Who is Tom Ditto?

by Danny Wallace

  I slowly turned to stare at her until she listened to her own words back and walked away.

  I closed my eyes.

  Pia.

  Nothing from Pia.

  But I knew what this was, now.

  Pia had talked about it that evening on the bus. Hayley had mentioned it the night she got back.

  Detachment.

  Cockroft’s Way. I’d realised some nights earlier there’d been a copy of his book on the bookshelf – Carbon Copy – nestled between a Lonely Planet guide to Crete I’d bought while optimistically hoping we might eventually plan a holiday, and a Taschen book about chairs I’d never once looked at.

  I stood and found the chapter on detachment.

  To disengage.

  To be easily removable.

  She considered herself easily removable. Something isolated, unneeded, unmissed.

  Pia had detached from me and now I knew for sure I wanted her back.

  thirty

  Wednesday. 7.45pm.

  I’d been milling about in the BP garage outside for the last fifteen minutes, pretending I was having a difficult time choosing between M&Ms or a Bounty.

  I could see the entrance to the Holiday Inn from here. I wanted to catch Andy on his own. I reasoned he’d be more open with me then. No one else around to chip in, or caution him, or distract from the story. No one to stop me finding out what I needed to know.

  First, I saw Tim, bleep-bleeping his small red Polo open, climbing in, Classic FM rising for a second until he could quell the strings, then roaring off.

  A moment later, and there was Andy, shoving his clipboard into a small red Eastpak that now looked ludicrous across the acres of his back. He was with Felix and Jackie. They walked to the bus stop together.

  I choose the M&Ms and paid.

  ‘Quite a decision,’ said the cashier. ‘Sure you don’t want to think about it some more?’

  I tailed the three of them – such an odd group. Jackie, the oldest, her silver hair lapping her shoulders, her limp more pronounced now, in the real world. Felix in his black skinny jeans and Slayer t-shirt, prepping his iPod, presumably with death metal or hardcore for some kind of furious march home. Andy and his tiny rucksack, taking his glasses off and cleaning them with his tie. A strange family unit, but tight; they way people are when they share a secret.

  Their bus approached, and as it did, Jackie and Felix peeled off, each with a hand in the air, leaving Andy to hop on – if hop is the right word. I sprinted across the road, dodged the cars, whipped out my Oyster card and squeezed through the doors, the back of my coat nipped for a second as the driver – blue jumper, nicotine fingers – rolled his eyes at me and gently pressed his foot down.

  Andy must have gone upstairs. I can’t talk to him here. Not on the bus. Too many people, too public, so I sat down by the window near the stairs, my prey trapped in the box above me.

  I’d catch him outside, or wherever he lived. Where was that, I wondered? What bus was this? The 22? But barely a half dozen stops had passed when I saw him again, white knuckles tight round the handrail, another on the wall to steady himself, noises of effort and concentration as he balanced himself onto each new step.

  Old Church Street. Chelsea.

  He thundered past me, and I rose to my feet, jumped through the doors after him, ready to shout his name and suggest a coffee when I saw what he was doing.

  He was on the follow.

  Andy was not the best follower I had seen. He was pretty bad at it. Lumbering, unsubtle. No elegance. His size, of course, made it harder for him to blend in. But there were his clothes, too. The blue trousers. The baseball cap. The bright red rucksack. This guy was an amateur.

  He’d followed two black guys in their early twenties off the bus and tailed them to a café where one of them seemed to work. He’d walked closely behind them, almost bumped into them at the door, then sat down and perused the menu, while I found shelter from a thin rain in the launderette opposite, the hot air thick with Persil. Then he’d simply pointed at the jacket potato an elderly man was enjoying by the window.

  I didn’t think he was getting the best out of this system. It’s not like he could claim he’d never had a jacket potato before.

  Over his shoulder, one of the guys he’d followed appeared from the kitchen wearing an apron. Andy clocked him, and I watched as he took in the details. His eyes went from the guy’s hair to his clothes to his watch to his shoes. He took out his clipboard and made some notes.

