Touch (33 page)

And then Coyle opened his eyes and I said: “I’m Babushka. Actually, I’m almost certainly not Babushka, but all I’ve got in my handbag is eighty euros cash, a set of front-door keys, a half-bottle of vodka, four condoms, a pack of paracetamol, pepper spray and these.”

I tossed the cards on to the bed where Coyle lay. He looked from them to me and back again, and said, “You look… surgical.”

“Do I?” I ran my hands around the expansive shape of my body, my platinum-blonde hair draping down the side of my podgy white neck. “Well, yes, the breasts feel silicone and a bit undercooked, but I’d say that my face was all my own, wouldn’t you?”

Coyle, lying on his back on the cheap hotel bed, scrutinised the copious quantities of bare flesh I sported, and said, “This is some sort of punishment, isn’t it? Divine retribution?”

“Nonsense!” I exclaimed, flopping on to the bed beside him and sliding the cards back into my bag. “Babushka seemed a very pleasant woman. Cheap too. Fifty euros for two hours. You don’t get rates like that in Paris, I can tell you. How are you feeling?”

Flinching with every press of his fingertips, he fumbled around the fresh bandages across his shoulder. “I don’t remember much.”

“That would be because you were stoned!” I sang out brightly, testing the rubbery ends of my bright white fingernails. “I knew you were stoned because I was the one who threw the drugs at you, but it took picking up Babushka here to realise just how high I – you – am. Are. You are. Enjoy it while it lasts. I was only checking in, so actually…” I reached out towards the soft skin of his cheek.

“Wait!”

I waited, eyebrows raised. Babushka had sensational plucked eyebrows, and I enjoyed raising them. Coyle sucked in a long slow breath. “You told me… you wanted a willing body. Someone who wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t run. And cheap though your… your Babushka is, if you take her anywhere outside this hotel room her pimp will come running, and you’ll have more trouble than you want. So you need me, and you need me to cooperate. So just wait.” I waited as Coyle pressed his fists against his forehead and drew in another shuddering breath. “Tell me how you get me to New York.”

“I can walk you through customs,” I replied simply. “I can ignore your boarding pass, stamp your passport, fail to search your bags. I could wear anyone I want to New York, fly first class, stretch my legs. But I’ll get you there, if you let me.”

“And what then? I wake up handcuffed to a radiator?”

“Or in a comfortable hotel room next to a lovely lady.”

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”

“No,” I confessed. “But I took a good long stare at me when I came through the door. I was promising all sorts of wonderful delights – sexual thrills and erotic mysteries. I implied that I was very athletic.” I stretched my legs, feeling the pull beneath my thighs and calves, and, curious, reached down and tried to touch my toes. My fingertips barely made it past my knees before tendons locked, muscles objected, and with a sigh I relaxed again. “Maybe I exaggerated. But I thought I had a tender smile. It laughed, but at itself. I think I am quite wonderful, in my way.”

“Do you do this a lot? You hear about people who establish… relationships with people like you. I was never sure I could believe it.”

“It’s true. I’ve had a few in my time – gofers, if you will. Don’t worry; I was always very well behaved. A cooperative body isn’t something to be taken for granted. I’d never drive dangerously or have unprotected sex in a gofer; it wouldn’t be professional. Never have sex at all, in fact, in a gofer – not without permission. A relationship like that is about someone who’s willing to get you to the next appointment without all the fuss of jumping from waiter to chef to driver and back again. And a good gofer is… can be a friend. If they want to be.”

“Did you love them too?”

“Yes. Of course I did. They knew what I was and trusted me. They trusted me with their naked skin. If that isn’t an act of love, I don’t know what is. I love all my hosts. I loved Josephine.” His eyes glinted in the low tungsten light of the room, and he said not a word. “There was a time when I took everything I wanted by force. You – the actions of your kind – have somewhat resurrected that experience, those memories. But Josephine Cebula knew what she had agreed to. She and I made a bargain in the international departures lounge of Frankfurt airport, once I had proved to her all that I could do. I would wash her body, run my hands through her hair, over her naked flesh. I would dress her in brand-new clothes, stand before a mirror and turn myself this way and that, wonder if my bum looked big in red, small in blue. I would laugh her laugh, fill her belly with food, run her tongue along my teeth, kiss with her lips, caress with her fingertips, pull a stranger down on to her body in the quiet of the night and in her most secret voice whisper tales of romance in my lover’s ears. All this I did, all this she permitted me to do, because I asked and did not take, and I… loved her. There is no giving greater than the gift she gave me, nor that I… meant to give her. A new life. A new her. A chance to be whoever she desired, and all this for a term of time no longer than the jail sentence given to a petty thief. But you killed her, Nathan Coyle. Whoever you are. You killed her.”

