Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  At that time there was no mirror in the room. I didn’t need one. After all, I’d always known what I look like and didn’t really see any need to be reminded. Part of my routine during the seven days of creation was to switch the computer on every three hours, to check the news on the BBC website, which I hate and distrust, but there’s no special merit in being told bad news by a friend. I’m guessing that on day seven I neglected to switch it off again. I was neglecting pretty much everything by that stage, including food and drink and, I’m ashamed to say, geographic relocation in connection with basic bodily functions. But around day seven, my chin started to itch, and that annoyed me, and I really couldn’t stand being annoyed. If need had been, I think I’d have cut my head off to stop that itch, but as it turned out I didn’t have to go to any such extreme. I knew from experience that if I shaved, the itch (caused by seven days growth of stubble; a coincidence that it carries on growing after you’re dead? I don’t think so) would go away.

  But I had no razor in the room, and no mirror, and the thought of getting up and actually leaving the room was frankly laughable. I remembered that I was a human being, resourceful and adaptable, Homo Faber, man the tool-maker. I looked around for something to improvise with.

  I found a penknife, which I didn’t remember ever acquiring or owning. It was too blunt to shave with, but I stropped it up real good on the rim of a glass and the sole of a shoe, until it sliced hairs off the back of my hand with perfect ease. I tried shaving blind, gave it up almost immediately, when I nicked myself and my hand came up all over blood. So I needed a mirror. I have a cheap webcam thing, it came with the PC, I’d never used it, but I rigged it up and balanced it precariously on the top of the monitor. My face appeared on the screen.

  A face, at any rate. I hadn’t realised the extent to which I’d let myself go, and it shocked me rather. I was this hairy, sunken-eyed mess. If I hadn’t known it was me, I wouldn’t have recognised him.

  Hint for you. If you ever need to shave dry, use spit as a lube. It works surprisingly well.

  So I shaved; and it sounds silly, but after such a long time sitting still, not eating, the effort wore me out and I nodded off. I hadn’t slept so you’d notice for the last week. I had a dream.

  I DON’T REMEMBER my dreams. I wake up conscious of having been part of a vivid and complex narrative, but I can’t recall a damn thing about it. I guess that’s what Alzheimer’s must feel like, and I hope to God I never get it. This dream, however, I remember very well to this day, so maybe it wasn’t a dream at all.

  I was in the room, but it was much bigger, huge. It was a portrait gallery, such as you might find in a stately home. It was very long (in at least two directions, cruciform or star-shaped) and the walls were covered in pictures, all of them faces, painted by my wife. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and the man I was talking to said that the stuff on display was only a fraction of what they had in store, but wall-space was limited and so they’d chosen the most representative examples of the various phases of her career. We walked up and down, admiring the pictures, and I expressed mild disappointment that there wasn’t one of me. She’d seen fit to paint every other man on the planet (no women) but not her own husband, who she professed to care for.

  The man I was talking to was highly amused by that. “She couldn’t paint you,” he said, “obviously.” It wasn’t obvious to me at all, but I let it ride, not wishing to show my ignorance.

  “You’ll notice,” he said, “that none of these paintings is on canvas.”

  That was silly, because she always painted on canvas. She sized them and left them to dry or cure or whatever the word is, stacked face-inwards against the walls, and then she painted on them. I pointed this out. He didn’t contradict me, but pointed; and I saw that the frames were in fact glued directly to the plaster, and the paintings were on the wall itself.

  “We call it fresco,” he explained, “painting direct onto fresh plaster. It’s a very old technique. The earliest frescoes were found in the palace of Cnossus, in Crete, about 2000 BC.”

  “I know,” I told him.

  “Of course. They’d been painted over, of course, which preserved them, ironically. Some fool with the urge to redecorate.”

  That made me laugh. “Who are all these people?” I asked him.

  He gave me a look that suggested that I’d asked a very odd question. “That depends,” he said.

  He was starting to annoy me, like the seven-day beard. “There ought to be names under the pictures,” I said. “I mean, what’s the good of a portrait if you don’t know who it’s meant to be?”

  I was annoying him, too. “Just who the hell do you think you are?” he said, and I woke up.

  AND AS SOON as I opened my eyes, I knew.

  I knew also that it was possible to know, if you follow me, because that’s exactly what happened to my father. He told me about it; the day, the split second when his theory suddenly exploded into being in his mind; the Big Bang, he called it, the instant of creation. Suddenly, he said, there was this fact, this chunk of knowledge, in his head, that hadn’t been there before. He knew the truth, about insides, outsides and the third space in the middle. Which wasn’t to say that he could explain it, understand it or account for it in any way that would make anybody else accept what he was saying. He knew in the same way as St Paul knew about God on the road to Damascus. He believed. Everything that came after that was him trying to figure out why he believed, and it took him twenty years. But his faith never wavered, until that damned Indian came along.

  So, I knew. I believed. I believed that the room had some inexplicable virtue or power. Inside the room I could be, as Dad always maintained, anyone I wanted to be. I could, in other words, shape-shift at will.

