Sophie

Next thing, I was back in the room sitting at the desk with my finger on the keyboard. Looks like I had just hit a full-stop. I stared weirdly at my hands. Thought for a moment. Looked around the room. On the wall opposite me were three mounted heads, stuffed like mooses or boars. Except they were human. Underneath were three plaques. One said “Inequity”, another “Reflection.” The third plaque was blank; it was below a weird, sad looking head that could have been a cross between Jesus and Hitler. Imagine a long-haired hippy Führer, one mad eye glinting angry, the other full of posies.

For a second, I thought it was alive. I could have sworn I saw the mouth twitch. I got up out of my chair to take a look. And then it spoke.

“So how was it?” the Hitler-hippy head said.

“It was okay.”

“Do you know what I’m talking about?” it said.

“No.”

“Oh.”

I stepped closer. I wanted to poke it but I was afraid. What if it burst out of the wall whole-bodied and mad? Poking just a head was obviously a safe thing to do – but if he had arms back there…and maybe a sword…

The one eye looked crazy. I tried to look at the other.

“Your death,” it said, “how was your death?”

“That was real?” I said.

“‘Real’? What is ‘real’”?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I used to know – I think – but…”

“It was good,” I said, “different to how I imagined it would be. You get more time. Doesn’t really hurt. They always make out like it hurts – but it’s sort of peaceful and fun. And full of light. ‘Cept…’cept I’m not dead, am I? I’m here.”

“Shit,” I said. I rubbed my hand through my hair and then the spot where the bullet had hit. “It hurts a little bit now.”

The head laughed. Then it coughed. Then it hocked and spat out a little hunk of phlegm.

“That’s better,” it said, “I been carrying that gunk far too long.”

I stared at the head.

“But how’d you do that?” I said, “as far as I can see you haven’t got any lungs.”

Then a voice spoke from behind me and I whirled around.

“Who you talking to?” it said. It was Chamone. He was younger again, handsome and smooth like the first day I met him. Wearing the same clothes too. Tall.

I looked back at the head; the head was gone. The other two were gone too. Just a plain blank wall.

I walked back over to the desk and sat down in the chair. I stared at the screen. On the screen the words ‘Never take a job that requires the purchase of new shoes.’

“That’s one of my favourite quotes,” I said.

Chamone sat down opposite me, peeling a banana.

“What are the others?” he said, not looking at me, staring at the banana and taking a careful bite.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. Something about…”

“Take a look at the screen.”

“‘Apply for everything, take what comes,’” I read, “yeah, that’s one.”

“Look again.”

“‘The Spanish are fuckin’ dogs.’” I laughed. “No, not that. I never heard that before. What does it even mean? That the Spanish are dogs or that they’re, like, having sex with dogs? Either way, I don’t think that’s true. Definitely not one of my favourite quotes.”

“Hm,” he said, “it’ll need tweaking.”

“What?” I said, glancing once more at the screen. This time it contained the words of a Winston Churchill quote, of how some woman would still be ugly in the morning.

I looked away.

“Listen man,” I said, “can you tell me what the hell is going on? I sort of…I forget why I’m here. I just had some sort of dream or vision where I was in Leeds in the past and some guy called Harry put a bullet in my head. And now I’m in this room with talking heads that disappear and…and – yeah! You were here before, and your face came off!”

I looked over quickly at the waste basket. The basket was empty. Chamone dropped his banana skin in it.

“We don’t have time for that, I’m afraid. I need to ask you some questions. But we’ve got to be quick: the fate of mankind literally rests on the answers you give. Seriously. But I promise you all will be revealed by the time we get to the end of this.”

“Okay man,” I said, “shoot.”

“Number one,” he said, “are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?”

“No,” I said, “but I did once chat to some Marxists. They were giving out pamphlets. They had a little fold-out table with a poster of Che Guevara on it. I said to them, ‘how come you don’t have a picture of Karl Marx?’ and they just shrugged and I said, ‘oh yeah, it’s ‘cos people wouldn’t know who it was and Guevara looks cool.’ Then I said, ‘say, what did Karl Marx look like anyway?’ and they all huddled over in discussion and admitted they didn’t know. ‘Probably some old bloke with a beard,’ I said, and left them to it. You’da thought they’d’ve known, right?”

Chamone stared at me thoughtfully. I hadn’t noticed before but he had a pen and clipboard. He made a mark on it and turned a page.

“Question two,” he said.

“Wait,” I said, “what did you put there? Did you say I was a Communist?”

“What’s a Communist?” he said.

“I don’t know. Someone who believes in sharing things? In eating turnips and driving rubbish cars? To each according to their need, from each according to their ability? Like Cubans and Russians, right? And maybe Chinese too. I been to China – they got like the most unbelievable service in their supermarkets, cute girls on every aisle ready to assist. Overemployment, I think we call it; something like that. But I dug it. I liked China. Very civilised, I thought. No drunks in the street, no stress on the faces. Even in Beijing I thought it was pretty mellow. Self-contained, that’s what they’re like. Centred. You know what they call us?”

“Big nose,” he said, “but we don’t have time for this.”

I watched him flip back the page and scribble out whatever he’d written before and write something new.

“Are you saying that I’m a Communist just ‘cos I said China was cool?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he said.

“I’m not a Communist,” I said, “although I do often think I’d quite like to live in a commune. Be its leader. Start a little village and then declare it independent and run it according to how I think life should be, not this weird thing we have now built around buying things we don’t need and going doolally over how much paper we have.”

