Touch

by Claire North

  He says:

  The man you are now? This… Nathan? Are you going to kill him?

  The words come tangled, courageous and scared.

  Maybe, I reply. Maybe.

  He nods, digesting my words, then says:

  Don’t. Life is a beautiful thing. Don’t kill him.

  Goodbye, Klemens Ebner.

  Goodbye, Nathan.

  We shake hands formally, and then, as I move away, his fingers touch my arm, the inside, where the skin is soft. He’s frightened, but his fingers stay, barely resting on my skin, and if there was a moment, it would have been then.

  I do not look back as I walk away.

  Travellers’ hotels.

  Seen one, seen ’em all.

  This one had a couple of cranky computers in the hall, accessible for half-hour stretches for residents’ internet access. Of the many email accounts I ran, only one had content more interesting than an invitation to buy three new coffee cups at 72 per cent of their original price or anti-cellulite cream for the modern woman.

  The email was from Johannes “Spunkmaster13” Schwarb, and came with a business disclaimer at the bottom pointing out that any information contained within was confidential, and that the value of your investments might go down as well as up. He’d forgotten to remove it before pressing ‘send’.

  The email was short and to the point.

  It had the registration number of a car driven to a hospice in rural Slovakia.

  The name of the woman who’d hired it from Eurocar in Bratislava.

  The credit card she’d used to secure the transaction.

  The last eleven places that credit card had been used.

  Five of the eleven were in Istanbul, on the days leading up to the death of Josephine Cebula.

  All the rest were in Berlin.

  A name and address were at the bottom.

  Alice Mair.

  Nice to meet you at last.

  Chapter 37

  An estate agent has two primary roles.

  The first is the acquisition of long-term investment property. Male or female, young or old, there’s no point moving long term into a skin unless you know its social situation, criminal record and medical history. I have known seven of my kind hospitalised for asthma, angina, diabetes – all of which could easily have been avoided if they’d done their homework – and two have died of the same, their physical conditions striking so hard and so fast that they couldn’t even get a good grip on the paramedic to jump away. Had one known enough about her target to check the inside jacket pocket, she would have found the epinephrine right there, ready to go. She would have lived but for ignorance of her own wardrobe.

  The second role of a good estate agent is exhaustive research for short-term loans.

  To take an example.

  “I wanna be Marilyn Monroe.”

  1959 Hollywood may have had the glitz, the glamour and the flashing lights, but the Scarlet and Star Diner on North Arlen Boulevard served the worst scrambled eggs this side of the Greenwich Meridian. I prodded them gingerly with my fork while on the other side of the booth the body of Anne Munfield, forty-two years old, said, “I wanna be her, just for a few days. There’s a party on Friday, the whole town’s talking, and I thought, maybe Tony Curtis, maybe Grace Kelly, maybe I’ll go as a politician or even just a waiter, whatever – but then I thought. Marilyn. Just for a few days, a couple of nights, even. I wanna be Marilyn Monroe.”

  My eggs, when prodded, oozed a thin liquid that might have been water, might have been undercooked grease – whatever it was, it could have formed the perfect medium for the evolution of some primeval monster.

  “So…?” asked my companion, leaning across the rubber tabletop. “Whatcha think?”

  I laid my fork to one side. The inhabitant of Anne Munfield went by the name Aurangzeb, for reasons which largely evaded me as, by her own confession, she’d been ghosting for less than thirty years and had been raised in her previous life on a farmstead in Illinois. Even had she not admitted to her youth, her behaviour would have been self-explanatory.

  “All right,” I murmured. “Let’s go with this for a moment. Why Marilyn?”

  “Jesus, why not Marilyn?” she exclaimed. “She’s got this sleek little body, and it’s perfect, but it’s also real, you know, I mean, she’s got a real arse and real tits and a real belly and you might call it chubby, but it’s not that – it’s just real.”

  “The word is she’s also prone to alcohol and pills.”

