Falling Over

by James Everington

  Floor 2 is an identical layout of corridors and rooms to our own, and for a moment I have the feeling that the staircase I have climbed is like one from an Escher drawing, and I have returned to where I started from. The windows are so dirty you can’t even get a feeling of height. Like our floor, Floor 2 is deserted, almost everyone elsewhere for the holidays. The corridors seem longer, as if emptiness isn’t an absence but a physical thing, pushing at the boundaries. But the boy I am looking for was here at least up until last week, so there is an outside chance that I’ll find him. There are a hundred doors, but I can hear faint music; I walk down the corridor slowly, quietly, a hunter following the trail of some hectic animal, for the music is loud, riotous yet synthetic, the rush of beats exactly the kind of thing I despise.

  The music is coming from behind a closed door, and I pause in front of it. What exactly am I going to say; why have I followed this trail here? Because I believe that the room this dreadful music is coming from is the room of the boy from the diary? And furthermore that the boy is some kind of doppelganger (shit wasn’t he circumcised the first time) who somehow caused Michelle to fall down the stairs and become a double in her turn? Every time I cross-examine my thoughts their ludicrousness seems obvious; yet I continue to think them.

  Without knowing his name, how will I even check it’s him? Could I recognise him from the fact that Michelle fancies him – has she a ‘type’? Given the fact that she slept with me too, probably not. But that was an aberration, as she has made clear. And besides that wasn’t her; the real Michelle slept with the boy behind this door. Twice.

  But even that isn’t true I think (still paused outside the door). For the second time Michelle slept with him (shameless I think, wondering what he did that was so special she came back) it wasn’t who she thought it was but some bodysnatcher with original foreskin attached. So I am right to hate him – if I hit him hard enough, will I see the skin of his real face beneath?

  Right too to be afraid.

  Before I can knock or push open the door, it opens from the inside.

  I start, flinch backwards. The person who opens it flinches back too. It obviously isn’t the boy that Michelle liked.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she asks.

  Flustered, my mind tries to adjust from conspiracy plots to the more mundane and embarrassing fact that I have been caught snooping outside a girl’s room.

  “Your music...?” I improvise lamely. “Could you turn it down? I’m right below you, on the floor below...”

  Some of the heat fades from the girl’s face, although she still looks wary.

  “Sorry,” she says, cautiously apologetic and friendly. “I thought I was on my own; there’s no one else up here you see.”

  “No one?” I say quickly, thinking of the boy I am after, but I realise I have said it too quickly, too eagerly, for the fright returns to the girl’s eyes.

  “No there are people,” she says loudly, “there are other people here” – throwing her voice into a shout that echoes down the corridor, trying to make me believe she has someone to call for protection, if I try anything funny. As if anyone could hear her over the music.

  “Wait I just meant are there any blokes up here?” I say, but she is already shutting the door, and my words don’t make her stop, for if I was thing she feared I might have said that too. I make a grab for the door, but just manage to get my fingers nipped as it slams shut.

  “Get away you freak or I’ll call the police!” she shouts from behind the door, her fright obvious now. I turn and run, feeling out of synch with this situation I have somehow got myself into. Like one of those films where the good guys and bad guys are not who they first appear to be, and your brain lags as you work it out. Will she call the police? Even if she does, why am I running, for I would merely have to explain things to them and they’ll see I’ve done nothing wrong. There’s no crime but I am running as if guilty, hurtling downstairs so quickly that I almost trip, back to my floor, my room. I shut the door but don’t put any music or TV on – I pace but try to keep quiet. I think of the campus security cameras outside, and shut the curtains.

  If the body-snatchers get you, I wonder, do you even realise? But I don’t understand what that thought even means.

  I can’t sleep, for the airplanes seem too low overhead, and the light coming through the windows seems unnatural.

