by Claire North
I pulled into a service station as the last of the day began to fade, between two great pools of white halogen light. The station promised fast food, petrol, games and entertainment. I bought coffee, pide and a chocolate bar containing a grand total of three raisins, sat in the window and watched. I didn’t like the face that watched back from the reflection. It looked like the face of someone without scruple.
Otoyol-3 was a busy highway at the best of times, and though the signs promised Edirne as you headed west, they could equally have offered directions to Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna. It was a road for bored truckers to whom the mighty bridge from Asia to Europe across a plunging gorge was no more and no less than a tedious bottleneck, and the sight of Aya Sofia on the banks of the Golden Horn nothing more than a mental tick box proclaiming, Only ten more hours to home…
Families, six to a five-seater car, tore through the station like prisoners freed from their cells. The parents and one regrettable grandmother who’d insisted on coming too bickered, while the children whooped, their eyes opened to the irresistible truth that what they’d needed their whole lives was a plastic water gun and a pair of x2 magnification binoculars.
I needed to ditch my car, sooner rather than later.
When had the face in the window made this decision? I wondered.
Probably around the same time it chose not to swallow a slow-acting but incurable poison.
Possibly the same instant it received a text message on an unused phone: Circe.
The moment it realised it wasn’t alone.
A man asked me if I had the time.
I did not.
Was I going to Edirne?
I was not.
Was I OK? I looked… different.
I was fine. Dealing with some personal stuff.
Everyone always respects a guy who’s dealing with personal stuff.
He left me alone.
In the half-gloom of the parking lot a pair of lovers screamed at each other, their blooming romance destroyed by the trauma of trying to map-read in the dark. I got back into the car, turned the radio up high, wound the windows down to let in the cold and headed north, towards Edirne.
Chapter 9
I’ve always liked Edirne. Sometime the haunt of princes and kings, in recent decades it had fallen into grubby disrepair, worn like an old man who knew that the holes in his cardigan were a badge, not of shame, but thrifty pride. In winter slush turned grey in the gutters of the straight dual carriageways, while in summer boys and men gathered to compete in the annual wrestling tournament, buttocks shining, oiled torsos gleaming, clawed hands locked across the arched backs of their beefy opponents as they rolled in the sand. I have never been tempted to participate, even in the skin of champions. For sure, the city lacked any of the great “come-hithers” of Istanbul, save for a silver-capped mosque built by yet another Sultan Selim with a penchant for marble, and a pleasant-looking hospital founded by a Beyazid who loved to both conquer and repent – but for all that it had a proud integrity of purpose and design which invited the visitor to remember that Edirne didn’t need to be flashy to be great.
I parked the car by a fountain decked with giant metal sunflowers.
I took the bags from the boot, put a hundred lira and one of the passports in my pocket, snapped one bracelet of a pair of handcuffs on to my right wrist, popped the key in my inside jacket pocket, pulled the sleeve down to hide the steel, slung the bags across my back and walked away through the quiet Edirne night.
Sodium lamps stood out from the walls where once torches had burned, the pinkish bulbs captured in old iron hooks. Magnolia apartment blocks squatted between ornate 1800s mansions, now transformed into flats for busy families, the grey-blue light of the TV flickering behind the balconies. A cat hissed from behind a laundry line. A speeding bus parped its hooter at a neglectful motorbike. A restaurant owner waved goodbye to his favourite customers as they staggered home through the night.
I headed towards the white-lit walls of the Selimiye mosque, for where there are great monuments to regal expenditure, there are hotels.
The receptionist was dozing off in front of a TV drama, the story of identical twin brothers played by a single actor. In the final scene they stood together and shook hands upon a hill. On the left side the weather was overcast, oppressive. On the right it was cool and fair. Where their hands met, a line sliced through the sky and the earth, tearing it in two. The credits rolled, the receptionist stirred. I laid my Canadian passport down on the table, and said, “Room?”
The receptionist read the name in the passport carefully, trying not to lose any syllables.
“Nathan Coyle?”
“That’s me.”
Everyone loves a Canadian.
The hotel was three floors in total, in a once-wooden building now fused into a mixture of brick and timber. There were no more than twelve guest rooms, nine empty, and silence in the corridors.
A girl with baggy eyes, straight black hair down to the small of her back and a jutting chin showed me to my room. A double bed dominated a small floor beneath a sloping ceiling. A window opened on to two inches of balcony. A radiator sat beneath a wooden bracket supporting a small TV. A bathroom, whose four walls I could touch by standing in the middle, smelt faintly of lemon and toilet products. The girl stood in the door and said, in heavily accented English, “It OK for you?”
“Perfect,” I replied. “Can you show me how to use this?”
I waved the TV remote at her. She barely managed to suppress the rolling of her eyes.
I smiled a toothy smile of North American doubt and confusion. Her hand came out to take the remote, and as it did, I reached behind me, snapping the free bracelet of the handcuffs shut around the radiator pipe on the wall. The sound caused the girl’s eyes to rise, and as they did, I pressed my left hand against hers, wrapping the fingers round the remote, and switched.
