Touch (5 page)

There are many ways to catch a ghost sitting in the body of a loved one. Basic questions – name, age, father’s name, mother’s name, university – can be answered by any well-informed inhabitant, but it takes a matter of minutes to probe a little deeper.

First place you lived when you left the family home?

Name of your primary school headmistress.

First girl you ever kissed.

Or – my personal favourite – can you play the violin?

The delight with that particular enquiry is of course when the ghost, relieved to be asked something it can successfully answer, stands up and rattles off five favourite tunes in the key of G, only to be informed upon the final semibreve that the body’s natural owner has never held a violin in all her life.

First skin I ever jumped to, the first question I was ever asked, I failed.

I was an empty-bellied killer, and the constable who pinned me to the watchtower floor wanted to know my name.

So I told him.

“Not
that
name,” he growled. “Not the poor soul you killed. I want to know
your
name
.
”

I had beaten a stranger to death, and that stranger, me.

I was a killer caught with blood on my hands.

“What’s
your
name?!”

I was a flake-skinned youth, the weight of a club across my neck, the pressure of a knee against my back, two ribs cracked, one eye swollen, never to see right again. And like the men who beat me, I too was curious to find the answer to that most thorny of questions.

What’s your name, bastard? Murderer, butcher, liar, thief. What’s your name?

When they threw me into Newgate, in the hot pits where the masses went, fifty to a room – forty-seven and three bags of flesh by morning – I laughed the hysterical laughter of a mind too shattered to remember that it should weep. When the judge sentenced me to hang by the neck until dead, my knees buckled, but my face was empty and my soul was calm. When Fat Jerome, king of the underbelly of the prison, tried to get there first, his great wet paws around my throat, I didn’t fight him. I threw up no defence, made no noise, but consigned my soul to Satan, to whom, it seemed, it had no choice but to go.

Yet it transpired I did not want to die, so with Fat Jerome murdering the murderer who had murdered me

rather inevitably, upon reflection,

I looked back into my murderer’s face from Fat Jerome’s eyes, and forgot to squeeze.

My killer fell to his knees, gagging for air, his face red, eyes popping. A small crowd had gathered, pinioning us together, body to body, sweat to sweat, and one voice said, “Why didn’t you finish him, Jerome? Why’d you let him live?”

I couldn’t speak.

“I’ll do it, Jerome!” piped up another, a crooked-lipped thief with a brand on his hand who desperately wanted to impress the king of the cellar, the lord of the throng.

My silence was taken for consent, and with a little whoop the spry-limbed convict leaped forward and drove the end of a spoon into the socket of my killer’s eye.

Sleeper train is a misnomer.

Starting-awake-in-the-night train is more apt.

As drivers change and carriages are shunted in and out of platforms in the dark, the journey towards Sofia is a stop-start of teeth-grinding screeches and head-bobbing rattles. You do not sleep on a sleeper train, but rather doze in and out of a fitful sense of unconsciousness, aware that this is not awareness, that the thoughts with which you think this are not thoughts at all, and so infused with so profound an understanding of your condition, you sleep to wake again ignorant that you slept at all.

We reached Sofia at 4.23 a.m. I would not have known, but the lone passenger had set his alarm to buzz at 4.15 a.m. precisely. It made the sound of a nuclear siren, a klaxon that knocked the entire compartment awake with a clenching heart. He rolled out of his bunk dressed in yesterday’s clothes, picked up his bag and left without a word. I tweaked the blind back as we passed into the station. The sun was still down over the city. A lone luggage handler waited on the deserted platform. I pushed my wafer-pillow higher against the back of the bed and rolled over to sleep.

The blind stayed down as we pulled away from Sofia. A city, its history and people, its stories and its tragedies, holds no interest to me at 4.23 a.m.

The Serbians did check passports.

At Kalotina-Zapad a team of fresh hard-jawed officials boarded the train, while the grimy-eyed crew of the previous night disembarked, wheeling their little cases to the opposite platform and the journey home. The new officials wore smart peaked hats and scuffed blue coats. As we pulled away from the station, they knocked on every compartment door, calling out, “Tickets, passports!”

Tickets and passports were taken away for inspection. I handed over my Turkish identity, the name newly learned, and lay back in the bunk, wishing we could open more of the window as the Bulgarian countryside flashed by. I had no great fear of detection this side of the border. No matter how good the Turkish police, international arrest warrants take time.

As my details were inspected and my tickets stamped, I flicked through the file marked Kepler.

Nearly a hundred photos and names, faces, glimpses of old CCTV pictures, arrest warrants, family photos. Records of interviews and documents logged, emails sent and phones hacked. Some of the faces in the file I barely remembered; others had been part of me for years at a time. There the beggar I had met in Chicago whose face, when shaved, turned out to be barely a boy’s, and whose body I enrolled, as my very last act in it, on a catering course in St Louis, reasoning there were worse places to begin again. Here the woman from St Petersburg whose companions had loved her and left her, and who I’d found wandering the streets without the money to get home, and who hissed, “Vengeance against all false friends…” There the district attorney in New Orleans who, sitting beside me in the bar, had said, “If he testifies, I can blow this case wide open, but he’s too goddamn scared to come to court.” And I’d replied, “What if I could get him there?”

