Falling Sideways (9 page)

(Of course: it was all Alex's fault. Now that he'd figured that out, everything dropped neatly into place. The only question was how come it had taken him so long to realise.)

‘Lost your key?'

Miraculously, he didn't drop the shopping bags with a deafening crash (only because his foot was between the bag and the concrete, shielding the impact). He secured them, then turned round.

‘I said,' repeated Mr Van Oppen, ‘have you lost your key?'

‘What?' It was, David realised, a perfectly civil question. ‘Oh, no. Thanks all the same. I was just, um, resting.'

‘Ah, right. Cheers, then.'

And away Mr Van Oppen trotted down the stairs, blithe as Christopher Robin; and with him went an opportunity—

(You could ask him; he probably knows. Yes, but if he knows, he might tell you, and maybe you won't like what you hear—)

‘Just a moment,' David heard himself call out. ‘Please.'

CHAPTER FOUR

M
r Van Oppen stopped and looked up at him.

‘Yes?' he asked.

I've done it again, David chided himself, committed myself to a course of action. Must stop doing that . . . ‘Excuse me,' he said, keeping his voice down, ‘but have you got a minute?'

‘What?'

David hesitated for a moment, then tiptoed down to join him. ‘Have you got a minute?' he repeated. ‘Only there's something I'd like to ask you.'

‘Sure,' Mr Van Oppen replied amiably. ‘Fire away.'

David opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Of course he knew exactly what he wanted to ask, but it wasn't the sort of question that went easily into words.
What the hell's going on?
Too vague.
Who are you, and who's the girl in my flat?
Too direct, too toe-curlingly embarrassing if Mr Van Oppen replied with a blank stare and a polite enquiry as to what he'd been smoking lately.

‘Excuse me,' David said, ‘but could I borrow a cup of sugar?'

‘No problem,' Mr Van Oppen replied. ‘Follow me.'

He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting to see when Mr Van Oppen turned the key and pushed open the door: something bizarre, certainly, because that was the way his life had suddenly decided to go, and the most disconcerting thing he could imagine running into at this stage was normality. But he definitely hadn't anticipated—

‘Here you go,' said Mr Van Oppen.

—Bare whitewashed walls, nude floorboards, uncurtained windows, a total absence of furniture, not even a doormat or a lampshade. Nothing at all, except for a single packet of Tate & Lyall granulated sugar in the exact centre of the living-room floor, and next to it a plain white cup, of the sort you get in old-fashioned cafés and railway-station buffets. Mr Van Oppen bent down, picked up the packet, opened it and poured sugar into the cup. ‘Will that be enough?' he asked.

David nodded. ‘Thanks,' he whispered. ‘I'll let you have it back tomorrow.'

‘No hurry.'

(Needless to say, he couldn't think of a rational explanation. But he did know what was going on: someone was taking the mickey, and not being desperately subtle about it, either.)

‘While I'm here.' David took a deep breath. ‘Would it be all right if I asked you a personal question?'

Mr Van Oppen smiled. ‘That depends on what it is,' he said.

‘All right.' David looked at the sugar in the cup. Just sugar. ‘Do you know a lawyer by the name of Alex Snaithe?'

‘Alex? Sure.' Mr Van Oppen nodded vigorously. ‘He does a lot of work for my company. Nice enough chap, for a lawyer, though if you ask me he's so far up himself he can see out of his ears. Still, I think that's par for the course if you're a high-powered lawyer these days.'

‘Ah,' David said. ‘He's my cousin.'

‘Really?' Mr Van Oppen hoisted an eyebrow, Spockwise. ‘Small world.'

Indeed. Any smaller and you could use it as a ball-bearing. ‘Right,' David said. ‘Well, thanks a lot for the sugar.'

‘My pleasure. Oh, by the way,' Mr Van Oppen added, ‘I almost forgot. I've got a message for you.'

‘For me?'

Mr Van Oppen nodded. ‘From my brother,' he said. ‘Apparently you left your briefcase at his workshop yesterday. No rush about collecting it; when you're next passing, he says.'

‘Your brother.'

‘John.'

‘Ah,' David said. ‘
That
brother.'

Now I know, David reflected, how a cue ball feels. He took a deep breath. ‘That's something else I'd like to talk to you about,' he said. ‘If that's all right with you.'

