Touch

by Claire North

  His eyes swept me from bottom to top, top to bottom, sticking to my skin, before his face opened into a smile of recognition and delight.

  And at his smile something twisted beneath my stomach and he said, “Why hello. I remember you very well,” and, though I was perfectly functional and my body liked to exercise two or three times a week and eat sensible food, I tasted bile. Quickly, I reached out towards his smiling, wobbling face, palm up and replied, “Yes you do.”

  He shook me by the hand.

  Later, when asked to recall Horst Gubler’s speech at the museum, kinder listeners would report that he seemed rather strange in the minutes leading up to it, hardly himself at all. Harsher listeners – and the press – would report that he was clearly drunk, there being no other explanation for his actions.

  Everyone, regardless of personal bias or inclination, would remember the first thing he said upon taking the stand, immortalised in journals across the state.

  “Hiya, all!” the body of Gubler cried, silencing the audience with the jingling of a silver spoon upon a crystal glass. “So glad you could all be here, so glad! There’s just one thing I’d like to say before we kick off with the evening’s festivities. President Obama – what a faggot.”

  Three days later I was on a plane to Slovakia, Horst Gubler’s passport in my hand, credit cards in my pocket. Of his assets – which turned out to be a mere 1.8 million dollars and a great deal of bluff – twenty thousand dollars went into a Swiss bank account for an unnamed roaming traveller, eighty thousand went to an ex-wife, and the remainder was bequeathed, along with any outstanding assets, to a charity dedicated to the victims of rape, violent crime and domestic abuse. They were so grateful, they sent me a plaque, framed in brass, which I forwarded on to Maria Anna Celeste, with my compliments.

  Chapter 21

  Slovakian?

  Not a word.

  I speak French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, English, Swahili, Malay, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Farsi and Italian. Based on these I can roughly comprehend a wide range of locally similar languages, though comprehension is never the same as being able to reply.

  Hungarian? Czech?

  Not a clue.

  Only a few borrowed words – toilet, TV, credit card, internet, email – that sprung up too fast and too late for the linguists of their nations to have any better idea.

  I got off the train a few stops short of Bratislava.

  When first I visited Slovakia it was a beautiful land of mighty rivers, great fields across fertile plains, pine tree hills rising on the horizon and the distant jingling of cattle bells from the blue-grey walls of the evening valleys. There may even have been some traditional dress – though at the time tradition was a concept yet to be romanticised into its knee-kicking glory.

  Communism, as always, had not been kind to this idyll. With as much tenderness as a tank in a trench, villages of rustic stone and tiny cared-for chapels now boasted squat apartment blocks and concrete industrial zones, fallen into disrepair almost as soon as they had risen. Rivers, once running clear, now flowed sluggishly through the flatlands, their surfaces decked with thick green scum that grew back as quickly as it was cleared. The land still held much beauty, but it was spotted through with the remnants of an industrial ambition stretched too far.

  I stopped in a bed and breakfast in a town with an unpronounceable name. A bus ran every three hours to Bratislava, twice a day on Sundays. One church, one school, one restaurant, and on the edge of town one supermarket, which sold, as well as cured meats and fish, garden furniture, bathroom parts and small electric cars.

  The owners of the bed and breakfast were a husband and wife, and only one other room was occupied by a pair of Austrian cyclists come to pedal the gentle low roads of Europe. I waited for the building to go to bed, then let myself out into the night.

  The one-church town was also a one-bar town.

  The one bar was playing 1980s pop songs from one CD. On the dance floor teenagers desperate to get out, get away, writhed against each other, too horny to go home, too frightened of their companions to actually have sex.

  I looked for the one person who might be interested, and found her, sitting back from the dance floor, watching in the dark. I sat down opposite her and said, you speak English?

  A little, she said.

  But for what she did, a little was more than enough.

  I bought her a drink, which she barely touched.

  Her English was better than she claimed, and her French, we eventually discovered, was superb. She said, where are you staying?

  The boarding house.

  That won’t do at all, she replied. If you’re interested, I know somewhere quiet.

  Quiet was perfect.

  Quiet was exactly what I needed.

  She lived on the very edge of town. The front door locked heavy behind us, the walls were hung with photos of ancient grandmothers, their hands resting proudly on the shoulders of their sons.

  Her room consisted of a bed, a desk, a couple of hand-me-down works of art put up by a tenant generations ago who hadn’t liked them enough to take them away and left hanging by a lazy landlord. Under the bed were books on economics, chemistry, mathematics. On the small crooked desk, old plates gathering mould, and pieces of foil, stained with powder. She kicked the books aside, took off her jacket and said, you ready?

  The track marks in her arm were faint but visible. The thin white scars across her wrists were in neat little rows, running up to her elbow, fading and old but made worse by scratching. I said, how old are you?

  She shook her head.

  Are you ready?

  I smiled and replied, something a little kinky?

  I gave her the key before I pulled out the handcuffs. It never serves to give the wrong impression. She looked briefly shocked, but her professionalism managed to restore her smile quickly enough and, gesturing at the bed she said, come on in.

  I lay down on the bed, let her cuff my right hand to the bedstead, and as she lent back to admire her handiwork, I caught her left wrist with my free hand and

  jumped.

