by Claire North
“Janus!” I called as his footsteps slapped in the night. “Janus!”
Janus, the gate a few metres away, half-turned to look back at me and fell.
There was the sound of an angry wasp biting a distracted bear, and Janus was on the ground, legs crooked beneath him. For a moment I couldn’t see the blood, but as I pressed my back against the crate wall and stared at the body lying not ten feet from my knocking knees, it began to spread. Fast at first, then somehow slower as the area it covered grew wider, the blood came from his back, from the hole the bullet had torn through his lung, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that ghosts are predictable. Mark your target, take them out. Whoever was shooting at us knew our natures.
I looked and saw only dark tunnels of towering crates, a chain fence and a padlocked gate. Janus lay just out in the open, head rolled towards me, mouth working, blood and foam on his lips, trying to speak. I eased closer, back still pressed against the containers, until I was a foot and a half from him.
“Ca… ca… ca…”
The beginning of a sound that might have been a name.
Janus’ left hand was outstretched to me, right hand limp as his life ran away, the breath bubbling up through the shattered remnants of his ribcage. I could almost reach his hand without exposing myself, grab it from cover. The blood trickled against the toe of my shoe.
I reached out, caught Janus’ arm by the wrist, pulling with all my might, dragging his body through the blood, little waves of it shifting beneath him as the body began to turn.
A gun fired and Janus’ body jerked. I saw his eyes go wide, a sharp punching-out of breath, felt the blood splatter against my face as the bullet slammed into his chest and
Janus jumped.
Into the only body that was available.
I screamed and so did Janus, the two of us in one falling back against the crate, shrieking as I pressed my hands against my head and Janus pulled my knees to our chin and we screamed to drown out the shrieking in my ears and screamed to silence the bursting in our brain and screamed because all the little blood vessels behind our eyes were peeling away from the optic nerve and our tear ducts were filling with iron and our nose was flooding with hot blood and our body was kicking and tearing against itself and I tried to shriek,
“Janus!”
but the body by my side was dead and someone else was howling with my tongue, the breath ripping my chest in two.
“Can’t… get the… / Help! / Can’t stop / can’t breathe!”
With all the strength I had, I pushed myself from the wall, flopping on to hands and knees, and Janus tried to pick me up, one knee buckling and another dragging up, and I screamed, “Gunman! Crane / gotta move / body! Get body!” as Janus hauled us to our feet. Blood was running down my face, spilling from my nose as vessels ruptured. Pain lanced through my side as some internal piece of machinery tried, and failed, to maintain its usual function, but the brain wasn’t having any of it, every part, every neuron, fit to bursting as Janus took a step, took another and I shrieked,
“Can’t… breathe! / then… breathe!”
We tumbled again as I tried to stop our legs, focus only on getting air into my lungs, on that single conscious act of inhalation, and I managed to drag down a lungful before Janus, giddy with terror, pushed us back on to our feet and, falling, running, staggering, pulled us away from his already chilling corpse.
Janus ran, and I breathed, and tried not to use my eyes, filled with blood, or my ears, singing where the drums were beginning to rupture. Away from the crane, we saw a strip of metal fence and Janus ran towards it, but I managed to gasp, “No!” and drop us to the ground.
“Got to run / sniper on the crane / got to get / need a body! / run / sniper!”
I rolled on to my side, clasping my knees to my chest in an effort to hold Janus down. “Speak / now! / listen! / now! / listen to me! Listen! There’s… sniper… gotta be / dying / I know / body dying! / listen! / gotta get out / listen! We’re not getting over fence, saw… sheds back / back? / way we came few hundred yards / dying! / few hundred, get to shed, call cops / cops? / flesh with guns! / run!”
Janus hauled me to my feet and I let him, dedicated every thought I had through the red haze of pain to breathing, just breathing, let him manage the rest, arms, feet, even the direction as we stumbled through the dark. The customs sheds lay, grey blots on a grey land, visible between the crates, and as we neared them I felt something hot and sharp down my side, and we screamed but kept running as another part, muscle, organ, nerve, didn’t matter, gave up trying.
