I didn’t answer. He pulled himself up higher, resting on his elbows, studying me. “When did you last sleep?”

“Sleep? This body sleeps during the day, I think.”

“Not the body. You. When did you last sleep?”

“I… Not for a while.”

“You should sleep.”

“Will you…” The words stopped dead on my lips. I licked them again, cheap make-up beneath my tongue. “Will you be there when I wake?”

“Where else would I be?”

I sleep.

Attempt to sleep.

Coyle turns the lights down, the TV off, lies on his back on the top of the bed beside me.

I try to remember: when was the last time someone watched me, without my watching them?

I want to curl up against him.

If I were a child

or someone with a slighter frame

auburn-haired, perhaps, with delicate wrists

I’d curl up against his side and he’d hold me.

If I was somebody else.

I sleep with my clothes on, ready to run, ready to jump.

Listen to his breathing, as he is listening to mine.

A truck grumbling outside the window, a long way down.

Police siren distant in the night.

Rise and fall of another’s chest.

There are words on the tip of my tongue.

I roll over, and he’s awake by my side, eyes open, watching me.

I know at once that he doesn’t find my body attractive, and indeed, in conventional terms, it isn’t glamorous.

Nor am I at home in it.

I do not yet know how to be beautiful in this body.

I reach out instinctively for his hand, and hesitate.

He doesn’t pull it away, watching me still.

My fingers are a centimetre from his.

I just want to touch.

Not jump, just touch.

Just feel another’s pulse beneath my own.

He’s waiting.

I’ve seen the look on his face before, but cannot now remember if it was his face that wore it, or mine.

I roll over, turning my back.

And I must sleep, for it is daytime, and the man whose name is not Nathan Coyle is still there.

Chapter 85

My name is…

Irena.

No. Irena was France; I don’t feel like being an Irena again.

Marta. Marilyn. Greta. Sandra. Salome. Amelia. Lydia. Susie.

My handbag doesn’t contain any evidence either way. This body has no name that isn’t a descriptor. Whatever the story behind the pasty face that regards me from the mirror, the pills cut in half in my bag, I can’t see it. I try to guess, but nothing convincing comes to mind and I seem unable to hold on to the basic tenets of even the simplest stories. Perhaps I ran away…

was taken from my home…

a father that beat…

a father who loved.

Perhaps, in this face, I see a woman wrongly convicted of stealing another woman’s child, sent to prison, from which I emerged too scathed to live. Perhaps one time I tried drugs, and it went wrong, or I didn’t try drugs but had within my heart no conviction of my own worth, and having so little faith in myself only served to prove, again and again, how accurate my self-assessment was.

Perhaps I have a daughter, crying alone at home for her mother.

Perhaps I have a husband, sitting in his underpants watching the hockey, a can of beer in one hand, a cap pulled down low over his puffy black eyes.

Perhaps I have none of these things at all, and my life is only the half-sliced pills and the next job to pay for the same.

Then Coyle is behind me, standing in the bathroom door, and he says, “Ready?”

“Nearly. There’s somewhere I want to go first.”

Nathan Coyle was not a man built for the women’s department of any Sixth Avenue store. He sat on a small padded bench outside the changing cubicles, legs crossed and arms folded, and perhaps tried to imagine himself a doting husband waiting on his wife’s selections. Skin flaking beneath my underwear, I tried on smart shirts, smart shoes, smart trousers, smart jewels, until at last, satisfied that I now looked like at worst a tired newsreader, I stepped out before him, twirled and said, “What do you think?”

He looked me over top to bottom. “You look… like someone else.”

“It’s all in the cut. Which do you prefer?” I held out my hand, in which two bracelets, one of silver, one of gold, lay for his inspection.

“If I were buying? Silver.”

“I thought so too. But then the gold may fetch a few more dollars at the pawnbroker.”

Revelation dawned, and he now took in the silk and linen, expensive shoes and designer bag. “You’re giving her wealth in clothes?”

“I might also slip cash into her handbag.”

“You think that’ll make a difference?”

“You have a better idea?”

“No,” he conceded, “I don’t. Money… seems a crude compensation for the price you take.”

“She sleeps a dreamless sleep and, a few hours later, she wakes and is some other place, dressed some other way. I may not know much about my host, but I think I can guess that of the events in her life, this will not count as the worst.”

“When first we met, I slept and woke, and the journey was from one bad place to somewhere worse.”

“That was when I didn’t love you,” I replied, checking my reflection in the mirror. “Times change.”

“You love yourself. Not your host.”

I shrugged. “In relationships as intimate as mine I challenge you to find the difference.” I turned back, happy with my ensemble; wealth not beauty adorned my back. “There. Do you like what you see?”

We rode the Subway. Too many people to find a seat, but as I bumped, shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm with the strangers on the train, I felt no urge to jump. My hands, buried in their new coat pockets, felt warm, fingers gently curled, tendons relaxed into their natural position. A beautiful man with long black hair and skin like melted chocolate smiled at me, and I smiled back and thought how nice it would be to experience the touch of his lips from the outside, a stranger kissing a stranger rather than myself. A child with a violin on its back stared up at me, studying my rich clothes, my expensive jewels. A pickpocket eyed my handbag and it occurred to me that the only reason I’d be him and stick his head through the nearest pane of glass was to protect my host. I looked him in the eye and smiled, and let him know in my smile that he was known to me. He fled at the next stop, searching for easier pickings, and I patted my bag of money and pills, felt the stretch of the leather in my new shoes, on my new feet, and it was good.

Then we were at 86th Street, the tide marks of Hurricane Sandy still visible on its walls where the water had risen over white tiles and red mosaic. The flow of well-jacketed, camera-slung strangers heading towards Fifth Avenue was thick enough to follow through the one-way streets towards Central Park. At Madison Avenue a small truck was attempting a delivery, causing a tailback of traffic which honked and roared its fury all the way down to East 72nd Street. Two blue-coated cops stood by, drinking their coffees beside a kiosk, ready to spring into action just as soon as the caffeine had hit.

Coyle walked a little ahead; I followed behind at an easy lollop, feeling warmer and more awake than I had felt for too many skins.

Then Coyle said, “Here.”

I looked at what here was and laughed.

“Something funny?”

“Sure. You don’t get the joke?”

“Humour was never my strong point. Come on.”

I followed him up the steps, into the museum.

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Museum is too small a word. Museums are places you visit for a few hours–half a day at the most. A museum is somewhere to go on a Sunday afternoon when the weather is not so warm that you want to be in the park. A museum is a place to take that distant relative who you don’t really know but promised a tour round the city. A museum is a repository of stories you were half-told as a child and then forgot when more pressing matters of sex and money overwhelmed your preoccupations.