My fingers jerked.
The TV popped on.
A newsreader laughed at an unheard punchline, lost to the airwaves. A weather map appeared behind him, and as if to confirm that nothing could be quite as wonderful as the weather, he laughed again, at grey skies and falling rain.
The man before me, 25 per cent of whose passports declared him to be Nathan Coyle, Canadian national and no bother to anyone, staggered, one knee buckling. He tried to climb back up, the handcuffs clattering on the radiator, turning blearily to blink at the metal bracelet holding him down.
I watched. His breathing, the sharp in-out of a body suddenly shocked and confused, slowed. His nostrils flared, and I counted the two, three long breaths he took, and by the time they were done, so was he, body tense, head high, respiration back under control.
I said, “Hello.”
He pressed his lips together and stared up at me, and it seemed to me that he saw
not me, not I that-is-she-who-lives-at-the-hotel, but me
I, myself
and I felt my breath catch in my throat.
He looked without speaking from his crouch on the floor, right arm half-pulled back behind him as he strained against the handcuffs. I hovered outside his arms’ reach and said, “You’re going to eat poison.”
Silence from the floor.
“Two questions are keeping you alive. First: who do you work with, and will they keep coming? I’m assuming that they will. People like you always do. Second: why did you kill Josephine Cebula?”
He stared up at me like a wounded cat and said nothing.
My body had been on its feet too long, the taste of cigarette smoke in its mouth, the weight of a day pulling my spine out and down. My bra was uncomfortable, done up too tightly at the back, and the piercing in my left ear was fresh, throbbing from a gently escalating infection.
“You’re going to eat poison,” I repeated to no one in particular. “All I want are answers.”
Silence from the floor.
“This relationship is going to be difficult for us both,” I said, then, “Left po
cket.”
A flicker of his eyebrows. His free hand turned instinctively towards his left pocket, then hesitated, and before he could consider further, I reached down and grabbed his fingers.
Switched.
The girl with the optimistically tight bra staggered. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the keys stashed therein, unlocked the cuffs and, as she reeled forward, I rose, caught her under the arms said, “You OK, miss? You came over dizzy.”
Incredible, the willingness of the human mind to believe in that which doesn’t scare it.
“Perhaps you need to sit down.”
Chapter 10
My first switch.
I was thirty-three years old.
He was probably only in his twenties, but his body felt a lot older. His skin flaked in little white clouds as he scratched, a great rasping of dry flesh beneath cracked yellow nails. His hair was turning smudged grey, his beard grew in erratic patches from a once-scarred chin, and when he beat me to death, he only did it for the money to fill his belly, and his belly was so empty
my belly was so empty
as I discovered, when I switched.
I didn’t want to touch him, since he had just killed me. But I didn’t want to die alone so, as my vision flooded like wine in a cup, I reached out and grabbed his shoulder as he pulled my purse from round my waist, and in that moment I became him, just in time to see myself die.
Chapter 11
Awake at 3 a.m. in a hotel room.
The light still on.
Nothing on TV.
This body needs sleep.
I need sleep.
Sleep does not come.
A mind that will not stop, thoughts that will not cease.
At 9.40 a.m. a woman called Josephine Cebula left a hotel room in Istanbul, heading to the waterfront. Three days ago she’d met two new friends, who’d said please join us, we’ll teach you how to fish off the Galata bridge.
I’m too beautiful to fish, the mind that wore the body of Josephine Cebula had thought. Are you sure you don’t want me to change into someone more appropriate?
Fishing would be delightful, my fresh red lips proclaimed. I’ve always meant to learn how to fish.
By midday I’d seen someone in the corner of my eye, and by 12.20 p.m. I was running, grateful that my shoes had flat soles, for the crowds of Taksim, for the easy way out, my bare fingers flicking from skin to skin as I searched for a suitable exit route, and then, as I stumbled against the body of a woman with swollen ankles and the taste of coconut in her mouth, the gunman at my back had fired, and I had felt the shot tear through my leg, felt flesh burst outwards and arteries snap, seen my own blood sprinkled on the concrete in front of me, and as I closed my eyes against the pain and opened my mouth to scream, my fingers had tangled against those of a stranger, and I had run and left Josephine Cebula to die.
And then
inexplicably
he’d killed Josephine.
She was fallen and I was gone, but he put two bullets in her chest and she died, even though he was coming for me.
Why would anyone do that?
In a hotel room, 3 a.m., and my left leg ached, though there was no sign of scarring or apparent cause for pain.
A Manila folder from Nathan Coyle’s lethal travelling bag.
I’d glimpsed it when I stole his car, and now, as the night crawled towards dawn, I spread its contents across the bed and looked again, and saw the faces of my life stretched out before me. A single name was written across the front of the file: Kepler.
It seemed as good a name as any.
Chapter 12
I checked out of the Edirne hotel at 7 a.m. Breakfast was from a bakery around the corner, which served hot croissants, cherry jam and the best coffee I’d had in this body so far. With my bags on my back and hat pulled down low, I went looking for the first bus to Kapikule, and out of this country. In a murderer’s body I couldn’t think of any good reason to linger.
