“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 wouldn’t 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 Bristol 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, a magical place. But you soon give that idea up when you’ve done a few shifts. It’s always the same old shit. It’s always the bloody same.”
“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, not really. It’s the shift itself that’s the thing. All these worlds going by and you’re not in any of them, you’re just falling and falling through them. In the middle of a shift the worlds go by so fast that it’s just a blur.”
She looked into the kitchen, into the bathroom, into the main bedroom. Jessica followed her patiently.
“I’ll tell you a weird thing about shifting, though,” Tamsin said at length. “You know those little flick-books you can get? The ones where you flick the pages and it looks like 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 growing all the time in the dark, growing and growing, and splitting off from each other all the time as quick as anything…”
She looked into Jessica’s spare bedroom, which had once been the den of Jessica’s motorcycle courier boyfriend, Jeff.
“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? That’s what you’re thinking. 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 it 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, 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. You look very pale. 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 blanked.
“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. Please. 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. 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 – yes, and then made extravagant promises to as welclass="underline" ‘Stay with me. I’ll look after you. I’ll make everything all right.’ What had she been thinking? Had she gone completely mad?