“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.”