Touch

by Claire North

  “Do you love me?!”

  As he pressed the gun deeper, his cheek next to mine, I reached up with the shard of shattered mug in my hand and drove it, as hard as I could, into the top of Will’s neck.

  My bloody hand slipped and missed his windpipe, pushing instead into the soft flesh beneath his jaw. Fresh red blood spurted out as ceramic edge penetrated skin, punching through the bottom of his mouth beneath his tongue, and he fell back even as I rolled on to him, putting both my knees on top of the arm that held the gun and twisting it. A bullet fired, a twitch in the finger, and another, great bone-jarring jumps of noise and light, but I held on, held on, as beneath me the hot body writhed and choked, coughing blood, eyes goggled and face pale, and as I prised the gun from his fingers and curled backwards, kicking my way free of him and scrambling back.

  Then he looked up into my face and, with a piece of coffee mug sticking through his jaw, he smiled. “D-d-do.” The sound tangled with the blood in his mouth, a rivulet spouting at the corner of his lips. He coughed, sending droplets splattering in my face, and tried again. “D-do you l-like… w-what you see?”

  I raised the gun in my one good hand. His smile widened to a grin. His teeth were fake, dentures stuck in with gum, stained with blood. I turned my face away and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 64

  Bodies.

  No one can track a ghost during rush hour.

  A crowded train. A busy station. Shoulder to shoulder, skin brushes skin, breath breathes breath, we inhale the sweat of the tall man’s armpits, crush the old lady’s feet beneath our boots.

  I

  whoever I am

  rode the Paris Metro from here to there, surfing the arterial pulse of strangers’ flesh.

  Where Janus was, who Janus was, I didn’t care, as long as someone who was Janus was where I needed him, her, whoever, when the journey was done.

  I slipped from skin to skin, a bump, a shudder, a slowing-down and a speeding-up, a swaying of the carriage, a stepping on another’s foot, I am

  a child dressed in school uniform,

  an old man bent double over his stick.

  I bleed in the body of a woman on the first day of her period,

  ache down to the soles of my tired builder’s feet.

  I crave alcohol, my nose burst and swollen from too much of the same.

  The doors open and I am young again, and beautiful, dressed for summer in a slinky dress and hoping that the goosebumps on my flesh will not detract from the glamour I seek to express.

  I am hungry

  and now I am full,

  desperate to pee by the carriage window,

  eating crisps in the seat by the door.

  I wear silk.

  I wear nylon.

  I loosen my tie.

  I hurt in leather shoes.

  My motion is constant, my skins are stationary, but by the brush of a hand on the rush-hour train

  I am everyone.

  I am no one at all.

  I ride the train to Gare de Lyon.

  To Janus.

  To somebody else.

  An uninspiring station of minimal merit.

  The nearest food is on the other side of a flagstone concourse where nothing grows and no one waits.

  The trains are roaring TGVs heading to Montpellier, Nice, Marseille. The commuter trains are full of suburban dreamers, men and women who aspire to boulevards lined with fir trees and the sound of old men playing boules. I become one of these women for a minute, my suit sharp, briefcase heavy, a copy of the latest thing, by the latest recommended cultural wonder, tucked under my arm. My ticket is to Troyes, where the streets are clean and the mayor always says hello. I look for platform 10, and see a woman eating a baguette, devouring a baguette, standing by the barrier. Her hair is fair, her face is young, her dress is small and black, her coat is lined with fur, and she wears upon her wedding finger a band of silver studded with jade. The wedding finger taps out a rhythm, and the rhythm is one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, while feet move, almost imperceptibly, to the motion of the waltz.

  I stand by her side, start to hum a tune, the same style, the same beat. We do not look at each other until she finishes her baguette and says, “I hope I didn’t just ditch a very beautiful body for nothing.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “Where’s your ticket to?”

  “I don’t have a ticket. I saw her on the train and suddenly realised that I hadn’t finished my dinner.”

  “You’re married,” I said.

  Janus shrugged. “I’ve got two condoms in my bag and a spare pair of black lace pants. I think I’m having an affair.”

  “If you say so. Either way, you don’t have a ticket, and unless you know the pin number to your host’s credit card…?”

  Janus sighed, brushing crumbs off the white collar of her fluffy coat. “What do you suggest?”

  “A train out of here.”

  “They can’t have followed us. I changed dozens of times.”

  “Yet the fact remains that they found you,” I replied, eyes still moving everywhere except over her. “They found me.”

  “Fine,” she grunted. “Pick a train. I’ll find someone boring to wear on it.”

  We caught the Montpellier TGV.

  I caught a man whose wallet proclaimed him to be Sebastian Puis, owner of three credit cards, one library card, one gym membership, four supermarket loyalty cards and a voucher for a free haircut at a salon in Nice.

  Janus rode Marillion Buclare, dark hair, deep puppy eyes and a pendant around her neck which proclaimed “Love” in Farsi. The train was not so crowded that Sebastian and Marillion could not have sat together. We did not.

  Sebastian Puis owned an iPod. As the train began the long slow hum of acceleration out of the station, I flicked through its contents. I had heard almost none of the music he possessed, most of which appeared to be some sort of French rap. Twenty minutes later I laid the iPod down. Sometimes even I struggle to get into character.

