Backstory

[versatilehand]

”I see your spelling hasn’t improved.”
“Piss off.”
“How’s your handwriting?”
“Versatile.”
Clip [20 seconds in]

Timothy Eames is born to Derek and Claire Eames in the summer of 1977. His parents own a fashionable private art gallery in the heart of Mayfair, and live in a penthouse apartment nearby. They’re a rich family, without a financial care in the world, and their son – and, later, their daughter Molly – grow up never wanting for anything.

As a young boy, Timothy is a social child, always the centre of attention from the day he starts at pre-school. He enjoys his time there; the days are filled with fun things to do, art and music and games with the other children. His parents receive glowing reports from the staff, which of course is to be expected, because no member of the Eames family is ever going to be anything less than perfect.

And then, real school starts. At first Timothy loves that like he had loved his pre-school, but then his teacher starts on the skills of reading and writing. From the beginning, Timothy struggles with this, his frustration made worse by the fact that he has never struggled at anything, ever, in all of his short life. Whatever he wants, he gets, and anything he wants to be good at, he learns to do. That’s who he is, that’s how he’s been brought up. And now, here he is, sat on a carpet with 15 other children, being asked what sounds go with what symbols and having it all go over his head whilst his classmates answer as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

“Everyone learns differently,” his parents promise, the afternoons he’s driven home in tears. “You’re a smart boy. All children learn to read and write.”

Years pass, and whilst Timothy does show progress, it is at half the speed of the rest of his class. By Year 3, he is taken aside in English lessons, made to sit one-to-one with an assistant to go over concepts he knows his classmates have mastered a year or more ago. But no matter how hard he tries, words on the page swim in front of his eyes, the letters produced at the end of his pencil refuse to come out in the right order. He’s praised, constantly, for having a level of handwriting beyond his years – his letters always neat and perfectly formed – but his spelling is quite simply atrocious. And as for reading? It takes him more time to read the first sentence of a worksheet than it takes most of his classmates to complete the work.

His parents, of course, don’t blame him. At the start of Year 5, he’s taken out and shipped off to a boarding school, the best education money can buy. It’s his teachers’ fault that his six-year-old sister can read and write better than him, that’s what his parents say. His new school will get him up to speed.

But his new school, as it turns out, just makes things worse. He’s given a whole battery of assessments, his first day there, before his parents have even finished settling him into his dormitory. He sits quietly in the headmaster’s office, later that day, letting the man row with his parents over his head. The word ‘dyslexia’ is bounced around, a word Timothy doesn’t understand, the differing reactions of his headteacher and his parents not helping. His father is yelling things like “my son is no idiot” and “does he look like a special needs case to you?”, whilst the man behind the desk is calmly explaining that “his IQ is unaffected” and “are you aware Einstein was dyslexic?”. All that Timothy really understands is that he is going to have special English lessons, from now on, with other children at the same level as he is. Lessons which turn out to be the most degrading experience the nine-year-old has ever experienced.

The worksheets are clearly taken from resources meant for pre-school children, and Eames – every pupil is called by their surname, here - takes immediate offence to the pictures of teddy bears and fluffy bunnies. The teacher treats him like a four-year-old as well, talking to him as if he’s some sort of idiot, and Eames hates that even more than the work. Within half a term, he’s given up on the classes completely. He lies, straight to Mrs. Special Need’s face, says he’s been asked to go back to English lessons with the rest of his year. He honestly doesn’t expect it to work, but he learns then that he can sound incredibly convincing when needs be; his teacher accepts his words without even seeming surprised. Of course, the Year 5 English teacher still believes him to be in remedial classes, and as simply as that, he’s left not needing to be in either class.

He’s left with the dilemma of what to do with himself when he’s meant to be in English, not wanting to be caught outside of lessons. It’s in devising a solution to this that he discovers another talent; thievery. It barely takes any effort for him to swipe a set of keys from the dormitory cleaners, pretending to trip up one morning on the way to breakfast as he passes one of the cleaning carts. From then on, all he has to do is let himself into the locked dormitories during his allotted English sessions. Nobody ever comes looking for him. When the time comes for reviews and grades, he just steals his own report card and puts an A in the right box, carefully drawn in his English’s teacher’s handwriting.

Other than English, however, Eames enjoys the privileges of a top class education. Just as he had been at his old school, he is constantly top of the class in art and all of its related subjects. He can draw with a level of detail his teachers rarely see in A-Level students, his woodwork is precise and always perfectly measured. He’s picked for more than one of the school sports teams, possessed of remarkable hand-eye coordination skills (mostly honed through his newfound talent for stealing and sleight of hand). He adores drama almost as much as he loves art, and is involved at some level in every dramatic production put on by the school. On the more academic side of the curriculum, he falls in love with history, and politics, showing a remarkable ability for retaining facts. He loves languages, and whilst reading and writing in French, or Spanish, is just as confusing as English, he learns to speak them both easily, learning through listening and copying. His grades are poor, thanks to his literacy problems, but he and his teachers know that the understanding is there. He’s terrible at mathematics, for the same reasons reading and writing elude him, the symbols confusing and illogical – but unlike English, a good deal of his classmates are equally terrible at the subject, and he never feels the same level of shame he does when questioned about his literacy.