  It would be the room doing it, though I had reason to believe that the transformation would hold good even outside the room, in the elsewhere beyond everywhere (because one little room is also everywhere; see above, passim) – in which case this effect might be of practical and even commercial use, rather than just a metaphysical curiosity.

  I knew all this without knowing how or why, but that was all right, I knew, because great scientific discoveries start off that way. Accordingly I wasn’t particularly fussed about knowing the how or why. I think that from time to time a great fundamental truth of this sort reveals itself to someone who isn’t a Newton or an Einstein, someone who’s too thick or idle to do all the twenty years’ hard figuring it all out, and who therefore just accepts and moves on. When you know something, why argue? It’s like arguing with the fact that the Earth moves round the Sun. It just does.

  Ah, belief. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. Needless to say, I had to try it out straight away. I thought of somebody at random, the first face that came into my head, the man who kept the newsagents on the corner of the street. I looked into the computer, but it had blown a fuse or gone to sleep, so I left the room – it felt quite easy and natural – and went into the hall and looked in the mirror. The face that looked back at me was not mine.

  I was feeling light-headed, exhilarated, and ridiculously cheerful. I ran down the stairs out into the street, and as luck would have it, met the postman. Ideal. He would know.

  “Excuse me,” I asked him. “I seem to have lost my memory. Can you tell me who I am?”

  He looked at me. “You’re Mr Patel from the shop,” he said. “Are you feeling all right?”

  I gave him the biggest grin ever. “Of course,” I said. “It’s all come back to me now. Thank you ever so much.”

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when some new planet swims into his ken. Another one of Dad’s, and I could see why he was so fond of it. That moment of discovery, of knowing and believing; like that moment when you say for the first time, I love you, and she says for the first time, I love you too. Ridiculously elated and over the moon, bathed in sunshine, everything bright and crisp and perfectly clear, as you feel when you put on your fir
st pair of reading glasses. I can shape-shift. It’s possible, and I can do it. How amazing is that?

  IT WOULD BE the room doing it. Rather like the small print at the foot of the otherwise blank sheet of paper signed by Faust; terms and conditions apply.

  THE JOB SOUNDED distinctly weird, but then again, describe a normal-sounding job that involves shape-shifting. At least it wasn’t overtly criminal and didn’t seem to have anything to do with tax.

  Customer’s husband, my agent told me, had recently died, and she wanted a picture of him. But she was one of those damned picky people (and stupidly rich) so the picture had to be a portrait by Humphries, nobody else would possibly do, and Humphries doesn’t work from photographs, it has to be from life, from the actual person sitting in a chair in the studio. Alarm bells were ringing at this point, but then my agent quoted a certain sum of money, and I let them ring, like the telephone when you’re not in the mood to talk to anyone.

  Humphries needed a live Mr X, but Mr X was dead. What to do? Answer: look in the Yellow Pages under S. Or contact my agent, who’ll pass the message on. Less fifteen per cent.

  Humphries turned out to be female, a stout young woman who worked in a converted warehouse beside the river. I’d omitted to ask my agent whether she knew that I was actually dead, or whether she thought she was dealing with the real thing. I decided I wouldn’t raise the issue unless she did, and she didn’t. In fact, she seemed completely uninterested in me, except as a three-dimensional object. Sit there, don’t move, left a bit, no, I said left, there, hold it. Didn’t even offer me a coffee. No idea how much she was charging. I don’t actually like her stuff myself. Very clever, but no feeling, in my opinion.

  But she’d done film stars and Booker prize winners and the crown prince of Spain and the Pope, and it wasn’t my money, so I did as I was told and stayed put while she looked at me for rather a long time. Then she said, “This is going to be very difficult.”

  What exactly are you supposed to say to that? I went with, “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault. I just can’t seem to see you, that’s all.”

  Long silence, the sort where you end up feeling you’ve got to say something or you’ll die. “A girl I knew once” – I’d nearly said my wife – “was a portrait painter.”

  “Is that right.”

  “She never painted me, though.”

  “I’m not surprised.” She took a step back and sort of looked through me. “It’s no good,” she said. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know.” She pulled an angry, sad face. “I don’t think I’ve ever had this problem before,” she said. “God knows, I’ve done murderers and investment bankers and Columbian drug barons and footballers. But I can’t seem to see you.”

  “You said that before. What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she said irritably. “It’s just – well, I can’t make out a line. Like trying to draw mist.”

  Not my problem. But there was the embarrassment factor, not to mention the risk that I wouldn’t get paid. “Give it a go,” I said. “Paint what you see.”

  “I can’t see anything.” She sighed. “Look, I can’t explain, I’ll have to draw it.”

  She grabbed a block of paper and a stick of charcoal and did some quick sketching. Then she showed me what she’d done. “You see?” she said. “It doesn’t look anything like you. But it’s what I see.”

  She was wrong there, of course. It looked just like me. That was the point. In fact, it was a really good likeness, though I fancy she hadn’t quite caught the eyes. My wife always used to say I had difficult eyes.

  “I think I can see what you’re getting at,” I said.