Here, over ten years of my life, laid out in neat chronological order, every jump, every switch, every skin, tracked and documented and filed for future reference, right up to the very last page, and Josephine.

Someone had spent years tracing me, monitoring my every move through records of amnesia, the testimonies of men and women who had lost an hour here, a day there, a few months at a time. It was a masterpiece of investigation, a triumph of forensic detection, right up to the point where, without explanation, it took it upon itself to lie shamelessly and brand both me and my host murderers.

I pulled a few pictures from the file.

A woman, sitting in the window of a café in Vienna, her cake untouched, her coffee growing cold.

A man in a hospital gown, a tawny beard spreading across his round sagging belly, staring out of the window at nothing much in particular.

A teenage boy, his hair stuck up in ozone-destroying spikes, giving two fingers to the camera as he waggled his pink pierced tongue. Definitely not my type but perhaps, given the circumstances, his presence in my file was fortuitous after all.

As the train slowed into Belgrade, I checked my belongings.

Passports, money, weapons, mobile phone.

I put the battery back in the phone and thumbed it on.

It took a while to work out its location and then grudgingly conceded that yes, it was in Serbia, and sent me a text message to inform me of the same and ask me to enjoy my stay. I waited. Two new messages. The first was a missed call, no message, number unknown. The second was a text message. It read:
SOS Circe
.

Nothing more.

I thought about it a moment, then turned the phone back off, removed the battery and put them away at the bottom of the bag.

What may be said of Belgrade?

It is a bad city in which to be old or cantankerous.

It is a fantastic place to party.

The station is a monument to triumphant 1800s ambition, a palace of fine lines and handsome stones that put Kapikule to shame. Step outside and taxis honk, cars scrunch head to tail, trams and trolley carts compete for space beneath the spider’s web of overhead power lines feeding the transport system, and a couple of tower blocks stand still, grey and empty where once – not so long ago – NATO cruise missiles fell. A proper heart-of-city station, the smell of the rivers pushes back against exhaust and cigarette smoke as the Sava and the Danube collide, determined to prove that whatever meagre definition of ‘river’ you’ve been working on up to now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It is easy to believe, when you stand on the shores of the Danube, that the world is an island after all.

By night the barges that hug the waterfront turn up the music and the disco lights, and the young come out to party. By day the pedestrianised streets of central Belgrade are swamped with the fashionable come to buy fashionable things, to sustain their sense of fashionability, while on the edge of the city the old folk sit, men with drooping cigarettes and time-sunken eyes, who stare at the swaggering world and are not impressed.

Cross the waters of the Sava, and long shadows are thrown by the tower blocks and industrial slabs of communist dreams with such catchy names as Blok 34, Blok 8, Blok whatever. It is a place perhaps more real than the dream of exclusive boutiques that line Prince Mihailo, where life is not glamorous, and fashion serves no purpose apart from provoking envy and contempt.

I checked in at a hotel that was one of a thousand hotels run by ten companies the world over. I used the German passport and the woman exclaimed in poorly accented
Deutsch
, “Ah! Welcome you here very much!”

My room, unlike in Edirne, had the space, uniformity and whitewashed luxury expected by any bug-eyed European traveller who is now too tired to want to think about where the kettle is or watch anything other than CNN sports reports or repeats of
CSI
. I locked my case away, put a few hundred euros in my pocket, tucked the Kepler folder under my arm and went in search of an internet café.

On page 14 of the Kepler file there was a photo of a man.

His hair was dyed black, his nose, chin, ears, jaw burst with pieces of metal, he wore a T-shirt with a white skull on it and, if it hadn’t been for the prescription-strength glasses on his nose and the textbook on
Prüfungs Gemacht Physik
in the background, I would happily have dismissed him then and there as your average happy punk.

The note in the file read: “Berlin, 2007. Johannes Schwarb. Short-term inhabitation, long-term association?”

Looking at the leering expression on the studded face, I shuddered to think that I had ever even considered habitation of that flesh, brief though it had been.

He was sixteen, I was twenty-seven, and he was hitting on me in a Berlin nightclub.

“No,” I said.

“Come on…”

“No.”

“Come on, babe…”

“Absolutely not.”

“Come on…”

The bar was loud, the music was good, I was Christina and had a taste for mojitos, he was Johannes Schwarb and he was high.

He waggled his tongue at me like a flailing fish, revealing the stud protruding from its flapping pink surface. “Young man,” I said, “you are all of thirty seconds away from self-harm.”

My statement, true as it was, didn’t seem to be comprehended by Johannes, who kept on writhing whichever parts of his body he still had some sort of control over up and down against the stool by my side. He hadn’t mustered the courage to writhe against anything living, so the furniture would have to do. For a brief moment I contemplated doing the unthinkable, grabbing his face and putting my tongue down his throat, just to see what happened.

Odds were, he’d be so shocked he’d bite, and it seemed unfair to leave Christina with a swollen tongue and the taste of vodka.