  Behind me, on a TV screwed to the wall, University Challenge blathered away.

  ‘Your bonuses are now on quotations about shellfish,’ said Jeremy Paxman. I glanced at the man on a plastic chair opposite, half-asleep, a well of drool forming in the corner of his mouth. I’m not sure how either of us would do on that show.

  Five minutes later Andy was finishing his jacket potato and can of Fanta. He noted something down on his clipboard, then held the can up, read what I had to assume was its ingredients, and noted that down too. He asked for the bill, and laid down a fiver on a plate with great care, a finger and a thumb at each end.

  He stood, left the café, and started to trudge back to the bus stop, his head down, his great jacket potato adventure over.

  I couldn’t work out why he’d followed that guy. I couldn’t work out what he’d seen in him, or what Andy wanted to be. What did he get out of that? At least when Pia did it, there was a sense of fun, a sense of adventure. It was about bettering yourself, making the best use of your time, losing yourself in a vast crowd of Koreans. Not just filling your day.

  I considered approaching, as I left the launderette, leaving nothing but a roomful of scowls behind me, but Andy was on the move, and where Andy went, I went.

  Turns out where Andy went was the Trocadero Centre to watch the new Jason Statham film. That was what Andy did when Andy was being himself.

  I couldn’t let him suffer like that.

  ‘Hey Andy,’ I said, sitting down, his popcorn spilling over the brim of its cup and bouncing from taut trouser legs from the shock of it.

  Andy didn’t have anything. Anyone. All he had was this. Well, this and his job.

  ‘Database administrator,’ he said, almost apologetically.

  ‘That’s cool,’ I said. ‘We all need databases.’

  He helps people with CC. But it doesn’t work for him, he said, at least not as well as it can for others. He doesn’t know what to look for. He doesn’t know what he wants to be. But he enjoys helping; he likes the company.

  ‘Maybe you’re just you,’ I said, nursing my coffee. We were in the Costa on Regent Street, surrounded by Italian students on MacBooks, Skyping home with cheap rubber earbuds.

  ‘Being just me, yeah … that’s what I’m afraid of,’ he said. ‘When I read Cockroft’s book, I just thought, this is incredible. It’s a million windows into other decisions. It’s like a bus you can hop on and hop off. You’re life-jacking, that’s what I call it. You’re piggybacking on the fun stuff that other people do. You’re—’

  ‘Having a jacket potato and a can of Fanta.’

  ‘Yeah, okay, look – there are degrees. It doesn’t always work. The Japanese chapters took it further, before they were shut down. One guy in Kyoto lived in someone else’s apartment for a year. Hid above her boiler cupboard at night. Used to wait until she’d left the apartment then slide out and eat her leftovers before heading out to work. There was nothing weird about it, though.’

  ‘Nothing weird about it?’

  ‘Sexual, I mean. But we’d never do that over here. I’ve done things, though. Some pretty great things.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like seen art I would never have seen. Did you know Leonardo da Vinci spent twelve years painting the Mona Lisa’s lips?’

  ‘You saw the “Mona Lisa”?’

  ‘Well, no, but I followed a bloke into an art lecture on the Strand and he had it up on a PowerPoint. But if I’d stayed home and watched Rip Off Britain I wouldn
’t have. Or I’ve been up Big Ben. That was on the follow, too. Tour group. Pretended to be a German. Did you know Big Ben, which is the bell, by the way, weighs the same as a small elephant and he’s wider than he is tall?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I was the only one in the group to understand that, to be fair,’ he said. ‘But those are the moments I live for. The unexpected. And I’m getting better.’

  ‘Pia told me why Tim does it …’

  ‘Tim’s trapped. He’s been trapped for years, in that semi with his mum. He doesn’t have time for his own life because he’s got to look after someone else’s. So when he does what he does, it’s because someone else has done all the work to build up to it. They can go to restaurants, they can form relationships, they can go and see Kenny G at the O2, they can do whatever they want. Tim can’t. That’s what I mean about life-jacking! He gets a glimpse into what his life could have been.’

