Being

by Kevin Brooks

  I looked down at the table again, then back at Eddi. ‘The Evening Standard,’ I said. ‘It was here when I went to the bathroom.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, still smiling. ‘I really don’t know –’

  She stopped speaking as I pulled the pistol from my pocket and aimed it at her head. She stopped smiling too. Her mouth dropped open and she just sat there, staring in surprise at the pistol.

  I was surprised to see it too. I wasn’t quite sure how it’d got there. One second it’d been in my pocket, the next thing I knew I was looking down its barrel into Eddi’s shocked eyes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘Where is it?’ I asked her again.

  ‘What is this? What’s going on?’

  ‘The newspaper, Eddi. Where’s the newspaper?’

  ‘What newspaper?’

  Something was happening inside me now. Something was taking over. And I didn’t want it to be there. I wanted Eddi to give me the paper before I lost control.

  ‘Please,’ I said to her, ‘just give it to me.’

  She tried smiling again, but her fear and surprise wouldn’t let her. Her lips were too tight to smile. ‘Come on, Robert,’ she said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘This is stupid. I don’t know what –’

  The pistol kicked in my hand. I heard a dull thwack, a gasp of breath, then the room was still and silent. Doomp doomp d-doomp. Eddi was frozen white, breathing hard, staring wide-eyed at me. I’d pulled the trigger, fired a shot into the leather settee. I could feel the shock in my bones.

  ‘The newspaper,’ I said quietly.

  Without taking her eyes off me, Eddi reached under a settee cushion and pulled out the newspaper.

  ‘Bring it here,’ I told her.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I don’t want –’

  ‘Bring it to me.’

  She got up slowly and brought the paper over to me. I took it from her outstretched hand.

  ‘Sit down,’ I told her.

  She backed across the room and sat down rigidly on the settee. I stared at her for a moment, then unfolded the newspaper and placed it on the table. I kept the pistol levelled at Eddi, glanced at her again, then turned my eyes to the front page.

  They’d used the same photograph as the Daily Express, the one that made me look shadowy and gaunt.

  The caption beneath the photo said:

  ROBERT SMITH: £50,000 REWARD

  I stared at the words for a while – ROBERT SMITH: £50,000 REWARD – and then, with the same sinking feeling I’d felt in the hotel, I forced myself to read the story.

  There was a phone number at the end of the article. A London number. I took Ryan’s wallet out of my pocket, found his business card and checked the number against the one in the newspaper.

  They weren’t the same.

  I looked over at Eddi. She was just sitting there, staring at me. Her eyes were still shocked and her face was rigid with fear, but she didn’t look out of control. She wasn’t terrified.

  ‘You’ve seen this?’ I said, showing her the newspaper.

  She nodded.

  ‘Have you told anyone?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You’d better not be lying.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ she said. ‘How could I have told anyone? You’ve only just got here.’

  ‘Why did you hide the paper?’

  ‘Why do you think? It says you killed someone –’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘It’s a set up,’ I told her. ‘I haven’t killed anyone.’

  ‘You’ve got a gun,’ she said. ‘You took a shot at me, for Christ’s sake. What am I supposed to think?’

  I was coming back to myself now. I was beginning to feel like Robert Smith again.

  ‘It’s not what it seems,’ I said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say? How could I explain anything? I didn’t know anything. And even if I did, it wouldn’t have made any difference. She’d never have believed me.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  She smiled warily. ‘Look, Robert,’ she said. ‘I was frightened, OK? I saw the thing in the newspaper about you, and I remembered who you were, that’s all. I wasn’t going to do anything about it. What could I do? I didn’t know where you were until you turned up here. And then I didn’t know what to do. It was just a bit of a shock, you know? I mean, what would you do if I came round to your place and you’d just seen a story in the newspaper saying that I was a murderer?’ She lit another cigarette. ‘I panicked, that’s all. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ I told her again.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘if you say so. But I don’t really care what you’ve done. I’m not going to grass you up, am I?’

  ‘Why not? £50,000 is a lot of money.’

  She laughed. ‘You think I want anything to do with the police? Come on, Robert… you know what I do.’ She looked at me. ‘I mean, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

  She was right. I was there because of what she did. Because what Eddi did was fake ID. That’s how she made her living – producing, providing and selling fake ID. That’s what all the equipment was for – the scanners and the cameras and all the rest of it. Fake ID. Passports, driving licences, birth certificates, medical cards. Anything and everything. If you had the right money, Eddi Ray could give you a brand-new life.

  The trouble was, I didn’t have the right money.

  And now there was this £50,000 reward to think about too.

  Eddi was smart. She had to be in her business. And I was pretty sure she could work out a way to get hold of the reward money without the police finding out what she did. But I needed her. I needed a new identity. Name, appearance, documents. I needed a brand-new life. Without it, I wasn’t going to last much longer.

