Touch

by Claire North

  “I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” said Aurangzeb, stretching her stockinged legs across my tabletop. “I thought you’d be up for this.”

  “Honestly,” I replied, shuffling my papers out of the way of her heeled shoes, “I don’t see the point.”

  “You don’t see the point of being Marilyn fucking Monroe?” she squeaked.

  “No. Is it wealth you want? There’s richer people out there. The body? There are prettier bodies. You want fame? You want to feel adored, adulated for a night? They’re not adoring you, it’s not you they’ll praise. You want to experience that high, find the body of a dresser or a stage manager, and as the actor goes on for their final bow, grab them by the wrist and walk out to the roaring of the crowd. Or learn to do it for yourself. Find a pretty body – an anonymous pretty body – and I’ll jump into producers and casting directors in any studio in LA and tick that box by your name right up to the moment when you turn to the camera and smile your cosmetic moonlit smile.”

  Aurangzeb had rolled her eyes when my words began, and now she rolled them again as I finished. “You want me to work? I could be Clark Gable like that.” She snapped her long manicured fingers. “I could walk Laurence Olivier naked round London; I could be fucking Marlon Brando – I could be Marlon Brando fucking – and you wanna tell me to sit back and take, what, five years out of my life, maybe ten, to get what I could get in a day? What the hell is wrong with you?” She leaned forward, legs swinging down, eyes bright. “I heard things about you. I thought you were the kinda guy who lived.”

  “What kind of things did you hear?” I asked softly.

  “That you were a guy who tried things out. That you’d been the fat soprano, the airline pilot; you’d shaken hands right into the Oval Office. I heard you did stuff too, like, back in the war. I heard that there were more forgetful soldiers staggering around central Europe in 1943 than there were fucking V1s dropped on London.”

  “I had no idea Janus gossiped so much. And what did you do in the war?”

  “Moved about. America. Canada. I thought it’d be cool to hitch a ride with a GI on a ship to Europe, once the U-boats were going down, but in the end I tagged along with a co-pilot and faked food poisoning over the Atlantic. Way easier. I saw the liberation of Paris.”

  “And what was that like?”

  “It was shit,” she replied. “Guys marching up and down and people waving and bands playing, and I thought, where were you last week, where were you yesterday, when you didn’t know if you were gonna wave the fucking tricolour or the swastika? Then I found out that the guy I was wearing was a collaborator and that dampened my mood.” She slammed her hands down into her thighs and exclaimed, “The war was so fucking lame!” and it occurred to me that, for all her curving clothes and pampered hair, in every way, in every flail of her arms and the way she sat with knees apart, Aurangzeb was through-and-through an American male.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “OK,” I breathed. “We need to get you walking in some higher heels.”

  Chapter 40

  A direct train runs from Vienna to Berlin. It is a white monster decked out with the square red letters DB – Deutsche Bahn. With its origami white cabins and stainless-steel sinks, the slick Berlin sleeper was a triumphant two fingers raised against the Balkans Express.

  I had a two-bed berth to myself. With the mattresses folded into the wall, it was a bright white triumph of spatial engineering. Unfolded, you had to squeeze between bunk and wall like an eel through a cracked sluice.

  Outside, the full romantic cliché of the German night became apparent, criss-crossed only by the light of the yellow-skimmed autobahn as we raced it north. Low moonlit mist clung to the fields; towns flared, puddles of whiteness; great rivers wound between black hills, little villas of white concrete and clean glass peeking out between the trees, where the stressed families of München and Augsburg went to relax. When the train began to curve east, it did so in a great sweep, luxurious as the painter’s brush drawing the final curve of a woman’s breast.

  I watched the landscape go by, my bed made but untouched. Every body grows used to its own smell, but even I could tell that I stank. The water from my sink ran either too hot, or too cold, with no middle ground.