Mr Van Oppen twitched his nose, like a rabbit. ‘OK,' he said. ‘But I'll have to be getting along in a minute or so, or I'll miss my flight.'

David nodded. ‘Your flat,' he said. ‘It's a bit—'

‘Sparse?'

‘Yes, sparse. I was wondering—'

Mr Van Oppen shrugged. ‘Typical of my rotten luck when it comes to moving,' he said. ‘Mix-up with the vans, or something like that. I phoned the removals people this morning, and they called me back and told me my stuff's in Durham, of all places. Apparently it's going to take a week to get it back. They didn't explain why – I've got this startlingly vivid mental image of all my socks lined up in a row, like the Osmonds, singing ‘I'm gonna leave old Durham town', but I don't suppose it's anything as anthropomorphic as that. Fortuitously, I'm just off to Ulan Bator for a week on business, so it's not going to be fatally inconvenient. Actually,' he added, his face lighting up like a small floodlit cathedral, ‘you could do me a tremendous favour, if you wouldn't mind. If I give you the key, could you let the removal men in when they do finally show up? Otherwise, I can just picture me coming home and finding all my worldly goods stacked into a barricade on the landing, like the defence of Rorke's Drift.'

‘Sure,' David said automatically.

‘That's extremely kind of you,' said Mr Van Oppen, handing him a keyring. It had an eight-legged pewter horse for a key fob and one solitary key.

(And nobody,
nobody
in the whole world had just one key on his keyring.)

‘My pleasure,' David said. ‘And I'll be sure to get some sugar.'

‘What? Oh, yes, right. Look, sorry if this sounds rude but I really do have to fly.'

Mr Van Oppen trotted away down the stairs, his footsteps inaudible (and that was strange, too: the communal stairs had a tendency to creak like the special effects in a radio ghost story), and David put the key in his top pocket. It was time he went back to his own flat and faced up to his heart's desire.

He paused outside his front door and listened; he couldn't hear her voice. So he let himself in.

‘There you are!' Once again he was knocked completely off balance by the sheer beauty of her voice. ‘You've been ever such a long time.'

She was wearing a pair of his jogging pants (he'd never jogged in his life, needless to say) and a dark blue sweatshirt given to him a long time ago by someone who didn't know him very well. She looked like an angel.

‘Sorry,' he replied. ‘But I bumped into my new neighbour, the man who's moved into the flat upstairs, and—'

In the most graceful and attractive way possible, she wrenched the carrier bag from his hand. ‘Danish butter,' she said, wrinkling her nose ever so very slightly. ‘Oh.'

‘They didn't have Normandy,' David explained.

‘Really?' She seemed genuinely shocked, disappointed, as if she was five years old and someone had just shown her irrefutable proof that there was no Santa Claus. ‘Oh, well,' she said, sadly but with a degree of genuine compassion for the world. ‘Just have to make do, that's all. Where's the gruyère? In the other bag?'

‘They didn't have any of that, either.'

Just briefly, a little flicker of fire sparkled in her eyes; small and fast as a spark plug, or the divine flame passing between fingertips in Michelangelo's painting. It faded immediately, but it left a burned patch in the middle of David's vision, as if he'd watched somebody arc-welding. ‘Never mind,' she said. ‘We'll just have to get a couple of spare pats when we go to Sainsbury's. Which reminds me; if we leave now, we'll get there just as they open.'

‘Before we do that—' The sound of his own voice amazed him. That was no way to speak to a lovely young woman, especially a lost, frightened, vulnerable one who'd only just—

She looked at him. It wasn't even a frown, let alone a scowl. Compared with some of the looks he'd been on the sharp end of over the years, it was pretty innocuous, simply a polite warning intended to put him on notice that there were unexploded scowls hidden in the vicinity. But it hit him like a rake in the grass.

And, most remarkable of all, he kept on going, like the Light Brigade charging the wrong way down a one-way street. ‘Before we do that,' he repeated, ‘maybe we should talk about a few things.'

‘Can't we do that on the way? Only I'm starving, and I thought we could grab something to eat in that little café next to the railway station – you know, the one that does the Danish pastries with the yellow custard in the middle—'

‘How the hell do you know about that?'

