by Françoise Harvey

The bell above the door rings when they go in, even though the shop is closed. And even though the shop is closed, the jangling racket conjures Missus Lambert from the mysterious cave beyond the faded fly curtain. She flicks the strands of beads from her curlers as she emerges, queenly. Because the shop is closed, she doesn’t stop behind the counter like she normally does. She carries on down the aisle, comfortable slippers slapping the linoleum.

She looks smaller, cozier, than she does from her usual position of power, presiding over the till with a view of the whole shop. Scary, actually, how much she always seems to see, and how – despite the smile, despite the welcoming of customers – always there is a hard gimlet glint to her eye. Measuring you.

Now, the gimlet glint is veiled by reading glasses. She views her two visitors with less of a laser stare, forgoing the raking measure of how much their pockets are bulging, how their sleeves are sitting against their arms – maybe in part because they’ve worn T-shirts, despite the cool morning, to show they mean no harm. Still, paying mind to Missus Lambert is a generational memory, and so they nod close to bowing as she approaches. This is her kingdom, and just pushing the door open against the “closed” sign required a stiffening of the spine.

“Here for the job, Missus Lambert,” says one. “Mam sent me.”

“And me,” pipes up the other, a bit quivery.

“Which job?” says Missus Lambert, taking off her glasses and squinting at them as though she’s posted a whole corporation’s worth of possibilities in the paper, not strung a single sign asking for a “deliverer of goods” on brown paper in the window.

“That one,” says the quivery lad, pointing. Missus Lambert narrows her eyes at the tip of his finger, and he drops his hand fast. “Deliveries. Mam said we’d to be here 6 a.m. on the dot.”

“Oh, yes,” she says, after a pause just long enough to make them both squirm. “Both of you, then? Follow me.” She turns and stamps back up the shop. Back straight, slippers somehow now tough as boots, as though they’d caught her unawares before, though wrong-footing Missus Lambert is unimaginable. She clatters back through the fly curtain, into the dark space beyond. They follow her, hesitantly, urging each other to go first with nods and slowed shufflings of the feet.

“I’ll need you to move quicker than that!” calls Missus Lambert from beyond the curtain, and they take a collective breath and part the beaded strands.

• • •

No one can remember a time when the shop wasn’t there, though there surely was one. It couldn’t have existed before there was a house, a settlement, a village, a town, surely? There’s a small brass plaque over the smartly painted doorframe that says “Proprietor Elsie Lambert: purveyor of goods and alcohol by permission of ----- Est. -----” The year and the name can read whatever you like, depending on the slant of the shadows and the glance of the light, and some people would say that the year is older than the date on the first stone in the cemetery – also scuffed and weathered to unreadable. Might say Lambert. Might not. It’s all in keeping with the magic of the place.

If magic’s what you’d call it. There’s no magic in the look of the building. It might have stood alone at one point, but now it’s the lit-up end of a row of close terrace houses – there’s a jagged line in the bricks where the red changes from old to older to drywall. The display window frames are painted bright green, the walls are white, the painted stones smoothed by time. There’s nowhere to park outside the shop, but people will make the effort to walk to it, with good reason: Elsie Lambert can conjure just about anything that’s asked for, given a few minutes to rummage in the dark, secretive space beyond the fly curtain, which hasn’t been changed in years.

There’s rumors of a smugglers’ tunnel, or a magic box, or a carpet bag a la Mary Poppins back there, depending on your age. Nothing seems too outlandish, because here’s a fact: Even in lean times, the shop has what’s needed for the people that frequent it, and it always has done – even when it was Elsie’s mam, or grandma, or great-grandma running the place. There’s a strong likeness between them all, according to the old people. In looks and ability and attitude. All the Lamberts could read a face for true want and get what was needed for a price the buyer could afford, though no one ever shared what was paid, if a deal was done.

“There’s families in this town wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the bitshop. They’d’ve starved to the end of the line,” said Mam, once. She said it to the boys harshly, along with a string of other reminders about respect, earning it, paying it, making amends. They’d been caught red-handed trying to roll a packet of Polos from the shelf up into their overlong sleeves. The police weren’t called, and they weren’t even banned. The look in Missus Lambert’s eye when she’d said “Hoi, now, and what’s that up your sleeve, lads?” ever so quietly, and the way every other person in the shop had turned suddenly, like soldiers under Missus Lambert’s command – it had near scared them to pissing themselves right there in front of everyone.

