Falling Over (20 page)

As he entered the newsagent he felt his disguise flimsy – as if an ill-fitting coat and woollen hat could disguise who he was, or hide the red flush that wouldn’t leave his face! His anxiety was increased because the shop was crowded with people who were  all muttering. He tried to listen but couldn’t tell if the euphemisms and veiled threats were directed at him or one of the usual press targets:

“The police?” a man was saying “What use are the police, their hands are tied.
We
need to sort them out, that’s what...” – a ‘they’, Joel thought, I’ve never been part of a ‘they’. But:

“It’s disgusting,” a woman was saying, “jail’s too good for the likes of him, they should bring back hanging, they really should...” – singular, Joel thought, so maybe they
are
talking about me.

Why were there so many people in the shop anyway? He tried to blank out their words, and turned to the newspapers to look for the one which had printed his face. But, Joel though, how did he know it had only been one? The crowd’s words continued to accuse him; all the magazines and papers half-revealed his crimes, yet when he took them from the shelf it was to reveal the banal drug addictions of super-models, the predilections of celebrity-adulterers, and the over-enthusiastic castigation of those who had fallen from tabloid grace.

Joel was pulling the titles from the shelves in no order now, not able to find the one whose publication of his face had started all of this. People were looking at him – he forced himself to calm down. When he found the paper, he flicked through it in the shop: topless celebrities on a beach, disputed casualty figures, new diet fads. He knew none of the pictures were of him; but it was hard to tell, with the smudged and grainy CCTV stills, the over-exposed and oddly-angled paparazzi shots. He tried to take it slow – headlines and stories kept catching his eye before he realised that no, they weren’t
his
crimes or misdemeanours. In many cases punishment had already been served and the tone of the paper was smirking, self-satisfied. Joel felt that when he found the right story,
his
story, all the others would make a new and deserved kind of sense too...

He was barely half way through the paper when someone pushed him. Taken by surprise, Joel staggered; the newspaper fluttered from his hand. Distressed, he turned round to face the man who had pushed him – was it the same drunk who’d accosted him in the street on the day of his sacking? Joel wasn’t sure – the boorish, over-defined face seemed to be the same, but not the man’s almost preening air of self-confidence – he was a man who smiled and spoke with the knowledge that he had the backing of a full majority.

“
You,
” he said. “I knew it was you!” And he shouted out to the people in the shop, drawing their attention...

People looked round, turned – I have to leave here, Joel thought. He moved towards the way out, not turning away from the man he faced. His back-stepping was stopped by the presence of someone behind – they had encircled him. He whirled away, felt hands pass by reaching out to grab him. They were forcing him back up another aisle, away from the exit! He kept walking with his back to them, and they kept walked slowly forward, moving him towards the back of the shop. Up close, he could barely focus on their faces; they were babbling and shouting but he couldn’t understand. It was like being hemmed in by a different species; how would they react if he turned and ran? He didn’t know but did so anyway, down the left-hand aisle. He saw a door marked with pictorials of fire and people fleeing – he barged though and heard the alarm of the shop scream like something denied behind him. He put his head down and ran, turning left, then left again...

He lost his pursuers (he could hear them behind him, but didn’t turn around to see), but stayed near the newsagent – the thought of the paper he had dropped half-read kept him circling like an animal round a dangerous source of food. Today, surely, they’d printed the story that made sense of all this, the sentence that spelt out why... But he couldn’t get to it! So he skulked around the shop, in the park opposite it, collar upturned in the streets alongside it, but never daring to go back in. Eventually, he saw them lock up, and darkness fell. He knew he couldn’t go back to his house, and so he kept near the locked shop, not quite psyching himself up for a break-in. He peered at it from over the brick wall of the park, squatting uncomfortably in the damp grass. He thought vaguely that this wasn’t his life, that really he was sitting at home watching TV, loathing work. But the thought was weak and all words – no images. He couldn’t picture his parallel life; maybe it had never happened.

