Here we have skeleton of the first attack at the first chapter of my new unputdownable international superselling Booker prize-winning wonder-novel, The Family Plot. Oh yes, here it is. This is only the begininng. The begininng of a horrible and terrifying journey through my head (as if there would be any other kind). Yes! This, now I'm on the Creative Writng thing, can also be classed as Useful Work Towards My Degree. See those two little avian corpses there? Yes. Two birds with one stone, mateys. I'm going to have some wine, now.
In the mineshaft-black heart of the night Alistair Caine woke with a start from an uncomfortable dream. He had been dreaming of a world of gravelly cone-shaped hills ringed with railway lines and crowned with gorse, which he had been frantically searching for Laura, his wife. Such a search was absurd, for he knew where she was: he knew she was nowhere near here, nowhere near this pointed landscape of shifting marble-round rocks. A large wristwatch weighed down his right hand and hampered his search – more of a clock than a watch, but it was stopped – not even the second hand moved. He saw, to his fury, that it was the traditional kind, an analogue dial lined with numbers from one to twelve and again, smaller, thirteen to twenty-four. Sixty seconds, sixty minutes, twenty-four hours. Stupid numbers. He stopped near the top of one of the hills and crouched under the gorse bushes to claw at the profane timepiece whilst somehow simultaneously searching his pocket for his decimal clock. It wasn’t there. Time was all wrong. Day and night raced each other crazily across the cloud-disfigured sky, daylight alternating with night like a strobe. Then, without preamble, the strobing days and weeks stopped, night fell and stayed fallen, the jagged horizon draped itself over crocodile-teeth of hills and valleys, and icy rain stung Alistair’s dreaming cheek. In the distance the lights of a two-car train were visible as it tried vainly to climb a gradient where one of the tracks looped one of the hills. Alistair suddenly felt as though he were being observed and froze like an ice-sculpture, but his stillness did not aid him – a powerful searchlight picked him out and an electronic voice informed him that he had been observed. It said nothing else, and in an instant daylight had returned, and stayed. Alistair made for the train, which had stopped. He didn’t know why – it simply seemed the sane thing to do. He scuttled down the tumbling slope to the wet valley floor, but when he looked up to pick out a route he could climb to the train he found a cliff in his path, and then, all at once, in the grass, he saw a familiar shape. Dread mounted in his heart – it was Laura’s bag, there in the grass, despite the fact that he knew, knew, that it had been burnt. He had been the one who had burnt it, so why was it here? How could it be here? The bag was dry, the grass was wet – she could not be far. And yet she could not be far, or near, or anywhere. The panic of incomprehension rising in his breast, Alistair ran forward a few steps towards, for no reason, the cliff. He saw there at the foot of the rocky wall a body lying face down in the grass. Laura – her hair told him it was her. Her hair, so glossy, so lifelike, and yet so dead. Like a wig, something false.
Something false: that was when Alistair had woken, and now he lay there in his bedroom at the Hotel Atlantis and momentarily wondered where he was, and what time it was. He looked to the decimal clock and, to his unquantifiable fury, could not stop himself from wondering what the real time was. The real time – that was the phrase that his mind had deployed. And yet it was emphatically not the real time – real time is International Decimal Time. International Decimal Time, he repeated. International Decimal Time.
He had a faint idea that it was not the dream that had woken him. A faint notion that he had been going to turn over Laura’s body still fizzed at the back of his mind, near the pillow. Something in the room, he fancied, had woken him – there was electricity in the air, as though the telephone or the alarm had just stopped ringing or as if there was someone standing somewhere in the shadowy recesses of the room. He blinked his green eyes until they felt clear of sleep and scanned the darkened room without moving. With every passing decimal second (he was careful to note) he became more certain that there was someone in the room with him, standing perfectly still, not even breathing. His eyes moved across the unfamiliar objects of the hotel room, trying to detect some notably more unfamiliar shape among the unfamiliar shapes that furnished the room. His eyes roamed from the huge wardrobe on his left, next to the bed, that had reminded him of that anecdote about Nicholas Soames; across the heavily curtained windows whose pattern was darkly silhouetted yellow by the sodium streetlamps below; across the large writing desk in the corner bay window and across his two manuscripts that rested on its scored leather surface; across the other windows – entirely dark because there was no streetlamp on the seaward side of the hotel; across the disdainful flamingo-like one-legged card table that seemed to be trying not to touch its surroundings; and across the black shadow of the right-hand wall that reared up like a bear over the pathetic battered dressing-table and pink velour stool to the door that was immediately adjacent to the bed. The key was still in the lock, the chair was still against the handle. No-one could have got in.
