As Bo fills Solomon in on what has been happening since he left, his anger grows. ‘How is Laura?’ he asks.

‘She’s fine,’ Bo says. ‘She’s busy. I barely see her.’

‘Does she know that she doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to?’

‘But she does, Sol – she signed a contract.’ She keeps her voice low so that Laura doesn’t hear her next door.

He goes silent for a moment. ‘Is she happy, Bo?’

‘How the fuck would I know?’ she says, tiredly. ‘She keeps everything to herself.’

‘Her sounds,’ he says, trying to keep calm. If he were there, he would automatically know. ‘At night, what are her sounds like?’

‘I haven’t noticed. I’ve been so tired, I suppose I’m so used to them now, I’ve stopped hearing them.’

She manages to talk Solomon out of coming home. He can’t simply walk out – they’d never hire him again. Besides, things have not reached crisis point here. She also tells him that she’s sure Laura has an infatuation with him and it’s best he stays away. This is not a lie.

Bo knows that nobody has even seen the best of Laura yet, there is so much more she has to give. She only hopes Laura can figure out how to harness it, and condense it all into a two-minute piece for live TV. It will work in Bo’s favour if Laura performs well in the semi-final. If she can’t work one-on-one with Laura, then the show can. She reaches for her phone to text Jack about some ideas for Laura’s next performance.

As she settles down to sleep, her neighbour’s new puppy starts to howl.

And like last night, Laura’s soft gentle sad howls join in. Bo lied to Solomon about Laura’s sounds; she couldn’t have told him that. Anyway, wasn’t it Solomon who’d told her that these sounds were merely mimicry, and not a conversation?

She turns off the light, wraps the covers tightly around her and covers her head with Solomon’s pillow to block out the sounds.

23

Exactly one week since her first live performance, Solomon and Laura sit outside the production office in the Slaughter House studio on plastic chairs, their heads leaning against the wall. He has just returned and they haven’t yet had a chance to talk. Solomon tries to steal glimpses of Laura, to see how she’s doing; he’s not sure he can trust Bo’s instincts as to her wellbeing.

‘I feel like we’re in trouble with the principal,’ Solomon says, looking at her, then realises Laura might not have a clue what he’s talking about, seeing as she never went to school. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘Never mind.’

‘Me understand joke,’ she says in a Tarzan accent. ‘Lyrebird see TV. Lyrebird read books.’

He chuckles. ‘Okay. Got it.’

People appear in the corridor from secret rooms, glance down at her, whispering, ‘That’s her,’ then disappear again. Others make obvious detours to walk past her, checking her out with sidelong looks before realising that at the end of the corridor is a dead end, and then are forced to walk by her again.

‘So, any news? Quiet week?’ he jokes. She laughs.

He’s missed her so much. Being away from her has felt like a torture, but a necessary one. Ever since he heard her imitate his laugh that night in bed, he knew he’d have to go away. He owed it to Bo. He owed it to Laura. Going away was the only way he could escape Laura’s sounds at night. Listening to them felt like being invited into her heart, reading her diary, and he had no place being there – all the more so because he wanted to be there. The fascination that the world is experiencing with her now is exactly what Solomon had experienced in the woods that first day he met her. But he has a nervous feeling that, in the brief time since he left last Monday, so much has shifted. Nobody could have foreseen this level of attention, but StarrGaze should at least be able to handle it. He’s wondering now who’s handling it.

‘How are you feeling about all of this?’ Solomon asks as somebody sneakily grabs a photo of Laura, pretending they’re texting, the phone aimed right in her direction. ‘It’s been a crazy week. We haven’t had a chance to speak.’

‘No. We haven’t.’ She mimics his awkward throat-clear and his chin-stubble scratch.

His week away hadn’t achieved the hoped-for goal of helping him to forget her. At the very moment Solomon was trying to get away from her, get her out of his head, the universe started conspiring against him. All week she’d been the topic of every conversation: ‘Did you see that girl?’ Even Paul, star of Grotesque Bodies, the show he was in Switzerland for, had asked Solomon about her in the waiting room one day, off camera.

At first Solomon hadn’t wanted to talk about her, but he soon discovered that pretending he had no idea who she was only led the other person to start telling him all about her, how she looked, how she wasted time before eventually blowing everyone away. So he’d changed his response, admitting that he had seen her, hoping that would end the conversation, but instead he found himself having to listen to conjectures about whether she had a recorder hidden away – and how she managed it when there was no hiding anything in that dress, huhuhuh.

Thankfully, nobody, fans or press, has yet figured out where Laura is living. When not at the studio meeting fans and being photographed, filmed, or being fitted for the next performance costume, Laura has been closeted away in the apartment. She has been photographed buying flowers on Grafton Street – a set-up photo op – and walking in Stephen’s Green. In particular, feeding the ducks. Lyrebird Feeds the Birds. She’ll be getting more than tuppence by the time she’s finished on the show, one clever tabloid journalist pointed out. Lyrebird’s earnings from potential reality shows, magazine shoots, interviews and performances has been totted up. If they knew how she really spent her days – sitting in the apartment with the TV off, or on the balcony watching the water, mimicking the bird in the cage on the balcony next door – he doesn’t know whether they’d be fascinated or bored by her. She would have loved to pass the time by cooking, but unfortunately Bo isn’t an eater, which makes the tension even heavier between them.

‘I’m okay,’ Laura replies. She makes a smacking sound, chewing gum in her mouth.

Solomon knows immediately she’s referring to Jack. ‘What about him?’ he asks.

It’s a relief to be with someone who gets what she means. Bo still doesn’t understand most of what she is saying. She doesn’t understand the connections. She thinks Laura is like a broken machine spurting out random sounds, she doesn’t get the underlying links. Neither does Jack, or Bianca, or just about anyone else, with the exception of Rachel, but most of all Solomon. It’s not complicated at all to Solomon, though Bo makes out he and Laura are speaking a secret language. It’s no secret; he pays attention, that’s all.

‘Jack doesn’t like you,’ she tells him.

‘Shocking, isn’t it?’