Fractions (54 page)

In the play-park off Holloway Road, Eleanor paced along painted lion-footprints and suddenly scooted off to the swings. We'd taken her here to run about after all the Tube and bus rides she'd sat through.

Annette flopped on a bench. ‘I'm knackered,' she said. ‘Long walk.' She leaned back, eyes half-shut against the sunlight but still watching Eleanor.

I sat down beside her, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

‘Long talk, too?'

‘Oh yes. Dave.' She sighed and shifted, half-facing me, an arm draped along the back of the bench. ‘I came across him selling his Socialist Action faction rag at the assembly area, and I'd lost the Islington lot so I ended up marching along with all those Scottish trade unionists. Dave and I talked the whole way.'

I smiled. ‘Like old times.'

Annette ran her upper teeth over her lower lip, looked in her bag and reached for a cigarette.

‘Yeah, well…' She lit up and inhaled hard, sighed smokily. ‘You could say that. Shit, this is difficult.'

‘What's difficult?'

‘I should've told you this before, but there never seemed to be a good reason, or a good time. The fact is, for quite a while now David's been, well, kind of gallantly flirting with me, you know?'

‘Of course.' I smiled sourly, feeling tense and cold. ‘That's understandable. And I suppose you would coquettishly flirt right back?'

‘How nice of you to put it like that.' She leaned forward, eyes bright, and laid a hand on my knee. ‘But Dave's stubborn, and literal, and he's so goddamn
serious
…'

‘And he got the wrong idea,' I said, my voice heavy and flat. Eleanor came off the swing and ran up a grassy mound, like a long barrow, and began climbing a wood-and-metal artificial tree.

‘Yes.' Annette sounded relieved. ‘Maybe that's why –' She stopped for a moment and sucked air around the cigarette, as if it were a joint. ‘Today,' she continued in a firmer tone, ‘God, my ears were burning. He told me that letting our…relationship, or whatever it was, break up was the worst mistake he's ever made, that he's never got over me and…' Her voice trailed off and she stared into space. ‘He's always loved me and he wants me to come back,' she concluded in a rush.

I stared at her. ‘You mean to tell me –'

‘Daa-ad!' Eleanor wailed from the top of the climbing-tree. She wind-milled her arms as she swayed, her feet on the top grips. I jumped, I
warped space
– it seemed only a moment later that I was reaching up to catch her and lower her to the ground.

‘Stay on the swings,' I said. ‘Please!'

I sat down again beside Annette, shaking my head. My heart was thumping for several reasons.

‘He really just blatantly told you that?'

‘Yes,' Annette agreed.

‘
Jesus
!' I exploded. ‘What the fuck does he think he's up to?' I thought of our casual, friendly banter and felt sick.

‘I've told you,' Annette said, ‘what the fuck he thinks he's up to.'

‘And what did
you
say?'

Annette lit another cigarette, her hands shaky, the flame invisible in the light. ‘I said he was crazy, he was pushing it too far and that I was perfectly happy and I love you and Eleanor and there's no
way
I'd leave you for him. I told him to forget it, basically.' She smiled at me wanly. ‘What did you expect?'

‘Well, that, obviously.' I squinted into the sun at her, smiling with relief. I was angry, not at her – at him. But some of it must have leaked into my voice as I said, ‘But did you say to him that
you
don't love
him
?'

‘No,' Annette said. ‘I couldn't. It's not that I still love him!' She laughed. ‘I don't, not…like that, but I still care about him. As you do too, yes? And I don't know if you know this, but I got the feeling he's really
unhappy
, and confused and frustrated, and it woulda been like a kick in the teeth.'

A kick in the teeth, I thought – that could be arranged. But I breathed out, and relaxed and forced a smile, and said, ‘Yeah, OK, I'm glad you said what you did. To him and to me.' I smiled at her more genuinely, and leaned forward to put my arms around her and as I did so realised that I had a cigarette in my hand and that after five years off the damn' things I was smoking again.

‘Well,' I said, ‘fuck me.'

‘Yes.'

 

Which was all very well and wonderful, but afterwards, lying staring at the ceiling, I thought about all she had said, and – more worryingly – all that she hadn't.

