Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  I called, she’d written, but you were out. The door was open so I let myself in. I found the book; thanks. And if there’s anything I can do, call me. And next to the note was a business card: Fidelity Arrangement Services, and the address of a website.

  When or why I called up the website I don’t know, but it was weird enough to lodge in my mind; we can arrange practically anything without undue fuss or hassle. We don’t freak out easily, so if you have an insoluble problem or an impossible job or you want something that defies the laws of morality and physics, ask us. You’d be amazed et cetera.

  We don’t freak out easily; well, then. When I knew I was a shape-shifter, I called her up and told her.

  I’d expected a long silence. And then she said, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Another very long pause. “Normally I’d assume you’re crazy, only Roxie always said how prosaic and down to earth you are, not to mention your Dad being a Nobel physicist.”

  “Mathematician.”

  “Well, there you are. Tell you what. Prove it and I might be able to put some work your way.”

  I hadn’t been expecting that. “Prove it how?”

  “Let me think. All right, here goes. I’ll mail you a photograph, and a time and a place. Be there, as the man in the picture. If you convince me, we’re in business. How does that sound?”

  The envelope arrived by special delivery the next morning, addressed to Messrs Scanlon and James, solicitors. The man in the picture was just a man, the essence of nondescript; I guess she chose him because nondescript is the hardest kind to portray by disguises and makeup. The place was some bar, that same day, noon. I went there, hung around for half an hour; nobody spoke to me and I don’t think I saw a woman of any description. I gave up and came home. I was barely through the door when the phone rang.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” she said.

  “WELL?” I SAID.

  “It’s a piece of cake, really,” she said, in that buzzing voice that makes my teeth ache. “All you’ve got to do is –”

  ON THE TRAIN I fell asleep and had a dream. I don’t remember dreams, as I think I’ve mentioned, but I can remember this one. In it, I had captured my deadly enemy, and I tortured him to death. I had unlimited resources and full legal sanction. I wanted him to die, but only eventually, after I’d made him pay me back for everything that had ever gone wrong with my life. He was still alive – just – when I woke up, and saw the name of my destination through the window.

  FOR SOMEONE WHO’S moved about so much over the years, I have a fairly hazy notion of geography. For example, I tend to think of Kent as basically a southern district of London. The idea that there might be a lot of it, including areas not readily accessible by public transport, hadn’t crossed my mind.

  Trains and buses got me most of the way but in the end I had to walk, which isn’t something I like doing. I figure that in the hundred thousand years or so since we left the caves, we ought to have arranged matters so that we’re spared the indignity of doing something so primitive as reaching a specific destination by putting one foot in front of the other. I walked five miles, which is a very long way in unsuitable shoes on hard tarmac roads, with cars and lorries whipping past you every fifteen seconds. Still; the village, when I eventually got there, was chocolate-box pretty, with white weatherboarded cottages and some of those pointy towers that once had something to do with brewing beer. The house I was looking for wasn’t one of those. It was a nasty yellowbrick box in a landrape development that wasn’t even sequentially numbered; 42, 44, 46, 50, and I was after number 48, which turned out to be at the bottom of a cul-de-sac branching off the main drag and nestling between 17a and 17b. It didn’t have a number on the door, and the grass of the tiny scrap of lawn was nine inches high. All in all, I wasn’t sure I’d come to the right place.

  But I had. When the man opened the front door, all I could see behind him was piles of books. It looked as though he was on the point of moving house; I followed a narrow winding footpath of carpet between canyons of books until we reached French windows opening on a titchy little paved patio with a glorious view of a creosoted fence ten yards away. On it were two white plastic chairs. “Let’s go through into the garden,” the man said, “it’s a bit cramped in here.” He gave me a sheepish grin. “I’m a bit claustrophobic,” he said.

