Falling Sideways Read online

  They were impressively efficient and polite about it, and fairly soon afterwards he was sitting in a Tube train heading west. He was being hustled towards a decision; he could stay on the train till it reached Ealing Broadway, where he’d get off and go home and promise to be good for ever after, or he could jump the train at Ravenscourt Park and go in search of destiny, darkness and danger (assuming he could find it, with only the directions he’d been given over the phone to guide him).

  Another coincidence; that, two days after he’d seen the short paragraph in the newspaper about the lock of hair coming up for auction, he’d been coming home from town on the Underground and had been struck down by a desperate need for a pee, in the long, slow haul through the desert between Hammersmith and Acton Town. If he’d caught the Piccadilly rather than the District Line, of course, none of this would have happened, since the Piccadilly didn’t stop at the funny little stations in between, he’d have had to dig deep into his inner reservoir of stoicism and held his water as far as Acton. But it hadn’t panned out that way; instead, he’d bounded off the train at Ravenscourt Park (wonderfully evocative name, that; until you’ve actually been there, you can’t help conjuring up mental images of Gothic castles, forked lightning and gargoyles) and sprinted painfully out of the station in search of a public bog or a shady, unfrequented section of wall.

  Successive governments have ignored the aspirations of Ravenscourt Parkers in the area of communal wid­dling; as David found on that memorable occasion, there aren’t any public bogs within awkward hobbling distance of the railhead. But there are walls and corners and nooks where the wild flowers grow, and it was after he’d found one of these and was beginning to feel a whole lot better that he saw the sign. It was quite some way away in the distance and he couldn’t really spare a hand to fish his glasses out of his top pocket; but what he’d thought it said was:

  [HONEST JOHN’S HOUSE OF CLONES]

  — except that it couldn’t really say that, what it probably said was ‘clowns’ or ‘cones’ (Honest John’s House of Crones? A cosy cottage built by the Three Little Pigs, using the latest in geodetic technology?) or something equally prosaic and mundane. Not clones, though. Surely not.

  Once he’d done up his zip and made sure nobody had been watching, he snuck across the road and took a closer look:

  [HONEST JOHN’S HOUSE OF CLONES]

  — just as he’d thought; and under the big block letters, in fancy italic signwriting,

  [Because everybody needs somebody]

  — and a phone number. The building itself didn’t look all that promising: a tatty timber-frame lock-up with the paint peeling off in leaf-sized flakes, the double doors padlocked, a pool of oil soaked away into dust and grime out front. Back when David had owned a car, he’d been to quite a few backstreet garages that looked just like this.

  Just then, for some reason, he thought about the lock of hair.

  Absolute nonsense, of course. For a start, cloning people was pure science fiction — all right, they could do sheep, but people weren’t a bit like sheep (except once every five years or so) and the technology simply didn’t exist. And if it had existed, it would have needed to be a huge multibillion-dollar laboratory, and even if it would­n’t have, there’d have been all sorts of laws against it. And even if there hadn’t been, even if you could have just strolled into some private establishment and said, ‘I’d like half a dozen Mrs Williamsons, please, and can you have them ready by Friday?’, nobody in his right mind would have given his custom to an outfit calling itself Honest John’s.

  And then the little voice spoke to him; not the one that sounded just like his mother, the other one, the quiet, sweet one that he’d suspected for a long, long time belonged to Pippa Levens. Fair enough, the little voice had said to him, somewhere inside his ears, if it’s all nonsense and completely impossible, what harm would it do, just writing down the phone number? Just writing it down, you wouldn’t actually have to call it. But you’d know it was there.

  He’d looked up. And the writing on the door still said:

  [HONEST JOHN’S HOUSE OF CLONES]

  — just like it had when he first saw it. But this time he had a pencil in his hand, and the back of an envelope.

  And sure, simply having the phone number in his pos­session didn’t mean that he was ever going to use it. He’d put the envelope down beside the telephone in the hall. Next time he tidied up (he liked everything nice and neat, because clutter grew in the dark like mush­rooms, and next thing you knew you had to climb up on the kitchen table to reach the sink) he’d have forgotten what it signified and he’d throw it away. Nothing was going to happen. It’d all be all right.

