At the bank, I slipped the dirty cash through the slot beneath the teller’s window. Said teller was a nineteen year old with acne, and for some reason I felt a vortex immediately materialise where his intestines used to be. There could’ve been many reasons for it. He could’ve been one of those cosseted types, intimidated by the sight of a big black dude―even in central London. He could’ve been new at the bank and uncertain about handling so much money. Or, it could’ve just been that he noticed the splat of fresh blood on the faded green strap of my Foreign Legion-issue shoulder bag. That was the thing about this ability; every reading was open to interpretation.
He got over whatever his problem was and laid into the stacks: five bundles of twenties; fifty to a bundle; a sweet five thousand in total. This was the only point throughout my dealings with that money, where I felt entirely happy about it. As far as I was concerned the best place for the cash was in my current account; the best place for the memory of how I’d earned it, was behind me.
Sabotaging a Prague nightclub wasn’t the worst of crimes, but it was still on the wrong face of Morality Mountain. And that’s a face that’s damn steep, if not sheer, when you’re a desperate ex-legionnaire.
While the kid continued to search for his groove, I discretely straightened my t-shirt and checked for creases, tears and blood. All clear. An hour earlier, the handler ―a well-known employer of ex-legionnaires for ‘black’ work―turned into a cliché when it came time to pay up. I hadn’t gotten physical for over a year until then, so I didn’t do too badly by despatching him and his two flankers the way I did. Luckily, he did actually bring the money. Luckily for him, that is.
The middle-aged woman training the kid wore glasses on a chain, and was the type you would guess had only ever done it missionary style…if you were sick enough to be thinking of things like that in the first place.
Jesus. I need a girlfriend.
She was called away while he fed the cash into the money counter. I guessed she thought that with most of the process being automated, it was safe to leave him alone for ten seconds, but it took him three goes at the machine to even get its lights flashing. I imagined he’d be the same in bed.
There I go again…
He then checked one of the notes under a UV scanner of some sort. Then, frowning, he checked another. And another. This was enough to yank me out of my sexual fixation.
“Uhm, can you hold on a second please, sir?”
I flushed at the thought that the handler might have screwed me over. The way he’d pissed me off I’d be happy to take another turn at him just for being a mere twenty pounds short. I slipped my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through the address book; a connected East London contact I knew of was in there somewhere.
The kid came back with Glasses-on-a-Chain, who leaned toward the machine and peered at it, frowning. She flipped a switch and glanced at him disapprovingly. He said, “Oh,” and turned almost purple.
She flashed me a smile of apology that turned my previous opinion on its head.
I really need a girlfriend!
I slipped my phone away, along with the idea of going back to shoot the mis-handler in the kneecap with an ex-SAS Browning High Power.
I soon left the bank holding up a balance slip showing that the five grand had brought me up to clearing half my debt. I performed some pretty impressive mental arithmetic and worked out that once I'd sold the farm I'd roughly be in credit by as much as I was now in debit, which wasn't too shabby at all.
My fat realtor, Monsieur Pierrot, specialised in selling farm properties in and around Bordeaux. He had wanted to sell the farm on my behalf for his entire fifteen-year career. Throughout that period our paths crossed at various points around Saint-Émillion town, and once on a black run near Mont Blanc. Each time he’d tell me that there were twenty times more rosy-cheeked British couples wanting properties like mine, than there were such properties available.
Just imagining having to put myself through the Czech experience again coated me in a film of dirt, in spite of the pay. And then it was such hard work getting paid for it too. No. The farm had to go. I decided I'd call Pierrot after the movie, just to let such a big step sink in a bit.
I jumped on a double-decker bus that would take me to Oxford Street via Whitehall and Trafalgar Square. My aim was for the cinema at Marble Arch. I didn’t know what was on but there were enough screens―and I liked movies enough―for me to just turn up impromptu.
The Spanish, Italian and French girls who milled around the city were perfect diversions. Late summer sunshine bounced off all surfaces, including their flawless skins. That was what I needed: a girlfriend. A proper one. I’d had an empty thing with a Czech woman, which now left me craving something substantial.
A rabble of those same continental girls bowled on at Trafalgar Square and sat a little behind me. It was torture, so I picked up a free newspaper that someone had left on the seat beside me. Impending financial crisis. Starlet 'unwittingly' flashes her crotch on exiting limo. Terrorists try to bully someone into something.
