Touch

by Claire North

  The film itself is shot on a smartphone camera.

  The filmmaker waves cheerfully to himself, his face giant, an angle that shoots up his nose as he proclaims in German, “This one’s for you.”

  A series of floors and walls as he lays the phone down on an unseen stand, and then, resplendent beneath the lights of the Brandenburg Gate, he reaches into a large black bag and pulls from it a can of gasoline. Grinning, he throws it over himself, hair sticking to his face, suit dripping, and when the last drop has fallen he waves again at the camera, arms spread wide for the inspection of his audience.

  A shout off screen and the filmmaker’s face glows with delight. “Come over, you’re just in time!” he calls, beckoning. From his pocket he removes a green cigarette lighter and as the security guard enters the frame, one hand on the pistol in his holster, another held out, calming, soothing, our filmmaker declares, “Smile! You’re going to be famous!”

  The words of the security guard are the inevitable half-stumbled placations of the moment, the please sir, calm sir, let me help you sir. He dare not approach, flinches back as our filmmaker turns in the pool of spilt gasoline, revelling at the mess, until suddenly, sharp as the crack of a pane of glass, he stops, turns to the security guard, face vacant, hand outstretched and says, “Help me.”

  The guard hesitates, as who would not?

  “Help me,” he says again, fingers uncurled, imploring. “Help me. Please?”

  The security guard is a good man.

  His toe slipping on the edge of the pool of petrol, he reaches out, and his fingers brush the hand that implores.

  The filmmaker staggers, and in that second the guard’s outstretched hand becomes a bunched fist and he slams it into the filmmaker’s jaw, pushing him up then dropping him down into the pool on the floor.

  This moment occurs at 1.31 into the film.

  Comments such as

  OMG 1.31!!

  or

  Wow so thought that was gonna end different 1.31

  fill the screen. One hundred and fifty-three viewers have even gone so far as to give what they’re seeing a little thumbs-up. I wonder briefly if they looked beyond this moment before rendering their judgement.

  Then the guard, all his previous fear and empty sounds turned to the dead silence of the competently self-aware, reaches down and plucks the cigarette lighter from the fallen man’s hands. He steps back to the edge of the pool, and as the filmmaker shakes himself, blinks in bleary confusion, opens his eyes and looks up to see – as though for the very first time – his situation, the guard flicks back the cap from the lighter, looks direct to camera and breathes,

  “Do you like what you see?”

  Saturated in a pool of petrol, Johannes Schwarb, his face bewildered and mouth open, begins to get out a scream before the falling flame hits the ground.

  The security guard waits for the body to stop burning before he reaches down, picks up the still-filming mobile phone and turns it off.

  Janus watches in silence.

  There is revulsion there, but not surprise.

  When it is done, she says, “Who is it for?”

  “What?”

  “He said this one’s for you. Who is it for?”

  “Oh,” I reply, briefly bewildered. “Me. Obviously. It’s for me.”

  Chapter 68

  The body of Sebastian Puis did not sleep that night.

  I have surfed from host to host, night by night, never sleeping, and though my skin may be fresh as a spring flower, yet I remain tired. The only conclusion I can reach is that the mind – whatever loose concept of the same may be applied to myself – needs sleep as much as every muscle fibre, nerve and hormone-crunching cell.

  Descending for breakfast out of the dumb sense that it was dawn and breakfast was what you did, I was only slightly surprised to find Janus not there. No one answered my knock on her bedroom door, and at the reception desk the clerk mumbled, “Yes, she went out this morning and left you this.”

  A yellow piece of hotel paper, a hand – child-like in its scrawled hugeness – proclaiming on it, Popped out. Dinner, Saint-Guillaume, 53 rue de la Garde, 5 p.m.? xx

  Dinner and a kiss.

  “Where is Saint-Guillaume?” I asked wearily.

  The receptionist looked it up on a map. “Do you have a car?”

  “No,” I sighed. “But I’m sure I can find a lift.”

  Abandoning a body is dangerous.

  If you cannot find the moment of the switch itself, then look for the next best thing. Find the patient who walked into the hospital, amnesiac and frightened, and ask them – what was the last thing you remember? And who was the last person you touched?

