Sunshine on Scotland Street

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Matthew was silent. He wondered whether he said embarrassing things himself. It was perfectly possible that he did. Or even if he did not say embarrassing things, then might some of the things he said simply be silly, or inconsequential? Most of our conversation was like that, he thought. We don’t speak as if our lines have been written for us by a dramatist. Did Oscar Wilde speak with the sophistication of an Oscar Wilde character? He doubted it. But then Oscar Wilde did come up with some very apt remarks in his ordinary exchanges with people. What had he said to the customs official on entering the United States? Have you anything to declare, Mr. Wilde? Only my genius. What a thing to say! What would happen if one tried that these days? Matthew doubted whether customs officials today would appreciate it. And he doubted, too, whether the customs official to whom it was originally said was all that pleased either. Would he have gone back to his colleagues and reported, “You know what that Oscar Wilde said to me when I asked him whether he had anything to declare? Well, you’d hardly believe it but …”

  Oscar Wilde was so funny, Matthew thought. A fly-on-the-wall account of his life would be quite a thing … well, not of all his life, just bits. And what was attributed to him on his deathbed in Paris? He had not liked the room’s decoration and had announced: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” He probably did not say that – but he could have.

  He looked at Bo. What does he expect of me, he wondered. And what if he were … sending me up?

  41. Observation

  Matthew had not envisaged how difficult it would be to appear natural when walking under the unremitting gaze of a camera. As he made his way up India Street that morning, with Bo walking backwards in front of him, his lens trained unblinkingly on his embarrassed subject, Matthew found himself uncertain what to do with his hands. In a normal walk, the hands find their place naturally, hanging by one’s side, perhaps moving slightly with the rhythm of the walk – not moving piston-like, as the hands and arms of a runner will move; that is how it is when we don’t think about what we’re doing. But once we start to think about those ordinary movements we perform when doing some everyday task, then the looseness and fluidity of the body is lost and an awkward rigidity may take over. And even more so, when we think about such movements and are at the same time observed by a camera: then not only may our gait become truly awkward but the facial expression we assume may reflect this state of discomfort too.

  Public figures – those who regularly find themselves under the scrutiny of crowds or cameras – have their ways of dealing with this: a fixed mask, perhaps, or little movements that absorb the body’s restless energy, that give it something to do. Some people, although seemingly at ease in the space they occupy, adjust the cuffs of their shirt as they walk, a small gesture that must make it easier for them; Mrs. Thatcher had her handbag to grasp – in her case, both a shield and a weapon to be used on opponents; Mr. Brown sucked in his cheeks and, it seemed, chewed them thoughtfully – perhaps a way of keeping himself awake, a substitute for pinching himself, in the many moments of mind-numbing tedium that a prime minister must endure. All of these were entirely understandable devices that those who have to put up with us – the public – at our most inquisitive and demanding must be forgiven for employing. But such techniques are not easily learned, and Matthew, who could not recall ever having been filmed before – let alone for a Danish documentary – had not had an opportunity to acquire them. Now, as he turned the corner into Heriot Row, he felt that lack acutely. And not only did he not know how to walk when observed by a camera, he also had no idea where to look. Bo had asked him not to look into the lens of the camera, and Matthew was trying to follow that instruction. But tell yourself not to do something, and that is exactly what you will feel drawn to do. Those who encounter Medusa know all about that. Skiers also know it, having had it drummed into them at ski school: do not look down at your skis but keep your gaze focused on where you want to be; funambulists too: they know that should they glance down at those curious, ballet-type shoes they wear, then they will lose their balance and fall; and so they look steadfastly ahead, their eyes focused on some point just beyond the end of the singing wire, as Matthew now focused his gaze on the junction of Heriot Row and Dundas Street, never before studied with such longing intensity.

  “Just relax,” called out Bo from behind his camera. “Pretend that I’m not here.”

  Matthew made a non-committal sound and tried, for a few moments, to think of something that would distract him. A completely detached thought – something that had no bearing on his current situation – could make him look normal, or so he thought. But the thought that came to him was an inadmissible one: one of those embarrassing, intrusive thoughts that arrive uninvited and make one blush, which is what Matthew now did. This is hopeless, he thought. I’m going to look ridiculous.

  Bo appeared not to share this view. After they had eventually arrived at the gallery, and Matthew had made a show of extracting the key from his pocket and opening the door, he switched off his camera, lowered it from his shoulder, and clapped his hands enthusiastically.

  “You’re a natural,” he exclaimed, patting Matthew on the back. “This is going to be a great film!”

  Matthew looked puzzled. “But nothing’s happened,” he exclaimed. “All you’ve done is to film me walking to work.” “But you walked so well,” said Bo. “The way you … the way you moved, your whole walk – people in Denmark are going to go wild over that.”

  Matthew frowned. He had no idea why people in Denmark should find his walking to work – or indeed his walking anywhere – of the remotest interest. If he were ever to see a documentary film showing Danish people walking to work in Copenhagen, he was sure that he would find it very dull; why should it be any different when the subject of the film was him?