But still the feeling of a presence persisted. He sighed a cloud of hot vapour into the cold room and watched it spread like a thundercloud over the bedewed plain of the bedspread. It disappeared, and nothing reacted to his sigh. Fully awake now, and with the dream not even a memory, Alistair scanned the room again and listened. He could still see nothing, and all he could he was the insistent jet-‘plane roar of the sea and the bouncing bamboo beat that bounded up from the Osmosis Club, three floors below. He began to feel foolish. There was, he told himself, nobody there. To confirm this theory, he grabbed for the torch by the bed, flicked it on and shone it around the room. Its narrow yellow beam of light, on its way to the furniture and the walls, picked out the floating dust like the constellations of distant galaxies. There was the wardrobe, there were the curtains, there was the writing desk, there was Andrew, Alistair’s twin brother – hollow eyed and staring from the end of the bed.
Alistair dropped the torch and gasped. It rolled across the bedspread, projecting a circling column of yellow onto the wall and the writing desk before it fell to the floor with a tiny but terminal tinkle of glass. Darkness again. But in the darkness the shadowy block of that other part of himself remained at the end of the bed, and his eyes could do nothing but remain fixed upon it. That shadow, despite its featureless blackness, had taken on the pallid, green-eyed, auburn-haired, jagged features of his twin and refused to relinquish them. It was impossible, Alistair told himself, that Andrew could be there. He was, like Laura, dead. And yet he was there, most definitely. The shadow was a solid shadow. It was no figment of his imagination. Alistair wondered whether he was still dreaming. He had never dreamt he’d woken up in a dream before, and yet this didn’t seem right. And if Andrew was there, what was he doing, and why hadn’t he said something when Alistair had shone the torch into his hollow green eyes? Alistair hoped he was till dreaming. He felt as though he might be – there was a certain liquid feeling to the whole room, as though it were turning about some not too distant point in space at low speed, but quickly enough to slightly unbalance everything. It was like going round a roundabout in a bus – if he had had to stand, Alistair didn’t think he could. And outside, or was it below in the Osmosis Club, the drums seemed to be getting louder. Suddenly Alistair went hot and in an instant he was inside his own novel, not Alistair at all but John Barrington, and not in Whorlton, England, but in Puerto Oro, Tierra Del Mar. That heavy beat wasn’t the Osmosis Club’s reggae night filtered through three floors; it was the Daiya Indians come to the city to wreak their revenge. Alistair sank beneath the covers and shut his eyes and suddenly a statue was before them, gleaming white in the summer sun in the centre of some vast plaza. It was like the plaza in Puerto Oro, but in the distant future. The air was cool and fresh and the sky was a vault of blackbird-egg blue, with nothing in it but the ghost of the full moon. Elegant white buildings lined the plaza and Alistair floated across, like a spoon sinking into syrup, towards the statue and saw that the statue was him. The statue held in its right hand a tiny facsimile of the world, in its left hand it held a book, and at its feet, crushed, were a tangle of snakes. It was a bloody statue, despite its whiteness. He floated nearer, in a rare example of assertiveness on his part, and saw that at the base of the statue was a small pile of golden watches and a carriage clock, all smashed. At the top of the pile was a silvered alarm clock, and as Alistair was almost close enough to read the inscription on the statue’s plinth the alarm clock went off like a bomb.
He was returned to the Atlantis by the alarm blast and saw that the shadow was still there, and that the alarm of the decimal clock was sounding. He reached out and switched it off.
“What are you doing here?” Alistair demanded of the shadow at last.
“I might ask you the same thing,” it replied.
Alistair ignored the reply. It was insufficient, and besides, a more pressing question had just occurred to him. He steeled himself for the question he knew he had to ask, but which he knew would sound absurd. He had never believed in ghosts, but then he knew his brother was dead, so it had to be settled somehow. “Are you dead? Are you a ghost?” he asked the shadow.
“Woooo,” said the shadow, investing the sound with rich sarcasm.
This wasn’t enough of an answer for Alistair. Ghosts, he presumed, would be capable of sarcasm, and immediately castigated himself for imagining that ghosts could be anything at all – this was exactly the sort of hokum that International Decimal Time was supposed to scotch. It was supposed to be a celebration of the triumph of science, a celebration of reason over superstition, a means of divorcing humanity from its terrified benighted past and here was its creator talking to a shadow and asking if it was a ghost or not.
It couldn’t have been a ghost. The only logical explanation was that Andrew was alive, not dead, and so Alistair asked the next most logical question: “Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”
Andrew, the shadow, gave a little breathy grunt of a laugh and flicked the table-lamp on the side of the dressing-table on. As if by magic the dark room of icy shadows was replaced by a similar room of warm pink light. It was an illusion – the iciness remained, masked by the influence of the pink tasselled lampshade but still distinctly, almost tangibly, present. The bulb hummed in the cold and the twins’ breath misted the pink light while the pair observed one-another, assessing the alterations that the five years of separation had wrought on them.
