And then I grabbed her. I honestly don’t know what I intended to do next. To shake her? To beat her against the ground? To rape her?
I never found out because next thing I was in the pool with those little shining fishes darting away all around me.
“I don’t think I told you I was in the British national judo team,” said Angela from the bank.
“No. Now that you mention it, I don’t believe you did.”
Angela:
There was a moment there, looking down at him in the water, when I really panicked. I’d made the wrong decision! I was trapped with a violent brutal man without any possibility of escape!
Then I got a hold on myself. Don’t be so silly, I told myself. You made a choice between this and death, that’s all, and death will always be an option. (Maybe that’s how my ancestors thought too, out in the cane fields? It’s this or death – and death will always be there for us, death will never let us down)
Tommy:
I climbed out of the stream. My anger had vanished, the way anger does, so you wonder where it comes from and where it goes to and whether it’s got anything to do with you at all.
“Since we’re the entire population of this planet,” I said, “I guess we’ve just had World War One.”
That made her laugh. She took my hand again and then we lay down together again in the moss, as if nothing else had happened in between.
Angela:
“Hoom – hoom – hoom” went a starbird far off the forest as we pulled back from each other.
I thought to myself, well there is something about him that is okay. And I cast back in my mind and realised that I’d read many, many bad things about Tommy – that he was a serial adulterer and a liar and all of that – but I’d never actually heard it said, or even hinted at, that he ever hit a woman or beat her up.
And I thought too that, after all, I had been a fool to go straight for the place that would hurt him and frighten him the most, even though, God knows, I had a right to be angry. No one reacts well when you deliberately prod their deepest wounds. And there was some wound in Tommy, some old wound to do with love.
Of course I knew that the time would soon enough come again when I would hate him again and want to do everything in my power to hurt him. There would be a World War Two and a World War Three and a World War Four. But this peaceful place we were in now would still be there, I thought. With any luck it would still be somewhere to come back to.
“Aaaah! – Aaaah! – Aaaah!” called back a second starbird, far off in the opposite direction to the first one.
“Hoom – hoom – hoom,” returned the first. It had got nearer since it last called. It was just across the pool.
“They don’t give a damn, those starbirds, do they?” Tommy said. “They don’t even notice that great wheel burning up there in the sky.”
Tommy:
Angela didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to. I was just speaking my thoughts aloud.
But then, five or ten minutes later, after we’d been lying there in silence all that time looking up at the stars, she spoke:
“No they don’t,” she said. “You’re right. This dark Eden, it’s just life to them, isn’t it? It’s just the way things have to be.”
We Could Be Sisters
Nature is profligate. All possible worlds exist. In one of them there was once an art gallery in Red Lion Street, London WC1, and its manager was a woman called Jessica Ferne. On one particular grey November day, when Jessica was thirty three, she spent the morning in her office as usual. She made phone calls about her next exhibition and then experimented on her PC with images of the art objects that she planned to exhibit, trying out different arrangements and juxtapositions. Then at lunchtime she put on her jacket, gave some instructions to her secretary, and walked through her gallery and out onto the street. As ever each exhibit stood alone – a pair of mummified hands, a flashing light, an assemblage of human bones – each one contained and separated from the rest of the world 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 a gate with a uniformed security guard in attendance. As Jessica approached it an elderly woman tried to walk in through the gate and it started bleeping. The guard stepped forward and 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. Meanwhile Jessica passed through the gate in the other direction, unimpeded, 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 now and the map of London had become a patchwork of subscriber areas, reserved for those who could pay, and open areas in between for the rest.
Jessica lived in a subscriber area in Docklands: the Docklands Secure Community. It was managed by a syndicate of subscription companies called LSN, which now controlled almost all the subscriber areas in London apart from a few exceptionally expensive ones for the seriously rich. And 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 even 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 groupings. Holborn, where Jessica was now, was not an especially rough area – LSN was actually in the process of negotiating its absorption into the West Central Zone and, in preparation, 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 there were 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 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. If either juggler had faltered for an instant the pattern and the illusion would collapse, but neither of them ever did. The appearance of smooth flow was created by precise rhythm, thought Jessica, and the illusion of weightlessness depended on the law of gravity to bring the clubs back to the jugglers’ hands. These little paradoxes 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.