I tried to tune him out, staring out across the darkening flatlands of Northern France, and thought without words, remembered without feeling.
A stranger approaches in the street.
Says you are beautiful.
Their warmth, your skin.
There is no loneliness more lonely than to be alone in a crowd. No awkwardness more unsettling than the inside joke you do not comprehend.
We fall in love too easily, ghosts such as I.
Chapter 65
In my younger days I associated south with warmth. From the north to the south there was, I imagined, a softening of the winters, a brightening of the summers. To grasp that a place could be both south and blisteringly cold took more bitter experience in more blue-lipped bodies than I care to recount. I would come to the coast of the Mediterranean unprepared for the slicing rains and frost-stained ground, abandoning the high-cheeked, slim creature I wore in favour of meatier locals with flubber around their bellies in the hope that a change of circulatory system might dull the distress of climate.
Sebastian Puis was not warm. Scrambling off the TGV in Montpellier station–as average a mainline building as any in France–I was immediately struck by how cold my fingertips became in the biting wind and how thin my coat felt against the pouring rain. I huddled by the tabac with its paraphernalia of cigarettes, chocolate and packs of heretic-themed playing cards, and waited for Marillion Buclare. Marillion Buclare did not come, but rather a woman in a fur stole of russet fox, the nose hanging forlornly down by her shoulder, approached me with a cry of “Is that still you?”
Her chins were many and layered, painted the same brilliant white as her face. Her jowls hung beneath the line of her jaw; her hair was an ozone catastrophe; her fingers were blood red, her lips purple, and as she swept upon me I had a sensation of being a rowing boat before the prow of an oncoming battleship. “Good God,” she blurted. “You look terrible.”
Janus, resplendent in…
“I feel like a Greta–do I look like a Greta to you?”
… in a woman whose name was almost certainly not Greta, flicked through a handbag hanging by a gold chain and with a cry of “Can I pick them, or can I pick them?” waved a fat wad of euros around for all to see.
I smiled the long-suffering smile of the embarrassed son meeting his extravagant mother, took Janus gently by the arm and angled her away from the gaze of the station. “Marillion?”
“Let her go in the lady’s loo. She has a bit of a rash, poor thing. Don’t look at me like that,” she added, slapping me on the arm. “I hopped half a dozen times before picking up marvellous Greta. What do you think?”
“I don’t think she’s your type.”
“I think I’m hers,” she retorted. “And if I am not now, then I will be. I will become so, yes? No one can follow a ghost through a subway; not even Galileo.”
I scowled. “No more unnecessary jumping. They may not track us through rush hour but what will they do when the hospital report comes in for Marillion? That will give them a city, a place to start looking.”
“Why, my dear precious thing,” she breathed, “I do believe you’re frightened.”
“If you had been shot as many times as I have in the last few days, you too would hear the beating of the drum.”
“Then we should have gone to the airport, flown to a place with no name, a hillside of tumbling shacks and shanties where the hospitals won’t ask and the records won’t tell.”
“Perhaps,” I replied. “But there’s more here than just them and us.”
“There’s never more.”
“Galileo is inside Aquarius.”
“What makes you sure?”
“Why else would his file be a lie?”
“That’s conjecture, not proof. Even if it were true, I don’t see why you need me.”
“Our kind never work together. We are competitors in a world of beautiful bodies and excessive tastes. In Miami we behaved exactly as ghosts would–we jumped and we ran, and we were gunned down for our mistakes. Just now we did precisely what you’d expect–we ran into rush hour, ditched our bodies for something rich and easy. Ghosts don’t cooperate. Let’s cooperate. No more unnecessary jumps.”
Janus turned away, preening at her reflection in a window. “Such a shame. I could have changed into someone less fashionable.”
We caught a taxi from the station.
The driver understood that his role was to be grizzled, gruff and terse. Strangers visiting his city for the first time might mistake all of the above for a symptom of deep wisdom as long as they didn’t perceive it for the antipathy it clearly was. Beyond my own sallow reflection in the window, I watched a city which had moved too fast to ever truly understand what it wanted to be. Beneath the overhanging remains of a Roman aqueduct, car parks and silver-grey bollards lined the boulevards and little winding streets. Between the coffee shop and the supermarket selling wine in six-euro cartons with a tap on the end, the green flashing light of a pharmacy, two snakes coiled around a staff. Swaying cedars pushed against dark-needled pines; hedges of thorns hid the new apartments which crawled up the hills towards the northern edge of town.
The driver asked, “Holiday?”
No, I answered, and yes, Janus replied.
Stupid time to come for a holiday, he said. Should have come in summer or closer to Christmas. You’ll have a horrible time now.
The hotel had purple ceilings, blue carpets and a motif of silver storks embossed into the walls. Janus paid with Greta’s cash for two rooms for the night. Dinner was still being served; would we be dining?
No, I said, running my eye over a menu of twenty-euro steak and thirty-euro wine. All things considered, I doubted that we would.
Alone in a room that could have been anywhere in the world, I stripped off before a full-length mirror and assessed the body of Sebastian Puis. He wasn’t my type, nor was I particularly comfortable with either his skin or his style. He hovered on the verge of being unhealthy grey, and from his chest and back tufts of hair sprouted in patchy clusters, unsure whether to give growth a try.
The urge to jump into someone darker, brighter, smoother, hairier–anything which could be firmly defined, seized upon as a starting ground for creating some sort of character–grew in my stomach. I rifled through Sebastian’s bag but could see no evidence of his occupation. His phone, simple and sensible, I pulled the battery from, in expectation of the moment when a friend or loved one, perhaps waiting at Montpellier station still, began to agonise about his disappearance. Maybe a frightened mother was already on the phone to the police, who would reply that young men lead their own lives, and that if she was truly concerned she should call back, on the non-emergency line, at the end of two days. Gut instinct is never accepted as a measure for the disappearance of a loved one, and for that I thank police procedure heartily.
Study this face and guess its nature.
I might be a rakish wit, a piss-taking clown. Perhaps I’m soulful and lonely, sitting awake at night writing sonnets to an imagined love. My hands are soft, alien to manual labour; suck in my stomach and my ribcage protrudes with aching clarity, yet relax my belly and I look almost portly as it rounds out above my hips. My buttocks have suffered the repetitive light abrasion that comes from too long sitting in the same place; the inside of my left thigh was once scratched and now is healed. Am I a student, a designer, a software programmer, a young DJ with a lot of trend and not much taste? More important, am I gluten intolerant? Can I manage lactose, do I get shin splints, should I be careful when eating sugar, will the sting of a bee cause my lungs to collapse? How will I know until I make the mistakes that Sebastian Puis would not make, having already made them once before?