Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  “It must have turned a lot colder since we’d been in there,” I said. “There was frost on the ground. I could see it sparkling.”

  “Did you actually lose consciousness?” Ronny asked. “Can you remember?”

  I hesitated, then said I suppose I must have done, just for a second. “I remember stepping out on to the concrete, then the next moment I was on the ground. My mates were all for me going to casualty but I said no. I wasn’t in pain, not really, I just felt dizzy. I knew I’d be all right once I was home and I didn’t want Mum doing a mental. They helped me up and when they saw I was able to walk they seemed less freaked out.”

  “Then your friends took you home?”

  “Right to the door. I went to bed and slept through until the next morning. I had a headache when I woke up but that was just the hangover. I’d had a bit to drink.” I grinned. “OK then, a lot.”

  “And that was the day you first realised. About your Aunty Claire?”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “Christmas morning.”

  “Thanks, Will.” She kissed me on the forehead, leaned her head briefly against my chest, but there was that vagueness in the way she spoke, and it was easy to tell that her thoughts were really elsewhere.

  Nothing vague about her the following afternoon, though. She turned up at my room – I was holed up in there trying to cobble together a mid-term essay on The Good Soldier – bubbling over with what I can only call excitement. She shoved a wadge of printed papers into my hands.

  “Read this,” she said. “I think I’ve found it, Will, I really do.”

  “Found what?”

  “What’s wrong with you.”

  “Wrong with me?”

  “Come on, you know what I mean. I’ve been stuck in the library half the week trying to make sense of this. If I never see another book on brain function ever again it’ll be too soon. But this is real, Willy. I spent the whole of this morning going through everything again, just to be sure.”

  “You want me to read this stuff now?”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you do.” She threw herself down in the fraying fake director’s chair I kept in the corner of my room and folded her arms. A moment later she was up again, making tea for us both. I sat at my desk, working my way through the papers she’d brought, photocopied extracts from a number of medical and psychology textbooks. I didn’t complain. Ronny was so hyped up and I reckoned I owed it to her. At the very least it was a distraction from the essay.

  CAPGRAS SYNDROME, OR impostor syndrome, was first described in 1923 by two French psychiatrists, Jean Reboul-Lachaux and Joseph Capgras. They wrote about a Madame M, who was convinced that her husband kept being replaced by a series of identical impostors. The doctors assumed that Madame M’s mystery illness was psychological, and for many years afterwards Capgras syndrome was thought to be a type of hysteria, found only in women. Even when the medical profession backpedalled on that one, they still tended towards the belief that the condition was psychiatric. It wasn’t until the 1980s that scientists began to suspect that the causes of Capgras weren’t psychosomatic, but neurological, the result of lesions in the frontal lobe of the brain. Schizophrenics, both male and female, seemed particularly susceptible. There were other cases though, cases where you wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong with the person, other than this bee in their bonnet they had about their wife or brother or uncle or whoever being replaced with an impostor.

  Some people with Capgras experience the symptoms as just one of a whole bundle of conditions brought on by dementia or Alzheimer’s. Others only begin suffering from the delusion following a traumatic head injury or other form of brain damage. In a few rare cases, no one has been able to point to any specific reason for its onset. The syndrome can come on suddenly and disappear just as suddenly. Usually though it is chronic, and difficult to get rid of. There is no known cure.

  There have been some fascinating cases. In one, a famous rock star was cautioned, sanctioned and finally imprisoned for harassing his wife and daughter, whom he believed had been replaced by space aliens. People suffering from Capgras have sometimes been so terrified by what’s happening to them that they’ve felt driven to change their locks or flee their homes. In a few rare cases, they have attacked or even murdered the supposed impostors.

  A lot of the time, people with Capgras syndrome don’t dare to come forward for help because they know they won’t be believed. All they know is that their world has become a nightmare overnight.

