by Lynne Truss
‘I’m not mad,’ she told Stefan. She was nearer now.
‘Of course you’re not.’
‘I mean, I’m not stupid.’ She picked up a scalpel and twiddled it, so that the blade found the only glimmer of light in the room. ‘How was London? How was Belinda?’
‘I haven’t been in London. I’ve been here. In Malmö. Going out after dark, stealing food and candles. An odd dabble in vivisection my only entertainment. Waiting, waiting for you. Dead and alive. And I have to tell you, Ingrid. Now we’re back together again, I’d like to move to somewhere a bit more interesting to be dead in. Like Belgium.’
‘Ha.’
Hauling herself vertical, Ingrid sat on the mouldy bed and started to cry.
‘I trusted you, Stefan. I believed you loved me. You remember how happy I always was?’
There was an awkward pause.
‘Well, I seem to remember—’
‘I was happy, Stefan!’
‘Of course, my dear. I remember.’
‘And now you are happy with somebody else, and you make little Stefans.’
‘No!’
‘Yes! I know all about Stefan Johansson’s high life in London with the Ferrari!’
‘I deny it. I can explain!’
The tension in the room was as thick as the darkness. Belinda’s husband had started to tremble, and Jago was hyperventilating. So it was a spectacularly bad moment for Jago’s phone to ring. Especially as he had programmed it to play The Ride of the Valkyries.
‘What’s that?’ screamed Ingrid, as the electronic Wagner trilled with unseemly volume.
‘Oh God,’ said Stefan.
Jago stood up in the dark and, with a mumbled ‘Sorry, sorry – God, isn’t this always happening?’ wrestled frantically with the inside pockets of his coat, while the Swedes both watched him open-mouthed.
‘Ripley, you’re OK!’ shouted the voice from the earpiece. ‘I knew you would be.’
It was Tanner. Two hours after he’d seen Jago struck by a picture-frame in the Möllevången, he had allowed conscience to prick him at last – as his star blazed in the Fleet Street firmament at home, and Jericho Jones boarded a private jet at Sturup. For in the interim, Tanner had saved the day for the Effort, and was extremely pleased with himself. Sitting on the steps of the ghastly statue’s plain granite plinth, he was attempting to get his bearings.
‘Tanner, I’m going to kill you,’ said Jago, and hung up.
‘Ripley!’ said Tanner, but the phone had gone dead. He tapped it against his leg.
Jago realized both the Swedes were still peering in his direction. He swallowed, and resolved to tough it out. ‘I’ll call him back,’ he confided in a whisper, dropping his blanket neatly over Belinda’s husband. He started to walk nonchalantly towards the stairs, on legs that wobbled. ‘Mobile phones,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘Big industry here in Sweden, yes? Taxi guy told me. Nice to meet you, Ingrid.’
Ingrid pounced, but her ankle betrayed her. Jago had never moved so quickly in his life. He reached the stairs and was gone.
‘Stefan, who was that, please?’
‘Just some guy,’ Stefan explained, lamely. ‘Guy with a phone. I found him here. He’s gone now.’
‘Anyone else back there?’ asked Ingrid. ‘The Malmö Meerkats? Lucky George?’
‘No, no.’
But Ingrid did not believe him. She started to grope around. She fingered the blanket that covered Belinda’s husband, so close that he could smell her.
‘Why are there no candles down here, Stefan?’ she asked. ‘Is it because – all those years ago, me and Lucky George?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was all his idea, you know. To make babies. I never wanted anyone but you.’
‘Mm.’
There was a long pause, while Belinda’s husband sat rigidly still and prayed to the god of luck genes. He tried to imagine himself one of those human statues in shopping centres, painted all over in blue or gold. He imagined the Woolworth’s and the children in football shirts trying to annoy him, and the smell of frying onions wafting from a van.
It can’t have worked, however.
‘Stefan,’ said Ingrid at last, twitching the blanket, ‘I can hear breathing. I know there is somebody here.’
Turning up outside the apartment and meeting Leon and Jago, Tanner was disappointed by his reception.
‘You stupid little transvestite bastard!’ yelled Jago, who had just emerged from the building. ‘I could have been killed down there! I could have been fucking killed! Where the fuck have you been?’
