And that shows just how wrong you can be. I got about seventy-five yards, then my legs folded up and I hit the ground. It was like being drunk, except I knew I wasn’t.
The thought that I might die was now definitely inside my head, taking its seat at the committee table. To be precise, I thought: well, I might die, and that’d be a way out of this mess with no further fuss or bother. But maybe I won’t, and I’ll lie here until some bastard good Samaritan trips over me and calls for help, and I’ll wake up in hospital with curious faces peering down at me, asking who are you, what were you doing there, why would someone want to kill you, where do you live, who are you really? Now that genuinely scared me, enough to get me back on my feet – breathing was a real nuisance at this stage, I seemed to have forgotten how to do it and had to keep reinventing the technique from first principles – and out onto the main street, where there were people and traffic.
The people, bless them, assumed I was drunk, stoned or crazy. I kept my coat tight around me. I saw a taxi and hailed it. The driver said, that’s a long way. I think he subscribed to the drunk-stoned-crazy hypothesis. I managed to get my wallet out of my coat pocket and handed him a random collection of banknotes, enough to make a papier-mâché coffee-table. On the drive home, I concentrated on keeping absolutely, perfectly still, as though if I were to move at all, I’d fall to bits all over the seat.
One loses track of time in these situations. It felt like it took me a whole day to get up the stairs and into the room, though I can’t remember anything about it apart from a general feeling of everything being far more effort than it was worth. I remember, I tried to shut the front door behind me, failed – it swung to, but the latch didn’t engage – and thought, Oh well, never mind. I fell against the door of the room and pressed down on the handle. The door opened, I stumbled in. A controlled collapse landed me in the chair. I distinctly recall thinking, as sleep rushed up all round me, that what I’d really just done was waste a magnificent opportunity, and that I was a stupid bloody fool.
MY WIFE SOLD quite a few paintings, portraits mostly, but she never got anything like the recognition she deserved. People admired her work tremendously but didn’t actually like it very much. I can understand that. I felt that way about it myself, to be honest. It was clever, witty, beautifully executed, technically accomplished and really very profound, but you wouldn’t want it on a wall, where you’d have to keep seeing it all the time. I don’t think she liked it much either – loved it but didn’t like it, like some parents and their kids – because she never hung any of it on her walls. Completed canvases were stacked neatly, painted side inwards, in the spare bedroom; the word that kept slipping into my mind was introspection, so many faces, so many brilliantly executed eyes staring into the masonry. Actually, what unnerves me about portraits is that they don’t blink. There’s a story about some Roman general who was captured and tortured to death in the desert. The nastiest thing they could think of to do to him was lie him on his back and cut off his eyelids, so that he had no option but to stare up at the cruel bright sky. A portrait does just the same, and if you turn its face to the wall – well. Asking for trouble.
Usually she worked from photographs, which she projected onto the living-room wall, which she’d painted a glaring white for that purpose. You’d come in and find the room dark except for a brilliant pool of light where she was sitting, and this stranger’s face, vastly amplified, apparently holding up one side of the building. She was deeply interested in faces; she reckoned she could read them (as the saying goes, only it barely scratches the surface) like a book. She said she could follow a person’s face the same way you follow a piece of orchestral music, picking out the various instrumental lines, soaking up information from the contours. Sometimes, for a laugh, I’d give her a picture of someone I knew and she didn’t and ask her to tell me all about them. She was actually very good at it. Not just aspects of character, which you might expect, but actual concrete data – what they did for a living, where they were from, even stuff like what’s his favourite drink or where would she like to go on holiday. Rather unnerving, sometimes. I accused her of cheating, but she just laughed. How would I know anything about your friends, she’d say, when I can’t stand any of them?
You spend too much time in here, I used to say to her, you ought to get out more. She laughed at me. I like it here, she said. One little room an everywhere – now I come to think of it, that’s where I know that quotation from. I seem to recall I just shrugged; suit yourself, so long as you’re happy. I do believe that deep down she was genuinely fond of me, insofar as she was ever fond of anybody. She told me when we first started going out together that I had a really interesting face. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I’ve always hated the way I look. Not handsome, she hastened to qualify, not in the least; but interesting, full of character. And quite often I’d catch sight of her gazing at me when she thought I wasn’t looking. Not that sort of gaze. More like someone taking in a landscape, figuring it out – if that’s the Blackdown Hills over there, then that over there must be Taunton. I imagine a lot of people would’ve found it irritating, but I didn’t mind at all. I didn’t feel like I was being exploited, or drained – old joke, about the man who was so greedy, when he finished reading a book, all the pages were blank. She was content to look without taking anything away. And what the hell; I’d never been interesting to anyone before.
I WOKE UP in the room with a dark red shirt front just starting to go stiff, feeling a bit cold and a bit hungry. My first thought was, am I dead? I didn’t think so, but how the hell would you know?