He didn’t sleep, and so when in the dark early morning a van pulled up outside the shop, it still felt like it was the day before.

Two men got out of the van, and looked around, peered through the windows of the shop, banged on the door. One of them cursed and looked at his watch, the other shrugged and started taking tied up bundles of newspapers from the back of the van and leaving them on the pavement. Hot off the presses; Joel could practically smell them. Another car pulled up, and a flustered looking man got out, already talking. The first two men shook their heads, gestured at the parcels of newspapers on the street, and got back in the van. The third man swore half-heartedly at the van as it pulled off, then went and unlocked the shop’s front door. Struggling, he picked up one of the bundles of newspapers and carried it slowly into the shop. He was gone a number of minutes before he returned for the next one, and Joel held his breath as he watched from over the wall. By the time he came back a third time the man looked tired, and already had a fag on the go. He slowly took another bundle of papers inside, and when he was out of sight in the shop Joel leapt over the wall of the park, ran across the street, and tried to pull a paper from the remaining pile. He knew it didn’t matter which title it was anymore, they were all the same. The papers were tightly bound together with some kind of plastic strips, and Joel felt scared in case the third man came back out of the newsagent and caught him in his act of transgression. He managed to worm one of the papers free, and he started to sprint back towards the park again, but the noise of a large group of people deterred him – probably just drunk lads coming home late, he told himself, but better not to find out. Instead he ran down the side of the shop, and turned round the back of it – there were two commercial skips there, filled to overflowing with old newspapers, sheets of which were scattered and trod into the pavement of this small space. Some were banded up neatly, as if yesterday’s news could be sold two for one; some were yellowed and fluttered sickly on the ground. Joel hunched down between the two large skips, ignoring the uncomfortable press of the metal against his back. It was still pre-dawn, still the previous night really, but there was just enough light to read the newspaper he had stolen. The date on the top of each page gave him an odd little feeling of excitement, like he was reading about future events before they had actually happened.

The first page obviously wasn’t the one he wanted, for the story was a lurid and sensationalist murder – as far as Joel could make out someone had been practically torn apart with no rhyme or reason. All the usual tabloid condemnations were offered: MONSTERS, MOB JUSTICE – but Joel felt these words were so clichéd as to be half-hearted, as if they didn’t really believe in the strong language they were using. Between the lines was a distinct excitement, heightened by the photograph which took up almost two thirds of the page – a non-descript, day-lit crime scene that could have been anywhere – some back alley somewhere.

But he was wasting time – Joel skimmed through the paper looking for his likeness; for the why and wherefore of his crimes that justified his picture being printed and the mob at his door. He couldn’t see anything; he felt a curious mixture of relief and disappointment. Maybe it had finished, maybe the press had given up on whatever its little moral crusade had been, maybe his face would appear no more. But it was hard to believe, for there had yet to be an explanation; skipping the lurid front-page Joel started to read the paper more carefully, just to make sure.

The sun was starting to rise, but it wasn’t getting lighter – Joel didn’t sense the shadows that fell across him as he read, still looking for his answer. He was reading the paper in a ‘corridor’ between the two large skips (each taller than he was) and the brick wall of the newsagent. At the front of this corridor the people approached silently and waited as their numbers slowly built up.

Eventually, Joel was alerted and turned his head – the crowd blocked the way out, blurred and monstrous in his vision. He looked the other way – at the end of his corridor the wall of the shop took a right-angle, blocking him off. He scrambled to his feet, but there was nowhere to go.

He looked at the crowd’s faces, at their tensed postures, and it was like Ian catching him in the act of trespass again: the way that they stood in the ‘doorway’ and blocked his escape, the feeling that if he tried to shove his way through then the violence simmering in their thoughts would become a reality. But the sheer number of them made it different too, the way the crowd seemed one body with one will, unconcerned with any petty doubts of its individual members. Ian had been uncertain of his right to inflict violence; the crowd felt no such ambiguity.