Tanner sighed. The excitability of journalists was beginning to annoy him. ‘Actually, you’ll be very impressed when you know. I was persuading Jericho Jones to return to sport. Got an exclusive for the Effort. Took longer than I expected, that’s all. The editor said you should call, by the way,’ Tanner added, smoothing his jacket, which Jago had grabbed by the lapels. ‘Something about Lambeth Palace going bananas.’
‘What? I don’t believe this. There’s a mad bitch with a knife down there, and you’re talking about the Archbishop of Canterbury?’
Leon intervened. ‘Ingrid? Is Ingrid all right?’
‘You know Ingrid?’ Jago swung round to look at him. He hadn’t registered Leon’s presence before. He was confused. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
‘Well, I carried her here from the hospital. She was hurt.’
Jago gave him a long, incredulous look. ‘Listen. Leon. That your name?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, Leon, fuck off. One minute you’re the most boring dinner guest I ever met, and the next you’re helping a psycho on the worst night of my life. You’re fired!’
‘I’m fired already.’
‘Well, you’re fired again! But you’re going to help me first, OK? And as for that smug son-of-a-bitch – Where did he go?’
Leon looked around. They both did. Tanner had disappeared. At the doorway of the sauna opposite, there appeared to be a commotion – people in uniforms spilling out into the night air, as if gasping for breath. For a few seconds, Leon and Jago ran in all directions, looking for Tanner, until it occurred to them that, for some unaccountable reason, he had chosen to go inside.
‘Help!’ Jago yelled. ‘For fuck’s sake, somebody help!’ And the people from the sauna came running.
What Belinda’s husband always said afterwards was that he heard the merest scuffle and that was it. Before Leon, Jago, Birgit and a herd of rather light-headed security men could hammer down those stairs with their torches and loudhailers, Ingrid had lunged fatally for Stefan with her knife. That’s what he told everybody, anyway. But there was more to it than that. Much more.
‘I can hear breathing, Stefan,’ Ingrid had repeated, tugging at the blanket. Belinda’s husband closed his eyes. It was all over. He would never see Belinda again, or work ‘under the cosh’ into a conversation. It struck him as terribly sad, suddenly, that Belinda would never know he wasn’t Swedish. She would never sing ‘Angeleyes’ to him again, or be disabused about the Söderbergs.
But as Ingrid pulled the blanket (‘I think I just see if Lucky George—’) a curious thing happened.
‘It’s all true!’ yelled Stefan.
‘What?’ said Ingrid. She dropped the blanket.
‘It’s all true! I’m so sorry, Ingrid. I went to London. Yes, I did. I always hated Malmö, it’s so cold and boring! And I always hated you!’
‘Stefan, how could you?’
Belinda’s husband felt his bowels turn to water. What was Stefan doing? What was he saying? He had been devoted to Ingrid all his life. He loved Malmö. This was suicide!
‘And I’ve been married for three years to a beautiful woman called Belinda,’ Stefan continued. ‘And we’ve got two little Stefans, and lots of money and—’ Stefan’s ingenuity was beginning to flag ‘—and we didn’t even go to the Carl Larsson retrospective when it came through, and the car is still running very well indeed and – aargh!’
‘Stop!’ Belinda’s husband yelled. He threw his blanket over Ingrid’s head and circled her with his arms. But he was too late. As he held the hooded, wriggling Ingrid, he was obliged to watch once again as his namesake Stefan Johansson expired in this bloody nasty basement in Malmö.
‘No!’ he cried. With a pang of grief and shame, Belinda’s husband noticed that Stefan had laid down his kitchen knife in the dark. As Ingrid ran to attack him, he had made no effort to defend himself.
Tanner was watching in disbelief from the stairs.
‘You!’ said Belinda’s husband. ‘Go away. This is all your fault.’ But Tanner didn’t move, because he couldn’t. Upstairs cacophonous people were approaching, swapping instructions in Swedish, and trying to switch the lights on.
Ingrid wriggled, but he held her tight under the blanket. Stefan hadn’t wanted her to see the state he was in, and now she never would.
In his final moments, Stefan reached out a scaly hand towards Belinda’s husband. As he remembered it afterwards, it was like a blessing, an apostolic succession of Stefanhood.
