Falling Over (4 page)

~

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shop on the ground floor, where you can buy flowers, books, cuddly toys; but otherwise the place appears shabby and out of date.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 receptionist 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.

~

(And somewhere, I hear a girl cry out.)

~

I was knocked unconscious when I fell over, but Michelle got me to help – not far, since we were already at the hospital! We laugh. I have the same number of stitches in my head as her, although my bandage stretches the other way. She and Christophe came to see me every day at hospital – my fall was the worst so far, and so I am kept in for observation for awhile. I am not bothered that they always come together, for Michelle wears my ring, the one we shall say I won at the fair for her. And Christophe does not seem angry to have lost either, at least not as far as I can tell, for he has offered to put me in touch with some friends of his father, who work in the city.

Only Grace gives me funny looks.

She only comes to visit occasionally, and our conversations are briefer and more stilted each time. I have outgrown her, I suppose, for I have been thinking a lot alone in this hospital bed. She is so idealistic; so naive!

But she is right to be wary.

For there are so many of us now. I close my eyes, and hear the rush hour.

Right too to be afraid.

So many!

Fate, Destiny, and a Fat Man
from Arkansas

In his dreams, he saw the car from outside.

It was a white car, climbing up the exit from a flyover, going the wrong way. It was doing well over the speed limit but the oncoming traffic managed to avoid it. The car’s white paintwork was speckled with both grime and the blood from the two pedestrians it had hit thirty seconds earlier. It reached the highest point of the flyover; below it other roads writhed in thick tangles. The road was clear of traffic ahead. But, as if not to be denied its chance for the spectacular, the car swerved violently and deliberately to the left, into the crash barrier. Which failed to hold. The car shot over the edge of the flyover, for a few seconds following the same trajectory in mid-air as it had held on the road. In those final seconds the driver turned and looked, not at his friend in the back, but at the smiling face and blank glasses of the fat man from Arkansas in the passenger seat... Then the car hit the ground bonnet first, with such force that the deaths inside should have been mercifully quick.

In his dreams he saw the car from outside, and himself, clamped and terrified in the driver’s seat.

~

Tom awoke from his uncomfortable sleep, stretching and yawning. Normally, his dreams faded quickly when he woke, as if recognising the daylight; but this one refused to fade. He sat up on the back seat where he had slept, and looked for a while at the scenery blurring past his window with a worried frown on his otherwise baby-smooth features. Then he leaned forward and tapped the driver of the car on the shoulder.

Sean flinched at the contact, although he tried to pretend that he hadn’t. He turned round and glared at his companion. They were both young men, in their mid-twenties, although Sean was two years older. Tom wished Sean would look at the
road
, rather than back at him.

“I had that dream again.”

“What dream?” Sean said irritably.

“You know, the one I told you about. The one I had
before
. The one about the car crash and... and the fat guy.”

“Oh
that
dream,” Sean said, as if they always talked of dreams and he’d grown confused about which one. “It’s only a dream.” They entered a small village where a sign politely asked them to drive carefully. “Besides, you just imagined the fat guy,” Sean said. Outside he saw a church, a bowling green, a family owned butcher – the village they were passing through was like some Tory wet-dream of England, and the two inner-city lads felt taunted and threatened by its presence, its smug air of permanence and durability. They could break into the large homes, but the insurance would pay; they could swear at the residents, and just reinforce their prejudices. Sean accelerated, felt some satisfaction as the white car sped past the bus stop. But there was no one standing there to tut disapprovingly – everyone was probably too rich to need the bus here, Sean thought angrily. The service had probably been stopped years ago. Leaving the small village, a sign thanked them for driving carefully, and although he hadn’t this made Sean angrier still. He tried to calm himself – after all, he did
want
to drive carefully so as to not attract unwelcome attention, given that the boot was full of stolen goods... Yet his nervous irritation remained, like the fumes of a fuel that should’ve long since run dry.

Tom was also wondering why Sean was so worked up. He had known Sean for years, since he’d been twelve and Sean fourteen. Tom didn’t tend to think about things too much, but he had semi-conscious and nagging doubts about why Sean had
ever
wanted to be his friend. He knew the fact that he was younger could no longer be used as an excuse for his deference, for the fact that Sean thought up the ideas, whereas he just tagged along, like hired help. Knew too that he reverted back to earlier childishness and excitability when he was alongside Sean, despite the fact that Sean professed to be angered by this. But he was glad Sean had stuck by him; without Sean he’d never have dared attempt anything as audacious as the robbery last night; even with Sean they’d almost blown it... But there was no point in thinking about that, for it was okay now, and they were on their way down to London. There weren’t many fences where they came from who could give them a fair deal on the loot in the back of the car: the ornaments of precious metal, the grotty books and other religious paraphernalia. The designs on them were... unique. So Tom hoped, anyway. If it was worth as much as they thought then neither of them would ever need to return to the sink estate on which they’d both grown up.

