'We
Could Be Sisters' ©
Chris Beckett, 2004. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction.
Not to be reproduced without permission.
We
Could Be Sisters
Nature is
profligate. All possible worlds exist and
in one of them
there was once an art gallery in Red Lion Street, London
WC1, whose manager was Jessica Ferne.
One November day, when Jessica was thirty three, she spent the
morning
in her office, making phone calls about her next exhibition and then
experimenting on her PC with the arrangement of the various art objects
that
she planned to exhibit, trying out different juxtapositions, different
patterns… Then at lunchtime she put on
her jacket, gave some instructions to her secretary, and walked through
her
gallery and out onto the street. Each exhibit stood alone - a pair of
hands, a
flashing light, an assemblage of human bones – each one contained by
its frame,
its label, its pedestal.
Outside an
electric cleaning vehicle went by and then some lawyers in robes. Red
Lion Street was part of a subscriber area,
but at
the end of it were the open streets of London,
where anyone could go. The boundary
between the two areas was marked by an electronic gate with a uniformed
security guard standing beside it. As
Jessica approached an elderly woman tried to walk in through the gate
and it
started bleeping. The guard politely
refused her entry.
‘But I am a
subscriber,’ she complained. ‘There’s
some mistake.’
A jet
fighter passed high overhead – it was part of the city’s ever-present
shield
against aerial attack. The guard
suggested to the elderly lady that perhaps her clearance was out of
date and
that she needed to check with the network.
And meanwhile Jessica passed through the gate in the other
direction,
and there she was, in High Holborn, in the open area.
She was not frightened exactly but she
quickened her pace and, without even thinking about it, she began to
monitor
the people around her, checking for sudden movements or suspicious
glances.
* * *
<>When Jessica
was a
child, growing
up with her adoptive parents in Highgate, you could travel from one
side of London
to another, on a
bus, on foot, in a car. But Jessica was
thirty-three and the map of London
was now a patchwork of subscriber areas, reserved for those who could
pay, with
open areas in between for the rest.
Jessica
lived in a subscriber area in Docklands.
It was managed by the syndicate of subscription companies called
LSN. LSN operated all the subscription
areas in London
apart from a few exceptionally expensive ones for the seriously rich. Jessica had just walked out of another LSN
area, the West Central Safe Street Zone, where her art gallery was
located. Within
the Zones, burglaries and street crime were almost at zero. Beggars, illegal immigrants, known criminals
and suspected trouble-makers were all excluded.
Everyone you met had been checked out.
And there were TV cameras on every street and LSN detectives
constantly
on patrol.
‘It’s not like
the good old days,’ said the
LSN ad in the Tube. ‘It’s much,
much better.’
The
syndicate even ran special trains between the Zones, which didn’t stop
at the
stations in between. There was talk of
special freeways.
* * *
<>Outside, in
the
open areas, things
were different. Violent crime was
commonplace and in some neighbourhoods there was more-or-less constant
low
level warfare between rival gangs and religious groups.
Holborn, where Jessica was now, was not an
especially rough area - LSN was actually in the process of negotiating
its
absorption into the Zone and had already begun augmenting policing
there with
its own security force - but still, as soon as you passed the gate you
could
feel the difference. There were beggars
for one thing and street performers who did not confine themselves, as
in the
Zones, to designated Street Entertainment Areas.
Today
there was a pair of jugglers. They were
very adept, making their spinning clubs pass between them so smoothly
and
quickly that it gave the impression of a constant stream, as if the
clubs were
flowing of their own accord round some kind of force field, though
neither
juggler could falter for an instant or the pattern and the illusion
would
collapse. The appearance of smooth flow was created by precise rhythm,
thought
Jessica, just as the illusion of weightlessness depended on the law of
gravity
to bring the clubs back to their hands. This pleased her.
She smiled and tossed a coin into their
hat. A sharp-eyed beggar noticed this
largesse and at once shot out his hand.
‘Any spare
change, love? I haven’t eaten yet
today.’
Jessica
looked away, quickening her pace.
