Ghostheart (15 page)

‘But you’re okay?’ he asked again.

‘I am –’ she started, and then without the thought forming in her mind, almost as if her lips were taking involuntary control of her words, she added, ‘and better now you’re here.’

He was dressed the same; the same as last time, and the time before that. There was a comfortable familiarity in the way he looked, his expression as he came towards her, and when he leaned against the counter and smiled she wanted to reach out and touch him, as if to verify his presence, to ensure he was real.

‘Take another day,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s go buy stuff, go waste some money. I’ve been wearing the same clothes since the end of last week, and the truth is I haven’t even bothered to unpack most of my stuff.’

‘So let’s go unpack it,’ she said. ‘I can help you get settled.’

‘In my apartment?’ he asked, a little surprised.

‘No, in the 7–11 David … where the hell d’you think I mean?’

‘You want to come and help me unpack my stuff?’

She nodded. ‘I want to help … I want to do something other than sit in here all day waiting for someone to come buy a book.’

David was nodding slowly, his thoughts running faster than he could catch them, and then he looked up, looked directly at Annie, and said: ‘Okay, let’s go do that … why the hell not?’

She turned the sign, locked up, and from the corner of West 107th they took a cab to the other end of Morningside Park. He led the way, down the street and in through the elevated entrance of a tall sandstone building. Up two flights, down the hall, turning right at the end and reaching a single doorway at the end of the corridor.

‘Home,’ he said, and produced keys. He unlocked the door, stepped inside and waited for her to follow.

Annie went in slowly – wide-eyed she suspected – and though there was anticipation and excitement contained in the moment, there was also her in-built caution, that walking-on-eggshells sensation that invaded the edges of her consciousness. What was she doing here? She barely knew this man. Nice guy or serial killer? Charming or deadly? She took another step forward and watched as the door seemed to close behind her in slow-motion. The latch hit the striker plate; it snapped home suddenly, and inside she jumped. What in God’s name was she doing?

‘Take your coat off,’ he said. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’

She stood in a vast and apparently empty room. A single chair was positioned beside the ceiling-high windows that ran from one end of the floor to the other. This would have been heaven for a painter, the light flooding in through the glass and bathing the entire space with an ambient yellow glow. To the right against the far wall were stacked a half-dozen
cardboard boxes, ahead of them a long rolled-up rug, beside it a wooden chest and a small suitcase with the travel tags still attached to the handle.

The room smelled a little musty, unlived-in, and crossing towards the window she stopped by the chair and looked down. The books he’d bought from the store were still in the same polythene bag she’d given him, and leaning down to take a closer look she noticed the till receipt was still inside. He had brought them back, set them down, and more than likely they had remained in exactly the same place.

‘Not that much of a reader.’

She turned suddenly, a little startled by the sound of David’s voice. Again a quiet sense of anxiety invaded her.

‘I want to read, I plan to read, but somehow I don’t get it together.’ He was walking towards her holding two cups, and when he reached her he set them down on the floor and held out his hand.

‘Your coat?’ he said.

She nodded, smiled a little awkwardly, and took it off. She handed it to him, and crossing the room he set it on top of the boxes behind the rug. He picked up a folding chair from beside the boxes, crossed back towards her and set it down.

‘Sit,’ he said, and she did, and for a moment felt a degree of tension inside her that was new. All of this was new. She was here with a man, a man she barely knew, and there was something so
close
about him that it unnerved her.

‘This stuff,’ he said, indicating the boxes against the wall, ‘has been here since I moved.’ He looked to the right, a door in the wall. ‘Through there is the bedroom, the door over there is the bathroom, and the kitchen’s through there.’ He nodded back towards the way he’d walked with the cups. ‘I unpacked some sheets, a quilt, my alarm clock, a few items of clothing, and that was where it ended … the relationship I have with my possessions. I think it has to do with my hotel mentality.’

Annie frowned. ‘Your what?’

He smiled. ‘My hotel mentality. Spent so much of my time in hotels I’ve forgotten how to take care of myself.’

