Chapter 1
It was an ordinary day when he found the door. He’d thought about it afterwards, but there was no warning, no sign of anything untoward. It was a day just like any other. He’d got up to go to work and was late, as usual; he’d never been a morning person. Every day was a battle to get to work on time and most days he lost. Sometimes not by much, but some days he’d wake up at 10 or 11 and then he’d have to come up with yet another excuse to his boss. It was lucky he was good at his job. He was acutely aware that if they could sack him, he’d have been out of a job some considerable time ago. But he’d had the forethought to make his job so incomprehensible, that it had made him indispensable. He knew though that it was a balancing act; if he pushed it too far, they’d eventually sack him anyway. He just had to make sure he did just enough, and that he played the game with his boss. He always had to come up with a new and innovative excuse. He suspected that the day he did finally admit that he had simply overslept would be the day they would finally have enough and he’d have to find another job. So every day he’d turn up to work late and he’d have to come up with yet another excuse.
Sometimes he wondered if he should keep a record of his excuses and perhaps even try to invent some new ones to use for the future. He knew that they didn’t really believe him. There are only so many times you can have a power cut that takes out your alarm clock (even though his alarm was battery powered). Or be up all night with a migraine. Or have to rescue a dog that’s got its head stuck in a railing. He sometimes wondered why he just didn’t get up on time. He was acutely aware of the fact that it was probably some childish rebellious streak inside him. Some irrational need to stick two fingers up at the establishment, as if to say “well, I’ll do what you say… But you’ll never own me”. He wasn’t sure why he felt that way. It wasn’t that he thought he was better than anyone else and it wasn’t that he was lazy. And deep down he knew it was bloody stupid. He knew that fighting the establishment was a stupid thing to do – you could never win. He had known someone once that lived in a homemade bender tent on a footpath in Glastonbury. He’d really put two fingers up to society and opted out. And Chez had absolutely no desire to follow in his footsteps. He smelt funny for a start.
So he carried on with this ridiculous protest at grown-up life, aware of the fact that in the end it was he who would pay the price. He’d get sacked and then would have to suck the corporate cock anyway. It’s a one-sided battle where there can only be one winner. You need the money more than they need you and there’s always another person out there who wants the job. Whereas there isn’t an alternative to money, unless you want to smell like bonfires, sweat and piss. One day he’d finally accept that the establishment did own him. But until then, he thought, he’d keep fighting the system on the inside, winning little moral victories for himself, even though he knew that the system turned a blind eye to his eccentricity, in much the same way as a parent does to a brilliant, but troubled child.
Today he was only half an hour late. And he had plenty of time to conjure up an excuse. Nothing too elaborate, he thought. He only saved the big ones for when he was more than two hours late. Half an hour could be road works; or perhaps his car had broken down and wouldn’t start. But he’d used that one quite a lot recently, so he allowed his mind to wander, to try and think of something he hadn’t used before. That’s the thing about crying wolf: the accepted moral of the story is that you shouldn’t lie. Chez always thought that the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t use the same lie twice. You should always tweak the lie to leave an element of doubt. Yes, they know that the end result is the same; but there has to be an element of doubt, that maybe you are actually telling the truth. He was a master of that.
Another secret is to keep the lie as close to the truth as you can. Don’t embellish needlessly. The further from the truth you stray, the more likely you are to be caught out. Often he would use whatever he saw that morning on his way to work as an excuse. Broken glass on the road would mean an accident, and he’d been held up by that accident. Or walking past an argument in the street would mean a fight that he’d had to break up. Then it wasn’t a blatant lie… Just a little bit of embellishment on his part. And if his boss ever wanted to actually try to prove that it didn’t happen, there was enough circumstantial evidence there to prove that it MIGHT have happened after all. So you couldn’t make up an accident, because he might check. Where there was doubt, there was a chance that you might wrongfully sack someone for something that did actually happen. That’s why he never once admitted that he just overslept. They’d have him then. He’d have nowhere to go, and they would then be able to sack him for all the other times he’d been late.
So he wandered through town, looking around him for inspiration for today’s masterpiece. A woman dropped her bag. He thought for a minute that all her papers could have fallen out… He had to help her collect them all… But no, that wouldn’t explain a half hour delay. He made a mental note to keep that one for when he was 10 minutes late. Maybe she was crying? Maybe she was really upset and sitting on the fountain in a flood of tears… Could he walk past? Surely he’d have to make sure she was alright… That was a possibility. Any excuse where you walked the moral high ground, where you made some great act of sacrifice for your fellow human being was always a good one. No boss would want to give you a bollocking for doing the right thing… It made them feel bad about themselves. But this one was too risky… He wasn’t the only one who walked to work this way. No, he’d have to find another excuse. He carried on walking.