Looking back, I could see that Annette had understated the length of time in which Reid had been ‘gallantly flirting' with her. He'd done it from the first evening he'd met us after we'd started going together. I'd thought it a joke on me, a compliment to Annette, in as much as I'd thought of it at all. Shortly afterwards, Reid had – to everyone's surprise – had a brief and tempestuous affair with Myra. Now
that
I'd thought showed a flash of male-primate teeth, a gesture at me. But strangely, he'd seemed more cutup about its predictable breakup than he had ever been about the ending of his relationship with Annette. Perhaps, like me, he'd unwittingly fallen for Myra, and she hadn't for him.

Sexual competition had been intertwined with our friendship from the start, and whether we were close or distant, so it apparently remained.

I rolled out of bed and padded through the flat to the kitchen. I sat in a pool of light and smoked another cigarette. Outside, in the black window, my reflection looked ironically back. The government health warning (always an occasion for ironic reflection) told me things I didn't need to know, and didn't warn of the real killer: the slight, the subtle, the incremental and irreversible hardening of the heart.

 

I was working at the college three days a week, and Monday wasn't one of them. Annette left for work, I cleared up the breakfast stuff and walked Eleanor to the school gates. I picked up the papers, almost bought ten Silk Cut, returned to the flat and whizzed through the housework like a student on speed. Then I sat down with a coffee and a Filofax and a savage bout of nicotine withdrawal.

Normally I'd devote days like this to what I called political work. (I'd almost persuaded Annette it was some kind of elaborate game-plan whereby I'd work my way up, from writing long pieces for obscure organisations and tiny pieces for famous organisations, to being the sort of global mover-and-shaker that a grateful humanity would some day commemorate with statues on the moons of Saturn.)

Today I had more serious plans. I found an old address for Reid in my Filofax, and a current one (with the old one crossed out) in one of Annette's diaries. I worked my way through every free-market, libertarian, anti-environmentalist or just sheer downright reactionary organisation I'd ever had any contact with, and phoned or sent Reid's details to their mailinglists. After about an hour that was done, and I wasn't satisfied, so I set out to cover a few more angles.

 

I leaned on the doorbell of the
Freethinker
offices in Holloway Road. Behind me the traffic rumbled past. As ever I felt saddened by the dusty window-display of sun-paled, damp-darkened books and pamphlets. After a minute the Society's secretary let me in. A slight-built, middle-aged man with a deeply lined face, eyes large behind thick glasses. Kind and unselfish and poor as an atheist church-mouse. I told him what I wanted, and he let me get on with it, busying himself with his breakfast while I picked my way through files, sifted stacks of magazines, got ink on my fingers from trays of painfully created label-sized addressing-stencils.

It didn't take long to compile a list of journals and organisations, mostly American, that could be guaranteed to stimulate a bit of free thought. By way of thanks on the way out I bought for full price a seriously shop-soiled copy of a selection from Thomas Paine's works. I browsed it while I used my Travelpass on an ideological whistlestop tour of London, from the Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley and the Market Bookshop in Covent Garden to Novosti Press Agency in Kensington, getting back via Bookmarks in Finsbury Park just in time to meet Eleanor coming out of school.

These are the times that try men's souls…The summer soldier, and the sunshine patriot, may shrink from the service of his country…

Reid miserable? He hadn't seemed so, except for that moment when he'd talked about union meetings. Looking back, I thought I'd seen in his eyes a desperate recollection of a waste of evenings, and a premonition of more to come. If he could try to fuck my wife and fuck with my life, the least I could do was to fuck up his mind. Reid was spooked by his ideas; he had wheels in the head. He
identified
with his beliefs in a way I never did with mine. He didn't enjoy exposing them to challenge, but when some bit of grit was dropped in their fine machinery he went to endless trouble to remove it, to clean and polish the wheels and replace any broken teeth. He'd once kept me up, if not exactly awake, half the night as he teased out the intricacies of a surreal debate the Fourth International had in the early 'eighties: over whether Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea was or was not a variant of…capitalism.

‘Stubborn, and literal, and so goddamn
serious
' – Annette had his number in more ways than one. And so did I. There was no way Reid could ignore any political literature that came through his letterbox. He'd worry away at refuting the most manifest absurdity, check up on every recalcitrant factoid and bold-faced lie. By the time he'd struggled with all those conflicting views, Reid's soul would be sorely tried.