“Some folks need to do it to learn not to,” Missus Lambert had said graciously to their Mam. “We’ll talk later.”

And Mam had gone very red and swallowed hard, herded them out and smacked their ears in the street. They’d only ever gone back in with lowered eyes since – because they’d had to go back, of course. It was unthinkable to go anywhere else.

• • •

Beyond the fly curtain is a perfectly ordinary room, walls painted blue, and bare apart from a calendar set to the wrong month and the wrong year. Two more doors – one open, stairs behind it, carpeted. Missus Lambert must sleep above the shop. The other is set into the far wall and can only lead farther back into the terrace of houses. There’s an armchair, worn, and two sturdy wooden chairs. They know those chairs – they’re the very ones brought out those years ago, for them to sit and await their punishment, the seats polished by years of shifting, guilty bums. There’s a tidy desk in one corner, with a small, ancient telly. It’s got a coat-hanger aerial on top and the screen’s showing the inside of the bitshop in HD. Delayed, the video seems to be, for whatever good that is: they just catch sight of their own backs passing through the curtain. Missus Lambert settles herself in the armchair, nods them toward the wooden chairs. She steeples her wrinkled fingers under her chin and considers them.

“Polos,” she says, eventually. “That was you two, wasn’t it?”

They blanch. One nods, chewing his lip; the other points at his twin, scowling. It’s infuriating, still, after all these years, to be scooped up in his twin’s misdeeds. Missus Lambert cackles. “No honor among thieves, eh. Good to know. I suppose you know what the job, is then? Your mam said?”

“Newspapers …?” says the one that pointed, trying for enthusiasm. He trails off. Shivers – it’s colder in this room than in the shop: no windows, no warmth. Missus Lambert raises her eyebrows.

“Newspapers?” she says. “Where do you see people with newspapers anymore? No, I move with the times, and the newspapers, what few sell, that’s in hand.”

The one who tried to steal the Polos catches on faster. “It’s everything else, isn’t it. ‘Cause the internet …”

“Exactly,” Missus Lambert leans back in her seat. “I’ve seen off supermarkets, farmers markets, hypermarkets. Always given a personal touch and been able to get my hands on the products people want. But I’m not blind to change …” This was true. The bitshop had a DVD of every film produced, it seemed, ready to rent and sell from the moment someone in town bought its first DVD player. They’ve since vanished, of course. “And this is something people need – things delivered, the next day they say. The same day, even, without them setting foot from their house. And so that’s what we’ll be offering. We – that includes you. I’ll be minding the shop, you’ll be taking the goods out.”

“What kinds of goods?” asks the not-thief. “Like? …” He thinks of all the stories, of the things Missus Lambert has supposedly provided from the back of this shop.

“Food. Paper. That sort of thing,” she considers him. “Anything more complicated, they’ll need to come here. At least to begin with. We’ll see how it goes. Test run. Remember that – this is a test run. The first sign of trouble …” she cocks her head and to the one that pointed, that’s more threatening than anything she could say out loud.

“We haven’t said we want the job yet,” says the thief. He’s folded his arms, straightened his back. Acting like he’s forgotten everything they were told, and maybe he has. His brother shoots him a pleading look.

“Would you still be sat here if you didn’t? Would your Mam let you keep your room if you don’t go back and say we’re straight and you’ve gainful employment?” Missus Lambert is tapping one finger, very lightly, on the flowery fabric of the armchair. Behind her there is a faint squeal of hinges, and the door in the far wall, not properly shut, moves in a non-breeze. Tap tap tap. The lad’s boldness is gently squashed by her fingertip.

“We could get jobs at the warehouse,” stammers the one who pointed. “Loads of jobs going there.” The other stares at the door, still swinging slowly open.

“Delivery,” says Missus Lambert. “Sure. But delivery with no soul to it and no heart to it. Here’s a job you can be proud of. And I pay well. And I’ll teach you all the secrets of this place, maybe. If it’s a fit. Or not.” The door swings squealing open all the way, hits the wall behind with a crack. Missus Lambert doesn’t even blink.

They say yes without checking the wage.

