Falling Over
Ever since Michelle has come back from hospital, I’ve not been sure that it’s really her.
By this I don’t mean that her personality has changed, that the shock of the fall has shaken her confidence, or left her tired and prone to staring into space (although both of these are in fact true); I literally mean that she went in but didn’t come out; that something has taken her place.
Which shows, given that another part of me knows that it certainly is her, that it is my own sanity that I should be questioning, my own identity rather than that of the girl I’ve fancied all term.
I am looking at her now; looking at her reflection in the window at least, for I am facing away from her. Is she aware that I am looking? Michelle is sitting at the table in our communal kitchen area; another girl called Grace is making her a cup of tea, and giving her looks of half-concern, half-admiration (Grace has always been somewhat under Michelle’s shadow). I am pretending to wash-up, half-heartedly scrubbing at the first plate from the stack, while studying Michelle’s reflection. It is superimposed over a bleached English sky, making her look paler than she really is.
The halls of residence are disturbingly quiet, for we three are almost the only ones on this floor – it is the holidays and most of the students have gone home. For reasons I won’t go into some of us have nowhere else to go, and so we stay. There is a becalmed atmosphere; any radios or TVs switched on seem too loud on their old settings. There are a few others scattered on the floors above us, but although we hear signs of their existence a certain lethargy prevents us from seeking them out. Instead we sit together in this kitchen (although during term-time we are hardly all best friends). The only other person on this floor is called Christophe; I don’t know where Christophe is. Looking out the window at the lifeless campus I imagine we are lost at sea, everyone else having been saved but us. A plane silently crosses the sky, glinting in sunlight which doesn’t reach us down here, but I make no attempt to wave for rescue. Behind me, the song on the radio cracks up with static, as if we really were adrift.
Michelle is dressed in jeans and a familiar baggy jumper that she always wears when there are no guys around whom she wants to impress. She says she knows it is too large but it is soft and comforting; it was a present from her sister. Her hair is tied back – she normally has a habit, Michelle, of playing with her hair, unconsciously twisting a lock around her fingers. In a completely characteristic gesture she raises her hand to do this, then lets it drop because her hair is back, all without noticing. She says something to Grace and her eyes do that thing of hers where she blinks in rapid succession, then focuses on you again as if seeing you for the first time. Despite her proclaimed tiredness her voice is as precise as always – she never ‘umms’ or ‘ahs’ but remains silent until she has figured out what to say. Which doesn’t normally take her long. Her accent is somewhat plummy (which I find sexy, with her) although her background is similar to mine: nothing special.
I hear the noise of car motors, distant from a road I cannot see. They are coming home from work again, and I am so out of synch with their daily rhythm that I am surprised it is so late already. I only got up a few hours ago, and my day is yet to come.
Michelle does that thing with her eyes again as she thanks Grace for the tea, and Grace smiles back somewhat nervously. This interaction between the two of them is in keeping with everything I’ve seen previously; it isn’t just Michelle’s appearance and body-language that are manifestly the same as before, but everyone else’s perception of her, their relationship to her. So why do I think that it’s not her?
Maybe it is the bandage around her head like some kind of bandana. She doesn’t need it, it is to hide stitches rather than to protect the wound or staunch bleeding. She doesn’t want anyone to see the (five) stitches in her head – which is reasonable enough – more importantly it is in character. Nevertheless her bandage does make her look different, almost surreal: she looks like a disaster survivor, a terrorist victim interviewed on TV, while she sits at our table drinking tea and moaning about coursework (she is writing her final year dissertation on ‘The Geo-Politics of Oil’ or some-such and she has to revise it almost every news broadcast). The white bandage makes her face seem too pale, as if she hasn’t recovered lost blood. It seems to shade into the skin of her forehead.
But I know, it isn’t the bandage. I would still feel the same suspicion if it wasn’t there, still have the same nagging feeling that she is an impostor, a chameleon, an impersonator. That I have no evidence to back up this theory (and indeed much that refutes it) doesn’t make my feeling go away; it makes it stronger, it convinces me how clever she, it, is. I must be going mad, I must have read Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers one too many times. Except I have never read it, and this is no sci-fi: it isn’t her.
“Hey,” Michelle says to me. “You’re very quiet. Aren’t you glad I’m back?”
I look at the plane, not at her. I try to see it for what it is: 400 people sitting strapped in, reading, sleeping, talking, farting... But I can’t keep that image in my head at the same time as watching the silver dart of the plane. Even its pollution looks otherworldly; beautiful.