  “Let’s just forget the whole thing,” she said. “Sorry, but it just isn’t going to work out. I look at you, but –”

  “No harm done,” I said quickly. I reached up and took the drawing from her. Evidence, potentially. “Actually, I rather like this,” I said, “whoever he is. Can I buy it from you?”

  She shrugged. “Keep it, I don’t want it,” she said, which was just as well, since I couldn’t have paid for it, not with one of his cheques, since he was dead, and I didn’t have a thick roll of cash on me. “Look, I really am sorry about this, it’s very unprofessional. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  “Not a problem,” I said firmly, lying. It was going to be a hell of a problem as soon as my agent heard about it. She dearly loves her fifteen per cent, so I’d have to smooth her ruffled feathers by making it up to her out of my own money, and there wasn’t very much of that at the moment.

  She was looking at the sketch. “It’s an interesting face,” she said.

  “That’s what –” Not my wife. “That’s what the girl I used to know said. When she wanted to draw someone.”

  “Quite.” She took another look at the sketch. “Still. To coin a phrase, no oil painting.”

  TERMS AND CONDITIONS apply. I cast a reflection in mirrors, which properly speaking I have no right to expect, and I show up in photographs. But not, apparently, portraits by incredibly talented artists.

  I took the sketch home and put it in the room, on the table beside the computer. The next day, of course, the paper was blank. Ah well.

  “I TOLD HER, we don’t do refunds, we’re not Marks and bloody Sparks. I said, you carried out your end of the bargain, you went there, as him, you were perfect. If the stupid woman couldn’t paint you, that’s her problem.”

  “You said that to a grieving widow.”

  “You should’ve heard what she said to me.”

  My agent is nothing if not robust when it comes to money and customer satisfaction. “So we got paid,” I said.

  “Of course. I do actually look out for your interests, you know.”

  I was ashamed of myself, but I did need the money rather badly at that moment. “I never doubted you for a moment,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Anyhow, let’s hope the next job won’t be such a bitch.”

  The next job. I felt tired. “Not another alibi,” I said. “I don’t want to do that sort of thing any more.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Yes, but this time I mean it. I don’t want to do any sort of work where I’m liable to end up killed. What we need is a better class of customer altogether.”

  Sigh. “Well, you needn’t have any worries on that score with this one. It’s about as edgy as tea in the vicarage garden.”

  “Good,” I said. “Well?”

  I’M NOT ENTIRELY sure how I came to have an agent. She called me one day, out of the blue.

  “Hi,” she said. “Is Roxy there, please?”

  That was a shock, because I didn’t know anybody else called my wife that, apart from me. I wouldn’t have thought so, because it always used to annoy her when I did it, until she got used to it.

  “I’m afraid not,” I said, and before I could start explaining, she interrupted. Typical, as I would come to discover.

  “Ah well. Can you pass on a message, please? It’s Ginger. Tell her I can’t make the seventeenth, OK?”

  My wife had never mentioned anybody called Ginger, but maybe she’d talked about her using her real name. Besides, I knew very little about her friends. Either I didn’t like them or they didn’t like me. I was tempted to agree and put the phone down, because I really didn’t want to have to explain, but doing that could have been interpreted as weird or suspicious rather than just idle and antisocial. “I can’t do that,” I said.

  “What?”

  I explained. It didn’t come out well. It was the first time I’d tried to put what had happened into words, and I hadn’t yet found any suitable phrases or formulas. I think I made it sound like she’d emigrated, or died, or got lost in the post, or she was away for a week, or she’d turned out to be a figment of my imagination. Remarkably, codename-Ginger seemed to get the gist of it. There was a long silence, and then she
said, “I’m so sorry.”

  What for? Not her fault. “That’s OK,” I said, a stupid remark if ever there was one, as it plainly wasn’t. I compounded it by saying, “Thank you for calling.” I have no idea what she made of that. Anyway, there was another long silence, and then she said, “There’s just one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “No, forget it. This really isn’t the time.”

  “No, it’s fine. What can I do for you?”

  Well, there was a book. A book of paintings; I couldn’t make out whether she meant an art book, printed by a publisher, or a sketchbook of drawings and watercolours. Regardless, I promised I’d look for it and call her back.

  “No, that’s fine,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

  Before I could object, she’d rung off. So I went and looked, and found nothing that answered the incredibly vague description. I had other things on my mind and forgot all about it until she called again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t seem to find it.” There was a long pause, the sort you have to fill, and I added, “If you like you can come over and look for yourself. After all, you know what you’re looking for and I don’t.”

  “Oh, but I really don’t want to impose.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, rather desperately. I wanted the conversation to be over and this idiotic obligation to pass from me. She said, are you sure, and I said, yes, I was sure, and she named a time later that day. I said I’d be there. Then I rang off and went back into the room; and once I was in there, I guess I must’ve lost track of time. That wouldn’t be unusual. In any event, when I came round or snapped out of it or whatever and happened to glance at my watch, I realised that it was long after the dratted woman was supposed to come round. I hadn’t heard a doorbell or a phone. I shuffled out of the room, and found a sheet of paper propped up against a vase of wilted flowers.