Annie reached for her cup. She sipped. The coffee was strong but good. She savored the smell, the heat through her skin, and over the rim of the cup she watched David Quinn as he surveyed the hollowness of his home.

Perhaps, she thought, this man is as lonely as I am, but in a different way
.

‘So when will you work again?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘I wait for a call. As soon as they call I have to leave. Could be anywhere. Newfoundland, Alaska, somewhere on the Pacific Coast. Furthest I ever got was Southampton in England.’

‘You’ve been to England?’

‘For a little while,’ he said.

‘What’s it like?’

‘It’s good … the people are good, different.’ He paused, as if remembering things – images and sounds. ‘It’s a dark country, claustrophobic almost, rains a great deal. They are tough, the English, a really tough people. They aren’t faddish or insubstantial. They know what they want and they’ll do everything to get it. They have persistence, and they don’t take any crap from foreigners.’

Annie laughed. She liked this man, this David Quinn. He seemed real and unpretentious. He seemed to be the sort of man who would possess a thought and voice it. A man who liked the truth.

‘So why did you come here?’ Annie asked. ‘Why not stay in East Village?’

David shrugged. He drank his coffee. He emptied the cup and set it on the floor. From his jacket pocket he took a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and then proceeded to use the empty cup as an ashtray. ‘I think I wanted a change, but I’m too conservative to go the whole nine yards and move state. I wanted to stay around Central Park, and one day I took a cab up here and
there was something about the atmosphere of the place, something learned and academic that appealed to me. Seemed everywhere I looked there were bistros with students eating brioche and drinking cappuccinos and reading Whitman and William Carlos Williams –’

Annie looked up, struck by the sudden coincidence of what he’d said.

‘– and I just felt a strange sensation … sort of like when you’ve been away and then you come home.’

‘But you’ve never lived here before?’

David shook his head. ‘No, always and forever an East Villager.’

‘You like it here?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel like I have more substance. People look at me and I believe they think I’m a Barnard lecturer, or someone taking a season at Columbia.’

‘You ever thought of going back to school, doing something else?’

‘You know, I have,’ David said, and in his voice was an element of surprise, as if he was puzzled why someone would ask such a thing. ‘I
have
thought about it, but never followed it through. I need some English blood perhaps.’ He smiled, smoked his cigarette, and for a little while neither of them said a thing.

Later, alone, Annie would wonder why she’d broken that silence with a question. Perhaps she had been uneasy, aware of the vast emptiness around her and needed to fill it with something. She didn’t know why, perhaps would never understand her own motivation, but nevertheless she asked the question.

‘David?’

He looked up at her.

‘You ever get lonely?’

He smiled, again that warm and genuine smile that said more about him than any words. ‘Endlessly,’ he said, his voice quiet, almost a whisper.

‘And why don’t you go out, meet people … how come you don’t have a girlfriend or something?’

‘Or something?’ he asked. ‘And what kind of something would that be?’

‘You know what I mean,’ Annie said.

He nodded. ‘I know what you mean. Defence through humor, eh?’

‘So how come?’

He shrugged. ‘Fear?’

‘Fear?’ she repeated.

‘Yes, fear,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps anxiety is a better word, but that’s just a harmonic of fear anyway, isn’t it?’

‘Fear of what?’

‘Of the something you end up with being worse than the nothing you had before. Fear of rejection, of losing whatever you might find, of others’ opinions, fear of discovery –’

‘Of discovery?’

‘Someone discovering that you’re not the perfect human being they first imagined you to be … that you have bad days, that you have irksome habits and idiosyncrasies.’

‘But surely those things are all part and parcel of making a relationship, even a friendship, work?’

‘Sure they are,’ he said, ‘but they’re also the things that you’re most afraid of when you walk blind into something like that.’

‘But you have to accept the fact that whoever you’re with has the same doubts and reservations, and you have to take as well as give.’

