Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  All done. I walk out of the bank, as Mr Morgan, hail a taxi and get a ride back home. Front door, up the stairs, business with keys, into the room, not Mr Morgan any more. Afterwards, as usual, I spend a quarter of an hour just sitting and shaking all over. What I’m so scared of, I just don’t know. But it passes, and I’m me again, and I’ve just earned myself one thousand pounds.

  Actually, I don’t charge nearly enough, given the value of my services to my clients. A fool to myself, I am. My own worst enemy. Excuse me; private joke.

  I WAS BORN, not that it has anything to do with anything, in Wales, in a small town whose name my father could pronounce but I could never get my tongue around; we left there when I was five and moved to Ireland; three years there, then two in New Zealand, then back to Wales (north not south this time) for another three years, then Birmingham till I was thirteen, then Canada for eighteen months, a year in Melbourne, then Leeds until I was eighteen; three years at university in Durham, and then I moved to London, where I’ve been ever since. All this shifting around has left its mark on me. People who hear me for the first time assume I’m South African. The next time, they revise that and guess I was raised in Jamaica. The third time, curiosity gets the better of good manners and they ask me, where are you from? I resent this question, so sometimes I say Pitcairn or the Falklands, depending on whether I give a damn; the rest of the time, I explain that it’s a long story, and do my best to cut it short.

  Where am I from? My father was born in India, the son of a Scottish administrator who stayed on for a while after Independence and a French mother (from Bayonne; she was more Basque than French). Dad came back to England when he was nine, grew up in Bristol, Norwich and Liverpool, studied at Cambridge, got his first tenured post in Reading. My mother was considerably younger than him, the sister of one of his students at Keele; she was Greek on her mother’s side and her father was Armenian, but she was brought up in Kent and spoke flawless BBC English, which she learned at drama school. Where am I from? I’m from my father mostly, because my mother left us in Birmingham, or was it Toronto? There was no divorce; she left me along with most of her clothes and some of her books. The last I heard she was in North Carolina, but that was some time ago. To conclude; if people can be said to have roots, I was raised hydroponically. When I was fourteen my father told me, you can be whatever you want to be. I suspect I shouldn’t have taken him quite so literally, but there you are.

  SO THERE YOU have it. What do I do for a living? I’m a shape-shifter. Not a lot of us about – ever so many frauds, charlatans, imposters pretending to be genuine shape-shifters, but they cheat, they do it with makeup and costumes and crepe hair and God only knows what shameless deceptions. I’m the real thing. Really really real, for as long as I want to be. My blood group changes, for crying out loud; you can take a DNA sample from me, and it’ll be Him, the other guy, not me.

  There are limits, naturally. I can do women, but only very superficially; shoot x-rays into me and you’ll see male organs in there instead of female (that actually happened once; not my finest hour; awful mess; very nearly gave the clients their money back). I can’t do animals or inanimate objects. But, within those parameters, I can be anyone you want me to be, provided you have the money, and my charges are sensible going on ridiculously cheap, in context. Even so, I’ve reached the point where I only work when I want to or when I’ve got to, because I’ve spent all the money. That takes some doing, but I manage it, somehow. Not sure how, because my tastes are plain verging on Spartan, and if you look round this place you’d be hard put to it to find any things, any stuff, to show for the millions (literally) that have passed through my hands over the last five years. I could’ve been a serious diamond collector, I could’ve afforded it; or Old Master paintings, or medieval armour, or anything I damned well chose; or I could own streets of houses and a vast portfolio of stocks and shares. Never got round to any of that, never wanted to. Why be a rich man when I can be anyone I want? I could be Mr Gates or Mr Getty – walk into their bank, pass the retina scans and the fingerprint tests. Fortunately for them, I’m too scared to steal. Nobody could prove anything, needless to say, but you don’t need proof to put two and two together, and if you steal from the rich, you might find yourself encountering retribution outside the usual forms and the prescribed due process. Mostly, though, money just doesn’t interest me, in the same way fish aren’t obsessively fascinated by water. My idea of a really good meal is a cheeseburger and fries.

  MY AGENT CALLED me.

