Ghostheart (10 page)

‘David?’ she asked, almost as if questioning his identity.

‘One and the same,’ he said, ‘and you’re late.’

She glanced at her watch. Her father’s watch. It was seven minutes past nine.

‘Seven minutes,’ she said as she reached the door and started to unlock it. She felt a momentary irritation.

‘I wasn’t complaining,’ David Quinn said.

Annie opened up and walked into the store. She removed her coat and let it fall in a sad, wet puddle behind the door. David followed her inside but didn’t take off his drenched overcoat.

‘Take your coat off,’ she said.

‘You’re not going to ask me why I’m here?’

Annie stood for a moment, looked down at the floor. She didn’t like games. People played games because they had nothing better to do; either that or they were a little crazy. She wondered which kind David Quinn was.

‘Why are you here David?’ she asked.

‘Because I’m a little crazy,’ he said, and then he laughed – a sort of nervous sound that said something about his vulnerability in that moment.

Annie smiled to herself. At least he wasn’t here because he had nothing better to do. She looked at him and frowned, and in that second her irritation dissipated. He looked a little sad, a little lonely perhaps, and she felt a kind of empathy for him.

‘A
little
crazy?’ she said.

‘Well, maybe a lot crazy,’ David replied.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Annie said. ‘You read all the books you bought and you want some more?’

David shook his head. ‘I wanted to talk,’ he replied.

‘To talk? About what?’

He shrugged. ‘Anything … everything … nothing perhaps.’

Annie started towards the kitchen at the back, where she kept a towel for days like this. ‘Now you do sound a lot crazy,’ she said. She turned as she reached the end of the floor. He was still standing there by the front door, his eyes at once looking at her, and then in the next second surveying the shelves and stacks surrounding him. Did she feel threatened? Was that what she was experiencing? She could not tell, for moments such as these were no common occurrence.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

He shrugged again, and then he raised his hand and started massaging the back of his neck. ‘I think I’m lost,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I came here … maybe –’ He looked directly at her. ‘Maybe it would be best if I went.’

He turned and reached for the doorhandle.

Annie took a couple of steps forward and raised her hand. ‘Don’t –’ she started.

David stopped. He didn’t turn to face her.

‘Don’t go,’ she said, her voice softening. ‘Tell me what you mean.’

‘What I mean?’

‘You said you were lost … what do you mean, lost?’

David looked down. His hair was still stuck to his forehead. He looked like a child who’d suffered a football game in the rain and just wanted to go home.

‘Moving here … everything changes, you know?’ He turned and looked at Annie. He raised his hand once again and massaged his neck. ‘I was settled … at least I thought I was settled, and then I decided to change everything … don’t know why I decided that –’

David smiled, and then the nervous laugh once more – a short, dry sound.

‘S’pose I was looking for something … or running away from something?’ he said, and the question was directed at no-one but himself.

‘So you have no-one to talk to?’ Annie asked, and again she took another step or two forward. She felt emboldened, as if here she was in her own territory and someone had come seeking help.

‘Sounds pathetic, right?’

Annie shook her head. ‘Not at all. Life is people. Starts and ends and there’s nothing but people in between. You don’t do this stuff alone.’

‘You seem to manage,’ he said.

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ Annie said, but there was nothing defensive in her tone. ‘I could be out living the life and partying ’till three every morning.’

‘You could,’ David said, ‘but somehow I don’t think so.’

She smiled. ‘You want some coffee?’

‘Could kill for coffee,’ he said.

‘Then washing cups wouldn’t be too much to ask?’

He smiled. It was a warm smile, a human smile, and there was something altogether
right
about the moment.

‘Come,’ she said, and turned towards the kitchen at the back.

David Quinn nodded, followed her, removing his coat as he walked.

For the best part of two hours they talked. There were no customers, and only when Annie went out to fetch sandwiches from the deli across the block did she realize that the store sign had not been turned. Another first. A very first.