“Run,” I whispered as we paused on the edge of the crates. Ten yards between us and the shed, ten open yards and a sniper at our back. “Run!”
Janus ran and so did I, our legs flying as we tore across the ground and something bit the concrete by my back, smacked into the wall ahead of us, but the first was wide to the left, the second wide to the right, and we ran and Janus slammed our shoulder into the door of the cabin, which cracked and collapsed beneath our weight, tipping us shoulder first into the musty gloom within.
For a moment I lay as the blood seeped into my mouth and Janus shrieked and buzzed around my mind and tongue. I managed to open my eyes long enough to see a beige phone hanging on the wall, and hand over hand crawled towards it, each limb dressed in lead, each movement a kick against a wall, until Janus too seemed to see my intention and with a sudden surge forward propelled us to the phone.
911.
The ringing in my shattered eardrums sent bubbles through my face, I could feel them burst and pop inside my cheeks, along the line of my jaw, and as the operator came on to the line another surge of pain kicked through us and I nearly dropped the phone from my bloody hand.
“Help me / dying! / port / help me! / gun / help!”
A bullet smashed through the window above our head and with a shriek Janus dropped the phone and I dropped us, landing curled up on the floor, head in my hands. I pressed against my skull in case it burst even without the help of lead, and as the phone hung swinging by its cable I screamed, “Get me a fucking body!”
Another bullet slammed into the table behind me, and it occurred to me suddenly that these shots weren’t muffled, weren’t the silent wasp of a sniper’s rifle, but were a revolver, high calibre, and getting closer.
“Coming,” I hissed. “He’s coming / oh god / got to move / where? / away / coming? / on foot / jesus jesus jesus / listen / oh god oh jesus jesus / listen we have to…”
Too late. Janus uncurled and crawled up on to our feet. “No, wait,” I gasped, but he was already staggering out through the broken door, and for a second I saw a shape move by the containers, dark beneath the dull street light, then a forklift truck, disguised as a nine-millimetre bullet, slammed into my left leg, spun me against the door frame and dropped me back down on to the cabin floor from whence I came.
Janus screamed, and screamed, and kept on screaming, even as I scrambled back into the shelter of the cabin, pressing my hand against the growing shock, the growing cold, the growing mess that had been my thigh, and breathed in
until Janus screamed again
and breathed out, which he seemed to find easier, and it occurred to me that this was it, dead in a cabin in the Port of Miami, gunned down by a stranger in a stranger’s body, and that all things considered, give or take a variation of geography and time, this was probably how it was always going to have been. How it always had to end.
Then the door opened at the other end of the cabin.
A flashlight swung into my face. Janus’ jolt as he tried to flee sent puke into my mouth. The flashlight came towards us, and behind the light was a security guard, from his peaked black hat to the revolver on his hip, his face open in an expression of shock and concern, and as he knelt down beside me he said, “What the hell…”
Janus moved
faster than me. He caught the guard by the wrist
and was gone.
The security gua
rd fell back on to his buttocks, a toddler learning to walk. Then full control kicked in: his eyes went from me to the door directly in front of us, and at once he fumbled at his side for his revolver, drawing it and locking it in place with a two-handed grip, the barrel fixed on the rectangle of light through which our assailant should walk. I lay beneath him, gasping for breath, the shock of my shattered limb beginning now to assert itself in strong, clean waves of physical pain, even as the blood slowed in my brain and I blinked scarlet tears from my eyes.
We waited, eyes on the door, Janus on one knee, torch beam and barrel pointing towards the exit.
Silence, and the hot slow passage of blood between my clenched fingertips.
“Where is he?” Janus whispered, for himself, not me. “Where is he?”
“Two doors,” I wheezed, and at once Janus snapped round to face the other door, through which the security guard had come. The bouncing of the phone on its cord had subsided, so had the voice on the other end of the line. “Cops are coming,” I added. “Help me.”
