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play the violin?
    The delight with that particular enquiry is of course when the ghost, relieved to be asked something it can successfully answer, stands up and rattles off five favourite tunes in the key of G, only to be informed upon the final semibreve that the body’s natural owner has never held a violin in all her life.
     
    First skin I ever jumped to, the first question I was ever asked, I failed.
    I was an empty-bellied killer, and the constable who pinned me to the watchtower floor wanted to know my name.
    So I told him.
    “Not
that
name,” he growled. “Not the poor soul you killed. I want to know
your
name
.
”
    I had beaten a stranger to death, and that stranger, me.
    I was a killer caught with blood on my hands.
    “What’s
your
name?!”
    I was a flake-skinned youth, the weight of a club across my neck, the pressure of a knee against my back, two ribs cracked, one eye swollen, never to see right again. And like the men who beat me, I too was curious to find the answer to that most thorny of questions.
    What’s your name, bastard? Murderer, butcher, liar, thief. What’s your name?
    When they threw me into Newgate, in the hot pits where the masses went, fifty to a room – forty-seven and three bags of flesh by morning – I laughed the hysterical laughter of a mind too shattered to remember that it should weep. When the judge sentenced me to hang by the neck until dead, my knees buckled, but my face was empty and my soul was calm. When Fat Jerome, king of the underbelly of the prison, tried to get there first, his great wet paws around my throat, I didn’t fight him. I threw up no defence, made no noise, but consigned my soul to Satan, to whom, it seemed, it had no choice but to go.
    Yet it transpired I did not want to die, so with Fat Jerome murdering the murderer who had murdered me
    rather inevitably, upon reflection,
    I looked back into my murderer’s face from Fat Jerome’s eyes, and forgot to squeeze.
    My killer fell to his knees, gagging for air, his face red, eyes popping. A small crowd had gathered, pinioning us together, body to body, sweat to sweat, and one voice said, “Why didn’t you finish him, Jerome? Why’d you let him live?”
    I couldn’t speak.
    “I’ll do it, Jerome!” piped up another, a crooked-lipped thief with a brand on his hand who desperately wanted to impress the king of the cellar, the lord of the throng.
    My silence was taken for consent, and with a little whoop the spry-limbed convict leaped forward and drove the end of a spoon into the socket of my killer’s eye.

Chapter 15
     
    Sleeper train is a misnomer.
    Starting-awake-in-the-night train is more apt.
    As drivers change and carriages are shunted in and out of platforms in the dark, the journey towards Sofia is a stop-start of teeth-grinding screeches and head-bobbing rattles. You do not sleep on a sleeper train, but rather doze in and out of a fitful sense of unconsciousness, aware that this is not awareness, that the thoughts with which you think this are not thoughts at all, and so infused with so profound an understanding of your condition, you sleep to wake again ignorant that you slept at all.
    We reached Sofia at 4.23 a.m. I would not have known, but the lone passenger had set his alarm to buzz at 4.15 a.m. precisely. It made the sound of a nuclear siren, a klaxon that knocked the entire compartment awake with a clenching heart. He rolled out of his bunk dressed in yesterday’s clothes, picked up his bag and left without a word. I tweaked the blind back as we passed into the station. The sun was still down over the city. A lone luggage handler waited on the deserted platform. I pushed my wafer-pillow higher against the back of the bed and rolled over to sleep.
    The blind stayed down as we pulled away from Sofia. A city, its history and people, its stories and its tragedies, holds no interest to me at 4.23 a.m.
     
    The Serbians did check passports.
    At Kalotina-Zapad a team of fresh hard-jawed