Who is Tom Ditto?

by Danny Wallace

  ‘You know, I’m not a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘But there are things you can do. Things that may help. Exercise is …’

  He smiled, hoping maybe I’d let him in.

  ‘I just came for a new prescription really,’ I said.

  This guy. Yeah, this one. The one with the stride. He’s the one I’ll go for. He’s the one I’ll follow.

  I was on Oxford Street, weaving through the crowds, my mood sedated and cosseted by my amitriptyline – my serotonin and noradrenaline protected for now – my mood light, my walk bouncier than I could otherwise hope for.

  Anything you can do, Hayley …

  The world was just that little bit louder, the scene around me ever-so-slightly blurred round the edges – they say it takes the edge off, amitriptyline, and maybe that’s what they mean. I’d get the dry mouth sometimes with this stuff. I’d get the floats, too. Seemed a small price to pay for the rendering it put over the bricks.

  Dr Moon was right. There were things I could do. Things that may help.

  The guy I’d chosen was a slender white guy with a walk I could only covet. Elegant, confident, not so much a walk as a stride. Look at him go, I thought to myself. Well, let’s do it.

  He had good hair, this guy – expensive shoes. Flat platinum wedding ring, chunky watch, light tan.

  He ducked into Selfridges and I ducked in after him.

  First floor. Men’s Designer. Men’s Contemporary. Men’s men’s men’s …

  I watched as he glided past the names – names I’d never stop to look at. This isn’t my world. Dolce & Gabbana. McQueen. Westwood. I had no business here. But this guy did, the way he’d trail his hands down the lining of a jacket, inspect a cuff, check the break of a sleeve.

  He was here for a fitting. I sat nearby and pretended to be waiting for an imaginary girlfriend – because I suppose in many ways you were just an imaginary girlfriend all along weren’t you, Hayley? – as a girl brought his suit out and laid it before him like it was her masterpiece. He slipped the jacket over his shirt, stretched his arms out, buttoned the second button, left the top one just like you’re supposed to, smoothed the whole piece down, checked the silhouette. The girl stood behind him, peeking over his shoulder, admiring in the mirror her tailor’s handiwork, perhaps imagining for a moment a life with this man in this jacket. I smiled to myself. That man was in control. He tried some shoes – nodded his admiration. She brought out a tie she thought he might like, that she thought might be perfect for him. He shrugged a why-not, then flipped open his wallet and threw a black card onto the counter. I made a note on my phone. Duchamp three-piece dash check suit. Paul Smith London Stamford shoes, red laces. Canali Jacquard-stripe single-cuff shirt. Tie: Boss, wool, grey with single black stripe.

  I would never buy this stuff, of course. That would be too far. Buying it would mean that I missed this too much. That following had me; meant more to me than I wanted to admit. But I enjoyed the moment. Liked thinking I might. Enjoyed the technicolour I’d been missing.

  He was off, now, and I was too, keeping my distance, observing, maybe thirty steps behind him as he left the shop and turned left towards Manchester Square, turning round, searching for a cab, arm in the air as one stopped.

  In a cab myself, now, my driver excited by the whole thing, chuckling to himself about how he never thought he’d be in a spy film, and how he’d longed to have a whole follow-that-cab! moment. I didn’t mention it was my second, though the first was by rickshaw, and as I looked up once more I saw we were slowing.

  Park Lane.

  I waited in the lobby of the hotel while the man dropped off his suit in his room. I knew that’s what he was doing as he’d said as much to the doorman, who’d put his hand to his hat and said, ‘Welcome back to the Dorchester, Mister Davis.’

  I can’t even get Adewale on reception to smile at me.

  Ten minutes later, he was back, and he was striding again. Quick stop for a takeaway coffee at Piccolo, then I stood three people behind him in a queue for Yazu Sushi on Curzon Street – followed his example and got the Sashimi Deluxe to go.

  I followed him round the corner, feeling like I was stomping but body somehow gliding, on past the Fox Club, and over the road into Green Park, sushi bags in hand, mine rustling behind my back, held there so he wouldn’t notice if he glanced over his shoulder, which he had, now, once or twice.