  In those circumstances where a body must be abandoned without triggering the usual panoply of symptoms that may arouse attention, I recommend massive doses of mind-altering drugs.

  Say what you will for the French; they know how to stock a pharmacy.

  I took a gentle walk around the city, stopping on the way to pick up a drug here, a painkiller there, until my bag was sagging with the weight of questionable medication. I visited the cathedral, read a little more of my book and managed to restrain myself from editing the contents of Sebastian’s iPod. I bought a map of the surrounding area and a bottle of water, tucked both into a brown paper bag and settled down on a bench opposite the emergency ward of the university hospital.

  As it began to rain, sideways off the sea, I reached into my bag, pulled out a hefty handful of pills and downed them in a gulp of sugar-coated delirium. I waited ten minutes, stood up, leaving my map behind beneath the bench, and, surprised at how reluctant my own legs were to move and how tempting it was to laugh, swung my way towards the emergency room.

  The receptionist at the entrance desk had a face designed to discourage sickness. Better a lingering disease, the furrows of her eye seemed to proclaim, than the customer care skills about to be revealed. I beamed, slouching across the desk, and let my packets of pills tumble from their bag. “Hi,” I said. “I’m really, really high. Can I shake you by the hand?”

  Jumping from a sober body to a drunk one is unpleasant.

  Jumping from a stoned body to a sober one is, arguably, an even harsher return.

  Needs must.

  Fifteen minutes later – ten spent in the ladies’ toilet reminding myself that my nausea was a psychological rather than physiological response – I was a male nurse with a straight back, short trousers and a set of car keys in my pocket. Five minutes walking round the car park with the electronic tag, looking for a flash of indicator lights, located my car. I paused long enough to turn my mobile phone off, and collect my map from beneath the bench, before settling into a car that smelt perfectly of me and heading north towards Saint-Guillaume.

  Chapter 69

  Once, in Milan, I was a woman with a handsome face and thick eyebrows that seemed always to rebuke the foolishness of what they beheld. I owned a little yellow Mini but, slipping into the driver’s seat for the first time, I was shocked to discover how high the headrest, how close the brakes, my knees bumping up against the wheel. The back of the seat was pushed forward, crunching me down like a rally driver, and not two minutes into the drive I was forced to stop, readjust every part, tweak every mirror. Comfort and security thus restored, I spent four glorious days attending the most fashionable gatherings of the town, until at last a beautiful man in a suit approached me and said hello, and only after I’d started hitting on him did it become apparent that this unknown gentleman was my brother and he was perturbed by my behaviour.

  Somewhat embarrassed, I moved swiftly on, and my host, it seemed, continued about her daily life as if oblivious to the time I had stolen from her. Until, that was, she tried to drive her car, which she crashed almost immediately into the side of a police truck, and was taken shrieking first to hospital, later to court.

  Remarkable, the habits people will justify as normal.

  I drive north as the rain thickens until it is a sh
immering sheet sloshed across my windscreen, until the road is a grey fuzz of rebounding water, until the skies are black and the mountains vanish beneath the frozen skies, and I think of Galileo.

  Chapter 70

  Saint-Guillaume.

  I had never been there before; doubt I’ll go again.

  The lights in their iron brackets along the steeply climbing streets were bubbles of pink hanging in the pouring air.

  A single shop was open at the bottom of the hill, its back balcony overhanging a rocky river in full roar. The streets were empty save for the occasional outline of a smoker framed in an open door. Parking was difficult, finding my way through the downpour up the tight-spun stairways and byways near impossible. I cowered beneath the arch of a church and peered into the gloom for rue de la Garde. Eventually an old woman, her umbrella abandoned as useless against the slicing deluge, pointed me back down the hill and round the side of a bakery, its shutters barred and delivery van tucked up on the pavement for the night. I slipped and scrambled, my coat over my head, looking for number 53, warm lights behind the open shutters and closed window panes; hammered on the door, waited to be let in.

  “It’s open!”

  A man’s voice, calling from inside. Tried the handle and the door scraped open, heavy wood scratching along the granite floor. A log fire burned within, the ceiling was low, the smell of onion heavy on the air. I looked for a restaurant sign and saw none; rather, a dining-room table neatly laid, lace tablecloth starched white, candle burning in an empty bottle in the middle. An open door, twisted trapezoid in its crooked frame, led to the smell of cooking and wine, and from within that hot glow came the man’s voice again: “That you?”