  Across the aisle a boy of fifteen gestured furiously at his teenage companion. Stick with me, he said, stick with me and I’ll see you all right. Them kids at school, they think they’re something, but they’re not, they’re all talk talk talk, they don’t know, I know, I’ve lived it, I’ve fucking lived it, I’ll see you’re good. Got a phone? Gimme. I’m gonna prank-call my brother again. He gets so mad. Just so mad. It’s amazing. This one time I called him fifteen times in a day, then sent him a picture of my balls. It was the best. I’m the fucking best, I’ll see you all right.

  I tried to tune him out, staring out across the darkening flatlands of Northern France, and thought without words, remembered without feeling.

  A stranger approaches in the street.

  Says you are beautiful.

  Their warmth, your skin.

  There is no loneliness more lonely than to be alone in a crowd. No awkwardness more unsettling than the inside joke you do not comprehend.

  We fall in love too easily, ghosts such as I.

  Chapter 65

  In my younger days I associated south with warmth. From the north to the south there was, I imagined, a softening of the winters, a brightening of the summers. To grasp that a place could be both south and blisteringly cold took more bitter experience in more blue-lipped bodies than I care to recount. I would come to the coast of the Mediterranean unprepared for the slicing rains and frost-stained ground, abandoning the high-cheeked, slim creature I wore in favour of meatier locals with flubber around their bellies in the hope that a change of circulatory system might dull the distress of climate.

  Sebastian Puis was not warm. Scrambling off the TGV in Montpellier station – as average a mainline building as any in France – I was immediately struck by how cold my fingertips became in the biting wind and how thin my coat felt against the pouring rain. I huddled by the tabac with its paraphernalia of cigarettes, chocolate and packs of heretic-themed p
laying cards, and waited for Marillion Buclare. Marillion Buclare did not come, but rather a woman in a fur stole of russet fox, the nose hanging forlornly down by her shoulder, approached me with a cry of “Is that still you?”

  Her chins were many and layered, painted the same brilliant white as her face. Her jowls hung beneath the line of her jaw; her hair was an ozone catastrophe; her fingers were blood red, her lips purple, and as she swept upon me I had a sensation of being a rowing boat before the prow of an oncoming battleship. “Good God,” she blurted. “You look terrible.”

  Janus, resplendent in…

  “I feel like a Greta – do I look like a Greta to you?”

  … in a woman whose name was almost certainly not Greta, flicked through a handbag hanging by a gold chain and with a cry of “Can I pick them, or can I pick them?” waved a fat wad of euros around for all to see.

  I smiled the long-suffering smile of the embarrassed son meeting his extravagant mother, took Janus gently by the arm and angled her away from the gaze of the station. “Marillion?”

  “Let her go in the lady’s loo. She has a bit of a rash, poor thing. Don’t look at me like that,” she added, slapping me on the arm. “I hopped half a dozen times before picking up marvellous Greta. What do you think?”

  “I don’t think she’s your type.”

  “I think I’m hers,” she retorted. “And if I am not now, then I will be. I will become so, yes? No one can follow a ghost through a subway; not even Galileo.”

  I scowled. “No more unnecessary jumping. They may not track us through rush hour but what will they do when the hospital report comes in for Marillion? That will give them a city, a place to start looking.”

  “Why, my dear precious thing,” she breathed, “I do believe you’re frightened.”

  “If you had been shot as many times as I have in the last few days, you too would hear the beating of the drum.”

  “Then we should have gone to the airport, flown to a place with no name, a hillside of tumbling shacks and shanties where the hospitals won’t ask and the records won’t tell.”

  “Perhaps,” I replied. “But there’s more here than just them and us.”

  “There’s never more.”

  “Galileo is inside Aquarius.”

  “What makes you sure?”

  “Why else would his file be a lie?”

  “That’s conjecture, not proof. Even if it were true, I don’t see why you need me.”

  “Our kind never work together. We are competitors in a world of beautiful bodies and excessive tastes. In Miami we behaved exactly as ghosts would – we jumped and we ran, and we were gunned down for our mistakes. Just now we did precisely what you’d expect – we ran into rush hour, ditched our bodies for something rich and easy. Ghosts don’t cooperate. Let’s cooperate. No more unnecessary jumps.”

  Janus turned away, preening at her reflection in a window. “Such a shame. I could have changed into someone less fashionable.”

  We caught a taxi from the station.

  The driver understood that his role was to be grizzled, gruff and terse. Strangers visiting his city for the first time might mistake all of the above for a symptom of deep wisdom as long as they didn’t perceive it for the antipathy it clearly was. Beyond my own sallow reflection in the window, I watched a city which had moved too fast to ever truly understand what it wanted to be. Beneath the overhanging remains of a Roman aqueduct, car parks and silver-grey bollards lined the boulevards and little winding streets. Between the coffee shop and the supermarket selling wine in six-euro cartons with a tap on the end, the green flashing light of a pharmacy, two snakes coiled around a staff. Swaying cedars pushed against dark-needled pines; hedges of thorns hid the new apartments which crawled up the hills towards the northern edge of town.