The pair drove in silence for a while, neither able to think of anything to say. Occasionally they saw a police car and the silence grew tense and rigid, but the law didn’t seem interested in them. It seemed too easy. When Sean did eventually speak he sounded uncomfortable, as though the two had only just met.

“It feels like winning the lottery, huh?”

“Uh huh,” Tom agreed. “Yep.” He wished Sean wouldn’t look over his shoulder to speak to him; he wished it was his turn to drive. Although they were only going thirty miles an hour, if he closed his eyes and focussed Tom sensed how unnaturally fast that actually was, as if the surrounding car didn’t exist, and he was travelling at that speed unprotected, the air whipping past his face... He felt doubly out of control, not driving and also confined to the back seat, like a child. But then where else was he supposed to sleep? They’d both been tired after the robbery, after their midnight dash.

“It’s like something out of a movie, huh? All this stuff? I mean we normally steal phones and you know... TVs and stuff. Not these, these
chalices
and things. Not old Bibles.”

“They’re not Bibles,” Tom said.

“Well, you know... religious books. I mean, not a real religion but ... Well it is to
them
I guess. The people who go there.”

“Doesn’t make it a religion” Tom said, and Sean didn’t argue. Neither of them knew what they were talking about, after all. Tom never did, but Sean guessed he was right on this occasion – it wasn’t a real religion, just a load of sad, sick fuckers, and stealing from them wasn’t like stealing from a church, but in its way almost a
good
deed... – Sean wasn’t trying to reason himself out of a sense of guilt, but one of fear.

They pulled into a service station, to fill up with petrol and take a hurried look around the mini-mart. Sean bought
The Mirror
, a scotch egg, forty Bensons, and a copy of
Razzle
which he slid inside his newspaper as he walked back to the car. Tom bought
Playboy
, some Smarties, and a
Ren & Stimpy
comic, which he slipped inside his magazine on his way back to the car. Outside on the forecourt he could hear the speed of the traffic rushing past;
if I just ran out into the road...
he thought; then shook his head as if his thoughts were physical distractions like flies. He’d had such feelings since he’d woken, not serious ideas but almost dream-like, creeping across his consciousness before he realised how silly they were. They must have been caused by his troubled sleep on the back-seat of a speeding car, by his nerves.

Tom got into the front seat; it was his turn to drive. The idea that some of the nervousness he was feeling would fade when he was in the driving seat proved false, for he still felt the same lack of control as he pulled out into the road, the speeding traffic swerving to one side of him. Just because he was driving, what control did he have? He could be the most careful driver on the road, but his fate could still be sealed by the mental calculations of the person coming up behind him who was talking on his mobile phone...
Slow down
, Tom said in his head; s
low down!
The car didn’t decelerate, but moved into the other lane at the last moment, the driver still oblivious on his mobile as he passed. Tom’s eyes flicked to the mirror, saw the other cars racing to catch him up.

Sean stretched out on the back seat, and idly flicked through the dull and clichéd pornography before tossing it aside, not feeling in the least bit aroused. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep – despite the pretence he had made last time Tom had driven, Sean hadn’t slept at all since the robbery. This time though, his eyes felt heavy and he thought if he could just relax then he might be able to drop off. He felt the car jerk violently; heard Tom press the horn and swear, his voice stressed – Sean smiled: Tom was always a nervous driver. For a long time Sean lay with his eyes closed, worrying about the police, the reliability of their fence, and an American voice promising revenge in a just so tone: this is how things
will
be. And then he slept. And dreamt.

~

Neither of them wanted the grotesquely fat man to get into the car, but they both invited him to sit in the passenger seat. Which he did, cramming his buttocks into the tight space, barely managing to pull the seat-belt across his massive belly. Yet he neither grunted nor sweated nor struggled. Once he was in and the door was shut he told them, in an American accent, where to go. It was a little out of the way for them, and they were already late – but they did what he said. They drove south for a while, speeding up all the time. They were going roughly seventy miles an hour when they hit the teenage couple walking hand in hand across a pedestrian crossing. She turned and her face struggled with the split second comprehension of her death; he had been whispering into her ear and didn’t even look round. The white car shook and jolted as it went across the bodies; a few drops splattered as high as the windscreen. The car didn’t slow down, but accelerated towards the flyover. They both wished to act, even just to plead, but they just sat silent and immobile (the disconnected way his arms turned the wheel and his feet pressed the pedal didn’t seem like any movement of his own). The fat man sat silent too, relaxed in the confinement of the seatbelt. The car climbed up the exit from the flyover, going the wrong way...