  At 1 a.m. I heard the shuffle of the stewardess as she made her rounds down the slumbering train. I snapped a bracelet of my handcuffs on to my left wrist, leaned out of my door and whispered, “Madam?” Even at that hour, her smile had been engineered to dazzling perfection. “Madam,” I murmured above the heartbeat of the track beneath us, “could you help me?”

  Of course, sir. It’d be a pleasure.

  I gestured her into the cabin. She followed, eyes curious, smile open. With one person the cabin might have been called cosy; with two it became suffocating.

  “May I…” she asked,

  and I reached out, caught her wrist, jumped.

  Nathan Coyle. He was getting better at recognising his own symptoms: as he swayed, dizzy at the release, he tried to lash out, flailing wildly, his hand striking the compartment wall with a thump that made him wince. I caught his hand and snapped the handcuffs to the rail on the higher bunk, waited for the dizziness to pass.

  Pass it did. He felt the restraint on his left wrist, saw the handcuff, groaned and slouched back against the wall. “Right,” he grunted. “Where now?”

  “Train to Berlin.”

  He raised one drooping eyebrow to examine me. “What are you supposed to be? I thought you only went in for whores and garbage men.”

  I smoothed down my uniform. “I think I look rather smart. You missed the joy that was Kapikule, or the Balkans Express, or Slovakian buses, so you probably lack the appreciation for a smiling face as it stamps your ticket that I have. Thankfully, you and I will both benefit from Deutsche Bahn’s breakfast tray with marmalade.”

  “I hate marmalade.”

  “I like it,” I retorted. “I could eat pots of the stuff.”

  He straightened a little, turned to fully examine me. “Are you… threatening me with breakfast condiments?”

  I tucked a loose strand of hair behind a delicate ear, and said, “I have an address for Alice Mair.”

  His fists tightened. “She’ll be ready for you,” he breathed.

  “I know. By now your friends will be scouring Europe for you – or rather me, or let’s say us. That they haven’t found us is something we can perhaps both be grateful for. I’ve been through the Kepler file and I can’t work out what deed I directly performed that could induce such personal hatred in you. Professional dislike and business animosity I can comprehend. In the last ten years I have worn prostitutes, beggars, criminals, liars, killers, thieves. I haven’t always been… I was not always what I am now, but surely you can see, I have tried my best.” I shivered, suddenly cold in my uniform shirt. “Your file is a lie. Perhaps you assume I’ve killed, that I’ve… worn a body for a night, ridden high on the sex and heroin, and left it to die of the overdose, alone on the hospital floor. I have lived longer than you know, and I have carved… turmoil through my past. You talked to my hosts. Were they unhappy? Were they left naked and alone? As samples of my species go, you must be able to see, you must know… I am a bad choice of target.”

  He didn’t speak, didn’t move. I hissed in frustration, my thin arms wrapped tight across my bony chest. “You presume the high ground. Most murderers do. But it was me you should have killed, not Josephine.”

  Was that hesitation in his face? A quiver of a thought more than hate? It was hard to tell. I had spent too much time in his features, not looking at them.

  “Who is Galileo?” I asked and saw his weight shift, one foot to the other, then back again.

  “How long has it been?” he said. “It was only a few minutes ago that I shot you in Taksim; a second ago you were a bin man in… some place. Somewhere else. How long has it been, really?”

  I dredged my thoughts back. “Five days? And it wasn’t me you shot.”<
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  “Yes, it was,” he replied, sharp as a tack through the toe. “It was you I shot; and a tragedy that it wasn’t you who died.”

  “But your orders were to kill Josephine too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “She was compromised.”

  “By what?”

  “You know.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “She killed our people.”

  “She really didn’t, but I can see this argument getting circular.”

  He tugged loosely against the cuff around his wrist, irritated rather than testing its strength. At last: “You must be very intimate with my body.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think?” he asked, twisting so I could admire it fully. “You have an unusual perspective. Do I fulfil your requirements? Is my face stern enough, are my legs of a suitable length, do you enjoy the colour of my hair?”

  “A stern face is not the consequence of the body that bore it.”

  “I cannot imagine my face in any shape other than the look I give it.”