But Michelle is still waiting for an answer. I mustn’t let on that I suspect. After all, it was me that found her.
~
I was in Christophe’s room at the time. The girls were elsewhere, watching some traffic camera TV show, so we had retreated to drink beer and listen to the radio – a neutral choice since neither of us liked each other’s CDs. It was supposedly night outside, but the on-campus lighting made it hard to tell. Every fourth or fifth light had a CCTV camera fitted – a hangover from some campus crime-wave that had never really abated, just become the accepted norm. Christophe had left his curtains open, and so every so often you’d see one of those cameras rotate, an unnerving reminder of the human hand behind the lens. Or is it just software? It worries me, when you see them move; I know I would have more of a sense of humour if I was adjusted, rather than this itchy feeling of being watched.
We were talking, Christophe and I, about the future, a vague but compulsive topic that has much occupied the paranoid parts of my mind recently. After all, there are just over two terms left, and then this degree course that I took as a stopgap (not knowing what else to do with my life) will be over. Barring catastrophe, I will achieve an honourable result in a course that leaves me fit for no job, except to teach similar courses. Of course, the lecturers would argue that employability is not the be all and end all of knowledge, and I would agree. But I still have no idea what to do with my life, and this thought makes me feel both desperate and apathetic – looking ahead, my life just disappears into a black-hole in nine months time, unknown and unobservable to anyone outside the periphery, including myself.
Christophe however, has it all sorted out. Or rather, his dad has – Christophe’s father is high-up in some faceless corporation, one whose actions would no doubt be stained and corrupt with oil, if I could be bothered to look them up. And so Christophe has all the money he needs – he is a student but he has savings; he has shares for fuck’s sake. He already has contacts among his dad’s friends in the city, which will guarantee him a foot on the rung of a very tall ladder when he graduates. So Christophe doesn’t want to talk about the future, or its attendant worries in my mind. Christophe wants to talk about girls.
“You know Grace likes you,” he says, opening another beer.
“Fuck does she,” I say. “She likes Michelle.” Christophe laughs because it’s true, sometimes the way Grace admires Michelle borders on infatuation: the way she follows her around, copies what she does, always harmonizes... But I doubt she actually fancies her.
Does she fancy me? It would be typical if she does – since the holidays started we have all been spending too much time together in these deserted halls, isolated by their perceived emptiness and the grey winter outside (I have started to feel an odd unease stepping outside, a sense of vague uncertainty and lack of purpose. It is cold out there, but not as cold as it should be this time of year). And in our isolation we have played out our little micro-dramas of lust in different combinations: I want to sleep with Michelle; Christophe wanted to sleep with Michelle and then wanted to sleep with Grace; Grace wants to sleep with Michelle (maybe) and me. God knows who Michelle wants to sleep with.
“Seriously,” Christophe says, still on about the Grace thing.
“She isn’t my type,” I say, and she isn’t – not because of the way she looks or the way she is, but because the one clear idea I have of my future is that I want Michelle to be in it. Never mind that the Michelle-future is a pipedream, whereas a Grace-future might just possibly work out. I want Michelle in the same way I want things from the brightest, gaudiest adverts. “What’s Michelle going to do when she finishes?” I ask. “Has she said anything to you?”
“Nope – she’s a loser too,” Christophe says. Once Christophe has put you into one of his little mental boxes there is no easy way out, and I am frightened by the fact that he will no doubt attain a position of real power in this country, and yet he barely seems to know he’s born. He imagines he is slumming it with us sometimes, I feel, treating us as equals when at best we will be employees of people like him in the next world. It’s like an unconscious caste system in his head. But one that others share, and maybe they are right and maybe I am a loser, for I have yet to summon the energy to even go and see the university careers adviser. I have yet to work out what I would actually say.
Upstairs on the floor above us there is the sound of movement – other stowaways on this abandoned ship of ours. The radio takes a break from music for a brief, rushed news bulletin – the presenter sounds like she just wants to rattle through the headlines as quickly as possible (and admittedly they would be scary if you stopped to think about them). Only the traffic report is lingered over – all gridlock and overturned chemical lorries.
“Bloody fucking hippies,” Christophe says, apropos of an environmental protest march that is alleged to be blocking traffic. “Talk about shutting the door after the horse has bolted!” Do I have the right to feel angry with him when I am not there; have not contributed?
