Touch (14 page)

“Galileo?”

He nodded, though barely at me or the word I spoke.

“You should have said,” I breathed. “I could have helped.”

“Helped?” The word choked out, almost a laugh. “You’re a fucking ghost. What good are you to anyone?”

“Might’ve been some. I’ve met your Galileo.”

Now his head turned, eyes striking like an axe on ice. “Where?”

“St Petersburg, Madrid, Edinburgh, Miami. Not since Miami.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Contrary to popular opinion, not every ghost you meet is inclined to once-every-twenty-years outbreaks of psychopathic extermination,” I replied. “Those that are, you tend to remember.”

“Tell me!”

“Why?” I breathed, and saw him almost flinch. “You are hell-bent on killing me. You killed Josephine, and for all that this is a perfectly friendly little encounter, give or take my hormonal condition and the handcuffs, I find it hard to simply forget the turbulent nature of our relationship. You’d kill me, Mr Coyle, because a ghost nearly killed you. I am not that ghost. You’d kill me for what I am. Why should I help you find Galileo?”

His lips thinned; he turned away, then as quickly turned back. “Because if you didn’t help me, knowing anything at all, it would prove that you are the monster I think you are.”

“You think that anyway. Give me something more. Why did you kill Josephine?”

“Orders.”

“Why?”

“Because I respect the men that give them. Because the file said…” His tongue tangled on the words. “Because the file said she murdered four of our researchers. She did. Not you – her.”

“Why?”

“She attempted to infiltrate one of our projects. A medical trial. You should know this.”

“I know some. She needed money, a medical trial in Frankfurt, something for the common cold. They rejected her when they realised she was a hooker. I did my research too, before making a deal with Josephine Cebula.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t for the common cold.”

“You astonish me. What was it?”

“Vaccinations.”

“Against?” He didn’t answer. A thought. I leaned back, feeling the idea settle like dusty cobwebs on clean skin. “Oh. Against us. You were trying to find a vaccine against us. Did it work?”

“Not with four of our researchers murdered.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“But it was Josephine. I saw footage, CCTV. I saw her with blood on her hands. Then you came to Frankfurt, made her an offer. What were we to think?”

I inhaled the words. I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself not to have a violent physical reaction. My fingers pressed over my belly. “You believe… that I became Josephine because of some medical trial? You think she and I launched some kind of
attack
against your people? Conspired to murder Doctor whoever-it-was and all his happy brood?”

He thought about it. “Yes. That is what I believe.”

Smell of detergent on my fingertips, a memory of fruit tea at the back of my throat. I counted backwards from ten slowly, and said, “You’re wrong.”

Coyle did not reply.

The train was slowing, carriages clunking against each other as we decelerated towards a siding. I wondered how this body would cope with pregnancy. It seemed a stick-skinny thing, frail ankles and tight waist. I wondered if fruit tea was any use against morning sickness.

“Who do you work for?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“You know I’ll find out.”

“Tell me about Galileo.”

“I’m going to keep on wearing your body, Mr Coyle, until someone shoots me in it. You want a happy outcome, I’m going to need more information.”

“You need information?” His voice was a half-laugh, having nothing better to do with itself. “Ten minutes ago it was midday in Istanbul. A man touched me on the train and I was somewhere else, wearing new clothes, talking to someone new. You’ve stripped me naked, talked with my tongue, eaten with my mouth, sweated and pissed and swallowed my spit, and you need information? Fuck you, Kepler. Fuck you.”

Silence.

The train bounced across an uneven set of points, slowing now, the engine winding down. Perhaps there was a station nearby, a midnight traveller looking for a ride. Perhaps a siding where we might sit for a few hours while the driver had a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette on the side of the track. The engine chunked to itself, unwilling to sleep.

I felt my hands on my belly and wondered what my child would grow up to be.

Perhaps he’d work on the railways like mum?

Perhaps she would dream of being something more.

A politician, perhaps, who in thirty years’ time would stand before the nation and proclaim, “My mother rode the tracks between Berlin and Vienna to support me in my youth, so that the future I could make would be better than the life she lived.”

Or maybe none of the above.

Maybe my child would grow up quiet and alone, a mother perpetually travelling, postcards from abroad, a sense that her life was not her own.

“Galileo,” I said, staring at nothing in particular. “You want to know about Galileo?”

An intake of breath, his eyes on my face.

I told him.

St Petersburg in 1912, and you could almost believe the Romanovs had got away with it. I had heard the rifles crack in 1905, seen barricades in the street and believed, as had many others, that the dynasty’s days were numbered. The social reforms could not keep up with the demands of economics; the political reforms could not keep up with the changes in society, and so, kicking its way into the twentieth century, it had seemed inevitable that some part of Russia would get caught on the wire.