  THERE WAS MORE: more descriptions of specific cases, more about how people with Capgras had been forced out of work, spied upon, thrown in jail, forcibly medicated or just plain laughed at. I read everything. I couldn’t help it. I was fascinated by what Ronny had found out, the case histories especially, but my compulsion went beyond that. If I’m honest, I think I was secretly hoping to find something else, something more, even if it was only a footnote saying how in some stratospherically rare cases, the person diagnosed with Capgras turned out not to have the disease, that they’d been right about the impostor all along.

  Needless to say, I found no such thing.

  “What do you think?” Ronny said. She was on edge, I could tell. You never know how a crazy person is going to react, after all.

  “You think this is what I’ve got? This Capgras thing?” I started tapping my pen against the edge of my desk. I should have felt jubilant, as Ronny clearly did, but I didn’t. I knew Ronny was trying to help – to help me – but what I felt most of all was a melancholy, almost desperate sense of distance opening up between us. Ronny hadn’t laughed at me or disbelieved me – the opposite – but she still didn’t get it.

  “Everything fits,” she said. “You falling down in the car park, I mean. Banging your head like that. You most likely had concussion and didn’t realise. That can be really dangerous, Will. I knew a girl at school who died.”

  “Yes, well. I’m OK now. Not dead, anyway.”

  “But you still could have damaged yourself. Damaged your brain. There’s so much about the brain we don’t understand. Something like this – it could happen to anyone.”

  “But these articles say there’s no cure.” I snatched up the papers again from my desk, waved them at her, as if I was insisting she was to blame for everything all of a sudden. Perhaps I sowed the seed of doom right there.

  “No cure as such, but –” She swallowed. I heard her throat click. “Becoming aware of the truth is the first stage of recovery. You should think of it as a kind of physio. If you smash up your knee you have to keep exercising it to get it better and it’s the same with the brain. You need to get your mind thinking along different pathways, that’s all. We can get you well again, Will, I know we can.”

  Well.

  I hugged her, because I loved her, and I loved what she’d done for me, what she was trying to do. I promised I’d restart my sessions with Sylvia and read the book on cognitive behaviour therapy that Ronny had just placed on order with the university bookshop. Did I entertain even a vague suspicion that she might be right, that everything I’d been going through since – well, since Claire and Dave’s trip to York, really – was the result of my falling down drunk in a car park on Christmas Eve?

  No, I didn’t. What Ronny said, what she’d found in the medical books made perfect sense – was the textbook definition of sense, in fact – but that didn’t make it correct, just as not having proof didn’t mean that I was wrong or that I could be cured. The world had changed for me, permanently. What that meant for my life? I realised this was something I was going to have to figure out on my own.

  COGNITIVE BEHAVIOUR THERAPY even worked for me on one level. Training the mind is like physio – in this respect at least, Ronny was right. Tell your mind a tiger is a horse often enough and you’ll come to believe it. I made up my mind there was no way Aunty Claire – or whatever Aunty Claire was now – was going to know I was afraid of her. If she knew, then she would use that knowledge against me.

&nb
sp; Damned if she will, I thought. Understand the problem. Know your enemy. Ronny was right about these things, as well.

  I kept my promise to Mum. The second weekend after the end of term, Ronny came up to Knutsford for the weekend. Mum adored her, of course, why wouldn’t she? On the Sunday afternoon we went over to Claire and Dave’s. Ronny hit it off with the twins immediately.

  “Take them up to the Moor, if you like, darling,” Aunty Claire said. “Goodness knows they need the exercise. They’ve been glued to the TV all morning.”

  “We’d love to,” Ronny said. The way she was with Aunty Claire – so natural and so spontaneous, so carefree – made me feel almost sick with admiration.

  I wasn’t doing too badly myself, though. I even let Claire hug me, and as she pressed my head in towards her chest I breathed in the smell of her: Samsara, just like before, with nothing behind it. The smell of a vacuum.

  A maggot.

  “You hang on to that one,” Claire whispered in my ear. “She’s a princess.”

  “I know she is,” I said. I smiled at her, and it was a real smile, not tight around the edges at all.

  My mind was growing stronger by the day.

  2: London

  RONNY AND I broke up in the summer of our second year at university. Ronny called me in floods of tears. She told me she’d met someone else – someone from her work placement at British Aerospace – and they were getting engaged.

