Dead Ringer - Friday Flash

Victor was a long-distance lorry driver. As a teenager, he’d failed his driving test three times before passing, but four years older and wiser, secured his HGV license at the first time of asking.

He delivered white goods in brown boxes up and down the length of Britain. From factory to high street shops and warehouses in industrial estates.

He often pondered his role in the process. For he always felt invisible. Even though the recipients were all too aware of his paperwork requirements, pink, yellow and blue copies requiring their endorsement, somehow he felt peripheral to everything. As extraneous as the brown cardboard box, or the foam packaging inside.

This may have had something to do with him not being permitted to unload the trailer. He just waited unseen and not even resented, in his cab reading the newspaper. Until the wraiths outside signalled they were done by slamming his tailgate shut. They weren’t allowed however to close his doors, so he always had to leap out and do the job himself. This wasn’t a contract stipulation, but a Trades Union demarcation. The porters had always melted away before his feet hit the ground.

But a chance comment overheard in a pub one Saturday night, provided the spark that could change all these feelings of inadequacy and invisibility. Someone unseen suggested that he bore a passing likeness to the lead singer of a stadium rock band. When Victor went home that night, he printed pictures from the internet and went and scrutinised himself against them in his floor-length mirror. Yes he could see the stranger’s point. He went back to the WorldWideWeb to read up on this world wide celebrity. It took him all night, such was the welter of coverage generated by this man.

When Victor surfaced early Sunday afternoon, his mind presented him with a scheme. Somewhere from the deep recesses of his memory, it had plucked the notion of look-alikes. He could use the resemblance to imitate this famous man and see what second-hand glamour rubbed off on himself like stardust. Then people might sit up and notice him all right.

He paid for a very expensive stylist to shape his hair exactly so. He shelled out for some stage clothes in keeping with the frontman’s flamboyant tastes. He even forked over cash to have several tattoos done for the full simulacrum. He passed out at the needles. He watched endless videos of the man moving, dancing and giving interviews, practising the same in front of his mirror. Until he’d got his man off pat. Stroke for stroke, intonation for intonation. Inhabiting his habits.

Next he looked up the band’s tour dates. After each day's last delivery, he’d disarticulate and drive to the town where they were due on stage. He’d change into the clothes and then proceed to wander up and down the lines of concert goers queuing to enter. Very quickly he was pulled into the ranks time and again, for his photo to be taken with the fans. They knew it was entirely improbable that their idol would be wondering up and down outside the venue two hours ahead of showtime, just to hobknob with his devotees. Far more likely to be sniffing cocaine from the midriff of a naked groupie in the back of a limo. But they were happy to maintain the part-fiction, after all they would see the real McCoy this very night. This guy was the warm up act.

But somehow word of the accuracy of his masquerade spread and soon people were approaching him to open fetes and or judge local talent contests. "Double Take TV" asked him to be present at the side of the red carpet along with other rock and roll lookalikes at a prestigious Awards show and to try and wedge himself in the camera frame when his doppelganger stopped to be interviewed. He had some business cards printed up. An agent contacted him, but he couldn't see the value of giving up a fifteen percent split of himself.

As the earnings built, he boosted his wardrobe to match that of his model. One slight wobble in his career arc was when he was invited to sing live. He realised he'd only taken his impersonation so far, now he needed to go the whole hog. He rehearsed at home. He accompanied CDs in his rig. Now when the unloaders were toiling away, music was booming from the cab and they turned resentful all right. Victor would sing along, emulating the singer's strangulated drawl, ignorant of their curses.

He formed a tribute band and they took off to the next level. Accomplished musicians in their own right, just ones spared the effort of having to compose their own songs. With live performing came the girls. His own groupies. Did he feel bad that they imagined him to be someone else while he was fucking them? Not especially.

The only aspect of his spitting image he didn't replicate, was the prodigious drug intake. But his counterpart's behaviour was becoming increasingly unpalatable as he repeatedly made the front pages of the newspapers with his frequent Court appearances. Victor began to fret, he was so nearly making enough money to be able to give up his road hauling.

He fashioned a voodoo poppet and pinned it in areas trying to restrain the excesses of his lodestar. He sealed its nose to stop the cocaine and festooned the arms with needles to prevent the use of larger ones full of heroin. He could of course touch neither mouth or throat and thereby take away the man's and his own livelihood. He also hovered over the crotch, but decided to let it be as he didn't want to jinx his own good fortune in that particular region.

The sympathetic magic seemed to work as well. The wild man of rock cooled his heels and checked into rehab. In his absence, bookings for Victor shot up. His visibility increased even as the singer's diminished, having dropped out of public sight. Victor was having a high old time of things, until one day a woman lunged out of the shadows and fatally drove a carving knife into his throat.

It was never established whether she knew him to be a lookalike or not. She might have been a celebrity stalker. Or one of the star's one night stand cast offs. She might conceivably even have been a lookalike herself, one of those female serial killers, who took her role just a bit too far. A bit like Victor really.

For his part after nine months, the original wild man of rock emerged from his refuge and became a gentleman farmer. Turning his back on his former lifestyle.