The Other Lives Read online

  He settles back into his chair again. The mishmash of a misquoted Bob Dylan lyric, a half-hearted stab at one of the most memorable quotes in American politics and the strange reference to soup has momentarily robbed me of words.

  Earl says one more thing.

  ‘Elliot, it’s no good just telling the truth about society. We have to find the right language to make people understand it.’

  I turn to Patti, offering her the opportunity to speak before me. She elects not to take it, and I turn back to Earl.

  ‘Language?’ I say. ‘Understand? Have you seen my show, Earl? Have you seen what people understand? What people enjoy? What people pay money for? Have you seen the language they talk?’

  Earl attempts a response, but I refuse it.

  ‘People understand simple words and ugly faces, cheap makeup, scrawny men who drink too much, foreigners who wear clothes they don’t like looking at and do the jobs they don’t want to do. They understand this because they don’t want to do any thinking. They have everything they need and that’s it; they just want to live and feel better about themselves, which they can’t because when they look in the mirror they see the same fat, ugly faces, stupid clothes and bad skin. People want to be reassured that they’re better than other people, and the only language they can be told that in is the language of fists and monosyllabic words.

  ‘Now if you think I’m going to come over to your stinking cesspool of a country and sit up on your stage with a shiny face and cool my act down for you, if you think I’m going to dance like fucking Oprah for you, then you’ve got another thing coming, sunshine.’

  I stand up.

  ‘Where are those fucking drinks?’

  I look over at the bar, where our waitress lurks holding our tray of vodkas. She looks around. Her eyes dart at the manager behind her as she opens the till to insert the stack of notes from the bill she has just collected.

  ‘Elliot, sit down,’ says Patti.

  ‘No. Earl, there’s only one thing people need to hear on this planet; there’s only one thing that sets them free, and there’s no way of sugar coating it.’

  Earl looks up at me. Austin is still working away at his food. He grunts and chews, his shoulders jiggling with effort. Nicole watches me coolly, her food uneaten.

  ‘And what’s that, Elliot?’ she says. ‘What is this truth?’

  I look over at the bar and see the waitress push in the bills. Just as she is about to close the till, I catch her slide out two twenties and slip them deftly in her skirt. As she carries the tray to our table, one of the traders, now hopelessly drunk, makes a clumsy grab for her, which she manages to sidestep but not before his palm brushes her behind. His smile is blissful and idiotic, eyelids blinking independently. That was all he wanted; the thrill of having made contact, having committed the act, however poorly it was executed.

  ‘The truth is that we like to think that we’re enlightened, moral individuals, each capable of goodness, but deep down we’re all the same. The truth is that everyone’s just an animal and nothing else. Everyone’s out for themselves and just wants to get their kicks. Community, society, family, togetherness — they’re just games we play to pass the time between meals. Everyone who comes onto this planet comes onto it alone and dies alone. We’re all separate, and we can’t ever hope to be anything else. Our history is of war and death and corruption and the clambering of the fastest and cleverest feet over the backs of the slowest and dumbest.

  ‘That’s the truth, Nicky, and anyone who tries to sugarcoat it is kidding themselves. So I suggest you go and…go and…’

  ‘Go and what, Elliot?’

  ‘I suggest you go and…’

  ‘Elliot?’ says Patti. ‘Are you all right?’

  But I can barely hear her. Time has slowed again. The world is muffled. My attention has been diverted to the corner, where a small collection of photographs is hanging. The one in the middle is stopping my heart.

  ‘Elliot?’

  I stumble from the table and find my way to the wall, quite unable to process what I am seeing. The noise and the movement of the restaurant are gone, and there is only my own heartbeat — speeding, strong and loud. Everything loses focus; everything but the photograph.