  We were staring at each other now. Eddi was thinking, I was thinking. We were both trying to work it all out.

  ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ I said.

  ‘What trouble?’ she said breezily. ‘There’s no trouble. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ I tapped the newspaper with the pistol. ‘If these people find me, they’ll kill me.’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t be stupid –’

  ‘They’ll kill me, and then they’ll kill you.’

  She shook her head. ‘The police don’t kill people –’

  ‘It’s not the police.’

  ‘What do you mean? It says in the paper –’

  ‘They’ll kill you, Eddi. Believe me. If they find out I’ve been here, they won’t let you live.’

  She started to say something else, but the look in my eyes made her change her mind. She was remembering the gunshot now. Remembering what I could be. She lowered her eyes and looked away.

  ‘I need to be someone else,’ I told her.

  She looked up at me. ‘What?’

  ‘I need to be someone else. I need some ID. Passport, driving licence, bank account, credit card –’

  ‘How much?’ she said.

  ‘How much what?’

  ‘Money. How much money have you got?’

  ‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘A couple of hundred in cash, a Switch card, some credit cards…’

  Eddi frowned at me. ‘That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t do much for that.’

  I pointed the pistol at her. ‘I think you can.’

  We spent the rest of the day making me into someone else. It took a long time, but Eddi was very thorough. Even though she was working at gunpoint, she took pride in her work, and she did a good job.

  First of all, she took me into the bathroom to cut my hair. It was quite awkward, becaus
e I wouldn’t let her stand behind me with a pair of scissors in her hand, just in case she decided to stick them in my neck, and if she was standing behind me, I couldn’t cover her with the pistol. So I sat in a chair and made her stand in front of me, which meant she had to lean right over me to get to the back of my head, and that meant I got a face full of her breasts. Which was kind of unsettling. And she knew it. So she leaned in more than she needed to.

  So I was sitting there holding the gun to her belly, and she was pressing herself into my face, and it was making me feel stuff… physical stuff. It was getting to me. Exciting me. And I wondered how that could be. I mean, if I wasn’t human… how did it work? How did a certain touch make a certain part of me do certain things? And that got me thinking about other stuff too – about me, and girls, and what I’d done. Because I had done things. I had had sex. Not very often, and probably not very well, but – as far as I knew – there hadn’t been anything unusual about it. Everything had worked.

  And I was starting to think about that, wondering what it meant, and I was trying not to think about what was happening to me now…

  Then Eddi said, ‘Keep still, for Christ’s sake. Stop wriggling around.’

  … and I forced myself to think of nothing.

  After she’d trimmed my hair, she asked me if I wanted it dyed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ she shrugged. ‘You’re the one with the gun.’

  ‘You think I want to do this?’ I asked her. ‘If I had the money, I’d pay you. But I don’t. So I don’t have any choice.’

  ‘You could trust me.’

  I smiled at her.

  She shrugged again, but this time there was a hint of a smile on her face. ‘Do you want your hair dyed or not?’

  ‘Will it make me look different?’

  She nodded. ‘Quite a bit. I can give you some glasses too. They’ll look like prescription glasses, but they’re clear.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘You want it dyed?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What colour?’

  We settled on blond.

  This time, as Eddi was leaning over me, massaging all kinds of crap into my hair, I tried to ignore her body. Her fingers, her hands, her breasts, her belly… I tried to just think of them as things. Shapes, textures, forms, matter.

  But it didn’t work.

  A certain part of me still did certain things.

  By early evening, Eddi had started work on my new identity. I already had a new look – short blond hair and designer glasses – and a new passport photograph – smartly dressed and clean-shaven – and now Eddi was finding me a new name. She was sitting at her desk, surrounded by blank passports and blank driving licences and all kinds of other stuff: official stamps, computer printouts, credit cards, birth certificates. She was sifting her way through it all, checking this and checking that, tapping at a keyboard every now and then, glancing at the screen, making notes, chain-smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, I was just sitting there, watching her, occasionally running my fingers through my soft blond hair.

  I felt all right.

  For now.

  I felt strangely comfortable.

  ‘How long have you been doing this?’ I asked Eddi.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fake ID… how long have you been doing it?’

  ‘A while,’ she said.

  ‘How did you get started? I mean, how did you learn how to do it?’

  ‘Curtis.’

  ‘What – he taught you?’

  She nodded. ‘It used to be his business. He taught me everything I know. How it all works, how to make money, how to stay out of jail.’

  ‘So how come he ended up in jail?’

  ‘I grassed him up.’

  I stared at her. She was bent over the table in concentration, looking through a lens at one of my new passport photographs.

  ‘Why?’ I asked her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was your boyfriend. Why did you grass him up?’

  ‘I wanted his business.’