I did not think I had heard a silence that ran so deep, burying itself in the very bones of the night.

He said, “I…”

And stopped.

Said, “It wasn’t…”

Stopped again.

Some words on the tip of his tongue. Justifications perhaps, excuses. Following orders. Justice. Retribution. Poor decisions, too little time, too much pressure. Past history – poor Nathan Coyle, he’s been hurt, he’s been traumatised by events gone by, don’t judge, not him, not for his actions freely taken.

The words rose to his lips and died before they could be expressed.

I watched them dissolve into him, burning as they burrowed deep into his flesh, until he looked away and said nothing at all.

I paced the room, turned on the TV.

Reports of…

… someone else’s problems.

Turned the TV off again.

Waited.

Then he said, I want to brush my teeth.

Bathroom’s right there. Knock yourself out.

He rose, painfully, testing the bandages across his arm and chest, feeling that they were good.

The bathroom door stood ajar, and from the bed I watched him move in and out of view against bright white light. When the tap had finished running, I eased back the bathroom door so that I might see him fully, and there he stood, hands pressed down on the edge of the sink, staring up into the mirror as if he too were only just seeing his face, he too was trying to solve the question of what shape it might become. I leaned against the door frame, a surgically skinned prostitute in a town where the rates were bad, the pimps difficult, the secrets of my trade hidden beneath new-washed cobbled streets. His eyes didn’t move to me, didn’t wander from the hypnotic weight of his own stare.

“If I say no?” he asked.

“Then I’ll leave. I’ll run to where my file on Aquarius will be. I’ll tear them apart from the inside out and leave you alone.”

“To die? Is that the threat?”

“I won’t hurt you. Aquarius, Galileo… your guess is as good as mine. But I won’t hurt you.”

He nodded once at his own reflection, then looked down into the depths of the sink, shoulders hunched, back bent, suddenly old before his time. “Do it,” he said. “Do it.”

I reached out, then hesitated, my fingers hovering above the bare skin of his back. “Do it!” he snarled, lips twisting, eyebrows knotted together and I pressed my fingers against his skin and, instinctive before his rage,

jumped.

I am Nathan Coyle. Here, the pounding of my heart. The heat in my eyes, the aching in my chest.

I am Nathan Coyle, standing hurt and breathless, a bewildered woman with an implausible name reeling in the doorway of the bathroom.

I am Nathan Coyle, looking up into the mirror at eyes that wanted to weep.

And for a moment, as I regard my reflection staring back at me, I wish to God that I were anyone else in the world.

There are no planes from Lyon to New York.

Back on to the trains.

Passengers on a train are harder to track than cars.

The TGV, the push of acceleration, the roar of tunnels, the flat fields of northern France.

Back to Paris.

The passenger next to me, at a table of four, was an old man with an oversized newspaper.

I read the articles over his shoulder for a while, but his reading speed was slow, mine fast, and I was tired, and bored, and lonely, so I put one hand on his wrist and

jumped.

Coyle stirred by my side, saw the window, the countryside grey-green outside, heard the engine, smelt overpriced railway coffee and at last, his hand still on mine, saw me.

“We’re not there yet?”

“Not yet.”

“What is it?”

“I… wanted to say hello.”

“Why?”

“I thought you might… want to know how we were doing?” He stared at me, incredulous. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I… was just trying to be nice.”

I jumped back through the hot palm of his hand.

Back in Gare de Lyona, nd for a few seconds I left Coyle, who staggered, catching his weight against the side of a ticket machine.

“What is it now?”

“We’re low on money,” I replied, fumbling in my pockets for my wallet. “Here – take this.” I pulled all the notes save one from my wallet, held them out for Coyle.

He looked down with the contempt of a bishop for a fallen devil, then folded the money into his fist. “Who are you?” he asked as I put my far lighter wallet back into my pocket.

“Right now I’m a man who met a stranger and shook him by the hand. So shake my hand, Nathan Coyle, and let’s move on.”

Slowly he uncurled his fingers and shook me gently by the hand.