Then his friend ran up, and she was fifteen, and she was crying, and she pulled at his arm and said, “They’re here!”

“Babe!” he wailed. “Can’t you see I’m…?” A gesture attempted to take in the curves of my body, the shape of my dress, the look of murder in my eyes.

“They’re here,” she hissed. “They want the money.”

Her eyes darted across the dance floor, and his followed, red capillaries wiggling through the whites, body half-falling as he twisted to see the source of the disruption.

Three men with the faces of those for whom a party was a source of profit, no more, were heading across the floor with the determination of a Roman road. Johannes whooped, stuck both his arms in the air, revealing a well-pierced midriff, and shrilled, “Hey! Motherfuckers! Come get it!”

If they heard this statement, the three gentlemen were unimpressed.

“You have to go. Please, run!” whimpered his companion, tugging at his arm.

“Fuckers!” he roared, face open with delight, eyes staring at some fantastical outcome only he could see. “Come on then, come on!”

I tapped the girl, tears still flowing down her face, politely on the shoulder. “Drugs?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, and didn’t need to. Johannes whooped. A blade flicked open in the fist of one of the approaching men.

“Right then,” I muttered, and put my hand on Johannes’ arm.

Jumping into an inebriated body is an entirely unpleasant experience. It is my belief that the process of getting drunk is a cushion to the actual reality of being drunk. Bit by bit the mind grows accustomed to swaying room, burning skin, churning stomach, so though every aspect of your physiology screams, poison, poison, it is the gentle and pleasant acquisition of the state that prevents the experience from becoming a thoroughly vile event.

Jumping straight from a reasonably sober body into one riding high on more noxious substances than I cared to guess at was like taking a standing jump from a trotting pony to a speeding train.

My body jerked, fingers tightening on the bar as every part of me tried to rearrange itself in some other place. I tasted bile, felt mosquitoes feeding inside my head. “Jesus Christ,” I hissed, and as Christina swayed and opened her eyes beside me, I pressed my hands against my skull and turned, and did my very best to run.

The skin of strangers as it touched mine was an electric shock that rippled through my arms, ran down to my stomach and made the sack full of puke I carried beneath my lungs swish like the ocean against a cliff. I heard the girl shriek and the boys run, staggered against a man with coffee skin and avocado eyes, beautiful in every way, and wanted to fall into him then and there, damn Johannes.

The fire exit was shut, but not locked, the alarm long since disabled to let the smokers, sniffers and shaggers out into the alley at the back. I stumbled, forgetting that I wasn’t in a dress, wasn’t in Christina’s fancy shoes. I crawled up the stairs to street level, reached for the nearest dumpster, pressed my head against the cold stinking metal and was profoundly, and gratefully, sick.

The fire door slammed shut behind me.

A voice said, “You’re dead, Schwarb.”

I lifted my head to see the fist, which collided with the hard bone beneath my eye. I fell, hands scraping along the tarmac, vision spinning, heard tinnitus break out loud in my right ear, coughed thin white bile.

The three boys had an average age of nineteen, twenty at most. They wore knock-offs of sporty brands: baggy trousers and tight T-shirts which emphasised in clinging polyester just how few muscles they had to celebrate.

They were going to kick the crap out of me, and with my head auditioning for soprano, I couldn’t precisely put my finger on why.

I tried to get up, and one of them swung his fist again, slamming it into the side of my face. My head hit the ground and that was fine, that was completely fine, because at least with most of me on the floor, there was less of me to fall. The same thought seemed to occur to one of the boys, who grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt and began to haul me upright. I caught his wrists instinctively and, as his nostrils flared and his eyes widened, I dug my fingers into his skin and switched.

Johannes in my hands, my heart in triple figures, Christ, my fingers wanted to strike, my muscles wanted to strike, every part of my body was buzzing with adrenaline and I thought – why the hell not?

I dropped Johannes and turned, putting my entire body into the blow, knees and hips, shoulders and arms, twisting and rising to deliver a punch under the chin of my nearest companion. His jaw cracked, a tooth snapping as mandible hit cranium, and as he fell back I leaped on top of him, my knees into his chest, my face against his face, and pushed him down, screaming with a voice only freshly broken. I hit him, and hit him again, and felt blood on my knuckles though I wasn’t sure where it had come from until the third boy grabbed me by the throat, yelling a name which I guessed had to be mine. As he pulled me off the bleeding mess beneath my knees, I grabbed his arm where it lay across my neck

I had an arm across the boy’s neck, but I made it better, putting my left forearm across my right to pull tighter as the boy, bewildered and confused, writhed and wheezed and wiggled in my grasp. I kicked his left knee, and as he dropped, I held on tighter, suspending him by skull alone until his eyes began to roll and his fighting grew less, at which point and at last

I let him go.

And turned, breathless, to Johannes.

He sat, blood running from a wide cut across his face, palms dirty and scratched, staring at me with mouth open, eyes wide. I looked at the two boys on the ground, and saw that they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. I looked back at Johannes. His lips were twitching from side to side, unsure of which torrent of thought they should express. When he finally found something, it was not the sentiment I had expected. “Oh my God!” he whispered. “That was
incredible
!”