His mind was working overtime as he walked, contemplating the different illnesses he could have or a situation that could have arisen to explain his lateness. He momentarily thought about seeing a UFO, but he quickly dismissed it as stupid. Sometimes the really leftfield excuses worked well – surely no one would have the balls to use something so bizarre as an excuse, it must be true – but it still had to be remotely believable. He started to feel uncomfortable. He was nearly at work and was running low on inspiration. He hated it when this happened. He knew he’d have to reel off some half-arsed excuse about having a headache or something. And they always knew when his excuse was weak; it felt like they were one step closer to catching him out. Whereas when he came up with a good excuse, it always felt like you were one step further away from being caught, one step ahead of the game. He’d have to buy some time. Being forty minutes late with a good excuse is better than being half an hour late with a lame one. He needed more time to think. He decided to double back on himself. If he was caught, he could always argue he’d left something in his car. He walked back through the town centre, trying to think of a good reason for why he was now forty minutes late, not half an hour.
It was when he got back to the fountain in the middle of town that he saw the door. He barely noticed it at first, he was so lost in thought, but it struck him as odd. The door itself was extremely plain. It was just a simple wooden door, much like the ones in his house. It wasn’t decorative or even new. Just a simple wooden door in a frame, standing in the middle of the town centre. For a moment he allowed his thoughts to wander. How could he use this as a reason to be late? Had someone lost it? No. Perhaps he’d had to help someone carry it? Or maybe it had fallen on someone… That one had potential. He held on to that thought. What the hell was a door doing in the middle of town? In order for this one to work, there would have to be a reason for WHY it was there, otherwise it would be just too bizarre, too unbelievable. And wouldn’t it be typical if the one day he did actually tell the truth, they didn’t believe him?
So what is a door doing in the middle of town? It could be some wanky art installation. The art college was just round the corner and he used to go out with one of the art students there. They were always doing stupid things like this, believing it to be the most inspirational and edgy thing anyone’s ever done. He liked art, but conceptual art in the main he found to be a little pretentious. He looked around for anyone with a camera. He suspected that if this was art, it would probably be a video installation, someone filming how other people react to a door in the town centre. He couldn’t see anyone. It could be a wind-up. Perhaps a candid camera type thing by some TV company. That thought alarmed him… If he was going to use the door as an excuse, he couldn’t be filmed… Unless being filmed in itself was the reason why he was late. That could be an interesting idea. He’d have to investigate the door, and see what happened.
As he walked to the door, he suddenly stopped. There was something else strange about this, something that hadn’t been immediately obvious. He’d been so distracted by the door itself and its potential for an excuse, that he hadn’t actually really noticed anything else. Now that he was looking around for people with cameras, he was suddenly aware that no one else was paying the door any attention whatsoever and that struck him as odd. He could understand people walking past, but he expected someone to at least acknowledge it. It wasn’t every day you saw a plain wooden door standing on its own in the middle of the city centre. He stood and watched for a minute or so. A woman walked straight past the door without even the briefest of glances. A boy on a bike cycled past it. Another woman, this one with a pushchair… No, nothing.
He started to feel uncomfortable. His desire to find an excuse completely gone now from his mind. His rational brain was working overtime, trying to make sense of this. OK, if this is a candid camera type thing… Maybe these are paid actors… Maybe it’s an attempt to freak out the general public… And you go up to the door, get an electric shock or maybe someone will be hiding on the other side and you open the door and they scare you, or something… But something didn’t feel right. He stood and watched for a bit longer. Part of him just wanted to bolt, but part of him was curious. What the hell was this door anyway? And why did it look like no one else but he could even see it?
Another woman walked past it. She didn’t look at the door, but she did give him a worried glance. He realised he probably looked a bit weird, just standing there and staring. His appearance alone usually got him a few odd glances; it was part of the same rebellious nature that made him late every day. His hair was shoulder length and was always incredibly messy. His boss jokingly told him he looked like a young mad professor, which Chez secretly liked. His boss was always immaculately turned out, and Chez knew that his boss hated Chez’s outlook on life. But he also knew that on another level, he envied it. In fact, it was probably the only thing that had stopped him from losing his job. Who knows, maybe keeping him on was his boss’s own act of rebellion, a sort of rebellion by association. He didn’t have the guts himself to stick two fingers up at his own boss, but having Chez around perhaps made him feel better, perhaps made him feel that he hadn’t completely sold out.
