Shape-Shifter (16 page)

I went straight to the mirror to try it on. It fitted perfectly but somehow I was disappointed. It made me look pale and wasted. Several times over the next few months, I tried it on. The result was always the same. Either I looked ill or, when it did suit me, I could find nothing to wear with it. In the end I left it hanging in the cupboard.

January came and went. No sign of Maisie. Shortly after she left I tried to write a story about her but nothing came. I decided that it was my own suggestibility that had endowed her with supernatural powers and I felt foolish.

I forgot about her. A year later I was working on a collection of short stories. I needed three more. I remember that it was a Wednesday evening and I was sitting, browsing through old notebooks searching for ideas. I found a few notes on Maisie. Perhaps I could knock them into a story. I wrote the first unflattering paragraph, stating that she was no more than a con-woman. As I completed it, the telephone rang. I heard the blip and squeak of a long-distance call, then the voice, quite clear:

‘Hello. This is Julia.’ I tried to think who it might be.

‘Julia Legwabe,’ the voice said as if I should know it.

‘Hi,’ I bluffed. ‘Where are you?’

‘Bophutaswanaland,’ came the reply. ‘Maisie says you must meet her at the airport on Friday.’

I glanced guiltily over at the page sticking out of the typewriter:

‘I’m afraid I can’t. I’m working on Friday.’ I lied.

‘All right. Thank you very much. I will tell her. Goodbye.’ The receiver at the other end clicked down.

Unnerved by the timing of the call, I felt that she was heading over here to stop me writing the truth about her. I decided to go ahead and worked late that night and all through the next day. In the evening the telephone rang. This time it was her:

‘Hello. This is Maisie,’ said the husky voice, intimate even at a distance of thousands of miles.

‘Hello,’ I said with false delight. ‘Where are you?’

‘Mafeking,’ she said. I had a picture of her flitting around the southern part of Africa, one minute in Bophutaswanaland, the next in Mafeking.

‘I am coming to London on Sunday. I want to stay with you.’

‘Oh no. What a shame. I won’t be in London. I’m working out of town.’ I hoped she mistook my hesitation for the normal time-lag of a long-distance call.

‘That is a pity because I am having a show. I wanted you to see it.’

‘Maybe I can get back for a bit. Where is it?’

‘The South African Embassy.’

I was shocked.

‘I can’t go in there,’ I said. ‘There’s a cultural boycott. There’s a picket outside. There’s a continuous twenty-four-hour demonstration in front of the Embassy.’

‘I know.’ She chuckled. ‘You should come with me. You might learn something.’

‘How long will you be in London?’

‘Just for the show on Monday. Then I go to Belgium and Austria.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. It looks as though I will miss you.’ I paused. ‘I haven’t written that story about you yet.’

It was not a lie. It was not the truth.

‘A lot of people want to write about me. You must write a nice story about me.’

‘
OK
. Goodbye, Maisie.’ I hung up.

I returned to the typewriter. So far what I had written was a condemnation of her as a fraud, a sell-out, a reactionary, a collaborator. Now I decided I would not write about her at all. I would scrap the whole idea. I took the pages and chucked them in the bin.

I’d taken the jacket out and laid it open on the sofa to remind me of the style and feel of her work, hoping it would lead me into the story. I stared at it. The black scarab shapes on the scarlet lining appeared to shift. I blinked to clear my eyes. The second time I looked they shifted more violently. That happens sometimes with the juxtaposition of red and black. It is an optical illusion, something to do with the structure of the cells at the back of the retina. I shut my eyes for a full minute. When I looked again, both the blue exterior of the jacket and the red lining were completely plain. There was nothing on them at all. Slowly, I raised my eyes. The black shapes were all over the wall and halfway across the ceiling. I looked away and looked back. They were still there.

The cat started to use the leg of the table as a scratching post. I pushed him down. Immediately, he levitated, rotating upright, his four legs outspread. With a sudden change of speed and direction, he hurled himself against the back wall and buried himself in the plaster causing thin, jagged cracks. I went over for a closer inspection. There was, where he had sunk in, a wide, cork plug in the wall, the sort of stopper you see in glass jars in fashionable kitchens. I manoeuvred it out. Through the hole in the wall I could see dusty catacombs. I was able to hear footsteps in there, but I saw nobody. I pulled away enough bits of plaster and masonry to be able to squeeze through.

