Earlier this year, you may have seen I attempted the National Novel Writing Month. The book I wrote was called Doppel and explored the themes of imposter syndrome, gender roles and mythology (okay, very loosely). These here is a redraft of the first chapter, bound to be changed, burnt, and sweated over multiple times. I hope you like it! (PS. if you’re squeamish and you like having your eyeballs in tact, you may not be the biggest fan…)
Chapter 1
The M25, the sun melting the road to the point of sky blue, the blue that shimmers drivers into accidents. Amos kept his foot steady, 70mph, indicate right, indicate left, carry on. He’d driven this stretch a few times, but it had been a couple of months since the last. A SatNav plugged into a cigarette lighter told how many miles were left, take the exit here into service, a nameless hotel waiting to greet you sir.
He took the slip road, decelerated and came to the car park. He put the car into a space and scanned the vehicles around. His piece of shabby not quite matching the standards of some of the other cars in their neat little rows. He scratched at his stubble in the wing mirror, allowed to grow from the days off. He tugged at his chin, then a cheek, then finally wiped the sweat from his forehead. Jack would be waiting.
It was his turn to be Jack, for a week or so. It was usually until Jack got bored. He kept that Jack himself. Two laptops, one work, one private. Amos exited the car, slung a backpack of a suitcase over his shoulder and walked towards the brick work.
On the way in, a sign read “British Clown Association meet: The Sloe Room” and beside it stood two clowns, smoking away. The paint dripped from their faces, fingers turning white with each pat of sweat. He gave them a nod and carried on, a chemical pulse to asking him to stop and ask for one.
He said he’d lost his key card, flashed a fake passport with a fake name on and he was on his way, room 122. The noise of adults in face paint came from across the hall as he unlocked the door. He remembered this one having nice rooms, if it was the one he was thinking of, and the breakfast wasn’t too shabby. It was the little things in life he lived for. He let himself in.
“Jack?” He closed the door and the room was silent. “Jack?” She stepped forward, and Jack lay across the double mattress, face up, suit and top button, eyes loose. Amos knew that this is what he would look like if he was dead, a bit of stubble to cover the imperfections.
“You’ve got to stop doing this, one of these days I’ll take you seriously.” He walked to the fridge, grabbed a Coke and sat down on the edge of the bed. He grabbed at one of Jack’s shoes and gave it a wiggle. There was no reaction, no “Don’t touch what you can’t afford.” He looked at the face again, a line of dribble coming from the side of the mouth and onto the duvet, crisp and white.
This is what Amos would look like if he was dead.
He reached for Jack’s wrists, felt the cold, the nothing where life should have been, then looked the other way.
“Well…shit!” Teeth clench. “What happened?” He waited, playing with the rim of fabric of his shorts, pushing it harder, fingers starting to hurt.
He stood, scratched heat from his face and closed his eyes in the air-con. He knew now that his boss was behind him. No, not his boss, a body. Their dead body. He turned, something connected with his foot and half-drunk bottle of whisky rolled away. He sat down nearer the head of the bed and stared into Jack, into those dead-bird eyes. The first time he’d seen those eyes were a good 25 years back.
Part-time bartender, part time freak; your early 20s can be rough if you can’t call daddy. After a show Jack slipped back stage, a 3-piece suit and magic in his eyes.
“That wasn’t prosthetics or anything was it, that was all you?” Jack asked.
“Yeah, that’s what the shows all about.” Jack stood.
“But how?”
“Pixie dust, I don’t know. What does it matter to someone like you and your fancy suit?” Jack checked himself up and down.
“You like it?”
“It makes you look like a Ken doll.”
“I can work with that. Want to be dressed in your own?”
“What, be a Ken?” With that, Amos started to twist his face, skin turning plastic and eyes shiney. His smile stretched, each tip almost at his eyes.
“Call it what you like, it’s gotta be better than being called a freak, hasn’t it?” Amos shrugged. He pushed his face back to normal, baby soft to dark stubble.
“How are you going to make me a Ken then? People don’t come out of dark corners and offer you the world without a price.” He started to scratch the white line that worked from his hip and across his stomach.
“Do me.”
“Are all rich people perverts?”
