Chapter 17
The Ghost in the City
EWAN
He has been fixing things for other people for long enough to know what his own avoidance looks like. It looks like charm. It looks like wit. It looks, right now, like a man in an empty flat with a corkboard and a cold coffee and no excuse for either.
The Dockyard Lofts. My flat. The one I keep for nights when the manor is too crowded with people who need me to be fine.
I haven’t slept here in weeks. The air’s stale.
The heating’s off. The mug on the table has a skin on it.
I can’t remember when I stopped noticing.
That’s the part. That’s the bit I should probably pay attention to – the not-noticing.
Because I notice everything. That’s the job.
That’s the whole point of being Ewan Alloway: you notice the room, you read the room, you fix the room.
And here I am, failing to notice a cold cup of coffee in my own flat, which suggests I’ve been too busy performing functional to actually be it.
Right. The board.
Corkboard. Twelve quid from the High Street. I hung it three days ago and I’ve been pinning things to it at two, three in the morning – the hours that belong to Ewan and not to the Fixer, if there’s still a difference, which some nights I doubt.
Three data points. Three breadcrumbs left by a woman who changed her name but couldn’t quite change it enough.
GP registration. Catherine Holloway. Not Catriona Alloway. Close enough to be lazy. Close enough to be – what? Deliberate? A woman who wants to be found but only by someone paying attention? (The arrogance of that. The arrogance of assuming I would look. She was right. I never stopped looking.)
Credit application, denied. C. Halloway – one letter different.
Glasgow address. Six months old. Small personal loan, denied for insufficient credit history.
You don’t have credit history when you don’t exist. You don’t have credit history when you’ve spent six years being a different person every few months and each person dies before the bills arrive.
Dance programme. Two years old. C. Hallow.
Contemporary ballet. Three nights in a community arts venue in Glasgow.
Audience of forty. I found the listing in an online archive.
The venue’s website is gone. The programme remains.
The programme is the thing, because Cat could change her name and her address and her phone and her hair, but she could not – would not – stop choreographing.
You can disappear from a family. You can’t disappear from the thing your body does when nobody is watching.
Three names. Three addresses. Three moments where my sister touched the system because she could not disappear entirely and the inability was either a weakness or a gift she left for me, and at two in the morning in a cold flat the distinction doesn’t matter.
What matters: she’s alive. She was in Cairndhu.
Fourteen months ago. Three streets from Al’s bar.
She chose not to find me.
I drank the cold coffee. It tasted like exactly what it was.
The hospice. Tuesday morning.
St. Jude’s was closed. Had been closed since Isobel’s diagnosis – the ballet studio dark, the door locked, a notice in the window that said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE in handwritten capitals that were starting to yellow from the sun.
Nobody had taken the notice down. The building had the heavy stillness of a place that was waiting for someone to come back, and the waiting had gone on long enough that the building had started to accept it might be permanent.
I did not go to St. Jude’s. I went to the hospice.
The hospice was on the hill above the town – a Victorian house converted into a care facility, with wide corridors and high ceilings and the smell of cleaning products and flowers and, beneath both, the older smell that all hospices share, which is the smell of time running in a single direction.
The nurses knew me. I visited Isobel every week.
I brought books and flowers and the news from the casino and the town, and Isobel listened with the same sharp attention she had brought to every ballet class she ever taught, and when I left she would say: “Tell Morven to keep her turnout” – the instruction of a woman who was dying and had decided that the dying would not prevent her from being a teacher.
Her room was at the end of the corridor.
Sunlight through clean windows. The lavender perfume she had worn for forty years was still present – she applied it every morning, the nurses told me, with the same discipline she had applied to everything in her life.
The bed was propped up. The pillows were white.
Her eyes were open and they were sharp and they found me the moment I walked through the door.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat. The chair beside her bed was the green vinyl kind that all hospitals have, and the vinyl was cold and the room was warm and the lavender was mixed with the antiseptic and the combination was Isobel – the beauty and the rigour and the fact that both existed simultaneously.
“You’re seven years late,” she said.
I looked at her. She looked at me. The sharpness in her eyes was the sharpness of a woman who had known the question I was going to ask before I knew I was going to ask it.