  ~

  The next morning I try and call Grace to see how she is, to see if she went under at the hospital. She’ll be alright, I think, she’ll be safe as long as she’s not been anaesthetized. I have nothing to base this on, but cling to it with an odd certainty. But my mobile has no signal – I am sure it is a network problem, but it is hard not to think that the fault is deliberate, local, centred on me. I head towards the front of the halls of residence where there are some payphones, but they have no dial tones and my coins just clatter through the mechanism and fall out the other end. This I am not surprised by, this doesn’t become a factor in my emergent paranoia, for the payphones are dilapidated relics of the days when mobiles were for the likes of Christophe only; I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. They have been superseded by later technology that can’t be relied on.

  I decide that I’ll have to go to the hospital to find Grace – and I am surprised to find that my decision is not just based on the still unspoken fears clenched in my gut, but also on something Christophe said: she likes me. Assuming for one minute Michelle is Michelle and my delusions are proven just that – still, why was I so fixated on Michelle? I suddenly can’t remember why.

  I force myself outside, but after days of being confined to halls the outdoors just seems a continuation – the holidays have thrown up a localised fog which makes me feel enclosed in a vague bubble, my sight limited to its circumference. I walk down the path from our campus, past the Job Centre which is outside the exit – a nice irony that is not lost on those of us doing humanities degrees – and towards the main road. Strangers coming the opposite way through the fog loom up so quickly that I couldn’t make eye contact even if I wanted to. The world appears in gasps and snatches through the mist. They are queuing round the block for petrol again, for fear of another price hike; their idling fumes add to the mist. My progress up the street is faster than that achieved by the rush-hour traffic, and I sense their antagonised looks as I pass: fuckin’ student; fuckin’ pedestrian.

  There is no bus in sight yet and so I decide to walk to the 24hr garage (the one the cars are slowly working towards) to buy some chocolates or flowers for Grace. I feel even more self-conscious inside: the only person not buying war-inflated petrol. I quickly buy some chocolates, because the only flowers look plastic to me, even though they are promoted as real. Outside two motorists almost crash, going for the same pumps. Their tempers are up before they are even out their cars, their firsts clenched before they can even see each other properly in the mist. They curse at each other, but it doesn’t quite come to blows.

  One day, my son, all this will be yours.

  A bus has somehow fought its way up the car clogged bus-lane, and I run to the stop. The bus is full of people studiously avoiding the world on the other side of the windows: plugged into headphones or bent over beach-fiction. It’s only a local bus but they have the practised look of long-distance travellers, of people who have given up hoping their journey will arrive on time, and are concentrating on making the best of being there – I settle myself in too, but I am not the same as them, for I am surely the only one not riding to work. The idea and desire that one day I will be feels oddly remote, like an advert for something that you can’t possibly imagine ever being able to afford.

  ~

  The hospital is another building of identical corridors, painted with seemingly the same colours as my own halls of residence, lit by the same dusty strip-lights. There is an extravagant shop on the ground floor, where you can buy flowers, books, cuddly toys; but otherwise the place appears shabby and out of date. Nevertheless the rece
ptionist I speak to is friendly and smiles at the box of chocolates I am clutching – she thinks I am some considerate boyfriend. But what boyfriend goes to hospital worrying that his girl might be someone else entirely? Worrying that the ring-line will have faded from her fingers? But I am getting muddled here, and anyway I didn’t win Michelle that ring.

  I find out from the friendly receptionist that Grace had been kept in overnight only as a precaution, because it was a head wound, and that she only needed a couple of stitches. There doesn’t seem to be any concussion, she says, but you can never assume.

  When I find Grace she seems very surprised to see me, and I can’t stop myself from grinning. Because it is her – the certainty, the authenticity of her is so strong that it clarifies all my fears and feelings about Michelle. The mind makes shit up yes, but as I sit besides Grace and give her the chocolates I know it isn’t making this up; and not my doubts about Michelle either (although I am not so certain if my doubts are any longer about her identity, or merely my own feelings towards her). Grace looks her usual self, with no bandages around her head; her stitches are faint and lost beneath her thick hair.

