Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  Straight from the bottle.

  Straight from the bottle all the way to her soul.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  At first there was the smell. It was not a bad smell, it did not actually assault the nostrils but it was strong. It seemed to be a combination of many smells, each with its own identity, and had there been some possibility of savoring each aroma independently she perhaps would have been successful in identifying each and every one.

  But, as it was, they were all folded together in one package, and after a while she became aware that the package contained sounds as well, and a sense of motion perhaps, and then there were voices – non-specific and vague, words that she did not understand, did not care to understand, and also there was a bright light, and the light seemed to be strong enough to pierce her eyelids and illuminate her thoughts.

  And the first thought was Where am I?

  And the second thought was Oh God … oh God … David …

  And with that she kind of gave up, and let herself fall back into something vaguely resembling freedom, and though that freedom was accompanied by pain and deep waves of nausea that threatened to engulf her body, she believed that this was a better freedom than awareness.

  And so she let it take her, and take her it did – willingly, easily – and for a while she was aware of nothing at all.

  Perhaps it was better that way.

  And then the sounds came back, and she perceived movement beside her, and when she struggled to open her eyes she was blinded by something bright and white and invasive.

  ‘Move it,’ someone said, and the brightness was gone.

  She tried to open her eyes again, one at a time seemed sensible, and when her vision began to focus she saw a man seated beside her, a man in a white coat, and her first thought was how handsome he was.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, and his voice seemed understanding and sensitive. But that was only a front. Annie knew that.

  ‘I’m Doctor Jim.’

  ‘That’s your surname … Jim?’ she asked, and her voice was fuzzy and slurred.

  Doctor Jim smiled and shook his head. ‘No, that’s my first name. Parrish is my surname.’

  ‘And you call yourself Doctor Jim? Where the fuck am I, the children’s ward?’

  Doctor Jim laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re in St Luke’s Hospital Emergency Room near Amsterdam Avenue. Your friend brought you here …’

  ‘Friend? Which friend?’ Annie asked. She tried to lift her head. A thunderous pain lanced through the side of her face.

  ‘Aah Jesus Christ, what the hell is that?’

  Jim touched her shoulder and eased her down again. ‘You had a fall,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps you went busy with a bottle of something, and your friend found you collapsed in your kitchen. Seems you fell and hit your head on the side of the sink.’

  ‘Which friend?’ Annie asked.

  Jim shook his head. ‘I don’t know, some guy.’

  ‘How old?’

  Jim shrugged. ‘Fifty, fifty-five maybe … looks like he hasn’t slept for three weeks.’

  ‘Jack,’ Annie said. ‘Jack Sullivan. Thank fuck for that.’

  ‘Does the bad language go with the drinking, or did the drinking come first?’ Jim asked.

  Annie started to smile but her head hurt too much. ‘Well, you know what they say. If you don’t say fuck every once in a while you might not get some.’

  Jim Parrish nodded understandingly. ‘You make a habit of this drinking and falling over stuff?’

  Annie closed her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I got dumped by the asshole of the millennium.’

  ‘So you figured if you drank enough he might come back?’

  ‘You’re a smartmouth asshole too,’ she said. ‘Go away and let me sleep.’

  ‘That I can do,’ Jim said. He stood up. ‘You sleep for a while and I’ll check on you in a couple of hours. We X-rayed your head and you haven’t broken anything, but sure as hell you’re going to have one helluva headache for a few days.’

  ‘Thanks very much Doctor Jim,’ Annie said.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘I’ll come see how you’re doing in a couple of hours.’

  But Annie O’Neill didn’t hear him. Sleep was there like the down-curve of a rollercoaster, and she was all paid-up on the ticket.

  He did come back, two or three hours later, and though she could see no windows Annie knew it was evening.

  ‘How goes it?’ he asked her.

  ‘As can be expected,’ she said. ‘When you drink enough to fall over you kind of expect to feel like this.’