I get up to go to the bathroom. I’m halfway down the corridor when I hear a faint sound, almost a tapping sound. It is on the other side of the door that leads to the stairwells to the other floors. It gives me pause, for it doesn’t sound like one of the girls – when you live with people for awhile you can identify them by the sounds of their footsteps or whatever, but this sound is different. Is it the sound of something moving, something alive... is it trying to keep quiet?
Somewhat nervously I open the door and Michelle falls through. She had obviously been sprawled against it, at the bottom of the stairs; the sound I heard was her fingers scratching against the wood. There is blood spreading down her face from a wound to her head – so much of it and so bright that it looks like a bad special-effect to me, not something I am inclined to believe in. Her eyes are closed; I can see her lips moving. For a moment the shock is so great that I almost fall myself.
She has obviously fallen down the stairs, and I completely ignore all the advice they give you about people whose back might be broken – I try to move her, cradling her and lifting her up so that she is half-sitting, half-leaning against me. She is half-awake, woozy.
Michelle’s eyes flutter as they struggle to open; when they do she seems pleased to see me, in a vague sort of way – I can’t help the thought that it would be like this if we woke up together some morning: the slow coming to consciousness, the hazy pleasure of recognition... But my cries have alerted the others and suddenly they are both here – Christophe is calmly calling for an ambulance on his mobile; Grace is just standing behind us, her face drained of what little colour it had. She is wringing her hands like it is her fault, like it has happened to her. But it is not Grace that I feel angry with but Christophe, for he is competently doing the things that I should have done.
Then Michelle’s grip tightens on me and I panic for a second, for the way she is holding me is suddenly desperate, clingy. But she is just trying to pull herself up to speak to me. I try to calm her, to tell her whatever she wants to say can wait, but she is insistent. Her breath is hot against my ear as she whispers into it, her voice husky like a seduction...
But I couldn’t tell what she said.
I couldn’t work it out, and now I have the nagging feeling that I have missed something important. I am sure she was herself then, Michelle, for that moment at least, with the same conviction that I feel that the person drinking tea in our communal kitchen isn’t someone I know. But she has just asked me if I am glad to have her back, and I say of course I am. I wish you’d never left, I say, and Michelle’s reflection smiles, slightly confused.
~
I leave the kitchen and find Christophe in the communal TV room, which is of course deserted. The whole room is a throwback to last century – all students have TVs in their rooms now. The TV here looks old-fashioned, redundant technology. The colours look off; the ratios are all wrong. Christophe has a large TV and no end of gadgets in his room, but here he is sprawled out across the sofa, as if enjoying the perversity of being alone in such a large room. He is watching 24hr news, and from the empty beer cans by his feet I can tell he must have watched the same looped bulletins over and over, which can’t be healthy. The sky framed in the window is darkening towards grey, and the planes are now only identifiable by their blinking lights.
I sit down next to him, practically on his legs until he reluctantly makes room. I know better than to ask for any of his beer.
“Listen,” I say. “I need to talk to you. It’s Michelle. Have you noticed...” I pull back on my words, on their insanity. How can I voice my concerns, when I know they must be ill-founded? But I need to tell someone, if only for them to laugh at me, to confirm I am a loon.
“It’s Michelle,” I say again, talking over the TV financials. “She’s different... I mean she doesn’t look different but she just is... different.” I am aware that my words aren’t quite satisfactory for what I have to express, but can find no others.
“Hallelujah,” Christophe says. “It’s about time.” He looks bored, unconcerned, still watching TV. I am somewhat taken aback, for this isn’t the reaction I expected.
“Huh?” I say. “You mean... You’ve noticed it too?”
“Course,” he says, then swears as static cloaks the screen for a second. “Months ago.”
Months ago – but that’s not right, that is before she went to hospital; before she fell. I don’t say this, but Christophe sees me looking at him.
“When I stopped fancying her!” he says loudly. “And now you don’t fancy her either, because now there’s you and Grace.” He grins evilly. “Of course she seems different, now you’re not blinded by her, after all these months, now you’ve got your head out of her arse.”
“No, that’s not it...”
But Christophe is half-drunk and insistent. He seems intent on the idea that me and Grace should get together. I realise it’s pointless to continue to talk to him, but I need to bring the conversation back to some kind of normality before I can leave. So I ask him when he stopped fancying Michelle.
“Well I still...,” he begins, blinking as if making an internal adjustment. “But she’ll never amount to anything mate! Not with all her... views. Getting in the way.” Just then his mobile rings, and I am glad. I don’t know why I am angry – because Michelle was being criticised, or because I know he was levelling some of the same criticism at me. But he is wrong – my ‘views’, such as they are, seem flimsy and ill-founded, unable to guide me. They don’t stop me buying things I don’t need, just make me uneasy afterwards.
