I watched. His breathing, the sharp in-out of a body suddenly shocked and confused, slowed. His nostrils flared, and I counted the two, three long breaths he took, and by the time they were done, so was he, body tense, head high, respiration back under control.
I said, “Hello.”
He pressed his lips together and stared up at me, and it seemed to me that he saw
not me, not I that-is-she-who-lives-at-the-hotel, but me
I, myself
and I felt my breath catch in my throat.
He looked without speaking from his crouch on the floor, right arm half-pulled back behind him as he strained against the handcuffs. I hovered outside his arms’ reach and said, “You’re going to eat poison.”
Silence from the floor.
“Two questions are keeping you alive. First: who do you work with, and will they keep coming? I’m assuming that they will. People like you always do. Second: why did you kill Josephine Cebula?”
He stared up at me like a wounded cat and said nothing.
My body had been on its feet too long, the taste of cigarette smoke in its mouth, the weight of a day pulling my spine out and down. My bra was uncomfortable, done up too tightly at the back, and the piercing in my left ear was fresh, throbbing from a gently escalating infection.
“You’re going to eat poison,” I repeated to no one in particular. “All I want are answers.”
Silence from the floor.
“This relationship is going to be difficult for us both,” I said, then, “Left pocket.”
A flicker of his eyebrows. His free hand turned instinctively towards his left pocket, then hesitated, and before he could consider further, I reached down and grabbed his fingers.
Switched.
The girl with the optimistically tight bra staggered. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the keys stashed therein, unlocked the cuffs and, as she reeled forward, I rose, caught her under the arms said, “You OK, miss? You came over dizzy.”
Incredible, the willingness of the human mind to believe in that which doesn’t scare it.
“Perhaps you need to sit down.”
Chapter 10
My first switch.
I was thirty-three years old.
He was probably only in his twenties, but his body felt a lot older. His skin flaked in little white clouds as he scratched, a great rasping of dry flesh beneath cracked yellow nails. His hair was turning smudged grey, his beard grew in erratic patches from a once-scarred chin, and when he beat me to death, he only did it for the money to fill his belly, and his belly was so empty
my belly was so empty
as I discovered, when I switched.
I didn’t want to touch him, since he had just killed me. But I didn’t want to die alone so, as my vision flooded like wine in a cup, I reached out and grabbed his shoulder as he pulled my purse from round my waist, and in that moment I became him, just in time to see myself die.
Chapter 11
Awake at 3 a.m. in a hotel room.
The light still on.
Nothing on TV.
This body needs sleep.
I need sleep.
Sleep does not come.
A mind that will not stop, thoughts that will not cease.
At 9.40 a.m. a woman called Josephine Cebula left a hotel room in Istanbul, heading to the waterfront. Three days ago she’d met two new friends, who’d said please join us, we’ll teach you how to fish off the Galata bridge.
I’m too beautiful to fish, the mind that wore the body of Josephine Cebula had thought. Are you sure you don’t want me to change into someone more appropriate?
Fishing would be delightful, my fresh red lips proclaimed. I’ve always meant to learn how to fish.
By midday I’d seen someone in the corner of my eye, and by 12.20 p.m. I was running, grateful that my shoes had flat soles, for the crowds of Taksim, for the easy way out, my bare fingers flicking from skin to skin as I searched for a suitable exit route, and then, as I stumbled against the body of a woman with swollen ankles and the taste of coconut in her mouth, the gunman at my back had fired, and I had felt the shot tear through my leg, felt flesh burst outwards and arteries snap, seen my own blood sprinkled on the concrete in front of me, and as I closed my eyes against the pain and opened my mouth to scream, my fingers had tangled against those of a stranger, and I had run and left Josephine Cebula to die.
And then
inexplicably
he’d killed Josephine.
She was fallen and I was gone, but he put two bullets in her chest and she died, even though he was coming for me.
Why would anyone do that?
In a hotel room, 3 a.m., and my left leg ached, though there was no sign of scarring or apparent cause for pain.
A Manila folder from Nathan Coyle’s lethal travelling bag.
I’d glimpsed it when I stole his car, and now, as the night crawled towards dawn, I spread its contents across the bed and looked again, and saw the faces of my life stretched out before me. A single name was written across the front of the file: Kepler.
It seemed as good a name as any.
Chapter 12
I checked out of the Edirne hotel at 7 a.m. Breakfast was from a bakery around the corner, which served hot croissants, cherry jam and the best coffee I’d had in this body so far. With my bags on my back and hat pulled down low, I went looking for the first bus to Kapikule, and out of this country. In a murderer’s body I couldn’t think of any good reason to linger.
How unusual it felt for me to be the innocent in any crime but my flesh to be the hunted.
The thought made me smile all the way to the ticket booth.
There were eleven people on the short bus ride to Kapikule, which seemed apt, as the bus was no more than a converted minivan with a paper sign in the front which read, KAPIKULE. LEV OR LIRA ACCEPTED, NO CHANGE GIVEN.
An ageing man and his aged mother were sitting in the twin seats behind me, bickering.
She said, “I don’t want to.”
He said, “Mother…”
She said, “I don’t want to and that’s that.”
He said, “Well, you’ve got to, Mother, you’ve got to, and we’ve had this conversation and this is your future as well as mine so we’re going and you’ve got to and that’s it.”
She said, her voice rising almost to the point of tears, “But I don’t want to!”
Their conversation continued in this vein all the way to the station, and doubtless beyond.
Kapikule was a non-place on the edge of not-anywhere-really. Not so long ago I would have avoided it and picked up the train I wanted directly from Edirne’s central station. But these were difficult times, lines suspended for lack of pay, terminals withering as the flow of people dried up with the work.
The station was a two-storey building of no discernible merit whatsoever, lit in fluorescent white. In another country it might have been a grim commercial development filled with little shops doomed to fail, or a well-intentioned residential undertaking whose purpose had been corrupted by dubious landowners looking to sell on to MegaMart International. As it was, it was neither of these things.
The ticket clerk sat with his chin resting on the palm of his hand as I approached. His cap was pulled down over his eyes, but when he looked up at the arrival of money on the steel counter before him I was excited to see that here was the last man left in the world who thought that a Hitler-Chaplin moustache was the pinnacle of stylish facial hair.