They talked of his life, how his family had once been scattered like buckshot across New York, into Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, but then soon after his tenth birthday he had been orphaned. A house fire. Fast, brutal. He had lost his parents and a younger brother. There were two
older brothers, one he hadn’t seen since 1992, another since 1989. He’d lost his mother and father simultaneously. Left for school, spent a handful of hours learning the names of the presidents and the chemical formulas for water and salt, and then returned home to find his life had changed irrevocably. After that, what was left of the family had drifted apart, gone their separate ways, as if to meet again would merely serve to open wounds that they knew could never heal. He had lived with an aunt until he reached his teens and then he’d walked away. Walked away from the past and never looked back. He spoke without anger, without any apparent emotion at all, and Annie could tell how deeply such a thing must have been buried for him to speak of it so bluntly. Her heart went out to him. There was something that connected them in some small way, and for this – despite its brutality – she was grateful. And Annie told him of her life, a small life though it seemed; the death of her parents, the ever-decreasing concentric circle of her existence.

‘What did you want?’ he asked her.

‘What did I want?’

‘As a kid, growing up you know? What did you dream about?’

She laughed briefly. ‘You mean like running away to the circus or something?’

‘Whatever,’ David said.

She was quiet for some time, pensive, casting her mind backward through events and people, names and faces and places, in some moments the edges blending together, seamless and without divide.

‘I wanted to write,’ she said eventually. ‘I seem to remember wanting to write … the great American novel or something.’

She looked up from her thoughts, and found David watching her. He wasn’t looking at her, he was
watching
her. She felt momentarily unnerved, a little disturbed perhaps. There was an intensity, a
passion
in his eyes, that she found disconcerting.

‘What?’ she asked, suddenly self-conscious.

He shook his head and smiled. ‘Nothing.’

‘
What
?’ she repeated.

He seemed awkward, off-balance. ‘It’s … it’s just that –’

‘Just
what
?’

‘You really are quite extraordinarily beautiful Annie O’Neill.’

She was lost for words. How did you respond to such a comment? She couldn’t ever remember anyone saying such a thing. She waved her hand in a nonchalant and dismissive fashion.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘A little Madeline Stowe, a little Winona Ryder –’

‘Enough,’ Annie said, her voice sharp, unforgiving. She didn’t wish to be complimented, for such things seemed unnecessary and inappropriate.

‘I’m sorry if I –’

Annie cut him off with another wave of the hand. ‘Forget about it,’ she said, and though she knew she would not, and neither would he, there was something that was now
out there
. He had crossed the line, turned what could have been an honest and meaningful friendship into something that implied sex and carnality and physical desire. Why did men always have to do that? Why couldn’t they just let something be what it was without introducing something awkward and ungainly into the proceedings? Hormones? Necessity?

Annie turned towards the window. She wished he was outside, she wished it was the first moment she’d met him. She wished whatever she’d said or done to make him feel she was approachable could be turned back and folded within itself, packed away neatly with all the other could-have-beens and might-have-dones that seemed to populate her life with such familiarity.

‘I’ve upset you,’ he said, ‘made you feel awkward … I’m sorry.’

She shook her head, and then she thought better of it. So easy to dismiss it all, to cast it aside. Who was it who’d said that
all the problems you didn’t face were finally the ones that buried you?

‘Why?’ she asked, aware of the tone of her voice, the emotion she was feeling. It was a new feeling, something closer to anger than irritation. ‘Why d’you have to say something like that? Here we were, getting along fine, just talking … whatever –’

‘I didn’t mean –’

‘Didn’t mean what? Didn’t mean to make me feel embarrassed? Well David Quinn, you did make me feel embarrassed … as simple as that. How come men have to throw things into the arena that really have no place there?’

He frowned, seemed dismayed. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What are you so afraid of?’

Now she
was
angry. How dare he! ‘Afraid? You have the nerve to ask me what I’m afraid of?’ she snapped.