Christophe leaves the room to take his call – he takes a number of such calls, secretive, but not like he doesn’t trust us. Just like there are certain things that you don’t talk about in front of children.
I sit and watch TV and try to relax. The beer has been left and now I help myself, gulping quickly even though it is better than the own-brand supermarket piss I am used to. I channel-hop but nothing on any of the stations suits my mood. After I have flipped round twice I feel somewhat numb. I make an effort to get up before I settle into an acceptance of something I don’t even want to watch. It is night outside by now, but the sky still seems the wrong colour; just like the ones on this brute of a TV.
I still need to talk to someone – Grace it is then. I will just need to get her alone, away from Michelle... away from the thing that isn’t Michelle I mean – I must remember to keep that distinction clear in my mind, or things will only get confusing. She still has that smile that sends tremors through me: the only sensations that have seemed unmediated recently. I must be wary, now that I know the truth about her, or recognise some of the lies at least.
I leave the TV room and see Christophe, quoting numbers into his mobile. He looks up at me and I realise if I go straight to find Grace he’ll believe his little theories. So I pretend to head to my room instead; but Michelle finds me first.
~
“Thank Christ for that,” she says. “I finally managed to shake her off.” For a moment I have no idea who she means, not with the confusing distinction of two Michelles in mind – who has thrown off whom? But then I realise she means Grace, and I shrug sympathetically.
“Ever since I got back she’s been following me,” Michelle says. She unconsciously raise a hand to touch her bandage (like she used to with her hair).
“She means well,” I say. “And she’s lonely. I mean, not just lonely because everyone else has left. Proper lonely.”
“I know but why me?” Michelle says. “Why do these people always fixate on me? I was thinking about this in hospital, and I decided I don’t need it. Thinking about a lot of things actually. I figured some stuff out.”
Her words unnerve me, perhaps because this little speech is the first time Michelle’s double hasn’t sounded like the real thing; the first time her words haven’t tallied with my memories. She seems genuinely annoyed as she speaks and I imagine a vein underneath her bandage, pulsing, like something independently alive.
“Like what other things?” I say, thinking: the hospital was where it happened, so maybe that’s where the clues lie. And I think, why didn’t we go and visit her, why couldn’t we escape these shipwrecked halls of residence even once, and go and see our friend in hospital? I have not thought this before, and I feel a chill, as if the conspiracy that I am caught up in is also one that I am unwittingly responsible for.
“Oh the future,” Michelle says, “things people have said.” Her tone is vague but the look on her face isn’t – she stares me straight in the eye. Things I have said? What have I ever said?
Michelle reaches out and takes my hand.
And I look down and think: there was a tan-line on your finger before. All summer you wore that plastic toy ring that some boy won for you at the fair, some guy we never even met but was obviously important to you, because despite the fact that you tried to laugh off the ring as plastic kitsch, and pass off your wearing of it as ironic, you keep pushing it up your finger because you were afraid it might slip off. And then one day it was gone, and the tan you’d got from your days outside in the sun was in contrast to the white that remained underneath. And that tan-line hadn’t yet faded, despite trips to the sun-bed when your student budget would allow it. But now when I look down at your hand it’s not there, not just faded but gone, your skin one-tone. As if you had been created afresh. Created anew from the original design, minus any blemishes that occurred later...
But even as I am thinking all this, even as I realise this is the first real proof – physical evidence – that what is happening isn’t all in my head – even as I am thinking this I am allowing Michelle to take my hand, and somewhat shyly lead me down the corridor to her room. She is still talking about some of the realisations she had in hospital after her blow to the head, but I am not listening because my heart is giddy. As Michelle fumbles the key one-handed into the lock, I look away and realise Grace is standing at the top of the corridor, watching us...
Grace, I think. I was on my way to find Grace. And not just because I wanted to explore my conspiracy with her, but because I am lonely; proper lonely. But Grace seems such a long way away at the other end of the corridor, and I am not sure which of us the look of accusation in her eyes is directed at anyway. She could just as well be mad with Michelle as me. My head is somewhat fuzzy from Christophe’s beer, and Michelle is talking about the future to me, and she isn’t even drunk (she isn’t allowed alcohol because of the pills) and I look away from Grace and allow Michelle to lead me into her bedroom; allow this even as I look again at the hand that pulls mine again, and become convinced that this isn’t Michelle at all, and that I might actually be in danger.
