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’ve blown up a great big bubble of anticipation, and she would have walked away from the whole thing at once 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, even 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’d 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 ‘slip’ or ‘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 to 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 Tamsin. “I don’t come from this world. I must have been in a hundred 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’ve been reading this, countless new worlds have come into being. In some of those worlds you’ve tossed this story aside already. In others you have been interrupted by the phone, or the doorbell, or 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 didn’t 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? They all told her they didn’t want anything to do with a selfish cow who would give away a little baby that never asked to be brought into the world. And 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 couldn’t have children of their own. They renamed her Jessica. Jessica Tamsin Ferne. 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. After getting her back, her mother had grossly neglected her. One of her mother’s boyfriends had abused her. In the end the authorities had 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 Bristol 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, thirty-three years ago a single baby girl had lain in a crib with these two different futures simultaneously ahead of her. Not to mention other futures that neither of them knew about.
“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 burst out laughing, like co-conspirators, both of them noticing how alike they were, how at some deep level they understood one another, whatever their different histories. And each of them was thinking simultaneously that at last she’d no longer be alone.
Both of them, however, had thought this many times before, if only ever very briefly. In Jessica’s case she’d 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.