  Annie hoisted herself up on the pillows. Her head hurt, but it was easing.

  ‘Your friend is still here,’ Jim Parrish told her. ‘He’s waited the whole time. I told him he should go home and sleep but he wouldn’t have any of it. Is he sick too?’

  Annie frowned. ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘He looks like he has a fever, his hands shake a lot.’

  ‘He quit drinking,’ Annie said. ‘He’s having a rough time of it.’

  Jim Parrish nodded understandingly. ‘As you will, if you don’t take your most recent experience as a lesson.’

  ‘We can do without the puritan lectures, okay?’

  Parrish nodded. ‘Okay.’

  Annie frowned. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Sunday,’ he said. ‘You’ve been here the best part of twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she said.

  Jim Parrish sat on the edge of the bed. ‘He tells me you own a bookstore.’

  Annie started to nod, and when she felt the pain she stopped. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I own a bookstore.’

  ‘I majored in Lit.,’ Parrish said. ‘First and foremost I’m a bookworm.’

  ‘So what’s with the white coat and stethoscope … or do they just call you in when literary people overdose on Crown Royal?’

  ‘No, I’m a real doctor,’ he said. ‘Figured I had to do something to pay the bills. I’m not sure what the going rate on sitting around reading books is, but I guess it ain’t great.’

  ‘The rate for selling them isn’t so good either. If I had to pay rent on the store I’d go under in a week.’

  ‘You want to see your friend?’ Parrish asked.

  ‘Sure thing,’ she said. ‘My port in a storm.’

  ‘Hell you look awful,’ was Annie’s greeting for Jack Sullivan, and perhaps because he didn’t reply, perhaps for some other unspoken reason, there was a moment’s silence between them. And in that moment it came back – the reason she was there in the first place, that if it hadn’t been for David she would never have gotten drunk, never have fallen down, and Sullivan would not now be visiting her in St Luke’s.

  The tears came without effort, and they were slow and lazy and fat, and even as she felt Sullivan’s arms around her there was nothing she could do to temper the tidal wave of heartache that came rushing to take her.

  ‘Fucking asshole,’ she kept saying through the sobs and hitches. ‘Fucking asshole Jack … just the lousiest good-for-nothing asshole you could ever imagine. Christ Jack, how did I ever get taken for such a fool?’

  Sullivan tried to say something – something consoling, words that showed he understood, that he empathized, but Jack Sullivan had never been a man to translate the sounds of the heart into words, and whatever he tried to say just seemed to make things worse.

  ‘I mean, you meet someone, they seem alright, like a regular human being … Goddamnit Jack, do I have schmuck loser tattooed on my face or what?’

  No, he was saying. No, you don’t Annie, but she wasn’t listening, she was merely monologuing her thoughts out into the room.

  ‘What the hell d’you have to do Jack … what the hell does it take to find someone with anything more on their mind than how they can get you into bed? And once they’ve done that they just want out. It’s always the fucking same … always the fucking same.’

  And Jack just held her, and after a while she did not
hing but cry soundlessly, and he could feel her breath stuttering in her chest, the way she pressed her face against him and didn’t want to let go.

  So he didn’t let her go. He stayed there, and would have stayed there all night, but the duty nurse came back and gave Annie painkillers, painkillers Sullivan himself could have used, and within minutes she seemed to close up inside herself and disappear.

  Her last thought, neither fully formed nor vocalized, a thought she would have difficulty even remembering, was for the book she had lent David Quinn. She had given him Breathing Space and he had stolen that as well as her heart.

  Jack Sullivan left Annie O’Neill sleeping and went down the block to eat, his face unshaven, his tongue like the bottom of a birdcage, his hands shaking and his head swollen with tension. This was not an easy trip, this wagon ride to sobriety, but he’d made a deal, made a promise, and hell, no-one could ever tell Jack Sullivan he wasn’t good to his word.

  When Annie again woke Jim Parrish was there.