How unusual it felt for me to be the innocent in any crime but my flesh to be the hunted.
The thought made me smile all the way to the ticket booth.
There were eleven people on the short bus ride to Kapikule, which seemed apt, as the bus was no more than a converted minivan with a paper sign in the front which read, KAPIKULE. LEV OR LIRA ACCEPTED, NO CHANGE GIVEN.
An ageing man and his aged mother were sitting in the twin seats behind me, bickering.
She said, “I don’t want to.”
He said, “Mother…”
She said, “I don’t want to and that’s that.”
He said, “Well, you’ve got to, Mother, you’ve got to, and we’ve had this conversation and this is your future as well as mine so we’re going and you’ve got to and that’s it.”
She said, her voice rising almost to the point of tears, “But I don’t want to!”
Their conversation continued in this vein all the way to the station, and doubtless beyond.
Kapikule was a non-place on the edge of not-anywhere-really. Not so long ago I would have avoided it and picked up the train I wanted directly from Edirne’s central station. But these were difficult times, lines suspended for lack of pay, terminals withering as the flow of people dried up with the work.
The station was a two-storey building of no discernible merit whatsoever, lit in fluorescent white. In another country it might have been a grim commercial development filled with little shops doomed to fail, or a well-intentioned residential undertaking whose purpose had been corrupted by dubious landowners looking to sell on to MegaMart International. As it was, it was neither of these things.
The ticket clerk sat with his chin resting on the palm of his hand as I approached. His cap was pulled down over his eyes, but when he looked up at the arrival of money on the steel counter before him I was excited to see that here was the last man left in the world who thought that a Hitler-Chaplin moustache was the pinnacle of stylish facial hair.
I pushed cash and my Turkish passport towards him. He regarded both as a doctor observes a severed leg, waiting to see if there may yet be a body attached.
“What?” he asked.
“Belgrade,” I said.
His sigh as he took my money – and ignored my passport – was the profound heave of a man aware that, strictly speaking, you have him. You have him and really he has to oblige, but, damn it, a kinder man would have walked away, let him rest, rather than trouble him with this ticket-selling business.
“Train is this evening,” he grumbled, pushing the meagre papers towards me. “You’ll have to hang around.”
“Is there anything to see in Kapikule?”
His look could have cowed a cobra. I smiled my most charming smile, slipped the tickets into my passport and said, “I’ll find somewhere to nap.”
“Don’t nap here,” he barked. “Station property.”
“Of course it is. How silly of me.”
I was reluctant to wait anywhere too public.
By now the police may have found my body’s fingerprints, a hair fallen from my fleeing head or some other symptom of a cock-up which I knew not of, and begun to trace its movements. Perhaps they – the great unknown “they” – have followed CCTV footage from the moment Josephine Cebula fell down the stairs of Taksim station, all the way back to a hire car pulling into a car park beneath a hotel, and, if they are especially skilled at their job, an alert could have been issued for my hire car, now sitting in the shade of a cypress tree opposite a fountain where metal sunflowers grow.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps the police were baffled.
Who was I to say?
I took shelter in a tiny pink-stone chapel by the banks of the river. I was in Turkey, but the neatly ordered dusty fields beyond the water, their crops uprooted for the harvest, the soil already turned for next year’s seeding, were in Greece. A spit and I could be there, and for a moment I considered it – quick knife to the wrists and then away I’d go in the body o
f a Greek farmer, breath smelling of garlic, shoes scrubbed with sand.
A priest with a great black beard approached me as I sat in the furthest pew, legs crossed upon a stone bench. He addressed me first in Greek, a language where I have never been strong, and hearing my accent raised his eyebrows in surprise, and switched to Turkish.
“This church was founded by Constantius I. He was travelling through the empire and came to this place, where he drank the waters of the river. That night, as he lay sleeping, the Virgin Mary came to him and bathed his feet and hands, and daubed his lips with the water from this stream. When he woke, he was so taken with the vision that he ordered a monastery built here. It was a thriving place: pilgrims came to wash their feet and dream of the Madonna. Then the Ottomans knocked down all but this little chapel you see now, but Sultan Selim the Grim came to this place while hunting, and lay down to rest by its banks and dreamed the same dream that his predecessor, Constantius, had dreamed. When he woke, he washed his hands and feet in the waters and proclaimed the river blessed, and said it was a crime to do any further harm against the walls of this place. He left this.” His hand swept the wall, brushing over the faded remains of a great golden scrawl of near-vanished paint, running across three feet of the wall nearest the altar. “The sultan’s tigra, stamp of his authority, so that should any man ever threaten these walls again, we could take him inside and show him the word of his master. He saved this chapel, though the pilgrims did not come again.”
I nodded the slow nod of the theologically well-meaning, eyes running from the signature of the sultan to the sad smile of the Virgin Mary above it, and asked, may I go down to the river and see if it washes my sins away?
The priest’s eyes widened in horror.