I rode the train to the airport, then the humming twin-carriaged shuttle to the terminal. A woman stood opposite me, her hair fair, her skin tanned, a green dress tied shut across her waist, her laugh as she chatted with a friend on the phone dazzling and bright. She was going to the car park, I decided, having returned from a sun-soaked holiday in some southern clime, and for her tomorrow held no dread of work or fear of jet lag, but rather a delight that having departed, she was now returning to her waiting family and friends, who would all cluster about to see her.

My fingers itched to brush her skin and have that laugh to call my own, as my mother, father – perhaps even some adoring siblings who as a child I squabbled with but are now all grown up and fraternally in love – crushed me to their sides and called me their little pumpkin, their dearest girl.

Then I looked round, and saw Nathan Coyle’s reflection staring back at me from the window panes, and the doors opened, and she was gone.

One ticket to New York, coming up.

And I was…

“Passport, please?”

Coyle blinked up at me, felt his hand upon my own, peeking through the little gap in the screen where weary travellers must place their passports upon attempting to leave this land. I smiled at him and said in cheerful, chatty French, “I’m going to look at your passport now, Mr Coyle,” and prised my fingers free from his.

It was the first time I’d been inside a passport control booth, having never before felt the need. An uncomfortable high stool, foolproof equipment that I was too foolish to fully comprehend, a holstered gun tucked beneath the counter.

“Give it a few moments,” I said, “then move on as if I’ve cleared you. I’ll be a couple of bodies behind.”

He nodded, and at my smile and cheery “Have a good flight!” shuffled like one half-asleep down through the line.

I scanned a few more passports, inspected a few more faces, just for the hell of it, wondering which might be criminal, which a smuggler. A bar code scanner beeped appreciatively when I waved a couple of passports at it, and up popped names and numbers on my screen which I made a show of studying while chubby tourists and harassed businessmen waited for me to clear them through. When one came along whose build seemed close enough to Coyle’s, his hair of the same colour and a similar cut, I smiled especially brightly, reached out for his passport and, as his fingers brushed mine,

my fingers brushed back.

Nine bodies later, as Coyle stepped up to the metal detectors at border control, laying his bag down on the X-ray conveyor, I said, “You carrying anything dodgy, sir?” His eyes flashed to mine, for “dodgy” was not a word commonly expected of customs officers. I smiled and added, “Strip-search, sir?”

“Do we have the time?”

“Oh, sir,” I chided, pushing his bag on to the conveyor belt, “don’t you know how much more exciting it is to be touched by another’s skin, instead of your own? But I can see you’re not in the mood, and I’ve got an ingrown toenail; you go straight on through.”

Then I was

businessman with horrific teeth, fillings that needed repair, heat in my gums, did he think this was normal?

sitting down beside Coyle in the international departures lounge, briefcase in one hand, paper cup in the other. “Tea?”

Coyle examined the cup, examined me, and without another word took the tea from my unresisting fingers. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I brought some sugar too, in case you like it sweet.”

“I don’t.”

“Never mind. Better for your teeth anyway.”

He slurped tea; I leaned back, tucking my briefcase between my knees, rolling my tongue nervously around the ravaged inside of my mouth. Charles de Gaulle airport was like any airport in the world: there the duty free, here the chemist for those unsuspecting travellers whose hundred-millilitre bottles of shampoo were one millilitre too dangerous for airport security. There the smart-suited men trying to sell indulged strangers the latest sports car, here the bookshop of last month’s greatest hits, tales of American lawyers with perfect teeth, American lovers with perfect lives, American killers who refuse to lie down and die.

Women in headscarves held their infant children by the hand and studied the departures board for the next plane to wherever. Tired travellers, stopping over on the way to something better, slumbered, heads back, tongues lolling, their boarding passes gripped tight against their slowly deflating chests. I fumbled in my pocket for my ticket, checked the flight, the time, the board overhead. “Can’t even see where I’m supposed to go.”

Coyle glanced down at the stub in my hand. “I think yours is delayed.”

“Typical. Yours?”

“‘Wait for announcements’.”

“That could mean anything.”

“I think it’s a good thing.”

“Are you sure?”

He glanced over at me, surprised. “You… don’t like flying?”

“First time I crossed the Atlantic, it was in a Dutch race-built frigate called the
Nessy Reach
. Bloody dangerous business.”

“But planes…?”