  “I can,” I retorted. “You’ve looked after yourself, that much is clear. Hard to say whether you’ve fallen foul of that fine line between fitness and vanity. I was curious about the scar across your stomach. Also you need to think about spectacles.” His mouth twisted in surprise. “Take it from an expert; you’ll be wanting reading glasses sooner rather than later.”

  “My eyes are twenty twenty!”

  Amazing, the indignant pride people invest in natural processes.

  Astonishing, how deeply vanity is ingrained.

  I tried to put my hands on my hips, but in the confined space of the cabin I could only manage one hand on one side. “Are you saying that to impress me?” I asked. “Because I imagine, having been in residence for a while, that you’re the kind of man to take pride in his physical prowess, but there’s no point being foolish when it comes to your eyesight. I’ve had cataracts, infections, long-sightedness, short-sightedness, partial blindness…”

  “Not you!” he snapped. “Not you. Someone else’s eyes, someone else’s blindness.”

  “Me,” I replied. “I, myself. These are the things I have experienced. I have walked bodies into courtrooms because they were too afraid to speak. I’ve held a skin down while they gave me the general anaesthetic because the tumour-ridden schmuck was too scared of hospitals to go through the treatment. Think whatever you want about who I am, but don’t waste your breath denying my experience.”

  He tried bristling for a moment longer, shoulders high and eyebrows low, but the effect was too conscious now, and he abandoned it. I slunk down on to the bottom bunk. My nails were shellacked to a fascinating firmness. My back ached, my uniform belt was tight, and as I pressed my hands against my spine, a thought struck me. “Am I…” I blurted. Coyle stared at me, one eyebrow raised. I ran my hands carefully across my midriff, pressing deep into my soft skin, feeling for something beneath the warmth. “I think I’m pregnant.”

  The train rattled, and no one spoke. Then the tiniest shiver passed down Coyle’s spine, his shoulders jerked and he gave a single, high hoot of merriment.

  “Bloody hell,” I groaned.

  Coyle’s laughter subsided as quickly as it had come. Outside, fields of freshly turned earth stretched away to the flat horizon. A full moon sat in a cloudless sky, promising icy winds and frozen soil come morning. I pressed my hands against my belly and felt something turn which wasn’t my stomach. “This is… peculiar,” I said.

  “You’re not enamoured of the joy of childbirth?” asked Coyle. “I thought you would have given it a go, just for the experience.”

  I scowled. “During times of stress I have been known to make… unexpected jumps. And while I’m sure giving birth is a wonderfully life-enhancing experience, if it comes with the associated baggage of planning, expectation and the optimism of another eighteen years of happy nurturing by the family fireside, when there’s a fifty/fifty chance that you might mid-convulsion find yourself a mewling infant still attached by an umbilical cord to a shrieking and confused woman, I’m sure you can see why the exercise might lose some of its appeal.”

  An idea dawned on Coyle’s face. “You could… ghost into a foetus?”

  “What a truly ghastly idea.”

  “You’ve never tried.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Never been tempted?”

  “Not in the least. I have no delusions about the joy of physicality. Having inhabited almost every size, shape and form of body you can possibly imagine, the only conclusions are these: exercise when you’re still young enough to appreciate it, look after your spine, and if you have the option, use an electric toothbrush.”

  “Decades of stealing bodies and that’s your big conclusion?”

  “Yep.”

  “How long have you been a ghost?”

  I glanced up and saw his eyes bright upon me. “Wouldn’t you love to know. How’d you get that scar across your stomach, Mr Coyle?”

  “You know it’s not my name.”

  “Curiously enough, that doesn’t bother me. A few hundred years.” His eyes flickered, and I leaned forward, one hand pressed instinctively over my belly. “A few hundred years,” I repeated, soft against the bouncing of the train. “I was murdered on the streets of London. My brains were bashed in. As I lay there, I caught the ankle of my killer. I hated him, feared him, dreaded him for killing me, and was so frightened of dying alone, I needed him, longed for him to stay with me. Next thing I knew, I was staring at my own corpse. I was arrested for it, an irony which has never entertained. Not a glamorous beginning, truth be told, but it seems the urge to live outweighs all other instincts.”