  “It’s a piece of cake,” she said. “Ten minutes of your time, and no heavy lifting. Of course, I said you’d do it.”

  I’m attuned to her tone of voice, like a dog with its master. She was too cheerful. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. It’s the perfect job.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  She sighed down the phone at me. “Sometimes I despair of you,” she said. “I line you up a job that pays the price of a pair of quality shoes per second, and all you can do is moan at me. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be sleeping in a cardboard box in shop doorways.”

  “What’s wrong –?”

  “All right.” She always gets bad-tempered when she’s making me do something dangerous or horrible. “Look, there’s no risk to you, none whatsoever. Even a total wuss like you would be hard to find anything to be scared of.”

  I find silence is the best response sometimes.

  “There is a slight, very slight trace element of illegality,” she went on, after a pause. “Not, it goes without saying, on your part. All you need to do is stand in a certain place at a certain time, where a certain camera can get a good clear shot of you.”

  Fine. Standing next to some form of event horizon that would be irrefutable proof in court; something with the date and time on it, in an instantly recognisable place a very long way away from where the actual crime was committed. Fine.

  “I told you,” I said. “I’m through with alibi work.”

  “For crying out loud.” She only shouts at me when she’s indefensibly in the wrong. “I don’t know what’s got into you lately, I really don’t. Here’s a perfectly good job I’ve worked really hard to get for you, paying really good money, and you turn round and spit in my face. You know your trouble? You’re just so bloody ungrateful.”

  I made no comment. Just because something’s true doesn’t make it relevant.

  “I mean, what is your problem with alibi jobs? Is it because they’re dishonest? Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but your entire career is founded on –”

  “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  She fetched up a sigh from the very deepest cellar. It was wreathed in cobwebs and she’d been saving it for a special occasion. “We’ve been through this,” she said. “No court will ever convict you, because no court will ever recognise the existence of magic. I thought that was –”

  “Don’t call it that.”

  Silly of me, to expose a weakness. But there you go. I’m scared of what I can do, and I really don’t like thinking about it. Words like, well, the M word remind me of the appalling truth; I can do this stuff, but I don’t know how it works.

  “I do apologise if I offended your delicate sensibilities, you total fucking primadonna. The fact, however, remains –”

  “It’s not just having my picture taken, is it?”

  A shot in the dark, but a clean hit. “Fine,” she snapped. “You’re also required to blow your nose. And that’s it. That’s absolutely everything, you have my word.”

  I smiled. It was my idea, originally, back when alibi stuff was still exciting and new. You blow your nose in a paper tissue, which you stuff in a crack in the wall, or down between two dustbins, whatever, some hidden place that’s dry and where the garbage men won’t look. The CCTV captures you doing it. The investigators go along, retrieve the tissue, analyse the dried snot and provide irrefutable DNA evidence to corroborate the cam
era. Any suggestion that the man in the picture is someone else in a false beard is stillborn. For a while, I ran a series of variations on the same theme, so as not to repeat myself – traces of blood from a paper cut, spit on a styrofoam cup, and once I pissed against a wall in broad daylight, for my art. Now I can no longer be bothered. Let prosecutors notice the conspicuous coincidences. They still can’t prove anything.

  Anyway, I was tired of arguing. “Just this once, then,” I said. “But this is the last time. I mean it.”

  “Good boy.” I wish she wouldn’t say that. “I’ll send you the stuff. Got to go. Bye.”

  IT WAS MY wife who suggested we move here. She saw the To Let board and fell in love.

  Back then, of course, I was still working for the polystyrene people, and my principal concern – it seems utterly absurd to me now – was money. We can’t possibly afford it, I told her. She was slightly deaf in both ears, I fancy, because at times she didn’t seem to hear what I said to her. We signed the lease and moved in.

  The name, Irongrove Lodge, gave me pause. Now there’s a kind of tree in the Tropics called Ironwood – it’s mentioned in Robinson Crusoe, which is all I know about it – and if there’s a tree, presumably it can grow in groves, though probably not in our climate. Even so. Counter-intuitive; iron, like money, doesn’t grow on trees. Why it should bug me I don’t know, but it did. Later, Googling aimlessly in the room, I discovered that in the fifteenth century this district was called Eyrengrove; eyren being Kentish dialect for eggs. For some stupid reason, that made me feel a whole lot better.

