I stand by her side, start to hum a tune, the same style, the same beat. We do not look at each other until she finishes her baguette and says, “I hope I didn’t just ditch a very beautiful body for nothing.”

“You didn’t.”

“You have a plan?”

“Where’s your ticket to?”

“I don’t have a ticket. I saw her on the train and suddenly realised that I hadn’t finished my dinner.”

“You’re married,” I said.

Janus shrugged. “I’ve got two condoms in my bag and a spare pair of black lace pants. I think I’m having an affair.”

“If you say so. Either way, you don’t have a ticket, and unless you know the pin number to your host’s credit card…?”

Janus sighed, brushing crumbs off the white collar of her fluffy coat. “What do you suggest?”

“A train out of here.”

“They can’t have followed us. I changed dozens of times.”

“Yet the fact remains that they found you,” I replied, eyes still moving everywhere except over her. “They found me.”

“Fine,” she grunted. “Pick a train. I’ll find someone boring to wear on it.”

We caught the Montpellier TGV.

I caught a man whose wallet proclaimed him to be Sebastian Puis, owner of three credit cards, one library card, one gym membership, four supermarket loyalty cards and a voucher for a free haircut at a salon in Nice.

Janus rode Marillion Buclare, dark hair, deep puppy eyes and a pendant around her neck which proclaimed “Love” in Farsi. The train was not so crowded that Sebastian and Marillion could not have sat together. We did not.

Sebastian Puis owned an iPod. As the train began the long slow hum of acceleration out of the station, I flicked through its contents. I had heard almost none of the music he possessed, most of which appeared to be some sort of French rap. Twenty minutes later I laid the iPod down. Sometimes even I struggle to get into character.

Across the aisle a boy of fifteen gestured furiously at his teenage companion. Stick with me, he said, stick with me and I’ll see you all right. Them kids at school, they think they’re something, but they’re not, they’re all talk talk talk, they don’t know, I know, I’ve lived it, I’ve fucking lived it, I’ll see you’re good. Got a phone? Gimme. I’m gonna prank-call my brother again. He gets so mad. Just so mad. It’s amazing. This one time I called him fifteen times in a day, then sent him a picture of my balls. It was the best. I’m the fucking best, I’ll see you all right.

I tried to tune him out, staring out across the darkening flatlands of Northern France, and thought without words, remembered without feeling.

A stranger approaches in the street.

Says you are beautiful.

Their warmth, your skin.

There is no loneliness more lonely than to be alone in a crowd. No awkwardness more unsettling than the inside joke you do not comprehend.

We fall in love too easily, ghosts such as I.

Chapter 65

In my younger days I associated south with warmth. From the north to the south there was, I imagined, a softening of the winters, a brightening of the summers. To grasp that a place could be both south and blisteringly cold took more bitter experience in more blue-lipped bodies than I care to recount. I would come to the coast of the Mediterranean unprepared for the slicing rains and frost-stained ground, abandoning the high-cheeked, slim creature I wore in favour of meatier locals with flubber around their bellies in the hope that a change of circulatory system might dull the distress of climate.

Sebastian Puis was not warm. Scrambling off the TGV in Montpellier station–as average a mainline building as any in France–I was immediately struck by how cold my fingertips became in the biting wind and how thin my coat felt against the pouring rain. I huddled by the tabac with its paraphernalia of cigarettes, chocolate and packs of heretic-themed playing cards, and waited for Marillion Buclare. Marillion Buclare did not come, but rather a woman in a fur stole of russet fox, the nose hanging forlornly down by her shoulder, approached me with a cry of “Is that still you?”

Her chins were many and layered, painted the same brilliant white as her face. Her jowls hung beneath the line of her jaw; her hair was an ozone catastrophe; her fingers were blood red, her lips purple, and as she swept upon me I had a sensation of being a rowing boat before the prow of an oncoming battleship. “Good God,” she blurted. “You look terrible.”

Janus, resplendent in…

“I feel like a Greta–do I look like a Greta to you?”

… in a woman whose name was almost certainly not Greta, flicked through a handbag hanging by a gold chain and with a cry of “Can I pick them, or can I pick them?” waved a fat wad of euros around for all to see.

I smiled the long-suffering smile of the embarrassed son meeting his extravagant mother, took Janus gently by the arm and angled her away from the gaze of the station. “Marillion?”

“Let her go in the lady’s loo. She has a bit of a rash, poor thing. Don’t look at me like that,” she added, slapping me on the arm. “I hopped half a dozen times before picking up marvellous Greta. What do you think?”

“I don’t think she’s your type.”

“I think I’m hers,” she retorted. “And if I am not now, then I will be. I will become so, yes? No one can follow a ghost through a subway; not even Galileo.”

I scowled. “No more unnecessary jumping. They may not track us through rush hour but what will they do when the hospital report comes in for Marillion? That will give them a city, a place to start looking.”

“Why, my dear precious thing,” she breathed, “I do believe you’re frightened.”

“If you had been shot as many times as I have in the last few days, you too would hear the beating of the drum.”

“Then we should have gone to the airport, flown to a place with no name, a hillside of tumbling shacks and shanties where the hospitals won’t ask and the records won’t tell.”

“Perhaps,” I replied. “But there’s more here than just them and us.”

“There’s never more.”

“Galileo is inside Aquarius.”

“What makes you sure?”

“Why else would his file be a lie?”

“That’s conjecture, not proof. Even if it were true, I don’t see why you need me.”

“Our kind never work together. We are competitors in a world of beautiful bodies and excessive tastes. In Miami we behaved exactly as ghosts would–we jumped and we ran, and we were gunned down for our mistakes. Just now we did precisely what you’d expect–we ran into rush hour, ditched our bodies for something rich and easy. Ghosts don’t cooperate. Let’s cooperate. No more unnecessary jumps.”

Janus turned away, preening at her reflection in a window. “Such a shame. I could have changed into someone less fashionable.”

We caught a taxi from the station.

The driver understood that his role was to be grizzled, gruff and terse. Strangers visiting his city for the first time might mistake all of the above for a symptom of deep wisdom as long as they didn’t perceive it for the antipathy it clearly was. Beyond my own sallow reflection in the window, I watched a city which had moved too fast to ever truly understand what it wanted to be. Beneath the overhanging remains of a Roman aqueduct, car parks and silver-grey bollards lined the boulevards and little winding streets. Between the coffee shop and the supermarket selling wine in six-euro cartons with a tap on the end, the green flashing light of a pharmacy, two snakes coiled around a staff. Swaying cedars pushed against dark-needled pines; hedges of thorns hid the new apartments which crawled up the hills towards the northern edge of town.