  It is black-and-white and faded, a hundred years old at least. The picture is of children standing and sitting in rows outside a school. It is a hot day and most look straight ahead, their brows down to protect them from the bright sun. The girls wear white summer dresses and ribbons in their hair, some holding posies, and in the centre of the group is a young girl of nine or ten dressed up as a May Queen with a crown of roses and a chair decorated with flowers and streamers. The boys are dressed in cloth shorts and shirts. Those in the front row slouch and squint at the sun or grin in mischievous huddles, and the rest either beam proudly or stand to a strange attention, frowning with their mouths pinched shut.

  I shiver. I shiver because, stooping at the end of the back row, away from things, is a boy. His shirt is buttoned up too tight. It was blue. I know this despite the fact that the photograph has no colour. I know this the same way I know that the fabric made the boy’s skin itch and sweat in the heat.

  I know this because the boy is me.

  STREAMING WITH FILTHY LIGHT

  A WHOOP OF LAUGHTER from a nearby table, unrelated to me and my position — now bent and squinting at the wall — shakes me from my trance. Patti is still calling my name, and I turn, briefly acknowledging the look of confusion on her face and on those of our American guests, before pulling the photograph from the wall.

  I prise it from its frame and look closer. Closer down the years at the face that is not mine and yet is, very much, mine. In one corner is a scrawl of two letters — M. J. Beneath it, printed on the white border, are the words: St. Agnes School, Marshfields-upon-sea. Underneath is a long string of initials and surnames separated by commas. …I. Grace, P. Jones, S. Peters, S. Mordant… I bring the image as near to my eyes as possible without losing focus. The grainy face of the boy fills my vision.

  There is something in his expression, just a twinge—something that looks out of place amongst the rest. He is looking at the camera, but for a reason other than that for which he has been ordered to. His eyebrows are raised just a little more than you would expect; his head is back just a little farther; his eyes are open just a little…

  The restaurant’s smear of noise and light suddenly seems to flap and wobble. Without warning, it falls away completely, and I am there.

  It was a hot day. My shirt felt like canvas against my back, slick with sweat. I had tried to release the top button three times before leaving the house, but my mother had stepped in each time, wrestling my hands away and refastening it before punishing me further with a spit-covered palm that she used to flatten my hair.

  It was the school summer fete. I could smell elderflower wine from the huge black bins in the yard, toffee apples and sugared almonds from stalls set up at one end of the field. At the other end was a boisterous tent of men, including my father, drinking scrumpy.

  A brass band played, badly, from the street. The tuba player, who had been drinking in the cider tent, played the same note again and again, missing the beat, whilst the rest of the ensemble clattered and howled their way through ‘Jerusalem’.

  The photographer was running up and down the line, trying to straighten the younger boys into some order. He had a bowler hat and braces. I remember he looked more like a butcher than a photographer.

  ‘Please, Mr Jensen, it is very hot,’ I heard my teacher say from the front row. She was fanning herself with a handkerchief. ‘Will you be much longer?’

  I had made sure I was on the end of the row. I had to be, otherwise it might not work. I was attempting to do something with an uncertain outcome, and I would never know if it had worked.

  Mr Jensen, the butcher-styled cameraman, walked back with his arms outstretched, appraising the scene. Then he ducked beneath his hood and held up his hand, cou
nting with his fingers, 3…2…

  I held out my own hand too.

  …1.

  The fruit machine suddenly blasts a celebratory fanfare, and its soused septuagenarian operator raises his skinny arms in victory. He releases a gargled cry as the trough fills with old ten-pence pieces. I am back in the Cherry Tree, staring at the photograph.

  I look at the edge of the row in which my not-me is standing. Poking out is my finger, very obviously in fact, now that I can see it. It is directed at something I cannot see, off-camera.

  I take the photograph and stuff it in my jacket.

  ‘Elliot? What the hell…?’

  I walk past Patti. Ignore the Americans. Everything has changed.

  The restaurant seems to be suspended in a strange glow. The air, the light, the sound — everything buzzes with charge. A new dimension of smells has opened up above the clean, clinical ones of the bar. Alcohol, urine, tobacco-infused fabric, salt and pork — each is exotic and bright. I walk to the door on legs lighter than air, treading carefully on the wood in case I float away from it. The walls shine. The glasses gleam. The tables seem to be like me, weightless and teetering on the brink of flight. The corners of the bar turn upwards, as if they themselves wish to escape their moorings and drift up and out and into the night.

