Alyzon Whitestarr

by Isobelle Carmody

  “You know,” Raoul said thoughtfully, “knowing where and when something is going to happen might offer an opportunity we shouldn’t ignore.”

  “Opportunity?”

  “I wonder if your journalist friend would respond to a tip. Imagine if he was there to witness what was happening, and knew that Aaron Rayc owns the warehouses nearby and funds the gang that meets there and produces books that prime kids like Serenity to do harm. It might even be that we could set it up so that he could stop your sister. That would make a dramatic story, and once he had access to the stuff Daisy dug up …”

  “That’s brilliant,” Harrison said. “Raoul, you are a genius.”

  Raoul laughed at his enthusiasm. “Not quite. But it does seem the perfect way to save your sister and discredit Rayc without any of us getting in the limelight. After the ORBA function tomorrow night, we might even have more to offer him.”

  “I’ve just had an idea,” Harrison said. “Alyzon, you have tae go with Raoul tae this ORBA thing. If there are going tae be a whole lot of celebrities there, you could smell any who were infected and we’d have a list that would take weeks of checking tae compile otherwise.”

  “It’s up to you, but it might be a good thing,” Raoul told me. “The only thing is that Aaron Rayc will be there, so we’d have to keep you away from him.”

  * * *

  By the time Raoul dropped me home, the house was nighttime quiet, with only Jesse up reading in the kitchen.

  “Where’s Da?” I asked, shrugging off the derelict coat and my backpack. I had no fear that Jesse would comment on my clothes because he never noticed anyone’s clothes—not even Mirandah’s.

  “He’s not home from the rehearsal yet,” Jesse said, and I heaved a sigh of relief. “Look, Alyzon,” he went on, using his rare stern-big-brother voice, “it’s time you did some talking.”

  I sat down. “I’m sorry about causing such a fuss tonight, but Serenity is mixed up with some weird people, and when she just went off …”

  “Weird people?” Jesse asked.

  “On Monday nights she meets these people in the library. They’re supposed to be meeting about poetry, but I think the group has been set up to suck in people like Serenity.”

  “What do you mean by ‘people like Serenity’?”

  “Angry, hurt, mixed-up people,” I said. “You read her diary.”

  “I did, and I’m ashamed to have done it.”

  “Jesse, Serenity is our sister, and whether or not she hates us or thinks she does, I love her and I’m scared for her. I’m scared of what she might do.”

  “As far as I can see, you don’t know that she’s going to do anything,” Jesse said. “That diary stuff might be nothing more than a sort of cathartic purge. Tonight she went to see a documentary, just as she said. She seemed perfectly calm and composed when she got in. I asked how she had got there, and she said some friends gave her a lift. You had me and Mirandah half convinced she was going to shoot someone or set something on fire.”

  “You read her diary. You tell me if that was written by someone calm and composed.”

  “All right,” Jesse said with sudden decision. “You tell Da all of this by tomorrow night before his gig, or I’ll tell him.”

  I gaped at him. “He has a gig tomorrow night?”

  He nodded impatiently. “The Big Sleep gig is Sunday, didn’t you hear Da say?” He gave me a narrow-eyed look. “Why?”

  “I just … I just didn’t realize it was so soon.” I collected my wits. “Look, I can’t drop this in his lap before an important gig. I’ll tell him Monday night, I swear.”

  Jesse gave me a level look. “You better, Alyzon.” He got up and said he was going to bed.

  I sat there staring at the vase of fiery chrysanthemums, trying to take in the fact that the function to which Raoul had been invited was on the same night as the function where Da would play with Neo Tokyo. I was an idiot not to have put the two things together sooner. Then I realized something else. Raoul had said the charity function would take place on the grounds of the Castledean Estate—Aaron Rayc’s own property.

  It was my turn to watch Luke the next morning. I had volunteered, partly because it meant Serenity would have to stay home with him all afternoon while I was at the charity function. She hadn’t complained or seemed to care, which reassured me that Raoul was right in thinking it was Monday night we had to worry about.

