Silence, and the hot slow passage of blood between my clenched fingertips.
“Where is he?” Janus whispered, for himself, not me. “Where is he?”
“Two doors,” I wheezed, and at once Janus snapped round to face the other door, through which the security guard had come. The bouncing of the phone on its cord had subsided, so had the voice on the other end of the line. “Cops are coming,” I added. “Help me.”
Janus turned again, gun swinging from one door to another. “Where is he?” he breathed. “Where is he?”
“Help me!”
His eyes flickered down to me, then away again.
“I’m sorry, Carla,” got to his feet, “I’m sorry,” gun held in front, “I’m so sorry,” and elbows bent, Janus turned and ran.
I lay in a body
whose I do not know
in a shed God knew where
and didn’t want to die.
My uniform was white, all the better for showing up the blood. I imagined that at some stage I’d taken a great deal of pride in the uniform. I’d pressed it, steamed it, made sure the crease down the trousers was just so. Perhaps, as I drove the boat
because I was a captain
I’d reflected on ancient seafaring days when I’d guided tankers into port, or sailed through the twenty-foot waves of the Atlantic, or dressed as the god Poseidon for the young novices as they crossed the equator or the dateline or, on those rare occasions when fortune was fair and navigation liberal, both at once, whooping my way across the centre of the world.
That would have been when I was young, but who knew? Maybe I’d been the captain of a tourist barge my whole life, chugging through the bay. Maybe I’d lied on my CV. Maybe no one would remember my name, whatever that turned out to be. Maybe I was the last person left alive who loved the body I was going to die in.
I tried getting up.
Getting up wasn’t happening.
I tried crawling for the door.
Crawling was within my repertoire, rolled out, snake-like on to my side, kicking with one good leg and pulling with my hands.
I thought I heard sirens, then thought I had imagined it.
A policeman’s body would be ideal.
A policeman’s body would come with a policeman’s gun.
I crawled to the door through which Janus had fled, and peered through it at a sodium-soaked car park adorned with no cover save for one disregarded black van and one overflowing grey dustbin.
Somewhere out on the water a ship blared its horn, proud and lonely in the night. I crawled back across the floor to the still-dangling telephone. The police operator had given up, and the line hung silent, whining like a hurt child. I braced my back against the wall and pushed myself up high enough to get a blood-smeared finger into the top drawer of a desk, yanking it out on to the floor beside me. The owner, damn him to a lingering demise, kept neat papers, business cards and a photograph of his smiling wife and daughter inside. Not a stapler, pair of scissors or sawn-off shotgun in sight.
The next drawer offered up a more promising arsenal of paper clips, sticky notes, pencils, pencil sharpener and a mug proclaiming WE ARE THE BEST in heavy black letters around the side. I smashed the mug against the floor, fumbled through the pieces for one large enough to sit in the palm of my hand, sharp enough to draw blood, wrapped my fingers around it, my hand beneath my body, and lay down on my side, knees tucked in, head down. The doctors call it the recovery position, though all that was recovered was that warm sense of comfort you possessed when, as a child, you curled up by your mother’s side and had not a care in the world.
If I survived this, I told myself, I would be a child again, if only for a few hours, and feel the warmth of unconditional love that forgave all sins.
A siren shrilled in the distance. It sounded too slow, too low, no urgency to it, no audible Doppler effect, and so I gripped my ceramic shard tighter and told myself that I was alone, always had been, and that was nothing new.
A footstep on concrete, taking its time.
Climbing the steps, a slightly different tone of concrete, hollow, ringing with bass. A footstep on carpet, the sound of breath. The hand that held the gun had no need to pull the safety off, that had already happened, but I fancied I could smell the cordite, taste the metal.
The breath above me moved.
Closer.
Denim crunched, haunched, hunched. A man squatted down, his elbows swinging out above his knees, wrists loose, hair white, gun in hand, and smiled at me, and he was
Will.
He was old now, not merely older. His skin was layered on top of itself like folds of cotton, his hair gone to reveal the irregularities of his skull, dotted with yellow. His hands were moulting, his eyes were grey with gum, but he was still William who loved the Dodgers when he was young, and Joe when he was old, and had dreamed of living for ever and becoming someone else.
Which, in a sense, he was.
I looked, and must have lost a little breath for my chest felt tighter, and he smiled, and though it was Will’s lips that parted, it wasn’t Will’s smile that settled there, but someone else’s, a Will who as a child had pulled the wings off flies, a Will who as a young man had been banished from his home and who had not, perhaps, in a single moment of change, chosen to share his body with a stranger for three weeks in California but had taken some other path, to some other person.
Not-Will, smiling still, looked my body up and down, taking in my face, my clothes, my shattered and bleeding leg. He reached out with his left hand and brushed my cheek, a lover’s touch, felt the half-growth of beard across my chin, loosely tugged at my hair, scrutinising its colour. His hand drifted down, my neck, my chest, my thigh, and came to rest just above the gunshot wound in my leg, suspended an inch in the air.
Then he said, but the accent was all wrong, someone else’s accent in Will’s throat, “I thought you’d want to say goodbye.”
Hand hovering, ready to scramble for a bullet in my leg, to dig it out with bare fingers, I had to breathe and couldn’t control the heaving of my lungs, felt the ceramic between my fingertips, saw the veins blue-black on the base of Will’s throat.
His head turned, pigeon-like, examining me, watching my face, my eyes. He said, “Do you love me?”
The question seemed to require a reply, and when I didn’t give one, his fingers brushed, so delicate, through the blood across my leg, streaking the uniform, pain running through the remnants of my thigh, up through my chest, throbbing from elbow to skull.
“Do you love me?” he asked again. “I wanted to find someone that you loved. When I found him, I wasn’t sure if I’d got it right. His kidneys are broken, there’s tumors in his bones and when I looked, see, here…” He pulled my right hand from beneath my body, rested it on his side, pressing it into his flesh where a bulge protruded beneath his jacket, a distortion in the flesh–hernia on a good day, something worse on a bad. “Isn’t it repulsive?” he asked, holding my hand in place, his warmth in my fingers. “Isn’t it strange? Why would anyone love something as disgusting as this? And look!” He moved my hand, higher now. I grunted in pain as the motion shifted my body, dragging me after his enthusiasm, pressing my palm into his armpit, against his skin. “There’s a mole here,” he exclaimed. “I find that fascinating. I play with it all the time; did you? I tried kissing a man, but he didn’t understand; he said there was something wrong. He didn’t love me, though he swore he loved… Will.” Hesitation, struggling to remember the name, trying it out. “He swore he loved Will, but not myself. I wanted to see if you felt the same way.”
He leaned in close, his breath mixing with mine, lips close enough to kiss, and for a moment I thought he’d do just that, lip to lip, but he was looking into my eyes, trying to find something that was not there. “Do you love me?” he asked. “I looked into the mirror and I couldn’t see it, but I thought… You’ve been me before; you’ve looked into my eyes so many times and you must have loved–loved my skin, my lips, my throat, my tongue. Did you? Do you love me? Will? Do you love me?”