I heard the sound of the receiver clicking into life and the continuous single dialling tone common to all American phones. I breathed out the corresponding tone in the gaps whilst I waited for it to be answered.
      “Hello, who the hell is this? Do you know what time it is?” sounded Michael’s pissed off lazy mid-Atlantic drawl, I could hear him rubbing his stubbly chin and yawning.
     “Michael, it’s your brother. Sorry to wake you.”
     “Jack? What the hell do you want? It’s been a while…do you know what time it is here?”
     “Ye sorry, I couldn’t wait ‘til morning I’m afraid. I’ve gotta ask you something.”
     “This better be good.”
     “Do you remember you told me about that mega minted family you did some work for a few years ago…?”
     “The Middletons? Sure. What about them?”
     “The Middeltons, that’s right. They had a son didn’t they? Went missing or something, that right?”
     “A son? Ye…er…Danny wasn’t it. Ye went missing. Stole a load of money and then disappeared. They ain’t seen him for years. Why?”
     “Stole money, that’s right. And they haven’t been in contact with him since?”
     “No. No-one knows where the hell he is. Why are you asking?”
     “Just curious. And the family. They’re American right?”
     “No English, John Middleton set up business here some ten years ago. Ex-pats just like me…probably why they hired me…”
     “That’s great bro, thanks. I’ll let you get back to sleep.”
     “Hey hang on, what’s this all about…”
     I hung up without answering, my hands shaking so much I could barely retrieve the coins from the payphone. I shoved them deep into my tattered coat pockets, powerless to stop the smile that stole across my face. I couldn’t even allow myself to think about the possibility.
     Back at the house nothing had changed. Nobody had disturbed my scene whilst I’d been away. It seemed quiet and empty, the abandoned house at peace with itself at last. The former inhabitants had presumably fled because of what they had found in the room I was about to step into. I moved aside the chest of drawers I’d pushed across the doorway and entered once more, the place stank of broken plaster board and the thick layer of dust that covered everything irritated my nose and lay in my throat, forcing me to cough again and again. As my eyes fell once more upon the figure lying by the window, just as he must have been for the last week at least my heart missed a beat, a strange shiver running down my spine. I spun round suddenly aware of another presence but no-one was there.
     We certainly looked alike. Identical. We could have been twins separated at birth. The week’s worth of rigor mortis had hollowed out his cheeks more so than mine, and his strong jaw line was perhaps more pronounced because of it, but it was in the eyes, they were so similar it was like looking in a mirror. Accept it was not like a mirror at all because a mirror shows the exact opposite of what it reflects. I was staring at myself. The smattering of freckles across our noses was the same, both our left ears jutted out that slight bit more than the right one, and we both had that thick double crown of black hair that stuck up at the back, making it look like we had always slept funny. It was uncanny, and really really eerie.
     The look on his face was serene and peaceful, one I hadn’t known on my own features for quite some time. The long thin needle still hung from the open wound in his left arm, dried blood circling the spot it had entered. Smack- the cause and relief of so many of his problems and the provider of the final thoughts, feelings and experiences he had before life had duly been taken him away for good. It was a familiar scene to me, but still one that managed to look so alien, I’d never understand drug addicts. I sat and watched him for a while. Transfixed by how peaceful death made him look. This is how I would look when I died I thought to myself, before pulling his thick black wallet from my inside pocket and examining the contents once more. There was no money but the leather was expensive, with the initials DM stitched in blue and red across the front cover. It was definitely him. How he had come to be here though was another question entirely, and one that for the moment I could quite easily ignore. I had found the place in much the same way I imagined he had: forced from the streets by the weather, the police or the ill mannered common street thug taking out his aggression on anyone smaller or weaker than himself. He must have been cleverer than the average junkie though, this place was not easy to come by. It was off the beaten track, behind a disused industrial estate, a place that only the bravest of the homeless tread.
     Inside his wallet there was also a picture of an ideal family. All sat grinning inanely and looking off to the left. The mother in the centre sat with her legs crossed, her long dyed blonde hair in heavy curls and her lips a deep dark rouge. Behind her stood the father, dominating the piece, the patriarch in charge of his family, stood tall in a double breasted pin stripped suit with his black hair scrapped back into a carefully gelled centre parting. At the front sat a girl of maybe eleven or twelve, a smaller version of the mother, with pigtails and dressed in a red and white spotted dress. And next to her sat me. Or rather the me I was about to become. Somewhat different from the me that lay dead on the floor of the twice abandoned house in Streatham, the house not even good enough for junkies to live in, but a former me. A me with gelled hair like his father’s and a suit to match, a cheeking grin from between chubby well fed cheeks, no idea of the fate that within just a few years would befall him. In this picture he had his whole future ahead of him. Little did he know it wasn’t his after all. His ended in a sad pile at my feet. His future was now mine. I was going to take it and make it my own. His future- my future- was now.