Silence; the quality of silence that follows the moment when the waiter drops a towering pile of trays on the tiled floor. ‘Excuse me?' she said.

‘How the hell do you know about little cafés in Ealing Broadway?' David demanded. (Either that or there was a ventriloquist hiding behind the sofa; he still couldn't believe he was actually saying the words, and in such an aggressive tone of voice.) ‘You can't know about that. Dammit, you're less than twelve hours old.'

‘What on earth are you talking about?'

The penny dropping, like a shooting star, streaked his mental skyline with agonising red fire. The only surprising thing was that he hadn't thought of it before–

He only had Honest John's word for it that she was a clone. All he knew for certain was that she'd jumped up out of an overgrown fishbowl, covered in green slime. The one didn't necessarily follow on from the other. Wasn't it far more likely that she wasn't a clone at all, just some perfectly normal female who for some reason had been curled up asleep with no clothes on in a tank full of green yuck? Improbable, yes, but a stone-cold certainty compared with the odds of her being a construct extrapolated from the hair of a centuries-dead witch in a shed in Ravenscourt Park by a man who called himself Honest John. ‘Excuse me,' David asked, very quietly, ‘but who exactly are you? And what are you doing here?'

Another look from those starlike eyes. They left David feel like a clumsy Jedi Knight who'd been cleaning his lightsabre when it went off. ‘Are you feeling all right?' she asked.

‘Could you answer the question?' David pleaded. ‘Please?'

‘Sure.' She was looking at him with wide, round eyes. ‘My name is Philippa Levens—'

‘You're certain about that?'

‘Don't be silly. My name's Philippa Levens, and I'm in my first year at Exeter University, reading chemistry, and Uncle John said I could earn some holiday money working for him in his factory.'

‘Factory,' David repeated.

‘All right, it's a bit small for that. Call it a workshop, then. Anyway—'

‘Your uncle,' David interrupted. ‘Honest John?'

She giggled. ‘I think he meant it as a joke to start with,' she said, ‘and then it sort of stuck, somehow. Anyway, I think it's got a sort of ring to it: “Honest John's House of Cones''.'

‘Cones?'

‘Cones. You know, the plastic pointy things they stick in the road. Like orange-and-white witches' hats. He makes them.'

‘Ah. I see.'

‘Oh good. Anyway, there I was helping him clean out the polymer vats – that's the tanks where he mixes up the chemicals – and I slipped on a damp patch, and next thing I knew—'

‘You fell in the vat.'

She nodded. ‘You know all this already,' she said. ‘I mean, obviously you know all this, if you're an old friend of Uncle John's.'

He frowned. ‘I'm an old friend of your Uncle John's?'

‘Well, that's what he told me. Aren't you?'

David shrugged. ‘Anything's possible. Look, sorry to wander off the subject, but have you got an Uncle Bill?'

She smiled. ‘Of course I have. Why else would I be here?'

He thought about taking her up on that, but decided to let it ride for a moment or so. ‘How about an Uncle Oliver? Have you got one of those?'

She shook her head. ‘Of course not, silly,' she said. ‘Oliver's my dad's name.'

David shook his head. ‘I don't think so,' he said. ‘When I met him, he said his name was Oliver Dean.

‘Of course it is.'

‘Then why aren't you Philippa Dean?'

Not anger in her eyes, not yet; just irritability, the sparkle of the fuse rather than the flare of the blasting charge itself. ‘You know perfectly well why.' She sighed. #8216;Because when my mum and dad split up, my mum made me take her maiden name. All right? Really, all these questions. If I pass, do I get a badge or something?'

David took a long, deep breath. ‘All right,' he said. ‘Can we just wind back a bit? You said something about me being a good friend of your Uncle John? I'd never even seen him before yesterday.'

Just for a split second, the time it takes for a cell to divide or a lawyer to earn sixpence, she looked nonplussed, as if she'd been caught out in a careless mistake. ‘Mutual friend's what I meant, of course. I know you don't know Uncle John, or Uncle Bill; but your best friend is their best friend. But that's a real mouthful to say, so—'

‘My best friend? I haven't got a—' He stopped short, like a swallow flying into a plate-glass window. ‘You mean Alex,' he said. ‘Alex Snaithe.'