  We talk for hours, Grace and I, and although I sense she is hurt and wary because of the way I went off with Michelle the other night, she doesn’t mention it, and of course neither do I. In fact Michelle and Christophe aren’t mentioned once, despite the fact that we have spent all our time with them these last few weeks, cut adrift in that pokey halls of residence. Nor do my body-snatcher theories get a mention; nor do they seem important. Instead we have the conversation we should have had the night before, the getting-to-know-you conversation. Not small talk, not the forced mini-biographies of those meeting for the first time, but a conversation that manages to be both relaxed and shy at the same time, a conversation where the embarrassment of revealing your real fears is balanced by the easy acceptance of them at the other end.

  She wants to go travelling, Grace. Not just being a tourist (which she can’t afford) but maybe doing some relief-work too. She says maybe she doesn’t want to go alone. I ask her why she wants to go.

  “Because the alternatives...,” she pauses, looks away. “Everyone knows the world’s got to change, but everyone just carries on as normal...” She shrugs and tries to make her tone light again. “Besides, it’s a stop-gap if nothing else.” And I know what she means – so what if it’s a stop-gap? Why should your life be fixed and decided by twenty-one? There is no mention in our talk of us becoming a couple, and I realise I have yet to prove myself, after I basically slept with her friend. And besides that I am not blind to the practicalities – once the student loans run out neither of us really know what we’ll be doing where – the travelling is a pipe-dream that hasn’t been planned for yet. Nevertheless I feel happier and more purposeful that I have done for months. Maybe if we do things different, other things could change too.

  About halfway through visiting hours, Michelle and Christophe turn up.

  They have bought lavish presents from the hospital shop downstairs, and their obvious expensiveness makes my chocolates look cheap, unthoughtful. The two of them are smiling secret little smiles, and I wonder if they were holding hands before the moment they came in here. Michelle is wearing a bandage around her wound, still hiding something that I am no longer interested in. Grace’s manner is polite yet distant with them, like with people you are told are your relatives, but whom you’ve never met before. I’m not sure whether this bothers them, or whether it’s my imagination.

  “Grace,” Michelle eventually says, “ do you mind if we have a moment alone?” – meaning me and her. “Christophe can stay here with you?” I look at Grace and our eyes meet; I see a little mental shrug in her glance – what harm can it do? We have reached an understanding, and as long as I am the person she thinks I am, neither Michelle nor Christophe can do anything about it (and if I’m not, why should she care?).

  “Sure,” Grace says. “Knock yourselves out.”

  ~

  I walk with Michelle back down the corridors, both of us silent. I don’t think her silence is any kind of ruse though, for she seems genuinely tense, building up to something. In the meantime I am content to keep walking, to keep quiet. She is wearing a ring again I notice – is that to hide the evidence, the mysterious vanishing of the tan-line? Has this body-snatcher read my mind, is it trying to disguise... – but these thoughts seem false, appended to my consciousness, unimportant. There’s no such thing as doppelgangers, no conspiracy – it was all part of the cracked and solipsistic paranoia I’d allowed myself to fall into because I was lonely... proper lonely. But now is the first time for months I’ve walked alongside Michelle (whoever she is) and not felt my centre of gravity slip. She has no power over me anymore, and this walk is a temporary pause in the conversation Grace and I were having. Whatever Christophe is doing or saying back in the ward doesn’t signify either.

  We have actually left the hospital, and are walking around the grounds in the fog. Michelle tugs at the collar of her long coat.

  “You know I still keep dressing for winter,” she says, “even though I know we’ll never have ones as cold as we used to again.”

  I keep quiet, although I am warm myself. Above us, there is the noise of a plane, but the sight of it is lost in the fog-like clouds. Grace and me, I think vaguely; but something about the idea of us on that plane, youthfully saving the planet while leaving a trail of pollution behind us, suddenly strikes a false chord in my thoughts. Have I merely fallen for another fantasy?

