Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  Consider the snail, therefore; and send not to know for whom the thrush knocks. It knocketh for thee.

  “SLOW DOWN A minute, will you, you’re gabbling.” She sounded intolerably cool and sceptical, as a true scientist ought to be. Actually, I do have a tendency to talk fast when I’m over-excited. “You’re saying you turned into your own father. That’s weird.”

  “No, I didn’t say that. I said it was just like being him, because of the maths thing and suddenly thinking like a mathematician, and then being in the same position. It was terrible. And I’m not doing it again.”

  Pause. “They haven’t actually asked you to.”

  “I mean anything like that. No more crazy stuff, no more getting inside people’s heads. It was bad enough getting stabbed, but that was worse. Are you listening to me?”

  A long sigh. “I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but you know, the list of things you won’t do is getting a bit on the long side. No more alibis, no more recreating famous people. Face it, there’s not exactly an infinite number of things that people will pay you to do. And a reputation for flakiness isn’t going to help much, either.”

  “You weren’t there,” I screamed at her, “you didn’t have to feel what it’s like to have the worst possible thing in the world happen to you. I’m not joking. One more trip like that one, and I’m out of the business. For good. Got that?”

  It’s hard to lip-read when you’re talking on the phone, but I could see her clear as day, mouthing prima donna under her breath. “We’ll talk again in the morning,” she said, “when you’ve had a chance to pull yourself together.” From her, that was being considerate and nice. “Get a good night’s sleep. You’ll feel so much better.”

  “I don’t want to sleep. I’ve been having nightmares.”

  “Then don’t eat so much rich food. Ciao.”

  It was true about the nightmares, though as a rule I forgot them completely the moment I opened my eyes. But I still knew I’d had one, because I’d be drenched in sweat, and my tongue would be dry and stiff, with that foul muddy taste. The good thing about nightmares is the sense of blessed relief when you wake up and find it isn’t true, hasn’t happened, wasn’t about to happen, and you lie there in the dark so overwhelmingly grateful. That’s the only good thing about nightmares.

  I SOMETIMES WONDER what they must think of me at the bank. Vast sums of money go into my account, always from the same source, and then vast sums go out again, always to the same payee. It says a lot about the inertia in the system that nobody’s ever bothered me about it, though one of these days the Inland Revenue’s going to catch up with me and I’ll be in so much trouble. The silly thing is, I’d willingly declare it all and pay the tax, except that I can’t afford to. I never have any money, just like my Dad, except I don’t let it get to me.

  I’d spent more or less the last of my ready money on woodchip and emulsion, so I wasn’t exactly amused to find that the paper was already starting to peel off the walls, a matter of days after I’d so laboriously put it up there. I have to concede that I’m not the world’s premier paperhanger. In my defence, I would argue that I do the best I can for someone who’s entirely self-taught. After all, how are you supposed to learn how to do these things? Other people are taught by their parents, I guess, but my dad and I were never in one place long enough, and besides, the walls always belonged to someone else, who took responsibility for maintenance and décor. So; the total failure of my woodchip may have been my fault, to some extent, rather than dereliction of duty on the part of the paper and paste manufacturers. Maybe I didn’t do the sugar soaping right – actually, I didn’t do it at all. I don’t even know what sugar soap is, though I gather it’s one of those things you do. At any rate, after a few days my walls started to look like a bad case of sunburn. I tried stripping the paper off, but although it hadn’t stuck in a lot of places, in a lot of other places it had stuck real good. The result was distinctly unattractive, but I couldn’t afford the materials to do it all over again, so it had to stay like it. Fortunately there was nobody else to see it except me and I can put up with most things, at least for a while.

  THE ACQUAINTANCE I told you about who makes armour; I went to see him once, and in his hall was a suit of the stuff, like you see in stately homes. He’d made it himself and it was really quite impressive, until you looked closely and saw the toolmarks and where he hadn’t managed to get the edges squared up properly. But it was so complete that it could stand up on its own two steel feet, without needing to rest on anything, a hollow steel man, all defence and nothing inside to keep safe. He showed me how it was held together with hundreds of rivets and internal straps, like little hinges, to allow the wearer to move freely. They were good at that, the old armourers. Apparently, when the space program people were designing a space suit for the Moon and had trouble articulating the joints, they ended up copying a lot of ideas from a suit of armour built for Henry VIII. My friend showed me a picture of it. There are even articulated plates for the insides of the knees and the arse. It’s a complete skin, like a space suit, to give you total protection against an unrelentingly hostile environment.

