People come and go. He doesn't know all of them. There is a girl who is becoming familiar, who sits in this corner, too; together they make a poor ghost of a non-existant couple, as though someone has badly traced over the outlines of Spike and Julia, distorted the memory into him and this girl.
He sits here, in this place where the memories hurt the most, so that he will get used to it and then he will not feel the hurt so much. Perhaps the girl, too, has her own memories that she is trying to render numb. She looks at him, her eyelashes curiously white and thick over narrow eyes; sees the tall glass in his hand, his fingers wet from the condensation on its sides. He is clean-cut, fresh-faced, his black hair slicked back into funky spikes. Green eyes are vacant, specks in the iris glowing gold from lamplight. Beside the pool table there is one who looks like him, who shoots fast and hard and celebrates when he wins with a cigarette in mouth, a short glass in hand. It is warm inside the bar, and through the diamond panes of glass that hang in the window she cannot see through the frost that clings thick and crystal-perfect to the panes.
"Hey boy," she says.
He starts, turns, he looks at her as though she was never there, as though she had not been sitting next to him all this time.
"You're supposed to say, 'hey girl'," she tells him. "It's a song. Haven't you heard it?"
"No."
She is not good at speaking to strangers, and neither is he; after a while, during which there is a great discomfort and the pool-players heckle loudly over a greatly disputed shot, he takes a drink from his glass, and things fall back into the way they were before she spoke - him staring at random, undefined objects in the distance, her looking at the patterns his fingers leave around the glass. He tries to remember ways of speaking to women, but he cannot think of anyone that he knows who has had a healthy male-female relationship, and is forced to remain silent and awkward until she speaks again.
"What's your name?"
"Lin."
He expects her to give him her name, but she says nothing, lifts her head to look at the progress of the pool game. He notices for the first time that she has black hair cut ragged across her shoulders, limbs willow-white and chopstick-thin; her mouth is a heavy line loaded with a weight of words unsaid, thoughts not expressed. He tries not to look at her eyes; they confuse him even more, so that he is totally unsure of what will happen, and wishes to simply walk out, although he knows that is the last thing he must do. Perhaps, he thinks, she is waiting for me to ask her name. But I do not wish to know her name.
"Is that your brother?"
"Shin."
"Why does he do that to his hair?"
Lin shrugs. The silence returns, and they are separated again by it, absence of words walling one person off from the other. But now he is aware of her, uncomfortably no longer alone. Why is she here, how did she invade his space? Who is she? She is not a Red Dragon. The Dragons are almost obsessively male; some have wives, daughters, lovers, but none are, themselves, women. Spike used to call it an abomination. Spike liked women; they are gentler, Spike said, kinder, softer. And yet they can also be sharper, more cruel, their cuts deeper. Lin knows what he means. No man could have shaken the friendship Spike had with Vicious, but it only took one woman...
He thinks of those days when he used to follow Spike on business meetings, when he was Spike's bodyguard and backup; the main memory he has of those days are of the stale smoke and tired dust of motel rooms and offices, the tension of being in a room with the deal still not yet made concrete and everyone's finger poised over the trigger of their guns. Now he drifts, mainly unutilised and ignored. Spike, they say, is dead, and he does not want to hope that Spike might be alive. The memory of the green-haired man brings as much pain to Lin as it does happiness; Spike is the only thing that Lin has ever betrayed the Red Dragon for.
"You sit here every night," the girl says. "Aren't you a little young to get nostalgic?"
"There are too many people over there."
"But there's me here."
"I don't mind you."
She bites on the end of a cigarette. Her teeth are the perfect white of cosmetic bleach, her lips painted ice-pale. Lin feels that she has gotten what she wants, at least enough for tonight; he finishes his drink, takes his coat and, subtle as mist disappearing in sunlight, leaves. Shin looks after him, sees the girl, sees him leaving, is obviously annoyed at him for going away so early, but is too deep in the crowd by the pool table to go after him. The girl drops her cigarette, unlit and unsmoked, onto the floor, crushes it under the toe of a high-heeled boot; stares at Shin, but is unable to find what she is looking for in him, and then she, too, leaves.
