Look at me. I met a dead mouse in the street. I stared at it. I prodded it with my pen. I called K. I photographed the mouse. I stared at it a little more. I glanced at my watch, and my shoulders rose and fell, and I went and had lunch with Michael.
Afterwards, after lunch, I passed that way again. I looked carefully, and in several places in case I was mistaken, but the mouse was gone.
That was it. That was how it started.
Rachel had called the night before to tell us that she was going to go to Poland. Apparently she’d had some strange sort of communication from an old school friend of her brother’s, and she wanted to investigate. She was pretty vague about it all, but sounded cheerful enough; excited that it’s happening yet again. I find it difficult to tell with Rachel though. K is better at identifying her humours. I think she fakes it with me sometimes – probably because she picks up on my frustration and unease about her, and particularly about her Max project. She’s an artist, I suppose. Well, actually, I don’t suppose it – she is an artist, of course she is. She works mostly with photography, but also with film and audio, and with longer-term projects in which she usually perpetrates some kind of deception and then documents what happens. In the past these have been fairly playful and quite fun. She spent a month last year telephoning random people from the phone book, greeting them by name and telling them that she’d just called up for a chat. She recorded the conversations. Most of them ended pretty abruptly with a Who the hell are you? kind of response. But a surprising number evolved into long dialogues, or monologues, some of them quite revealing. Rachel was never sure sometimes whether people believed they knew her, or didn’t care and talked anyway.
Hi there [xxxx], it’s Rachel. Just thought I’d call for a chat. How are you?
Her best-known project is the one that no one knows she’s responsible for. Until now, I suppose. It’s the Double-Decker Slasher rumour. She started that. It took off to such an extent that I think it freaked her out a bit. I suppose paranoia is a fairly easy thing to generate, or feed off, these days, and half the city seemed to believe at various times last year that people were having their throats cut on the upstairs of double-decker buses. It was an elaborate set-up and she did it really well. But it got out of hand and she has more or less disowned it now. Originally there had been plans for a show, but I haven’t heard anything about that lately. She has lots of eerie photographs taken on the upper decks of city buses, and she was going to show them, along with the fake evening newspaper front pages that she printed and left lying about all over the place, and she was going to record people’s accounts of the rumour, as they’d heard it, as they’d embellished it, and have the audio playing on a loop. But I think she’s shelved all that.
Upstairs only, on buses that are about half full – less than half full, a quarter full; the point is that they don’t have to be empty, and you sit upstairs, towards the back; you’re aware that there are people sitting behind you but you haven’t really paid them any attention, you haven’t picked them out at all – maybe one or two, probably one man, two women, something like that, two on the left, two on the right, and you sit down and you read your book or your newspaper or listen to your iPod or you look out the window, or you do all of these things because you can and the day is good and buses are nice, you can see the city go by, and then you feel something, at your shoulder maybe, what can that be, as if someone has brushed up against you, and then a sudden cold sensation across your throat, one that ends all the sounds that you’ve been hearing, one that seems to stop the world still, a thin abrupt clarity, as if you have plunged into cold water up to your neck, and you look down, you can’t seem to help looking down, and you are wearing, how strange, a flowing apron of dark blood, and you know in a slowing-down instant, in the last of your sight, out of nowhere, on such a nice day, that you’re dead.
I was one of the team on the Double-Decker Slasher project. I don’t know how many of us there were, but I’m not sure it was that many really. I was told to drop it into conversations, casually, precisely. I wasn’t allowed to give any details. I was to ask a question rather than impart information. Did you hear something about someone on a number 38 getting their throat cut? The other day? No? Well, I don’t know, I heard something, oh, maybe I heard it wrong, never mind. No more than that. And when I was with her, when we were in a pub or having lunch, or on a bus, we would have the conversation, and she was very good at lowering her voice in such a way that it would attract attention from people within eavesdropping range.
—I heard there was another slashing last weekend.
—You’re joking.
—No. The number 7. Some middle-aged woman. A passenger climbed the stairs and found her bleeding to death, throat cut from ear to ear, two people sitting three seats in front of her hadn’t heard a thing.
—Jesus.
—And the camera not working of course. And the conductor sitting downstairs reading the paper. Of course. It’s the third.
—My God.
—They don’t want to start a panic. It may be al-Qaeda. But it’s going to get out. City like this. People talk.
She shut it down when the bus companies issued a joint statement saying that the rumours were no more than rumours, and that they suspected a malicious intent and a single source, and had asked the police to investigate. There was real panic then for a few days as Rachel made all of us swear a vow of silence – convinced that one of us had overplayed it, or that the fake newspaper pages she’d printed would somehow be traced back to her. But she’d used a printer friend, Serbian Stan, and I think practically his entire life is illegal and virtually invisible anyway, and she had no real reason to worry. For a while there were ripples in the (real) newspapers and on the radio about rumour-mongering and the climate of fear, before there was another wave of terrorist arrests and talk of a dirty bomb, and everyone forgot about old-fashioned throat-cutting and was terrified again for real.
But the major thing that Rachel’s been doing, for about eighteen months now, is to pretend she has a missing brother. She’s given him the name Max. She has concocted photographs, using a picture of her uncle as a young man, altered digitally in a couple of respects – removing the moustache for example, changing the colour of the eyes, restyling the hair and updating the clothes. Her uncle is dead and she doesn’t actually have any brothers, so there is absolutely no one real to find. She’s given Max something of a biography, but she’s left most of the details blank. He was born in 1970, left school in 1987, spent some time travelling all over Europe and possibly North America and possibly the Far East, and possibly anywhere else that might come in handy, and returned here in 1992, possibly, where he lived at various addresses, mostly unknown, doing various jobs, mostly unknown, until disappearing completely in 1994, at the age of twenty-four. So she has a website about him, and she has these little posters that she sticks up, and she’ll sometimes go around asking all the people in a particular street or block of flats or bar or something, saying that she’s found out recently that he might have lived in the area or been a regular in the bar. And what she’s looking for really is exactly what she gets – people screwed up in various ways sufficient to make them believe that they knew this non-existent Max, and to offer Rachel hints and clues and insights, not into her fictional brother, but into themselves, which she duly records in some way, and stores, cross-indexed, neat, until she’s ready to stick it all in an exhibition.
Anyway. Rachel called to say she was going to Poland, in connection with the Max project. This is not the first trip abroad that she’s undertaken in the course of this. She’s already been to Spain and Morocco, and to Israel twice. She makes quite a good living