  ‘Time is it?’ she asked as she slurred into semi-consciousness.

  ‘A little after four,’ he said. ‘Monday morning.’

  ‘I’ll be able to go home today,’ she said.

  ‘That a question or a statement?’

  ‘I want to go home today,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s see how you’re doing in a few hours,’ Parrish said. ‘Rest some more … you’ve been through something that you don’t recover from in a day.’

  ‘But people do recover?’ Annie asked. Her eyes were wide, brimming with tears.

  Jim Parrish stepped forward and sat on the edge of the bed where Annie lay. He reached out and took her hand.

  ‘Recover?’ he said. ‘Sure they recover … as will you Annie O’Neill, bookstore owner.’

  She smiled weakly, and then she closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

  ‘I brought something for you,’ he said quietly, and from his coat pocket he took a slim volume. ‘You know Hemingway?’

  ‘Ernest or Mariel?’

  Parrish smiled. ‘Ernest.’

  ‘Not personally, no.’

  He held the book in his hand for a moment and then passed it to her.

  Annie took it. It was A Farewell To Arms.

  ‘You’re giving this to me because it’s a tragic love story, and you thought that was the kind of thing I needed to read right now?’ she asked, her tone a little sarcastic, perhaps a little defensive.

  Parrish shook his head. ‘No, I’m giving it to you because Hemingway was a drunk, and when he was drunk he was a foul-mouthed son-of-a-bitch and I thought you guys might relate.’

  ‘Jeez, you really have switched on the charm tonight haven’t you?’

  Parrish smiled, and there was something in his expression that told Annie this was a little more than the standard bedside manner.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and then she looked at him directly, and with as little emotion in her voice as she could manage said, ‘Thank you Doctor Jim Parrish. I appreciate that you brought me this, but right now I have a headache the size of Texas, my boyfriend just dumped me, and I really don’t think I can handle whatever it is you think I might be able to handle.’

  Parrish shook his head. ‘Take the book,’ he said. ‘It’s a helluva story, and if you read it and want to return it you know where I am, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. She wanted him to go away, to leave her be. However handsome and sympathetic he might have been he was still a man.

  Jim Parrish didn’t speak again, merely sat with her for a little while, then got up and walked away. He didn’t look back, didn’t even glance.

  Just like the rest.

  Standing at the front entrance of St Luke’s, Jack Sullivan propping her up against the rain and wind that rushed towards her as the automatic doors slid open, Annie O’Neill was suddenly filled with the impulse to turn back, to hurry down the antiseptically white corridors, find the bed where she’d lain and crawl beneath the disinfectant-smelling sheets to hide from the world.

  The world was rough edges and sharp corners, and sometimes you collided with them, and sometimes it hurt so bad you couldn’t breathe, could barely stand, and there was nothing you could say, nothing anyone could say, that would make it feel better. Beautiful, but worthless, a voice said. He said you were beautiful, but what he did made you worthless.

  They took a cab – Jack and Annie – and when they arrived at the apartment building it was all Jack could do to bring her from the car to her own doorstep.

  ‘Don’t want to go in,’ she kept saying. ‘Don’t want to go inside,’ and so he carried her up the stairwell and took her into his place, and he put on the TV, turned it up loud, because Jack Sullivan knew all about the need for noise, the need to have something mindless to drown out the sound of the ghosts inside.

  Always recover, she kept telling herself, but she knew it was a lie, and early afternoon came, and then it went, and even as darkness started creeping along the sidewalks and filling the spaces between things, she remembered Forrester.

  ‘Go,’ she told Sullivan. ‘Go tell him I can’t be there,’ but Sullivan was determined not to leave her alone.

  ‘I mean it Jack … he’s a good man, probably the best man I know aside from you. He’s too old to want me for anything other than company, right?’

  She insisted, insisted more than Sullivan imagined she could, and so he took a cab down to The Reader’s Rest and he waited there for Forrester to arrive.

