Evensong (36 page)

He had to stop this relentless spot-picking. He needed to focus on unrelated things. Anything that would take his mind somewhere else. The Cobra, for instance. He’d always wanted a Cobra. It looked like no other car ever made, right on the cusp of ugliness and beauty. Its power wasn’t much in evidence in this foul traffic, but he’d open it up when he got further out of Brighton.

Thinking about the Cobra didn’t work, though. He felt as empty as if his own identity had been wiped, and there was nothing put into him to fill it.

And then he thought of something.

They put Marek’s identity into her mind after wiping her mind clear of hers, and hers came back and shoved Marek’s aside. Does that mean the soul, or the identity, resides in the body and not the brain? No, that couldn’t be. But maybe, however good they were at this, they weren’t good enough.
You can never completely wipe a soul away.
Some residual traces will always remain, and they’ll always grow back. Like grass will always grow back through concrete buildings, if the buildings are left empty for long enough. Makes you wonder where the soul really resides.

For a moment he felt comforted and even slightly optimistic at the thought. Then he remembered what he’d done, and realised he was whistling in the dark. No, it doesn’t make you wonder where the soul really resides. It might sound more poetic if the body’s microscopic building blocks, its cells or its atoms, have some residual memory of the original identity. But, more likely,
they
just weren’t as good at wiping identities as they thought they were.

And it leaves me no better than I was when I left the Pier. Consultants aren’t alone. Consultants who kill the only two people who ever meant anything to them, they’re alone.

By now he’d reached the Seven Dials district of Brighton, on the way out towards the Downs. The traffic was still heavy, but he expected it to thin out soon.

He was driving past the Al Quds Mosque, the new one built on the site of the old one, when he noticed a car following him. It was a Ferrari Octavian—low, wide, with an almost alien beauty, like one of Rafiq’s VSTOLs. He noticed the car because it had been expertly weaving its way through the traffic and was getting closer. It was about five cars behind him now.

Its colour was distinctive, too. It wasn’t the usual rather vulgar Ferrari orange-red, but a beautiful deep dark red. Like her dress. By now it was only three cars behind him, and he could make out Gaetano’s face behind the windshield. He’d never talked about cars with Gaetano before, but a Ferrari Octavian would seem about right for him. As fast as the Cobra. Maybe even faster. Certainly more conventionally beautiful.

Gradually, coming out of Seven Dials, the traffic thinned. The buildings lining either side of the road were less densely packed, and the road itself was faster and wider.
Time.
Anwar floored the accelerator, and the Cobra did what it had always been designed for, both in its original incarnation and in its replica form.

The car chase that followed was something whose irony wasn’t lost on Anwar, and probably wasn’t on Gaetano either: it was a repeat of the Cobra-Ferrari Wars at Le Mans in the 1960s, though this one lasted only a fraction of the time. The Ferrari was at least as fast as the Cobra, and Gaetano was a driver of almost equal ability to Anwar. He couldn’t quite catch Anwar, but Anwar couldn’t quite lose him either.

In this fashion, though only for a few short miles, the two cars hurtled out of Brighton in the direction of the Downs. Then Anwar thought,
Why do I need to lose him?
He slammed on the brakes, downshifted the gears, and did a handbrake turn, so the Cobra was facing the Ferrari as it came round a bend.

He’d stopped right on the edge of Devil’s Dyke. In the small car park overlooking its northern slopes. He smelt the damp earth and grass, the same smell from before. They both got out of their cars and walked slowly towards each other.
I always knew I’d come back here before I left Brighton. I never thought it would be like this.

“I’m done here,” he said to Gaetano. “I’m going to the Downs to pick up a VSTOL back to Rafiq. You should go back too. We don’t need this.”

“I can’t,” Gaetano said. “Not now.” There was something wrong about his voice, something thick and choked. He made an odd, swift movement inside his jacket.

“Don’t go for the gun,” Anwar said. “Or the knife. I’d be quicker.”

“Then...”

“Not combat, either. I’d win. And it’d be an anticlimax after the Signing Room.”

“Why did you do it?”
Gaetano’s eyes were red-rimmed. Anwar knew what she’d meant to him, but he couldn’t for the life of him imagine Gaetano actually shedding tears.

“I can’t tell you. And you wouldn’t believe me anyway. Go back now. This belongs to another time.”

“I’ll hunt you down,” Gaetano said quietly. “For the rest of my life, and yours. I’ll never stop. I will find you.”

“I know you will. But it won’t be me.”

She knows Gaetano is coming. Now. This evening. It will be either here in her flat, or in Rochester Cathedral. She doesn’t want it to be in the Cathedral.

She decides she won’t go there tonight. She’ll miss Evensong.

And Gaetano isn’t the only one getting closer. There’s also Michael Taber. She remembers her conversation with him after last week’s Evensong, and thinks wryly,
He’s too clever.
Surely Deans of Cathedrals aren’t supposed to be like that. Only people in positions like Rafiq are supposed to be like that.

Rafiq. She thinks of her meeting with him, at Fallingwater, on October 22, 2060.

“I’ve done your bidding. I completed the mission. I avenged your family. Now I want out of the Consultancy, and I want you to do this last thing for me.”

“Are you sure about this, Anwar?”

“Yes. I can’t remain as I am.”