  “Just go ahead with your normal routine,” said Bo. “Just ignore me.”

  Matthew went to his desk and sat down. Bo picked up his camera again, turned it on, and moved slowly towards Matthew. “Don’t look into the camera,” he whispered. “Just do what you normally do.”

  For a few moments Matthew stared blankly at the surface of his desk. What did he normally do when he sat at his desk? Now that he had to think about it, he found it difficult to remember. He read the mail, of course; that would give him something to do.

  He reached for the small pile of letters he had picked up as he had entered the gallery. There was not much to the pile that morning: two white envelopes, one brown, and an advertisement for an Italian restaurant.

  “You could open the letters,” Bo suggested helpfully.

  Matthew resisted the temptation to give him a scathing look. He did not need to be told what to do; he would open the letters because that was what he normally did. “I don’t need prompting,” he muttered sotto voce.

  He slit open the first of the white envelopes and extracted a typewritten page from within. It was an enquiry from a dealer in London who wondered whether Matthew had any Anne Redpaths in stock. Matthew put the letter to one side and opened the second. This was handwritten, and consisted of no more than one line.

  You, it said, are being watched.

  There was no address at the top of the letter and no signature at the bottom.

  42. Jonathan Makes a Proposition to Bruce

  Jonathan stayed for no more than half an hour before he looked at his watch and explained to Bruce that he was expecting a visitor in his own flat, on the opposite side of the street.

  “I’ll have to go,” he said. “But I imagine that we’ll be seeing one another again.”

  He smiled, and looked at Bruce in a way that was not easily interpreted. It was not exactly an invitation, but it was more than one of those mere social niceties that we utter without meaning them: the “see you later” or “we must meet for lunch sometime” remarks that are not meant to be taken literally. The last thing one should say if somebody says let’s meet for lunch sometime is when? It is even less appropriate to take one’s
diary out of a pocket and prepare to write; that quite justifies the response next year, perhaps.

  Bruce nodded; he was thinking of what Jonathan had said about twins, and how twins separated at birth, brought up in ignorance of the existence of each other, sometimes reported a vague sense of incompleteness – a sense that there was something, somebody, missing.

  “It’s very strange,” Jonathan had said. “I was reading about somebody who was convinced he had a brother. He said that he just knew it. And then, when he was well into his adult years, he discovered that there was a brother, who had been handed over for adoption straightaway. He was there all the time.” He paused, and fixed Bruce with a stare. “Imagine what it feels like to find that you have a brother you didn’t know about? Can you imagine that?”

  “I suppose it’s rather satisfying,” said Bruce.

  “Mind you,” said Jonathan thoughtfully, “children believe all sorts of surprising things. Some of them seem to be convinced that they’ve had other lives.”

  “Spooky,” said Bruce.

  Jonathan laughed. “I don’t let these things worry me. I rather like hearing about them, in fact. I was reading about a child who was adamant that she had lived in a village in France over a hundred years ago. She gave the name of the village and mentioned people who lived there – by name.”

  “And were the details correct?”

  Jonathan nodded. “Apparently so.”

  “Did she speak French?”

  “That’s the extraordinary thing. She spoke some, although she had never learned it. She wasn’t fluent, but she knew the French names for some fairly obscure agricultural implements. That’s called xenoglossy, by the way.”

  “What’s called xenoglossy?”

  “The ability to speak a language you’ve never learned.” Bruce was thinking of the girl who claimed to have been French. “She must have been exposed to some information about that place,” he said. “Perhaps she read about it somewhere. You don’t need to know much about a place to be able to pretend to be from there.”

  Jonathan thought about this. “Or a person. You probably don’t have to know all that much about a person’s life in order to claim to be that person. Remember all those films about people being sent off as spies, having to mug up on a false identity. They can’t have known all that much about the person they were pretending to be.”

  Bruce shrugged. “You had to be careful about details. Little things – and one slip could get you shot …”

  He did not finish. “Like us,” said Jonathan.

  Bruce looked puzzled. “How like us?”

  “Well,” said Jonathan, “we could find out a bit about each other and then … exchange existences. To get away with it, I suspect that we’d only have to know a few things: names of family members, where we went to school, the name of our boss, a handful of things like that.”

  Bruce frowned. “Are you serious?”

  Jonathan got up from his chair. “Actually, I am.”

  “You mean I should step into your shoes, and you into mine?”

  Jonathan nodded. “We’ll take the same size,” he said, and then laughed.

  Bruce ignored this. “Why? Why should we do it?”

  “Why do people do anything unusual? Why do they decide that they’ve had enough of their own lives and look at the lives of others?”

  Bruce did not answer, and so Jonathan continued. “I have an interesting life, I suppose. But sometimes I think of how … how fulfilling it would be to be someone else. Don’t you think that too?”

  Bruce looked out of the window. He had always been entirely satisfied with his existence but … yes, he supposed that there had been times when it had occurred to him that other people’s lives were more interesting than his. “Sometimes,” he said.

  Jonathan was studying him. “I thought of an amazing story, by the way,” he said. “Imagine that you have an identical twin and your twin commits a crime.”