  The driver asked, “Holiday?”

  No, I answered, and yes, Janus replied.

  Stupid time to come for a holiday, he said. Should have come in summer or closer to Christmas. You’ll have a horrible time now.

  The hotel had purple ceilings, blue carpets and a motif of silver storks embossed into the walls. Janus paid with Greta’s cash for two rooms for the night. Dinner was still being served; would we be dining?

  No, I said, running my eye over a menu of twenty-euro steak and thirty-euro wine. All things considered, I doubted that we would.

  Alone in a room that could have been anywhere in the world, I stripped off before a full-length mirror and assessed the body of Sebastian Puis. He wasn’t my type, nor was I particularly comfortable with either his skin or his style. He hovered on the verge of being unhealthy grey, and from his chest and back tufts of hair sprouted in patchy clusters, unsure whether to give growth a try.

  The urge to jump into someone darker, brighter, smoother, hairier – anything which could be firmly defined, seized upon as a starting ground for creating some sort of character – grew in my stomach. I rifled through Sebastian’s bag but could see no evidence of his occupation. His phone, simple and sensible, I pulled the battery from, in expectation of the moment when a friend or loved one, perhaps waiting at Montpellier station still, began to agonise about his disappearance. Maybe a frightened mother was already on the phone to the police, who would reply that young men lead their own lives, and that if she was truly concerned she should call back, on the non-emergency line, at the end of two days. Gut instinct is never accepted as a measure for the disappearance of a loved one, and for that I thank police procedure heartily.

  Study this face and guess its nature.

  I might be a rakish wit, a piss-taking clown. Perhaps I’m soulful and lonely, sitting awake at night writing sonnets to an imagined love. My hands are soft, alien to manual labour; suck in my stomach and my ribcage protrudes with aching clarity, yet relax my belly and I look almost portly as it rounds out above my hips. My buttocks have suffered the repetitive light abrasion that comes from too long sitting in the same place; the inside of my left thigh was once scratched and now is healed. Am I a student, a designer, a software programmer, a young DJ with a lot of trend and not much taste? More important, am I gluten intolerant? Can I manage lactose, do I get shin splints, should I be careful when eating sugar, will the sting of a bee cause my lungs to collapse? How will I know until I make the mistakes that Sebastian Puis would not make, having already made them once before?

  For a moment I miss the familiar weight of Nathan Coyle or the runner’s confidence of Alice Mair.

  We eat, Janus and I, in a small restaurant opposite a remnant of medieval wall. She orders cheese and wine and duck in simmering purple sauce. The owner/waiter/matron of the place asks me if I will be paying for my mother’s meal. Janus forgets who she is and for a moment is indignant at the idea.

  Conversation is hollow.

  Do you know the city?

  A little.

  When were you last here?

  A long time ago.

  And who were you then?

  I forget. But I wore yellow as I walked by the sea, and ate oysters from a nickel bucket. And you?

  I was someone extraordinary.

  I am always someone extraordinary, you see.

  And then Janus said, “Why did you save me?” The question was so against the tenor of our conversation I was taken by surprise. “Our relationship has been… temperamental, shall we say. You need help – you could have gone elsewhere.”

  “Galileo. You’re the only one I know – besides myself and one other – who’s met him.”

  “And Miami?” she murmured, prodding a piece of drooping vegetable with her fork. “What of that?”

  I laid my cutlery down, folded my hands together beneath my chin. It feels like a gesture Sebastian Puis would not make, but then for this brief encounter, for this rare moment between old acquaintances, I am not he, but…

  … someone else.

  “We… understand flesh,” I said at last. “We are connoisseurs of eyes and lips, hair and skin. The emotions which would otherwise drive the
flesh, the… complexity that arises from a life long lived, we perhaps lack. Like children, we flee from pain and deny our own responsibilities. This is the simple truth of our existence. Yet we have still lived as human. We still dread to die and feel all the things humans feel not merely as a chemical response, but as… the only language we have left with which to speak. Had it been me who switched into a body without injury that night in Miami, I cannot guarantee that I would not have fled. I do not say this –” I added as she opened her mouth to speak “– to forgive you. You left me to die; that was the decision you made. As I understand fear and dread, and panic and pain, I also comprehend resentment, anger and betrayal. You saved your skin and left me to die in mine, and though I can comprehend the action I cannot forgive it.”

  “And if I repented?” she murmured. “If I… apologised?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine how that might sound.”

  The end of a fingertip played with the hollow of her spoon. A moment came, a moment went, and that was all that there was to it. Our plates were removed, coffee presented, for you cannot have dinner and not have coffee, Monsieur, it simply is not a concept we are prepared to comprehend. And as she crumbled in a cube of brown sugar Janus said simply, “You were meant to have killed him.”

  “Who? I am caretaker to a whole cemetery of responsibilities.”

  “Galileo.”

  “I did kill him,” I retorted, sharper than I’d meant. “I shot him, and when the police came I knelt over his body and there wasn’t a pulse.”

  “And yet the rumours persist. Milli Vra, Santa Rosa…”

  “I didn’t know you paid attention.”