In-between the Queen's husband removing all doubt by opening his mouth, and the public comment on a football player being paid a million a month, there was a half page ad for the National Portrait gallery. Clay sculptures by a Georgian artist, it said. I hoped I wasn't the only one who thought of Georgia, Atlanta, before actually looking at her name and considering the ex-Soviet State instead. Elektra Chakvetadze, it said.
The picture of one of her busts took a while to seep in. The flared nose. The curve of heavy eyelids. Typically full lips. Plain chin. Then it was like one of those snap hypnosis tricks on TV, where an expert puts someone in a trance by tapping their heads, or clapping his hands in front of their face. My eyes were fixed on the image...because it looked exactly like me. Exactly.
“Elektra Chakvetadze?” I whispered.
I had no idea where I was for a few seconds, busy wondering when I had posed for the artist, and if the name was a pseudonym of an old friend. I was sure I didn't know any artists, let alone one that was good enough to be exhibited in one of London's most prestigious galleries.
I was pulled out of it by the Spanish girls giggling at the resemblance, or maybe just at my evident dumbfounded expression. I was that dazed that I couldn't even interact with them as I normally would. All that was left was a furrowed brow and a reasonably strong desire to get to the bottom of it.
I jumped off on Regent Street then caught the same number bus from the opposite side of the road back down to Haymarket. I then snaked east through the quiet back streets behind the National Gallery.
On the way, I started to expect nothing more than work by an artist who had a fascination with a person that resembled me. I also realised that I had seen the adverts for this exhibition all over the place since returning to London, but had just not paid attention to them until now.
I slipped through the glass doors of the gallery's main entrance, into the bone-coloured building. A wanted criminal would feel less conspicuous going up to the enquiries desk, as there was a photo of another clay likeness of me pasted on a stack of leaflets there. I picked one up and opened it; three images stared boldly back at me from inside the leaflet. There was no way I could pick out the smaller details, but the larger ones plainly hinted at a resemblance that justified deeper investigation.
I hadn't felt this self-conscious since I was at a train station in northern Laos once, where approximately forty locals surrounded me, curious as to what product I had used to colour my skin. Back then I nearly passed out from the input of so many excited people crammed within a five-metre radius of me.
"A Study of The Man" by Elektra Chakvetadze.
―was the title of the exhibition. The man.
"Uhm, excuse me," I said. The lady behind the desk glanced up. I expected more than that, seeing as what appeared to be my image was multiplied by about two hundred and stacked in front of her almost as high as the cash I just deposited into my bank account. "Can you point me in the direction of this exhibition please?"
I held up the leaflet for her to see.
"Yes. It's here on the ground floor. Straight through to the main hall and turn right. Room 41. Opposite the cloak room."
"Thanks."
My heart battered at my ribcage like someone regaining consciousness in the boot of a car. It was as if I was about to be inserted in a hostile environment.
The room's entrance came into view, while I still wondered if perhaps I did know this person. Elektra Chakvetadze, I read. Having to break her last name down into slow syllables. E.C. thoughts trailed through the faces of people I knew begging for a clue. Someone who might have taken a bunch of photographs of me at some point in my life, then turned their hand to sculpting. No. There was just no explaining this. Not yet.
I entered the reasonably crowded, airy space. Without even looking at the sculptures I could already tell that they were good from the readings I picked up. People were generally very pleased with what they saw.
The room held about forty pieces in total. They were of all sizes and mostly clay or bronze. Busts. Full height. Small, intimate ones on high plinths sometimes covered in Perspex boxes. Dozens of pencil or charcoal drawings sat in glazed frames on the white walls. A large central plinth displayed a cluster of smaller sculptures. Three busts on a single long thin plinth stared at each other instead of at the visitors. At the far side of the room an eight foot one greeted the room with arms out-stretched, drawing the largest crowd.
Half of the pieces that were of people, definitely looked like―someone―who looked like me. With some of them it was difficult to say. I peered at one bust closely. It’s details that distinguish identical twins. For instance, they're not likely to have pimples in exactly the same places. But comparing myself with a clay model was difficult, especially with the ones where she had used a busy impressionistic technique. Standing back, it could have been me, my cousin, or the tramp I’d just passed sitting outside a bookshop. But then there were others that were harder to just shrug off. For instance, I knew the shape of my forehead. I knew about my naturally overdeveloped shoulders, the trapezius muscles of the upper back, to be exact. I knew about the scar on my upper lip from when I tripped and fell on a small garden fork when I was seven. Sheknew each of these details too.