“Well that’s the next question,” he said, “how much paper do you have?”

“Paper?” I said.

“Money,” he said.

“About two grand,” I said.

“Debts?”

“None.”

“None?”

“None. My dad always told me a man in debt is a man enslaved and I think he was right. I think I once owed someone a fiver – probably him – but that’s as close as I’ve ever come. Never been overdrawn, never used my credit card as anything other than a debit card that I paid off immediately. I feel sorry for people that owe money: how could they ever feel free? How could they ever just decide to jack in their jobs and go hitch-hiking around the world with that hanging over their heads? Of course, mortgages are different – but then I’ve never had one of those either. Applied once and even put an offer in on a house but – ”

“So you don’t own any property?”

“Come on, man – you know I don’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Please.”

“What about the house in Brodsworth?”

“What house? I don’t own no house.”

“Just checking,” he said. “Tell me about the time you put an offer in.”

He flipped over five or six pages, flipped back one. He started writing and then raised his pen, continuing at a mad pace once I began to speak.

“It was in Canterbury,” I said, “when I was with Sophie. When I was working as a teacher and she was doing the landscape architect thing. I went down the Halifax and got approved for a hundred and thirty-five grand. Can you believe that! And there was this house on The Mint in Harbledown we’d taken a shine to – was a lovely little street, we had a friend who lived there – and they were asking mad money for it. Two-thousand-and-six, you know: the whole big boom. It was a hundred and seventy grand but I knew it wasn’t worth that much and so I offered one-twenny-five; get in below the stamp duty limit. And I thought that about right. A cheeky offer but, you know what? It eventually went for one-thirty like six months later. They probably thought I was an ass for offering so low – but I wasn’t far off. Anyways, me and Sophie broke up like five months after that and I quit teaching and I’ve never earned much since. Madness! Feels like some long ago past life, me almost buying a house. I mean, I’ve slept on the streets several times since then. And most of the clothes I own were found or given. The turns this life could have took…”

“And so you’re sure you didn’t buy it?”

“Of course I’m sure! Jesus, man, what the hell’s got into you?”

“Just that I’ve information here says otherwise.”

“What information?”

“See for yourself.”

He hands me a brown envelope and I pull out some pictures. There’s me and Sophie, standing in front of the house, smiling. Me with my hands on my hips in the living room, smiling. Her in the back garden, lying on a sun lounger in shades, smiling. Me with a big hammer in my hand, attacking a wall. The two of us looking close at the camera. Her doing the washing up. Gardening. Holding some tomatoes. Sitting on the bed, pregnant.

“What the hell?”

Her and I holding a baby, her mum and dad flanking us, everybody smiling. The little pink mass. With scrunched up face. In a soft yellow blanket. Its tiny little fingers.

I drop the photos on the table. Continue staring at the picture on the top.

“But…I don’t…what’s the…”

“That is you in those photographs?”

I stare and shake my head.

“You’re saying it’s not you?”

“It’s…it looks like me. But I don’t remember any of that! None of those things happened! We…we broke up. I went back to Leeds and she went to Bristol. We never bought that house – they didn’t even think twice about my offer. I haven’t seen her in years. I quit teaching. And we certainly didn’t have no kid.”

“Let me ask you,” he said, “the universe – is it infinite or finite?”

“It’s infinite, I think.”

“You think? How does that work?”

“I don’t know! Jesus: I’m not Stephen Hawking. At least I don’t think I am.” I looked down to check my legs; at this stage anything was possible. I turned to the door of the room. The handle was back. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I said, “get my fuckin’ head together. I thought I was a student in Leeds. Was it all a dream? What about the refereeing and the squash? Did that never happen? Are you telling me I’ve actually got a kid and I live in Canterbury and I’m still a goddamn teacher? Did I go fuckin’ mad? Christ!”

I jumped up from my chair and staggered towards the door. Everything had gone weird. I didn’t know where I was anymore. My mind whirled, thinking back on a thousand possibilities – that I was still tripping acid in Wembley in ’95 – that I had died somewhere, sometime – that I was banged up in some straightjacket in a padded room talking to myself, an old man, or twenty-two, or maybe not even human. It was the whole mad night of the West Memphis truck stop all over again. Coffee and aliens. The times when the hinges of the doors of reality had fallen loose and everything had gone somersaulting into space. Where reality? What truth? Everything just a game leading up to this point and the weird unveiling of what life actually was now taking place in this room, which was maybe just in my head.

I felt dizzy. The room span. The maddest headrush of my life.

“Headrush,” I said, and plummeted towards the ground. My eyes were full of diamonds of coloured light. The room disappeared in them. Red and green and gold. I wanted to vomit and giggle simultaneously. It was the iboga! I was still tripping iboga.

But then I knew I wasn’t.

The diamonds faded and I was back in the room, on the floor, my right hand resting slovenly on the door handle.

Chamone came over and helped me up.

“Come on then,” he said, “we can go for a walk. A little old walk ‘n’ talk, just you and me.”

He lifted my hand off the door handle. He took out a key and pushed it in the lock. He tried to turn it but the key didn’t work. He turned it again, more frantically.

Nothing.

“The sons of bitches,” he said, losing his cool.

He tried the key. He rattled the handle. He banged on the door. I left him and slumped down in my seat. The pictures were gone. In their place, a small white envelope.

I looked at the computer screen. It was blank. And then these words slowly began to appear: ‘don’t turn around…’less you wanna see my heart breaking.’

I looked down, and it was me typing them.

I knew I shouldn’t look.

But I did.