  He kept looking at me, and I reckon I got a small insight into what it must be like to be a beautiful woman. He kept looking at me just because of the way I looked, which I found strange and rather unnerving. Still, he’d paid a lot of money, or someone had on his behalf.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I know, I keep staring.” He was about fifty-five, a short, fat man with thinning hair and a TUC beard, very cheap clothes, carpet slippers and bad teeth. “I hope it’s not bothering you. It’s just –”

  “That’s fine,” I said, in a firm tone of voice that strongly suggested the opposite. “Understandable.”

  That made him smile. “You could say that. Look, can I get you some tea or something?”

  I shook my head. “Coffee,” I said. “Black.”

  Black coffee gives me a splitting headache; but I wasn’t me, of course. “Naturally,” he said, as though I’d just scored a bonus point. “He never drank anything but black coffee. But I expect you knew that already.”

  No, I didn’t; but I didn’t say so, because I don’t suppose he’d have believed me. He went away, twisting his trunk sideways with surprising suppleness and grace to squeeze himself between two towering piles of books without knocking them over, and came back a few minutes later with two mugs and a coffee-pot. It was superb coffee (I don’t like coffee), made with care by someone who understood. I smiled and thanked him, and for a moment he was lost for words.

  (“Piece of cake,” my agent had repeated. “The client is the world’s greatest authority on some towering genius or other, and he’s desperate to meet him.”

  “So?”

  “He’s dead. The genius, I mean. Which is where you come in.”)

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling himself together with a visible effort. “Only, for a moment there, I could have sworn it was –”

  I grinned. “Him?”

  He nodded. I shrugged. Let’s hear it for non-verbal communication. “To all intents and purposes I am,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said, “you aren’t. You’re a quite remarkable replica. I’d heard about this... gift of yours. I won’t ask how you do it.”

  “Good.”

  “But obviously, you’re not him. I mean, you look like him, exactly like all the surviving photographs, and you’ve got that difficult South Austrian accent down to a T; and the patterns of speech, and all the recorded mannerisms – it really is a wonderful performance, and I congratulate you. But you’re not him, are you?”

  I felt deeply affronted, which was very strange. If I’d been me and felt that insulted, I’d have smashed his face in. But at that moment I was him, so I resolved to take a more cerebral and effective revenge. The worst thing you can do to a man, I knew, was prove him wrong. So that’s what I decided to do.

  “Let me see,” I said, slowly and quietly. “He, or rather I, was or am a mathematician. Yes?”

  “Yes. To put it mildly. Possibly the greatest –”

  I shut him up with a tiny gesture of my left hand. I wish I could do that. “I assume you’re a mathematician too.”

  He smiled. Modesty forbids, and all that.

  “Set me a problem,” I said. “One that only he could solve.”

  He looked at me for a long time, and I think he was scared of something. Then he stood up. “Wait there,” he said quietly, and went back into the house. He was gone for a long time. I amused myself by counting the bricks in the wall.

  “Try that,” he said, putting a sheet of paper and a pen down in front of me. I looked at it, and for a split second saw nothing but a jumbled mess of numbers and symbols. But it cleared, like dis
sipating mist, and I found myself confronted with a problem of such elegant awkwardness that I almost forgave him. There were obvious traps, I could cheerfully ignore them, but there were other, more subtle snares and devices that I was actually going to have to think about. I realised that thinking, in that manner, was my greatest pleasure. I picked up the pen and started thinking on paper, in numbers and symbols. I got lost and sidetracked a couple of times, wandering in a tangled jungle of entrancing images, and had to cut my way back to the true path. Eventually I reached the true answer, and wrote it down with a feeling of mild regret, because the experience was ended. I think it had taken me about fifteen seconds. I pushed the paper across to him and he went white as a sheet.

  “It’s not just skin deep,” I said gently, because my malice had evaporated away and here was a humiliated man, at my mercy, deserving my pity. “I’m him.”

  He looked at me.

  “For as long as you can afford to pay.”

  He took a deep breath. “There’s so much I want to ask you,” he said.