     “Hi Michael, sorry to get you out of bed again,” I said, back at the train station, my final coins counting down the seconds.
     “Jack! What on earth do you want now?”
     “I need the air fare to New York.”
     “What?! Why…?”
     “I’m coming to stay brother. Book me on the next flight to JFK.”

     Several days later I found myself stood outside the Middleton’s residence, a huge gothic town house on the Upper Westside. I was more nervous than I thought I’d be, having to stop twice to use the toilets in diners that the inhabitants of which I could have sworn looked at me with scorn when I spoke with an English accent. My palms were sweating in accompaniment to my forehead, the sweat stinging my eyes and soaking the collar of my starched shirt. It felt uncomfortable to be in a suit and I shrugged my shoulders constantly and pulled at the jacket sleeves of Michael’s second best suit which were slightly too short. I’d told him I was over for a job interview, which was not a million miles from the truth. He was so tight he never would have let me stay otherwise, hence the early morning phone calls, to catch him off his guard.
     The house was gigantic, the grandest one in a terraced row of grand houses: four stores high and covered in ornate grey black stone carvings of Gargoyles and Dragons. A huge stone family crest lay above the door, too old to be that of the Middletons themselves. I wondered briefly what happened to the family who owned the house before them, and then with some difficulty forced my foot onto the first step, my second following slowly behind it. The door was opened by an extremely old man in a tuxedo. He looked at me with disinterest and said:
     “Yeeeeeess?” dragging out the word with the air of someone who had answered the door a thousand times and never found someone worth answering it to.
     “Er...hello...” I said nervously. In my stupidity I hadn’t thought that the butler might open the door.
     Even though he had been looking at me it was only then that he saw me for the first time. Initially his eyebrows furrowed slightly in the middle as recognition dawned, the rest of his face giving away nothing else as his mind whirred through the thousands of faces he had met in his time, trying to place mine. Before a second had elapsed his eyebrows, seemingly the only part of his body that ever showed any emotion, shot upwards.
     “Master Danny!” he exclaimed.

     And it was as easy as that. The less I said the more they assumed and made up themselves. The rich are so ignorant it isn’t true; they see what they want to see and let themselves believe the same thing. 
    

     “You’ve been on a rather long holiday haven’t you poppet,” the gin soaked mother had said from the top of the magnificent marble stairwell that ran down into the reception area where I stood, once she’d been prised from her bed. Drunk though she was at eleven in the morning my breath had still been taken away as I had seen her descend. She must have been a model before she became a drunk. She was stunning in her late middle age, tall and elegantly dressed, not as I’d imagined in an ill fitting pink suit with enormous shoulder pads, but in a black trouser suit tapered in at the leg, and wearing black three inch high heels to match. She looked like the type of woman who was born to dress well and would never be seen leaving the house without her makeup on or without having consulted a stylist first.
      My heart was once again in my throat as she finally stood in front of me, my breath short as I fought to catch it. I felt like I was waiting to meet the queen of sixteenth century France. She stood for a second looking me up and down, I smiled and she smiled back, and then she slapped me once round the face causing me to almost loose my footing. The pain was excruciating and brought tears to my eyes.
     “Where was my phone call?” was all she said, her voice loud and grand and sounding out across the cavernous space.
     “Sorry,” was all I could think to say.
     The left side of her mouth flickered upwards in the slightest of motions and she tilted her head to one side, crossing her arms across her flat bosom.
     “You haven’t changed,” she said, and marched off to her left. I assumed I was to follow and so I scarped after her.