  Bruce thought about this. “I can see where this is going,” he said. “The innocent twin is arrested and convicted of the crime committed by his brother.”

  “No,” said Jonathan. “That could happen, of course, but what I had in mind was that the guilty twin is arrested and sent to prison. His brother comes to visit him and the guilty twin overpowers him …”

  “Difficult under the eyes of the guard, surely.”

  “The guard is in on it,” said Jonathan quickly.

  “I see.”

  “Yes, and the prisoner dresses his brother in his prison clothing and gets into his. Then he walks out, leaving his twin in his place.”

  Bruce laughed. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?” asked Jonathan.

  “Because the one left behind would tell them. And they would check up and see that there was a twin.”

  Jonathan was prepared for this. “But they wouldn’t be able to tell.”

  “Fingerprints?” said Bruce.

  Jonathan considered this for a moment. “Maybe. But it’s fiction, just a story, remember, and you don’t have to be completely realistic.” He paused. “But what I want to ask you is this: should we do it? Should we swap?”

  Bruce never understood why he gave his answer so quickly.

  “Yes. Why not?”

  43. You Have My Life, I’ll Have Yours

  “One thing,” said Bruce. “One thing I want to ask you: how long for?”

  Jonathan, who had been on the point of leaving before this conversation started, now sat down again. “Good question,” he said.

  “A couple of hours?” asked Bruce. “A day?”

  Jonathan shook his head. “Oh, more than that,” he said. “What would be the point of doing it for a short time? You wouldn’t get the feeling of being me and I wouldn’t get the feeling of being you.”

  Bruce looked at him doubtfully. “But what about work?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “You tell me what you’re expected to do and I’ll try and do it. Your job isn’t rocket science, I take it?”

  “No,” said Bruce. “But you still have to know a bit.”

  “I can bluff,” said Jonathan.

  “But what about the names of the other people at work? It’d become pretty apparent, don’t you think, that we didn’t know who was who?”

  Jonathan did not consider this to be a problem. “It’s amazing how long you can go without knowing what to call somebody,” he said. “Have people got their names on their doors in your office?”

  “Yes,” replied Bruce.

  “Then I’d find out who’s who.”

  Bruce thought for a moment. “Do you know anything about building?”

  Jonathan said he did. He had a friend who was an architect and he had told him a lot about levels and detailing of walls and things of that sort. “And I bought a flat once,” he said. “That taught me a lot about the way you people work.” He looked at Bruce, a smile playing about his lips. “You’ll have no difficulty with my job,” he said. “PR is CS, which means common sense. CGW – can’t go wrong.”

  “Except with the acronyms,” said Bruce. “One could go wrong PDQ with those.”

  Jonathan was sanguine. “Don’t worry – it’ll be all right. Shall we give it a week? Ten days?”

  Bruce hesitated. “My job’s fairly responsible,” he said. “People buy property on the basis of my reports.”

  Jonathan tried to reassure him. “I’ll consult you,” he said. “We could meet on the occasional evening and go over things. You could tell me what to do.”

  Bruce was still unhappy.

  “Listen,” said Jonathan. “It’ll be a cinch. Haven’t you heard of those people who pass themselves off as doctors? You read about them in the newspapers from time to time. Sometimes they get away with it for years – in fact, they can be rather good at what they do.”

  “They can’t be,” said Bruce.

  Jonathan contradicted him. “No, they can be. If you’ve been a nurse or whatever for ages and seen what the doct
or does, then you can probably do it just as well. Maybe the same applies to dentists. I suspect it does. After all, you don’t really need to train for all those years to do those jobs.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. Long training periods are all about professionalisation and restricting access. And they’re also about the vested interests that colleges and universities have in keeping people on their courses for years. Take accountancy: six months intensive training and you can do most of the jobs done by accountants. You won’t know everything, of course, but you’ll know enough to do a lot of it. Plumbing: six months too. Max. Same for being an electrician. That’s dead simple. Green wire here, brown wire here, earth over there.”

  Bruce found himself wondering whether Jonathan was joking. “But the earth is the green wire,” he interjected. “Green and yellow, I think.”

  Jonathan seemed vaguely surprised. “Is it? Well, okay, you put the green wire in the earth socket and that’s that.”

  Bruce listened.

  “The only one I’d be careful about is being a pilot,” Jonathan continued. “You need actual flying hours for that. Anything that requires feel needs quite a long training. But the rest …” He shrugged. He seemed to have second thoughts about pilots. “Actually, pilots don’t really need much experience any more. Those big planes are flown by computers. You just sit there and switch on automatic takeoff and landing and the computers do the rest. You don’t have to touch a thing. If you can turn on a computer, then you can fly a jumbo. Simple.”

  “As long as everything goes well,” Bruce said.

  “Which it will do 99.9 per cent of the time. But do you think you’re going to get the pilots’ unions to admit that? Oh no, you aren’t. And the reason for that is that if they admit that they just sit there and do nothing, then somebody’s going to ask how come they deserve those big salaries? How much do you think the captain of a big passenger jet gets?”