  And the faces…the faces.

  I pass the fruit machine. There sits its victor, stacking his glittering prize in neat piles. His eyes are lake-sized blue corridors of light; his mouth is a glorious, wet-lipped leer of happiness. The barman’s face turns to me as I walk to the door, like a giant, bald balloon sweeping away on a forest gale.

  Two women chatter in a corner booth like crones cackling over flat, transparent potions. Their office-battered hair streams from their scalps in proud, roaring rivers of cherry and auburn.

  A tall man in an ill-fitting suit sits at a table nursing a pint of stout. He cranes over the tower of black liquid, his eyes peering down into it as if the secrets of the universe are bubbling up from the froth.

  I step out onto the dark cobbles running with rain, and turn left onto a giddy thoroughfare of cars and people. Human life teems in the night: Commuters coming home from work, couples and gangs of hens and stags going out to play in drunk swarms. I stagger along, revelling in the feeling of water rushing down my cheeks and neck.

  Everything is alive.

  I choose a path along the pavement, through the crowd, through the life. Every face I pass is lit with colour, dazzling me with hues daubed from their own unique palette. Emotion, intelligence, experience, pain. The dials spin. Joy to anger, love to hate, passion to apathy, happiness to despair. IQs of every number flip up and down around me like abacuses as they skip past, each one alone, a cell of awareness, a lone bedsit rising in humanity’s high-rise tenement with their windows open, each face a dot of chance that glows, glows, glows in the London lights.

  I lose track of time. Each moment could be a second or an hour or a day. I cross a park that heaves with its own emptiness, and burst out of a hedge onto a glorious street of shops, where I lose my breath and stumble back against the railing, gasping up at it all. From end to end the street is streaked with colour. People stream beneath the streetlamps — dull and dim against the light of their faces — spirals of conversations trailing in their wake, and their dreams drifting behind them in blue clouds. Their eyes twinkle with wonder. Whether they are happy, sad or just lost in their own brain’s buzzing distraction, their eyes twinkle.

  Understand: I am not hallucinating. I am experiencing things as they are — a blinding, deafening gush of everything at once.

  I feel my way along the railing, unable to take my eyes from the scene. I settle on a bench and sit with my hands on my lap. On the other side of the street is a bus stop. I watch it for an hour. I watch every bus that comes and goes and every face behind every window on it. I watch every jitter, flinch and tick of every soul who waits there. Every eyeball spin, every finger swipe of every phone, every thought that makes its way to every surface and splashes onto every face of the ones who have thought them. I watch it all. Everything.

  Then I feel hungry, ravenous in fact, so I walk some more and find myself at Piccadilly Circus. I check my watch; it is after midnight. I buy the largest cheeseburger I can find and sit eating it on some theatre steps. Grease spills down my chin, and I watch life circling in great arcs around the loop of roads. I watch arguments erupt in languages I do not know, understanding everything.

  And I dive.

  I dive through every face I see without effort and without control. I take two, three, four lives at once and then onto the next. I see not only their near futures, but their pasts as well. I know who they are, what they have done, what they wanted to do and the secrets they will never tell.

  Normally this would terrify me, but I am too delirious to feel terror. And I’m still hungry. I toss my burger’s wrapper, lick my palms and install myself in the window seat of a sushi place. I take a plate of everything and work through it all, watching, watching, watching.

  I see a man holding his hat and chasing a small dog on a string. He stole money from his mother’s purse when he was ten. He cried about this endlessly to his first girlfriend, then embezzled money from his company when he was twenty-nine. He often dreams of seeing China, but I know he never will.