Andrew and Alistair had changed, predictably for twins, in similar ways. They were both nearly thirty – their birthday was only three days away – and they had both changed from overgrown teenagers into freshly-minted, as yet unworn middle-aged men. Their auburn hair had begun to recede at the temples; their eyes were sunk more deeply into their heads; lines had begun to extend from the corners of their eyes and mouths. They had both lost weight and become gaunt rather than athletic.
“You look alright for a dead man,” said Alistair.
“So do you,” said Andrew.
There was a pause while they both rearranged their positions, Alistair moving further up in bed to sit up and Andrew moving from the floor where he had been squatting to sit on the velour stool in front of the dressing table. He lit a cigarette and crossed his legs, leaning back against the table with what suddenly struck Alistair as an insolent degree of relaxation.
“How did you get in here?” demanded Alistair, suddenly annoyed.
Andrew gestured at the window, but if he was going to speak he didn’t get the chance because another thought had occurred to Alistair, which he immediately gave voice to: “And what do you mean ‘I look alright for a dead man’, I’m not dead, you’re the one who’s dead – and,” he suddenly shouted, “why the hell did you let us all think you were dead?”
Andrew leaned forward and made placatory gestures with his hands. “Not so loud,” he said, “you’re in here alone, remember.”
Alistair gave an unconcerned grunt.
“You’ve already drawn attention to yourself by coming here and insisting on this ridiculous timetable,” said Andrew, “so don’t start shouting to yourself in your room unless you want…”
Alistair interrupted him: “It’s not a fucking timetable, it’s an experiment – it’s a test of an idea that’ll change the world…”
Andrew interrupted him back: “A Concept for Temporal Rationalisation? International Decimal Time?” He gesticulated dismissively at the manuscript to indicate the source of his knowledge. “Look at yourself,” he said, and then, after a brief pause, he asked: “Where’s Laura?”
The non sequitur shook Alistair so that he could only emit a few indistinct syllables.
Andrew took this to be an attempt to evade the question. There was an unfamiliar hardness in his eyes that Alistair found threatening.
“The police are looking for you,” whispered Andrew, leaning forward and pointing his cigarette at Alistair. “That’s why I’m here. The bastards stopped me yesterday morning thinking I was you – I had a fucking lucky escape, you’ve caused me a lot of bloody trouble coming here. A lot of bloody trouble. It would be a hell of a lot better for me if you still thought I was dead – Andrew Caine is dead. I’m Phillip Chalmers now, and Phillip Chalmers is pissed off at the trouble Andrew Caine’s brother is causing him.”
Alistair was dumbstruck. He wondered again whether or not he was dreaming, but his brother’s – or Phillip Chalmers’ – stream of angry invective had brought him up short. This was no dream. Alistair had been under the impression that it was only he that was undergoing problems, but it appeared his brother was looking upon him as a problem.
Alistair suddenly wondered what the police had said, and enquired as much from Andrew. It seemed wrong to start calling Andrew Phillip Chalmers, even if that was the name he’d been going by for five years.
“Didn’t find out,” said Andrew. “My insistence that I wasn’t you knocked them for six. They thought they’d got their man, though, they know you’re in Whorlton and I’ve seen in the ‘paper that Laura’s missing, so I put two and two together; I ask again – where’s Laura? Why are you hiding and why are you hiding here?”
“I’m not hiding,” said Alistair, “well, not from the police at least.”
“Why are you checked into this hotel as Bob fucking Carolgees then, and why didn’t you tell the police where you were going when your wife is the subject of a fucking messing persons enquiry?” demanded Andrew, waving his expired cigarette with exasperation. He was looking increasingly agitated.
Alistair sighed and pressed his temples with his fingers. “In case Coggs the builder tried to find me,” he explained. “I owe him some money and he’s turned nasty. The police have turned nasty, too. There’s a Detective Inspector Spectre who just keeps asking loads and loads of bloody stupid questions again and again and again.”
“Turned nasty,” repeated Andrew, investing the words with many meanings, the paramount one being I’ll turn nasty in a minute if you don’t start making some sense. “Why did you come here? Couldn’t you have gone somewhere else? Why Whorlton? Did you know I was here?”
Alistair stopped rubbing his temples and looked to his brother with blank confusion. “Well of course I knew you were here,” Alistair said, his voice suggesting that it was a stupid question. His brother’s angry eyes stopped flitting around the room and came to rest in his own. “Marie rang.”
Andrew’s face contorted with disbelief. “Marie rang?” he repeated. “When? When?” he half rose and fixed Alistair with a madman’s glare – perhaps it was Phillip Chalmers’ glare.
“The day before yesterday – Saturday,” said Alistair, “she said you’d been killed – I came to try to find out why you’d let everyone think you’d been killed all those years ago. I wouldn’t have come to Whorlton otherwise; why on Earth would I? I thought you were in France, dead.”