Yet in 1912, dancing beneath the chandeliers of the Winter Palace, silk gloves rolled to my elbows and hair held high with silver and crystal, I could believe that this world would last for ever.

I was Antonina Baryskina, seventh daughter of a grand old duke, and I was there to demonstrate an eligibility that my host singularly lacked. Antonina, sixteen years old, was already branded a flirt, a harlot in the making, and worst of all the kind of woman who would sleep with a proletarian largely because her daddy forbade her from doing so. No coercion, wheedling or downright threat had yet coaxed Antonina into reforming her ways. As rumours threatened to burst into flame, a Moscow estate agent by the name of Kuanyin approached me with an unusual commission from the father.

“Six months,” she said. “Beautiful woman, beautiful life. There is, I think, no existence on this earth more refined than the Baryskina girl.”

“And in return for this… refined existence?”

“It is asked that you manifest a maturity worthy of the rewards that are bestowed.”

“To what purpose?”

“To prove to the world that Antonina Baryskina is open for business.”

I loved being Antonina Baryskina. She had a beautiful bay mare who I rode every morning regardless of the cold; owned a cello which she had almost never played but whose strings, when pressed, sang like the weeping of an widowed god, and as I danced, and laughed, and discussed the current political climate and the state of the weather, the rumours of Antonina-that-was fell away, and across St Petersburg eligible men queued to catch a glimpse of this reformed heiress.

The bores I ignored; the handsome and the witty I permitted to visit me in my mansion on the banks of the canal, feeding them coffee and Turkish delight. Several brought prepared verse and song to entertain me, and I clapped my hands and felt really quite giddy at the rapt adulation of so many noblemen. I have waved my banners with the suffragettes, marched for civil rights and the equality of man, and still feel a flush of excitement at the recollection of handsome men reciting verses to my honour.

In time, my father came to me and said, “You are receiving a great many eligible visitors to this house, and I think the time has come to discuss marriage prospects.”

He had never known how to speak to his daughter. He knew even less how to speak to the mind that now wore his daughter’s flesh. I said, “The commission was to keep me away from treasure-hunting lieutenants and unwise sexual behaviour long enough to undo the potential smirch on my name. Nowhere did our arrangement extend to finding marriageable material.”

It takes the full force of a magnificent Russian beard to truly bristle, and bristle it did. “I do not suggest that
you
marry the gentlemen!” he retorted. “Simply that we must start laying the groundwork for my daughter.”

After some haggling I agreed to dine with the top ten most eligible and wealthy bachelors my father could find. I dismissed four on the first encounter for behaviours ranging from the boorish to the barbaric, while retaining the other six at the end of a very long social leash. In time my father came to respect my judgment and, for a few brief moments, would almost forget that it was I, not his daughter, who he addressed.

“You are aware,” I said one day, “that when my tenancy expires, the individual these gentlemen have come to admire will be replaced by, if you don’t mind me saying, your daughter.”

“My daughter desires only one thing in this world – to be adored,” replied my father as we sat in the gloom of his swaddled coach, bouncing its way over the Moscow cobbles at the gorging hour of night. “As it was, that need made her a thoroughly unadorable creature. It is my hope that, once she realises that she is already adored, thanks to your groundwork, she will settle down and become rather more manageable. Even if she does not, it is satisfactory for now that her reputation has been salvaged, and perhaps in a few years, when we have beaten the demon out of her, she can return and reclaim the reputation you have made.”

“You are not concerned by the… unorthodox nature of our relationship?”

“To which relationship do you refer?”

“To mine and your daughter’s, perhaps,” I murmured. “And pursuant to that, my relationship to you and yours to your child.”

He was silent a while as we rattled through the chittering night-time streets. At last: “On accepting this commission, it was necessary that you acquainted yourself with my family’s history. Did you do so?”

“Of course.”

“Then you have done more than my daughter,” he grunted. “Whatever your motives may have been. You will be aware that my family has a long history of military service, My father, in particular, fought in the Crimea and was applauded for gallantry.”

“I have read the same.”

“Lies,” he replied flatly. “My father did not fight in the Crimea. His body was in attendance and by all accounts warred gallantly, yet of the battles engaged, the foes struck down, I assure you my father had not one memory. He could not bear the sight of blood but is famed to this day as a mighty warrior. Can you conceive of how this situation came to pass?”

“Yes,” I breathed. “I rather think I can.”

He straightened, half-nodding at a purpose unseen. “You wonder why I would permit – forgive me, that is not the word – why I would invite you to assume the role of my daughter. You consider it unfit for a father? I would answer to you this: that if you were to have a gangrenous leg cut off, or to stand before a lover and declare that your love is dead; that if the necessity of your position commanded you to kill a friend, to stick a knife into the throat of a man who has ever been loyal – what would you give
not
to do it? And what would you give for it to be done?”