  Annie left the TV on, and when it started to drown out her thoughts she turned it off and crossed the landing to her apartment.

  She stood silent and immobile for a time. She looked at where David had sat. She stepped through to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. A bed where she had felt safe beside him only hours before it seemed. From there she could see through to the front room, the small table upon which had sat a vase, now a thousand pieces swept up and emptied away somewhere unknown. Like her emotions perhaps. Like her life.

  She leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees, and put her face in her hands.

  She was too empty to cry, too hollow, like a clay gourd waiting to be filled. But there was nothing to fill her, nothing to rid her of the sense of absence and longing and heartbreak.

  She asked herself what there was now, where she would go, what she would become.

  Is this it? she asked herself. Is this all there will ever be? This apartment, the bookstore, my evenings with Jack Sullivan – wonderful man though he is, he is not my lover, nor my soul-mate, nor …

  Nor my father …

  And then she cried again, because she wished her mother and father were there, wished they would hold her and tell her everything would be alright, because moms and dads didn’t lie, did they? No, moms and dads never lied.

  And by the time Sullivan returned with the message from Robert Forrester Annie was sleeping, curled up in the middle of her bed like a little child. Sullivan tugged the quilt out and covered her, and because it seemed right and fitting, because for some reason he didn’t wish to be alone either, he lay beside her, his arm over her to protect her from things unseen, and he slept too.

  The wind crept up to the windows and pressed against the glass, for it was warm inside, and out beyond those windows Manhattan teemed with a hundred million thoughts, each one special, each one unique, and yet all of them – in some strange way – silent and alone.

  TWENTY-NINE

  ‘A fascinating man altogether, your Mister Forrester,’ Sullivan said.

  He was sitting at the table in Annie’s front room. It was Tuesday morning, a little after eleven, and when they’d woken earlier Annie had seemed comforted by the fact that Sullivan had stayed with her through the night.

  ‘He said very little about himself at all. He didn’t seem guarded as such –’

  ‘You want tea or coffee?’ Annie called from the kitchen.

  ‘Coffee,’ Sullivan said, and rose from the chair. He walked to the ki
tchen doorway and stood there watching her for a moment.

  ‘It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to answer questions … more like there was something about him that made you feel any kind of question would have been an invasion of his privacy.’

  ‘And he said he would come Wednesday?’

  Sullivan nodded. ‘Wednesday, seven as usual.’

  She handed Sullivan his coffee and they walked back through to the front.

  ‘When he told me about it, the first time, you know? … well, he went through this whole thing about how if you were going to be late you didn’t show up at all. He said my dad was a perfectionist, wanted everything just so or not at all.’

  ‘Your father’s not there this time,’ Sullivan said. ‘Maybe he figured things could relax a little. He also said he wanted you to have the last section of the manuscript.’

  ‘The last section?’ Annie asked.

  ‘’S what he said.’

  Annie was quiet for a while. She wanted a cigarette. She wished Sullivan smoked, would have convinced herself that she could have smoked only one and not been tempted again.

  ‘So what do I do about David Quinn?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘What d’you wanna do about David Quinn?’

  Annie shrugged. ‘Hell Jack, if I knew what to do about David Quinn I wouldn’t have asked your opinion, would I?’

  ‘Most times people only ask for someone else’s opinion to confirm what they’ve already decided themselves.’

  ‘Well this doesn’t happen to be one of those times,’ Annie said. ‘You want the question again?’

  Sullivan shook his head. ‘I got it the first time.’

  ‘So?’

  Sullivan went silent, then he eased himself back on the couch as if he was settling in for the duration.

  ‘One time,’ he said, ‘I was on the subway.’

  ‘Good,’ Annie said. ‘I was on the subway one time as well.’

  ‘You wanna hear what I have to say or you want I should go home?’

  She smiled. ‘Please continue Jack … I am deeply sorry.’