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.
‘Lyrebird,’ 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.
Laura shakes her head and keeps walking to the door. She should go into the bathroom to clean herself up, but she knows she must leave, she doesn’t want Rory to wake up, she doesn’t want to have to deal with talking about what happened.
She has no idea where she is, or where her bags are. She’s in an apartment block somewhere. She heads for the fire escape and runs down five flights of stairs, thinking someone is chasing her, not hearing any footsteps but afraid to stop or look behind her in case they catch her. It’s like a bad dream being played out and she’s the one playing it out with an overactive imagination. She races downstairs, clinging to the rail, hand brushing the metal and feeling splinters from the chipped paint. She thinks she’ll be stuck on that staircase forever, that it will never end, until finally she reaches the ground floor. She passes a wall of grey postboxes, all numbers no address, not that it would mean anything to her anyway. She bursts out on to the street, hoping to see somewhere familiar, one of the places she’s been to with Solomon, Bo, or Rachel, but she doesn’t recognise it. Across from her is an identical building, beside and all around her is the same.