’ he yells to the photographers, lowering his window. They continue to bang against the side of his car, the taxi driver clambers out and confronts them. Cameras continue to flash as Lyrebird’s taxi driver is involved in an altercation, Lyrebird passed out in the back seat.

‘Fuck,’ Rory says, as they sit in the back seat with no driver, completely surrounded. ‘Fuck.’

‘Solomon,’ she says again, sleepily.

‘Uh, no, not Solomon. Okay, Laura, new plan.’ He shakes her, trying to wake her. He opens his door and goes around to her side. He pulls her out, tries to stand her up but now she’s both exhausted and intoxicated. The cameras ignore the taxi driver’s altercation and follow Laura and Rory.

‘Hey! Where are you going?’ the taxi driver yells.

‘I’m not sitting there while you argue,’ Rory yells back.

‘This is because of you, who do you think you are?’ The taxi driver yells a load of abuse at him as he half-carries, half-pulls Laura away. The taxis have all left the queue. ‘I’ve missed a load of fares because of you!’

A taxi stops for them in the middle of the road. The light is out. There are people inside. A door opens. ‘Get in.’

Rory looks in and recognises two guys from the club. He puts Laura in the front seat, trying to pull down her dress that’s rising up her long lean legs; that’s a tartan shirt, with black Doc Martens, and walking socks beneath. He gets in the back, squishing in beside the two men.

‘Where are you going?’ one asks. Rory thinks his name is Niall, a property guy, or was that someone else? As he looks at him, he wonders if he met him in the club at all.

‘Anywhere,’ Rory says, blocking his face from the cameras pushed up against the glass.

The men laugh. The taxi drives off.

Laura wakes up in darkness. Her head, her throat, her eyes, everything aches. There’s a buzzing sound, the familiar vibrating of a phone and she thinks of Solomon. She looks around and sees light coming from a shoe. The phone is vibrating inside a trainer. It buzzes one more time, then makes the sound of a flat battery before dying, the light gone. It’s like witnessing another death. The dull headache that arrived in Galway and worsened in Dublin, but disappeared after her first two glasses of wine, has now returned and is worse than ever. It hurts for her to lift her head, gravity appears to have intensified and pulls her down. She’s afraid, she doesn’t know where she is and so she sits up. She’s on a couch, next to a double bed. There’s a figure over the covers and a shape beneath it.

She smells vomit, realises it’s in her hair, and on her clothes and the smell brings her back instantly, like a flashback to her head over a toilet bowl, a dirty toilet bowl with shit still stuck on the side. Somebody is holding her hair out of the way. There’s lots of laughter, girls beside her and around her. A voice close to her ear is telling her she will be okay. A kind voice. A female voice. She remembers Rory, the nightclub, the man who attacked her. Being brought outside. The camera flashes, the taxi, another taxi, feeling sick.

She doesn’t remember this place that she’s in. She doesn’t remember getting here, how she got to this room or who she’s with. She looks at the pair of Converse with the dead phone and she recognises it as Rory’s. So he’s here, quite possibly the person lying on the bed. He brought her here. She can’t blame him for what happened, she can only blame herself. She’s twenty-six years old and she should have known better. She’s so ashamed of herself for losing control, for such irresponsibility, for allowing others to see her like that, she can’t bring herself to wake Rory. She’s still wearing her boots, she doesn’t care about finding her jacket, she just wants to get out of there.

She stands up and steadies herself as her head swirls. She takes a moment for the dizziness to pass, takes long deep breaths as silently as possible so as not to stir the sleeping others. The room is hot and stuffy. It smells of alcohol and hot bodies, which turns her stomach. She steps over the shoes and bottles, falling over and catching herself on the wall. She bangs against the wall and hears somebody stir behind her, waking as if in fright. She doesn’t look back, she keeps walking, she knows she needs to get out of there before they wake.

Out of the bedroom she finds herself in a corridor. She sees the main door. The next door is the bathroom, then the front door. She passes an open-plan living and kitchen area, more bodies on floors and couches, a couple slowly kissing on the couch, his hand moving around inside her top as she makes soft breathy sounds.

She thinks of Solomon and Bo in the hotel when they were making love and she must have made a sound, given herself away, because suddenly the couple stop kissing and look up. A head pops out from the kitchen.

‘What the fuck was that noise?’ the girl asks.

‘The bird,’ the guy on the couch says.

‘ Lyre bird,’ she says, giggling.

‘Whatever. Hi,’ he says and she thinks she recognises him. She remembers him from the nightclub. He was friendly, offering to buy her drinks, giving out to somebody for accidentally shoving her as he passed. Getting the barman’s attention faster than the others. Whispering in her ear. Did he kiss her ear? Her neck? He’s the one who held her arm tightly when she stumbled.

‘I’m Gary, I’m an actor. Our premiere was tonight at the festival,’ he says. She remembers being impressed, she’d never met an actor before. Not a professional one anyway, as it turned out.

‘Gary, you little shit,’ the girl says, hitting him, jumping up from the couch so quickly she knees him by mistake. He groans. ‘You told her you were a fucking actor? Who are you, Leonardo DiCaprio?’

‘I was only messing, babe, chill out.’

‘Don’t babe me,’ she wallops him again, which stirs the others, who are sleeping.

Her voice is familiar. Laura studies her, trying to pinpoint how she knows her. Then she remembers. In the toilet, her head literally in the toilet, trying to ignore the dried shit, hearing laughter, that girl’s voice, looking up between retches to see a camera phone in their hands.

‘Stop,’ Laura had said, trying to block her face.

‘Get out of here, Lisa,’ another voice had said.

‘It’s going on Facebook,’ she says, leaving the bathroom. ‘Lyrebird, dirtbird,’ she says, giggling.

Laura must have said this all out loud.

‘Cara, you put photos of her puking on Facebook?’ Gary asks. ‘And you’re giving out to me?’

‘Are you okay?’ a voice says from the kitchen. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

Laura doesn’t recognise her face, but she knows her voice instantly. It was the one that was in her ear. ‘Ssh. Ssh. It’s going to be okay.’

Laura knows she has repeated this because the girl is smiling. She has a friendly face, it’s nice to see one. She holds a cup of tea out to her.