  Aurangzeb threw her hands up in frustration. “Who isn’t in this town? You seen some of the faces round here – it’s like they’ve been eaten by crabs. I heard you were the guy for this. I heard you were good. This body I’ve got, it’s got more money than sense – I can wire you whatever you need, whatever currency, I’ve got the signature down perfect. Just gimme this? OK?”

  Anne Munfield might once have been a dignified middle-aged woman, serene and calm, quite possibly vegetarian. Now her face twisted with wheedling desire, her eyes looking up like a meek puppy afraid of a master’s slipper. Such juvenile imploring did not suit features better made for motherhood.

  My eggs oozed oily water and my body craved cabbage. I had never liked cabbage, but now my stomach ached for it like a baby for mother’s milk, and Aurangzeb whined, straining every muscle, every fibre and vein beneath her skin with the need to be someone new.

  “If I do this,” I grunted, “I want to be absolutely clear – one night, two at the most, and you’re out. Marilyn Monroe wakes up on Monday morning with a stinking hangover and a feeling that she’s missed something insignificant and that’s it. The end. No more, no less. Are we agreed?”

  Aurangzeb whooped, punching the air in her glee, and I felt a momentary pang of shame that a body as beautiful as hers should be so ugly to my eyes.

  It didn’t take much to research Marilyn.

  She was one of the first movie stars not only to court the press, but seduce it, invite it round with an intimate suggestion, bathe with the press, share two straws to one milkshake with the press and, when the press looked up from its mug with a creamy moustache, it was Marilyn’s metaphorical – and not so metaphorical – handkerchief that dabbed the offending mark away.

  A little more research was required to get the important – and perhaps more interesting – information on the people around her.

  I spent half a day as a chipper black woman by the name of Maggie who brought coffee to all the execs in Fox; another three hours as a harried producer with thinning hair and what felt suspiciously like undiagnosed sciatica. I hopped around for three minutes as a security guard, two as a gaffer, seven as a costume girl and finally, angling for the exit, forty-five seconds as a minor movie star whose name I forget and whose mouth reeked of aniseed.

  Out in the clearer air, my body – my preferred body – was waiting for me by the car.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “I hate this town,” I replied. “Every mouth aches from smiling too much.”

  He shrugged. “Works out well enough. Hey, you in tonight?”

  “I was thinking about it, why?”

  “The Dodgers are playing. I thought, you wanna go?”

  I thought about it. “Why not? I’ll change into someone less sensible.”

  So saying, I took his unresisting hand, and jumped.

  The Dodgers don’t interest me.

  Baseball doesn’t interest me.

  Sports trivia.

  If you suspect that the body you’re sitting opposite is a ghost, I recommend sports trivia as a method of detection. A body wearing a Dodgers shirt should, if it paid for the threads, know the score – but what self-respecting ghost wastes time on detail like that?

  That’s the kind of thing you pay estate agents to do.

  Straight white streets through the straight grey grid of LA.

  My body is young, stronger now for a decent meal, with a mole under my left armpit that I find perpetually fascinating
and have to force myself not to fiddle with in public. He is also that most vital of employees for a jobbing estate agent – a clean, cooperative gofer.

  I had met my body beneath freeway 101.

  It was the place where dreams went to die. The failed actors, the porn stars who’d been too late to get the treatment. The handyman turned out when the studio went under, the scriptwriter who’d never quite hit the money. The drug dealer who’d lost his haul in the last bust, the kid whose father was in lock-up and whose mum couldn’t cope. It was the dead night-time stain of the city, the hollow-eyed place that peeked out between the brightness of the street lights. It was a dangerous place to walk alone at night. It was the perfect place to find unwanted flesh.

  He wore stinking grey fabrics falling off him like the wrappings from a rotten mummy. His beard was down to his collarbone. His hair appeared grey, but when I squatted down opposite him and put a twenty-dollar note into his foul black hat, he told me his name was Will and he was twenty-two years old.