I felt as if I’d stumbled into the darkroom of a stalker, their red-lit walls plastered with dozens of covertly-taken photos of me in situations that no-one should know about, like my times this year visiting the beautiful PVC-loving Spaniard, Rosa Ruiz Del Toro, or images of the things my foster-sister Marin and I got up to when I was eleven, or that bloody, psyche-obliterating period in the Foreign Legion.
Okay Lukas. Relax…
I allowed myself to feel a little special. Then a sense of responsibility. Then a tapping on the arm.
"Excuse me?"
A little boy.
"Hey. What's up?"
"How long did you have to sit for these?"
I stared at him as if he was speaking Russian.
It dawned on me that however I looked at it, I was deeply connected to this artist, whether I was her subject, or just looked like her subject.
"Uhm. I think she used photos."
"Oh right," he said, then looked away thoughtfully. "So she cheated."
And he ran back to his family before I could come up with anything smart enough to reply with.
The eight foot tall sculpture with the open arms was looking upwards with a striking expression of awe. It made me think of untouchable things like time and dreams, and of the fact that the human race will be extinct before any of us learns or experiences more than a tiny fraction of the universe's secrets. Well most of us will be anyway. I was one of the lucky few, as I had thought many times throughout my life, to be fortunate enough to have one of those secrets hard-wired inside me.
I smiled and floated back down to earth. A small part of me wanted to believe that I had found a partner in crime, someone else who knew something about the universe that the general populace didn't. Someone who was something that the general populace wasn't. She seemed to be. Either that or she was actually an accomplished stalker. I felt the desire to meet her more strongly than anything else at that moment, and I started to fully believe that something strange was happening. I also finally allowed myself to give way to the hope that she was single and attractive. That was, after all, the only thing that makes a stalker okay. Who would report Liv Tyler after finding her in their back garden at night with a camera and a high-powered lens attachment?
I found myself next to some drawings of me. A cardboard tag beside one of them read:
“Study for Busts”
Charcoal, 1996. Elektra Chakvetadze
"1996?" said out loud, accidentally, and immediately reverting to being freaked out again, forgetting the optimistic desire from just seconds earlier.
Another drawing, of me smiling in profile, was dated 2000. Another was dated 2007.
She had worked on her subject for at least twelve years! I turned and stared at the parquet floor trying to understand what this meant. Before I could figure anything out something whacked me to attention. My heart, and all the other things that are part of the process of feeling immense attraction to someone, synchronised with hers.
I turned around.
She wasn't attractive after all. No. She was something that none of the vast amounts of English literature I'd consumed nor none of my mother's English tutoring had equipped me to describe.
I stopped fighting the obvious then, and just allowed the doubt that I'd been playing tug-o-war with for the last fifteen minutes to slip away like water down a plughole. My five-metre radius was about to be breached, and not just physically, anybody could do that. Until now though, nobody had cracked it emotionally.
She stood near the middle of the room, by the large central plinth, as transfixed as I was. Her hair was long, and dark as night. Her skin like rice paper that I felt would tear if I handled it carelessly. Eyes huge and glinting shades of green. She wore brown lace-up trainer-boots, slightly rugged, but still mostly feminine. A dark loose skirt, and a green fine corduroy jacket that fitted her hyper-slim form snugly. Eyes and mouth cutting perfect circles of astonishment.
I didn't know how or when, but before I knew it I was there beside her. We hugged each other like long-lost school pals. People around us clapped for some reason.
"Hey," she said softly.
"Hello," I said, surprisingly, because I didn't think I'd be able to speak.
Her eyes were bright, glazed with joy. She shook her head in what seemed to be relief as she stared at me, then allowed it to fall on my chest.
"I've found you. At last, I've found you."
We held each other in a way that showed we had no regard for whether we should do so or not, whether one of us was presently free to do so or not. Our physical contact seemed to grant me immediate access to another plane of existence. I felt split between two worlds. One was opaque, and set in clay. Definite. The other was translucent, transient, uncertain, and could go anywhere and do anything. Unrestricted by convention or known physics.
“I’m so glad you’re not an ugly witch,” I said.
She burst out laughing, raising her level of gorgeousness a few more notches.
“Ah! But witches can be attractive too, no?”
“I guess,” and I smiled.
“Let’s go and get to know each other,” she said, walking away from me a little but still holding my hand.
I followed her, leaving behind all those admirers of her works, and the works themselves. One of them that I passed stood out. It was a small simple bronze, of a couple sitting facing each other.
I smiled, and couldn’t help thinking it was us.
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