Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  ‘No,’ David replied. ‘Sorry. I didn’t think—’

  ‘Never mind,’ she sad, ‘I expect I can last till morning. Just a few Ritz crackers and some Normandy butter would tide me over just fine.’

  ‘There’s some ginger-nuts,’ David suggested help­lessly. ‘Somewhere.’

  Philippa Levens breathed out slowly through her nose. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The shops’ll be open in, what, seven hours. I don’t suppose I’ll actually starve to death between then and now. Talking of which, could I be an awful bore and get you to turn the heating up just a trifle? It’s a bit chilly sitting here in nothing but a towel.’

  David nodded, trying very hard to remember how the heating worked. He’d been there six years and never bothered with it, preferring to regulate his immediate environment by putting on or taking off sweaters. After a minute or so he found a knob on the side of the radia­tor and managed to get it to turn.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said as he emerged from under the window, his knees grey with dust. ‘And now, would it be terribly rude of me if I said goodnight?’ She yawned exquisitely. ‘I know I’ve only been awake for a few min­utes, but somehow it isn't t really proper sleep in those tank things, if you know what I mean. Don’t bother making the bed,’ she added, ‘I’ll be asleep as soon as I hit the pillow.’ A moment later she was in the bedroom. ‘Well,’ she called out, ‘actually, if there’s a spare pil­lowslip handy—’

  Fortunately, David knew precisely where to find a clean pillowslip. It was still in its cellophane, pristine from the shop. He pulled off the little card. (‘For David, happy birthday, love, Mummy’), ripped off the wrapping at the third attempt and took it through into the bed­room. Philippa Levens was looking round with a curious expression on her face, like a child at the zoo peering into the chimpanzee cage. He changed the pillowslip.

  ‘Thanks ever so much,’ she said, with a heart-melting you-can-go-away-now smile. ‘See you in the morning.’

  Lying awkwardly on the sofa (the headrest bit into his neck like a shire-horse’s collar) he stared up at the ceiling and tried to figure at least some of it out. It was like trying to make up a composite jigsaw out of leftover pieces from four entirely different sets, blindfold, wear­ing thick woolly mittens: some bits seemed to slot together, but no amount of ingenuity or imagination would get them to connect with anything else. Not that it seemed to matter any more; it was as if he’d walked barefoot across the desert and climbed the mountain on his knees to reach the cave of the Prophet, only to be told to go away and come back in half an hour after the Master had finished watching Neighbours. He grabbed the cushion and stabbed it a couple of times with his elbow, but that didn’t seem to make it any softer.

  There’s bound to be a perfectly simple explana­tion... He thought about that for a moment. Yes, there was one extremely simple explanation that would account for pretty well everything he’d seen, done or had done to him in the last twenty-four hours: at last, after years of teetering on the brink of delusional insan­ity, he’d finally taken that one small step. Accept that —and everything else slotted neatly into place. Try and work round it, and he faced the impossible task of cook­ing up a theory that explained Honest John and his serendipitous kinsmen, the light being on in the sitting room, Philippa Levens’s perfect command of modern idiomatic English (and she’d known his name, too — sort of). Couldn’t be done, even if you widened the parame­ters to include reincarnation and witchcraft. Trouble was, he didn’t feel particularly crazy. (Ah yes, pointed out his inner voice, but the really crazy ones never do. By the way, are you aware that you’ve started hearing voices in your head? Told you...)

  Of course, with all this strange and terrible stuff swirling round in his head like lint in a Dyson vacuum cleaner, there was absolutely no danger of him falling asleep— He opened his eyes and immediately assumed he was dreaming; but when a whole second passed and still the huge silver trombone hadn’t sidled up to him and eaten him, he opened his mind to other possibilities— ‘I said, excuse me,’ Philippa Levens repeated, shaking him rather more vigorously by the shoulder. ‘Ah, you’re awake. Look, I’m dreadfully sorry to disturb you, but it’s gone a quarter to seven.’

  A quarter to seven. Six-forty-five a.m.

  As far as the first ten hours of each day were con­cerned, David was a convinced agnostic; he was prepared to accept that they might very well exist, in some form, in a dark and neglected corner of space-time, but he had so little personal experience of them that he didn’t feel justified in forming a coherent opinion on the matter. ‘Really?’ he groaned.

  “Yes. So if you’re going to be waiting outside the Spar shop when it opens, don’t you think you ought to be get­ting up?’