• • •

There’d been a game for a bit, when they were even younger, when they still dared cheek Missus Lambert a bit. Not just them, of course: the whole rowdy lot of their class in school. On Fridays, it was, they’d dare each other things to ask for. Impossible things. You’d get your pocket money Saturday morning and spend Saturday afternoon seeing if you could catch Missus Lambert out with your requests.

They never could, mind. She had the measure of them – they couldn’t have been the first to try it. They’d asked – for elephants; camels; a rocket ship; nail polish that turned from green to blue. And every time she’d twinkle at them, and accept their 25p in return for a little plastic figure of whatever they asked for, or in the case of the nail polish, exactly that. But she knew – she knew when the longing was real. You didn’t really want a massive rocket ship in your tiny garden, or a stinky camel in the street, so plastic models were fine. But when there’d been a request for “a real-live proper puppy that I can take for walks and will be my best friend” from Daisy McClean, she’d leaned in close and studied the freckled face and the quivering hopeful lip. Got her a small handful of dog biscuits and told her to pet the next dog she saw and ask if she could feed it the biscuits. So Daisy did, with her Dad, the next day in the park, and the dog she petted had pupped, and the owner was desperate to get them away – had talked to Missus Lambert, actually, about putting up a notice. And her dad, soft-hearted man that he was, well – long story short, she got the puppy; a sweet, fluff of a thing. Still had it. Not so sweet these days, though. There’d been something, hadn’t there? Something had happened, when they’d been older, 13 or so, not long after the Polo incident.

Daisy getting a dog started rumors that Missus Lambert was a witch, of sorts. Not impossible to believe even now, sat on hard wooden chairs while she sized them up. Laid out the rules. Stood up like a queen from her throne and beckoned them out of the cold light of the office, into the muggy dark of a storeroom so ill-lit that you couldn’t tell what was shadows and what was shelving.

• • •

The shelves have a smell, that’s the first thing they notice: above the dust, something sweet. And there’s a well-worn trail through the dust straight down the middle of the room, barely lit by the faint yellow flickering bulb. The bulb hums as if there’s flies trapped in it.

“Can’t barely see nothing,” says one of them.

“Sorry,” says Missus Lambert briskly. She flicks a switch and the lights come on properly – flood-like along the walls. The shadows become the shelving, miles of it shelves, and refrigerators. The room’s the size of a supermarket, a long one. It’s 10, 50, 100 times bigger than the shop.

“How do you manage all this by yourself?” asks one – the one who stole.

Missus Lambert raises an eyebrow. “I won’t be, will I, with you two delivering.”

It’s quite simple, she explains, leading them through a bewildering array of goods. She’ll take the phone calls, the emails – yes, she snaps at the disbelieving expressions, the bitshop is online – and she will set the goods ready to deliver, and each day the boys will take the goods carefully house to house, as needed. And politely, for she’ll not have the good name of the bitshop smirched by them. When they settle in, when it’s clear they might be a good fit – though she says it strangely “if the shop fits you” – she’ll allow them to fetch the goods themselves. She expects it won’t take them long to learn their way around the stockroom …

She stops at an arbitrary line.

“This, here onwards, is off-limits.” Off-limits looks exactly like the bit of the room they’re standing in, if the absolute end of it. There’s a row of chest freezers against the back wall. They’re filthy, finger marks on the edges where they’ve been opened, but otherwise thickly layered with dirt. The wall behind them bulges in a way that makes it look like it’s moving, like one of those optical illusions. It’s definitely warmer back here – the freezers must struggle.

Missus Lambert scuffs a mark on the floor. “You don’t go beyond here. No matter what you come to get, you don’t open those chests. I’ll know.”

• • •

“It’s all right,” they say to Mam when they get home. “She’s not so bad.”

“Well what sort of thing will you be delivering?” she says, plating up dinner. There’s a swirling smell of warm grease and caramelized onions, and the chill of her anxiousness cuts through as though she didn’t send them off to the job herself.

“Pork chops, today,” says one, Michael, the one who stole. They’re home now, and Mam can tell them apart even if no one else can. “Beans. Exciting things like that.” Mam looks doubtfully at the chops on the plates she’s just put on the table. Michael raises an eyebrow. “Perk of the job, Mam. It’s fine.”