‘Go on,
surprise yourself!’ said the next beggar along, this time a woman.
‘Sorry, no
change,’ said Jessica.
She noticed
the woman beggar had extremely fine blonde hair, very like her own.
High up in
the cold blue sky, a pilotless surveillance plane passed above them.
* * *
<>Jessica was
having
lunch in a
Laotian restaurant with an artist called Julian Smart.
He had told her that, on principle, he only
ever ate outside the safe zones. Inside,
apparently, the food had no flavour. He
was about her own age, currently enjoying a rapidly growing reputation
in the
art world and he was very good
looking. Last night Jessica had been so
excited about this meeting she had not been able to sleep.
It was true that this morning in the gallery
she had felt strangely indifferent, unable to connect at all with her
previous
night’s excitement, but now once again she felt as excited as an
infatuated
teenager.
‘Jessica! Hi!’
He kissed her. She
trembled.
He seemed ten times more beautiful than she had remembered him,
passionate and fiery. She could not
believe that he was interested in her.
She could not believe that she had ever doubted her interest in
him.
But Jessica
was exceptionally ambivalent in matters of the heart. She had never had
a
sustained relationship with a man of her own age, though she had
several
affairs with older men, and had recently ended a two-year arrangement
with a
motorcycle courier ten years her junior, who she had taken in to live
with
her. Equality was the hardest thing, and
yet what she longed for the most.
They ordered fish soup and
braised quail. He showed her some
pictures of his latest work. It
consisted of a sequence of images, the first of which was a banal
photograph of
a couple feeding pigeons in a park. In
succeeding stages, Julian had first drained the scene of colour and
then
gradually disassembled it into small numbered components like the parts
in a
child’s construction kit. The final
image showed the pieces lined up for assembly: rows and rows of grey
pigeons
numbered 1 to 45 on a grey plastic stem, grey plastic flowers (50 to
62), grey
plastic trees (80 to 82), grey plastic hands and heads and feet…
‘You’ll
have to come and see it though,’ he said as she leafed though the
pictures. ‘Come over and see it. Come up and look at my etchings.
We can go for a drink or something.’
Wanting to
share something of herself in return, she told him about the jugglers
she had
watched on the way.
‘I found it
a bit disturbing,’ she said, ‘I found that I’d rather watch them than
look at
any of the stuff we’ve got in the gallery at the moment.
They had something that most artists now have
lost: style, virtuosity, defiance… Do you know what I mean?’
The soup
arrived. He did not understand her. He suggested using the jugglers as a basis
for a video piece, or making them into one of his plastic kits - a row
of grey
clubs numbered 1-10, and a chart to show what colours to paint them - or getting the jugglers themselves to stand
in the gallery and perform as a sort of living objet
trouvé. And this
reminded him of plan of his to stage an exhibition in which the museum
attendants themselves were the sole exhibits, with nothing to guard but
themselves.
He laughed
loudly and, with that laugh, he lost her: it had such a callous sound. He no longer looked beautiful to her. She saw in his eyes a kind of greedy gleam
and it occurred to her that Julian Smart could not really see her at
all except
as a pleasing receptacle for his own words.
She wondered how she could have ever failed to notice that
greedy gleam
and how once again she had managed to deceive herself into thinking she
had
found a fellow spirit.
As she
headed back to Red Lion
Street
she asked herself why this happened so often.
She thought perhaps it came from being adopted, raised by beings
whose
blood was strange to her, and hers to them, so that she had learnt from
the
beginning to work at imagining a connection that wasn’t really there. But then again it might just be the world she
lived in. All the art in her gallery
seemed to mock the possibility of meaning, of connection.
It was subversive but without a cause. It
exposed artifice but put nothing in its
place.
<>
Even
the
jugglers, when she saw them again, seemed weary, as if they longed to
let the
clubs fall to the ground and leave them to lie in peace.
* * *
<>‘Surprise
yourself!’ said
the woman
beggar, right in front of her.
