They reach the main street and there’s a crowd of people standing by, wondering what all the scuffle is about, waiting to see which celebrity is leaving the nightclub.
‘Lyrebird, Lyrebird,’ she hears from lips, all whispering around her like the wind blowing through the leaves on her mountain. But she’s not on the mountain, she’s here, camera phones pointed in her face. Autograph books and pens extended.
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.
29
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.