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 been the one that had woken first and had found Tamsin still there, then she 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 7am. 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 newsvendor setting up his stand paused 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. She hurried through that pure white space in which each exhibit was isolated and quarantined by a frame, by glass, by a neatly printed labeclass="underline" 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…
Barely even speaking to her secretary, she shut herself away in her office and 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 Tammy, in Jessica’s bath robe, in Jessica’s pyjamas, laughing and pulling faces and striking poses.
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 what these twelve pictures showed had been reality. But now each of them had already become an object in its own right, separate from the past, separate from each other, separate from Jessica, separate above all from Tamsin.
Jessica felt nothing. She moved the photos this way and that on the desk, over and over again, trying different arrangements, as if she thought she might find a pattern, a resolution, if only she tried long enough.
La Macchina
On the first day I thought I’d go and see the David at the Accademia, but what really caught my imagination there wasn’t the David at all but the Captives. You’ve probably seen pictures of them. They were intended for a Pope’s tomb, but Michelangelo never finished them. The half-made figures seem to be struggling to free themselves from the lifeless stone. I liked them so much that I went back again in the afternoon. And while I was standing there for the second time, someone spoke quietly beside me:
“This is my favourite too.”
I turned smiling. Beside me was a robot.
I had noticed it in the morning. It was a security guard, humanoid in shape and size, with silver eyes and a transparent skin beneath which you could see tubes, wires, sheets of synthetic muscle…
“Move out of my way!” I said. (You know how it is? Like when you say Hello to an ansaphone? You feel like an idiot. You need to establish the correct relationship again between human and inanimate object.) “Move out of the way,” I snapped. “I want to stand there.”
The automaton obediently stepped back and I moved in front of it, thinking that this would be the end of the encounter. But the thing spoke again, very softly.
“I am sorry. I thought you might understand.”
“What?”
I wheeled round angrily.
But the robot was walking away from me.
You know how Italians drive? Round the corner from the Accademia some idiot in a Fiat took it into his head to try and overtake a delivery van, just as a young woman was stepping out into the road. He smashed her into the path of the van, whose left wheel crushed her head.
A wail of horror went up from the onlookers. One second there had been a living woman, the next only an ugly physical object, a broken dolclass="underline" limbs twisted, brains splattered across the tarmac…
I waited there for a short while, dazed and sick but thinking vaguely that they might want me for a witness. Among the bystanders an appalled and vociferous debate was building up. The Fiat driver had hit and run, but strangely the recriminations seemed to centre not on him but on the robot driver of the delivery van, which remained motionless in the cab, obviously programmed in the event of an accident to sit tight and wait for human instructions.
“La macchina,” I kept hearing people say, “La macchina diabolica.”
One forgets that in all its gleaming Euro-modernity, Italy is still a Catholic country.
I went back to the hotel.
It was one of those cheap mass-market places. Through the little window of the lift, you could see that every floor was identicaclass="underline" the same claustrophobically narrow and low-ceilinged corridor, the same rows of plywood doors painted in alternating red, white and green. The delayed shock of the road accident suddenly hit me and I felt almost tearfully lonely.