  I sipped at my drink as Andy leaned forward.

  ‘Look, you’ve followed,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve done it. You did it tonight! I know you get it.’

  He was right. I did get it. Despite it all, I’d seen the point. No, that wasn’t fair. I saw the point. But I was done. I’d moved on. I was getting my life back together. And then I thought of Hayley, of the tension that hung thick round the flat.

  ‘It’s different for Felix,’ he said. ‘He’s younger. He hasn’t tasted true failure yet. He does it because he’s impatient. He’s in a hurry to find out who he is. I keep telling him, “Just wait! You’ll figure it out!” He doesn’t realise he has his whole life ahead of him. He wants it now.’

  ‘And Jackie?’

  ‘Well to be honest with you, Jackie’s just a bit odd.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But that doesn’t take away from the whole. Someone like Pia – someone who needed this once – enjoys it now. Pia’s got the right idea.’

  I grabbed my chance.

  ‘That’s kind of why I’m here. It’s about Pia.’

  ‘What about her? Is she okay?’ he said, his face now concerned. ‘She hasn’t been to the place in a while.’

  ‘I don’t know if she’s okay. We had a fight. Hayley came back.’

  His jaw dropped.

  ‘She’s back? Did she say why?’

  ‘She said she needed to go away to work out why she needed to come back.’

  He nodded, hid his mouth behind his cup.

  ‘Pia said I needed to move on. Said Hayley would only ever hurt me. I said some things. Now she won’t take my calls. I keep looking over my shoulder in case she’s there. But she never is.’

  Andy put his cup down, wondering how to phrase something.

  ‘Maybe she had a point. About Hayley.’

  I blinked.

  ‘I thought you were all for people doing this? You encouraged Hayley.’

  ‘I didn’t encourage her. I told her to follow her heart.’

  ‘That sounds like pretty much the same thing.’

  ‘But I also told her I didn’t agree with what she was doing.’

  It wasn’t Hayley I wanted to talk about, to be honest. It was Pia. Pia was the important thing.

  ‘Look, here’s the thing: I think that after she broke up with Jeremy, she spiralled into some kind of depression. Some dark place. I get that.’

  Andy raised his eyebrows.

  ‘So she broke up with him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, didn’t she?’

  ‘Well, good. That guy was not a good guy. I’m pleased you know about him, to be frank. He was a user. Powerful personality, quite magnetic, but overpowering. That was always her problem: personalities are her magnet. We used to talk about that so much. Her whole life has been like that. I suppose it makes sense she was attracted to him.’

  ‘Do you think she’s over him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Andy. ‘Did she tell you she was?’

  ‘She’d always change the subject. I mean, a break-up’s tough, of course. But especially if you’re married.’

  Andy stopped now, no movement, nothing, just frozen as I continued.

  ‘And then there’s the zoo thing,’ I said.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said, the spell now broken. ‘Wait.’

  ‘And if I ever asked her about it, about her marriage, she’d tell me those weren’t the rules. That she was here to talk to me about my stuff, to protect me, not to help her. She was acting like she was my guardian angel or something.’

  ‘Stop,’ said Andy. ‘Can you go back a bit, because I’m really confused?’

  ‘Pia,’ I said.

  ‘You’re talking about Pia?’

  ‘Of course I’m talking about Pia. Pia and this Jeremy guy.’

  He sighed, looked around, didn’t know how to tell me.

  ‘Tom, Pia wasn’t with Jeremy,’ he said, as gently as he could. ‘Pia had nothing to do with Jeremy.’

  ‘Well, who the hell is Jeremy, then?’ I said, and Andy put his hand over his mouth.

  [11]

  Ezra Cockroft disappeared from my life soon after the night we had talked of the hurt from which he’d run, and the hurt that he still felt.

  He detached.

  I called him, of course, and I visited his apartment, but all to no avail. Perhaps, I thought, he has escaped for the sun once more – perhaps he needed the warmth in his life.