As he thought that, he noticed a man in a sharp pin-stripe suit. He was striding towards the door. Chez started to relax and felt more than a little stupid. Of course the other people could see the door, they were just so caught up in their own world, they hadn’t paid it any attention. His imagination did often get the better of him. It was what enabled him to come up with such great excuses, day after day. But there was a price – it did mean that the line between reality and fantasy was sometimes a little vague. Often he would end up believing his own fantasies, as if they had actually happened. He knew deep down that it hadn’t actually happened like that. That dog hadn’t actually had its head stuck in the railings last week. It had just sniffed the railings, and then walked on. But in his mind, he could see that same dog, howling with fear… He could remember the conversation he’d had with the man from the RSPCA, who had come to help the dog out. He could even remember the stale smell of smoke on the man’s uniform, the looks on the faces of the people walking past, the relief when the dog was finally freed… Somehow it HAD happened. Even though his rational mind told him that it hadn’t, that he’d made it up. But somehow, as the story played back in his mind, just the act of thinking it had meant that it had happened.
The guy in the suit was nearly at the door and Chez stood back to watch what would happen when he opened it. His mind was back to finding an excuse now. If this was some sort of prank, he would say he stopped to watch. If it’s just a door, he’d use pin-stripe man. He’d say the man opened the door and it fell on him or something, and Chez had made sure he was OK. It was always good to use real people in a story. It gave the story more flesh, made it seem more real in your mind. The dog had been real, and that was why that excuse worked. It meant that if someone did ask about the colour of the dog or the breed, you could easily describe it. Chez looked at the man as he approached the door, and he noticed Chez looking at him. Their eyes met for the briefest of seconds as the man walked straight through the door.
Chez staggered back in horror. The man hadn’t opened the door and walked through it. He’d simply walked straight through it, without even breaking stride. As if it wasn’t even there. For a moment, Chez thought about calling after the man. But he stopped himself. After all, what was he going to say? ‘Hey, didn’t you see that door you just walked through? That one, the wooden one over there.’ Clearly he hadn’t seen it. All that would achieve is making Chez look even more of a weirdo than he currently did, and he didn’t want the police involved. Then he’d certainly lose his job. Mad-haired weirdo in town centre, rambling on about a door that no one else could see. No, that’s definitely the kind of thing you keep to yourself.
It wasn’t the first time he’d hallucinated, he reminded himself. When he’d lived in London, he’d experimented with drugs. Nothing too extreme, but he’d done a bit of acid and he’d also had a couple of really mad episodes with ketamin - what he’d seen on ketamin made this seem like a walk in the park. He remembered being at a squat party in Hackney, stumbling around trying to work out what was real and what was not real. He’d sat on someone’s lap, believing them to be a chair. He remembered that guy with a head the size of a space hopper and a face the size of a postage stamp; the couple screwing on the floor, who had turned into a pair of snakes, writhing around each other. He didn’t even know if the couple were real, let alone the snakes. And the maggots on the floor, everywhere, the whole floor alive with maggots. It had been some experience. And for some bizarre reason, he hadn’t been able to look at a black person for 3 days afterwards without bursting out laughing. Seeing as he lived in Brixton at the time, that had not been a lot of fun.
Maybe this was a flashback. He’d heard about people having acid flashbacks, where they suddenly start tripping again years after doing acid. But he’d always thought that was just an urban myth, put out by the authorities to scare people. He’d never actually believed it. And besides, even when he was on acid, he’d always known that what he was seeing wasn’t actually real. It was always ‘wow, that guy’s got three mouths, but I know he hasn’t really and it’s because I’m tripping’. This door on the other hand looked completely real. And it was broad daylight and he hadn’t done any hallucinogens in years. There was only one thing for it, he realised… He couldn’t walk away. He’d spend the rest of his life wondering what the hell it was. He would have to go to the door and see for himself.
He walked gingerly to the door, his stomach doing back flips. His mind was racing with possibilities, still trying to rationalise what his doubting eyes were telling him. He fought the instinct to flee, which was surprisingly strong. He took his rucksack off his back, put it on the floor in front of him and stretched out his hand to touch the door… And it was solid. Shit. This was no flashback. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. At least it proved he wasn’t going mad. Or did it? In truth, he had no idea what this meant. All he knew was there was a solid door in the middle of town, a door that pinstripe man had just walked straight through. A door that was only real and solid for him. All his life he’d believed that he was different, that the rules didn’t really apply to him. It now appeared that something or someone else thought the same.