‘Sure you do,’ he said, ‘but it’s always there at the beginning isn’t it? It’s the first days, the first hours even, when all you think about is what that person might think of you.’

‘Isn’t that a little egocentric?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so … more like hoping that someone likes you as much as you like them, and hoping as well that you’re not going to say or do something that drives
them away. We all have our monkeys to carry, and sometimes those monkeys jump without warning.’

‘I think somewhere you have lost your basic faith in human nature.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I think somewhere all of us fear the unknown, the uncertainty that comes with meeting new people, guessing what they’re like, whether they can be trusted or not.’

‘You don’t trust people?’

‘Do you?’ he asked.

‘I think I do,’ Annie said.

‘You think?’

‘Yes,’ she repeated, ‘I think I do.’

‘You trust me?’

Annie looked at David Quinn, looked at him directly. ‘I don’t know you well enough to answer that.’

‘That’s exactly my point,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about. This could be the start of a friendship, right?’

Annie nodded. ‘It could.’

‘So we have a little time here and there to get to know each other, to ask questions, to hear the answers … not only the words that are said, but what might really be meant by those words, and we make our judgements. You had to have trusted me somewhat to suggest we come here, agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ Annie said.

‘So you must trust me.’

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I trust you.’

‘How much?’

‘How much do I trust you? I don’t know … how d’you measure trust?’

David leaned back in his chair. ‘You want to do an experiment?’

‘What kind of experiment?’

‘A measure of trust experiment.’

Annie frowned.

David stood up, walked across the room and went through
the door into the bedroom. He returned a moment later, in his hand a scarf.

‘Sit back,’ he said. ‘Relax, close your eyes.’

Annie shifted uneasily in her chair.

David leaned towards her, looked right at her. ‘Trust me,’ he said.

‘You’re a doctor, right?’

He smiled. ‘Grace under pressure Annie O’Neill.’

She leaned back, closed her eyes, couldn’t imagine what she was doing, or why.

David took a step behind her, and brushing the hair back from her forehead with his hand he placed the scarf over her eyes and tied it loosely at the back.

‘What are you doing?’ Annie asked.

‘Blindfolding you,’ David Quinn said, and then Annie felt his hands on her shoulders. She tensed physically, and in her mind she was shouting at herself.
What the hell are you doing? What the hell do you think you’re playing at?

‘So this is the experiment?’ she asked, and even in her own voice she could hear a sense of trepidation and anxiety. She wanted to pull the scarf from her face, but there was something in the simplicity of how he had captured her in this game that made her want to see it through.

But what if he kills you? What if he really is a deranged sociopath? Who knows you’re here? Does anyone actually know where you are?

‘You have to sit there for one minute straight,’ David said. ‘I’ll time it, exactly a minute, and for that minute you cannot move, you cannot say a word, okay?’

‘And what will you be doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m not going to tell you.’

‘You’re not going to tell me?’

‘Right, I’m not going to tell you … you just have to trust me, okay?’

Annie was quiet for a moment.

‘Okay?’ he asked again.

She nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘So we start the minute now,’ he said. ‘Three, two, one, go.’

Annie felt the desire to move immediately, but she didn’t. She sat stock-still, every muscle in her body tight like whipcord. She tried to imagine what it was that had possessed her to suggest she come here in the first place, and what in God’s name had made her agree to this ludicrous game.

And then she thought of David. She was aware of the fact that he’d been behind her when he tied the scarf, but where was he now?

Was he still behind her or had he moved?

For a couple of seconds she held her breath in the hope that she would hear his breathing and determine his position, but there was nothing, merely the hollow vastness of the room and the awareness that she was seated by the window. Alone in a stranger’s apartment and blindfolded …

Surely a minute must have elapsed by now, she thought. What is he doing?

And where is he right now?

She turned her head to one side, tried to sense the difference in light between the window and the walls. She couldn’t see a thing. It was pitch-black.

How many seconds have gone now?
she asked herself, but there was no way she could tell. She should have started counting when he tied the blindfold.
Hell, why didn’t I think of that?