  I still returned to Keen’s when I could, where I would sit by the bar and scan the room, just in case.

  Six weeks passed before I found a note, pinned to my door, folded once, a tear of Royal Blue ink running down one side where the weather had found it.

  I had returned from following a tall Jewish man from the azaleas in the Botanical Garden – to which I am ashamed to say I had never before been – via a bookstore on W 155th Street to a small diner on Broadway where quietly we ate latkes with Smetana and read our new books (The Running Man by Richard Bachman).

  For the Attention of Michael Kosinski

  Cc: The World

  Michael, I was passing, and I was thinking.

  Maybe one day there’ll be born a man who’s got it all worked out.

  Maybe statistically, that has to happen one day. And I wish that had been me.

  Truth is, I messed up. When I was young I worked too much because I was trying to be who I thought everyone wanted me to be. I didn’t feel like I was enough. But maybe I always was, and if I hadn’t tried so hard to be someone else, I’d have realized that everyone was happy with me being me. But I was desperate to be someone else, Michael, and to hide away in someone else’s world.

  So I found someone like me who’d made the right choices. I decided to step into his shadow, because being in his shadow was better than always being at the foot of my own. Only when I was being someone else could I be myself. And soon I lived a life that was anyone’s but my own.

  Maybe, Michael – despite it all … the fun, the fights, the girls … maybe I should have just lived my own life. Seen it through. Maybe following is something to be shared. Because following by its very nature means that despite the presence of the person you could be, you are alone.

  But these are the ramblings of an old and stupid man.

  Our old friend Oscar Wilde would say: be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

  Me? I take a different road. Be whomever you want to be, Michael. Be you, be me, be the kid you pass on the stairs. But be well.

  – Ezra

  thirty-one

  So there it was: the banality of truth.

  No pop star, no great adventure, no ‘detachment’, no ‘finding herself’ cod-psychology 1960s New York bullshit – just an investments analyst named Jeremy who’d wowed her with the force of his incredible investments-analyst personality.

  She’d left me. But she didn’t have the balls to leave me.

  The mundanity of how it happened shocked me. That a relationship could be put in jeopardy in such a pedestrian way.

  She’d been out, one nig
ht, with Fran. Picked her up from Spitalfields, headed to Mayfair. Sat at a table next to a group of men celebrating some kind of win. Listened to them bellow and brag. Fran had found it boring, the way Hayley was never quite there, ears cocked to the table next to hers, taking nothing in, not being present. She’d made her excuses – ‘iffy tapas’ – and left, stormed out, had that argument, leaving Hayley to settle up and make her own way home. Home to me. But she knew I’d be asleep. Home promised no fun. And anyway: she’d found her next follow.

  So Hayley had stayed, listened, made sure she was leaving at the same time, caught the eye of Jeremy at the cloakroom, laughed at his jokes, said she’d been stood up, accepted the invite to follow on with the group.

  Soon, it was just those two.

  I walked to the tube, shoulders hunched, my fists in a ball, not knowing if I’d ever be able to unclench them.

  She hadn’t gone to Paris on a whim. She hadn’t seen it on some travel show and thought it seemed nice. She hadn’t come straight back to Britain, either, staying at her dad’s in King’s Lynn, or her sister’s in Brighton, or whatever else she’d told me that seemed a good enough dead end.

  She’d been with Jeremy.

  I felt around for the pills in my pocket. Found the packet. Brought them out.

  Stared at them.

  When I got home, I found a note.

  Just popped out. Back in a bit.

  Where now? Where this time?

  There was a bag by the door, cream with brown cotton handles, tissue paper billowing out. I peered in. She’d bought herself a new biker jacket.

  Stella McCartney.

  I walked to the bedroom. Found what I was looking for in the drawer by the window.

  I took it out, and stared at the picture in the back of her passport. Those big eyes. That curl. I’d been there when she’d taken this picture. We’d found a booth in a tube station, had one taken together afterwards. I still had it in my wallet. We still had one on our fridge.

  I took a breath. Flicked through.