  “Greta?” I asked.

  “I left her behind. Hope you don’t mind.”

  I shook my dripping coat out by the fire and took in the neat plates displayed in a cabinet on one wall, the crucifix by the bookshelf, the picture of family children and family pets on the round table beneath the windows. “Janus,” I called. “What’s going on?”

  “Dinner!” he replied. “I came here for a holiday a few months ago and suddenly remembered this little place – perfect, I thought, absolutely perfect! The perfect hideout!”

  I pulled my shoes off, felt water seep from my socks as I wriggled my toes on the flagstones before the fire. From the kitchen came a sudden burst of sizzling, a gout of steam. I sidled towards it, ducking beneath the door frame, and beheld Janus.

  He was tall, a habitual stoop having curved his shoulders and neck. A long-sleeved black shirt was buttoned tight around his wrists; long black trousers descended into a pair of mighty fur slippers. He tossed wine-soaked pork in a pan and as potatoes frothed beside him exclaimed, “Can you pass that?”

  A hand flickered out towards an open bottle of wine. I passed it over without a word. The fingers which took it were red and yellow. Red beneath, yellow on top, where the scar tissue had healed in rivulets and pools. “Thanks.” He poured wine into the hissing pan, then helped himself to a slurp. “Don’t you love this place? I always thought I’d like to retire to a little village in the mountains.”

  “Retire from what?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Actually I tried retiring a couple of times but I got bored. Politics politics politics. You know how hard it is to organise a village bake?”

  “Not really.”

  “Nightmare!” he exclaimed. “Everyone’s always got to be a leader.”

  I took the bottle of wine, smelt its fragrance, murmured, “Mind if…?”

  “Help yourself.”

  My hand shook as I poured, though I couldn’t conceive of any satisfactory physiological reason why.

  Glass in hand, I turned and looked him in the eye. There was only one eye to look in; the other had long since been removed or sealed over with the zigzag tissue that covered his face and neck, wriggling down beneath the collar of his shirt. It had possibly been a beautiful eye, sky-blue, now lost beneath the flesh-sunk savagery that was Janus’ face. Feeling my stare, he glanced up briefly from the pan, smiled and kept on cooking.

  I rolled the stem of the glass backwards and forwards between my fingertips.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Pork, paprika, red wine, white beans, soft potatoes, black cabbage and a surprise dessert.”

  “I’m not sure if I can cope with many more surprises.”

  “You’re strong, Kepler. You’ll be just fine.”

  On the thin warped glass of the windows the rain tap-danced, noisy in the night.

  “Where did you leave Greta?” I asked.

  “On the train to Narbonne.”

  “Good call.”

  “I thought you’d approve. Took me a while to get back to where I wanted to be, but I came clean. Where’d you leave… whoever-he-was?”

  “Hospital.”

  “What are you, some sort of…”

  “Nurse. And you?”

  “Marcel… something. Bit of a recluse.”

  “I see. Chemical or physical?”

  “Gas fire,” he replied with a shrug. “I’m having skin grafts; there are expanders, if you’ve heard of them, implanted in my back. They’re filled with saline and over the course of several months the skin stretches and grows around them until there’s enough surplus to cut away and graft to somewhere more interesting. Fascinating stuff, really.”

  “You know this… how?”

  “Spent time in hospitals.” The sharp double-strike of metal on metal as Janus tapped a spoon on the edge of a pan. “Stir this, will you?”

  I stirred. “So,” I said, “if we’re still at the graft stage, I’m guessing the burns are fairly new?”

  “Fairly.”

  “You in much pain?”

  “There’s morphine in the bedroom.”

  “You taken any?”

  “No.”

  “Want me to get you some?”

  “No.”

  “Want me to get you someone?”

  “No.”

  Potatoes rose, potatoes fell, and I stirred the pot.

  Janus’ two scarred hands clapped together in command. The little finger on his right hand had been removed. So had the thumb. Now three fingers remained, over-long, over-stretched, against the stubbiness of their neighbours. “Dinner is served!”