Jessica
gave a little cry of shock, not just because she was startled but also
because
for a moment she felt as if she was looking into a mirror and seeing
her own
reflection. But once having collected
herself she realised this face was altogether leaner, and had different
and
deeper lines in it. She is not like me
at all, thought Jessica taking out her purse, except superficially in
the hair
colour and the eyes. And the hair was
thinner, the eyes more bloodshot.
But the
beggar said, ‘We could be sisters couldn’t we?’
Two jet
fighters hurtled by above them.
Jessica
pressed bank notes into the beggar’s hands.
<>
* * *
<>Well I could
have a sister, Jessica thought as she hurried back to the
gallery. It is not impossible.
She had met
her natural mother once, a haggard icy-hearted creature called Liz.
‘Brothers
or sisters?’ her mother had said. ‘You
must be joking. I had my
tubes done after you. No way was I going
through that again.’
But Liz
could quite well have been lying. She
had struck Jessica as a woman who spoke and believed whatever seemed at
that
particular moment to further her own ends.
In that one meeting Liz had given Jessica three different
accounts of
why she had given Jessica up, discarding each one when Jessica had
presented
her with contradictory facts she had read in her file.
Then again,
the files had not mentioned a sister either.
* * *
<>At six
o’clock
Jessica
went back
down Red Lion Street
to look for the beggar, but she wasn’t there.
She drove home through North London and lay awake planning to
search the
homeless hostels and the soup kitchens, all over London
if necessary, all over England.
The beggar had a Midlands
accent she thought. Like Liz, who came
from Worcester.
In
the morning after she had parked the car, Jessica went down Red Lion Street
again, and again at
lunchtime. She spent half the afternoon
in her office in the gallery phoning hostels and charities and welfare
agencies, asking how she would go about finding someone she had met in
the
street. They all said they couldn’t tell
her anything. Jessica could have been anyone after all: a dealer, a
blackmailer, a slave trader looking for a runaway.
And anyway Jessica couldn’t even give a name.
She
nearly wept with frustration, furious with herself for not finding out
more
when she met the woman yesterday. And
now it seemed to her that if she could find the blonde beggar again it
would be
the turning point of her whole life.
That is no exaggeration, she thought.
If necessary, I really will give the rest of my life to this
search. This is my purpose, this is the
quest which I have so long wanted to begin.
When she
went down Red Lion Street
for the third time, though, the beggar was there again - and this
turned out to
be a bit of a disappointment. It had
really been far too short a time for
this to have been a satisfactory life’s quest.
And anyway, when it came down to it, who was the beggar but just
some
stranger? Once again, Jessica thought, I
have blown up a great bubble of anticipation, and she would have walked
away
from the whole thing had she not known herself well enough to realise
that, as
soon as she turned her back, she would immediately want to begin again.
So she made
herself go forward, though she was full of hostility and resentment.
‘We
could be sisters?’ she demanded.
The
beggar woman looked up, recognising Jessica at once.
<>
‘Yes!’ she
exclaimed, and she appealed to her male companion.
‘Look Jim.
This is the woman I was telling you about. We
could
be sisters don’t you reckon?’
The
man looked up.
‘Yeah,’ he said indifferently, ‘the
spitting image…’
Then
he really looked.
‘Fucking
hell, Tamsin! You’re right.
You could be fucking twins.’
Jessica
felt dizzy, as if she had taken a blow to the head.
‘Tamsin?’
she asked. ‘Tamsin? Is
that your name?’
‘Yeah,
Tamsin.’
‘Tamsin’s
my name too. My middle name.
The name my mother gave me before she had me
adopted.’
Tamsin
the beggar gave a small whistle.
‘We
need to talk, don’t we?’ said Jessica.
‘There’s a coffee shop over there.
Let me buy you some coffee and something to eat.’
‘Coffee
and something to eat?’ said the male beggar. ‘Yummy.
Can anyone come?’
‘Fuck
off Jim,’ said Tamsin.
A
powerful helicopter crossed very low over the street.
It was painted dark green and armed like a
tank.
* * *
<>In the coffee
shop
Jessica
said, ‘Could we really be sisters?’
