“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 that she’d not been able to sleep. It was true that this morning in the gallery that feeling had vanished and she’d 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 the two of 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. No, he didn’t know what she meant at all. 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 then this reminded him of a 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 finally 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 couldn’t really see her at all except only 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 all very 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 there 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, though she was, 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’s 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’d 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’d 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 West Country accent she thought. Like Liz, who came from Bristol.
In the morning, after she’d parked the car, Jessica went down to the end of 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 alclass="underline" a dealer, a blackmailer, a slave trader looking for a runaway. And anyway Jessica couldn’t even give a name for the woman she was looking for.
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’s 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’ve so long wanted to begin.