  Three whole days had passed, and every time he’d passed the phone he’d picked up the envelope and stared at the number, as if hoping it’d mysteriously vanished since the last time he’d looked. On the fourth day he must have been thinking about something else, because by the time he realised what he was doing, he’d already dialled the number.

  ‘Honest John’s,’ said a voice at the other end of the line.

  Even then, he could have slammed the phone down and left the country for a week or so. But he hadn’t; contact had been established, and it was rude to put the phone down on people (said the little his-mother’s-voice). So he’d coughed, and said, ‘Honest John’s House of, um, Clones?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ah.’ He hadn’t got the faintest idea what to say next. ‘Can I help you?’ The voice at the other end sounded bored, mostly, as if it had had conversations like this before. That only increased the embarrassment, which in turn increased the pressure on him to say something. Anything...

  ‘Do you, er, clone things?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the voice; and he could imagine the man at the other end of the wire, slumping his shoul­ders, thinking, Oh great, another bloody time-waster. ‘You want something cloned, then, do you?’

  The correct answer, of course, would have been ‘No’. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘So you can do that, can you?’

  ‘Depends,’ the voice had replied, ‘on what it is.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  ‘What was it,’ the voice asked patiently, ‘you had in mind?’

  (Bizarre, he’d thought; here I am, talking to a self-pro­claimed clone artist called Honest John, and I’m the one feeling embarrassed because I’m afraid I’m sound­ing like a fruitcake.)

  ‘I’ve got this lock of hair,’ he’d heard himself say. ‘Well, I haven’t got it yet, actually, but I might be getting it quite soon. Fairly soon. Nothing definite,’ he’d added, ‘but it’s a possibility.’

  ‘I see. Human hair, is this?’

  ‘No. Well, yes.’

  Short, excruciating pause. (What’s he up to? Is he calling the police on the other line?)

  ‘Are we talking fresh,’ the voice said, ‘or frozen?’

  ‘Neither.’ It occurred to David that he might just pos­sibly get out of this in one piece if the project turned out to be too difficult; if Honest John said, Sorry, no, can’t help you there, try NASA or someone like that. ‘Actually, it’s very old.’

  ‘Right.’ Another pause. ‘How old, roughly?’

  ‘Centuries,’ David said, with a touch of desperation. ‘Four hundred years. At least.’

  ‘Mphm.’

  ‘That’s much too old,’ he said hopefully. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ the voice replied. ‘I mean, there’s your second-hand old, your antique old and your Jurassic Park old, if you get my meaning. It all depends on the linear degradation.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I mean,’ the voice continued, ‘they done all sorts of old things, they done simple mosses from the Late Cretaceous, they done mammoths. Mind you,’ the voice added, ‘that was the Yanks, they’ll do any bloody thing. And the Russians — well, you haven’t got a clue what they were up to, towards the end. And, ‘course, the main-moths were frozen.’

&n
bsp; ‘Well, quite,’ David said crazily. ‘They would be, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Four hundred years,’ the voice went on, ‘look at it one way, that’s practically yesterday. Or it might be com­pletely fucked, you just don’t know.’

  ‘Because of the linear degradation?’

  ‘There’s that, and other stuff. Not cheap, either,’ the voice went on. ‘Not dear, the way these things go, but not cheap, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ David said. ‘Sort of how much...?’

  (He had no idea what had possessed him to ask that. It just seemed called for, by the shape and general drift of the conversation.)

  ‘Well,’ replied the voice, ‘now you’re asking me some­thing. Like, it all depends. Don’t even know if we can do the job, let alone give you a firm quote.’

  ‘Ah, right. I quite understand—’

  ‘Definitely not more than fifty, though. Seventy-five, top whack.’

  ‘Seventy-five?’

  ‘At the most. And then there’s your vat, of course.’

  ‘VAT?’