  Why the hell would I want to be—? He remembered; something about Ritz crackers and Normandy butter. ‘Good idea,’ he heard himself say. ‘Right, I’ll do that, then.’

  ‘Splendid. And while you’re there, there’re a few other things you could get. I’ve made a list.’

  She shoved a piece of paper under his nose. It was shorter than the Old Testament, though the handwriting was so small that physical size was a misleading crite­rion. As it flashed by, he caught sight of a few words and phrases; gruyère was one, and fresh asparagus and plovers eggs and smoked salmon paté, irish not scottish. Expensive stuff like that. There was more on the back, but he didn’t get a chance to take a close look before it was whisked away.

  ‘That ought to tide us over for now,’ she was saying, ‘at least till Sainsbury’s opens. We can leave the clothes and stuff till after lunch.’

  He blinked twice. ‘How do you know about Sainsbury’s?’ he asked.

  She smiled at him. ‘While you’re out,’ she said, ‘would it be all right if I use the phone? Just local calls,’ she added. ‘Mostly.’

  ‘Of course, help yourself,’ he replied. ‘Well, I’d better be going, then.’

  “Bye.’

  As his front door closed behind him, he couldn’t help remembering the last time he’d passed that way. In a sense, it had all come together far, far better than he could possibly have expected. He hadn’t been arrested. He wasn’t lying in a heap on the floor, with a shattered jaw and three broken ribs. He’d actually talked to the girl of his dreams. Furthermore, she’d actually smiled at him and allowed him to run errands for her. This time yes­terday, he’d have sold his soul for that.

  (Why did he have an uncomfortable feeling that that was precisely what had just happened?)

  Anyhow, all the seemingly insurmountable problems had melted away like chocolate in a blast furnace; and if they’d been replaced by other, subtler problems, wasn’t that the nature of things, with the proviso that a change is always as good as a rest? High time he stopped crib­bing and acknowledged his good fortune

  ‘Morning,’ said a voice behind him; and Mr Van Oppen, his new neighbour, hurried past him down the stairs and vanished through the front door before he had a chance to reply. In his haste to pursue, David very nearly tripped over his feet and broke his neck.

  By the time he had the front door open, there was no sign of Mr Van Oppen. He took a deep breath and headed up the road to the shop— (Indeed. How did she know there was a Spar shop five minutes walk away?)

  As he’d anticipated, they didn’t have most of the things on the list she’d given him. (Bizarrely, they did have fromage frais and Parma ham.) While he was at it,

  he slung a carton of milk and a sliced Hovis in the basket for himself. He didn’t have enough cash on him to pay for the stuff, but luckily they accepted cheques for twenty-five pounds or over, so that was all right.

  On the way home he noticed that he was walking more slowly than usual. Curious: the girl of his dreams was waiting for him, but he was trudging along like someone on his way to a meeting at the tax office. He thought about that for a moment; then, as the implica­tions started to seep through, he made a conscious decision not to think about it any more, and turned his attention to other as
pects of the situation, in particular the matter of the John brothers. Now, then: pigeon-holing for a moment the I’ve-gone-crazy hypothesis, was it possible to put together an explanation for what was going on that accounted for the three of them plus the girl?

  Try this. Brother A (Mr Dean), having seen him hanging around the gallery gawping at the painting, had checked him out and discovered that he had a certain amount of money; so he planted a spurious lock of hair belonging to a female accomplice (his daughter, say) in the auction, knowing that he, David, would buy it and take it to Brother B (Honest John) to be cloned. Meanwhile Brother C (Mr Van Oppen) rented the flat above so as to be in a position to gather photographs and other materials necessary for effective blackmail.

  Well, there were loopholes in the story, but no more than you’d find in the average made-for-TV movie, and if it wasn’t one hundred per cent right, maybe it was along the right lines; it would explain why the girl knew so much about the twenty-first century, the neighbour­hood and him, and why the Brothers John—

  He froze, at the junction of Warwick Road

  and Elm Drive

  . The Brothers John: three men who looked almost but not quite identical, the differences being mostly such things as length and colour of hair. Maybe they were triplets, born the old-fashioned way; or maybe they’d all come out of a vat of green gumbo under the railway arches at Ravenscourt Park. In which case, it was better than even money that they weren’t the only copies of that particular original floating around the place— Close, he suspected, but no cigar; even if the Brothers

  John really were somehow related to the late Philippa Levens, marchioness of Ipswich (who died childless, remember, in her nineteenth year), was it likely that they’d be able to find anybody, even his/their offspring, who just happened to be an identical, peas-in-a-pod match for the girl in the portrait? Not just a similarity, or even a striking resemblance. Identical (and he should know, since every detail of the face in the picture was ingrained into his mind to the point where it acted as his mental screen-saver, immediately there every time he closed his eyes or allowed his attention to wander). In order to get round that one, you’d have to prise the goal-posts another furlong or so apart and find a way to fit mind-altering drugs into the scenario, something that’d make him imagine that the female plant (to coin a phrase) looked like the girl in the painting, when in fact she looked completely different— Of course, he could always quit speculating and ask her.