“I delivered a new hat to someone,” says the other, hurriedly – David. The one who pointed. He’s not sure he’ll be able to choke down a chop, ‘cause Missus Lambert doesn’t know about the perks Michael’s decided to have. “Wouldn’t have thought the bitshop was the place for clothes, but …”

“And I delivered a box of pens.”

“Nothing more than that, though?” asks Mam, a bit anxious. “Because Missus Lambert’s a gem, of course, but some of the things people ask for …”

“What like?” says David, though he’s not sure he wants to know what might really be lurking in that stockroom.

Mam laughs, a bit brittle. “Well, you know, there’s rumors. Mr. Mudlam, that time, asked for something to make his wife happy, and then he vanished …”

“That one’s just a joke, though,” said David. “Everyone knows he had another family out in Helmingly-on-Sea.”

“They haven’t seen him either,” said Michael. “That’s what I heard. And anyway, she said not those things, not for delivery. So it’s not a problem. Mam, what are you worrying about? You always worry.”

“Oh,” said Mam. “Just the Lamberts, they have long memories. It does well to stay on their right side.”

“Oh, well, she definitely remembers us, if that’s what you’re worried about,” says David. “And she still scares the shit out of me, like, but we’ll be fine, if Michael behaves.” He glares at his brother, who takes a big bite of pork chop and chews through his grin. “I think she might even like us. Likes that we’re supporting the bitshop against evil corporations and all that bollocks, you know. Support your local independents.”

“Language,” says Mam, but so relieved that there’s no strength to her admonishment.

Her sons make her a cup of tea, do the washing up. They’re well brought up, she thinks. That incident with the mints was the beginning and end of it.

• • •

Pork chops, beans, weekly shops. Now that the shine of seeing behind the fly curtain is over, the best part of the job is the sneaking view into other people’s lives. Mundane, mostly, but somehow fascinating to know that the fella at number 53 gets through about six bags of spinach a week; that her across the park needed a spindle for a spinning wheel (and Missus Lambert magicked one up). Word hasn’t yet spread fully that the bitshop delivers, so a lot of the day involves standing around behind the counter, waiting for instructions, especially when both of them are working. It’s been three weeks of delivering when David gets sent down to the storeroom by himself for the first time. Michael’s out dropping off stationery, so David’s alone with Missus Lambert, though he’s pretty sure she doesn’t know which twin he is.

Wellies, size 5 child. Blue, preferably.

“I’ll draw you a map,” she says. She draws him a map. “David, you’ll be quite all right, I’m sure. Just keep your head.”

It’s a disconcerting sendoff for a task that, really, shouldn’t be that difficult – both that he’s supposed to keep his head, but also that she got his name right. Getting his name right means she’s separating him from his brother – she’s turning those truth-seeking eyes on him and they are working. And though it’s frustrating being treated as one when they are two, there’s also comfort in it: his brother’s larger-than-lifeness is a shield to hide behind, and she has wiped that away.

And she knows it, he realizes. The stockroom is a test, of sorts, because he’s noticed something, and she’s noticed he’d noticed: they go out on delivery all the time, but Missus Lambert doesn’t seem to get any stock delivered in.

In the little blue backroom, he has, again, that disconcerting moment of seeing his own back vanish into the dark beyond the curtain on the screen. He studies the map carefully – stupid, really, but suppose there’s some code word for finding the wellies. Does Missus Lambert have other people living and working down there or something, smuggling goods in through a hidden doorway at the back? Maybe the rumors are real …

The stockroom door swings open with its whispery little squeal. He catches it before it bangs into the wall, wipes his sweaty hands on his jeans and enters.

Can’t find the light switch. Of course he can’t – he was so busy gawping at the shelves first time round he never saw where they were. He pulls out his phone and turns on the torch function, casts the weak light around the walls. Nothing. It’ll have to do.

It’s not much better than the gray dark, all leaping shadow shapes, but at least he can count his way along the shelves and pull out a few wellies. He thinks of his brother, out in the bright sun, delivering sausages and A4 binders. They both still wear T-shirts to the shop. He has a feeling that the day they wear long sleeves, some sort of penance will have been paid, for an incident not even his fault.

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5, left turn, right turn, four more shelves.

Here?