     And that was the mother. Easy enough. A little pain, but not too much. Nothing I couldn’t handle. Nothing that boarding school hadn’t taught me to put up with.

     Next came the sister. She wandered into the drawing room that the mother and I occupied some two hours later. The mother had ordered ‘drinks’ for the pair of us, which apparently meant a constant flow of gin and tonics from various different servants who seemed to be playing a game where the mother’s - or mine for that matter - glass was never allowed to be finished . If either showed the sign of doing so then a replacement had to make its way to the nearest fox hunt themed mat before we deposited an empty on the same mat.
     Nancy Middleton was as beautiful as her mother. Not quite as tall, but then she was not stood on as high heels, and with slightly more weight about her, which was probably because she was not a model. What she missed from her mother’s elegance and prowess she made up for in youth and audacity. When she entered she flung her long black suede coat on the floor and headed straight for the decanter of Martini that had been placed there some ten minutes before her arrival, before even looking about the room. When she saw me she dropped her drink on the floor, which sounded with a large smash and then stood for a second, frozen to the spot. I smiled and her mouth dropped open just before both her hands covered it. Then she launched herself across the room and leapt into my lap, screaming and immediately regressing to the seventeen year old girl she has been when Danny saw her last.
     “Where have you been?!” she yelled at me, amidst hugs and kisses. Her accent was placed somewhere in the mid-Atlantic and reminded me of those boys who’d gone home in the holidays from school.

     The father I didn’t meet until much later one. There was a grand party planned for that evening to be held in the largest of the dinning rooms which was situated on the second floor, which was one flight earlier than I had expected it to be. The party was to consist of various associates of daddy so I was told by Nancy, who remained stuck to my side throughout the afternoon and it was quite likely that I wouldn’t see him until we were all sat down waiting for the entre. As it turned out one of the staff must have tipped him off because he burst through the doors sometime before six. The atmosphere changed once he’d arrived, the servants suddenly more upright and much busier, even the mother seemingly more sober. Nancy was the only one that seemed immune to his status and didn’t move or change her stance as her father thundered up the stairs and stormed into another of the upstairs sitting rooms that we have decamped to, the same onslaught of gin and tonics still finding their way to us.
     “Where is the heir?” I heard a great booming voice yell just before the double doors to the room flew open and a huge figure burst into the room. John Middleton was a tall man. The years had added weight and a thinning greyness to his hair, but apart from that he looked exactly as he had done in the photo that at that moment sat in my inside pocket, carefully placed there in case I’d had any difficulty recognising any of the family. He even seemed to be wearing the same double breasted pin stripped suit he had in the photo.
     “My son returns,” he said, his voice that echoing around the huge room, both arms held aloft as he headed my way. I was a little drunk by that point and it seemed appropriate so I stood and embraced him as best I could.
     “Dad!” I managed to say as his hug knocked the wind out of me.

     Dinner came several hours later. I found myself sat at a table filled with characters I wasn’t sure whether I was being introduced to for the first time or expected to remember from before. It had been ten years all in all so I considered it, with much help from the wine, fairly easy just to meet them all for the first time and pass my ignorance off as upper class insolence should anyone call me up on it.
     After the main course the father, who had sat himself far down the other end of the table, stumbled to his feet and after tapping his wine glass and calling for a hush said:
     “Now many of you here think that I am a fantastic businessman.” Here he paused and looked about the table, each of the other inhabitants glanced shiftily from one to the other, wondering whether they were supposed to laugh or not. “And many of you here,” he continued, “KNOW that I am a fantastic businessman....” Here the inhabitants needed no prodding and launched, as one, into a huge sycophantic guttural laugh. “...and you know this because I’ve made you so much damn money...” Again the same laugh sounded out. I looked about the room. The men laughed heartily, not wanting to be the first to stop, and the women looked from one another to their husbands slightly bewildered. “...but seriously,” he continued again, wiping tears from his eyes, “you probably all thought me not much of a family man. Some of you have known me for a long time and some of you not so long, and those of you that have known me for not so long might have thought me a fool to only have a daughter to pass on my business and money to...” A titter emanated at this point, but it was not strong enough to take over the table and break him from his flow. “...but those of you that have known me slightly longer will know that I also have a son. A son that went missing some time ago. Ten years ago to speak the facts. He disappeared without a trace after a bit of a disagreement and took rather a large sum of money with him. But did I give up on him, abandon my heir and carry on life without him?” I could see the inhabitants looking from one another, almost ready to cheer ‘no’ as he spoke. “Did I roll over, give in and wait for nothing to happen? No I did not. I never gave up hope, I never gave in, and now tonight my son returns. Daniel, the heir to the Middleton empire, stand up and take your bow...!”
     And then all eyes were on me. From the servants to the businessmen everyone stared my way. My blood froze. I wanted to throw up. Everyone in the room was staring my way and a day’s worth of gin and tonics, Martinis and expensive red wines, combined with the fact that I was no more the heir to the Middleton fortune than I was the Milkybar kid all seemed to hit me at once. I must have gone white. I felt like I did. I just managed to stand - all eyes glued to my every movement - glance up the table at the father, who looked back at me, proud I had stood to speak, and then dart out of my seat and head for the door before throwing up. And I very nearly would have done to if it weren’t for the huge, ancient shag pile carpet that got in the way. I emptied my guts on the priceless rug and carried on for several minutes until I was done. My last thought before I collapsed being that I should probably get it all out: might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