  “Hey there,” I said, as the body beneath me blinked bleary, unfocused eyes. “I think we should talk.”

  Chapter 22

  The scars on my arms itched.

  Hidden beneath my tights were fresher scars on the inside of my thighs, still burning, crying out for the scalpel and the antiseptic wipe.

  Nathan Coyle – or at least the man whose Canadian passport so proclaimed him to be – lay handcuffed to the bed beneath me. I sat down beside him, crossed my legs, put my chin in the palm of my hand and said, “You’ve got some text messages.”

  His eyes focused on me, and with clarity of vision came clarity of thought.

  Clarity of thought, it seemed, was not impressed with its conclusions.

  His jaw tightened, his fingers tensed.

  “I’m guessing,” I said, “that they’re security checks. The first was Circe, the second Aeolus. Having no idea who to reply to or what to say, I didn’t respond. Your colleagues must know by now that you’re in trouble. Good news for you, unless they shoot you like you shot Josephine.”

  He lay motionless. Flat. The angle of his arm cuffed to the bedhead couldn’t have been comfortable, but he was a tough guy. Tough guys don’t fidget.

  “I read the Kepler file,” I added, fighting the urge to scratch my arms. “It’s mostly correct – I’m impressed – but you don’t appear in my file, and based on what I can remember I’m reasonably confident I never touched your body, right up to the point you shot me with it. So it can’t be personal. Met any ghosts before now, Mr Coyle?”

  Silence.

  Of course.

  Tough guys, they wake up handcuffed in strange places, gun down women in stations, get possessed and marched halfway across Europe by an invading consciousness, but it’s nothing they can’t handle.

  “I considered mutilating you,” I breathed, barely aware of the words as I
spoke them, and had the satisfaction of seeing something twitch in Coyle’s face. “Obviously not while I was inhabiting, I have never had a taste for such things. But I still hope that your colleagues, whoever they may be, may hesitate to kill you, as you killed my Josephine, and that hesitation could yet save my life.”

  Silence.

  “In Edirne I asked two questions. Having spent some time in your body I now have a couple more, though the direction of the enquiry hasn’t changed. Who are you working for, and why did they lie about Josephine?”

  He levered himself, just a tiny bit, further up, and for the first time his eyes met mine, and stayed.

  “It’s lies,” I breathed. “Most of the file is fine, but then it gets to Josephine and it’s lies. Your employers wanted her to die as well as me. Why is that, do you think? Who are these people she’s meant to have killed? People have always tried to kill my kind, down the centuries. It is inevitable, given what we are. But you shot Josephine in the leg, and even though I fled, even though you knew I’d fled, you still put two bullets in her chest. And I don’t understand why. I want this to end well. You’re a murderer, but you didn’t act alone. You’re alive because you’re the only lead I have.”

  I waited.

  So did he.

  “You’ll be wanting to think,” I concluded. “I understand.” My fingers crawled against the soft inside of my arms, tracing scars, wanting to scratch. I pulled my hand away, stood up, hoping that motion and speed would distract from the physiological urge. He watched me. I smiled. “This body –” I gestured head to foot at my skin “– she’s maybe seventeen? Self-harm, drug use, prostitution and schoolbooks under the bed. Not my problem, of course. This is just a rest stop, no business of mine. Tell me: do you like what you see?”

  Did tough guys have opinions?

  He didn’t seem to.

  Perhaps the discipline in suppressing terror also suppressed thought.

  “You think,” I said. “I’ll potter.”

  And I did precisely that.

  I swept the grubby pieces of foil into a plastic bag, scraped the crumbs off her desk, opened the window to let in cold night air. I straightened her books, folded her clothes where they’d fallen from the lopsided wardrobe, threw out two pairs of tights with irredeemable holes. I realigned the not-quite-art on the wall, and as I went through the drawers I pulled out a small packet of pot, another of cocaine, and added them both to the rubbish. The bottom drawer was locked. I forced it with a kitchen knife, and from within produced a collection of well kept medical scissors, bandages and a single silver scalpel. I hesitated, then threw the sharps away, left the bandages intact.

  Coyle watched me from the bed, sharp as a cat, silent as a paw in the night.

  His stare was a distraction. I have stood up before the US House of Representatives, and been witty and vibrant and in control, but then I wore a three-thousand-dollar suit, ate a two-hundred-dollar lunch, and I was fabulous because it was what I was meant to be.

  This girl – whoever she was – was not fabulous. With her fraying tights and her welted arms, the temptation to hide behind her frailty, to curl up into my skinny bones, shoulder blades sticking out like chicken wings, chin down, neck tight, was as natural as night. Yet still Coyle watched me, and it wasn’t me he watched, but me, myself, and no shadowed eye or buried face could alter the object of his interest.

  Unsettling. Unwelcome and unfamiliar. Exciting.

  I concentrated hard, my every step measured, and went about imposing what should be upon the what was of the bedroom. Cleaning a room is an extension of cleaning a body; changing its furniture as well as its clothes. Everyone needs a hobby, and everyone was mine.

  Then Coyle said, “You’re an arrogant son of a bitch.”