  I mention this because, instead of spending what little money I had on paint and wallpaper, I bought a suit of armour. I have no idea why, except that when I saw it, on a website, I realised I had to have it. My very own suit of armour. They make them in India these days – what they must think of us Westerners I dread to imagine – dirt cheap, considering what’s involved, and not a bad job at all. It arrived astonishingly quickly, in a huge cardboard box. There weren’t any instructions for putting it together but I figured it out from photographs and first principles. It came with a wooden stand to act as a sort of surrogate backbone. Apparently you could actually wear it if you felt inclined, or you could stick it up somewhere and just look at it, which was what I did. Very fine it looked too, though a trifle stiff and unnatural. Properly speaking, it should have been standing with both hands resting on the pommel of a long sword, but the sword was extra and it counted as a weapon for the purposes of postal regulations, so I had to make do without. Which is me all over: passive, not active; all defence and no counter-attack. It was nice having another anthropomorphic shape in the house, after I’d been on my own for so long, and since it didn’t move or speak it offered just about the level of social interaction that I felt capable of dealing with.

  The next few jobs were easy, no trouble at all. I turned into someone and paid in a cheque or stood in front of a CCTV camera holding a newspaper with the date plainly visible, tax and residency stuff, bread and butter; it paid my armourer’s bill and that’s something, in these uncertain times. In a way I felt like I could go on like that for ever, while at the same time I could hear a clock ticking in the back of my head. After I finished work I’d go and sit in the room, surfing the Net or reading a book. I took to falling asleep in there, waking up with a cricked neck and pins and needles in my legs, usually out of a nightmare whose plot immediately disintegrated. Sometimes the discomfort woke me, sometimes it was the phone – only one voice ever called me, giving me new, improbable assignments, mailing the details to a firm of lawyers who never existed. I moved the armour in there with me, mostly for the company, but also in case I needed protection in a hurry. They do say, don’t they, that if you live in dread of burglars and intruders, you should have a safe room where you can barricade yourself in and call the police. Well; I had a safe place inside my safe place, like a set of Russian dolls, each one with her own flak jacket.

  Amazing, incidentally, what they get up to in India these days. A country that can produce mathematicians of the highest calibre, and yet they earn their living making medieval armour for dotty Westerners.

  I WOKE UP out of a dream involving a bird and a rock. Someone was knocking on the door.

  You have to knock loudly if you expect me to hear you when I’m in the room, so whoever it was, they were anxious to see me. I got up and opened the door.

 
; Some people you just know you aren’t going to like. “Can I help you?” I said, as politely as anyone could want. She just glared at me. Then she told me my name.

  I didn’t try to deny it. Yes, I said, that’s me. That got me a triumphant scowl. She said she wanted to see my wife. That’s not possible, I told her.

  “Where is she?”

  I managed to keep the hesitation down to a second and a half. That’s still a long time, in context. “You’d better come in,” I said.

  Doubts crossed her mind. If I’d murdered my wife, which was evidently one of her theories, did she really want to be alone with me in an enclosed space? In her shoes, I think I’d have decided against it, but I guess she was made of sterner stuff. “All right,” she said. I led her through into the front room. “Excuse the mess,” I said. “I’m redecorating.”

  She was, she explained, a friend of my wife, from school. She’d been abroad and had only just got back. She’d asked around, but nobody had seen or heard from my wife in ages. Her phone didn’t answer, her email account bounced. So; where was she?

  I smiled pathetically. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Is that right.”

  “She left me. I haven’t heard from her.” I shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

  “You haven’t tried to contact her.”

  “I sort of got the impression there’d be no point.”

  She wasn’t sure if she believed me. On the one hand, it was perfectly reasonable to imagine somebody leaving a specimen like me, not leaving a forwarding address, not returning calls, never wanting to see or hear from me again in this world or the next. On the other hand, people don’t just vanish. “And you’ve got no idea where she’s gone?”

  “None whatsoever,” I lied.

  “Has anybody else been asking after her?”

  “One or two people.”

  Grim, stony silence. Then, “She was painting a picture of me. Did she finish it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “She didn’t show me her work.”

  “Can I look and see if it’s here?”

  “There’s none of her paintings here. She took them all with her.”

  I guess she decided the murder theory was the most plausible, because she got up quickly and got close to the door, with me where I couldn’t obstruct her escape. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “It’s no bother.”

  “I’ll see myself out.”

  I heard the door close behind her. Then I went back into the room and sat very still for a long time.

  “I KNOW YOU don’t do women,” she said. “As a rule. But this one’s –”

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

  “– no bother at all, an absolute piece of cake. All you’ve got to do is sit there, for crying out loud. You won’t have to say more than half a dozen words.”

  “No women,” I repeated. “I hate being women.”

  “Really.”

  “No offence. But it’s –”

  “Unnatural?”

  “Laugh all you want. It’s so difficult. There’s so many things I don’t know how to do. Going to the lavatory, for crying out loud –”

  “Oddly enough,” she said, “we manage.”

  “You’ve had the practice.”

  “This one,” she repeated calmly, “is a piece of cake. All you have to do is sit perfectly still. Maybe smile a few times. That’s all.” She paused, then added, “You need the money.”

  Now there she had a point. “Can’t you get me a nice alibi job? Two days ago you’d got so many you were having to turn them down.”

  “That was then. Now, I’ve got you this. A nice, easy job where you just turn up and sit.”

  “It’ll be a disaster. Remember the last time.”