~
The next morning I awake in Michelle’s bed, and she is asleep beside me. Our exertions in the night have caused a few faint specks of blood to stain her bandage from underneath, and I feel a moment’s distaste.
The dawn outside is dull, but still manages to find its way through her cheap curtains, as does the noise of the rush-hour. I look to one side and on Michelle’s bedside table there is a collection of Get Well cards that she has retrieved from hospital. I nudge them open with my fingers so that I can see the names inside – her parents; her sister; Christophe. So one of us did visit her in hospital after all. My paranoia finally catches on that I am awake and I remember; I look at Michelle but her hands are underneath the covers and I can’t see the uninterrupted tone of her skin, the clear-cut evidence of the night before.
Grace, I think, I was on my way to find Grace and you distracted me. As if I not only believe in body-snatchers, but mind-readers too now.
I look again at the card from Christophe – what he has written inside is nothing beyond the usual clichés: Get Well Soon – yet I can imagine his voice dwelling on that “well”, implying we weren’t just sick but lazy, feckless, losers. Later on in life people like Michelle and I will just be small pluses on Christophe’s asset sheet (or someone very much like him). In abstract I hate people like Christophe; yet ever since everyone else left he has effectively been my best friend. It is like one of those TV documentaries where two diametrically opposed people are made to live with each other: the budding capitalist and the... what? Because our beliefs are not opposed at all, for I have no beliefs strong enough for anyone to oppose. I am just the soon to be ex-student, adrift.
But goddamn Christophe! Yesterday he claimed he didn’t fancy her! Yet I know him well enough to know he doesn’t invest without hope of return – he wouldn’t have bought that card unless he liked her. Maybe that’s why he’s been so intent that Grace likes me. His comments to me were misdirection, moves in a game I didn’t even know we were playing.
But if it was a game then I won didn’t I? I got the girl. And she wasn’t drunk and it won’t be a one night stand. So fuck you Christophe, with your sneering looks whenever I sketch out my ambitions. Because I got the girl – whoever she is.
I look at her again, at the bandage across her head. Dare I lift it up; would I wake her? What am I expecting to see but slowly healing stitches anyway? But although Michelle’s face is the same as I remember I am overcome by a feeling of fakery at the sight of it, and I suddenly have to move, to get away from her.
“Where y’going?” Michelle mumbles, eyes still closed, as I hunt for my clothes.
“To get us some coffee!” I say brightly, and I feel the fakery in my own voice too, in the whole interaction.
Just then there is a bang at the door; Christophe shouting.
“Quickly,” he says. “Grace is hurt.”
~
I dash out into the corridor wearing just my boxer-shorts, while Michelle hurriedly dresses. The usually unflappable Christophe is looking fazed – every time he moves towards Grace she bats him away. Grace herself is standing in a beige dressing gown, which is stained with blood. I cannot see the source; she has blood on her hands and keeps rubbing them against the material of her dressing gown. Guiltily, I half-expect her to turn her hands wrist upwards and for me to see twin cuts there, one for Michelle and one for me, after Grace saw us together last night. That is why she is repeatedly beating Christophe’s attempts at help away – not because she wants to die, but because she wants Michelle to be here, for her to see as well as me.
But getting closer I see her wrists are fine; the blood is in fact coming from a cut to the scalp, and when she runs her hands through her hair she keeps bloodying them. Scalp wounds bleed a lot, so it probably isn’t as serious as it looks – nevertheless Grace is very pale and obviously afraid. Her grey eyes fasten on mine and she pushes past Christophe towards me.
“I don’t want to go to hospital,” is the first thing she says.
“Stop being idiotic,” Christophe says, “your head’s bleeding!” He shakes his own head at me, then makes another attempt to put his arm around Grace’s shoulders so that he can lead her down the corridor.
“I don’t want to go to hospital!” Grace shouts this time, and twists away from him. I move in front of her, for Christophe’s irritation obviously isn’t helping. I try and hold her gaze and ask her what happened.
Her eyes flicker as if she were about to tell an untruth, or at least something of which she is uncertain. “I... I don’t know what,” she says, brow furrowed. “I was just walking and I... I was daydreaming I guess and I just... fell over. Like I was pushed but there was no one there.”
Michelle is out of her room and hurrying towards us now; Christophe is telling her what happened.
