WHO KNOWS THEIR father’s date of birth? The key to all successful identity theft is preparation, so before I picked up the phone to ring Sky, I rummaged through the wardrobe, found his passport, gathered his account numbers and address details, and only then did I dial.
After cycling through automated gate-keepers, commercial jingles, unwanted offers and prompts to hang up and do this whole thing online instead of bothering us, I reached my destination; a far recess of the call centre at which the owner of a trilling female Scottish voice had been sitting at a cubicle and waiting for my call. Click.
“Good morning my name is Kirsty and how can I help you today?”
I was back in my parents’ house and trying to update their “viewing experience”, as these companies insist on terming it. The viewing experience at their place was broken. Where pictures of young sports-cherub Rory McIlroy smashing golf balls around verdant American pastures should have been gently dissolving from one to another, the viewing experience machine had instead been offering dancing digital cubes endlessly reforming. For the past week the viewing experience had been akin to watching Tetris – or my Mum’s at least. The plus side for him was that my father was elsewhere, enjoying a superior viewing experience – the minus being that he was doing so from a hospital bed.
Now I was hoping to impersonate a man in his 70s on the phone successfully so that the experience box could be fixed – Dad’s was the identity I was hoping to thieve, briefly.
“Hello Richard. To protect your identity, can you tell me your date of birth?”
On account of diligent research I knew this one. For some reason, I added a slightly rural emphasis to my response, as if Kirsty knew that Richard was from Abbeyleix and had not been reared in south Dublin. I was laying it on slightly thick, but my voice still sounded young; weird and sickly, but young.
“I must say, Richard, from your voice I’d have put you in your mid-20s at the most . . .”
I allowed myself a genuine laugh at her mistake. How far off-beam she was!
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“ You must get it a lot. Your voice is very youthful.”
“If only the rest of me was so young, Kirsty .”
“Right. Now, in order to confirm your request, I’ll send you a text message. When you reply to the text message, the order will be placed. Can you give me your mobile number?”
“ Sure, it’s 086 . . . hang on. Isn’t there another way of doing this?”
I gathered my composure before continuing. I certainly didn’t want Sky texting Dad in his hospital bed.
“I’m not great with the old mobiles I have to say. It drives my kids around the bend, but there you have it.”
“Well Richard, we can write you a letter instead.”
“That’ll take too long.”
“I’m sorry Richard, but they are the only two options available to us right now.”
“Kirsty, do you think I could give you my son John’s mobile telephone number? He’s much better at this stuff than I am, and he can respond to your request for me.”
She sighed.
“Okay then. What’s ‘your son’s’ number?”
Had I imagined it, or had she wrapped a set of judgmental air quotes around the concept of my own identity? I wanted to tell her that I was at least as unhappy about impersonating my own father as she was. Had he not been in hospital he could have made this call himself, and it was hard not to charge the moment with more significance than is entirely healthy. As time presses on, and the genetic prophesy is fulfilled, it feels as if we become more like our parents than our own selves, or the self-determined third person we thought we had been building all along. As I reeled off my own mobile number, it seemed that the very idea of “me” was leaking out of a phone line on the seabed somewhere between Dublin and Glasgow.
Did she doubt Richard’s existence, or John’s? I was the taxidermist’s assistant in the Flann O’Brien story Two in One, he who has killed Kelly, his tyrannical boss, and must now don his skin to preserve the illusion of two living men, only for the skin to stick. In Two in One, the assistant ends up being charged with his own murder – by Kelly – and reasons it thus: “If Kelly and I must each be either murderer or murdered, it is perhaps better to accept my present fate as philosophically as I can and be cherished in the public mind as the victim of this murderous monster, Kelly. He was a murderer, anyway.”
A bead of sweat lands on the picture page of Dad’s passport as Kirsty punches my mobile number into her terminal. In this old picture we look very alike.
“Okay, we’ll send ‘your son John’ a text which he can respond to and then your request will be accepted. Is there anything else I can do for you today?”
It seemed I was in the clear.
“No, I think that’s it, Kirsty. Thank you very much for your help.”
“You’re more than welcome, John. Have a nice day.”
Click.