“No, replicate my face.” Amos stared him down, looked at every crevice, the bits of stubble that had been missed. He pulled at his own, eyes going further in, one ear sticking out a bit more than the other, suck the facial hair in for the fresh cut. Jack felt his stomach turning, bones moving to the point of breaking underneath the other man’s face. He stopped and Jack saw himself, almost, like he was looking at a brother, maybe a year or 3 older.
“Almost.”
“Why? You want to have sex with yourself?”
“No, you think small.” Amos shrugged, and Jack touched the new formed skin. “That’ll work. Now, what do you know about investment banking?”
At that moment in time he’d heard of Invesment Wankers, but that was the start of swapping at hotels, shaving at set intervals, moving from the multifaced creature and into Jack Afferby. Investment Banker, corporate meetings, getting reports handed to him by the next up and comers that would do anything for a taste of posh-wood desks and secretaries. Jack had a taste for secretaries, but they never stayed for long.
Amos sat there, a banker with a body. He picked a packet of pills from the floor, empty plastic and popped foil. White markings around the body’s lips. He started to cry, knowing that at some point the door to this room would have to be opened, that the body would be found, unless he carried it out. He pictured a rug over his shoulder, nothing to see here officer, I swear, just help me get it into my car.
He hunted through the drawers, looking for something, a reason, anything he could hold up, point at and nod. Pills and alcohol seemed like Jack’s style but he was too arrogant to die, and to too loud to die so quietly, laying in a second-rate hotel in one of his least favourite suits. He found the work laptop, skimmed e-mails of jargon, meeting approvals, hiring protocol. He found Jack’s laptop, tucked under the bed in its carry case. He looked at the body again, expecting Jack to sit up, hit him like the first time.
He took to the desk now, kneeling with his elbows raised, and looked up into the screen. A blank password box blinked at him, a tranquil island behind it. The clue read “Fuck Yourself”. He searched his mind for words, the kinds of things Jack would have as a password, but nothing made its way to his fingertips. He’d been him for 25 odd years, but all he knew of him was the skin.
He searched the bag; some cables, how to turn on a laptop, a digital camera. A naughty child with his dad’s toy. He flicked the switch, and wood grain turned synthetic in the display. To the pictures. A girl on all fours, tape across her mouth, black crosses across each nipple. Jack’s body, their body, behind mid-thrust. A string of these photos, she must have been about half his age. Amos thought of Kat, probably lounging at home, the first time he’d met her. The way that she’d kissed him, the bite he’d given back.
He put the camera down and sat, folding sideways as he landed on the corpse’s shoe. Fuck yourself, fuck yourself. He picked up the laptop and tried a few strings: go, masturbate, taxman. Incorrect password, please try again. He stared at the lighthouse in the screensaver. Jack had never made a plan for if one of them died. Amos knew he was the lackey, he dies, Jack just carries on, the holidays get a little tighter, but they had never planned for this; two bodies, one on its side and full of pills, the other stood upright.
He gripped at his arms, reds under fingers and fingernail marks etching into his skin. Run, the voice said, run! Jack had gone and taken everything.
He strode to the bathroom mirror and looked at the face he’d had for the last 25 years. The wrinkles, the laughter lines, the slightly chipped tooth. He started to push, the one aching, pulsing, almost reaching the point of breaking, almost reaching…he stopped, tried again, clawing at his jaw, pushing his nose in, teeth clenching to the point of collapse. Tears came down his face, a guttural high note as something snapped.
He gripped the rim of the sink, tendons raised, fingertips bending back on themselves. Jack looked back at him, nose broken, the taste of blood in his mouth. His throat let out another note and he winced, shaking back and forward, touching his face, the way it used to, the way his fingers were able to slip into creases and pull the skin into the shapes he wanted. He rubbed his eyes, a sting as blood. He whimpered, fist connected to mirror.
It collapsed, shards clattering into the sink, followed by a drop of blood, two. He looked at his raised bloody hand. In the remaining glass, his face, their face, Jack’s face. He started to laugh, then put the cut into his mouth. It was bitter, the taste sour in a throat trying to close. He sucked it down and clasped it with the other hand. More blood landed on the broken shards in the sink. He was waiting for the sirens, the explosion of static in his own head, the moment the door bursts open in every film, heavy music blare. But it was silent.