‘No
chance,’ said Tamsin, ‘my mum had herself sterilised right after I was
born.’
‘But
how old are you?’ asked Jessica.
‘Thirty
three.’
‘When
is your birthday?’
‘April
the second,’ said the beggar. ‘What?
What’s the matter?’
Jessica
had gone white.
‘It’s mine
too,’ she said. ‘April the second. And I’m thirty-three. We
must be twins.’
Tamsin
laughed.
‘We’re
not you know.’
‘Same
name, same birthday, same looks, I’m adopted.
What other explanation can there be?’
'I’ve never
heard of twins with the same name,’ said Tamsin.
‘Well no
but…’ Jessica was genuinely at a
loss.
‘Haven’t
you ever heard of shifters you posh git?’
Shifters?’
Jessica had
heard of them
of
course. She had never knowingly met one.
The word had eerie, uncomfortable connotations. People said shifters
moved
sideways across time by taking some kind of drug. She’d heard it came
in pills
they called ‘seeds’. A few years ago
there had been something of a moral panic about shifters and there had
been
talk about how they were a mortal threat to law and civilisation and to
humanity’s whole understanding of its place in space and time. But oddly people seemed to have rather
forgotten about them since then. It was
like flying to the moon, or having conversations with people on the far
side of
the world: impossible things happened and people soon got used to them
(though
in the case of shifters there were still those who maintained the whole
phenomenon
was some sort of elaborate hoax).
‘I’m
a
shifter,’ said Tammy. ‘I don’t come from
this world. I must have been in twenty
worlds at least.’
‘But if you
don’t come from this world how can…?’
Tamsin made
an exasperated gesture. ‘Don’t you get
it? I’m not your twin.
I am
you. You and me were once the same
person.’
For some
reason Jessica leapt to her feet with a
small cry. Everyone in the coffee shop
looked round. She sat down again. She stood up.
‘Give me
your phone a minute,’ said Tamsin.
Like most
pocket phones at that time, Jessica’s had a security lock which could
only be
deactivated by her own thumbprint.
Tamsin pressed her thumb on the pad and they watched the little
screen
light up.
Jessica
couldn’t bear to stay still.
‘Let’s go
out,’ she said. ‘Let’s walk in the
street.’
* * *
<>The world
splits
like
cells on agar
jelly. Just in the short space of time you have been reading this,
countless
new worlds have come into being. In some
of those worlds you have tossed this story aside already.
In others you have been interrupted by the
phone, by the doorbell, by a jet plane crashing through the ceiling. But it seems that you – this particular
version of you – were one of the ones who carried on reading.
When
Tamsin was born, her mother Liz had her placed for adoption. Tamsin was not a wanted child.
She was the child of a rape for one thing and
this did not help, but as a matter of fact she wouldn’t have been
wanted
anyway, for Liz did not have an ounce of maternal feeling in her. But Liz’s mother and her sister and her
brother and the people in the pub where she drank every night, they all
told
her she was a selfish cow and how could she give up her own flesh and
blood and
they didn’t want anything to do with a selfish bitch who would give
away a
little baby that never asked to be brought into the world.
All this was not easy for someone like Liz to
withstand.
Time
split and in some of its branches, Liz gave way to the pressure and
asked for
Tamsin to be returned to her, as was her legal right, before the
adoption went
through. In other branches Tamsin was
adopted by the couple who’d been caring for her since birth, two
earnest young
doctors who could not have children of their own. They
renamed her Jessica. This is what Tamsin
and Jessica worked out
between them as they walked in the open streets.
Tamsin
had not had an easy time of it. Her
mother had grossly neglected her. One of
her mother’s boyfriend had abused her.
The authorities had finally taken her back into care but they
left it
too late and were unable to settle her anywhere. She
moved between many different foster-homes
and residential units, in and around the big social housing project
outside Worcester
where she had
originally lived with Liz.
Jessica on
the other hand had been raised in Highgate by the two earnest doctors,
who sent
her to private schools and took her in the car to ballet classes every
Saturday
morning and violin lessons on Wednesdays and extra French every second
Thursday. But once a single baby girl
had lain in a crib with these two different futures simultaneously
ahead of
her.