‘You are Stefan now,’ he whispered. ‘Make more Stefans, for my sake!’ And then, just as Birgit and the others came running with their lights and noise, he gagged, and his eyes rolled, and he died.
They arrested Leon for aiding Ingrid’s escape, but then let him go. Tanner’s story made the last edition, while Jago made his peace with the Archbishop of Canterbury by offering him a weekly ontological spot on the puzzles page. Leon asked Tanner politely about his encounter with Jericho Jones, but found it hard to bear. All his life, Leon’s father had fantasized about sharing a flat with Roger Bannister or telling Gary Player he should try wearing black. Leon had always hoped to make that dream come true. And now Tanner had simply bumped into Jericho Jones on a windy night in Malmö, and was deciding when to take up the offer of the trip to meet the folks in Cincinnati.
‘I was running off to call the police, of course,’ said Tanner. ‘But there he was, looking up at that awful statue. What could I do? The editor had asked me to save the day. Jerry made them stop the car when he saw it.’
‘Jerry?’
‘Mm. He said the figures straining to hold up the boulder reminded him of life at the top in basketball. He cried, actually. I mentioned it in the piece.’
‘I should think so.’
‘Yes. Cried on my shoulder. But I simply told him he should pull himself together, and in the end he saw my point. He’s a great fan of the sarong, incidentally. Offered to model one for the Effort. It could have been anyone who gave him the courage to carry on, obviously. But funny how it was me.’
Meanwhile, in the basement, Belinda’s husband sat for hours on his old bed, feeling bereft, lonely and shaky. He had been an inch from death when Stefan had intervened and drawn Ingrid’s wrath away from him. What should he make of Stefan’s bizarre sacrifice? Should he admire it or deplore it? Did it set him free, or obligate him for the rest of his life? And how could he ever share it with the woman he loved?
Jago put his arm around him, but found that even in this extreme situation, his unreconstructed maleness prevented him from going for the full hug. So he converted the gesture at the last minute into a matey shove at the back of the neck. ‘Stefan? You OK?’
Belinda’s husband smiled grimly at the appellation, but didn’t contradict it.
‘I’ve got to tell you,’ said Jago. ‘I got this all wrong. I had no idea. I thought you were a clone.’
‘What? That’s a bit far-fetched, Jago.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I got carried away. I had no idea it would be something straightforward like you taking the identity of a Swedish guy who cut chunks off you.’
‘He loved me, you know.’
‘Yeah? It really looked like it. I hope no one ever loves me that much.’
‘We were very close.’
‘There’s such a thing as too close.’
Jago helped him to stand up.
‘Promise me you’ll never tell anybody about this.’
Jago pulled a face. This was too tough a promise to make. ‘I’m only human, Stefan! Jesus!’
‘Please, Jago. I left all this behind. Belinda thinks this kind of thing only happens in books. She thinks doubles are some sort of literary convention! And it was your fault it all happened. That boy you sent to spy on me? Why did you do that? When I think of the things I’ve done for you. The times I supplied you with names of Swedes!’
Jago felt like a heel. ‘OK,’ he agreed, softly.
‘What?’
‘I said OK. I won’t tell anybody. I’ll go nuts, but I won’t tell anybody.’
They sat together on the bed, Stefan still hugging the blanket. He sniffed it. It smelt of surgical spirit, reindeer sandwich, rat poison and ancient mould. In short, in a funny old way, it smelt of home.
Part Three
Three months later
Eleven
From her sparkling attic window, one morning in the last week of June, Belinda observed the arrival of the cleaning lady. Mrs Holdsworth came three times a week, these days. She entered without noise or bother, and was no longer permitted to smoke except in the garden. Swearing had been prohibited. In the intervening months, Linda had trained her to Hoover and dust, tidy and polish, and do simple shopping for haddock and eels. According to reports, the rest of the house was like a palace. Linda had also instituted a Time Wasting Box, into which Mrs H must insert 50p if she tried to start a conversation up the loft ladder. Belinda felt a twinge of sadness at this. A nice old philosophical chat with Mrs Holdsworth about why God made lungs so complicated would have been pretty welcome, the way she was feeling right now.