“Don’t let me go to the hospital,” Grace says quietly, making it between me and her. “Not like Michelle...” I wipe blood from her forehead because I don’t know what to say: although I know she needs stitches I am reluctant to tell her this. I should have spoken to her last night – has she had suspicions herself? Just because she was acting natural around Michelle doesn’t mean she hadn’t spotted anything; after all I tried to act natural too. Maybe we just fooled each other. But did we fool Michelle? I don’t know and now Michelle is here, hugging Grace, asking me if anybody has called a taxi. I take the opportunity to check her hand again, and the ring-line has definitely vanished. This is real enough, it isn’t all in my head. Whatever this is, for I still have no idea what is going on.
Grace repeats her request not to go to hospital, now that Michelle is here.
“Of course you’ve got to go,” Michelle says, all business, like a mother ignoring her child’s heartfelt fears of the darkness. “Don’t you agree?” she says to me, to get me to back her up. Grace looks at me and there is a plea in her eyes, but much as I see that pleading I also see the blood that isn’t stopping, dark red on her scalp. “You need to go,” I say.
“Will you come with me?” she says directly at me.
“Sure,” I say, “we’ll go in the taxi together...”
“I’ve got a car,” Christophe says.
I look up in some astonishment. “What?”
“Where the hell do you think I’ve been trying to lead her for the past ten minutes?” Christophe says, in the voice of one announcing the first checks of a forced mate.
“Since when did you have a car?” I’m angry because I can feel him taking over again, feel my own adulthood diminish next to his. I can’t even drive, another misalignment with the real-world that Christophe mocks. But he has never mentioned owning a car before – not that I am surprised. “Did Daddy buy it for you?” I add, before I’ve even given him chance to reply to my first question.
“Is this really the time?” Michelle snaps. “We need to get her to A&E, a taxi could be ages, not that you’ve even ordered one.” She is angry at me, at my inefficiencies.
“I’ll get dressed,” I say, straightening up, suddenly feeling cold and self-conscious in just my underwear. But I am miles from my own room; I could just get yesterday’s clothes from Michelle’s but even then...
“There’s no time!” Christophe and Michelle say in unison, and their synchrony shocks me for a second. “Should have slept in your own room last night,” Christophe says with an evil look at me, and instead of being annoyed at him, Michelle just smiles.
“She wanted me to go with her,” I say, as the two of them take hold of Grace, one either side of her gripping her elbows, hauling her off like she really has done harm to herself. My words sound like a child’s, plaintive sentiment ready to be ignored. Grace is struggling, but mutely, like she is half resigned to her fate. Like I have let her down too. I don’t follow. Michelle glares at me over her shoulder, for not being any help, for creating complication where none exists, and I know it was a one-off last night after all – there’s no future there. I have made an incorrect decision, and allowed myself to be judged by a girl whose standards I no longer even understand.
It’s not Michelle remember, I tell myself, something has taken her place in hospital... and the thought of this doppelganger is now oddly comforting – the real Michelle wouldn’t have rejected me... But I know the feeling of comfort is illusory, for there is danger here, and I doubt I’ll ever see Grace again. Oh, something will come back, bandaged up and with scars I never found erased, but it won’t be Grace. They will have gotten to her too.
After the three of them are out of sight, my sense of powerlessness fades. I need to find out what is going on. And in all the confusion with Grace, Michelle has left her room unlocked...
When I find it, it is almost too easy, like fake clues have been planted directly in my path – I find Michelle’s diary. It is almost too obvious.
~
Everyone has gone home for the holidays except for me and a few others, I read. Michelle’s handwriting is entirely legible, as if she’d wrote it out neat for the class. But despite this clarity there is an uncertainty to the content – although it is never written directly, each line seems to hint at the fact that girls like Michelle don’t really keep such diaries anymore, in this late age. As though the sincerity of each sentence is contradicted by an irony affecting the whole. I skim read the latest entries, not really knowing what I am looking for. Everyone seems to be sticking to their own floor – annoying because that boy I really like from lectures is on Floor 2 and I don’t even know if he’s still around. Last year he was so drunk I doubt he even remembers what we did together. So bad that I can’t remember his name! Drunk too. Maybe I should go and look see if he is still around.
Still feeling faint. Thank god I didn’t go home – Mother would be unbearable if she knew. More unbearable, I mean.
......
Talked with others about plans after uni today. None of us know except C, who was being his usual self! Flattering that he likes me though, with his expensive tastes. G will end up being a teacher or nurse surely, she was only copying anxiety to fit in. World outside is going crazy too – keep the news switched off.