 

Other streets, other summers…We met Reid at marches against the poll tax and apartheid. In the black June of '89 we sat down in a Soho street with thousands of Chinese and hundreds of Trotskyists, and sang ‘The Internationale', and he nodded, giving me an almost worried look, when I told him I would march with the Taiwanese students.

‘Ah so,' he murmured. ‘The Kuomintang. Catch you later.'

Neither I nor Annette said anything more about what he'd said to her, and he always seemed to turn up with a new girlfriend for every demo. All of them, Bernadette and Mairi and Anne and Claire, seemed to me like distant relatives of Annette, dark Irish girls with bright eyes and ironic voices.

He never commented on the steady trickle of anti-socialist or dissident socialist or maddeningly wrong-headed socialist material I kept sending him. In the end I think it was redundant: the way things went in the Communist world, the subscription to
Moscow News
would have covered the lot.

But it had an effect, and it wasn't the one I sought.

‘Basically,' says Ax, as he and Dee wander back along the canal-bank towards Circle Square, ‘I don't know if I believe it. I mean, most people just dismiss it, like, well, flying saucers and Old New Martian ruins and Elvis and shit. But I've heard stories.'

His pause indicates that whatever stories he's heard, Dee's going to hear too. She nods.

‘Go on.'

‘Well, some of us…not Tamara, not the activist types, OK, have always thought, or wished, that Wilde would come back. Or come through. And over the years, people have seen him. Or said they have. Out in the desert. Sometimes walking, sometimes driving a 'track. Usually he's with a girl, and he looks like he did when he was an old man.'

He's been going on about the iniquities of society for a few minutes now. He's talked about things that have happened to him, and about how they'd be all right with Reid but not with Wilde. Wilde wouldn't have stood for it. This Jonathan Wilde seems to be a mythical figure, somebody who knew Reid and lost out to him and who might, equally mythically, some day come back and avenge the oppressed. Dee has listened politely, filing it all away for more detailed study later. She's handling it as she used to handle social occasions. But what he's just said brings her up short.

‘What do you mean, an old man?' she asks.

‘Somebody who hasn't re-juved before stabilising,' Ax replies flippantly. ‘Quite a sight.'

Dee shudders, thinking of how people used to fall apart like badly maintained biotech, how they'd eventually
just stop.
Horrible. She's sat through classical movies with Reid, and they give a very different picture of Earth than historical romances do.
Nobody
lives happily ever after.

‘I saw an old man recently,' she says. ‘In the last couple of weeks. An old man with a girl, in a truck. Called up Reid's front office, said it was a wrong number.' She glances sidelong at Ax. ‘Not many old men here. Could that have been Wilde?'

Ax looks at her with sharp scepticism. ‘What was this guy like?'

‘Hmmm,' says Dee. She moves her lower lip over her upper teeth, then wipes her thumb across the teeth and observes the streak of lipstick.

‘Something bothering you?' Ax asks, amused.

Dee stops in mid-stride. ‘Yes.' The memory belongs to Secretary, but it resonates with several of her other selves as well: all the new ones she's loaded up have this odd imperative, linked to the memory and tagged to their root directories.

‘Just a minute,' she says.

There's a bollard a few metres away. She walks over to it and sits down, flipping the back of her black lace skirt carefully out of the way, so that she sits on the bollard, not on the skirt. The iron is cold through fine leather, thin silk and bare skin. Ax, watching, gives an appreciative moan, but Dee has already boot-strapped into the dry clarity of Sys.

When Dee is in Self she thinks of Sys as ‘Sis', and indeed it's what (she imagines) a big sister would be like: knowing everything, correcting her, tidying up after her, picking up and putting away the shrugged-off costumes of her quick-changed selves. She doesn't go into Sys very often, and doesn't stay in that thin, chill air for long.

Now, her cold inward eye takes in the hierarchy of her selves and minds and tools, the common structures and the ceaseless activity of Sys that make them one personality and not a squabbling legion contending for control of her body. She traces the memory of the phone-call, as it's passed from Secretary to Self to Sys, and then sees its onward cascade over the days in which she loaded up all that extra software: Scientist, Soldier, Spy, Seneschal…and on to Stores and Secrets, out on a limb of their own. These last two she can't access. They've always been in her mind anyway; but now patient, mindless subroutines of Sys are systematically besieging them, hurling code after code at their mental locks like antibodies at a virus.

She drops back in to Self. Ax is looking down at her with puzzled concern.

‘So that's how it happened,' she says, rising.