“We can make you look like her on the surface, but you won’t
be
her.”

“Surface will be enough.”

Rafiq paused, and considered yet again. The whole idea was so insane he kept going over and over it, trying to find reasons for refusing.
Psychologically he’s blown to pieces. He’s no use to me now, he’ll never recover from what he’s done. We’ve put a fortune into him, but sometimes with Consultants you just have to take the hit and let them go. Like Adeola Chukwu, when she became Adeola Chukwu-Asika. Also, he was never really one of the top ones, even now. And…what he said. I owe him.

“Our surgeons will brief you fully, but I can give you some of the details.”

“Please. I’m good at details.”

“They can’t make you exactly her size: too many major bones to shorten. You’ll be a little taller than she was, but the resemblance will still be close. Your enhancements will be reduced. You’ll keep some of your abilities, but not enough to face people like Gaetano. The surgery will take weeks, and so will the physiological and psychological adjustments. And we can’t give you her mind, or soul, or identity. That’s gone, Anwar. We only do bodies.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Or do you really think that looking like her will somehow make you turn into her?”

“No. I don’t think that.” “Then why do you want this?”

“So I can go to churches she went to, looking like her. Walkinplacesshewalked,lookinglikeher.Walkinherworld for a while, rather than live without her in mine.” He wasn’t consciously paraphrasing Jim Weatherly’s old song, but he recognised the words when he spoke them. They fitted.

She has left the front door of her flat open so she can hear them when they enter the hall and walk up the stairs. She expects there will be more than one. Gaetano, certainly, and perhaps Proskar and two or three others.

She is still shabbily dressed. Her cheap blue jeans are faded and frayed. Her blonde hair is lank and greasy, not coiffed and swirled to hide the sharpness of the features Rafiq’s surgeons have recreated so closely.

And all this time she hasn’t been able to bring herself to wear a skirt or dress. Anwar has been remade to look like Olivia. Does that mean Anwar could get an erection if he stood in front of a mirror and looked at his remade body? He could, if the remaking hadn’t been so thorough, and if he still had a penis. But Rafiq’s surgeons have thoughtfully given him a clitoris.

Anwar is long gone.
She knows she has to keep thinking of him in the third person. And Olivia, too. She’s neither, and both. She doesn’t know where her identity resides.

Or where she resides. She has been drifting from one seedy flat to another, from Evensongs at one church to another, but she has always wanted Rochester Cathedral to be her final destination. She remembers that Olivia liked it, and liked the quiet understated companionship of the Old Anglicans. She remembers that Olivia told Anwar that, once.

The irony isn’t lost on her. The ones who wanted Olivia dead, the ones Anwar had fought and defeated, are now satisfied. The ones who loved Olivia, who fought along side Anwar to protect her, are the ones coming for her this evening. Or coming for me, whoever I am.

She thinks, how would Anwar feel about all this? He’d loved a woman who’d been abducted and force-fed the soul of a man—an unspeakable man—and the man’s soul started to revert back to the woman’s. And now Anwar is a man’s soul inhabiting the surgically-replicated body of that woman, and knowing, because the body is only a replica, that he’ll never turn into her.

She knows exactly how Gaetano will feel, though. Gaetano will kill someone who looks like Olivia, knowing she isn’t the real Olivia. Maybe the real Olivia wasn’t what Anwar had killed, either. Or maybe she was. Parvin Marek had died, or had been dying, inside her.

Which makes her recall another irony. Marek, who’d murdered Rafiq’s family, was also part of Olivia when Olivia was persuading Rafiq to give her someone to protect her life.

She doesn’t want to go down that road anymore, so it’s almost a relief when, at last, she hears the door to the hall downstairs being softly but precisely forced open.

“Time,” she says to the ginger cat. It has been standing in her open doorway. It looks back at her, its amber eyes huge and expressionless. “Go. They’ll probably take you back to Brighton with them.”

The ginger cat walks out through her open doorway. It pauses to look back at her over its shoulder and meows Fuck You. It is not, and never has been, fooled by her appearance.

She sits in an old stained armchair and waits for them. She hears them entering the hall downstairs and hears their voices (Gaetano’s and Proskar’s, among others) greeting the ginger cat.

In her bedroom, on the pillow, is the page Anwar once tore out of his book, the page with the first four lines of Sonnet 116. On the floor by the side of her chair she has placed Olivia’s book, the one Olivia gave Anwar and which Anwar took with him along with her cat. She has left it open at the title page, with Olivia’s inscription in large untidy writing.

You mistimed.

She considers putting Anwar’s torn-out page on top of Olivia’s spread-open book, but decides the symbolism is rather obvious. And there isn’t time. She can hear them walking up the stairs.

Author photograph by Gemma Shaw

John Love spent most of his working life in the music industry. He was Managing Director of PPL, the world’s largest record industry copyright organization. He also ran Ocean, a large music venue in Hackney, East London.

He lives just outside London in northwest Kent with his wife and cats (currently two, but they have had as many as six). They have two grown-up children.

Apart from his family, London, and cats, his favorite things include books and book collecting, cars and driving, football and Tottenham Hostpur, old movies, and music. Science fiction books were among the first he can remember reading, and he thinks they will probably be among the last.

Evensong
is John Love’s second novel. His first,
Faith
, was published by Night Shade Books in 2012.