~

Sean awoke with a barely controlled noise of fear. Within seconds he was angry with Tom – the stupid little prick had got him all worked up with his talk of dreams: now he was having them too! Except that wasn’t quite true. Sean hadn’t managed to sleep the first time Tom had taken over the driving, but he had... dozed. His thoughts had wandered, with as little coherence and control as if he had been dreaming after all. And while he could remember no details, Tom’s talk of car crashes and... and that fat guy had chimed perfectly with the vague feeling of dread he remembered, and which persisted.

“How long was I asleep?” he asked Tom. “This time?”

“About ten minutes. No, maybe fifteen.”

Sean looked out the window, trying to keep a frown from his face. He was sure he’d heard that you had to sleep for at least an hour to go deep enough to dream. But then, he had been so tired... Sean felt even worse after his nap than before. He pulled out a cigarette, and rolled down the car window. There was nothing to look at in the scenery scrolling past, and his eyes defocused so that the sight became nothing but a rushed blur. He got bored, irritable, and flicked through his newspaper, saw the same usual load of shite: scandals, gossip, the low down on a boy-band apparently ‘
Destined For No 1!
’, and a surprisingly accurate weather forecast.

“Hey, you wanna know your horoscope?” he asked Tom, more for something to say than through wanting to say it. Besides, he knew his friend liked hearing them, for Tom listened with childlike glee when they predicted great things.

“No, don’t read them out,” Tom said quietly. The car braked suddenly and Tom held down the horn; Sean was sprawled on the back seat and so didn’t see what had happened.

“Aw come on, Taurus right?” Sean said. He started to read the bullshit about financial luck and a broadening of personal horizons due to travel, but Tom interrupted him:

“Just shut up will you! You’re putting me off!”

Sean looked up from the paper – he couldn’t see Tom’s face, only his arm and hand on the gear stick. It was trembling.

“Well, fuck you too,” he muttered, flinging the paper away in disgust that was half feigned to hide his confusion.

Tom stared out the window, aware of his friend’s anger but unable to find anything to say to explain himself. Thought seemed hard, he was concentrating so much on driving – like he was a learner again, like it was a matter of life and death. Which he supposed it was. But the road didn’t normally seem so wild, with traffic veering and swerving with no predictability, with invisible bumps in the road making the car judder and bolt, with unsignposted junctions, unexpected side-winds. He wanted to explain to Sean why he was so afraid, but he didn’t know himself. He just knew that he was very scared and that the feeling had been getting stronger ever since the robbery. Of course he had been scared
during
the break-in as well, but that had been different, an adrenaline fuelled fear, alive with possibilities and so close to excitement it had made him feel high. Until he had seen the fat man: tall, but slumped under his own immense weight, leaning forward like a dinosaur, his head high and hairless, his spectacles glaring with reflected light, his teeth grinning horribly. He had introduced himself with an American accent, but Tom couldn’t remember the odd sounding name. Then as Tom had stood there paralysed, caught red handed with the temple’s goods in his pilferer’s grip, the fat man had said he came from Arkansas but “long before it was called that.” He had licked his fat round lips and then, smiling as if hungry, he had started saying the most horrible things... which Tom couldn’t quite remember. He didn’t want to. But now he felt like a rat in a maze, being prodded and electrocuted into going down certain routes...

It hadn’t been a
real
temple. Just an old rented house, where people gathered. No one admitted to going, or to having friends who went; maybe friends of friends, maybe, but no one you personally knew... Nevertheless, people went – neighbours saw people entering at strange hours, and began to claim they heard chanting through adjoining walls. And of course, because no one knew anyone who went, the stories about what went on inside became spuriously specific and hysterical: animal sacrifice, child abuse. There were, apparently, strange relics and old, old books inside the house, books that told of old beliefs that should’ve been long since buried... No one knew who owned the house, it had been empty for years. Overnight it became daubed with lurid anti-immigrant graffiti – but still people came and went at odd hours, and any slight noise on the wind was claimed to chanting from its interior.