  “My God!” I exclaimed. “He speaks.”

  “You fuck with her life —”

  “Do you mind if I interrupt you before this becomes emotive? I am here to talk to you. And as you cannot think when I am in residence, I need a host to let you mull the fruity depth of our conversation. I don’t deny that I bore easily, and naturally I regard the skins I wear as something of a project, as anyone would, as everyone does. Some people knit; others take up yoga. If this were a long-term habitation, I would absolutely consider the latter – I feel my knees would benefit from the regime. But it isn’t, so I do what little I can in passing, and you, before you hold forth on the theme of my monstrosity, should be relieved that rather than tidy and bin some junk, I didn’t pull your fucking eyes out with my fingernails.”

  His lips sealed once more.

  I hopped back on to the end of the bed, tucking my knees up to my chin, wrapping my scarred arms across the thin bony shins, staring into his grey, dark eyes.

  “You tear people to pieces,” he said at last.

  “Yes. Yes, I do. I don’t deny it. I walk through people’s lives and I steal what I find. Their bodies, their time, their money, their friends, their lovers, their wives – I’ll take it all, if I want to. And sometimes I put them back together, in some other shape. This skin,” I flicked a stray piece of hair behind my ear, “is going to wake up in a few minutes, frightened and confused because several hours of her life have vanished in a flash. She’s going to think I raped her, maybe drugged her, did something to her body, her belongings, which are the only symbol she has of achievement in her life – in most people’s lives. She’s going to be frightened not because of any pain to her flesh, but because someone walked in and violated the home where she lives. And perhaps she does what she does when she feels alone. Perhaps she cuts, perhaps she sniffs, perhaps she drinks and then finds a guy to pay for all of the above. I really don’t know. But you and I needed to talk.”

  A slight intake of breath. “Did we?”

  “It would have been as easy for me to walk you through Chinese customs with five kilos of heroin strapped to your belly as it is to have a conversation. If you talk to me, you might have a chance.”

  “You steal life, you steal choices – her choices.”

  “Not right now. In a few hours her body is her own again and we’ll be gone. A few minutes, a few seconds, everything changes. Or nothing at all. What you do when that moment comes is all that matters.”

  “A thief is a thief.”

  “And a killer a killer. That is the extension of your argument, is it not?”

  He shifted, barely, against the bed. “What do you want?”

  “You killed Josephine,” I answered, a mere breath in the chilly gloom. “You know how I feel about these things. Why did you try to kill me, Mr Coyle?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to fight than to have a conversation.”

  “You’d talk to the smallpox virus?”

  “If it had stories to tell me of plagues it had seen, of great men it had visited, of children who lived and mothers who died, of hot hospitals and cold freezers in guarded trucks, I’d buy it a three-course meal and a weekend in Monaco. Don’t compare me with a DNA strand in a protein shell, Mr Coyle; the argument is beneath us both. Your passports, your money, your weapons; you’re clearly organised, part of a wider operation. You keep yourself in excellent shape – I haven’t been following the diet or doing the press-ups, I’m afraid. And now you kill people like me.” I sighed. “For no better reason, I’d guess, than because we exist. Did you think you were the first? Sooner or later someone always tries. Yet here we are, as persistent as death itself. In two separate continents through two different paths, two entirely different yet functionally identical species of vulture evolved, nature filling a void. No matter how many of us you kill, we keep on recurring, nature’s hiccup. Here it is, then,” I murmured. “You killed my host, who I loved. You may find the concept hard to believe, but I loved Josephine Cebula, and you killed her. You killed her because there was a note in her file which said she wasn’t just a host, she was a murderer. This was a lie. Your masters lied to you. That, and only that, is something new.”

/>   “The file didn’t lie,” he replied. “Josephine Cebula had to die.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “I really don’t. The names in the file – the corpses she was meant to have left behind – Tortsen Ulk, Magda Müller, James Richter, Elsbet Horn. I hadn’t heard of them until I read them, and the manner of their death – brutal, sadistic perhaps. Josephine was not that woman. She lacked motive, opportunity and means, and if you’d done your own research you’d know that. She was my skin, nothing more, nothing less.” He wasn’t meeting my eyes. I caught his chin, pulled his head up and round, forcing his gaze to meet mine. “Tell me why.”

  “Galileo,” he said. I froze, fingers tight across his jaw. He seemed surprised to have heard himself speak. “For Galileo.”

  “What is Galileo?”

  “The Santa Rosa,” he replied. “That was Galileo.”

  I hesitated, looking for something in his face, something more, and as I did, he struck, his left hand slamming up in a fist, into my face. I cried out and fell to one side, rolling off the edge of the bed. He scrambled up on to his knees, pulling at the handcuffs, ripping with both his hands at the metal chain, even as the bedpost cracked and begin to splinter. I staggered to my feet and he swung one leg into my belly, but I caught his foot, and as he ripped his hand free from the bedpost I flailed against his trouser leg, felt ankle beneath my fingertips

  and that was the end of that.

  Chapter 23

  We have always been hunted.

  My first encounter with this truth was in 1838. I was in Rome, and how they found me I will never fully know.