Michael Frayn - Skios

The sweet unknown owner of that sweetly importunate hand pressed herself against his back and kissed his ear. “You bad boy,” she whispered. “Don’t you ever listen to your messages?”

Dr. Wilfred found the soft whisper as delightful as everything else, but the sense of the words hard to construe. “What messages?” he said.

The magical hand stopped moving. For a moment it remained motionless. Then the long softness pressing against his back abruptly removed itself, the bed bounced violently, and there was the sound of the mosquito netting ripping as a body rocketed through it and away into the darkness.

He was too stunned to understand, then too blinded to see as a light came on, then too deafened to think as the room filled with screaming. It seemed to be coming, he slowly made out through the pink dazzle in his eyes, from somewhere in the midst of a scrabble of torn mosquito netting pressed back against the wall near the light switch.

He struggled to sit up, so as to think more clearly. At once the bundle of mosquito netting screamed louder than ever, picked up various pieces of clothing scattered around the floor, and ran into the bathroom. There was the sound of a bolt being slammed home.

He remembered that he had uttered two words, but not, in his state of shock, what they were. What could they possibly have been? Never, surely, in the history of traveling lecturers had two words produced such an abrupt and total reversal of fortune.

Somewhere in the world, perhaps in America or India, inside one vast electronic machine among a bank of others, an inaudible voice was saying, “Hi! I know it sounds like me. But it’s not me. It’s just my phone, pretending.…”

And then, inside perhaps the same machine, perhaps a different one, on a different continent even, another inaudible voice was saying in a desperate whisper, “Oliver, will you please answer your phone! I’m locked in the bathroom! He’s hammering on the door! I thought it was you ! He nearly raped me! I don’t know how to phone the police in this country! Oliver! Please help me! I’m all on my own! In the bathroom!”

And then, a minute or two later, perhaps inside one of the same machines, perhaps not: “Hi! I know it sounds like me. But it’s not me…”

Followed by a voice that had risen to a hysterical scream: “Oliver! Where are you? He was in bed! He was pretending to be you! He hasn’t done something to you, has he? Tied you up? Murdered you…?”

* * *

And inside perhaps once again the same machine, perhaps another one in some completely different part of the world, two inaudible voices talking simultaneously. A man’s:

“Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here — some woman has broken into the guest quarters — she’s having hysterics — she’s locked herself in the bathroom — can you send someone — or call the police — or tell me what to dial? What did you say?”

And a woman’s:

“You have reached the Fred Toppler Foundation. There is no one here right now to take your call…”

As the night wore on Nikki’s worries about the future of the directorship began to change their shape, in the way that worries so often do in the darkness. What was keeping her awake now was a memory of the past. A past only a few hours old, but as lost to her as childhood. Once again she saw that tousled blond head slowly turning, and those rueful dark eyes coming to rest on the sign she was holding up. Once again she saw the summer dawn of that slow smile. And the smile becoming the full sunrise of his laughter.

She kept hearing the name. Dr. Norman Wilfred. She turned onto her other side and pulled the pillow over her ears, but the name spoke through it. “Dr. Wilfred. Norman.”

She might manage to go to sleep, she thought, if she could get some air into the room. She could quite safely unbolt the window now, surely. No one was going to be trying to get in at this time of the night. She jumped out of bed and had her hand on the bolt when her phone rang. She ran back and snatched it up. “Yes?” she said breathlessly. Too late she remembered the tone of voice she used for answering the phone, the one that went with the pleasant expression and the crisp white shirts. “Hello? Yes?”

“Nikki, I know I’ve woken you up,” said Georgie, “and I’m desperately sorry, and I know there’s nothing you can do where you are, and I’ve calmed down, I’m not in a panic, but I can’t get through to anyone, and I’ve just got to talk to someone, because I can hear him outside the door, he’s hammering, he’s shouting threats, I’m in the bathroom, he’s going to kick the door down.”

At some point, as Nikki struggled to understand what was happening, and grasped that the man Georgie had found herself getting into bed with was not the one she had expected, and sympathized, and calmed the now supposedly calm Georgie even further, and offered good practical advice about how to negotiate through a stoutly built door and calm the unexpected bedfellow in his turn, she thought she heard a scratching at the window. But by the time the battery in Georgie’s phone had finally gone flat and Nikki was able to get across to the window and open it, there was nothing to be seen outside.

Except, just possibly, one or two little pools of water on the tiled floor of the veranda, already drying in the hot night air.

* * *

Now he was Dr. Norman Wilfred, Oliver had discovered, once the security guard had unlocked his room and broken the padlock off his suitcase for him, he had an unexpected taste for pure silk underpants and pure silk pajamas. He was a more substantial man than he had realized; the underpants and pajama trousers were both forty inches round the middle. He was also the master of a pair of swimming trunks of the same size. They were decorated with a motif of smiling dolphins, and were remarkably difficult to keep on.

By the time he had swum fifty lengths of a small floodlit pool he had found near his room to work off his undischarged head of energy he was in a relatively philosophical frame of mind. After the first twenty lengths he had been seized by a sudden hope that Nikki might have forgiven his mistake, and opened her window again. But when he got down to Democritus and crept past the (still open) right-hand veranda window, as it appeared to him to be from outside, with scarcely the sound of a splash or a wet foot on the ground, the left-hand veranda window was firmly closed. He had tapped and pushed at it and peered in. He had thought he could see her sitting on the edge of her bed in the darkness inside, but she had not relented.

Well, there was always tomorrow. The golden pathway still stretched ahead. Until the other claimant to his identity turned up, he was Dr. Norman Wilfred still. He knew everything, he had done everything, and he would be irresistible. And if by any chance his elusive fat Doppelgänger had still not arrived in time to give his lecture … He laughed to himself at the thought as he swam. What would he say? He had no idea. Something would come to him, though. Something would turn up. Something always did. The world would continue to revolve, one way or another.

Forty-one lengths. Forty-two.

But how endlessly uncertain life was! Things might be like this, or might be like that, or might be like nothing anyone could imagine — and it all depended upon the endlessly shifting sands of who was who, and when they were, and where. Upon who was Oliver Fox and who was Dr. Norman Wilfred. Upon whether you were outside the window looking in, or inside the window looking out.

When Oliver emerged from Parmenides next morning the confusions of the night landscape had been resolved, and the reasonableness of the world restored, only fresher, greener, lighter, happier than ever. The air was already hot, but still agreeably so. Prostrating itself at his feet, almost whimpering and wagging its tail like a dog begging to be loved and walked, was a neatly cobbled path zigzagging down to the perfectly composed picture laid out below him: translucent blue water, white boats, blue and white cottages. His kingdom, waiting only for him to enter upon it and claim it.