     Sometime later I came to and felt extremely comfortable, covered as I was in a quilt and blankets. My head rested on what felt like a silk quilted pillow, not that I really knew what a silk quilted pillow felt like. I became aware of another figure in the dark room straight away.
     “Michael?” I said, peering into the inky blackness.
     “Michael, who’s Michael?” said Nancy. She stepped into sight wearing the same peach white dress she had at dinner and perched on the end of the bed.
     “Oh...no-one,” I said, trying to sit up and falling back to rest in the overly comfortable bed straight away. “Just someone from my past. From my time away. Who’s bed is this?”
     She paused briefly, looking about herself and then down at me again.
     “This is your bed Danny,” she said, moving a hand toward a side cabinet to my right. “You been away so long you don’t even remember your own bed?”
     “No, nothing like that,” I started, trying and failing once again to sit upright, the bed really was very comfortable, I could have lain there forever. “I just...I just...forgot...is everyone alright?” The events of the party filtered back to me, I ran a hand over my face and groaned, wondering whether I’d fucked things up for good.”
     “Don’t worry Danny,” she said, something clutched in her hand. “Everyone’s fine. Here, drink this, it’ll make you feel better.”
      She helped me up to rest on my right arm and guided the warm milky substance to my lips. I drank deeply and then sank back into the pillows, comfortable again, all I wanted to do was sleep for a hundred years.
     “No-one’s annoyed with me then?” I said, yawning.
     “No-one’s annoyed with you boy. No-one but me that is.”
     “What do you mean?” I said, suddenly aware.
     “I was certainly never going to let Danny take my inheritance from me, and I’m certainly not going to let some impostor take it either. “
      I tried to sit up but just couldn’t find the strength, I was so tired. So tired. The tiredness did not stop the terror that pounded through my veins though and my body screamed back at me, powerless to do anything. Each sinew suddenly aware of its own lack of strength.
     “Who the hell are you then?” she continued, getting to her feet and moving round and leaning low so she could look me right in the face, her sweet breath intoxicating me.
     “I’m...I’m...Danny...” I said, it even sounded pathetic to me.
     “You’re nothing like my brother. You don’t look like him, you don’t smell like him, you certainly don’t dress like him. Danny knew everything about everything. He knew about clothes, he knew about style – I mean that ugly suit, Danny wouldn’t have been seen dead in that horrible garment. Where the hell did you pick that piece of rubbish up from...?”
     I tried to say something but my throat had closed up. I couldn’t speak. My vision was starting to fade. Nancy was blurring in and out of focus. She slapped me once round the face, reminding me of her mother, and then leaned down as close as she could. So her mouth was right next to my ear.
     “Why?” she said, and then without waiting for a response. “Why did I pretend I knew you? For the same reason that I pretended I didn’t know where Danny was. For the money of course. And the inheritance. That stupid layabout never diserved anything, in the same way that you don’t either. I’m the Middelton heir, and that my soon to be deceased young friend, is that.”
     And just as she said, that was indeed that.