  I could just follow this guy forever, I thought. Escape my life. Live his. Pop my pills and eat sushi and stride. I don’t know what he did. Banker?

  Who cares. I liked how he did things. I liked the feel of his life.

  And there she was: waiting on a bench. The inevitable girl, this vision, this beautiful flame-haired woman, model-pretty, her face lighting up the second she saw him, her arms out for the hug, the kiss on the cheek, the kiss on the mouth, the hug now an embrace and lasting an age.

  Now they began to talk excitedly, and I noticed she wasn’t wearing a ring, and I studied his hand again and saw that now no longer was he, and ‘that’s strange’ I thought, and I followed them as they walked arm-in-arm, tight like a team or a unit, and he showed her the sushi and said he hoped it was okay, and she took in the trees and the grass and the big grey sky above her, and I thought about the last time Hayley had seemed excited to see me, the last time we’d held each other like that, the last time we’d surprised each other.

  Well, except for the time she surprised me by fucking off. But you know what I mean. And that was when I realised I was standing far too close to this couple and he turned to me. Took me in.

  Remembered me.

  ‘You were in Selfridges,’ he said. ‘And my hotel.’

  He glanced at my sushi bag – then the coffee from Piccolo. His eyes widened.

  ‘What the hell are you up to?’

  I smiled. The girl looked uncertain at first, frightened now.

  ‘So …’ I began, not quite knowing how I would finish.

  Stoke Newington Church Street. Bottle shop. It was coming up for six. Head home. Sleep. Sleep all this off. The day, the cans, the pills. The wine would help.

  But thump-thump-thump on the door, just as I was running a bath.

  ‘Hi,’ said Pia, when I opened it. ‘Jesus, you look rough.’

  ‘You’ve changed your hair,’ I said.

  ‘Bob,’ she said.

  ‘And your name, apparently.’

  ‘No, it’s a bob.’

  ‘I know. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was passing.’

  ‘You mean someone else was.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I let her in.

  ‘You’ve been drinking,’ she said, opening the blinds. ‘I thought you didn’t drink much.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘That doesn’t look like your first can.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I’m particularly happy today.’

  She brushed the words away, quickly.

  ‘You should be. You’ve got focus now, and clarity, and—’

  ‘I followed someone today,’ I said.

  Her jaw dropped.

  ‘You followed someone? Without me?’ she said. ‘That’s fantastic! Who were they? What did you do? You know what this means? You’re free!’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes. You’re in control again.’

  ‘I’m not, Pia …’

  ‘You are! And you have your reason, for why Hayley went. Having that reason means you can move on. You know how?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s Wednesday.’

  The Holiday Inn Express, Wandsworth.

  We sat around the table. Me. Pia. Jackie. Tim. Felix. And Andy.

  Sometimes it felt like the Holiday Inn was the closest I’d ever get to an actual holiday. We’d planned for it, me and Hayley. I’d saved for it. Just never done it. It felt like London had me.

  ‘Guys! Let’s start by sharing some of our experiences from the week,’ said Andy, clipboard in hand.

  I sipped
at my coffee, let the caffeine do its work.

  Everyone kept stealing little glances at me. They seemed thrilled I was here, though no one asked why. At one point Jackie gave Pia a little pat on the hand. A ‘well done’, maybe.

  ‘Tim, let’s start with you,’ he said, full of beans. ‘Share your story.’

  ‘Well, it was quite a week for me,’ said Tim, smiling. ‘The man downstairs, the man who owns the betting shop, well ordinarily on a Monday I’d follow him, wouldn’t I? Quick walk through the park, spot of lunch, then he disappears off to see his mistress at Glenmore Villas and I’d hang around by the benches.’

  As always, he said all this as if it was completely normal.

  ‘Well, he’s off on holiday this week. I can’t go, obviously, because I’ve got my mother to take care of, so I did something completely different.’

  He made a big you’ll-like-this face.

  ‘So I followed his mistress instead!’

  ‘Ooh!’ said Jackie.