Were these the same people who’d been outside his house, or different? They didn’t make a move yet, and more people arrived and started pushing at the back.
None of this is fair!
Joel thought;
just why me?
He tried to talk to them, but he didn’t know what to say other than this obviously couldn’t be happening, that he was in the wrong place, or wrong time. He paced back and forth in his trap, feeling condemned. They were shadow shapes of human beings, grunting incomprehensibly – but they were normal looking people at the same time, hugging themselves or stamping their feet to keep themselves warm in the early morning chill. Joel continued to try to talk to them, started to shout at them, but they didn’t seem to understand, and the noise made them displeased, and they responded in words of their own that Joel couldn’t comprehend.

The crowd continued to grow, the ones at the back who couldn’t see pushing forwards so that those at the front were forced forward into the corridor – Joel looked into their faces and saw they were still reluctant to be the ones who actually started it, but they kept getting pushed further and further and so lent further legitimacy to what was going to happen. Joel was still shouting at them, no longer begging an explanation, but just to be let go. He saw nothing new in their faces, just the same myopic righteousness. A man was pushed to the front of the crowd – it looked like the drunk before, or like Ian, but Joel realised that the similarity was just his mind’s final attempt to find order in what was happening. The man had been shoved into Joel, and he pushed him to get some room; Joel nearly slipped on the ripped sheets of newspaper underfoot. Someone else moved up alongside the man, was pressed forward right against Joel, pulling at Joel’s ill-fitting coat to keep herself from falling over. He instinctively pushed her away, but more of the crowd were already pressing in behind her and she had nowhere to go. She pushed him backwards; his shoulder slammed against the metal skip, and he slipped. Trying to regain his feet, he reached out for something to keep himself upright; but his hand only found the body of someone else who was off balance because they were being pushed from behind, and this person shoved him away so that his head banged against the brick wall, and he fell. People moved forward so that they were practically standing on him; he covered his head with his arms on the floor. He knew that he was screaming, and that his screams sounded incomprehensible. Legs brushed against him, softly, then stumbled against him, then kicked him. There was another kick, and then another, either side of him now; hands reached to haul him up only to cast him down again. He heard the shout of the people at the back of the crowd, impatient to push forward for their share. He tasted blood, the taste sharp behind his closed eyes. More blows, one slamming into his head and simultaneously slamming it into the brick wall. Joel wished he could lose consciousness, for his terrified thoughts were useless, there was no way to stop what was happening, for it had already occurred. He opened his eyes one last time, saw the dark shapes looming over him, but saw too how the sunlight lit up the corridor he was trapped in, made its dimensions and appearance familiar – it looked like some back alley, that could have been anywhere...

He had been wrong to flick forward, he realised.

He was front-page news, after all.

Epilogue:
A Dream about Robert Aickman

Last night, I dreamt I was in a bookshop. All the books were on rotating carousels; they were square and very thin with covers seemingly made of canvas or some sort of woven fabric. They only displayed the author’s name on the front, not any titles, and to tell who the book was by you had to run your fingers over the embossed writing like Braille. 

~

I was turning the carousel looking through the books and I wondered why there weren’t any by Robert Aickman. As soon as I thought this, the carousel (which turned of its own accord) presented a book to me; I traced Aickman’s name on the cover and then opened it. 

~

All the pages were folded into each like the leaves of a map, but a thousand times more complicated and intricately layered. As I unfolded more and more pages I held them up to the light, and the paper was tough but almost see through, like an insect’s wing. Each page spawned more and more pages. The next might have writing in all the alphabets of the world, or diagrams that drew themselves, or colourful illustrations like the Book Of Kells, or brand new periodic tables, or anatomical drawings of imaginary creatures. 

~

I looked around the bookshop, and all the other people there had similar books open, their open pages unfolding and connecting like paper streamers between us. Everyone was smiling and everyone was reading, and I knew I’d never be able to shut the book that was opening and opening in my hands.