  ‘No,’ replied the voice wearily, ‘your vat. That’s another fifteen on top. Not going to see much change out of a hundred, anyway.’

  ‘I see,’ David said. ‘A hundred thousand pounds.’

  This time, the voice sounded bewildered. ‘No,’ it had said, ‘a hundred quid. And there’s your gel, of course, call that another ten. Soon mounts up, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A hundred and ten pounds? For a clone?’

  From the other end of the line, a sigh. ‘Bloody dread­ful, isn’t it? And that’s shaving my margins right back, I got to make a living too. No wonder this business is dead on its feet.’

  ‘Thank you,’ David had said, in a little, lost voice. ‘I’ll think about it and get back to you.’

  — And now here he was, with his small, crisp curl of hair in its plastic envelope in his pocket, lurching towards Ravenscourt Park to be born. I don’t have to do this, he muttered to himself, like a mantra; but the soft, sweet voice was drowning him out, saying, A hundred and ten pounds, it’s an absolute bargain. You couldn’t buy a decent suit for that. For some reason, he found that argument quite irresistible.

  The doors slid open. Through them (as if through

  the frame of a picture) he saw the words Ravenscourt Park. You Are Here, he thought, and stood up.

  There was a very real possibility, so real that with encouragement, support and some Lottery funding it could easily morph into a virtual certainty, that Honest John’s wouldn’t be there any more. After all, the banshee wailed for perfectly legitimate, straightforward, socially useful businesses every day; strolling through the local industrial estate was like a tour of a utilitarian version of the Valley of the Kings, surrounded on all sides by gauntly looming mausolea of dead enterprises. A backstreet clone shop in the Ravenscourt Park badlands — something like that would probably come and go so fast that it wouldn’t even show up in stop-motion photography. In which case, he could forget all about the idea and go home.

  Honest John’s was still there.

  Ah yes, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was still in business; and even if it was, the odds against anybody being there and willing to talk to him were comfortingly long. The last time he’d been here, hadn’t it been all padlocked up and dark?

  Even as the thought crossed his mind, the doors opened. Well, he was still a free man. He could carry on walking past, as if he had nothing more extreme on his mind than whether or not to have curry sauce on his saveloy and chips.

  ‘Evening,’ said the man in the doorway.

  ‘Hello,’ David replied (and compared to him, one of Pavlov’s dogs was an anarchist). ‘Are you Honest John?’

  The man looked at him with a cold, searching eye. The right one, its counterpart being distressingly con­spicuous by its absence. ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘Do something for you?’

  David yelped out loud and took a step back. As well as the gruesomely missing left eye, the other points of resemblance between this character and the loony who’d cornered him in the pub were: hair length and colour, nose shape, the Levens chin. This one was scruffier, wearing an Albert Steptoe-exclusive cardigan with holes in the elbows, and he didn’t have a cigar. Otherwise they could’ve been twins.

  ‘Just nipped outside for a smoke,’ said Honest John, producing a packet of small cigars. He pointed them at David, either offering him one or threatening him with them (the gesture was ambiguous).

  ‘No, thanks,’ David said, in a very quiet voice. ‘Excuse me, but have we met before?’

  Honest John laughed. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’d remember you. Only, your voice sounds familiar. Did you ring me up a few days ago?’

  David admitted that he had.

  ‘Thought so,’ said Honest John, breathing out smoke through his nose like a dragon. ‘You’re that bloke with the bit of hair, right?’

  ‘That’s me,’ David whispered. It was the same voice that he’d used twenty-five years ago, when owning up in front of the whole class. ‘You remind me of someone,’ he added.

  Honest John looked down at the ground for a moment. ‘You must’ve met my brother Joe,’ he said. ‘Looks a bit like me. He’s an art dealer in Town. Right ponce, but there you are, can’t choose your family. Except in my line of work,’ he added, with a new variant of the Levens grin, ‘and even that’s just adding to it, not getting rid of the bloody embarrassing ones. You got your bit of hair, then?’

  Lying to this person was impossible; David wanted to, but his brain and voice had forgotten how, and there wasn’t time to consult the manual.