  What came back to me most clearly was that moment in the Oak car park: me stepping out on to the tarmac, then winding up flat on my back with my eyes on the stars. The same instantaneous jump cut from then to now. Two wholly distinct moments, worlds apart, and me with no memory of how I had travelled from one to the other.

  “Ronny,” I said. She was still crying. I wondered if this was the last time I would call her by her name. My chest was hurting as if someone had stamped on it, and all I could think was how I wanted to put down the phone and call Ronny, tell her about this awful thing that had just happened to me, the way I told her everything.

  Ronny was who I talked to, you see. There was no one else.

  “I never thought this would happen,” she said. “Not ever.”

  “Me neither,” I said. Whispered, really. And it was true – I hadn’t. Only the second the words left my lips I was wondering if that was so, if I hadn’t known in some deep part of myself that this was exactly what was bound to happen. That my mistake hadn’t been telling Ronny about Aunty Claire, but not telling her later on that the feelings and thoughts I’d described had never gone away.

  Our togetherness had become hollowed out. On the outside it looked OK, but there was nothing inside. The same way Aunty Claire smelled of Samsara without smelling of anything.

  How could I have expected her not to notice? Even if I had changed, Ronny was still Ronny, still very much not stupid.

  In a hurt-like-a-bastard way, Ronny’s leaving was just her trying to tell me she missed me. That she’d waited, and tried, but that she didn’t have the devil’s own clue what to do about it anymore.

  “I love you,” I said, then put down the phone. I knew she wouldn’t call back and she didn’t. Ronny and I had both arranged jobs at a hotel on Loch Lomond over August and September. I guessed Ronny would have cancelled hers, but I decided I’d go anyway. I wanted to get away from everything and anything that might remind me, not just of Ronny but of the way I’d taken her for granted, the way I’d assumed.

  I worked like a navvy all summer. When I wasn’t fulfilling my duties in the hotel I was out on marathon walks around the loch, powering through my third year reading list as if I was swotting up to be on Mastermind or something. Mainly I was trying not to think about how I was going to cope with being back in halls, seeing Ronny. The thought of having to speak to her sent me into a nose dive. I didn’t think I’d be able to deal with the pain, and yet when it actually happened it was all right. Better than all right, in fact. In the realm of mind over matter I’d become a master.

  We ended up in the Union coffee bar. Neither of us said much. It seemed to be enough just to be there together, sitting in the same space and knowing the other person still existed.

  “You will let me know,” I said in the end. “If you ever need me? You will just say?”

  Ronny nodded and then turned away. We went our separate ways soon after that. I saw her once or twice on campus, at a distance, but that was it. I threw myself into my coursework, and then into revision. I ended up getting a First, which knocked Mum’s socks off, and I was happy that she was happy. At least all those hours in the library had counted for something. After graduation I did what all English graduates do and sat the civil service exam. I ended up being offered a post at the Serious Fraud Office.

  “It means moving to London,” I told Mum and Dad.

  “It’s not so far,” Dad said. “And you can come home at the weekend, whenever you like.”

  “Of course he can,” Mum said. There were tears in her eyes. “We’re so proud of you, pet. Just you wait until I tell your Aunty Claire.”

  They clubbed together to buy me a leaving present – Mum, Dad, Uncle Dave and Aunty Claire, I mean – a beautiful antique watch with the date and my initials engraved on the back. There was a little card that came with it. They’d each written something inside, including the twins.

  Love you, darling, Claire had written. Good luck in London.

  Once I was alone, I stared at her message for a long time, trying to work out its real meaning, but it kept itself hidden.

  I LIKED MY job. Some people would have found it boring, I’m sure, but I quickly came to enjoy the intricacies of it, the obscure procedures, the obsessive fact-checking. The equally arcane office politics were a downside, at least until I’d learned how to negotiate them. Things could get tense even by civil service standards. Some of the people in my department had been there for years – for years read decades – and like every obscure pen pusher on the planet, they were hell bent on protecting their positions from incoming usurpers.