  I carried dishes into the dining room. Janus had over-catered. The pork was tender, the potatoes were soft, the cabbage tasted of pepper and the sauce was good enough to lick from the plate. I said, where’d you learn to cook like that?

  He said, my wife.

  Your wife?

  Yes, he replied. My wife. Paula. The woman I married.

  By the fireplace an old clock ticked away the seconds and Janus scraped sauce and potato fluff from the edge of his plate with the end of one half-dissolved fingertip.

  Have you seen her since? I asked. Have you seen Paula Morgan, the woman you married?

  Dead.

  Dead?

  Dead. Michael Morgan lived, Paula Morgan died. Perhaps she couldn’t bear the loss of the man she loved and his replacement by a twenty-one-year-old child screaming in his old man’s shell. Perhaps the arthritis was more than just arthritis. Perhaps she was tired. Perhaps she simply had enough. Who can say, in the lives of little people?

  Janus’ fingertip swept around the plate, scooping up another dribble of juice. His tongue, when it flicked out to collect the liquid, was shockingly whole, pink and unscathed. His bottom lip drooped, one side thicker than the other, as if a rat had gnawed it while Marcel slept.

  You said you’ve spent time in hospitals.

  Yes, I have.

  I talked to Osako in Paris.

  I loved Osako, Janus replied. Osako had lovely fingers.

  She mentioned cysts.

  Yes. That was a problem.

  And Miami…

  Are we going to talk about only the past, Kepler?

  … in Miami your host on the Fairview Royale. She had no hair and I thought it
was a style thing, but now I think back, she had no eyebrows too. And what about Greta? Interesting choice, older than your usual tight-arsed Adonis, all that make-up on such frail flesh…

  Janus, licking sauce off the edge of his plate.

  Sometimes, he said, it’s good to experience something new.

  “Janus –” I lay my fork to one side, press my hands into my lap “– is there something you want to tell me?”

  “Why, certainly, sweetheart,” he replied. “I’m dying.”

  “And how’s that going for you?”

  “Well. Really well. You know, I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve done for a while.”

  “But never quite followed through on.”

  A slight intake of breath. “Not yet.”

  “Osako’s cysts, they were more than just an inconvenience.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you ran away. Mr Petrain had such a lovely arse. You know, if you wanted to jump off a roof I’m sure you could have found someone with terminal… whatever… who’d be up for the plunge.”

  “Have you ever tried? Stood on the edge, looked at the fall, known it didn’t have to be that way?”

  “I’m not in a hurry to die.”

  “Yet.”

  “Seems to me you have the vision, not the commitment.”

  “Kepler…”

  “My name is Samir.”

  He twirled the stem of his wine glass back and forth between two fingers and thumb. Greta had done the same thing as we ate duck in Montpellier. It took a moment to remember not to be surprised.

  “Done much research into Samir, have you?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Sloppy, for an estate agent. I always wondered why you did the work. Clearly it wasn’t for the money or the flesh – you could have got both any other way. Was it the curiosity?”

  “Something like that.” Hard to look away from the glass, spinning, spinning between Janus’ fingers. I spoke to pull my mind from it: “Easier to be in a body when you know its friends. Discernment is the first step to picking a skin, one we tragically tend to lack. Perhaps… there is a kind of intimacy too. Say I decide to be a brain surgeon. Cutting heads open isn’t what I’m interested in, that’s not the point of ‘brain surgeon’ at all. I want to be someone admired by my peers, loved by my students and for new-found friends to look awed at my expertise. Do I love my mother? Is my smile real or forced? Do I wear purple spotted pants underneath my sensible brown trousers? I look at people in the same way an architect might look at a great house. This is a shack crumbling round the edges… this a palace waiting to be filled… here a tiny cottage of bitter resentments and half-lies; there a terraced house squashed between its friends. Watching their films, feeling their clothes, smelling their soap – there is something beautiful in the choice of soap a stranger makes. There is an intimacy that comes from that kind of knowing, and from our circumstances we can look with a sort of dispassion that need make no allowances for the sins of others, nor has no history that blinds it to the wonders before it. An estate agent looks at people, wonderful and whole, living their lives, and if you look long enough and hard enough, perhaps for a moment you can feel what that must be like. What it must be to be… not just the skin, but the person. The whole thing, right down to the heart.”