  I watched her in silence for a while, wondering if she was really that ruthless, or if there was something she wasn’t telling me. Curtis had been her boyfriend. They could have had relationship problems, personal problems, problems she didn’t want to tell me about. And, besides, why should she tell me anything anyway? I had a gun on her. I was forcing her to work for nothing. Why should she even talk to me?

  I carried on watching her. She was leafing through a pile of birth certificates now, looking at the names and birth dates.

  ‘Do I get a choice?’ I asked her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A choice of name.’

  ‘No,’ she said, without looking up from her desk.

  From the tone of her voice, I guessed she wanted me to shut up and let her concentrate. So I shut up and let her concentrate.

  After a while, though, she said, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  She looked over at me. ‘I need to find you a birth certificate. It has to be someone who’s dead, someone who’d be about the same age as you. What are you – eighteen, nineteen?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ I told her.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘You could easily pass for nineteen.’

  I smiled at her. ‘I’ve always looked older than I am.’

  She picked out one of the birth certificates and studied it. ‘This’ll have to do – 30 March 1987.’ She looked over at me again. ‘You’ll have to be eighteen. It’s the best I can do.’

  ‘OK.’

  She glanced back at the birth certificate. ‘Robin Ames.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s your name – Robin Ames.’

  ‘Robin?’

  She grinned. ‘You can still call yourself Rob.’

  ‘I’ve never called myself Rob.’

  ‘Well, you’d better start getting used to it… Rob.’

  It was OK. The rest of the evening, the rest of the night… it was fine. Eddi worked away – printing and copying, cutting and pasting, sticking and stamping – and I watched her doing her stuff. We talked a bit. I asked her questions. She answered them. Sometimes we just sat in silence.

  The hours passed by.

  It was still an awkward situation, what with the gun and everything, but we both did our best to ignore it. It wasn’t always easy, though. Especially when one of us had to use the bathroom. The first time Eddi had to go, I went into the bathroom first and checked it out. It seemed safe enough. The window was too small to climb through, and we were on the seventh floor anyway. And I couldn’t find anything she could use as a weapon. No razor blades, no pointy objects.

  ‘All right,’ I said to her, stepping out. ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

  She shook her head. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not going to do anything.’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘I suppose you want me to leave the door open?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I muttered, ‘that’s all right.’

  ‘You’re too kind,’ she said sarcastically, shutting the door in my face.

  An hour or so later, when I had to use the bathroom, I didn’t know what to do. I thought about it for a long time. Eventually, I gave Eddi a choice.

  ‘Look,’ I told her, ‘this is really embarrassing, but I need to use the bathroom, and I can’t just leave you alone.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What do you think I’m going to do? Run away? Call the police?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just can’t. You’ll either have to stand by the bathroom door or I’ll have to tie you up.’

  ‘You what? I’m not going to stand by the door watching you take a piss.’

  ‘I’m really sorry…’

  She glared at me for a moment, then her face suddenly s
oftened into a smile. ‘You know what’d be a whole lot easier?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lock me in the bedroom. Easier for me, easier for you.’ She grinned. ‘And a lot less pervy for both of us.’

  I blushed then.

  She led me down the hall to her bedroom and waited in the doorway while I looked it over. I removed a baseball bat from beside the bed, a phone from the bedside table, and then I had to embarrass myself again by searching through all her cupboards and drawers. Clothes, underwear, women’s things…

  ‘Enjoying yourself?’ Eddi said from the doorway.

  I looked at her – sleek and slim, smiley and hot – and I wished that things were different. The same, but different. I wished I was here, just being here, and Eddi was just being like this because she wanted to be like this…

  But, deep down, I knew that if things were different, I’d never have come here in the first place. And, even if I had, Eddi wouldn’t have let me in. She wouldn’t even have remembered me if she hadn’t seen my picture in the newspaper.

  I locked her in the bedroom and used the bathroom.

  It was almost midnight by the time Eddi had finished my new ID. She called me over to her desk and showed me everything she’d done. I had a passport and a driving licence (complete with three points). I had credit cards (Visa and Mastercard). I had a birth certificate. I had gas bills and water bills and letters from my bank. I had a National Insurance number. I even had an unpaid parking ticket.

  ‘The passport’s fine,’ Eddi explained. ‘I’ve entered it into their files. But the driving licence won’t stand up to much. I can’t access the DVLA’s database. The address on everything should be OK. It won’t check out against the electoral roll, but that’s not a problem. If anyone asks, just tell them you haven’t lived there very long.’ She showed me the credit cards. ‘The PIN’s four zeros, the credit limit’s £2,000 on each. If you’re taking out cash, they’ve both got a daily limit of £500. But once you’ve used them, max them out fast. They won’t last forever – OK?’

  ‘Right.’

  She put everything into a carrier bag and passed it to me. ‘That’s it. If I’d had more time, I could have got you a chequebook. But you can use all this to open a genuine bank account if you want. You’ll need to get yourself a proper address…’ She yawned, and her voice trailed off.