"Don't touch the table!" Shin shouts at his friends; he slips through them, the crowd and the haze of cigarette smoke, runs out into the street, cue still in hand. She hears him running, pauses to look over her shoulder. He cannot think of anything to say.
"You..."
"What?"
"Julia."
"Sorry," she says, "wrong name."
But he feels her hand graze his coat as she turns to walk away. He knows that snagged onto the rough fabric of his coat there is now a wafer of silicon, perhaps no longer than his little fingernail; he looks down, picks it off his coat, looks at it. It is shaped like a pin and it is thin enough, when he tries, to fit into one of the holes he has pierced into his ear; that, he decides, is the safest place for it. It must be safe; he must not lose it, and no one must know that he has it, nor can they know what it is.
Shin rubs his eyes, pushes his stiff, sharp-ended fringe back from his forehead. He feels uneasy, alcohol and nicotine suddenly sour in his mouth. Wonders who she is. Where Julia found her. How they are related. He thinks of the invisible strings that bind them, Julia to him and to Lin, to the girl with her eyelashes a white fence over her eyes. And there is a string from Julia to Vicious and also to Spike, and between Spike and Vicious, Spike to Lin, Lin to Vicious, all of them, the strings too thin to be seen but always there, their touch cruel. The past, Shin thinks, is a hideous thing, when it stays around haunting the present.
"Lin. Oi. Lin."
"What is it?"
The twins have moved into the same flat, an uneasy truce called after they realised how far apart they have drifted. Shin was always a little bit jealous that he never made it under Spike's wing; perhaps that was why it was difficult for the brothers to speak when there was still Spike around, and Lin working for him. There was also the time when Shin was Julia's bodyguard, and for that time Julia was to Shin something like what Spike was to Lin. Now there is just the Red Dragon, with Julia and Spike no longer around, and Vicious off somewhere fighting a strange war on a strange planet. Shin has no one else, and, for all the distance between them, is strangely, fiercely loyal to his brother.
"You left so early. You'll never get any fun."
"I was tired."
Shin leaves the lights off; he knows his way around. He speaks to Lin as he stands in the hallway, voice thinned by passing through the door of Lin's bedroom.
"Who was the girl?"
"I don't know her name."
"Never trust a woman," Shin says, grinning in the dark. "But it's all right. She wasn't all that beautiful."
"No, she wasn't."
"It's been a long time since there was a woman and a man sitting in that corner where you were today," Shin says, his tone light. He is half lost inside the shirt that he is taking off when he hears the doorknob click; he fumbles with the fabric, loses, fights again, manages to get it off. Stands aloof and alert, watching as Lin walks out of the room, half-asleep, but with a thought on his mind that shows in the way that he holds himself.
"I think I should tell you," Lin says. "That if you know where she is - don't tell me."
"Why not?" Shin asks. The back of his throat feels terribly dry.
"If I know where she is, I'll go after her, and I'll bring her back. I have been ordered to, and it is so. But if I don't know where she is, I don't have to do anything. So don't tell me."
"Fine," Shin says. "You're the big brother."
When Lin has turned around and gone back to sleep, he forgets to close his door. Shin listens, waits for the sound of breathing to slow down and deepen until it is regular, the smooth and deep breathing of sleep. Shin sits down on the floor of the living room, his arms still tangled in the shirt he has not yet fully gotten off. And thinks: if I am the younger one, then why do I feel so old?
In the corner where they used to sit now linger the memory-ghosts of Spike and Julia, doomed, with love. A girl with white eyelashes and black hair lank on her shoulders tilts her head, looks at a boy whose head is always turned away. In Lin's dreams, that he cannot remember when he wakes up, there forms a linear link between him and her, based on the link that he remembers between Spike and Julia. He needs the link. He has cut himself off from Shin, and all other luminous figures have left him. Out of a memory he fabricates an affection, and it lies patient in his subconcious, waiting for the night to pull him back to that corner in the pool room, waiting for the girl with her sad mouth and white-lined eyes to walk into the room again. He is not in love with her, but is willing to believe that he is.