  The back room, she decided, would be absolutely perfect. There was that enormous window, with all the light she could possibly want, and plenty of space, so she could spread out when she was working. I could see her point there. Before we came here, she was having to work in a tiny little cooped-up box, and she wasn’t by nature a tidy person. She’d put a brush down for a split second and never see it again. Hear it, maybe, as it splintered under her foot. And she so loved doing big canvases – life-size or bigger; she once did a study of a hand, ten feet by eight. Very good it was, too; the fingernail of the little finger was bigger than my head.

  The other rooms didn’t seem to interest her particularly. We dumped our stuff in boxes, swearing a solemn vow to unpack as soon as we had five minutes. Most of those boxes are still where we first dumped them, their brown tape unspoilt. I decided (unilaterally) that if she was going to have a room all to herself, I wanted one too; so I moved all my stuff in here.

  I think they used to call them box-rooms; for storing boxes, presumably. Ironic, since we’d turned the whole place into a box-room, and the only serious unpacking – taking stuff out of boxes – got done in here; it’s the only actual box-free space on the premises. Anyhow, I set up my computer and put in some defiantly asymmetrical shelves for my books and DVDs. I imprinted my personality on the space –

  Excuse me. Something must’ve gone down the wrong way.

  Imprinted my personality, such as it is, on the space, to differentiate it from the rest of the infinite and probably curved universe; everything bounded by these walls, that floor and that ceiling is me, mine, my achievement, my fault. Pathetic, really; a table, a chair, a computer and a bit of data storage. Not even any pictures. Still; when you live with a dominant personality like my wife, you need some place of your own, a shell you can crawl back into; like the caches of weapons that freedom fighters bury in forests, just in case the newly-brokered peace doesn’t work out.

  She had everything else. Say what you like about her, she had a flair for décor. I think that was the Italian side of her coming out, while the Austrian half of her genetic mix expressed itself in swift and efficient organisation. Even now, the walls and the floors bear witness to her taste and eye for colour; she indelibly shaped her environment, like a beaver or a herd of elephants. It means – probably I’m being fanciful, the sympathetic fallacy I think it’s called – that’s she’s still in here somewhere, digested but nevertheless present. Unlike other living organisms, this house consumes but doesn’t, so far as I know, excrete. Makes you wonder what it does with it all.

  A FOOTNOTE ABOUT the polystyrene people.

  Calling them that was my idea of a little joke, back when I still had something approximating to a sense of humour. Insofar as it was funny, it was funny because it contained a grain or scintilla of truth. The organisation I worked for, as a lowly accountant, dealt in extruded polystyrene. They didn’t actually make anything, that was all done in the Far East, or sell anything, or design things in any real sense. People who wanted large quantities of polystyrene artefacts contacted them, and they arranged for the things to be made and delivered. I think it was probably all perfectly valid, and all I ever had to do was play games with numbers. The silly thing was that although I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to be doing – nobody ever felt the need to explain exactly how my efforts dovetailed with those of my colleagues to produce the company’s boisterous prosperity – apparently I did it very well, because I kept being promoted and paid more money and given more work to do. Not that I cared. Back then I cared about very little, apart from my wife and a few favourite books.

  I DON’T REALLY do poetry, but I remember a line I heard on the car radio or somewhere: one little room an everywhere. Neat, I remember thinking, because I’ve got a room like that. A little room, but everywhere, as far as I’m concerned. Which set me thinking about issues of scale; bounded in a nutshell and king of infinite space, which is more poetry – that’s a leftover from school, about the only thing I learned. My line of reasoning was: everything I am will fit into this tiny little box-room, so does that make me a sort of spiritual amoeba or am I an amazingly pared-down, simplified, utterly-essentials-only sort of a guy, the essence of concentrated human? Mind you, it was probably just a reaction to Herself covering every available surface in the greater Venn diagram with blue-and-white vases and scatter cushions.

  MY AGENT SENDS me the details of each job in A4 brown manila envelopes, recorded delivery, addressed to Messrs Scanlon and James, solicitors. Why she does this I have no idea.