“Is she safe?” I said.
Isobel looked at me for a long time. The looking was not unkind. It was the looking of a woman who had been keeping a secret for reasons that were not her own and was now assessing whether the person in front of her had earned the right to receive it.
“She’s safer than she was,” Isobel said.
“Where is she?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.” Her voice was quiet and firm and unapologetic. “She asked me not to. I gave her my word. My word is the last thing I have that works properly, and I intend to keep it.”
I sat with this. The room held its breath.
The afternoon light was moving across the wall and the flowers on the bedside table – yellow chrysanthemums I had brought last Tuesday – were starting to droop.
I looked at the flowers and I looked at Isobel and I sat with the weight of a woman who loved me enough to refuse me.
She had been carrying this for years. The secret was not a burden she resented – I could see that.
It was a trust given by a girl she had taught and loved and watched disappear, and holding that trust was Isobel’s last act of teaching.
She was teaching Cat, from a hospice bed, that promises held.
That a word given to a frightened woman in a chip shop or a ballet studio or wherever the promise had been made was a word that would be kept until it couldn’t be.
I loved her for it. I hated her for it. Both things were true.
“But I will give you one thing,” she said.
She turned her head on the pillow. The movement was slow – the body failing, the mind refusing to acknowledge it.
“I wrote a phone number on a piece of paper six months ago. I gave it to the hospice nurse. In case anything happened to me before you worked it out.”
“She gave you her number.”
“She gave me a way to reach her. Whether it’s a number she still uses – that I can’t guarantee.” Isobel paused. “She’s been moving. She moves because she has to. But she left this number six months ago, and six months ago she was closer than she’s been in years.”
I sat very still. The vinyl chair creaked.
The lavender settled around us. Outside the window, the Clyde was visible – grey, flat, constant – and the dock cranes stood in their rows and the town spread along the waterfront and somewhere in that town, or beyond it, my sister had left a number with a dying woman because she trusted Isobel more than she trusted the world.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me. Find her. And when you find her, tell her that her turnout was always better than Morven’s.
” Isobel’s mouth moved. A smile – faint, brief, the smile of a teacher who was making a joke about technique from a hospice bed because the alternative was not making the joke, and Isobel had never accepted an alternative when the first option was still available.
The car. The hospice car park. The engine was off. The windows were fogged from my breathing and the cold was settling into the car’s interior and I sat in the driver’s seat with the piece of paper the nurse had given me and I looked at the number.
Ten digits. Cat’s handwriting – I knew it, even after six years.
The letters were small, precise, the handwriting of a woman who had been trained in ballet notation and applied the same discipline to everything she wrote.
The paper was folded once. It smelled faintly of the hospice – the antiseptic and the lavender, the combination that was Isobel.
I called the number.
It rang three times. Each ring lasted approximately two seconds. Six seconds of ringing in a cold car in a hospice car park on a Tuesday afternoon with the Clyde visible through the windscreen and the cranes standing in the dark and my breathing fogging the glass.
It went to voicemail.
The voicemail message was wordless. No greeting. No name. No instruction to leave a message. Just four bars of music. A melody. Played on what sounded like a phone recording of a piano – thin, slightly out of tune, the sound of someone playing in a room with poor acoustics.
I knew the melody. I had known it for twenty-three years.
Cat used to hum it. In the kitchen. In the car.
In the studio at St. Jude’s, warming up at the barre, her feet in first position and her voice carrying the melody through the empty room while Isobel set up the day’s exercises.
The melody had no name. Cat said she’d heard it once, in a film she couldn’t remember, and it had stayed.
It had stayed with me too.
I sat in the car. The voicemail ended. The phone asked if I wanted to leave a message. I did not leave a message. I ended the call. I put the phone on the dashboard. I put my head on the steering wheel. I stayed like that for a long time.
She was alive. She had a phone number. She had left a melody on her voicemail that only someone who knew her would recognise. She had built a door into her disappearance and left it unlocked for the people who knew which melody was the key.
The car was very cold. The fogging on the windscreen was thickening. The cranes stood in the dark. And I sat in the car with the knowledge that the melody I had just heard was the sound of my sister saying: I am here. Come find me.