He’s fifteen when he’s finally found out. Mock O Levels, and he fails every single one of them. Not because he can’t answer the questions – he knows exactly what he wants to say, but even with the extra time given to him because of his dyslexia, he’s barely managed to write a paragraph when he’s told to put his pen down. Confronted, he has no choice but to explain what he’s been doing, and to this day it is one of the worst memories of his life. His teachers, looking at him as if he’s committed murder. His parents, nothing but disappointed, scandalised that anyone in their family could ever fail at anything. The friends he’s made, turning their backs now that they know who he really is.

That summer, his parents organise for private tutoring for their son. Eames – he doesn’t think of himself as Timothy, any more – is prepared to hate the sessions like he hated his school’s remedial classes, but as it turns out, the woman his parents hire actually knows what she’s doing. Also, she’s young and curvaceous, and that catches Eames’ attention like it would any teenage boy. Instead of sitting him down with childish worksheets, she teaches him through things he enjoys. They talk about history, geography, the artists he admires and the plays he’s been in. She teaches him strategies that make the letters clearer, small things like using coloured paper, a bigger font. He learns to read through classic literature, something he can engage with far better than pointless sentences about domestic animals sitting in doorways.

He passes all his O Levels. Not well, but he passes. He’s never going to be reading War and Peace, nor is he ever going to be the next Shakespeare, but he’s old enough to feel happy in the talents he does have. And thanks to his tutoring session, he no longer feels like an illiterate idiot. Reading and writing, they’re always going to be a chore. But they’re not impossible, not any more. He takes A-Levels in art, drama, French and history. As expected, he scrapes a pass in French and history, unable to put his knowledge into words, but his art and drama grades make up for it. Unable to cope with the idea of further education, Eames moves back home from school, and spends a while working in his parent’s gallery, but whilst he appreciates the art and the conversation, he’s bored. He knows there’s more to his life than working in a gallery.

It’s boredom that makes him do it, in the end. He’s in a cafe, one Saturday afternoon, sat out in the sun with a coffee, idly people-watching. It’s peaceful, or at least, it is until the man at the next table starts up an incredibly loud conversation on his mobile phone. As his frustration rises, Eames becomes more and more inclined to go over and give the man a piece of his mind – but just before he gets up, the guy finally finishes arguing with his company and puts his phone back down on the table. With a huff, he unfolds his newspaper instead, and quickly becomes engrossed.

For the last two years, Eames has kept his fingers to himself, but seeing that phone lying open on the cafe table is more than enough to feel that old adrenaline rush deep in his veins. Leaving some money on his own table for his drink, he gets up and walks slowly past the man and his newspaper, hand slowly coming out once he knows it’s hidden away behind the broadsheet. With the smallest of movements, he lets his palm slide over the phone, his fingers moving to clutch at it, and then he’s walking away, as casual as he can manage with his heart thumping in his chest. Once he deems himself far enough away, he starts to run, beginning to laugh as he realises that he’s gotten away with it. He’s stolen, in broad daylight, and he’s gotten away without trouble.

Or at least, that’s the first thought that crosses his mind, before he becomes aware of the footsteps chasing him down. Cursing, he turns, expecting an angry businessman, but it’s not the guy he’s stolen from who’s chasing him down an alley. Instead, it’s a different man, dressed in an expensive-looking suit, a man Eames recognises as having been sat a few tables away from him at the cafe. Immediately, he puts up his hands in a gesture of surrender, expecting the guy to be after him on behalf of the businessman, but as he gets closer Eames realises he’s smiling.

“You’ve got some skill there, son,” he’s laughing as he reaches Eames, gesturing for him to put his hands down. “I could use someone with those skills of yours.” The man, it turns out, runs a small team of con artists in the heart of central London, and is always on the lookout for new ‘talent’, as he calls it. He reassures Eames that they only steal from those who deserve it, quoting the hustlers’ motto that you cannot con an honest man. Eames shakes the man’s hand in the afternoon sun, and a whole new career is born. Over the next few years, Eames learns everything there is to learn about the con artist business, and these news skills combined with his natural artistic talent lead him to become one of the most requested forgers in the country.

With the number of contacts he makes in his line of work, it’s not long before Eames begins to hear about a whole new branch of con artistry; extraction within dreams. The first time he’s offered in on an extraction job, it’s not as forger, but as extractor. He started as a thief, after all, and there’s little need for a forged Van Gogh in the world of the subconscious. It’s another year before he’s asked to play extractor on a job which also hires a dream forger, and it’s as if some huge lightbulb has been illuminated in Eames’ mind. Here is his ideal profession on a platter; it’s cunning, skillful thievery, but it’s also ultimately creative, artistic, in a far more human way that the creativity ascribed to the architect. He doesn’t need to read or write to watch somebody and learn how they move, how they speak; he’s done it for years already, impersonating people from every walk of life playing con man in reality. Even before that, he hadn’t been picked for the lead in the school play almost every year for no reason.

He introduces himself to the forger at the end of the job, begs and offers anything to be taken on as an apprentice. The man – Franklin, as Eames came to know him – accepts, and over the next six months teaches his new protégé everything he knows. Within the year, Eames has surpassed even what Franklin knows how to do, able to transform every part of himself within a dream, even gender. Word spreads fast, in their line of work, and by the time Cobb comes calling for the Fischer inception, he’s widely renowned as the best dream forger in the business.