‘How what happened?'

‘How I became me. It was that phone-call. There was a command-code carried in it. It told me to load up and seek and search and…and I did, and when there were enough selves and data and so on in my head, it happened! I woke up!' She gives a flighty laugh. ‘Is that how it is with you? Do you get lots of selves, and then become self-aware?'

‘To the best of my knowledge,' Ax says gravely, ‘no. That is not how humans become self-aware. It happens at an early age, you understand.'

He shakes himself. ‘You're telling me you woke up because of a phone-call from an old man?'

‘Yes.'

‘Hey man, cool. This is like Zen! Maybe he
was
Wilde, or maybe he was a perfect master.'

He catches her hand and starts her walking again. She complies, searching her brain for some referent to ‘perfect master'. Scientist has a disdainful account, and its sneer is just fading from her mind as Ax asks excitedly:

‘Do you know how to draw?'

‘I can make pictures,' Dee says. ‘But I don't think he was a perfect master. The girl with him sure didn't look like she needed enlightenment.'

‘Zen,' Ax nods to himself. ‘Definitely.'

 

In the lower floor of the house there's a big room with a kitchen-range and sink, sofas and chairs and a heavy, scrubbed wooden table. Books and papers and kit are piled in corners, and on the table. Dee sits down at the table, clearing a space between cups and tools. Ax rummages up some sheets of paper and a steel ballpoint pen. He gives them to her.

‘So make a picture,' he says.

‘OK,' says Dee. She takes the pen in her right hand and steadies the paper with her left. A quick jiggle at the top right of the paper tells her the ink is black, and running smoothly. Closing her eyes, she calls up the image of the man in the truck. She ignores the girl for the moment (though there's something there, something about her eyes, that Dee thinks odd and in need of further investigation – more research is necessary, OK, over to Scientist)…now. Yes. Tab to Printer Control: a little routine in Secretary's repertoire.

Start. She hears the skittering sound of the pen on the paper for a minute, as her right hand moves back and forth horizontally, very fast, with tiny vertical movements lifting the pen on to and off the paper; and her left hand moves the paper away from her, very slowly. Finish.

She opens her eyes. ‘There,' she says. She rubs her wrist.

Ax is looking at her, open-mouthed. He closes his mouth and shakes his head.

‘OK,' he says. ‘Let's have a look.'

Even Dee is a little surprised to see what a good picture she's made out of the skips and breaks in a few hundred straight lines ruled across the paper; almost like a black-and-white photograph, it shows the man's face and some of his surroundings: the seat-back behind him, the scored panelling of the rear wall of the cab, the coiled cable of the hanging microphone he's holding in front of him, the girl's shoulder.

‘I don't believe it,' says Ax. ‘That's him. That's the guy I was telling you about: Jonathan Wilde.'

‘Well,' says Dee, ‘I told you he wasn't a perfect master.'

Ax grins at her as if even he is surprised at this level of wit from her (and oh, how those little surprises smart!) and drags an old book out of a drift in one of the corners. It's a leather binder holding an algae-cellulose paper print-out. Dee hefts it in her hand and leafs through it. The first page that falls open is near the end, and it's a photograph of the same man as she's just drawn. Even the pose and expression are similar – he's leaning forward, talking earnestly to camera.

‘That's one of the last pictures of Wilde that ever became public,' Ax explains. ‘It's lifted from a television interview with him in February 2046.'

Dee feels the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as she studies this image, from a past almost incalculably remote (but only in
real time
, Scientist reminds her, not in
ship time
; and it's going on about the Malley Mile again – the real thing, the one the pub is named for. She shuts it off).

‘That's him all right,' she says. She glances at the picture she made, then at the one in the book; runs a transform. ‘Every line maps exactly.'

She looks at it again. Something's bugging her.

‘Well, yes,' Ax says.

Dee continues to leaf backwards through the book. The pictures get fewer as she gets closer to the beginning, Wilde gets younger; most of them are obviously not posed, but snatched on the fly: clipped blow-ups from surveillance systems, a calm face in angry crowds…

‘What is this, exactly?'

‘It's a dossier on Wilde,' Ax tells her. ‘Notes for a biography.'

She stops at another picture, a low-angle shot, blurry. It's labelled ‘FOI(PrevGovts)/SB/08–95'. Two men at a table, in a pub or café. One, identified in the caption as Wilde, has his back to the camera. The other, talking past a held cigarette, is Reid.