  I don’t think being from the north – and from a northern university to boot – did much to strengthen my standing when I first joined them.

  I’d become skilled at watching people though, at gauging their reactions. I wasn’t about to set my sights on anyone’s corner office, anyway – I couldn’t give a toss about that shit. Instead, I made a point of making the tea without being asked, remembering people’s birthdays, that sort of thing. Call me an arse-licker if you like but at least my course of action got me where I wanted to be, which was left alone. Within a couple of months I was less like the new boy, more like a part of the furniture. I was working on my own case files in less than a year.

  My salary was generous and went a long way, especially back then. After three years renting in Bermondsey I was able to put down a deposit on a decently sized flat near Earl’s Court. My life was OK and so was I. I still thought about Ronny, a lot. We weren’t in touch, not directly, but I knew through a mutual friend – someone who’d been in classes with both of us – that she and the British Aerospace guy had split up. It was Ronny who ended it, apparently. So, I don’t know, I suppose I still secretly thought we might get back together.

  What with Ronny being on my mind so much I wasn’t exactly in the market for new relationships. Not that I minded. I had my work, and I had my hobby. Plenty enough to stop me from being idle.

  MY HOBBY, IF you can call it that, was hunting for stories that were like my own. I was searching for evidence, I suppose – evidence that what had happened to me was not a fever dream, or the result of brain damage, but something that had a basis in objective reality.

  The truth was, the more time passed, the less I felt convinced by Ronny’s theory, that I was suffering from a physiological disorder. I also knew I could not be alone. There would be others who’d had similar experiences – experiences that could not be written off as mental illness or simple delusion.

  Other people who knew, in other
words. I searched online, of course, but also in newspaper archives, museum stacks, second hand bookshops. I read through literally hundreds of case histories of people with so-called Capgras syndrome. The circumstances of those affected were as diverse as the individuals who had been studied and interviewed. What bound these accounts together were the feelings of disorientation, alienation and panic their subjects experienced. Feelings so similar to my own that I soon started seeing them less as mental patients than as kindred spirits.

  Many of them were long dead, ancient case histories only. Yet in the immediacy and acuity of their testimony, they seemed more alive to me – more immediately relevant – than the living people I encountered in my daily life.

  They offered me proof, you see. Proof of what I knew instinctively from the moment I first realised that Claire was no longer Claire: that somewhere amongst all the untied loose ends, the scraps of hearsay and pseudo-scientific flummery, there was something real, a truth so awful that people had expended thousands of words – millions – trying not to talk about it.

  There were many dead ends, many false leads and rays of hope that turned out to be nothing – the equivalent of my own reflection staring back at me from a darkened window pane. I wasn’t too bothered. My job at the SFO had made me a past master of separating the false leads from the true ones, and it wasn’t as if I was working to a deadline. I knew I’d know what I was looking for when I eventually unearthed it, and that’s exactly what happened.

  AS WELL AS my more obvious lines of research, I liked to hang out on several collectors’ forums. Not immediately relevant to my interests, you might think, but most of the regulars were heavily into problem-solving and I liked the way they talked to each other. Also they gave me a break from the UFO forums, which were exhausting in their relentlessness. The ufologists always seemed to have some deadly feud or other going on. The collectors weren’t so much into feuding as one-upmanship, though they remained remarkably civil, by internet standards at least, which was why I noticed more or less straight away when one of its regular members, a guy named Lionel Rose, starting going off the rails. The tone of his posts became increasingly belligerent, and he seemed actively intent on picking fights with people. I’d not been aware of Rose much before – I even wondered if he was a new member, someone who’d drifted in from some other forum hoping to make trouble – but when I checked his back history I saw he’d been active on that particular forum (Memento Mori, it was called) for more than eight years. Up until recently he’d seemed like a really friendly guy, always up for a joke and often at his own expense. I wondered what had happened to make him change. Some of his posts were so strange, so at odds with the general tone of the forum, and I think it was this in the end – the way Rose had isolated himself – that flicked a switch, that made me start paying attention to what he was saying. He seemed especially obsessed with a dealer he’d had recent contact with, a Blythe Mccabe.