‘You
must come home with me,’ said Jessica.
‘I’ll phone my work and say I’ve had to go home.’
Tamsin
smiled as she listened to Jessica lying to her secretary.
When Jessica had finished they looked at each
other and laughed, like successful conspirators, both of them noticing
how
alike they were, how at some deep level they instinctively understood
one
another, whatever their different histories.
And each of them was thinking simultaneously that at last she
would no
longer be alone.
Both
of them, however, had thought this many times before, if only ever very
briefly. In Jessica’s case she had
thought it for a short while just a few hours previously in the Laotian
restaurant
with Julian. And yet Julian hadn’t
entered her thoughts, even for a moment, since Tamsin said, ‘We could
be
sisters’.
Jessica led
the way to her car, but as they turned up Red Lion Street the gate began to
bleep,
for only Jessica had an LSN card in her pocket.
<>
‘Excuse
me!’ called out the guard. ‘Can
you…’
When they
turned towards him, each with the same irritated expression, he was
speechless. He knew both of them by
sight, for Jessica often walked through his gate and Tamsin often
begged outside
it, but it had never until now occurred to him to compare them.<>
* * *
<>As the guard
would
not let
Tamsin
into the West Central Safe Streets Zone, Jessica had to fetch the car
and pick
Tamsin up outside it. There were
problems at the other end too. As a
resident subscriber of the Docklands Zone, Jessica was allowed to bring
in
visitors, but they were still required to show their national ID card
at the
gate. Tamsin had no ID of any sort. She may have been born in Worcester but this didn’t alter the
fact that
she was an illegal immigrant from another universe.
So
she hid in the luggage compartment of the
car, and in that way Jessica smuggled her deviant alter ego through the
security barrier within which she herself had, at considerable expense,
chosen
to live. She was taking quite a risk in
doing so, for the penalty for deliberately violating the LSN security
rules was
to be automatically barred not only from the Docklands Safe Streets
Zone but
from all the other LSN Zones in London as well.
So she would lose both her home and her job if she was caught.
An elderly
neighbour from two floors up stared at them in the lift: Jessica in her
chic
outfit and Tamsin in a jumper and jeans which gave off the sickly odour
of
clothes that have been slept in. They
were both giggly and excited, each in her own way feeling released from
a long
oppression.
‘People
usually call me Jess,’ said Jessica.
‘People
usually call me Tammy.’
‘Do you
want some wine?’
‘You are so
fucking posh aren’t you?’
‘Well
you’re so fucking common. Do you want
wine or not?’
‘Yeah
great. Haven’t you got a bloke or kids
or nothing?’
‘Nope.
I did have a bloke but I chucked him
out. I never wanted kids.’
‘Me
neither. Like mum.’
Tamsin
sipped the wine and looked around.
‘You must
be rich!
I bet you’re one of those
that go on foreign holidays every year. Thailand, India… all that…’
‘Well I’ve
never been to another world,
though. I can’t even imagine what that’s
like.’
‘They’re
just the same as this one, except for stupid little things, like the
phone
boxes are a different colour, or the money looks different, or the
estates have
different names. Just stupid little
things. When you start shifting you
think you are going to find a place where it will be better, but you
soon give
up that idea when you’ve done a few shifts.
It’s always the same old shit.’
‘So why did
you keep doing it?’
Tamsin
walked to the doorway of the room and looked out, clutching her
wineglass
against her body with both hands.
‘Once you
start its hard to stop,’ she said.
‘You’re not looking to get
anywhere any more. It’s the shift itself. All these worlds going by and
you’re
not in any of them, just falling and falling through them. In the
middle of a
shift they go by so fast that it’s just a blur.’
She
looked into the kitchen, into the
bathroom, into the main bedroom with Jessica patiently following.
‘I’ll tell
you a weird thing about shifting, though,’ Tamsin said at length. ‘You know those little books you get in
crackers and that, where you flick the pages and it don’t look like
lots of
pictures anymore, just one picture that’s moving?