‘I just said you were beautiful … did no-one ever tell you how beautiful you were before?’

She looked at him, looked right at him, and in that moment there was such honesty, such a genuine question in his eyes, that her anger seemed to collapse within itself and disappear. It left as quickly and unexpectedly as it had come. She shook her head. ‘I don’t think anyone …’ She paused, her words lost in some indefinable territory around her heart.

David reached out and touched her hand.

She instinctively withdrew.

He left his hand right where it was, palm upwards now until, with some trepidation, she lowered her hand once more and rested it on his. His fingers enclosed hers; she felt the warmth of his skin.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you or made you feel awkward or embarrassed …’

‘It’s okay,’ she heard herself say, her voice sounding as if it came not from her but from some other place in the room. It was almost as if she were watching herself. The angles and corners she’d felt were softening, merging a little, and she
believed that if she’d been able to step outside herself she would have looked back and seen someone vague and blurred at the edges.

‘We go backwards,’ he said. ‘Rewind half an hour or so and start again, okay?’

She nodded in the affirmative, but knew that what had been said was still
out there
. He’d said she was beautiful, sounded as if he’d meant it, and there was something about such a thing that would never, ever be forgotten. How could such a thing ever lose its sense of moment?

‘We were talking about your family,’ he said, ‘and then we were talking about the great American novel you were going to write.’

She smiled as the memory returned.

‘How old were you?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘Twelve, thirteen, I don’t remember exactly.’

‘And why did you want to write?’

‘I think I wanted to make people feel things … make people feel emotions that were new, have thoughts they hadn’t had before, something like that.’

He nodded, understanding reflected in his eyes. ‘What’s the most important book you’ve ever read?’

She smiled. ‘The most important book I’ve ever read? How is it possible to answer a question like that?’ she said, and then it came to her, came to her so easily, and she started to smile wider, her face relaxing, her tension easing so comfortably.

‘Which one?’ he prompted.

‘A book called
Breathing Space
,’ she said. ‘My father left it for me … one of the few things he left for me.’ She touched the face of the watch on her wrist, and in that moment she recalled an image of her father, vague and indistinct, standing there in the hallway of their house. It had been raining then also. She could remember the sound of the water hitting the deck beyond the kitchen, and there was a smell in the air like cinnamon, and something else unidentifiable. He was leaving, always leaving it seemed. She couldn’t have been more than
five years old, perhaps six, and had she known then that he would be alive for no more than a year or two she would have rushed towards him, thrown her arms around him, told him she loved him, that she didn’t want him to leave again. She tried to concentrate on the image, tried to focus, but there was nothing more than a feeling.

There was a tightness in her chest, her throat felt constricted, and when she blinked there was moisture around her eyes.

David squeezed her hand, and only then did she become aware that he had never let go. A lifeline. Tenuous, fragile, but nevertheless a lifeline. To what she didn’t know, and in that moment it didn’t matter. She was not alone. That was the main thing, and she appreciated it.

‘You okay?’ he asked, his voice sympathetic, gentle.

‘Fine,’ she said, but there was a reserve in her tone that said she wasn’t so fine at all.

‘What did he do?’ David asked.

‘Do?’

‘Your father … what did he do?’

Annie didn’t speak for some time. She tried to recall something, anything. She tried to picture him leaving with a bag, a holdall perhaps, some kind of uniform? She could remember nothing at all.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t know what he did.’ Her voice conveyed her uncertainty and confusion. She found it hard to believe that this thought had never really crossed her mind before.

‘And your mother never told you?’ David inquired.

Annie shook her head.

‘You never asked?’

Annie was still for a while. ‘I must have done,’ she said quietly. ‘I must have asked her … and she must have told me.’

There was a silence between them, as if here in this moment some deep secret had been unearthed, something that even as she considered it brought a sense of potential alarm. How
could she arrive at thirty years of age and not have the faintest clue as to her own father’s profession?