The yellow porous rock crumbled a little under my touch. Rough walls were pitted with holes containing grains of sand. Light came from somewhere but I couldn’t discover the source. There was no trace of damp and the air was warm. To my left, in a hollowed-out cave, a man lay groaning on the ground, his shirt wrapped tightly round him. I approached. Over his head some letters were scratched in the wall. The letters were all constructed of straight lines. As I studied them they lit up as if someone had shone a torch from behind me. I read:

H
…
E
…
R
…
A
…
K
…
L
… The last letters were indecipherable.

I did not go too close to the man because I knew his shirt was poisoned.

I passed through the honeycombed passages and came to the bottom of a staircase. It was familiar. I recognised it as the staircase of a London house where I had lived some years earlier in a flat on the top floor. I climbed the stairs. The house appeared to be unoccupied. Where there had been carpeting on the stairs, the boards were bare and dusty. I held onto the wooden banister and went up to the top. The flat was empty, the windows dirty, and my shoes made tapping noises on the floorboards. I opened the door to what used to be the living room.

To my surprise I found myself at the back of an evangelical church hall. A phalanx of wooden chairs waited for a congregation. The only occupants were two women seated some way apart, one in a drab maroon coat, the other in dull green. A flush of embarrassment came over me. What would my friends think if they discovered I had a functioning church in my front room? There was no altar, just a high pulpit set in front of the chairs. An Anglican vicar entered from the back and made his way down the left-hand able to the pulpit. His white surplice hung limply over the black gown. Steel grey streaked the hair on the back of his head. He mounted the pulpit:

‘Today’s sermon is taken from two readings of the Old Testament: the first from Exodus, Chapter 39, verses 24–26 and the second from Ecclesiastes,
Chapter 3
, verses 1–3.’

The voice was weary:

‘“
And they made upon the hems of the robe, pomegranates of blue and purple, and scarlet, and twined linen.

And they made bells of pure gold and put the bells between the pomegranates upon the hem of the robe, round about between the pomegranates;

A bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate round about the hem of the robe.
”’

The church smelled musty. He continued with monotonous intonation:

‘“
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill and a time to heal …
”’

I slipped out through the side door into the sunshine.

The grass beneath my feet was dry and brown, the heat overpowering. Dolores was hanging out clothes on the line strung between the mango tree and Mr Elliot’s house. Water glistened on her brown hands. As she reached for the pegs her dress rode up round her strong thighs. I couldn’t believe that I had lived in my ground floor London flat for five years without ever realising that Jamaica was just on the other side of my back wall. Relief flooded me. Now I would be able to return whenever I wanted, by going through the hole in the wall:

‘Hi there, Dolores.’

She turned, smiling:

‘Hi there to you too. ‘Ave you seen Mr Elliot? ‘Im say ‘im a soon come but ‘im don’ reach yet.’ She spoke in her slow, country accent.

‘I ain’ seen him.’

Every day Dolores walked three miles across Kingston to look after Mr Elliot’s children while his wife was in America:

‘Thirta dollars ‘im say ‘im woudda give me today. Thirta dollars.’

She sprinkled some Coldpower from a packet into a tin tub full of white washing. The clothes squeaked as she rubbed them. Another tub on the ground contained the clean water for rinsing. Heat prickled the back of my neck. A bird was cursing in the hedge.

‘How are the children?’ I knew that the father of her two children had deserted her for a rich man’s daughter.

‘They doin’ fine. Is me mudda raise dem now. She don’ barn dem but she do raise dem.’

‘Do you ever hear from Fat-Boy?’

‘Not one word. Not one dollar. But ah washin’ this for ‘im now.’ She held up a long, dazzling white robe. The brilliance of the white hurt my eyes. It reminded me of the garb worn for the pocomania ritual.

‘I’m surprised you’re doing anything for him,’ I said.

She convulsed with laughter:

‘It’s the media,’ she said. I must have looked confused. She laughed again, this time astonished at my lack of comprehension.

‘You don’ hunnerstan’? It’s the
MEEDEEA
.’ She doubled up, clutching the robe to her chest, creased with laughter.

I left her and went into the house. In Mr Elliot’s bedroom lay the jumble and clutter of a man whose wife is away. The room was stuffy. I turned the handle of a door to the right of the bed. It opened onto a room which I recognised immediately as the place where I was supposed to be.