  CONSIDER THE SNAIL. He wears armour, like a knight. I once knew a man – couldn’t describe him as a friend – who spent his leisure time building suits of armour, beating them out of sheets of metal from scrapyards and old car doors. I asked him why, and he waffled for a bit about re-enactment and living history and experimental archaeology, but eventually I pinned him down and he said it was because he never felt safe, any time, anywhere. The armour, the house, the shell; we seek a confined space inside which we can be safe, or at least marginally safer than we’d be outside, naked.

  So the snail carries his house around with him wherever he goes, ready at a moment’s notice to shrink away inside it. Everywhere he goes, his house goes too, and all places are alike to him; one little shell an everywhere, so to speak. But the weight, the strain, the monumental bloody effort of carrying his entire world, his everywhere, on his shoulders, like the Greek god whose name escapes me for the moment, consumes every last gasp of his energy. He’s slow, painfully and proverbially slow, which makes him easy prey for all manner of birds and predatory beasts, unimaginably bigger and stronger than he is, who can simply pick him up and bash him against a rock until his armour and his house shatter and become useless. Silly, silly snail.

  I wonder if snails decorate the insides of their shells.

  I couldn’t tell you offhand what colour the walls of the room are, because I never see them. The light doesn’t reach that far. For illumination I have a single table-lamp, and it’s got one of those infuriating, useless energy-saving bulbs that takes half an hour to get beyond the glow-worm level. Even when it’s fired up and belting out photons to the utmost of its capacity, it only casts a very circumscribed penumbra, which doesn’t go as far as the walls. Last time I looked they were a sort of off-white, what my wife would probably have called buttermilk or magnolia or pale apricot. And dirty, of course, with years of ingrained dust, and cobwebs. I really ought to clean it up one of these days, but I can’t summon up the energy. Besides, I’m reluctant to change anything. It’s perfect as it is.

  It got me through those horrible weeks, months, after my wife went away. I think it was because it was the only part of the house where she never came, and so there were no memories or associations of her in there. The rest of the place was decorated with her, papered and emulsioned with her presence and hung with cameos of remembered incidents. I have a theory about memory, which might just be as far-reaching and significant and important as my father’s theory about space, the one that got disproved. I believe that memory isn’t just the recherché des temps perdues, because that would be recognising, assenting to, granting legal status to the concept of loss, which is something I would tend to reject utterly, because it’s unbearable. No, I maintain that anything that is remembered can’t be lost because it still exists; and the logical implication of that is that everything still exists, nothing is lost, it’s just that it becomes incredibly difficult and inconvenient to get to, like Cambridge. If you persevere and try really hard you can get back there, to the past, and when you make it through you’ll find everything exactly as it was and everybody still precisely the same, yourself included. From time to time you snatch glimpses of that other space in dreams or flashes of memory – like peeping through a hole in a wall; if you can see it, it must still be there, mustn’t it? The only problem (which is purely a matter of mechanics, ingenuity and effort) is scaling or undermining that wall, and we don’t tend to do it because we’re too busy or idle or preoccupied with the present or the future. But it’s nice to know it’s there even though we don’t use it, like Radio Three, and the only thing separating us from it, from the Hundred Acre Wood of our past where a boy and his bear are still happily playing, is a simple, annoying wall.

  “THERE’S JUST ONE other thing,” he said.

  He was exhausted and so was I. You can get out of the habit of thinking, and it had been a long time since I’d had to use my intelligence with such a high level of intensity. I’d enjoyed it, but you can enjoy something and still be worn out after you’ve been doing it non-stop for four hours. Also I had trains to catch. Did this amiable buffoon have a car? If so, he could give me a lift to the station and save me a five mile hike. Even so.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about your Proposition 295,” he said. “And the thing is, I simply don’t understand it. I can’t seem to make it work.”

  Proposition which? “Refresh my memory,” I said.

  He wrote a string of numbers on a bit of paper and pushed it at me. I glanced at it. Hot stuff. Did I do that? If so, I was a genius. He was. Whatever. “I don’t see the difficulty,” I said. “It seems pretty straightforward to me.” Breathtaking, visionary, but simple. All the best strokes of genius always are, you know.

  “Indeed.” He looked humble and ashamed. “And the Nobel judges thought so too. But I can’t get it to come out right. Here, let me show you.”

  It took him ten minutes, and he got the wrong answer. I was getting fed up. “Give it here,” I snapped, and started to work my way through the numbers. It was so simple, like following a clearly-signposted path across a flat plain. One thing led inevitably to another, until there you were.

  “No,” he said gently.

  I stopped. I was about halfway through. “What do you mean, no?”

  “No, that’s not right.” He leaned across me and pointed to a number with the tip of his pencil. “That should be a minus. You haven’t reversed the signs.”

  I frowned. Of course I had. To fail to do so would be a schoolboy error. I went back two stages and worked them through, then came to a sudden, horrible stop, as if I’d just flown my airliner into a mountain.

  “You haven’t reversed the signs,” he repeated.

  No, I hadn’t, had I. Which meant that the whole thing was an error, a mistake, a falsehood, a lie. I put the pen carefully down and looked at him. His eyes were full of fear and embarrassment.

  “I was wondering when anyone would spot that,” I said.

  WHAT, AFTER ALL, is a snail without its shell? I’ll tell you: nothing, nothing at all. A smear of grey goo, shapeless, without form and void. So we build ourselves houses and cover ourselves with armour, we armour our walls with paint and woodchip and festoon them with painted likenesses, of other people’s houses, of knights in armour, of bodies and faces which are just other forms of container for the thing contained.

  I guess I ought to be grateful, since I experienced, albeit vicariously, at one remove, and without really feeling the full force, since it wasn’t my world that suddenly exploded in my face – I experienced to some degree the worst moment in my father’s life, his greatest pain, shock and sorrow; which isn’t something everybody can boast, now is it? I had at least some idea of how he must have felt. Lucky me.

  He never recovered from it, that goes without saying. His reaction was curious, ambivalent. He didn’t actually believe that the refutation was correct. He acknowledged that he couldn�
�t disprove what the damned Indian had said. Well, there you are, then, I said to him, the bastard must be right, but he shook his head. Just because I can’t disprove it, he said, doesn’t make it true; it just means I’m not smart enough to point out the flaw in his reasoning, which undoubtedly exists. Faith, you see. He carried on knowing he was right, which only made it worse, because now everybody else believed he was wrong.

  But he acknowledged – it was something he did supremely well, acknowledging – that he was a scientist who couldn’t prove his assertion and yet continues to assert it, which in his view was about the worst thing anybody could possibly be, worse than a murderer or a fascist dictator. He therefore regarded himself as a disgrace to the profession, a failure and a waste of good oxygen. The polite unspoken sympathy of his colleagues infuriated him; rotten luck being found out, he felt they were saying to him, and he couldn’t bear that. Nobody tried to fire him or strip him of his Nobel prize (he wouldn’t have objected, I think he was waiting for someone to suggest it so he could agree, but nobody ever did, so he couldn’t). They carried on as though nothing had happened, praising everything else he’d done and achieved and never once mentioning the other thing. When it got too much for him, he resigned his post and retired to a small flat in what could just about be described as central London; even so, it was more than he could afford. Actually, I think it was shortage of money as much as anything that killed him. From never thinking about money he became obsessed with it, and what with one thing and another, inflation and recession and God knows what all, it gradually got less and less, and he was too good a mathematician to be able to disregard the numbers, or the clearly visible progression, always diminishing. I could cheerfully have murdered that Indian – I thought about it quite seriously, once I found I could shape-shift; I had an airline ticket and a hotel reservation in Mumbai, but at the last minute my nerve failed me.