“I dislike the universality of the threat with flying. First-class fat-cat or economy class with your knees pressed to your chin; if a plane falls, you’re dead no matter who you are.”

“My God,” he exclaimed. “You’re a coward.”

“Am I? I suppose bravery must be defined relative to the deeds habitually available to he who faces it. I have been hired to do many of the things that brave man can’t: leave a lover, attend a job interview, march to war. I grant you I had none of the emotional involvement in these acts that might have rendered them tricky, but still I have to ask… am I really a coward? I think the case could be argued both ways.”

“All right – you’re not a coward. You’re merely operating by a different set of rules.”

I smiled and said, “Want another cup of tea?”

“No. Thank you.”

“I should let this body go. Flight delayed or not, the mind can only lose so much time.”

“I know.” He held out his hand, not looking, the fingers hanging loose like those of a queen waiting to be kissed.

“You’re very brave,” I said, resting my fingers in his skin.

Then there was the slow crawl to the runway.

Safety demonstrations. Chin to knees, oxygen from above, be sure to save yourself before you save a child or your friend.

A push of acceleration as we headed for the sky. I let my skull press back into the headrest of my seat, felt the chemically numbed throbbing in my shoulder and arm, resisted the urge to prod at the wound, watched the landscape turn from a thing of solid nature into a map of straight lines, roads and paths carved by a human hand, ordered the vegetarian meal and a bottle of water and, finding that the in-flight movies had even less merit than commonly supposed, played chess instead with an unknown passenger in seat D12, who lost quickly and didn’t return for a rematch.

Then there was ocean beneath us and tiny clouds far below, and I was tired, and my shoulder ached, and my eyes hurt, and in a moment of temptation I became

round-faced man, too fat for my economy-class seat, belt chafing across my middle, my knees pressed up awkwardly, elbows jammed in, and as I shifted uncomfortably and the engines hummed and the drinks trolley clattered up and down the aisle, Coyle turned blearily to me and said:

“Brave?”

“What?”

“You called me brave.”

“Did I?”

“A second ago.”

“A few hours ago.”

“Where are we now?”

“Somewhere over the Atlantic.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Matter?”

“Why are you… you?” he asked, gesturing at my more abundant flesh.

“I was… uncomfortable. Wanted to stretch my legs. This gentleman was in the way, so I thought I’d stretch his.”

“I can believe that. You called me brave.”

“Must have imagined it.”

“A moment ago.”

“I also called you a murderer, a blind fool and the killer of a woman I loved. All of which is true. Yet here we are, knuckling down and carrying on. I wouldn’t be too worried about it.”

“Are you going to be him long?”

I shifted awkwardly in my seat. “No,” I said at last. “I’m too wide for the armrests – they’re compressing my belly – and my knees hurt, and my feet feel splayed and flat, and I’ve got an aftertaste of ginger ale in my mouth, and even if all this were not the case, I still think I’m a coronary risk. But if you want to watch a movie or something, I could take a wander round the plane? Upgrade to first class, perhaps.”

“What are the movie choices like?”

“Appalling. Do you play chess?”

“What?”

“Do you play chess?”

“No. I mean yes, I play.”

“Want a game?”

“With you?”

“Sure. Or challenge seat D12, but they won’t give you much trouble.”

“I’m not sure…”

“You let me wear your body, but you won’t play me at chess?”

“One is grim necessity, the other feels like socialising.”

“Suit yourself.”

Silence a while. Then, “I’m not your friend. You understand that.”

“Of course.”

“In Berlin, in Istanbul, I meant everything I said. I believe everything that I believe. A few minutes here or there, a game of chess… it doesn’t change what you are. What you represent. I let you… touch me… because I must, and it repulses me. I don’t know why I’m explaining this to you.”

“It’s OK,” I replied. “It’ll be OK.”

Silence.

As much as there is ever silence in the roar of a plane.

“So… do you want to sleep?” I asked, shifting awkwardly in my seat.

“Won’t your body notice if you stay in too long?”

I shrugged. “Planes are boring. Most people are relieved to find that the hours have flown by, so to speak.”

“I could do with some time.”

“Fine.”

“By myself.”

I half-nodded at nothing in particular. “That’s not a problem,” I murmured, reaching out to touch my neighbour’s hand. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

I am a first-class businesswoman.

At home I probably do yoga.

I eat prawns and drink champagne.

Coyle sits alone, and so do I.