  “Are you on drugs?” I asked.

  “Jesus,” he groaned as the cars rumbled by overhead. “What kinda question is that?”

  “A question that could change your life,” I replied. “There’s more than just money on the line.”

  His head turned one way, then the other, twisting down like a swan examining its feathers. “No. You think I got the cash to pay for that shit?”

  “What brings you here?”

  “I fell for a guy.”

  “So?”

  “They don’t take kindly to sodomy in Texas. If it’d had been a white guy, maybe my folks would’ve been OK. Maybe they wouldn’t. With all the shit that went down, didn’t really stop to ask.”

  “You got family, friends here?”

  “I got folk who look out for me,” he replied, bristling.

  “That’s… not what I meant.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Spill. Don’t dance – talk.”

  I sat back on my haunches, hands spilling over the tops of my knees. “In five seconds’ time you’ll be standing up, but you won’t know how you got there.”

  “What the —”

  I grabbed his wrist and switched.

  Five seconds later he was standing up and didn’t know how he’d got there.

  “What the fuck did you do to me?” he breathed.

  I swayed, my body a little dizzy from the two rapid jumps, in and out. “I want you to listen to me carefully. There sometimes comes a moment – so fast, a flash in the pan – which can change your life. It’s the two seconds in which the driver of the truck failed to hit the brakes. It’s the single breath where you said something stupid, and you should have said something kind. It’s the moment the cops bust in through the door. Everyone feels it, that moment where their lives hang on a knife’s edge. This is one of those moments.”

  “Who are you?” he stammered. “What the fuck are you?”

  “I am a ghost. I live through other people’s skins, wear the flesh of strangers. Quickly, painlessly, and without memory of the event. I’m not going to ask for a decision now. I’ll keep my distance and let you think it over. I’m in town for a few weeks running some errands. What I want – what I need – is a semi-permanent body I can touch base with when the day is done, which won’t get up and walk away when I’m not in residence. Do you understand?”

  “Fuck no!” he said, but he wasn’t shouting, wasn’t screaming, wasn’t running, which was in itself good news.

  “The deal is simple. I’ll clean you up: new clothes, haircut, money, identification, whatever. I’ll put down six months’ rent on an apartment, somewhere nice, stock up the fridge, and put five thousand dollars into an account in whatever name you choose. If you have culinary preferences or sexual concerns, we can negotiate. In exchange, I get your body for three weeks.”

  He shook his head, but it wasn’t anger or rejection. “You’re fucking insane,” he breathed.

  “I am asking politely,” I replied. “It will be far more convenient if we enter into this arrangement willingly. If you doubt my word then it is my intention to leave this body tomorrow lunchtime. This host, unlike you, I acquired for the purpose of the bus ride to LA. He will not remember how he got here, he will not remember how he came to be wearing these clothes or where the insole that he sorely needed for his left shoe came from; the last three days will be a blank to him, and absolutely he will not remember how one thousand dollars in used notes came to be in the bottom of his suitcase. He may panic, he may run, he may do all sorts of things that alas I cannot influence or control, or he may take this for the gift it is. When he wakes, he too will be on that knife-edge that can change a life, and whether he dances or whether he slides will be his call. You just want to talk; that’s fine. You want to dance? Be at the junction of Lexington and Cahuenga tomorrow. It’s a good deal – consider it.”

  So saying, I walked away.

  Chapter 38

  I hate LA.

  Endless straight lines from nowhere particular to nothing much especially.

  Even the places that should be green – parks and “recreation areas” – are no more than a slab of fenced-off concrete where the kids sit and drink while waiting for something more interesting to pass them by.

  But say what you will for Los Angeles, you can always find someone willing to do something if it’ll cut them a break.

  At 12.03 p.m. I left my host for the body of a passing stranger, walked far enough along Lexington for my former host not to suspect, then crossed over the street to where Will was waiting, squinting against the noonday sun.