  ‘Turns out she’s also seeing a fella in Turnham Green!’

  ‘Ooh!’ said Jackie.

  ‘I thought to myself, “if there’s one thing that’d turn him green, it’s that!” Green with envy!’

  He treated us to a moment of jazz hands after this well-rehearsed joke, and Jackie chuckled in a way that implied she knew she shouldn’t.

  ‘I’d not been to Turnham Green in years,’ said Tim. ‘They’ve got a Starbucks there now.’

  I noticed Pia had moved to the side of the room, now. She’d told me about all of them. Tim was a good man, I knew that, no side to him, an optimist, but he was shackled to his home. The two hours a day his mother was cared for by the woman who also came to clean were his only chance to get out there, to live. This was his way of doing it.

  Jackie suffered from crippling shyness. Her first year at CC she hadn’t spoken a word. In this room, she was Someone. She was accepted. Now she even brought the biscuits. Although I was concerned to hear that one night, struggling to find anyone worth following, Jackie had spent two hours following a dustman.

  Felix had been bullied all his life. His mum’s new boyfriend, an army man, hadn’t taken to him. It affected him at school. Made him an outcast. He struggled with his identity. He’d been a goth, then a metaller, a boy-bander, all before he was fourteen. Now he was experimenting with spray tan and hairspray. For Felix, it was the purest form of finding himself. He knew he was out there. He just didn’t know who.

  And again, I thought, the only person Pia hadn’t told me about was Pia.

  And now she sat, head against the wall, just listening.

  ‘And what about you … Tom?’ said Andy, kindly, and this is what everyone had been waiting for. ‘You’re back, I see …’

  I nodded.

  ‘And … is there a reason for that? Last time you were here …’

  ‘Tom went on the follow this afternoon,’ said Pia, interrupting her own self-imposed silence, and this changed the whole atmosphere.

  ‘What?’ said Jackie. ‘Did you?’

  ‘I’m having an … unusual time of late,’ I explained, struggling to find the right words. ‘The more I find out about Hayley, I … yeah. I gave it a go. No big deal. I did a little follow.’

  ‘No big deal?’ laughed Andy. ‘You’re on the road now, Tom. The road to—’

  ‘He was caught,’ said Pia, and Jackie’s face fell. Tim put his hand to his head.

  ‘What did you say?’ said Felix.

  ‘He said he was a private detective,’ said Pia, giggling, and I shot her a look. ‘He said the guy’s wife had sent him!’

  ‘Is everyone just having affairs these days?’ said Tim, shocked at the world.

  ‘I suppose really before anything else happens, Andy,’ I said, trying to move things on, away from my own humiliation, ‘I just want to know a bit more about the club.’

  He smiled and put his clipboard down.

  CC – which I’d thought must mean Copy Club, or perhaps even Copy Cat – stood for Carbon Copy. It stood, also, for inclusion.

  ‘CC me in,’ they’d say. Or ‘CC all’.

  It had started in Berlin in the late 1960s, thanks to a New York academic by the name of Ezra Cockroft on an exchange programme with the Freie Universität. He’d seen the light one night walking down the Kurfürstendamm – papers in hand, another night of nothing but work in front of him – as a man he described as his unbelievable doppelgänger bounded up the steps of the U-Bahn and into the arms of a waiting family.

  ‘In that moment,’ he wrote, in a paper he presented some years later at a conference in Connecticut on the changing face of social mobility, ‘I wondered what had happened in our lives to take us in such different directions, this other me and me. We shared a city, a time, a look, even – though he was younger than me, far younger than me – and what he had seemed so removed from my own life that it became incredibly attractive to me.’

  Fascinated, he’d followed the man, gently at first, from a distance, before the urge to talk to him grew so great that he had to approach. The man – a financial adviser for a large chain of German real estate brokers – was charmed to meet someone who seemed so like him. A father figure, maybe.

  They became great friends.

  The idea then spread thanks to a student writing a piece on him. Small chapters opened up in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and while they’d fizzled out, that same student had brought it to London some years later. Chapters opened up here and there, usually of no more than six or seven people in size, meeting in pubs or church halls. Most dropped out when life took over, as they had in New York, or San Francisco, or Boston.