He wipes his hand along a shelf and raises a cloud of dust, peculiarly sweet and musty, like cedar mixed with honey. It huffs and snuffs up his nose till he sneezes - and the phone flies out of his hand and skitters under a shelf, almost as if it has a mind of its own. It skims the ground like some black-shelled bug running for its life, propelled by the glow of its belly. The dark is not pitch. It’s worse than pitch – it’s threateningly gray, lumpy, musty, draped with webs and cloths and the soft, flaking fingers of creatures that have never seen daylight.

David shudders, swears at himself for his imagination. Where did that thought come from? He remembers a trick Michael swore by when they were younger. Closes his eyes tight, stares at the back of his own eyelids and their panicked display of light splatters and floating orbs for what feels like full minutes. Actually opens them a few seconds later, braced for a world of gray.

Now he can see the faint outlines of the boxes and shelves. He feels his way along them carefully, until he’s back to the middle aisle. At one end, so fine and glimmering it could be a mirage, is the outline of the door he came through. He will, he decides, admit defeat. Tell Missus Lambert that he’s not ready for the secrets of the bitshop stockroom yet; he’s a delivery boy, not a goods-fetcher. They are two different things, like he and Michael are two different people. Michael would make a great goods-fetcher – he does it naturally, not always legally. He doesn’t get jumpy in the dark. But he, David, he’s a delivery boy. He’s good at giving, good at passing on. The only thing he is good at taking, he thinks sourly, is the blame for his brother’s actions. His brother right now is out shagging Alice Emberly under the guise of delivering a packet of pens.

He shuffles carefully toward the rectangle, hands outstretched.

Michael would get a kick out of this, though, he thinks. And misses his brother for a second almost as much as he is angry with him.

The door doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, so he walks faster, almost running, and he’s nearly there, he thinks, nearly to the blue room where time feels a bit weird, but at least it doesn’t smell, when he hears Missus Lambert calling him. He has just a moment to wonder why he can’t see her in the doorway and why, also, she seems to be calling from behind him, before he trips against an obstacle, his toe catching under it, hurtling him forward over a sharp-edged corner which shoves the air out of him from the belly up and knocks his head briefly against old, painted stone.

He grabs on to the dark, trying to stay upright and smears his hands through the layers of dirt on the freezer chest he’s landed on. The filth is soft under his fingers, like velvet. It occurs to him that freezers have lights – he need only open one and he will at least see where he is. There may even be a light switch at this end of the room – it would make sense, surely, for a room this long to have light switches at both ends, and especially if there was a door. He’s sure there was a door; there was something … He hooks his nails under the edge of the freezer and yanks against a long-closed seal. The whole freezer jerks, and then the lid releases with a hiss, and swings up loosely as if it’s been waiting to open – as if it’s been pushed from the inside.

There is light, and he’s blinded for a moment by brilliance – and the smell. The awful smell. The freezer is broken, it must be, and whatever is inside, the colourful silhouettes, the neon outlines against the bright light – it is rotting. And he sees … he sees … reaching fingers, bare arms, roiled and tangled roots passing through and into a fleshy mound, a face, puckered and wrinkled, waking – mouth opening and closing in a yawn, and it turns its eyes to him and they are gimlets, lasering him, looking for guilt, looking for truth …

Missus Lambert calls again, from somewhere far behind him, and the flood lights flare on.

He slams the lid closed.

It took him long minutes to shuffle the wrong way down the full length of the storeroom. It takes her seconds of angry stamping to reach the same place.

“Where are the wellies?” she demands. She places one hand flat on top of the chest freezer without looking down at it.

“I couldn’t find the light switch,” says David. “And I dropped my phone …”

Missus Lambert nods, curtly, grabs him by the elbow and leads him first to the wellies, which are exactly where she said they would be, and then to the door, where she points at the light switches very obviously right next to the doorframe.

She unpurses her lips long enough to serve the welly-needing customer, and waits for the dooming jangle of the bell to fade before turning to David.

“And did you look, then?” she says, as casually as if they are carrying on a conversation from earlier. She is watching him the same way she must have watched Mrs. Selter when she asked for suitcases; when Mr. Mudlam asked for something to make his “bitch wife happy for once”. And when Daisy McClean, David remembers now, when Daisy McClean asked for the dog who came to her rescue, mauling scars into the father who, it turned out, wasn’t quite as soft as everyone thought.

He can’t lie.

“Yeah,” he says. “Missus Lambert, I don’t think this job’s for me.”