Andrew hung his head. “I don’t suppose she said where she was?” he speculated.
Alistair shook his head. “She said she’d see me here, so I just assumed she was here – in Whorlton. I had no reason to…”
Andrew interrupted: “We’re being manipulated by someone. It might be Marie or it might be someone else. Does anyone here know your real name?”
Alistair shook his head.
“Keep it that way,” urged Alistair. “And make sure you keep on putting that chair under the door handle. And don’t go out unless it’s absolutely necessary. What else did Marie say to you?”
Alistair closed his eyes and tried to remember. She had called in the middle of the night. The call had been short and he had been half asleep. “Nothing much,” he said, slowly, fighting to recall her exact words, “just that there’d been an accident, that you’d been killed and that I must come to Whorlton for the funeral.” He paused and then added: “I had a funny feeling someone was listening…”
Andrew shook his head irritably. “She’s supposed to be coming back,” he said, and suddenly stood up and walked across the room, walked back and sat down again, his brow furrowed with emotion. He lit a cigarette and looked his brother in the eye. “Why couldn’t you have just taken the fucking money?” he asked, suddenly calm.
It occurred to Alistair that he hadn’t known that Andrew smoked, and then the content of the question hit home. Or didn’t. “What money?” he asked, baffled.
“Truss’s money,” said Andrew.
Alistair felt light-headed. Truss was Frederick Truss, the Crakethorne novelty doorbell tycoon. He had offered Alistair a sum of money that was uncannily identical to the sum total of his debts to buy a plot of land that Alistair owned in Crakethorne. Alistair, despite being in the midst of a financial shipwreck, had taken exception to a stupid man with too much money (namely, Truss) offering him money out of the blue for something that he did not want to sell and sent the doorbell tycoon’s envoy away with a flea in his ear. “How did you know about that?” he asked, his voice betraying the extent of his total incomprehension.
Andrew sighed and blew a grey plume of smoke at the dust-swagged electroliers. “I asked him to offer you that money,” he said. “I was trying to do you a favour, but now Truss seems to think it was some sort of trick and he’s gone, well, I don’t know what he’s gone but he’s not the steady hand on the tiller that he was two weeks ago. Marie went to see him to try to sort him out. She hasn’t come back.”
Alistair could do little but make a small sound of surprised acquiescence. He could do little but accept his brother’s statement and wait to see what happened next.
Andrew continued to smoke, distantly eying the growing ceiling-height cloud as he did so, and then abruptly laughed. “You always did get me into trouble,” he said. “Remember the time you told mum I’d been swimming in the Oxclose?”
Alistair smiled. Oxclose was a deep, syrupy, black, leaf-scummed lock in a barely-used canal near the house they’d lived in as children. Andrew’s way of stating the recollection was not quite accurate. Alistair had not “told” their mother that Andrew had been swimming in the lock: he had actually said to his brother, thinking them alone on the half-landing, that he wished that he would not swim in the lock alone, just in case anything did happen with no-one around to help, and their mother had overheard. Alistair suddenly felt the prickling hysteria of grief creeping up on him at the memory of her, and at the memory of how close he and Andrew had once been. He recalled how they had once been the stereotypical twins: indistinguishable, with a secret language of looks and a habit of finishing one-another’s sentences, and he was upset that that friend he had always thought would be there had first gone to France to study, then chosen to live there and then apparently faked his own death there. “Why did you let us think you were dead, you fucking cruel bastard?” he shouted at Andrew, his voice cracked with emotion.
Andrew was taken aback. He had been reliving his lone summer swims in the lock. He shook his head and shrugged a Gallic shrug: those years in France had left at least one mark. “I can’t explain now,” he said. “It’s all so long ago.”
“Five years,” reminded Alistair. “Not so long at all. Tell me.”
Andrew got to his feet and looked away from Alistair. “I really can’t,” he said, a firmness in his voice which Alistair had never known before. He turned back and smiled. “Soon, I’ll tell you soon. I’ve got to get back – if Marie comes back and I’m not there she’ll think something’s happened.”
Alistair wondered who this strange dead man with his face was, and what he thought Marie would think had happened if he wasn’t there. In the pause that allowed these thoughts to form themselves Andrew had gone to the window, pushed the curtain back and lifted the sash. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, “see you, Bob.”
For a moment Alistair wondered what he was talking about, and then, just as the sash was closing with Andrew on the balcony outside, he realised and replied: “see you, Phillip Chalmers.”
After a moment he got out of bed into the cold room and crossed to the window and tried to see where his twin had gone, but on the darkened seaward side of the hotel there were no streetlights, and with the table-lamp still on all he saw was his own reflection looking back at him with his brother’s hard green eyes. He drew the curtains and switched off the light. Hang International Decimal Time for now, he thought, and returned to bed; not to sleep, but to think.
Outside, the sea still rumbled; downstairs, the drums went on.
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