  When I handed Luke to her, I noticed that she still smelled densely of licorice without even the merest trace of violet. That further convinced me that she had suppressed the old Serenity almost out of existence, in preparation for what was soon to happen.

  Luke giggled and touched her face with his fat little starfish hands, and for a moment her face twisted as if love for him knifed through her. I left them, praying that an afternoon with Luke and his wonderful radiant innocence would bring her out of the darkness she had woven for herself.

  * * *

  It took over an hour to get to Raoul’s because the Sunday buses came less often, and I was startled and pleased to find both Harrison and Gilly there. I barely had time to greet everyone before Gilly announced that she had come to ensure that my own father would not recognize me. Without giving me a chance to protest, she all but dragged me down the hall to the bathroom, where she bade me undress, shower, and wash my hair. I protested that I was perfectly clean, but she insisted, saying a canvas had to be properly prepared. I could see how happy she was, so I gave in.

  I came out in a towel, and Gilly examined me like a doctor about to make an incision, then alarmingly asked if I minded her trimming my hair. Before I could do more than stammer a weak answer, she whipped out scissors and began snipping vigorously.

  “Have you done this before?” I asked, horrified by the amount of hair raining down.

  “I’ve done it to my Barbie dolls for years,” she said blithely. Swallowing hard, I told myself that my hair, unlike that of the unfortunate Barbies, would grow back. At last Gilly laid aside the scissors, painted some horrible-smelling brown mess onto a few strands, and wrapped them in foil. I wanted to ask what she was doing to me, but then she took up tweezers and began plucking out eyebrow hairs. This was so excruciatingly painful that I screamed. She nearly poked my eye out, and reacted to the news that I had never plucked my eyebrows with Mirandah-like superiority. Several painful minutes later I offered to sell her Da if she would stop.

  “Pathetic,” she said, leading me back to the bathroom. She proceeded to wash the brown stuff out of my hair, at the same time running water into my ear so that it gurgled. The whole time, she was rubbing sandpaper-like gel onto my face and arms and neck, then washing it off. Then she puffed some foam into my hair and rubbed it through.

  “What is the point of putting all this stuff on me if you’re only going to wash it off four seconds later?” I protested.

  “Feel how soft,” she said, pointing to my bare arm. I rubbed it and marveled. Then, before I could stop myself, I wondered if Harrison would think so.

  “You’re blushing,” Gilly accused. That made the blood in my face get even hotter. “Wow,” she said. “What were you just thinking about?”

  “Nobody. I mean, nothing. What now?” She gave me a skeptical look but only began to wipe pale brown stuff on my face. “Ugh,” I said, looking at her fingers.

  She said loftily, “It’ll make your skin feel like silk.”

  “Dirty silk,” I muttered.

  She started doing things to my eyes, and I flinched until I realized she wasn’t intending to pull anything out. Even so, when she got to the mascara, she ordered me severely not to make my eyes water.

  “Like I can stop them,” I said, cringing.

  She told me to shut up and then started drawing on my mouth with a pencil. Crimson, I saw. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t think I’d look good with lips the color of blood, but she had a ferocious look that told me she’d stick the pencil in my mouth if I opened it. I wanted to look when she was
finished but she wouldn’t let me.

  “You have to get the full impact.” She regarded me critically, then dusted enough powder over my face to flour the bottom of a dozen cake pans; then she went to the door and took a zipped clothes bag down from the hook.

  “Oh no!” I said, pointing to the mini she drew out, which looked like she had got it off one of her Barbie dolls. “I’m not wearing that. I brought my own clothes.”

  “You can’t wear your own clothes. They’ll make you look like you. The whole point is for you to look like someone else.”

  “God,” I said. But I pulled on dense black tights and then the skirt, which came to just above the knees and was stretchy, so not as minuscule as it had looked. She got out cherry-red boots that Mirandah would have changed colors for. They were a size too big, but Gilly told me just to put my socks back on over the tights to make my feet bigger. Then she handed me a cherry-red and black striped top made out of stocking material. I put this on and then a sort of slick tank top over that, then a dark red tailored riding jacket. Then she sat me down on the edge of the bath while she blow-dried and fluffed my newly shortened hair. I could see the ends curling up and my head felt light. But maybe that was my state of mind.