Well, it’s a bit like that. All
those blurry worlds sort of merge
together and you see something else which isn’t in any of them. And it’s like a huge tree, a massive great
tree,
but with no roots or leaves or nothing, no ground or sky, just branches
and
branches and branches growing all the time in the dark, as quick as
anything…’
She looked
into Jessica’s spare bedroom, which had once been the den of her
motorcycle
courier boyfriend.
‘And you
think if only you could see that tree properly,’ she said.
‘If only you could see it you’d, like, understand. But it only ever lasts a second or two and
the next thing you’re in some other shitty world and you’re thinking, oh crap, now I’m all on my own again,
and I’ve got to get some money and somewhere to sleep, and why the fuck
did I
give myself all this grief all over again?
Yeah, but even then you’re
already thinking about your next shift.
Where am I going to get some more seeds?
Who can I nick them from? Who’ve
I got to have sex with to get him to give them me?’
Tamsin
looked into Jessica’s study. As she
entered the large wall-mounted computer screen came to life and there
was
Jessica’s virtual p.a., ‘Elsie’, life-sized, smiling out at her in the
form of
a friendly, slightly overweight Scottish woman in her middle thirties. Everyone had one these days – or at least
everyone who had an exceptionally expensive, powerful state-of-the-art
computer
like Jessica. The things copied and
spread themselves through the internet and you could customise them at
will.
‘Hi
Jessica,’ Elsie said to Tamsin. ‘Have
you had a good day?’
Tamsin
dropped her glass.
‘What the fuck?’
The
electronic face furrowed with concern.
‘Are you okay,
Jessica. Is everything alright?’
Tamsin
looked to the real Jessica outside the doorway for support. Jessica laughed.
‘Don’t
worry Tammy, it’s only a computer graphic.’
She came
into the room, identified herself as the real Jessica, and told Elsie
to shut
herself down.
‘Creepy,’
muttered Tamsin as the screen became blank.
‘You’re
right,’ said Jessica. ‘I think it’s about time I uninstalled her.’
She went
for a cloth to mop up the spilled wine.
‘That
computer can’t have come cheap,’ Tamsin said, looking round, while
Jessica
cleared up the mess, at the elegantly minimal furnishings, the shelves
of art
books, the signed painting on the wall. ‘What the fuck do you do to get
all
this money?’
‘I manage
an art gallery.’
‘What,
paintings and that?’
‘Not many
paintings actually. Body pieces mainly
these days.’
‘What?’
‘Pieces
made from human bodies.’
‘Ugh.’
‘Listen Tammy.
Don’t do any more shifts. Stay
with me. Promise me you will.
I’ll look after you. I’ll make
everything alright for you.’
‘Have
you
got a bath? I’d really like a bath.’
‘Of
course. And take some of my
clothes. They can be our clothes. I’ll change too. We
could have a bath together and dress the
same. Let’s see how alike we are when we
dress the same. Let’s take pictures of
ourselves together.’
* * *
<>They slept
together
that
night in
Jessica’s double bed. Tamsin went to
sleep very quickly. It was a long time
since she had lain down in a real warm bed after a bath with a
belly-full of
food, and, like some small forest animal, she had learnt to exploit
such
moments when they came.
Perhaps
she’s not like me at all, thought Jessica suddenly in the dark,
listening to
Tamsin’s wheezy breathing. A person’s body and brain were just empty
vessels
waiting to be filled, or so the earnest doctors had told her.
Personality was
in the programming, not in the machine. What did a shoot ‘em up game
and a word
processor have in common just because they could be run with the same
hardware? This was a complete stranger
lying beside her: a dangerous, unpredictable interloper who, in a
moment of
madness, she had brought into the safe zone and into her flat and her
bedroom
and her bed.
But
then she thought: yes, but the same things made us laugh.
She and I both noticed it. We
noticed each other noticing it. So there is
something in common. Whatever the different paths we have travelled,
deep down
Tammy and I are still the same.