A few simple tests proved to my satisfaction that I could still feel a pinch on the back of my hand, and I could lift small objects. Cool. I unbuttoned my shirt – difficult, because the blood had soaked into the fibres; blood contains collagen, which is the basis of a wide variety of commonly-used glues – and peered at my skin. There was a big crusty scab, and the area around it was slightly pink, suggesting a very mild inflammation. The thing of it was, as a rule I don’t heal quickly. The scab looked about ten days old. Generally, I felt fine.
Thank you, room, I said. My instinct had proved well-founded; get back to the room, at all costs, it’ll look after you, better than any damnfool hospital. As an afterthought, I glanced in the mirror. I was me again. I considered the hypothesis that he’d died, but at the moment of his death he sort of sloughed off, like a snakeskin, leaving me more or less pristine underneath. A bit far-fetched, I decided, and anyhow, I’m not obliged to submit scientific research papers on every aspect and incident of my life. Screw it, I thought. Rather more interesting was why someone had deliberately tried to kill me.
Ah well, good question. Maybe he simply didn’t like my face.
Perfectly understandable if he didn’t. I don’t either. But as I weighed that one on the balance of probabilities, I decided to reject it. Not that sort of attack; too slick and sly for a random crazy man, though what do I know about the moduses operandi of crazy people? Even so. The evidence seemed to suggest that it had been a specific attempt to get rid of me, me personally, him personally – entirely plausible, from what I’d managed to gather about him, he did seem to be the sort of man other people might be glad to see the back of. If so, that raised the interesting question of how the assassin knew he’d, I’d, we’d be there at that time in that place. Ruling out an incredibly lucky guess, it had to be because someone had told him I’d be there.
Objections. He could have been tracking his victim and followed him there. No, on two counts. One, he came from the opposite direction, not behind. Two, I wasn’t that man, therefore how would he have known to follow me?
So; some evil person had told him I’d be at place X at time Y. Except, of course, that that made no sense. I was there, but he wasn’t. An alibi job, remember? The whole point was, at that time, he was somewhere very much else, probably up to no good whatsoever. Meanwhile, the only people who knew I’d be at place X at time Y
were me, my agent, and the man himself and/or his people, who’d set up the alibi –
Revised hypothesis: it wasn’t him that someone wanted killed. It was me. Real me.
But that’s silly; I have no enemies, just as I have no friends. It must take an awful lot of time, money and aggravation to arrange to have someone killed; try as I might, I couldn’t think of anybody who might find me that interesting –
Find me that much of a threat, or hate me to such an extent. Therefore it made no sense. All right, here’s a remote possibility. Some of the people I work for entrust me with confidential secrets, if only by implication. All alibi work, for example, implies that I know the alibi is false. I could just conceivably go to the authorities and say, he wasn’t there at that time, it was me, pretending. Only, who’d believe me? How did you do it? I shape-shifted. Besides, there’s also the corroboration of the DNA evidence. Consequently, I’m no threat to anyone (that’s a major plank of my business pitch, of course); consequently, why court disaster by plotting to have me killed, when there’s absolutely no need?
WHEN IT WAS unavoidably clear that she wasn’t coming back, I redecorated. In particular, I slapped three coats of mustard yellow emulsion on her plain white wall, the one she used as a screen for her projections.
She wouldn’t have cared for mustard yellow, not one bit. Maybe I did it to spite her, for not being there any more. She always was incredibly particular about colour. I never knew anybody who could obsess like her over delicately differentiated shades of nearly-white. Magnolia, barleycorn, apricot, buttermilk – for crying out loud, I’d tell her, there’s white and there’s off-white, and that’s it. She laughed, of course.
I also papered the bedroom with good old-fashioned woodchip (I can’t hang patterns to save my life) and got rid of twelve black plastic bags full of scatter cushions; that was as far as I could bring myself to go, in terms of erasing her identity from my environment. Some people are easy to wipe off the walls and scrub out of the carpet; others linger, no matter what you do. I actually considered moving – I hadn’t found out about the room at that point, of course – but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Besides (the excuse I made to myself?) there would have been all sorts of legal complications, since we were joint owners; I’d have needed her signature on the transfer paperwork, or else I’d have had to prove her legally dead, which of course I couldn’t do. So I contented myself with a little token vandalism, and left it at that.
What to do, meanwhile, with all the damn paintings? The simple truth was that I couldn’t bear to touch them, let alone move them, throw them out, give them away. I left them, faces still to the wall, and turned the key on the spare bedroom. I never have guests anyhow, so what did it matter? A case of accessing my inner Miss Haversham. The hell with it.
NEEDLESS TO SAY, I phoned my agent.
“No,” she said, “you’re wrong. You must be.”
She says things like that. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I was there. I saw everything. This man tried to kill me.”
“No,” she repeated. “No, either it was an accident or he was some kind of lunatic. You probably don’t remember it clearly. Fair enough. It must have been an awful shock.”