  Leaving aside for one moment Hieronymus Bosch and some of the more disturbed Goyas, I’m no oil painting; this I freely admit. I became reconciled to my appearance many years ago and it no longer bothers me. Sometimes, though (and this was just such an occasion) I’m required to turn into someone who makes my skin crawl.

  The man in the envelope wasn’t hideously maimed or deformed, no leprosy, burns or ghastly blemishes, just a singularly unfortunate juxtaposition of ill-proportioned features. I read in a book once that exhaustive scientific tests have shown that the difference between beauty and ugliness is often as little as a quarter of an inch – meaning, take your stunning beauty and move the mouth a quarter inch up, or make the nose a quarter inch shorter, and you get something that’ll give you nightmares. By the same token, shift the features of the ugly face by the same margin and you get ravishing beauty. That’s all there is in it, between gorgeous and horrible, between a life of adulation and worship and the stinging misery of being rejected by everybody at first sight, before you’ve said a word or done a thing. A quarter inch – 0.25” or 6.35mm if you’re metric. The man in the photograph had done especially badly in that particular lottery. Nobody could ever possibly like him, except for his beautiful soul or his generous nature (and I guessed that, if he needed a professional alibi and could afford to pay for the best, he didn’t have either of those), and it was going to be my job to be him, if only for a short time. What joy. I didn’t even have the satisfaction that an actor would get from being Richard the Third, because the whole point of the exercise was that the audience wasn’t supposed to notice the quality of the performance.

  The man, we’ll call the fusion of him and me ‘the man’ for the time being, went to where he was supposed to go to, catching the bus as far as the tube station and the tube as far as Ealing Broadway, then footslogging it the remaining fiv
e hundred yards or so to the designated place, which was a narrow alley between two commercial premises. The man turned and looked up at the CCTV camera, because in spite of his claims to being a professional, sometimes he can’t resist hamming it up, then blew his nose and stuffed the paper tissue into the narrow gap between a skip full of trash plasterboard and the wall. Then he walked on, quickening his step slightly, wanting to be somewhere else.

  Now let’s stop calling him ‘the man’, because I find it awkward and annoying. I was on my way out, and I slowed down just a bit to let someone walk past me. I barely noticed him, because you don’t; he was a big man, broad, in a dark coat with a black bobble-hat. He was in a hurry, taking up rather more of the available space than was his due; to avoid a collision, I flattened myself somewhat against the wall, making myself smaller and narrower to accommodate him. As he passed me, he opened his right hand, and a knife slid down his sleeve into his palm. He closed his fingers round the handle, then stuck the knife in me. After that I think he kept on going; I can’t say for sure, because I wasn’t paying attention.

  In case anything of the sort ever happens to you, here’s what’s likely to run through your mind.

  The first, main and overriding thing will be surprise. Did that just happen, you’ll ask yourself, and only the sight of the big spreading red stain on your shirtfront will convince you that something so amazingly improbable has just taken place. Don’t worry about pain, because there won’t really be any that you’ll notice, but straight away you’ll feel weak and shivery, like a really bad cold. You’ll also be asking yourself, in a remarkably objective, dispassionate way: how bad is it? You’ll argue that you’re alive and you don’t feel all that different, so maybe it’s not so bad after all, particularly if you have reasons of your own for not wanting to explain yourself to officials, such as doctors and nurses in a hospital, or the police. How’d it be if I just went home and put a plaster on it, you say to yourself. But the huge red stain reminds you that this is probably different from all the nasty little cuts and scrapes you’ve sustained over the years. At this point, you’ll probably still be standing exactly where you were when you got hit, confused to a standstill, bewildered. And then, I’m guessing, you’ll pull out your phone and call an ambulance. I didn’t, for the reasons stated above. No, I pulled my coat tight shut, so I couldn’t see the red mess – ostrich thinking – and told myself that even when it started seeping through, it wouldn’t show on the dark coat, and if I couldn’t see it, it couldn’t really be important. Not important enough to warrant all that aggravation, anyway. Instead, I turned round and started to walk back the way I’d come, towards the tube station.