  “Have you decided what you’re going to do after university?” Michelle asks, looking at me. Something lurks in her polite tone, implying she knows my sudden plans, and that they will come to nothing. I am overcome with a sudden repulsion at her presence – why have I not questioned, even in my own head, the fact that she is still wearing that bandage? That she has put on any old ring to hide that vanished tan-line? It is all I can do not to flinch, to keep walking at a steady pace while my mind is racing: my thoughts become clearer in the fog, the realisation that potential happiness with Grace is no protection against this predatory thing that walks besides me, and is again going through the motions of flirting: doing that thing of hers with her eyes which she knows makes me want her. That works.

  Ahead of us I notice a solitary figure walking in the mist, in the same direction as us. I decide if I look at Michelle I might get angry, or worse get muddled again, and so I focus on that figure in front of me. He is going at the same pace as us, so we don’t get any closer.

  Out of the corner of my eyes I see Michelle smile to herself. “You see I’m wearing your ring again?” she says.

  I do look at her now, in surprise, for the blunder she has made is so glaring: I never won that ring for her from the fair did I? And the one she is wearing isn’t even the same one... What is she trying to convince me of; can this thing that I thought could read minds really have made such an error? And if so why is Michelle’s face still smiling?

  “What?” is all I say aloud, trying to keep the tone of my voice absent.

  “The ring that you won for me at the fair?” Michelle says quietly. “Don’t you remember?”

  No, I think, there’s nothing for me to remember. It was that boy, the one we never even met... I merely wanted to have won it for you, and wanting isn’t good enough.

  “Ummm?” I say, politely disinterested. We have paused and the figure in front of us has paused too, like it wants to keep an equidistance. I’m not even clear if it’s male or female, can determine neither age nor race in this fog, which has only thickened as the sun has risen. The figure is so obscured I can’t even make out its height properly; it shifts form in the mist like it is still waiting to adopt one permanently. I start walking again and Michelle follows me. The lonely figure starts walking again too.

  “Don’t you remember?” Michelle repeats, and for a moment the hurt in her voice sounds natural enough for me to consider it, but it can’t be true, no matter how much I
wanted it to be; I build conspiracy upon conspiracy; I imagine that all these months another has been walking around with my face, never in a room at the same time as me, but messing up my life.

  The mind makes shit up, I think. If the body-snatchers get you, do you even realise? The deja-vu, the fact that I have thought these things before, makes my thoughts oddly automatic, as if learnt by rote.

  I look at Michelle and suddenly realise why she is smiling, just why she is trying to take me in with lies that I will blatantly see through. It is because she doesn’t have to try; I am already caught. She is just playing with me, giving me convincing proof that she lies, knowing that I will still end up suckered anyway. Already, Grace seems too far away to influence my actions. Maybe, if I had stronger convictions, they would have had to work harder, maybe then they would have made the effort to make their lies believable, to dig out the right ring, the real one that I (wanted) to have given her. But as is, they believe I am caught anyway; as soon as I realise what the trap is it will snap shut.

  No, I think, all you have to do is keep walking until you get back to Grace, and not to look at this Michelle besides you.

  Just then the figure in front of us starts to fall over.

  It is like he has been shot (I can suddenly see it is a he), shot or put to sleep, it is that sudden: the way his head lurches, his whole body lurches to one side like someone has pushed him. And as he is pushed right his legs start to go beneath him, buckle, as if they are made of inappropriate materials with which to support him. It all seems to happen in slow motion, like it has been filmed and is being played at the wrong speed in front of us. The boy (who now looks like some student) falls so slowly that I manage to break into a run to get to him. I lurch arms outstretched, clumsy and off balance across the car-park tarmac towards him. But the fog thickens not lessens as I near him, or maybe it is all in my eyes, for my feet go suddenly as I am rushing forwards, I am off balance and off gravity, and I realise that the boy I saw falling has become more and more like myself as I’ve approached; his flesh has copied mine, he is me, my double, and we are falling over.