  At last, she let me look.

  I gaped.

  I looked about ten feet tall and beanpole lean. My hair had been cut into a sassy bob, and there were two flashes of indigo color in the very short straight bangs, another two slashes of purple in one side. My face, far from muddy, was milk pale, and my lips looked like someone had cut them out of a magazine. I appeared, I thought, about five years older. Maybe more.

  “You look like a French rock star,” Gilly said, admiring her handiwork. “Perfect. Let’s go show the guys.”

  “Wait!” I said.

  “Stage fright,” Gilly pronounced. “Come on. Into the deep end is best. You look hot.”

  I was actually shaking as I walked slowly down the hallway behind Gilly, although I told myself it was the boots, which still slipped around on my feet a bit.

  “Ta-da!” Gilly said in the doorway, and she waved me in with a theatrical flourish.

  I swallowed and stepped into the room. I made myself look at Raoul, because I was scared to look at Harrison. What if he thought I looked horrible?

  Raoul gave me an admiring once-over. “Well, you don’t look like a schoolgirl,” he said.

  “Doesn’t she look French with those short bangs?” Gilly asked, delighted. She had gone over to Raoul and taken his arm in her pleasure.

  I looked at Harrison because it would have seemed odd if I hadn’t, and struck a pose to hide my nervousness. “What do you think?”

  “You look different,” he said in a peculiar flat voice.

  “Different good or bad?” Gilly asked. I could have strangled her. I stopped feeling like a French rock star and started feeling stupid.

  “Different,” Harrison said.

  “Boy, don’t go overboard with flattery,” Gilly teased, but I could see puzzlement dawning, and it would be one step from that to her remembering how I had blushed.

  “Time to go?” I asked Raoul. He nodded, and I noticed that he looked very cool in a dark gray suit so velvety soft it was like liquid.

  * * *

  “You OK?” he asked once we were on the way.

  “Fine,” I said, and heard the false brightness in my tone. I was hurt by Harrison’s reaction, and yet what else had I expected? Then I told myself sternly that this was a serious and maybe even dangerous quest for information and I ought to be concentrating on that.

  “I really do doubt your da would recognize his little girl right now,” Raoul said. “But he might remember me, so I will have to be sure to be gone before his gig finishes. It would be most unfortunate if he arrived and mentioned to Rayc that I was a friend of yours. The wheelchair makes me look harmless but very distinctive.”

  “Well, I think you’d look distinctive with or without the wheelchair.”

  He gave me a warm look. “That’s a nice thing to say, Alyzon. I guess a lot of the time I feel the wheelchair is pretty much all people see when they look at me. It defines me.”

  “Maybe people who don’t know you,” I conceded. “But I have to say that I never saw anyone make a wheelchair look more cool.”

  He laughed out loud. “So I define the wheelchair? Not bad.”

  I asked how Sarry was then, and he sobered and said that she was beginning to remember whole slabs of her childhood that she had forgotten. “Some of it is fairly harrowing, but Dr. Abernathy says it’s a positive sign that she is remembering instead of keeping it locked up. But she’s pretty fixated on Austin, and that’s not good. She keeps thinking he was around even when she was small, and that he knew her mother.” He paused. “The main thing from Sarry’s point of view is that they are no longer drugging her. Dr. Abernathy says it would be counterproductive, given that she is phobic about drugs. And no wonder. One of the things she’s been remembering is seeing her mother shoot up, and it looks like she might have been an addict.”

  I thought of the flash of vision I had seen when Sarry had grabbed me, and wondered if her mother’s drug use had been forced. I told Raoul what I had seen, and after a whole lot of questions, we decided that this must have been close to the time Sarry had been infected, and that perhaps what she had seen was the drugging of her mother prior to infection. When we had talked this subject to death, Raoul asked if Serenity had seen the painting that Mum had done of her.