“What makes you think another would do what you cannot?”

“Because it is not
your
lover you destroy, yet they, in looking on you, are destroyed as truly. My daughter derides her birth and damns her family, and yes. This is better.”

The halt of the carriage came with a two-three of rocking bodies and the stamp of horses’ hooves by the kerb. For a moment my father did not move. Then, “There is a question I would ask.”

“Please.”

“When we met, you wore my servant’s body, and said, call me Josef, the name of the man you wore. Now you wear my daughter, and say, call me Antonina and you… speak alone with men, and wash yourself before the mirror and… engage in those personal acts of womanhood that I would rather not consider too deeply. Here is my question: who are you? When you are neither Antonina nor Josef, who are you when you lay my daughter’s head down to sleep?”

I considered this problem. “I am a well-bred daughter of Russia. I am a cellist with a love for a bay mare that I spoil greatly. I am polite at the dinner table, charming with those who merit my attention and dismissive to those young gentlemen whose intentions are inclined only towards my modesty or my wealth. All this is true. What else matters?”

He shifted, readying himself to speak, so I reached out with my gloved fingers, resting them on his liver-spotted hand. “Did your father ask who it was who slew his way across the Crimea?” I breathed. “Did he want to know?”

“No. I don’t believe he did. There were rumours of… some vile things permitted in my father’s body, and yet I suppose in war vile things are accepted.”

“Then ask yourself this – do you want to know who it is you have permitted into your daughter’s flesh?”

I saw his Adam’s apple rise and sink in the half-gloom of the carriage, Then, with a brighter bark he exclaimed, “Well, what is it we are seeing tonight, Antonina?”

What we were seeing was a show of minimal merit, and that night as the curtain fell I applauded the actors and smiled at the audience, and a reasonable percentage of the audience applauded me, for I was beautiful and wealthy, the perfect picture of who Antonina should be.

And then in the crowd that swirled beneath the chandelier of the lobby – for no one of society came to the theatre just for the play – a chubby finger prodded my elbow and a small voice said, “I know who you are.”

I looked down and beheld a little girl, her hair done up in doll-like curls. Her tiny dress of pink silk clung to an undeveloped chest, yet she wore rouge on her cheeks and as her fingers brushed my arm, I felt a buzzing in my teeth like a wasps’ nest doused in smoke.

“Do you?” I murmured, studying the face that studied mine.

“Yes. I love your dress.”

“Thank you, Miss…?”

“Senyavin. I’m… oh!” A tiny hand went to her mouth, holding back a giggle. “Am I Tulia or Tasha? We look so alike, I can’t always tell, and mummy calls us both ‘angel’.”

I drew further into the candle-washed gloom of the theatre, pulling my cape tight across my thin shoulders. “And how long has your mummy called you that?”

“All my life, I suppose,” replied the child, “But it’s only been two weeks.” Her head tipped to one side, staring at me crookedly. “I burned Tulia’s dolls’ house. Or maybe Tasha’s. The rooms were painted in pink, and I wanted them blue, and they said no. So I burned it. What do you do?”

“I salvage the reputations of young women too naïve to realise what a good reputation is worth,” I replied. “But in two weeks’ time, I imagine I’ll be someone else.”

“Only two weeks?” asked Senyavin. “I’m moving out tonight. Look.” She pointed across the room, a chubby finger lancing a man in a bright red sash and curled dark moustache, standing iron-straight in the centre of the foyer, slim glass between three fingers. “Do you like what you see? He’s beautiful, yes?”

“Very pleasant.”

The girl turned back to me, face full of concern. “I wanted to let you know,” she explained. “When I realised who you were, I wanted you to understand that he’s mine. I love him already. I love his sweat. I love his smell. His eyes smile even when his lips are still, his hair is soft and falls that way across his brow by nature, not hard work. He works to keep his hands still, but they still twitch at his side, bursting with energy, and when I kiss a woman with his lips she’ll cry out, no, I can’t, no, and then kiss me harder because she knows what I know. She knows that I am beautiful. If I could keep him for ever, I would, just like this, perfect. But people get old, flesh withers, so now – now I need to be him while he’s still perfect, before his face changes. He’s so beautiful, I thought, what if you try to move in? That couldn’t happen. Too much noise, not enough room. So I thought I’d say hello and tell you. He’s mine. I love him. Touch him and I’ll rip your eyes out and feed them to my pussy cat.”

So saying, little Senyavin smiled a delightful smile, grabbed two fingers of my hand with her fist and shook it goodbye. I stood in silence and watched her as she skipped brightly away.

That was what I believe to be my first meeting with the entity known as Galileo.

It was not my last.