  “Who were you when you died?”

  “I was…” the words drifted somewhere at the back of my throat “… no one of significance. What about you, Mr Coyle? How’d you get that scar?”

  Silence.

  “Galileo,” he said and stopped.

  I waited.

  “Galileo,” he tried again. “Stuck a knife in me.”

  “A ghost?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why’d he stab you?”

  “I was the last one left standing.”

  “Where?”

  “Santa Rosa.”

  “You said these things before.”

  A small shake of his head, a smile. He can’t believe what he’s saying. Now would not be the time to question the notion.

  “There’s… a rumour,” he murmured. “A myth. Over time the story has outgrown the seeds that sowed it. Yet for all that, there is some truth in it. A ferry ride, a few hours, across the Straits of Malacca, perhaps through the Baltic Sea. The engine stops, and as the passengers and crew wait for rescue, a body is found. The body is… someone, doesn’t matter. Throat cut, blood on the deck and everyone panics until someone points out that the killer cannot have escaped being seen, must have been caught on camera, drenched in blood. They look. They find the murderer, who sits huddled in a toilet, shaking with fear, blood on his, her – whoever’s – face, on their hands, their clothes. We have the killer, they say. As soon as the engines are fixed we shall take this murderer to the police on shore.

  “Then another body is found, intestines pulled out, eyes popping up at nothing, tongue lolling in a vacant mouth, and everyone goes, it is not the killer we have caught, or perhaps who we’ve caught is working with someone else, and the panic spreads, and this ferry has too few staff to too many passengers, no hope of order, so the captain orders all passengers to a muster point. Everyone stay in one place, he says, no one move, and we shall be safe. Safety in numbers. It is a comforting thought until the first mate sees that at the muster point on the first-class deck the passengers are all dead. Some have blood on their hands, some on their faces; some tried to bite the ears off their neighbours; some ran; some fled, but one remains, standing, grinning at the camera, before he too waves goodbye and is, within a few min
utes, himself found dead.

  “In the three hours it takes the coastguard to board the ferry and fix the engines, seventeen people are dead, five are in a critical condition. And when the forensic police examine the corpses, they find that each body carries the stamp of someone else’s DNA, as though for every victim there was a different murderer, a different set of fingerprints on the blade. Do you know this story?” he asked, gaze returning from a distant place.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know it.”

  “Do you know the names? Of the ships, of the dead?”

  “Some,” I replied. “There was a frigate in 1899 off the coast of Hong Kong. A cruiser in 1924. A ferry in 1957, though that was never confirmed – someone opened the cargo bay doors and the living went down with the dead. Something similar happened in 1971: twenty-three dead, the authorities claimed pirate attack. A yacht in 1983 off the coast of Scotland. Two people died on board, a small body count by his standards, but still him. We all know the rumours.”

  He nodded at nothing at all. “Santa Rosa,” he breathed. “October 1999.”

  “You were there?” I asked.

  “Yes. I killed a man. I don’t remember doing it, but I opened my eyes and there was blood on my hands, and a man with a hollow of blood filling the indent beneath his throat. He was alive, but when he breathed, bubbles popped, and then he wasn’t alive, and I was holding the knife and a woman stood in front of me and watched me watch him die. She took the blade from my fingers – it was a kitchen knife from the canteen – and put one hand on my shoulder like a mother and stuck the blade in me, rocked it around, smiled and didn’t say a word. They classed me with the dead until the pathologist called out that I had a pulse. Then they called me murderer. Which, in a way, I was.”

  “Galileo?”

  He nodded, though barely at me or the word I spoke.

  “You should have said,” I breathed. “I could have helped.”

  “Helped?” The word choked out, almost a laugh. “You’re a fucking ghost. What good are you to anyone?”