She was lying against the wall, curled up. He almost hadn’t noticed her. It was only the sound she made, a faint mewling sound, that stopped him. He crouched beside her. There was something strange about her. Her brown skin seemed faded, and when he gently raised her head with his hand and looked in her eyes he seemed to see the wall through them, as if the eyes had lost all substance, had become windows into an empty house. There was a bottle held in the girl’s hand, but it was empty. The girl blinked when he touched her. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said.

‘It’s me,’ he said. And, ‘Are you all right?’

The girl tried to laugh. The sound came out of her like gurgling water. It seemed to him, later, when he tried to remember it, as if all the sounds she made were merely the sounds of the street, as if she spoke in traffic noise, and in the words of the public announcement system, and in the sound of the wind. No one disturbed them. People went past without looking. It almost seemed to him, as he held her, that there was no one and nothing there, that what he was holding was merely a heap of old, cheap clothes left by the side of the station. ‘I can’t any more,’ the girl said. ‘I was on a bus. The bus was full of people. I was on a bus, and…’ her eyes closed. For a moment it was as if she wasn’t there. ‘I was on a bus…’

‘Wait!’ He didn’t know what made him shout.

‘No more drink. No more sex… I don’t feel it when I do it. It’s like I’m not really there. Not really here. I was on a bus…’ She looked up at him, but there was nothing in her eyes. ‘Can you take me home?’

He didn’t answer, and she sighed, and the sound was like the wind stirring leaves along the pavement. ‘Maybe there is somewhere else…’ she said, and then she said one strange word: she said, ‘Nangilima.’

Then, somehow, she was gone. He wasn’t sure, afterwards, what had happened. All he knew was that she was not there any more. He got up from his crouch and looked around, but he couldn’t see her and the people who walked past never shifted and, like a drunk, he walked away, into the great hall of the station, the clockwork inside him still, somehow, ticking, and at the counter he said, ‘Londres,’ and paid for the ticket, and less than an hour later he was on the train.

IN TRANSIT

missed connections

——

The train chug-chug-chugged out of the Gare du Nord, passing through industrial landscapes like spray-painted grey fields where nothing grew. The street lights cast ghostly glows over the bare walls of this unfashionable part of town. The city was being left behind gradually, and he thought he had missed something there. There had been – clues, he thought, scattered over pavements, dropped in ashtrayed bars, garish neon signs saying: You are following the wrong trail.

But what was the trail? These were the facts: his name was Joe. He was a private investigator. He had been hired to find a man, and given more-than-adequate funds to do so. Everything else…

These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe’s world. Everything else…

He sat in the dining car and smoked and watched the lights of Paris, like a cloud of scattered moths, disappear in the distance. He had always liked trains. There was a sense of timelessness in the way they moved across a landscape, a comfort in their rhythm and their constant pattern, an order of sound and movement. The train’s whistle sounded and it made Joe smile. The dining compartment was half-empty, and beside the heavy weight of smoke he could smell brewing tea and floor polish, and as the train gathered speed the windows rattled, just a little, and the wheels turned with a soothing constancy and the windows steamed up and the car was like a cocoon, and he felt no desire to leave it.

And yet there was a little part of him that did. It was a part that, while he was staring out of the window and pulling on his cigarette and letting the lights in the dark world outside all run together as the train sped past them, asked questions. That part made him restless and irritable. It was a part that suggested he got lost underground. That he had taken the wrong line, had missed his connection, but rather than admit it to himself he continued to ride the train to somewhere else.

No. There were facts. Everything else – the Monceau Parc with its fabricated landscape, the men in black, the way Papadopulous had asked him, Are you one of them? Refugees? – none of that had significance beyond, perhaps, its connection to the immediate case. It was important, and he felt the need, somehow, to reiterate it to himself, not to confuse reality with fiction.

That seemingly resolved, he ordered tea, which made him suspect he wasn’t feeling all that well, since he only ever drank tea when he was sick, and he lit another cigarette before realising the previous one was still burning in the ashtray. He watched a white round man with a bulbous nose and a floppy hat and a grimy blue backpack enter the car through the connecting door, followed by an incredibly lovely Chinese girl at least fifteen years younger than him; she wore a long-lens Japanese camera around her neck and her hair was long and untied. They found an empty table and sat down and spoke to each other in low voices, fingers touching across the table, the man breaking off the touch to gesticulate, the girl smiling at him in obvious affection. There was something very real and solid about the two of them, and he wondered what she saw in the guy; they had wrapped the world around themselves and recreated it for themselves and yet they were fully a part of it, strange and bemusing and inexplicable with their relationship he would never know the true nature or origin of, their shared history that was private between the two of them, their life that were separate and had now joined and later may split and rejoin, remain, or part. At another table sat a man with a Slavic face, a thick dark moustache braided with silver, hairy brown hands hugging a coffee mug. Three young women with pale skin sat together, also, talking rapidly in French, bags of shopping by their feet. He felt a curious dislocation from these people, a distance he could not – did not want to – articulate. They possessed the car – the space inside it – the space around themselves – in a way he could not quite comprehend, only knowing – again, with that small, rebellious part of him that he was trying to shut down – that he could not, did not, share it.

There was the girl, back in Paris. He didn’t even know her name. But he knew her. The connection between them worried him. And then she had gone – like leaves blowing down the street, like clouds converging over the setting sun – and he could not rationally explain it. His mind turned away from it, from her memory, and from the memory, also, of the Parc Monceau where for a moment he had a curious sensation of having already been there, having walked hand in hand with a girl… He drank from the cooling tea, and the taste in his mouth was of leaves soaked for too long, and he swallowed and got up and went to his compartment, and into a black and dreamless sleep.

red flowers, blossoming

——

When he awoke it was to get on the boat and then there was the voyage across the sea and the spray of cold seawater as he stood on the deck and looked out. Then there was a moon and the cliffs of Dover, chalk-white, shone in its light, not ghostly, but like the face of a mute corpse, turning its face away, in death, from the ferry approaching across the black waters of the channel. The ferry docked and snatches of music came across from the land and were snatched by turn in the wind, a jazz orchestra band coming through on BBC radio. It was a cold, clean night.