But
then she thought: why I am so
obsessed anyway with finding someone who is the same? Why this constant
obsessive longing for a soul-mate?
Suppose I did find someone who was identical to me in every way. Wouldn’t that just be another way of being
alone?
Tamsin
whimpered in her sleep.
‘Tex! Don’t do that!’ she pleaded with someone in
her dream. ‘Please! Please!
Please!… You’re
scaring me Tex.
Oh shit, no! Please!’
‘It’s
okay sweetheart,’ whispered Jessica.
‘It’s okay Tammy. You’re only
dreaming. You’re safe here with me.’
She
took Tammy in her arms. Tenderness such
as she had never felt came welling up in the darkness.
She remembered Tammy’s body in the bath, thin
and pale, worn and scratched and bruised, with dozens of deep scars
where Tammy
had cut herself with razor blades and knives and broken glass. What sort of pain would you need to have
suffered to make you do that to your own flesh?
<>
What did it
matter how alike or unalike Tammy was to her?
The point was that they were connected.
They were inextricably connected.
* * *
<>Next morning,
as it
happened, Britain
embarked on a war. Few people even
remarked on it. It took place in a small
country far beyond the imaginative universe of most British people. Even the brave warriors themselves fought
from ten thousand metres up and never once saw the faces of those they
attacked.
A
war had
begun. What last night had been solid
buildings in that small faraway country – houses, offices, factories -
this
morning were scattered stones and bricks and bits of wood.
On TV, if Jessica had chosen to watch it, the
safely returned warriors were being asked how they felt
(‘How was it for you?’ ‘Was it your
first time?’ ‘Was it like what
you expected?’) But Jessica didn’t
watch TV and, though she woke abruptly with a sense of loss and dread,
it came
from quite another source. She was
alone. While she slept, Tamsin had
gone.
‘Tammy!’
cried Jessica, leaping out of bed, but she already knew what she would
find:
her purse emptied on the floor, her money gone, the front door left
open, no
note, no explanation…
Jessica
threw on some clothes. She wasn’t
angry. She knew that Tamsin had gone to
buy ‘seeds’ and she understood this perfectly, for she knew that, if
she had
woken to find Tamsin still there then, she herself would have resented
the
intruder, and it would have been her
who would have been desperate to put distance between them.
She ran out
into the street.
‘Tammy! Tammy!’
It
was 7 a.m. Only a few people were about,
most of them workers – LSN-vetted workers - who travelled into the Zone
from
far away to make the cappuccinos and empty the dishwashers and clean
the
streets. They observed Jessica with
surprise. A Turkish news vendor setting
up his stand stopped and asked her if she was alright.
Jessica ran past him to the gate.
‘Are
you running round in circles?’ asked the LSN guard.
‘It was only twenty minutes ago you last ran
through.’
He
frowned.
‘And
weren’t you wearing red last time?’
* * *
<>Jessica
arrived an
hour
late at the
gallery. Barely acknowledging the
doorman she hurried through the pure white space where each exhibit was
isolated – quarantined – by a frame, by glass, by a neatly printed
label: a
preserved human face, a self-portrait made in blood, a scribbled page
from a
diary reproduced in relief on a slab of marble, a row of grainy
snapshots of an
ordinary London street, elaborately framed and labelled with Roman
numerals
like the stations of the cross…
In
her office she went at once to her PC to download the photographs she
had taken
the previous night. There they were on
the screen, a dozen pictures of her with Tammy, in matching pyjamas,
laughing
and playing the fool together.
She
clicked the print icon. She gathered up
the printed images one by one as they emerged and then laid them out on
her
desk. Last night, when she and Tamsin
had been together it had been reality.
But now these twelve images were the only tangible remnant of
that
reality, and they had already become objects in their own right,
separate from
the past, separate from each other, separate from Jessica.
Jessica felt nothing. She moved the
photos this way and that on the
desk, trying different arrangements and orders as if she thought she
might find
a pattern.
'We Could Be Sisters' © Chris Beckett, 2004. First published
in Asimov's Science Fiction. Not to be reproduced without
permission.
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