Far away downstairs, a phone rang. Belinda strained to hear it. When Stefan and Linda were both out, sometimes she would drag herself to the top of the loft-ladder to hear more clearly, but usually she just stopped tapping the keys for a minute. Today, as she paused midway through ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, the muffled voice leaving a message was her new agent praising her ‘Up the Duff’ column in the Effort. Belinda liked the sound of this new agent: he had parties for clients and, on occasion, even came to the house with good news and a bunch of roses. The phone rang again almost immediately, with a different voice but the same congratulation. This time it was Julian Barnes.
Wow, thought Belinda. She had no idea she knew Julian Barnes.
Three months on, Belinda still could not believe her luck. Linda had continued to remove from her every worry and obstacle of life – including some she hadn’t even admitted to herself. Look at the way Linda disposed of Mother, for example, then forbade Belinda to feel bad about it. ‘If you grieve, then I’ll feel guilty,’ Linda explained. ‘And if I feel guilty, I’ll have to leave. Which I assume you wouldn’t want. Besides which, grief always saps creativity, and we can’t have that. So buck up, Belinda. Look, as far as the world’s concerned, you’re dealing with the bereavement brilliantly. Honestly, I’m congratulated on my surprisingly high spirits everywhere I go!’
That Mother had died through the dreadful accident of slipping on a piece of squid had been accepted by the police and was, in any case, the truth. But the incident had linked Linda to Belinda in a complicity that made both of them uncomfortable. Belinda’s move to the attic took place within a day, and was mainly Linda’s idea, but it made sense to them both to separate Belinda totally from the life downstairs. Especially if she kept crying, and getting on everyone’s nerves.
‘I did it for you!’ Linda would remind her. ‘Her love wasn’t unconditional. Conditional, judgemental love – well, it isn’t worth having.’ And although Belinda secretly disagreed (she rather liked the idea that love should be deserved), she had to admit that a great weight had been lifted from her psyche with the death of Mother. Yes, she blamed herself for not intervening more quickly when she heard the fight downstairs on that fateful night. She wished she had been a better daughter. But she did feel better in some ways.
No longer was there somebody in the world who automatically thought badly of her. As an incidental symptom of this reaction, her attitude softened towards squid. She still couldn’t eat it, of course, but nowadays it was certainly welcome in the house.
Meanwhile, look at this block about babies, too. Again Linda had blazed the trail. Why had Belinda been waiting to have children, putting things off? Because she felt inadequate? Because she felt unqualified, not good enough for motherhood? Fortunate, then, that Linda entertained no such weaselly doubts on the subject.
‘But you will make a marvellous mother, Belinda,’ she’d said, on that momentous day conception was confirmed. ‘And Stefan will be over the moon about it. You know what he was like when he got back from Sweden.’
‘Am I the first to know? Oh, Linda!’
‘Of course. Do you want to see the test-kit thing? I can get it from the bathroom.’
‘Oh yes, please.’
‘How do you feel?’ Linda gave her a conspiratorial wink.
‘Fine. No different. I can’t really believe it.’
‘Belinda, I’m so happy for you. I have to say it. I think you’re doing absolutely the right thing. Especially when there’s been a death. New life! Congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And I’ll do everything, as usual. Eat coal, whatever. I’m fit and strong.’
‘You’re marvellous. When you first came, I would never have thought one day you’d have a baby for me. Tell Stefan I’m blooming.’
And now Linda was making Belinda famous with this column about the pregnancy, and earning more in a month than Belinda expected to receive when the doubles book was finished! It was amazing how life turned out, really.
The only fly in the ointment – it was now more like a gluey knot of drowned bluebottles – remained the book. Because after spending several months devoting herself entirely to it, Belinda found to her astonishment she didn’t give a damn. No one could have predicted this development, but the more she studied the literature of doubles, the less she saw anything remarkable in it. It was Dr Jekyll and Mister Bleeding Obvious, as far as she was now concerned. Even her formerly favourite story, the Hans Christian Andersen one about the shadow, seemed curiously pointless. Given the choice, she read ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Princess and the Pea’ instead. Her notes had started taking a sardonic turn, and she had written ‘SO WHAT?’ in big letters across the front of her Dostoevsky. ‘Existential angst, my arse,’ she surprised Linda by saying once, when she popped up to borrow some Sartre.