Silent.
The blood had dried. He stood looking at the mess of MDF and glass, lookin gat nothing, looking at what he was now at the age of 48, the grey mixed in with black, the lean chin now with a slight hang. The eyes were cracked between two pieces of glass, stuck grey blue and glassy in the yellow lighting. He was Jack, that was that, no quick switching out and running, setting up home with someone that wasn’t Kat. His stomach churned, explaining the broken nose, that the man she loves isn’t the man she loves and that the man that she doesn’t love is the man that she loves. He couldn’t leave her, but the body next door sunk into itself, a threshold.
He went back through; the body still. He walked over and closed the eyes. He thought back to every late-night crime drama he’d seen, the way they pulled the covers back, the little details they pulled out, the model of car based on the paint under the fingernails. The way they matched the medical records and found the rare genetic disorder that narrows it down to two people, the way they’ll almost kiss but get interrupted.
What if this body wasn’t Jack’s body? It struck him, a nerve ache moving from nose to eye. If I’m going to be Jack, I really need to be Jack. He hadn’t been for a medical in years, when would his last test match up? An anonymous body just left in a room for someone to find. Take the passport, scrub the room of everything, anything, clothes, documents, distinguishing features, his face. They’d know the face, put out pictures, 25 years of practice won’t put people off. He looked down at their face again, the calmness of death, the smugness he could just break.
He touched the shadow of facial hair, the soft skin, pushed harder and watched the skin try to return to its place. Fingernails digging in, creating shapes in the whiteness. He let go, fingers wouldn’t work, he didn’t want to feel the skin rip, the things underneath it. He reached for a pillow, took the case from it and moved to the bathroom. In the sink, the fragments of mirror, his face sharpened to point, he picked up the biggest piece he could. Glass, pillow case, hand. He walked back through to the body.
He put the tip to the forehead, cut a thin line along the hair, dug it in, felt it grate against the bone. He juddered and started to pull the skin down with the glass, stopped, and looked away. His hand cramped around the sharp glass, he raised it into the air, and pushed it down.
And again.
And again, and again, and again and again and again again again agaian agaianainaina.
He collapsed to the floor, not looking at the mess, the red draining into the whites of the pillows. The white globule spilling from a socket. His face massacred, a skeletal grimace and hollow sockets. He ran for the toilet and the next few minutes stretched into days. The heavy splash hitting the bowl, eyes clenched harder and harder. Teeth trying to grit but being forced apart with sourness, liquid-solid thudding against the ceramic. His arms curled around it and he cried, the yellow and white of wall and light blurring and spinning, the tiles beneath him trying to shift left and right. He inhaled, counted to six, then released, the world letting go.
Jack wasn’t next door anymore, that was just a body, a pseudonym at a help desk, so white pristine smile of a white generic man. The teeth, that’s what might give him away. The face is a mess of red, but the teeth jutting out, sinew and muscle poking from a pinkened collar. He wiped the spit from his lips, matted the hair on his arm, and took to the glass shard in the cloth. It touched the marks it had made in his hand, cutting through the fabric and into him, and he winced. He rewrapped and went to the body once more.
Each tooth took its time. He would wretch, nothing more to come. It was just playdough and kid’s games. He lined each tooth up on the bedside table, counting as he went. He exhaled, took the last one and added it to the line, an empty scarlet maw. He wrapped the teeth in toilet paper and flushed them away. This is not what Thursdays were about, they are about being curled up and watching property shows.
He put the TV on, the body remaining in his periphery.
“You know, this might work.” He said to the body. He looked around, grabbing up everything that he could, the car key, the fake passports and documents, a suitcase of clothes, the laptops, work; and private.
“Just, what were you thinking?” He tidied the empty pills into the bin and stood the bottle of whisky to attention on the bedside table.
He sat on the bed a moment, reached out and felt Jack’s leg.
“I guess, we’ll see if I can go fuck myself, and work out what’s happened.”
He stood, loaded like a pack mule, and staggered out of the room where Jack no longer laid.
AF Cowlin 