  I see three men muscling along, shouting and tripping. I feel all of them at once — diesel-fuelled lust, foggy memories of a stepfather’s belt, a magazine one of them keeps hidden and will never show the others, the certainty of all three that they would fight to the death for each other, and the guilt of one who knows he would do so much more for just one.

  I dive into the night and never resurface. I am fully submerged, drowning in every life that passes.

  I stuff a third plate of gyoza into my mouth and neck a beer, then start on another. My appetite is going nowhere. A woman sits beside me and makes conversation I only half-listen to, because I am engrossed in a human statue outside, and his memories of a winter he once spent with a Romanian girl. She begged him not to leave. It was Christmas Day.

  Finally, I turn and give the woman my full attention.

  My full attention is something that perhaps neither of us is ready for.

  She is lonely and middle-aged — divorced, I surmise — wearing a business suit and smelling of offices, cigarettes and the half-bottle of Pinot Grigio she has just finished. This is not something she does often — the late night, the sushi on her own, the talking to a stranger. It’s an experiment, an act of desperation perhaps, but an experiment nonetheless.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she says.

  There is no trace of horror in her voice, no alarm bells telling her to abort. There is something though — excitement. Her eyes widen at it, and I dive straight in.

  Not divorced then. Too busy for a marriage. Too busy for children. Career has always come first. You kid yourself that you can survive on arm’s-length, three-month flings, one-night stands and messy, ill-advised meet-ups with school friends, that you can survive on a few drinks with work at the weekends, but then before you know it it’s ten years down the line, then twenty and you’re forty-five and washed up and alone. So one evening you decide to make a change, to just step out and see what happens. And then you find a man of similar age on his own in a dark sushi bar, staring out at the night, and he could be anyone — maybe a murderer or a rapist, but even that’s worth the risk, and you start talking to him and you’re getting sick of your own voice, when he turns and you realise who he is…

  ‘Would you like to come home with me?’ I say.

  She smiles.

  INESCAPABLE CLOSENESS

  The Next Morning

  I KNOW WHAT IT’S like to be you. It’s noisy. Beneath that veneer of half-smiles and small-talk, there’s a cacophony of 3:00 a.m. thoughts, sour memories and jarring voices. It’s not just the others out there you have to live with, is it? It’s the others in your head too. We are all schizophrenic, by v
arying degrees.

  But occasionally, there is peace.

  Without warning, sometimes, you find yourself with your hand covering your heart and you wonder how it got there. You realise it has become quiet, as if you have stepped outside from a loud party to discover that it has snowed. You are on your own in the cool and crackling quiet while all inside is clamour and noise and excess. You think: How can I keep this? How can I stay here, away from all that noise?

  And then the door bursts open and the party floods out, all your other little selves, and they ruin the snow and build crude effigies from it, and you join them.

  But still, if only for a moment, sometimes there is peace.

  It’s 7:00 a.m. and I’m awake, lying on my back with my arms by my side. The sheets — freshly laundered the day before by my cleaning lady, whom I have never met — are crisp and untangled. The air is fresh and scented with apple. I am not sweating; I am not feverish; I am not delirious. I am not panicking. My mind is clear. The only disturbance is the lingering dream, but it is gone now. It is as if nothing happened.

  I know she is there in the bed next to me, wrapped in a sheet, asleep.

  I lie there, listening to the slow, unfazed thump of my heart while I hazard some explanations for my behaviour the night before.

  Hallucinations, I think. Stress, a little too much booze. The incident at the restaurant. The woman. The ragged man…

  I sit bolt upright in bed, overwhelmed by a sudden realisation that forces a single, shrill laugh from my lungs. The sound alarms me but it does not matter, because...the ragged man — I know where I’ve seen him before.

  I slip out of bed and check the time — 7:24 a.m., five minutes to go. Then I dress quietly, make tea and head for the balcony.

  I live in a penthouse suite with nothing around me but the best view in London. I have no children to keep me awake and no neighbours to disturb me, because when I bought this place I bought the two flats beneath it as well, with no other intention but to keep them empty. My home is a fortress, protected by empty, prime real estate.