Floor 2 was empty when I went up – full of ghosts creaking. No sign of that boy!
......
Saw him today! Was shameless! He’s practically all alone up there, and I said I was too down here. Strongly hinted that I could do with some company – talk about playing hard to get Michelle! Ah well. He’s coming down tonight with some wine and DVDs.
Wish G would stop following me around, she better not turn up tonight! At least those boys have hormones as an excuse – decided they both fancy me now? Christ, it’s this place, too empty – the mind makes shit up.
......
Fuck, fuck, fuck, who was that boy? Fuck!
......
No wait, calm down. The mind makes shit up, you said it yourself.
......
But shit wasn’t he circumcised the first time?!!!
......
Michelle’s handwriting had been getting steadily more ragged as I’d read, but for the next entry it was back to its previous neat and tidy progress across the page.
How drunk was I last night? (And how hung-over this morning – but then I’ve had this background headache for days.) Should tear the above pages out, I’m obviously stir crazy. But leave them. I can’t help thinking...
I’ll go up today, sober, and speak to Floor 2 boy again (still don’t remember his name) and that will sort me out. That and aspirin. Stop craziness. Which I don’t need. I need to sort stuff out, work out what graduate placements to apply for. Writing this knowing I won’t. C has invited me to some careers fair, transparent, but it won’t be because of that I don’t go. I’ll just end up kicking around here with the other two. We can all be losers together. Until the money runs out. Or the oil dries up and we all end up back in the caves anyway.
Better go upstairs and find that boy though, so I can get my head into some kind of working order. Before I lose my nerve.
~
The was the last entry, dated the day she fell over. After that, nothing. I wasn’t expecting entries for the time she was actually in hospital, but I was for the days after. But it is like diary writing is a childish, teenage thing that she has suddenly grown out of.
But the Floor 2 boy – that is a clue surely? The boy who she went up to find on the day she fell. And the person I have read more about in Michelle’s diary than myself, despite the fact she sees me every day, despite the fact that she doesn’t even know his name...
Without letting myself think too much I drop Michelle’s diary on her bed, leaving the clasps open. Let her guess that I read it, that I know her secrets... My head is pounding as I leave her room and head towards the stairwell. I am dizzy on the stairs, and scared I will fall myself. I hold tightly onto the banister, and I feel enflamed, tenacious despite my dizziness. I welcome the unexpected struggle of the climb, for without obstacles my anger would be a tantrum only; with them my fury seems justified... The fact that it is without cause doesn’t signify, only its intensity.
Floor 2 is an identical layout of corridors and rooms to our own, and for a moment I have the feeling that the staircase I have climbed is like one from an Escher drawing, and I have returned to where I started from. The windows are so dirty you can’t even get a feeling of height. Like our floor, Floor 2 is deserted, almost everyone elsewhere for the holidays. The corridors seem longer, as if emptiness isn’t an absence but a physical thing, pushing at the boundaries. But the boy I am looking for was here at least up until last week, so there is an outside chance that I’ll find him. There are a hundred doors, but I can hear faint music; I walk down the corridor slowly, quietly, a hunter following the trail of some hectic animal, for the music is loud, riotous yet synthetic, the rush of beats exactly the kind of thing I despise.
The music is coming from behind a closed door, and I pause in front of it. What exactly am I going to say; why have I followed this trail here? Because I believe that the room this dreadful music is coming from is the room of the boy from the diary? And furthermore that the boy is some kind of doppelganger (shit wasn’t he circumcised the first time) who somehow caused Michelle to fall down the stairs and become a double in her turn? Every time I cross-examine my thoughts their ludicrousness seems obvious; yet I continue to think them.
Without knowing his name, how will I even check it’s him? Could I recognise him from the fact that Michelle fancies him – has she a ‘type’? Given the fact that she slept with me too, probably not. But that was an aberration, as she has made clear. And besides that wasn’t her; the real Michelle slept with the boy behind this door. Twice.
But even that isn’t true I think (still paused outside the door). For the second time Michelle slept with him (shameless I think, wondering what he did that was so special she came back) it wasn’t who she thought it was but some bodysnatcher with original foreskin attached. So I am right to hate him – if I hit him hard enough, will I see the skin of his real face beneath?
Right too to be afraid.
Before I can knock or push open the door, it opens from the inside.
I start, flinch backwards. The person who opens it flinches back too. It obviously isn’t the boy that Michelle liked.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.
Flustered, my mind tries to adjust from conspiracy plots to the more mundane and embarrassing fact that I have been caught snooping outside a girl’s room.