“This shop’s been here a long time,” says Missus Lambert. “It keeps a balance. If you take you have to give; if you set roots you have to fertilize them. This shop’s the roots of this town. Do you see what I’m saying?”

He doesn’t.

“No,” he says.

“Good,” says Missus Lambert. She walks briskly – she walks so briskly for such an old lady – to the door of the shop and swings the sign closed. It is not yet time to close. “You’re not lying, that’s good.” David backs toward the crisps shelves. The packets crinkle into his back. Missus Lambert keeps coming, toward, toward … past. “You can’t simply provide, you know. There’s a balance, to making sure people get what they need, even if it’s not what they want. You end up feeding yourself to a place like this, bit by bit. Body, soul, mind. It’s wearing.” She beckons him back over to the fly curtain, and he follows like a calf led by milk.

She points at the door, swinging gently open all by itself.

“It was for your own good, I told you stay away from it. It was an accident, I know, but we’ve got a taste of you now. So?”

“So,” repeats David, dazed.

“So what do you want? Do you want to be out of a job, David? You’re not the first I’ve had work here; you won’t be the last. This is, as I said, a job of heart and soul. You’d be part of long tradition if you stayed. But if you choose not, you’d be the first I’ve had to let go.”

David nods. “I know – we, we’re probably not a good fit.”

The door swings open wider. Out the front of the shop, the doorbell rings. Missus Lambert, hair neat, eyes twinkling and friendly now, looks at David with just a tilt of an eyebrow. “We, you say. Now, I don’t know about we. Hoi, now,” she adds, “am I right that you would’ve had pork chops for dinner again the other night?”

David nods again.

Missus Lambert shakes her head. “Your Mam, she’ll understand,” she says. “You should go now. Consider this … a redundancy. Not a firing.”

On the little television screen, Michael pushes through the front door of the shop just as he pushes through the fly curtain, and he winks at David and grins at Missus Lambert and announces that he has a date with Alice, so he won’t be working the Saturday. And Missus Lambert nods and smiles as though the dating lives of teenage boys are all she’d like to hear about, but her eyes are gimlets, and for now will Michael, please, fetch something from the stockroom for a delivery?

Michael grins – delighted – and punches David on the arm.

“Look at that – we’re the inner circle now!” he says.

David daredn’t punch him back. He doesn’t want that to be the last thing he does to his brother. Missus Lambert gives Michael instructions, strict, and David’s map. Michael pretty much skips into the stockroom, sticks his head back in, asks where the light switch is, and Missus Lambert shows him as if the lights will help him at all.

She settles in her armchair, presses a button on the TV and the scene changes.

David takes a wooden seat alone, and watches himself whistling through the stock room door, doing a jaunty walk down the middle aisle. Picking through the boxes, pocketing a thing or two. He watches himself hover at the line they were told not cross, and check back quick over his shoulder, and then step deliberately on toward the chest freezers, and when that happens he feels an icy shearing through his chest and his loses his breath for a second and goes dizzy.

He closes his eyes, and when he opens them, the screen has gone dark and Missus Lambert is gone, too, and the door to the storeroom is stood open. There’s an envelope with “David” scrawled on it. and it’s the pay he’s owed, but he leaves it where it is, and hovers at the open door wondering whether it’s too late to turn on the lights, and what he’ll see if he does. He catches the smell of the open freezer, and hears a clattering of footsteps rushing out of the dark, and he hears a shriek that could be his own voice and as though caught on a string he turns and runs through the clinging tangle of the fly curtain. The curtain wraps his arms and catches in his hair and he thinks it’s the curtain holding him and pulling him – he thinks it is, as he tears loose and runs home panting with tears streaming down his face. He runs home and it’s just the one heart pounding, just the one person’s breath gasping, just the one soul making it safe back.

Mam doesn’t ask. She doesn’t need to: sets the table for two, and tells her friends proudly that, yes, Michael’s gone into retail: stockroom coordinator.

They still shop at the bitshop. Even knowing. Even then. They order an easy delivery once a month, but the parcels are left on the doorstep. No matter how David watches and waits at the window, he only ever sees his brother’s back as he walks away, and Michael never turns around when David calls his name, and over the years one of them grows older and grayer and stoops and forgets which one he was, and the other has forgotten that he was ever two.