There is absolutely no point in losing my temper with her, just as there’s no point spitting at the incoming tide. “Trust me,” I said. “I was perfectly lucid and aware throughout the whole experience, and I remember it all with perfect clarity. He pushed past me and stuck me with a knife.”
“Impossible,” she said, so decisively that I was sorely tempted to agree with her. “For one thing, you’d be dead by now. Or in intensive care, at the very least.”
Here I was on shakier ground. “Miraculously it was just a flesh wound,” I said. “But that doesn’t alter the fact –”
“Are you sure he wasn’t wearing a spiky belt-buckle or something like that? You can get a nasty graze that way.”
I gave up. “Did we get the money?”
“Of course.” She sounded deeply wounded. “It’ll be in your bank Monday. Why? You’re not broke again already, are you?”
I didn’t hear that, did I? “I’m taking the next two weeks off,” I told her, “so don’t book me in for anything, all right?”
“Two weeks? What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”
“I need a rest.”
“Don’t be so bloody ridiculous.” That’s her, all over. “You don’t need a rest, you hardly do anything at all. What do you need a rest for?”
True, she gets fifteen per cent; and fifteen per cent of what I can earn in a good fortnight is not to be sneezed at. Even so. “Two weeks,” I said. “I haven’t had a break in five years. I think I’m entitled.”
Brief silence. Then, “What the hell will you find to do with yourself for two weeks? You’ll be bored stiff.”
“Listen,” I said. “I’ve just had a near-death experience. My nerves are totally shot. Two weeks minimum, and then I may consider going back to work at some point in the future. And that’s final. Do you understand me?”
“Ten days.”
“Fine.”
You have to be firm with her, the way an old, rotten gate is firm with two tons of angry bull.
YOU CAN BE, my father told me once, whatever you want to be. Which was a laugh, coming from him.
When he was fifteen, he did something really clever. He disproved a famous mathematical theorem. It was so famous that they taught it in schools; not quite as famous as the square on the hypotenuse, but definitely an A-lister. For homework one day, he was told to prove the theorem, meaning redo all the sums, recreate the experiment, if you arrive at the universally accepted answer, you get full marks. Well, he did that. Then, being a methodical sort of person, he went back over it and did it again, just to make sure. This time, the answer came out wrong. So he did it a third time, and a fourth, fifth, sixth, until he realised, was left with no choice but to accept, that he’d made the mistake the first time, and attempts two through six were the valid ones.
So he handed in his homework – version one – and he paperclipped a fair copy of version two to his exercise book, with a request to have explained to him where he’d gone wrong. As luck would have it, his teacher was a fair-minded man, a genuine enthusiast for his subject. He also had various friends, rather more brilliant than he was, at several leading universities. The teacher was wise enough not to tell them, when he sent them the calculations, that they were the work of a fifteen year old kid. The friends passed them on to their friends, who passed them on to the editors of a leading journal. By the time my father’s age and identity leaked out, there was a copy of his work on the desk of the chairman of the Nobel judges.
He didn’t win – not that time – but he was published, and catapulted straight from school into a scholarship at Cambridge; Reading snapped him up as soon as he graduated, and that was more or less that. The question what do you want to do when you grow up was never asked or answered; engine driver, fighter pilot, professional backgammon player, chartered surveyor – there was never any question in anyone’s mind. This kid is going to be a professor of advanced pure mathematics. He could do it, therefore he was going to do it. Straightforward as that.
Now my father probably could have been anything he wanted. He was smart, I think we’ve established that; also, he was a big, tall man, strong as an ox, very practical, mechanically minded, good with his hands – never paid a penny to a garage, always fixed his own car; played the harpsichord to concert standard; spoke five languages fluently, three others well enough to get by; followed both horse-racing and the stock market, purely out of academic interest, kept notebooks recording notional bets and investments, whereby he could prove that if he’d gambled a trivial sum when he was thirty, he’d have been a multi-millionaire at thirty-five (but he never placed a bet or bought a share, ever). Loved amateur dramatics, got offered a part in a film once, by a friend of a friend who was in pictures. I have no doubt that if he’d done it, he’d have
been a star. And another friend of his kept asking his advice about this idiotic scheme for a business venture, was still asking for and following my dad’s advice when the business was quoted on the New York Stock Exchange. And all this time, what did he do? He did maths and taught adolescents, and made just enough money so that money was never a terribly serious problem.
Actually, he did more than that. For twenty years, he worked on a theorem of his own, and proved it, and that’s when he got to shake the hand of the King of Norway. I think it was all he’d ever wanted, and I was so proud of him that day. Three years later, some bastard student in India disproved it; shot it down in flames, the way Dad had done to some other poor devil forty years earlier. And Dad, not the mildest of men and blessed with something of a temper, took it on the chin, meek as a lamb to the slaughter, because the Indian was right. I remember saying to him: what’s that got to do with anything? And he just looked at me, and I knew I was of no further use or interest to him.
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