Ghostheart by R.J. Ellory Page A

are Jack, but –’
    ‘We make a deal,’ he said. ‘A deal, right?’
    Annie nodded hesitantly.
    ‘You get yourself a man, I’ll stop drinking.’
    ‘What d’you mean, get myself a man?’
    Sullivan smiled. ‘The night I can’t sleep because you’repounding the headboard and moaning like a banshee I’ll stop drinking.’
    ‘So crude,’ Annie said. ‘So unnecessarily crude Jack Sullivan.’
    ‘You get yourself someone you feel you can care for, make a go of it, see if you can’t make something of a relationship, and I’ll stop drinking for good. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.’
    Annie shook her head. ‘I want you to stop drinking because it will kill you Jack –’
    Sullivan raised his hand. Annie fell silent.
    ‘And I want you to find someone because loneliness is gonna kill
you
.’
    The day unfolded around her and she lost it within its own insignificances. After breakfast Sullivan had gone down the street to meet his friends. Annie stayed home, watched TV, did other things of little moment, and as evening crawled along the sidewalks and whispered between the buildings she sat and read for a while. Like someone who owns a bar drinking so rarely it’s barely worth mentioning, Annie read infrequently these days. She thought a little of Forrester, a little of Jack Sullivan, and how each of them had in some way come to represent a part of what her father might have been. But she thought mostly of David Quinn and whether she would ever see him again.
    And it was with these thoughts that she turned on her side on the couch, tugged her knees up against her chest, receptive to the silence in the apartment, the vague ghost of wind beyond the walls that was somehow comforting, and closed her eyes; she drifted away; she dreamed.
    She sits at a table. Sullivan faces her. He has one eye closed, and from the other a thin stream of smoke issues. It slips from between his lids with a gentle sound of exhalation, and as he breathes the smoke is caught in curlicues and arabesques. She watches them without a word and she is somehow enchanted by the patterns they make.
    ‘Operations Malheur, Hickory and Rolling Thunder,’Sullivan is saying, with his one eye closed and his other exhaling thin gray smoke. ‘Dragon Head … and Cedar Falls when the Yanks and the ARVN destroyed the Iron Triangle twenty kilometers north of Saigon. And then there was Operation Junction City … and you know twelve thousand civilians were killed in the Tet Offensive crossfire alone?’
    ‘I didn’t know that,’ Annie hears herself saying, but her lips haven’t moved, and the sound doesn’t come from inside her head, it comes from outside.
    ‘Something else,’ Sullivan says. ‘From January ’68 to January ’69 there were fifteen thousand wounded … ’69 to ’70 that figure jumped to ninety-six thousand, but we still kicked their commie asses in Khe Sanh, Gio Linh and Con Thien …’
    ‘Why are we here Jack?’ Annie asks, and she wants to smoke a cigarette more than anything in the world.
    ‘Made a deal, didn’t we?’
    ‘A deal?’
    Jack Sullivan smiles. He opens his smoking eye, there’s a mirror inside, and when she looks at it she can see her mother’s face. Her mother is crying, mouthing some silent word.
    Annie peers closely.
    Chance
, the mouth says.
Chance
…
Chance
…
    ‘Yes … we made a deal Annie O’Neill … and the deal was?’
    ‘I have to fuck someone and you’ll quit drinking yourself to death.’
    ‘Ladies and gentlemen, give this girl a Kewpie doll!’ Sullivan shouts.
    ‘I don’t use words like that,’ Annie says. ‘Words like fuck.’
    ‘Maybe you should,’ Sullivan replies. ‘Maybe if you used a word like that every once in a while you might get some.’
    Annie reaches out, touches him, passes right through him, and as Sullivan unfurls into arabesques and curlicues of smoke she hears him whispering
Not everything is as it seems Annie O’Neill
…
    *
    And then she woke, and for a