  “Hi,” I said, and to his credit he didn’t jump. “Make your mind up?”

  Two weeks later we sat on the concrete stands of the stadium, he eating popcorn, me in the over-tanned, dry-skinned body of a handy stranger, when Will put his hand on my arm and said, “I can see you now.”

  “See what?”

  “You,” he replied. “Doesn’t matter who you’re wearing, where you’ve come from; I wait by the car and when you come to find me, I know it’s you.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno. Something in the way you walk. Something in the way you look. Something old. I can recognise you, whoever you are. I know who you are now.”

  I tried to answer and found I had nothing. My eyes were hot, and I turned my face away and hoped he didn’t see me cry.

  Chapter 39

  The Kepler file made no mention of estate agents.

  Its list of my bodies was far from comprehensive. Details were pieced together based on the testimony of witnesses, medical reports, but by definition the bodies I had worn had only gaps in their memories to offer, not hard information.

  Nowhere did it tell of my previous employment.

  If it had, perhaps Nathan Coyle would have tried that much harder when he came to pull the trigger.

  A good estate agent will spend months researching a target.

  For long-term habitation, a clean skin is advisable: those with no social connections or economic expectations, whose sudden alteration will not be noticed. The ideal candidate is, naturally enough, the comatose patient whose family have given up hope. With no one else at home, it’s as clean as it comes to pick the body up for whatever purposes you so desire. The downside of acquiring a body whose original inhabitant is in a vegetative state is you cannot always guarantee the extent of the biological trauma the body itself has suffered. Some muscle atrophy is inevitable; I find that bladder control and various secretions such as tears, saliva and snot can also take a hit, though these can be nursed back to stability with patience, a quality many of my kind lack.

  In rare cases ghosts have been known to jump into a vegetative patient only to discover that as well as higher brain activity, muscle control and coordination are entirely out of the window, and so they remain, trapped, awake, paralysed, screaming without a voice, shrieking with no sound, until someone, God almighty be praised, some nurse or passing janitor, accidentally bru
shes their naked skin, and they can move out again. I once spent two days in such a state, until my body was given a sponge bath, and when I escaped into the nurse I fell on to the floor, weeping with relief to have a body back.

  Whatever the risks, a long-term habitation of a clean skin is almost invariably preferable to one with an established history. An estate agent can help: they can teach you the names of brothers, fathers, mothers, daughters, colleagues, friends; they can show you where your skin keeps the car keys, help you learn the signature, fake the accent, tell the tales, to ensure that the leap from skin to skin happens with minimum fuss to the moving ghost. Hopping into any well-established skin is hard; ghosting into Marilyn Monroe was utterly insane.

  “She’s taking drugs,” I said as Aurangzeb sat in my flat and drank my wine. The great glass window of the living room looked out and down from the LA hills on to a city like a circuit board, red and yellow twinkling in the smog beneath us.

  “So?” she asked. “Who isn’t in this town?”

  “She’s mixing drugs and drink.”

  “Come on.” Aurangzeb rolled her eyes. “Having me in residence will be a lucky break for the girl! Couple of clean days, you know?”

  “Have you had much experience of the physiological effect of dependency?”

  “A day – two at most – I think the body will make it a coupla days without going to shit, you know? Gimme the stuff I can use. Who’s she sleeping with, what’s her agent’s name, who’s the guy she owes money to, that sorta stuff. Is she…” She shuffled forward eagerly. “Is she sleeping with Kennedy?”

  “Even if she is,” I replied, “Monroe’s response is coyness, and I suggest you try that yourself. The golden phrase is ‘I don’t really want to talk about that now.’”

  “Whatever – I can do that.”

  “She’s no dope,” I added quickly. “Whatever you do, don’t play her as a dope. She becomes vapid as a defence mechanism, is blunt when she’s sure of her power. You can’t be sure of anything with this level of research, so for God’s sake play it empty. But not dumb.”