Janus turned again, gun swinging from one door to another. “Where is he?” he breathed. “Where is he?”
“Help me!”
His eyes flickered down to me, then away again.
“I’m sorry, Carla,” got to his feet, “I’m sorry,” gun held in front, “I’m so sorry,” and elbows bent, Janus turned and ran.
I lay in a body
whose I do not know
in a shed God knew where
and didn’t want to die.
My uniform was white, all the better for showing up the blood. I imagined that at some stage I’d taken a great deal of pride in the uniform. I’d pressed it, steamed it, made sure the crease down the trousers was just so. Perhaps, as I drove the boat
because I was a captain
I’d reflected on ancient seafaring days when I’d guided tankers into port, or sailed through the twenty-foot waves of the Atlantic, or dressed as the god Poseidon for the young novices as they crossed the equator or the dateline or, on those rare occasions when fortune was fair and navigation liberal, both at once, whooping my way across the centre of the world.
That would have been when I was young, but who knew? Maybe I’d been the captain of a tourist barge my whole life, chugging through the bay. Maybe I’d lied on my CV. Maybe no one would remember my name, whatever that turned out to be. Maybe I was the last person left alive who loved the body I was going to die in.
I tried getting up.
Getting up wasn’t happening.
I tried crawling for the door.
Crawling was within my repertoire, rolled out, snake-like on to my side, kicking with one good leg and pulling with my hands.
I thought I heard sirens, then thought I had imagined it.
A policeman’s body would be ideal.
A policeman’s body would come with a policeman’s gun.
I crawled to the door through which Janus had fled, and peered through it at a sodium-soaked car park adorned with no cover save for one disregarded black van and one overflowing grey dustbin.
Somewhere out on the water a ship blared its horn, proud and lonely in the night. I crawled back across the floor to the still-dangling telephone. The police operator had given up, and the line hung silent, whining like a hurt child. I braced my back against the wall and pushed myself up high enough to get a blood-smeared finger into the top drawer of a desk, yanking it out on to the floor beside me. The owner, damn him to a lingering demise, kept neat papers, business cards and a photograph of his smiling wife and daughter inside. Not a stapler, pair of scissors or sawn-off shotgun in sight.
The next drawer offered up a more promising arsenal of paper clips, sticky notes, pencils, pencil sharpener and a mug proclaiming WE ARE THE BEST in heavy black letters around the side. I smashed the mug against the floor, fumbled through the pieces for one large enough to sit in the palm of my hand, sharp enough to draw blood, wrapped my fingers around it, my hand beneath my body, and lay down on my side, knees tucked in, head down. The doctors call it the recovery position, though all that was recovered was that warm sense of comfort you possessed when, as a child, you curled up by your mother’s side and had not a care in the world.
If I survived this, I told myself, I would be a child again, if only for a few hours, and feel the warmth of unconditional love that forgave all sins.
A siren shrilled in the distance. It sounded too slow, too low, no urgency to it, no audible Doppler effect, and so I gripped my ceramic shard tighter and told myself that I was alone, always had been, and that was nothing new.
A footstep on concrete, taking its time.
Climbing the steps, a slightly different tone of concrete, hollow, ringing with bass. A footstep on carpet, the sound of breath. The hand that held the gun had no need to pull the safety off, that had already happened, but I fancied I could smell the cordite, taste the metal.
The breath above me moved.
Closer.
Denim crunched, haunched, hunched. A man squatted down, his elbows swinging out above his knees, wrists loose, hair white, gun in hand, and smiled at me, and he was
Will.
He was old now, not merely older. His skin was layered on top of itself like folds of cotton, his hair gone to reveal the irregularities of his skull, dotted with yellow. His hands were moulting, his eyes were grey with gum, but he was still William who loved the Dodgers when he was young, and Joe when he was old, and had dreamed of living for ever and becoming someone else.
Which, in a sense, he was.