The ceiling was high. The walls were built of great, square, yellow stone slabs. The room was no bigger than a cell. I shut the door gently behind me. Everything was peaceful. The only furniture was a small wooden table with a wooden chair set by it. The wood was rough and white and reminded me of the wooden draining-board we had at home which my mother used to scrub with parazone. On the table stood a typewriter. Sunlight fell on it from a window that was no more than a slit in the enormously thick walls. Placed next to the typewriter was an opened packet of plain foolscap paper.

I took out a sheet of paper and inserted it in the typewriter. I barely needed to touch the keys. The typewriter wrote of its own accord:

THE TRUTH IS IN THE CLOTHES

SOME EVENTS DEFY SCRUTINY. LIKE ELECTRONS IN
a bubble-chamber, the act of looking at them disturbs them. All that can be seen are traces of recent passage, tracks left behind. The electron itself remains unseen, its form only to be guessed at, a ghost in the atom.

The attack – and it was a violent one, a murderous one, at night, as I lay sleeping – was just such an event. Under close examination, the meaning of it began to dance. There were traces, both before and after, that served as clues; synchronicities, unaccountable coincidences, signs even, as well as solid facts and evidence. But, at the heart of the matter lay impenetrable ambiguity, like the infuriating Necker cube – a cube drawn in such a way that one minute it appears solid and facing in one direction and then, through an involuntary shift in the mechanism of the eye, it appears to be hollow and facing the other way.

The paradigm, the lens through which something is viewed, determines what is seen. Psychologists, with their particular conceptual spectacles, saw the attack as the work of a paranoid schizophrenic. Sociologists would doubtless have some other explanation for the epidemic of stranglings and rapes that plagued London throughout the long, hot summer of that year. Theories that include the idea of a demon are, of course, out of the question in this day and age. Demons have lost their footing on the hierarchy of scientific disciplines. The police lay yet another template on events. Their gaze rests only on the physical, forensic evidence and facts:

‘Did you notice anyone suspicious hanging around the area before you were attacked?’ A buxom policewoman in a spotlessly white blouse and neat skirt was taking down my statement.

‘Yes, I did. A few days earlier I saw a man sitting on the low wall outside one of the houses a few doors down the street.’

‘What did this man look like?’ she asked.

‘He looked as though he had the soul of a wolf,’ I replied.

The policewoman did not write this down. Her pen remained poised over the sheaf of statement papers. It was not the sort of fact the police wish to accumulate:

‘Did you notice what he was wearing?’ she asked.

I tried to remember the physical details. It had been a warm day, yet he had been wearing a jacket, blue or grey, I think. I passed him, sitting on the wall, as I returned home from the shops; a man in his late thirties, with a broad forehead and fairish hair receding at the temples, lean in build. As I approached him, the hairs on the back of my hands prickled and rose. There seemed to be some sort of aura around him like an electro-magnetic force-field. He stared at me and through me and past me. What struck me was that he looked more utterly alone than anyone I have ever seen. Schoolchildren were tumbling out of the gates of the school across the road. For a moment I felt a brief, inexplicable concern for their safety, but I gave him no more than a glance as I returned home. A couple of hours later, I went out again. The man was still sitting there.

I am a cabaret artist. I specialise in impersonations. Not for me the grand, plush venues of London, I work in the tiny clubs, the underground cellars hung with black drapes where the audiences are impecunious and raucous. On this circuit, there is usually one cramped room put aside as a dressing room. Jugglers, comics, fire-eaters and musicians vie for space amid dirty tables, empty beer cans and plastic cups sprouting cigarette ends hastily doused as some performer hears his name being announced by the compère on stage. A few months before the main events of this story took place – the attack occurred in the summer and I suppose the idea first came to me in February – I was becoming bored with my act and I conceived the idea of doing some male impersonation. One night, alone at home, I found myself in the bathroom looking in the cabinet mirror. I took a black eyebrow pencil from my make-up bag and drew a moustache on my upper lip. It was too thick. I made it thinner. Then I took some hair gel from the shelf and smarmed my hair back off my face. I spent an inordinate amount of time combing my hair. I thickened my eyebrows and looked at the face in the mirror. It grinned. It was the face of a small-time crook, a petty thief. I settled on a name for him – Charlie. The next day, I went to the market to find Charlie some clothes. A cold drizzle fell on the stalls of second-hand clothes and cheap jewellery. I selected the following items for him: