Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  And then Annie slept, neither fitful nor restless nor agitated, and when she woke it was Sunday, and in amongst her feelings was a quiet sense of reassurance, as if the world had ventured to return a little of that which she had lost: faith in basic human nature, perhaps, something such as a belief that somewhere out there things made sense, and she would no longer be the only one to miss the point.

  FIVE

  Sunday morning Annie did not wish to be alone. Such a desire was new, a little strange, and yet she did not resist it as she would ordinarily have done. She crossed the hall and told Jack Sullivan to come have breakfast with her, and he – ever the one to take a free meal when it was offered – came willingly.

  She made eggs and hash browns and bacon, fried some mushrooms and brewed fresh coffee. She had Sullivan squeeze a dozen oranges and set the jug in the freezer to chill while she cooked, and then they sat together in silence and ate well.

  ‘Something has changed,’ Sullivan ventured as they sat drinking coffee. He frowned, tilted his head to the right. ‘You didn’t go out and get laid, did you Annie?’

  She smiled, laughed. ‘No Jack, I didn’t go out and get laid.’

  ‘So you stayed home and did it, right?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t stay home.’

  ‘So tell me.’ He pushed his plate to one side, rested his elbows on the table and set his chin on his steepled fingers. He looked down his nose at her. ‘Tell Doctor Sullivan my dear … tell me your secret.’

  Annie paused, silent for a moment. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she began, then waved her hand in a dismissive fashion. ‘Not too hard, don’t worry,’ she added. ‘Just thinking about what I want I s’pose.’

  ‘What you want?’ Sullivan asked. ‘You have the store, you have this apartment, and you have me … what the hell else could a beautiful single thirty-year-old New Yorker want?’

  ‘A relationship?’

  Sullivan closed his eyes and exhaled. ‘Oh shit,’ he said quietly.

  Annie laughed. ‘Oh shit. That’s what you have to say? Christ Jack, you didn’t expect me to stay single for the rest of my life did you?’

  ‘Hell no Annie, I was hoping you’d fall head over heels for me.’

  Annie reached out and closed her hand over Jack’s. ‘You, you old warhorse … you will always be the one.’

  Sullivan opened his eyes and smiled at her. ‘So tell me his name.’

  ‘What makes you think there’s a someone?’

  ‘His name,’ Sullivan repeated.

  Annie looked away towards the window. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing happened, nothing at all.’

  ‘He’s married?’

  Annie shook her head. ‘No … well, at least I don’t think he’s married.’

  ‘So what’s his name?’

  ‘Quinn … David Quinn.’

  ‘And you met him where?’

  ‘He came to the store on Friday,’ Annie replied.

  ‘And he bought a book –’

  ‘Three,’ Annie interjected.

  ‘Well fuck it Annie … marry the guy.’

  She laughed. It felt good to be talking about real things with a real person, perhaps the realest person she’d ever known.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then yesterday morning I woke up and thought to hell with it. I didn’t go to the store, I walked uptown, the other side of the park, and there I was, sitting outside some place drinking coffee, and he shows up. Just like that.’

  Sullivan shook his head. ‘You believe in coincidence?’

  ‘Sure I do,’ she said.

  Sullivan shook his head. ‘Coincidence, my dear, is bullshit.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Annie said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Your thoughts are almost exclusively responsible for the situations you get yourself into.’

  ‘My thoughts?’

  Sullivan nodded.

  Annie frowned. ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Ask yourself this … you get up in the morning and you feel like shit off a griddle, bad hair day, bad everything day, right?’

  Annie shrugged. ‘Right.’

  ‘So you don’t feel good about yourself, you don’t feel good about the way you look. Well, from that perspective you’re going to have a negatively biased view about yourself. That viewpoint will communicate in what you say, how you say it, your body language, agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘So how do people judge people … generally on first impressions in this day and age? Well, their first impression is going to be of someone who doesn’t think very much of themselves, someone who’s perhaps reserved, withdrawn. That will then influence the way they respond to you, what they say, how they say it. You project something and people are aware of it, if it’s negative or positive. And thus someone comes along with an idea, they’re all eager to tell someone … who are they gonna tell? They’re gonna tell someone they feel might be receptive to their idea. You’re with me so far?’

  Annie nodded.

  ‘So this guy comes to the store, he buys some books, you share a few words, and there must have been something about the way you responded to him to make him feel that he could come and talk to you when he saw you outside drinking your coffee. If you had been cold and aloof he perhaps would have pretended not to see you or something.’

  ‘Okay,’ Annie said, ‘and after lunch we do world hunger and the AIDS crisis.’

  ‘Be facetious,’ Sullivan interjected, mock indignation in his eyes. ‘What I say is true … whatever you said and however you said it made him feel safe enough to come and speak with you again.’

  ‘So what now?’

  Sullivan frowned. ‘What d’you mean what now?’

  ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘Well, hell Annie, you call the guy up, have him come over, make him some dinner and then fuck him six ways to Sunday.’

  Annie laughed, embarrassed perhaps. She held her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes.

  ‘You do know what that means, right?’ Sullivan asked.

  ‘Enough,’ she said, and stood up. She started to clear plates from the table.