  Or — rather more practical? — he could get a jemmy or a big screwdriver and bust his way into the flat upstairs, now supposedly the home of the enigmatic Mr Van

  Oppen, and poke about until he found the obvious clue, the letter or file or document. That was what they did in movies.

  (And he’d always wondered about that. For example, if he was the bad guy in a film and the hero and his sidekick burgled his flat, they wouldn’t have a lawyer’s chance in Heaven of finding anything. After all, he lived there and he spent hours vainly looking for letters and bills and stuff that weren’t even hidden.)

  More to the point, he didn’t have a big screwdriver, let alone a jemmy. True, you’re supposed to be able to open locks with a credit card, but David had a fairly shrewd idea that if he were to try that, he’d end up standing outside a locked door holding a sliver of termi­nally bent plastic. Kicking the door in was probably way beyond his physical abilities, shooting the lock off would require a gun, and it was the Lottery jackpot to a bent pfennig that Mr Van Oppen didn’t leave a spare key under the mat. Assuming, of course, that he’d been telling the truth when he’d said he was the new tenant; David only had his word for that, and right now he wouldn’t be inclined to believe Mr Van Oppen if he told him that snow was white.

  Or he could just ask the girl.

  Yes, it was theoretically possible, like so many things: world peace, an end to famine in Africa, England win­ning the World Cup. All it would take was a certain amount of courage, strength of character, determina­tion. He knew at least a dozen people — people very like him in many ways — who’d do it like a shot without a moment’s hesitation. ‘See here,’ they’d say (his cousin Norman, for example, or his aunt Sheila), ‘what the bloody hell’s going on here, and who are those three identical jokers? And while you’re at it, buy your own sodding plovers’ eggs.’

  He considered the position. They probably sold big screwdrivers in Halfords, which was only a few doors down from Sainsbury’s; or there was that big ironmon­gers across the road from the library (or had it closed down? He couldn’t remember offhand). There was probably a knack to it, you’d have to get in behind the latch and force it back in— David looked up, and saw his front door. He prayed to any gods who happened to be listening that she wouldn’t be too upset about the lack of smoked-salmon and let himself in.

  She was on the phone as he walked up the stairs; her voice carried (it was exquisitely lovely, like a shaft of bright sunlight in a dark and dusty attic or the high, clear note of the lark on the moors in summer; but you could hear it quite distinctly right the way down the hall) and he had no difficulty making out the words— ‘Mr Snaithe, please. No, that’s fine, I’ll hold. Yes, that’s right, I called about ten minutes ago. Yes, I’m sure you do.’

  Snaithe: as in his loathsome aunt Mary Snaithe and her revolting son Alex, the lawyer. What the hell was she doing calling him?

  He walked up a few more steps, then hesitated. Eavesdropping on someone else’s phone conversation was the sort of mean, tricksy behaviour he most despised. Eavesdropping on the girl he loved with all his heart was—

  —Was probably the only way he was likely to find out what was going on, since he was too chicken to ask her outright. Besides, he desperately needed to know why she was ringing Alex Snaithe, of all people, and where she’d got the number from. He leaned against the door-frame and held his breath.

  Silence, for a very long time. Then she said, ‘Yes, please, I’ll carry on holding.’

  (My phone bill, he caught himself thinking. Of course, he suppressed the unworthy thought immedi­ately, but nevertheless: his phone bill...)

  More silence; and in the meantime, the carrier bags hanging from his hands weren’t getting any lighter, nor their handles any less sharp where they were cutting into his fingers. Dropping the bags with an audible crash might well put her on notice that he was outside, ear-wigging (see above under mean, tricksy behaviour). Bursting in on her while she was making this secret, probably highly personal call would quite likely register somewhere between embarrassing and unforgivable. Of course, it would all resolve itself quite satisfactorily if only that bastard Alex would get off the other line and talk to her— (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

  Mr 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.)