  “I doubt it. She doesn’t show anyone what she’s painted for ages and ages, and sometimes she doesn’t show it at all. She just takes it out to the backyard in the middle of the night and lights a bonfire, and Da helps her. I wonder how much he really knows.”

  “Maybe he just loves her and trusts her,” Raoul said. “Like we do with Sarry.”

  * * *

  We hit signs pointing the way to the Castledean Estate five miles before Remington, and turned off the main road. There were no streetlights on the side road leading to the estate, and the clouded sky made it dark, but the headlights shone over car after car parked along the side of the road, and clots of people walking toward the gates. By the time we got to the parking lot entrance, Raoul had to crawl along because there were people all over the road. I was guiltily glad of Raoul’s disabled sticker, which enabled us to enter the packed lot and weave through hundreds of cars to the disabled parking spaces right by the entrance to the estate. Men and women in white fluorescent suits were directing people, looking like nothing so much as officials dealing with atomic fallout.

  Raoul’s wheelchair lurched over the loose gravel in the lot, making me nervous that it might tip over, but I wasn’t much safer, tottering along in my boots, and twice it was Raoul who caught my hand and steadied me. We made it without mishap to the line of people waiting to enter, and when our gold-edged tickets were scanned by a man roaming along the line, the man’s face changed and he ushered us out of the line.

  “Welcome to the Big Sleep Gala Party, sir,” he told Raoul effusively. “Your entrance is this way.” He led us to the front of the line, but instead of sending us through the main gate into what seemed a seething tide of people intermittently visible under roaming colored lights, we were taken to a smaller gate. Beyond it waited a woman who told us her name was Klara. Raoul introduced me as his niece, Tanya, and the woman offered me a professionally brilliant smile before turning her attention to Raoul.

  We followed Klara along a well-made path. It led us away from the enormous stage, which in the distance looked a bit like a landing pad for a spaceship, surrounded by all that country darkness. We were headed for a cluster of large white tents linked by covered walkways hung with holiday lights.

  Two security men were standing at the door to the first tent, wearing black suits that accentuated the unnatural breadth of their shoulders. They nodded unsmilingly at the woman and stood aside to let us into the perfumed and candlelit interior, which had been made to look like a ba
llroom in some palace. The furniture was all beautiful heavy wood and looked as if it was antique. On every table, amid an incredible array of food, were enormous, beautifully detailed ice sculptures of birds, surrounded by dry ice that gave off a mist of pale smoke. There were also giant vases of flowers set about: lilies, bird-of-paradise flowers, and blazing bursts of gerberas, irises, and tulips. A woman in a white dress was playing a white harp, and there was also a white grand piano, although no one was sitting at it. The men and women standing around were dressed in expensive suits and magnificent, lavish gowns. It was attire for the Academy Awards, not a marathon of bands in a field, and I wondered for the first time what the point was of holding the two events simultaneously.

  “See anyone you recognize, Tanya?” Klara asked me coyly, coming close enough for me to perceive her strong burnt-onion smell under the hair spray. I instinctively stepped back from her. “Are you all right?” she asked, and there was a speculative look in her eye that made me regret bringing myself so much to her attention.

  “Everyone’s like a million years old,” I said, putting on a sullen adolescent look. I cast a glance of disparagement at the harp player, and Klara smiled brilliantly.

  “Now, Tanya,” Raoul said in an avuncular sort of voice. “Maybe you can get yourself a drink and something to eat.”

  That was my signal to cut loose. I sighed and shrugged and slouched off, playing my role with a certain relish. I went to a drinks table, and a man in a white suit with a startling orange-looking tan poured me mineral water with a twist of lemon. I tried to look as if I were drying out after a hard night as I accepted it and walked over to the food table. I swallowed a couple of grapes and looked around the room, pretending boredom. In fact, I was anything but bored.

  As Klara had tried to point out, there were a lot of famous faces: musicians and singers and actors I had only ever seen before on the covers of magazines or at the movies. There were also hundreds of unknown faces, and the crowd was getting thicker minute by minute. I began to look for the artists I had seen associated with Aaron Rayc in the many articles I’d read about him.