‘Told you,' says Ax. ‘They knew each other for years.'

Dee has known, at some level, that Reid is one of the originals, that he came physically from Earth, but it's somehow still a shock to see what is – assuming the picture's antiquity and provenance – visual evidence. More pages flip past. When the sheaf of pages is thin under her thumb, there's a sharp, professional photograph that stops her thoughts. It has rough, scissored edges, a caption below and a scrawled attribution:
Dumbarton Gazette
04/06/77 – some local zine, apparently. She stares at it, points at it dumbly. Behind her shoulder, Ax's breath hisses in past his teeth.

A wedding-portrait of a couple: formal clothes, informal pose, almost cheek-to-cheek. The man, she sees now that the continuity has been established, is the younger self of the old man at the end of the book; is Wilde; is the man she saw yesterday. The woman's face, above frilled shoulders and high collar in lace-trimmed white voile, is her own.

 

‘Let me guess,' Ax says heavily. ‘That's the guy who walked into the Malley Mile?'

‘Yes,' she breathes. ‘No wonder he looked like he recognised me. My body is a clone all right – a clone of his wife!'

‘Creepy,' says Ax. He peers closer at the caption. ‘Annette, that was her name.'

Dee can't look at the picture any longer, and doesn't need to: this image will stay in her mind forever unless she deletes it. It's creepy, all right, and disturbing in a deeper sense: this distant twin, this woman whose physical ghost Dee is, looks happy in a way Dee has never been, with a personality Dee knows is different from her own. Only the physical body, and the underlying temperament which, Dee knows, is likewise genetic, are the same. She lets the last lot of pages fall over the picture, and stares unseeing at the title on the first page:

 

Jonathan Wilde,
1953–2046: A Critical Life
by Eon Talgarth

 

Ax is pacing the room, heedless of Dee's
angst
, talking excitedly. Dee has to run the first few seconds past her again before she catches up: ‘So we have a puzzle,' he's been saying. ‘A couple of weeks ago, Wilde sees you on Reid's screen. He gives no sign of recognition, but fires off an instructionset to get you loading up information, maybe with the intention of waking you up, maybe not. Yesterday, Wilde walks in, apparently having re-juved in the meantime, sees you and freaks out.'

Dee shakes her head.

‘The guy in the pub wasn't a re-juve of the man I saw on the screen.'

Ax frowns. ‘You sound pretty sure of that.'

‘The re-juve doesn't change the fact that you've lived longer. It always shows. Not on a picture, perhaps, but when you see someone move and speak it's obvious.' She smiles. ‘Don't you find?'

‘Haven't seen enough re-juves,' Ax says. ‘It's not a common procedure – most people stabilise at what they fancy is their best.' He laughs. ‘Sometimes there's a fashion for ageing, but it never lasts.'

‘I'll tell you this,' Dee says. ‘The Wilde I saw two weeks ago had lived a hell of a lot longer than the Wilde I saw last night.'

‘OK, assume there's two of him. That's no more of a mystery than there being even one of him, because he shouldn't be here at all. He wasn't in the crew, or the gangs.' He flashes her a feral grin. ‘So Reid says, or at least the lists do. The company roll. I've checked. But like I said, people say they see him. And now, you have proof. He's back!'

He picks up again the picture that Dee made. She can see his hands are shaking. He lights a cigarette after a couple of attempts, and stares at nothing for a while. His facial expression slowly changes, in a way that makes Dee think of how he must have got his names: it's hard, and sharp, and…terminal.

‘Do you know what this means?' he says.

Dee compresses her lips, shakes her head.

‘It means he's back from
the dead
,' Ax says. ‘It means everything's going to change. It means all bets are off.'

‘I don't understand,' Dee says.

Ax jabs out the cigarette and lights another. He's still shaking.

‘People assume things,' he says. ‘They assume things will go on just as they are. They know what they can get away with. They know what they can get people to agree to. Like, I agreed to let other people use my body, because I needed the money. And they knew I did. But because I
agreed
, they think that makes it all right. Some of them even knew I hated it. But I agreed to it.'

Dee suddenly needs a cigarette herself. She lights one, and her hands, now, are trembling.

‘Did Reid ever let other people use your body?'

‘Oh no,' Dee says quickly. ‘He's very possessive.'