  “That was completely different. That was a painting. This is photographs. We know you show up just fine in photographs, think of all the CCTV stuff you’ve done. Look, if it makes it any easier I’ll tell them you’ve got laryngitis and lost your voice, and then you won’t have to say anything.”

  “I bet you they all know her.”

  “Never met her before. She’s never worked in this country, the photographer’s never worked abroad.”

  I breathed through my nose. “Will they know I’m, you know, not her?”

  “Well, the photographer won’t. But that doesn’t matter. Oh come on, you’ve done far harder jobs than this. You turn up, the photographer tells you exactly what she wants you to do, snappity-snappity and you’re out of there in half an hour. Well, an hour. Hour and a half, tops. She doesn’t speak English, for God’s sake, they won’t be expecting scintillating conversation.”

  “Sure,” I said. “So they’ll talk to me in Spanish, which I don’t understand.”

  “Look.” Angry pause. “Do you want me to carry on being your agent or don’t you? Because the way you’ve been lately, it’s like getting blood out of a stone. If you’ve decided to call it a day, then just say so. All right?”

  But I need the money. “What sort of clothes are they going to make me wear?”

  “It’ll be fine once you’re there,” she told me. “You’ll see.”

  Actually, she was quite right. It was no bother at all. Amazing what you can get across in sign language, by the way; turn left, turn right, smile, again, no words needed. The photographer was a thin, sharp-faced woman with a cloud of frizzy black hair and the most beautiful hands; if I was a painter, I’d have wanted to paint them. When the shoot was over, one of the lesser underlings – there were loads of them – pressed a CD into my hands, as a sort of going-away present.

  MY WIFE HAD black hair too, though you couldn’t rely on it being black from one day’s end to the next. Quite often, when I was still with the polystyrene people, I’d come home and find a blonde, or a redhead, or some woman with red and green layered streaks who on closer examination proved to be my wife. You’ll ruin it with all those chemicals, I told her, it can’t be good for it. I don’t think she ever deigned to reply.

  Amazing, too, the things she did with it. One moment it’d be long and dead straight, like spaghetti trailing off a fork. The next day it’d be all waves and bubbles, like a glass of champagne. Then she had a do that looked like she was wearing a knitted onion on top of her head, and another where it turned into a set of braided carrying-handles. One time I came back from a few days away to find it had doubled in length – extensions, apparently. They all came out a short while later and she put the whole lot into pigtails, which didn’t suit her at all. Her hair, she said, was a work in progress, and it was the only aspect of her appearance she was ever remotely vain about. I guess I can understand that; she did have remarkably thick, full hair, and her face itself was – well, beautiful in a way but sort of indistinct, the sort of face you have trouble remembering. So, when she radically redesigned the thatch, she could look totally different, practically a shape-shifter.

  Appearances matter, was one of her great themes. Appearances are everything – and when I objected, not to a blind man, surely, she widened the definition of appearance to include voices: accents, pitch, tone, clarity and so on. You form your first impression of someone in a fraction of a second, she said, from their appearance (and, yes, the sound of their voice, which is why so many people think I’m South African; see above) and it takes heavy machinery and dynamite to shift that first assessment, once it’s been formed. Hence, she said, the essential nature of her trade. A portrait strives to be that most vital act of human communication, a good first impression. For one thing, it saves so much time, not to mention misunderstanding. A good portrait sums its subject up, it’s a complete and accurate précis, like a civil service briefing to an overworked minister. All the salient points are there, all the issues impartially set forth, the irrelevancies trimmed away. It’s a pitch, a declaration of intent, a list of contents, a pre-emptive defence, an explanation (but never an apology), it’s the
objective truth and really good advertising. It says more about you that you ever can; like your taste in books, or the way you decorate your living space.

  I wish my father could have met her. I think they’d have got on well together.

  Her disappearance was a gradual process. First there was this note. That was nothing unusual. We had a convention, a place where notes should be put if they were expected to be read and taken notice of; sellotaped to the door of the room, so I’d be sure to see them. The note said, I may be held up, no idea when I’ll be back.

  That didn’t bother me particularly. She didn’t like it when I asked where she’d been, what she’d been doing, so I gave it up early in our relationship. There were all manner of possibilities. Clients, friends, agents, gallery owners, or maybe she’d just had enough of everything and needed to get away for a bit, to the country, to some other country, there really was absolutely no way of knowing. I could try calling her, but eight times out of ten her phone wouldn’t be on. So I didn’t worry, took no notice. While she was away on her various occasional jaunts, I tended to move into the room and stay there, where I’d quickly lose track of time, lost among my thoughts and other people’s, until I could barely tell them apart.

  She didn’t come back for two days, and I wasn’t particularly anxious. And there’s the thing about absence, a quality specific to a negative entity. Something that isn’t there carries on not being there. Nothing changes, it doesn’t get bigger or louder or hotter; by the very fact of staying the same, unchanged, absence grows. Day three and she’s still not back. Day four; nothing has changed, which changes everything. If presence is a solid, absence is a gas, invisible and silent, filling all the available space. Day five and her absence pervaded the entire house, and I had no option but to do something about it.