  But some kept going.

  ‘There’s a group in Rome,’ said Felix. ‘One in Doha, for some reason. And a few scattered around some of the bigger cities in Spain. Everyone does it differently, but the fundamental idea remains the same.’

  ‘Observe, learn, leave,’ said Jackie.

  ‘And what about you, Andy?’ I asked. ‘How did you get started?’

  ‘I was introduced to it,’ he said.

  ‘By who?’ I asked.

  He looked uncomfortable. His eyes flit around the room, landed on Pia.

  ‘Guy called Jeremy.’

  I cast a glance at Pia, looking daggers at Andy.

  ‘But anyway,’ he said. ‘Long time ago.’

  ‘Who’s Jeremy?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody,’ said Pia, breaking her silence. ‘A great big nobody.’

  ‘It might be good to talk about Jeremy,’ tried Jackie, with all the courage she could muster.

  ‘No,’ said Pia, fixing her with a stare I’d never seen her use before, full of hurt and caution. ‘It would not be good to talk about Jeremy.’

  And in that moment, with the way she said that name, I was pretty sure I knew what Pia’s story was.

  ‘So what are everyone’s plans for the night?’ asked Andy, clearing the biscuits away. By which I mean eating them.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Felix, flatly. ‘Maybe I’ll follow Tom.’

  ‘Haha,’ I said, uncomfortably.

  ‘Would you mind if I followed you?’ he said. ‘I’d do it quietly.’

  ‘Why would you follow me?’ I said, confused.

  ‘You probably go to cool parties.’

  Pia laughed very hard at this.

  ‘You probably meet loads of celebrities. You probably know Will.i.am.’

  She slapped the table at that.

  Andy kindly changed the subject.

  ‘Pia? What about you?’

  ‘I’m taking Tom to the zoo,’ said Pia, calming down.

  The others turned to stare.

  ‘You’re taking me where?’ I said.

  ‘The zoo,’ said Pia.

  ‘That is fantastic,’ said Jackie, hands on hips, impressed. ‘That is great, P.’

  Everyone was acting like this was a huge deal.

  ‘So we’re going to the zoo?’ I said. ‘What – on our own?’

>   ‘Yes, on our own. You’ve earned it.’

  ‘No, I mean – without following anyone there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We will be using our own free will.’

  ‘The zoo,’ said Andy, smiling. ‘Well done, Pia.’

  [7]

  And so, at last, I broached 1968.

  ‘The university had a deal with the Freie Universität. Especially when it came to economists. We’d send someone over for a year or two, they’d send someone our way for a year or two. Well, I put my hand up for that one pretty quick. I wanted to see Berlin again, wanted to see Germany again, but on better terms this time. I was at Aachen in ’44. Crossing the Siegfried Line. Well, you become fascinated, you know? You want to go back.’

  He becomes more animated now.

  ‘And so I move there, and I work, and I work, and I work. And soon I realize that all I’m doing is working. I’m not seeing the old place, I haven’t been back to Aachen, I’m just preparing classes, delivering classes, marking the papers I ask them to do in the classes … well, I could have been doing that back at NYU, where my counterpart – my intellectual doppelgänger – was probably now going to my guy on 5th and probably ordering my favorite sandwich.’

  He laughs, and slaps the table with one huge hand.

  ‘And then I saw the guy.’

  He flips his hands open as if to say ‘and there you have it’.

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Well, I would follow him.’

  He stands and walks to the mantelpiece.

  I notice a photograph – a beautiful girl, his daughter. A photograph from his wedding, Ezra and Mae before an old white church up in Amenia Union. And there is one final photograph – of Ezra and another man.

  ‘I’d follow from a distance at first, observing, enjoying. He’d spend weekends at the Wannsee with his family, sitting by the beach, enjoying a Weissbier or what have you. I’d always carry a Berliner Zeitung for cover. People were less suspicious in those days, more open to coincidence.’

  He studies my face for a moment.