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 out of magazine photography. And I think her father was a pretty successful businessman. He’s either dead or has retired to Israel, I actually can’t remember. I think he’s retired to Israel.
During lunch, Michael told me the story of the BOX building ghost. But before that, he wanted to talk about Rachel. He admires Rachel a great deal. He thinks she’s a great artist. Michael has strong views on these things.
—She’s off to Warsaw, you know.
—Yes, I know. She called last night.
—Oh.
He was a bit put out that she’d told us. That his news wasn’t news. He made a sulky face. He makes a lot of faces, Michael. And he does voices. I think sitting at a desk all day doesn’t suit him.
—Well, he whined.—Did she tell you what it was?
—An old school friend?
—Isn’t that marvellous? You know, this is about the seventh or eighth one who’s claimed to be a schoolmate. This chap though also claims to have seen a photograph of him, of Max, behind a bar somewhere outside Warsaw. Some hideous little Polish dump full of vodka alcoholics and toothless Catholics, can you just imagine? He lives out there now, some EU chappie. Swears that it’s Max. On his life. Poor sod. And the really pathetic thing is that this fellow has told Rachel that he saw the photograph months and months ago, and recognised it then, and even pointed it out to his wife, or girlfriend or what have you, as in, Look, how strange, there’s a photograph of an old school chum, good old Max, wonder what he was doing here, and that it wasn’t until last week that he finally got around to searching for Max on the Internet and found Rachel’s website and discovered he was missing.
—Jesus. That’s quite elaborate.
—Isn’t it? People are elaborate, though. People are Byzantine.
I’m sure that one of these days the Max project is going to go seriously off the rails. Someone is going to find out that they’re being taken for a ride and they’re going to get really angry. Of course Rachel insists that such a thing could never happen because such a person would, were Rachel genuine, actually be taking Rachel for a ride, and a much crueller and more disturbing one, and anger, should it all break down, would be entirely Rachel’s prerogative. She insists that the room for mistaken identity is slim. The photographs, while slightly altered, are photographs of an actual distinctive person, with distinguishing features (a small scar over the left eyebrow, what looks like a mole on the lower right cheek, a handsome gap between the two front teeth), and could not be easily mistaken for somebody else. Similarly, the name she has given her missing brother, Max Poe, is sufficiently unusual to rule out that kind of confusion. And the dates she has come up with – of birth and departure and return and disappearance – are unalterable. Put all of this together, says Rachel, and it simply doesn’t fit any actual missing person. She’s checked. And when someone does approach her with some story about Max, Rachel goes through (so she tells us) a complicated checking procedure to ensure that it doesn’t amount to valuable information about somebody who is genuinely missing. By which I think she means that she checks any checkable details against files for those who went missing at the same time and the same age as Max did not.
But of course no one is deceiving her on purpose. What would be the point? Any deception involved is total, in the sense that the people who claim to have seen Max, or who claim to have known him either before or after he didn’t disappear, are deceiving themselves. Completely and utterly – almost religiously. And they’re doing it for a reason – it’s in their interest to deceive themselves. Because they are divided against themselves, like nations. They’re disturbed. And Rachel is flying out to Poland to have a chat with them. It makes me nervous.
Of course she’s aware of all of this, she’s talked about it. It seems to be the point of it, in many ways. I once tried to tell her that I was worried on her behalf, but I think it came across quite badly, as if I had accused her of something, which I suppose I had. Well, I don’t suppose. I did accuse her. I actually accused her of abuse – of the abuse of vulnerable, lonely people. She was astonished, and angry, and in turn she suggested that I was jealous of her – artistically jealous – and that if I wasn’t fulfilled by cartooning I shouldn’t take it out on her. Which of course may be true to some extent – I’m not really sure – but it distracted me and confused me and I lost sight of the point that I was trying to make, which was that someone at some time was going to discover that the Max they claimed to know didn’t actually exist, and they would feel fooled, and they might become angry, even dangerously so. After the argument with Rachel I went over all the same ground with K, who immediately saw what I had been trying to say, but insisted that the disturbing nature of the Max project was exactly the point of it, that Rachel was that kind of artist, and that her work was for that reason hugely interesting, and that her friends should really only offer support, that anything else would be useless, that she was a grown woman who was completely aware of what she was doing, and that it would be patronising to tell her to be careful. Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, didn’t exactly comfort me. I was still nervous, and added to it now was a new nervousness, about myself and my own motivations and my own worth in terms of what I do and what I manage to understand. It left me feeling rather stupid, to tell you the truth.
Michael