  Sullivan reached out and took her hand. He tugged at her until she sat down again.

  ‘Listen,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m only half joking Annie. I see you come and go every day, I see the store, the way you’re so wrapped up in yourself and what you feel and I worry about you. You need to be out there, out there talking to people … and sure there are rough edges and sharp corners, that’s just the way it is, but hell, if you never actually live a life then you’ll wind up more bitter and twisted than if you get kicked a few times.’

  Annie O’Neill couldn’t think of anything to say. He was right, right enough to empty her head of any reply. She looked at him. She hated him, but in the same moment she cared for him as much as anyone she’d ever known. She reached out and pressed her hand against the side of his face.

  ‘And you can stop drinking so much,’ she said.

  Sullivan nodded. ‘I’m tougher than you think.’

  ‘I know you are Jack, but –’

  ‘We make a deal,’ he said. ‘A deal, right?’

  Annie nodded hesitantly.

  ‘You get yourself a man, I’ll stop drinking.’

  ‘What d’you mean, get myself a man?’

  Sullivan smiled. ‘The night I can’t sleep because you’re pounding the headboard and moaning like a banshee I’ll stop drinking.’

  ‘So crude,’ Annie said. ‘So unnecessarily crude Jack Sullivan.’

  ‘You get yourself someone you feel you can care for, make a go of it, see if you can’t make something of a relationship, and I’ll stop drinking for good. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.’

  Annie shook her head. ‘I want you to stop drinking because it will kill you Jack –’

  Sullivan raised his hand. Annie fell silent.

  ‘And I want you to find someone because loneliness is gon
na kill you.’

  The day unfolded around her and she lost it within its own insignificances. After breakfast Sullivan had gone down the street to meet his friends. Annie stayed home, watched TV, did other things of little moment, and as evening crawled along the sidewalks and whispered between the buildings she sat and read for a while. Like someone who owns a bar drinking so rarely it’s barely worth mentioning, Annie read infrequently these days. She thought a little of Forrester, a little of Jack Sullivan, and how each of them had in some way come to represent a part of what her father might have been. But she thought mostly of David Quinn and whether she would ever see him again.

  And it was with these thoughts that she turned on her side on the couch, tugged her knees up against her chest, receptive to the silence in the apartment, the vague ghost of wind beyond the walls that was somehow comforting, and closed her eyes; she drifted away; she dreamed.

  She sits at a table. Sullivan faces her. He has one eye closed, and from the other a thin stream of smoke issues. It slips from between his lids with a gentle sound of exhalation, and as he breathes the smoke is caught in curlicues and arabesques. She watches them without a word and she is somehow enchanted by the patterns they make.

  ‘Operations Malheur, Hickory and Rolling Thunder,’ Sullivan is saying, with his one eye closed and his other exhaling thin gray smoke. ‘Dragon Head … and Cedar Falls when the Yanks and the ARVN destroyed the Iron Triangle twenty kilometers north of Saigon. And then there was Operation Junction City … and you know twelve thousand civilians were killed in the Tet Offensive crossfire alone?’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Annie hears herself saying, but her lips haven’t moved, and the sound doesn’t come from inside her head, it comes from outside.

  ‘Something else,’ Sullivan says. ‘From January ’68 to January ’69 there were fifteen thousand wounded … ’69 to ’70 that figure jumped to ninety-six thousand, but we still kicked their commie asses in Khe Sanh, Gio Linh and Con Thien …’

  ‘Why are we here Jack?’ Annie asks, and she wants to smoke a cigarette more than anything in the world.

  ‘Made a deal, didn’t we?’

  ‘A deal?’

  Jack Sullivan smiles. He opens his smoking eye, there’s a mirror inside, and when she looks at it she can see her mother’s face. Her mother is crying, mouthing some silent word.

  Annie peers closely.

  Chance, the mouth says. Chance … Chance …

  ‘Yes … we made a deal Annie O’Neill … and the deal was?’

  ‘I have to fuck someone and you’ll quit drinking yourself to death.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, give this girl a Kewpie doll!’ Sullivan shouts.

  ‘I don’t use words like that,’ Annie says. ‘Words like fuck.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ Sullivan replies. ‘Maybe if you used a word like that every once in a while you might get some.’

  Annie reaches out, touches him, passes right through him, and as Sullivan unfurls into arabesques and curlicues of smoke she hears him whispering Not everything is as it seems Annie O’Neill …

  *

  And then she woke, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. Her knees against her chest, her face pressed against the back of the couch, and she found it hard to breathe. Claustrophobic, suddenly tense and frightened, Annie began to breathe heavily. She turned and sat on the edge of the couch, placed her feet firmly on the floor as if to convince herself that the here-and-now really existed, and closed her eyes. Reorienting herself, her breathing slowed. She wanted a cigarette, a cup of tea, something.

  She stood up, hesitated for a moment to gain her balance. She thought of her dream, could remember little but Sullivan’s voice, the voice that had woken her.

  She made it to the kitchen, prepared tea, and as she poured water into the cup she lost her grip and scalded herself.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said, her voice bitter and sharp, almost like someone else’s.