I looked, and must have lost a little breath for my chest felt tighter, and he smiled, and though it was Will’s lips that parted, it wasn’t Will’s smile that settled there, but someone else’s, a Will who as a child had pulled the wings off flies, a Will who as a young man had been banished from his home and who had not, perhaps, in a single moment of change, chosen to share his body with a stranger for three weeks in California but had taken some other path, to some other person.
Not-Will, smiling still, looked my body up and down, taking in my face, my clothes, my shattered and bleeding leg. He reached out with his left hand and brushed my cheek, a lover’s touch, felt the half-growth of beard across my chin, loosely tugged at my hair, scrutinising its colour. His hand drifted down, my neck, my chest, my thigh, and came to rest just above the gunshot wound in my leg, suspended an inch in the air.
Then he said, but the accent was all wrong, someone else’s accent in Will’s throat, “I thought you’d want to say goodbye.”
Hand hovering, ready to scramble for a bullet in my leg, to dig it out with bare fingers, I had to breathe and couldn’t control the heaving of my lungs, felt the ceramic between my fingertips, saw the veins blue-black on the base of Will’s throat.
His head turned, pigeon-like, examining me, watching my face, my eyes. He said, “Do you love me?”
The question seemed to require a reply, and when I didn’t give one, his fingers brushed, so delicate, through the blood across my leg, streaking the uniform, pain running through the remnants of my thigh, up through my chest, throbbing from elbow to skull.
“Do you love me?” he asked again. “I wanted to find someone that you loved. When I found him, I wasn’t sure if I’d got it right. His kidneys are broken, there’s tumors in his bones and when I looked, see, here…” He pulled my right hand from beneath my body, rested it on his side, pressing it into his flesh where a bulge protruded beneath his jacket, a distortion in the flesh – hernia on a good day, something worse on a bad. “Isn’t it repulsive?” he asked, holding my hand in place, his warmth in my fingers. “Isn’t it strange? Why would anyone love something as disgusting as this? And look!” He moved my hand, higher now. I grunted in pain as the motion shifted my body, dragging me after his enthusiasm, pressing my palm into his armpit, against his skin. “There’s a mole here,” he exclaimed. “I find that fascinating. I play with it all the time; did you? I tried kissing a man, but he didn’t understand; he
said there was something wrong. He didn’t love me, though he swore he loved… Will.” Hesitation, struggling to remember the name, trying it out. “He swore he loved Will, but not myself. I wanted to see if you felt the same way.”
He leaned in close, his breath mixing with mine, lips close enough to kiss, and for a moment I thought he’d do just that, lip to lip, but he was looking into my eyes, trying to find something that was not there. “Do you love me?” he asked. “I looked into the mirror and I couldn’t see it, but I thought… You’ve been me before; you’ve looked into my eyes so many times and you must have loved – loved my skin, my lips, my throat, my tongue. Did you? Do you love me? Will? Do you love me?”
Need. A child needing, imploring on Will’s face.
No, not on Will’s.
On his face.
On its face.
I didn’t answer, couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“Sometimes I look at myself, and all I see is contempt. My face is full of hatred and I think, why would it hate me, I am beautiful, but then I move, and I move, and I move, and it’s all hatred, all ugly every single time I try to smile and then…” A shudder, breath drawing in, going out. “Do you love me? Come on!” A laugh that was lacking patience, a humour that had only a passing wit. “Come on, Will. Do you or do you not love me?”
I tried to speak, yes, no, maybe, perhaps. Nothing formed as my mind searched for the right answer, the way out, and couldn’t work out what that might be.
Will’s face darkened. Eyebrows closing in, eyes crunching up tight, a childish sulk on an ageing face, not Will’s face now, I hadn’t ever seen it with such a look, couldn’t call it his; he lunged forward now and rammed the barrel of the gun hard enough into my broken leg to make me scream, digging it in, and I howled, an animal sound from a stranger’s throat, my voice not so high as it had been a few bodies ago but so much more intense, a lungful of agony across my teeth, and I doubted if it had ever made such a sound before but not-Will pressed harder and roared, his left hand around my face, pulling it into his.
