Some hours later, as the rising sun pushed shadows across my bedroom ceiling, Janus rolled over beside me and said, “Cancer.”
“What?”
“I–Morgan, I, myself–developed lung cancer.”
“I’m… sorry to hear that.”
“It’s a slow tumour–large but slow. It hasn’t spread–hadn’t spread. Left lung. I had excellent medical insurance. I think he’ll live.”
“You had a family.”
I could have made it a question, but there was no point. The answer was easy, obvious, known.
“A wife, two children. Elsa, Amber. They’re both grown up now. I was in a hurry. We’re always in such a hurry, you and I. The treatment was chemotherapy, radiotherapy, drugs, and eventually a lung transplant. I did the radiotherapy and it was… fine. My wife, Paula, came with me on every trip. She was very brave. She carried on as if nothing was happening, which is what you need when you have… this thing. But when the hospital called, she was there by my side. Then my hair began to fall out, I was sick, cramps in my stomach, legs. My gums bled, my eyes ached, I was hot and dizzy and it wouldn’t go away. Pain I have experienced… Would you believe I used to go to the dentist when I was Morgan? But nausea. Trapped sweating in a dying corpse, knowing that there’s nothing you can do to make it stop, your own body trying to poison you from the inside out. It was… And Paula held my hand and… I didn’t mean to, it happened so fast. I was Morgan, and then he was lying on the bed beside me, his eyebrows falling out, and he was shouting, screaming, who are you, who are you, what’s happening, so loud that Elsa came running too. She’d come for dad. To help me get through this, and I was so… I didn’t mean to jump. I blew it. When Elsa came through the door and saw me–saw Morgan–and he didn’t recognise her, didn’t know her face. It was over. Just one second, just a moment, a tiny moment and…” She stopped, turned her face away from me. I waited. “My wife. Paula. She lied to me. She had arthritis, her hands had seized up, painful. She’d said that they were fine, not to worry, here–have another pillow. But I went into her and my fingers were… to even bend them hurt up to my elbows, hurt into my jaw, relentless. She’d lied to me as she brought me food and held me in the dark. My wife lied.”
Janus was crying, silently, her back shaking, head buried.
I held her, tight and without a word, having nothing better to give.
And then the sun was up, and I said, “I’ve quit estate agenting.”
She sat in the window, eating toast and honey, and I said,
“There was an affair in Edinburgh. A deal that went bad. A ghost who… I thought I knew. You hear rumours but you never know for certain until it happens to you. I sold her out. Gave her account information to some people.”
“What people?”
“The kind of people who kill ghosts.”
“Why?”
I thought about it then shrugged. “I didn’t think she deserved to live.”
Janus laughed.
Twelve hours later Janus was gone, and Ambrosia Jane was in the emergency room. The doctors inspected her for concussion, substance abuse, psychotic breakdown; prodded for the four months of lost time she had experienced between getting on a bus in Tampa and waking up in South Beach with silk on her shoulders.
A week later a letter addressed to Carla Hermandez arrived at my apartment. It smelt of lavender and was signed, “Your fellow traveller and friend”.
It contained an invitation to the Fairview Royale, a barge specialising in loud music and cheap wine: Please come if you can. There’ll be fireworks.
You hear rumours.
A frigate in 1899 off the coast of Hong Kong. A cruiser in 1924, ferry in 1957.
Milli Vra, Alexandra, Santa Rosa.
You never believe it’ll happen to you.
In the same way that a beautiful man in a Parisian café perhaps does not look for the men in Lycra who have come to end him. They’ve been there all along. You simply did not think they could be there for you.
I went to the Port of Miami, to have drinks on the Fairview Royale.
As the ship pulled away from the harbour I looked for Janus, and she found me.
She was wearing a young black woman with warm round cheeks and a shaven head.
She said, “Carla?” and there was a note of surprise in her voice. “What are you doing here?”
“I received an invite. I thought it was from you.”
“I didn’t send anything.”
This is that moment. It is the second of realisation when the terror bites. It is the instant when paranoia raises its head and whispers, Fear me. I was right all along. You go forward, you go back; the choosing is all.
“We need to get off this ship,” I breathed.
“Carla…”
“We need to get off this ship.”
Janus didn’t argue.
I am
partygoer, packet of pills in my pocket, vodka on my breath,
waiter, blisters on my feet, trousers too tight at the groin.
I am sailor in childish white uniform who knocks on the door of the cabin and says, sir? A message, sir?
I am the captain of the ship, and I am taking the boat towards land as fast as I possibly can.
Janus is my first mate, arms folded, eyes fixed on the partying throng below.
“It’s not a bomb,” she–he, a young man in white buttoned socks–says at last. “If it was a bomb we’d be dead now.”
“Maybe they’re limiting casualties.”
“They?”
“They. Whoever they are this time.”
His eyes flicker to me, then back to the dancing below. “You’ve done this before,” he murmurs.
“A couple of times.”
“It might not be a trap.”
“You believe that?”
“No.”
I take us towards a concrete wharf, flattened sheds of an industrial quay, the swollen sides of container ships riding high in the water, silent monoliths overhead.
“When we arrive,” I breathe, “don’t stop, just run.”
“Don’t need to tell me, sweetheart.”
I flinch. A first mate doesn’t say “sweetheart” to his captain.
It’s wrong, the wrong words from the wrong mouth, it is ugly.
In another time, another place, I would say something.
Not tonight.
Slow as an ox, stately as a fattened cow, I ease us in.
Janus didn’t bother with the rope, waited for the ship to slow to walking pace and jumped. I killed the engines and, as we bounced against the quay, I too hopped overboard, landing awkwardly on crooked ankles, steadying myself and pushing up, heading towards land.
Janus was already running for the metal fence that ringed the quay, while behind us, someone, a confused waiter, seeing his captain and first mate depart, shouted, “Hey!”
I kept running, unsure where I was, heading for the bright lights of the city, a silent causeway between us and it, cranes overhead, yellow beasts for hauling containers the size of houses, cars parked on the other side of the fence, low buildings with ominous messages such as CUSTOMS & IMMIGRATION–OBEY ALL COMMANDS nailed to the door. Janus was ahead, running between great walls of crates, through the sodium-stained night towards the metal gate and the bright road beyond, and it occurred to me that no one might have spotted us, safe in our skins, until the moment when we ran.
“Janus!” I called as his footsteps slapped in the night. “Janus!”
Janus, the gate a few metres away, half-turned to look back at me and fell.
There was the sound of an angry wasp biting a distracted bear, and Janus was on the ground, legs crooked beneath him. For a moment I couldn’t see the blood, but as I pressed my back against the crate wall and stared at the body lying not ten feet from my knocking knees, it began to spread. Fast at first, then somehow slower as the area it covered grew wider, the blood came from his back, from the hole the bullet had torn through his lung, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that ghosts are predictable. Mark your target, take them out. Whoever was shooting at us knew our natures.