  She stopped, frowned. ‘Fuck?’ she asked herself, and realized that this was a word she never used.

  She shrugged, reached for the tap and put her scalded hand beneath the cold running water.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said again, and even as the word escaped her lips she knew she was letting go of something. Or something was letting go of her.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she repeated emphatically, and reached for the towel to dry her hand.

  A little later, seated there at the same table where she’d shared breakfast with Sullivan, she thought of David Quinn, of Robert Forrester, of the reading club she was to attend the following evening. Something had changed, and if Sullivan was right it was all down to her. Perhaps – finally – she had decided to reach for life, and in deciding such a thing found that life was now reaching her. She was uncertain, a little afraid, but what was it that Sullivan had said?

  If you never actually live a life then you’ll wind up more bitter and twisted than if you get kicked a few times. She smiled, and in the same moment she cursed Jack Sullivan. Until now everything had been fine. Life had been fine. Or had it?

  She closed her eyes, felt the warmth from the cup between her hands traveling through her fingers, her wrists, up her arms, and she wished … somehow she wished her father was there for counsel.

  SIX

  Monday morning it was raining heavily. Raining straight down like stair-posts, Annie’s mother would have said, and then laughed her laugh, a laugh that said more about the woman than any words could have done. Annie’s mother had tried to live a life after her husband had gone. She’d tried hard, so very hard. But tough though she was life had somehow been tougher than her, and the face she’d worn for the world was one of grim determination hidden beneath a shadow of easy contentment. You didn’t have to look long to see the real Madeline O’Neill; didn’t have to look long at all.

  Annie switched off the alarm clock and stayed right where she was, buried inside the quilts she’d piled around her, savoring those moments of sleep-drenched semi-wakefulness when the night had not yet fully emptied itself out, and the morning was still hurrying on its way. The narrow hiatus between the two was perhaps where she found herself most secure. It was early, there was no rush to be up, and somehow the urgency to be at the store, to ensure that everything was in order, that the sign was turned just at the right moment, seemed unimportant. So many things seemed unimportant in that moment, and yet later – standing beneath the shower as water rushed enthusiastically across her skin – she could place neither the moment nor the event that had changed her perspective. Had it been the letter from Forrester? The sheaf of papers she had read with Sullivan? The words she’d shared at the store with David Quinn? Their chance meeting outside the coffee shop uptown? A dream she vaguely recalled from a thousand lifetimes ago?

  Perhaps all of these things. Perhaps none.

  She made breakfast – coffee, wholemeal toast with bitter ginger preserve – and then she dressed warm against the rain, collected the sheaf of papers Forrester had given her, and left the apartment.

  David Quinn was there when she arrived, doing his best to shelter beneath the narrow eave above the door. He was soaked, his hair plastered in thin streaks down his forehead, streaks that served to angle the rivulets of water down his nose and cheeks.

  ‘David?’ she asked, almost as if questioning his identity.

  ‘One and the same,’ he said, ‘and you’re late.’

  She glanced at her watch. Her father’s watch. It was seven minutes past nine.

  ‘Seven minutes,’ she said as she reached the door and started to unlock it. She felt a momentary irritation.

  ‘I wasn’t complaining,’ David Quinn said.

  Annie opened up and walked into the store. She removed her coat and let it fall in a sad, wet puddle behind the door. David followed her inside but didn’t take off his drenched overcoat.

  ‘Take your coat off,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not going to ask me why I’m here?’

 
; Annie stood for a moment, looked down at the floor. She didn’t like games. People played games because they had nothing better to do; either that or they were a little crazy. She wondered which kind David Quinn was.

  ‘Why are you here David?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I’m a little crazy,’ he said, and then he laughed – a sort of nervous sound that said something about his vulnerability in that moment.

  Annie smiled to herself. At least he wasn’t here because he had nothing better to do. She looked at him and frowned, and in that second her irritation dissipated. He looked a little sad, a little lonely perhaps, and she felt a kind of empathy for him.

  ‘A little crazy?’ she said.

  ‘Well, maybe a lot crazy,’ David replied.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Annie said. ‘You read all the books you bought and you want some more?’

  David shook his head. ‘I wanted to talk,’ he replied.

  ‘To talk? About what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Anything … everything … nothing perhaps.’

  Annie started towards the kitchen at the back, where she kept a towel for days like this. ‘Now you do sound a lot crazy,’ she said. She turned as she reached the end of the floor. He was still standing there by the front door, his eyes at once looking at her, and then in the next second surveying the shelves and stacks surrounding him. Did she feel threatened? Was that what she was experiencing? She could not tell, for moments such as these were no common occurrence.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  He shrugged again, and then he raised his hand and started massaging the back of his neck. ‘I think I’m lost,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I came here … maybe –’ He looked directly at her. ‘Maybe it would be best if I went.’

  He turned and reached for the doorhandle.

  Annie took a couple of steps forward and raised her hand. ‘Don’t –’ she started.

  David stopped. He didn’t turn to face her.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said, her voice softening. ‘Tell me what you mean.’

  ‘What I mean?’

  ‘You said you were lost … what do you mean, lost?’