  ‘Right, so we’re in business. Come inside. Kettle’s just on.’

  He pinched out his cigar — not that it was any shorter than it had been — and pottered through the double doors. David followed.

  Inside, the workshop looked just like one of those garages. The floor was concrete; there were patches of something dark and sticky spilt on it and partially soaked up by sawdust. The walls were lined with tools and empty spaces for tools. The roof was high and rested on I-section girders. There was something that looked a bit like a car-inspection pit, but slightly different in some respects he couldn’t quite make out. The main differ­ence between this place and the ordinary backstreet garage was the line of glass boxes, like overgrown tropi­cal-fish tanks, up against the far wall. They were filled with something green. And they all glowed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘I'll need just the one hair,’ said Honest John, wrapping a filthy handkerchief round the handle of a battered kettle and tilting it over two mugs.

  His voice was interesting; the same accent, more or less, as his brother’s, but spliced with something else. He wasn’t the same man that David had met earlier in the Blue Boar.

  ‘OK,’ David replied apprehensively (for one thing, each of the hairs in the little curl had cost him something over five hundred pounds; for another — well, that really didn’t bear thinking about). He took the plastic envelope from his pocket and handed it over. Honest John was squeezing a tea bag against the rim of a mug with the end of a biro.

  ‘Yup, human all right,’ he said, glancing casually at the envelope. ‘Who’s this when he’s at home, then? Somebody old, you said.’

  David nodded.

  ‘Anybody I’d have heard of?’

  Once again he tried to lie, and found he couldn’t. ‘Philippa Levens,’ he whimpered. ‘You may have...’

  Honest John laughed. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you didn’t buy this off of my brother Joe, did you? Bloody hell,’ he went on with a chuckle.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ David replied, realising that he didn’t have a clue who the seller had been. ‘It was an auction, they didn’t say who it had belonged to.’

  Another variant of the Levens grin appeared on Honest John’s face; at least fifty-seven varieties, like Heinz beans. ‘My brother Joe likes to tell people we’re descended from the aristocracy,’ he said. ‘Usually j
ust before he sells them something. You don’t mind me asking, how much did you give for this?’

  David shrugged awkwardly. ‘Fifteen,’ he muttered.

  ‘Fifteen quid? Oh boy.’ Honest John chuckled again. ‘Still, it’s your money, you do what the hell you want to with it. Right, let’s see. There’s number six, that’s empty. Scrubbed it out last week, as it happens, so it’s all ready to go. Unless the cat’s been in it, of course.’ He slurped some tea and handed David the other mug. By the looks of it, the last time it had been washed England had still been a Catholic country. ‘Right,’ Honest John went on, ‘let the dog see the rabbit.’ He put his cup down on top of a bench vice, took a pair of tweezers from his top pocket and fished out a single Levens hair. It was probably just David’s imagination, but it seemed to squirm a little, like a worm on a hook. Four identical cats jumped down from a high window ledge and walked past, their tails stuck up in the air at precisely the same angle.

  ‘Looks all right to me,’ Honest John muttered, handing back the plastic envelope containing the rest of the hairs. ‘But you can’t really tell just by looking. No good fartarsing about, let’s bung this under the spec­trometer and take some readings.’

  The spectrometer turned out to be something like a salon hair-dryer, with grubby matt-green paint peeling off the cowl. Honest John put the hair on some kind of slide and flipped a switch. Cruelly bright blue-white light, like a welding arc, flared up all round the slide, and David looked away, though not quickly enough to avoid having a hole burned through the central point of his field of vision that persisted for some minutes after­wards. Honest John didn’t seem bothered by it in the slightest.

  ‘Nah, that’s all right,’ he said. ‘Got a bit chewy in places, or else she had split ends, but no more’n point nought-nought-one-one-five cellular detail loss. Worst-case scenario, she could come out the tank with a really blank expression on her face, but not enough to worry about.’ He flipped an ‘off’ switch, and the machine went quiet. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what d’you want to do?’