‘That’s all I do, I just wish …’ She swallowed. ‘I just wish I’d been born dead. I wish we both had.’
I started to say something but saw the self-reproach already working its way through her. I changed the subject. ‘Who was the dead man at the identification? I’ve spoken to Ross Browne and he backed up what you were saying. The two of you dated, then broke up when he left town. So you had to have dedicated a different copy of The Rubáiyát to someone else. The way you reacted, it had to be someone you thought you’d never see again.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ She was scratching at her scarred wrist now. ‘What have I ever done to you?’
‘We’re way past that. At least two more people have died because of what they did or didn’t know about this case.’
She put her hands over her eyes like a child hiding.
‘And I’m not adding you or your boy’s name to that list. If the only place I think you’re safe is in a cell, then that’s where you’re going. The dead man from the Palace Hotel,’ I said. ‘He’s the boy’s father, isn’t he?’ She heard me but she was still processing the fact of additional deaths. She stared at the hospital lime wall. She’d aged a decade since I walked through the door. After a minute or so, she started to speak, telling me what she’d run from and where it took her, finally arriving at her meeting with the unidentified man from the Palace Hotel. Her accent, which had always felt rigid, held in place by sheer will, started to slip, until it was recognizable as something from the southern hemisphere. Australia or New Zealand, I thought.
4
‘By the time I got to Marseille I’d run out of money, and I was pretty low on everything else. If I think of it now I start itching all over, like all the lice and dirt and shit from that time in my life got inside me and kept on burrowing. I’d been sleeping in the same clothes for so long they were practically alive themselves, probably more than the rest of me by then. I’d had my birthday on board the trawler, in a sleeping bag with Seb, grinding my teeth and coming back down from whatever it was, just sweating it out and feeling awful, feeling like it’d never end.’
She looked at me.
‘It never did, really. Life’s one big fucking come-down. I didn’t dare look in a mirror until we’d docked in the old port, gone into this tavern that was right on the water. I remember I burst out crying because my jaw was so swollen up, like, to twice its usual size. Seb and the rest were supposed to be getting us a lift into town but when I came out of the toilet they were all gone. I think they left me the sleeping bag.
‘I couldn’t speak a word of French so I started walking, further inland, towards the buildings. The men had told me all I needed to know was the name of the place where we were staying. They’d made me memorize it and say it back to them so many times. So I started saying that to people on the street. Sans Abri, Sans Abri. They’re probably still laughing about it now. I think I was laughing too by the time I got directed to the homeless shelter. You sort of start to see life for what it is from that angle.
‘They gave me a shower there, and some clothes, and something to eat. They gave me somewhere to be. I was there a few weeks, but it wasn’t hard. It was a relief to stop running, to be clean. I was the sanest person I met, which was really saying something. It was mainly all these wild-eyed boys with track-marks on their arms, plus a few dilapidated old Romeos who’d hunch up on their crutches to hold the doors open for girls. There were older women there as well, but I steered clear. They carried round photos and bits of old wedding dresses like artefacts, to prove their sob stories true. And that was it. The boys had to be tough, the men had to be gents and the women had to be tragic. I was a girl, but I was the only one, so I was sort of my own thing, somewhere in between all the rest of them. I suppose all that made me stick out.
‘There was only one guy who didn’t fit in with the rest. He wasn’t there all the time, and he never stayed either. He sort of held himself apart from the rest of us. He had this kind of natural gravity, this kind of power over the others. I never saw him laugh or relax. He watched people and then attached himself to them. He’d sit next to someone and start talking. This soft murmur, not even looking at them. Then they’d leave together or both disappear for a while. The man wouldn’t come back but when whoever he’d been speaking to did, it was like they’d borrowed his status, like they’d been chosen or something. Whenever I tried to talk to him he looked uncomfortable or embarrassed, he sort of winced himself out of the room, and I assumed he didn’t speak English, or didn’t like girls. I had all kinds of ideas about him, like, he was a secret millionaire or a drug dealer or a writer. He seemed above it all. Like he’d been out to the edge of life and now nothing could really surprise him.
‘I was maybe even a little bit sad when he did talk to me, a few weeks after I’d arrived. Those mysteries mean a lot to you when you’re lonely like that. He explained that he was a businessman but his trade wasn’t for everyone. If it wasn’t for me I should get up and go. His English was so good, better than the people I’d grown up with, better than mine. He was interested in buying personal documents. He said it was illegal, there were risks involved, but they mainly sat with him. I sold him my passport for 500 euros. When I looked at my real name for the last time I felt like it was me who was ripping him off.
‘I had the money in my pocket for five minutes flat. We’d left the shelter to make our agreement and, of course, he wouldn’t be going back there that day. So I turned on to the square feeling good, feeling rich for the first time since I ran away. There was a man sitting on the doorstep with his head in his hands. As I got closer I realized he was holding his nose. It was broken and bleeding, and he was crying. It was Seb, the guy I’d come over with. And I knew they’d caught up with me again. I turned around and walked right into Tedge, my big brother. He …’
She took a breath and swallowed.
‘… He asked me how I was, said our old dad had been worried sick. Then he punched me in the stomach. He went through my pockets, found the money and took it. Said he could guess how I’d earned all that. Then right in front of me he slotted it down a drain like it was nothing. He asked where my passport was, he’d need it to get me home, and I told him it was back inside the shelter. In my locker.’
She smiled. The shake had moved from her hands, to her face, to her voice.
‘I’d been keeping a case in there for when they found me. A plastic bag and a reel of duct tape that I could wrap around my head. Good, thick razor blades for my wrists and ankles.