“Your music...?” I improvise lamely. “Could you turn it down? I’m right below you, on the floor below...”
Some of the heat fades from the girl’s face, although she still looks wary.
“Sorry,” she says, cautiously apologetic and friendly. “I thought I was on my own; there’s no one else up here you see.”
“No one?” I say quickly, thinking of the boy I am after, but I realise I have said it too quickly, too eagerly, for the fright returns to the girl’s eyes.
“No there are people,” she says loudly, “there are other people here” – throwing her voice into a shout that echoes down the corridor, trying to make me believe she has someone to call for protection, if I try anything funny. As if anyone could hear her over the music.
“Wait I just meant are there any blokes up here?” I say, but she is already shutting the door, and my words don’t make her stop, for if I was thing she feared I might have said that too. I make a grab for the door, but just manage to get my fingers nipped as it slams shut.
“Get away you freak or I’ll call the police!” she shouts from behind the door, her fright obvious now. I turn and run, feeling out of synch with this situation I have somehow got myself into. Like one of those films where the good guys and bad guys are not who they first appear to be, and your brain lags as you work it out. Will she call the police? Even if she does, why am I running, for I would merely have to explain things to them and they’ll see I’ve done nothing wrong. There’s no crime but I am running as if guilty, hurtling downstairs so quickly that I almost trip, back to my floor, my room. I shut the door but don’t put any music or TV on – I pace but try to keep quiet. I think of the campus security cameras outside, and shut the curtains.
If the body-snatchers get you, I wonder, do you even realise? But I don’t understand what that thought even means.
I can’t sleep, for the airplanes seem too low overhead, and the light coming through the windows seems unnatural.
~
The next morning I try and call Grace to see how she is, to see if she went under at the hospital. She’ll be alright, I think, she’ll be safe as long as she’s not been anaesthetized. I have nothing to base this on, but cling to it with an odd certainty. But my mobile has no signal – I am sure it is a network problem, but it is hard not to think that the fault is deliberate, local, centred on me. I head towards the front of the halls of residence where there are some payphones, but they have no dial tones and my coins just clatter through the mechanism and fall out the other end. This I am not surprised by, this doesn’t become a factor in my emergent paranoia, for the payphones are dilapidated relics of the days when mobiles were for the likes of Christophe only; I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. They have been superseded by later technology that can’t be relied on.
I decide that I’ll have to go to the hospital to find Grace – and I am surprised to find that my decision is not just based on the still unspoken fears clenched in my gut, but also on something Christophe said: she likes me. Assuming for one minute Michelle is Michelle and my delusions are proven just that – still, why was I so fixated on Michelle? I suddenly can’t remember why.
I force myself outside, but after days of being confined to halls the outdoors just seems a continuation – the holidays have thrown up a localised fog which makes me feel enclosed in a vague bubble, my sight limited to its circumference. I walk down the path from our campus, past the Job Centre which is outside the exit – a nice irony that is not lost on those of us doing humanities degrees – and towards the main road. Strangers coming the opposite way through the fog loom up so quickly that I couldn’t make eye contact even if I wanted to. The world appears in gasps and snatches through the mist. They are queuing round the block for petrol again, for fear of another price hike; their idling fumes add to the mist. My progress up the street is faster than that achieved by the rush-hour traffic, and I sense their antagonised looks as I pass: fuckin’ student; fuckin’ pedestrian.
There is no bus in sight yet and so I decide to walk to the 24hr garage (the one the cars are slowly working towards) to buy some chocolates or flowers for Grace. I feel even more self-conscious inside: the only person not buying war-inflated petrol. I quickly buy some chocolates, because the only flowers look plastic to me, even though they are promoted as real. Outside two motorists almost crash, going for the same pumps. Their tempers are up before they are even out their cars, their firsts clenched before they can even see each other properly in the mist. They curse at each other, but it doesn’t quite come to blows.
One day, my son, all this will be yours.
A bus has somehow fought its way up the car clogged bus-lane, and I run to the stop. The bus is full of people studiously avoiding the world on the other side of the windows: plugged into headphones or bent over beach-fiction. It’s only a local bus but they have the practised look of long-distance travellers, of people who have given up hoping their journey will arrive on time, and are concentrating on making the best of being there – I settle myself in too, but I am not the same as them, for I am surely the only one not riding to work. The idea and desire that one day I will be feels oddly remote, like an advert for something that you can’t possibly imagine ever being able to afford.
~
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!