Evensong

by Love, John

  He showered and shaved, then dressed. He walked out of the room to the hospital reception desk. “I’m discharging myself,” he told the receptionist.

  “Mr. Abbas! Are you...”

  “I’m quite well, thank you. Please call the Director and thank him for his attention. If he needs to contact me I’ll be in my suite at the New Grand.”

  “I’ll tell him. So will you be leaving us, Mr. Abbas?”

  “The hospital, right now. The Pier, soon.”

  He walked out of the hospital onto a small piazza at the edge of the Pier, overlooking the sea. It was the view he’d seen from his hospital room, looking out to sea rather than back towards the foreshore. The day was grey, cold and windy. The sea was the colour he remembered from the day he’d arrived at Brighton: pewter, like his shirt. He stood for a moment watching the gulls, and listening to their cries. Then he turned and strode away, through the Garden and past the Conference Centre and back towards the New Grand.

  All of the paraphernalia of the summit had gone, cleared up as tidily as if it, and the summit, had never existed. The Pier was still busy, though: there were people who worked in the business quarter, tourists and casual visitors, and a group of New Anglican staff who greeted him politely. He recognised one of them as Yusuf Khan, the IT specialist whose identity he’d briefly borrowed, and two others as Olivia’s personal staff.

  “Hello, Mr. Abbas. Are you well enough to be walking in this weather?”

  “I’m fine, thanks. I’ve just left the hospital, and I’m going back to my suite to sort some things out.”

  “So you’re leaving us?”

  “Soon.”

  The sheer ordinariness of the conversation made him realise all the things it didn’t contain, all the things he now knew but couldn’t say. He wanted to cry out, even more intensely than he’d cried out for Levin, but he stayed silent. That would come later, back in his suite. Until then, he had to keep it contained. Containers and Contents. Containers are hardware. Contents are software. Usually software would be more important than hardware. But if the contents of a container are liquid or gas or powder, the container will shape them.

  Her contradictory signals towards him, her strange Evensong sermon, were all part of what was happening to her. How had she held it together so long?

  Somehow he made it back to the New Grand without showing externally what he was feeling inside. He strode through the lobby, nodding politely to the reception staff. Then into the lift and along the corridor and into his suite, where he waited until he heard the expected knock on his door.

  She was wearing the dark red dress.

  “I heard from the hospital and from some of my staff that you’re leaving soon, so I wanted to...”

  “Say goodbye? Yes, I did too.”

  She walked past him into his suite and turned to face him.

  “If you hadn’t come here,” he continued, “I’d have stopped off at your apartment on my way out.” He closed the door softly. “You knew I’d find it, didn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You thought your Detail would die with you. You didn’t think either of us would survive.”

  “I didn’t expect to live past tomorrow. And you, in the Signing Room! Where did you find...”

  “Find the ability to win? I don’t know. Maybe it was having someone to fight for.”

  “Do you know all of it?”

  “I think so,” Anwar said. “Let’s try, and you can tell me if any of the details aren’t quite right...”

  She smiled. “Always obsessive. Not just about The Detail, but about details.”

  He clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Of course I am! It’ll be one of the last things we talk about. I want to get it right,it’s important...So. To begin with, they abducted you before you were Archbishop. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. They’re good at abducting people. They’re not good with bodies, but they’re good with minds. Look at what they did to Levin.”

  “Was that his name?”

  “You recognised what they did to him. I saw you, in the Signing Room. But with you, they did something more.”

  She said nothing. Her dark violet eyes, which always seemed to see everything and which wouldn’t be stared down by anyone, did not leave his face.

  “Shall I tell you?” he asked.

  “Oh, for God’s sake! All this play acting, the show of annoyance and the lead-up questions, are because you know what it is but you’re afraid to actually say it!”

  “Yes, I am. Now.”

  “Then,” her voice became quieter, “I’ll say it. When they abducted Levin they wiped his identity and left him a monster. A killing machine.

  “When they abducted me they wiped my identity and put another one inside me: Parvin Marek. Then they set me up to lead what was then their creation, the New Anglican Church. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t work out like that, for reasons I’ll tell you later because this is the last thing we’ll talk about. Is that what you were going to say but couldn’t?”

  “Yes.”

  “So when did you know?”

  “I didn’t, until the Signing Room. Until after my friend Levin died. Because of what you told Gaetano. You remembered about going back.”

  She looked at him quizzically.

  “You went back. Marek would always go back. He’d go back to make sure, and he’d shoot someone who was wounded and helpless. A passerby outside the UN Embassy in Zagreb. Rafiq’s seven-year-old-son. No,” he said, as she started to speak, “this isn’t just for Rafiq. Rafiq said, ‘Marek killed far more people than just my family. For all of them, this is unfinished business.’ I can’t leave it unfinished.”

  “Body and mind. Hardware and software. Container and contents. It seemed obvious to them, when they did it, that the mind was the most important. But it wasn’t, it was the container! I didn’t change into Marek. Marek changed into me.”

  “You went back.”

  “You don’t need to do this. Marek changed into me, and I wanted to love you.”

  “Wanted?”

  “Love’s more intimate than just intimacy. Friendship and companionship grow out of it, over the years. Nothing could grow out of what we did together, Anwar.”

  “You were right, it does overturn everything.” He paused, and added, “How did they do it to you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’d rather talk about that than what you just said. And yes,it does matter. It’s the last thing. I need to tell Rafiq. They must have other Marek identities stored somewhere.”

  “Wouldn’t matter. They’d all seep...”

  “I still need to know. Are they organic or electronic?” “Both. They converted his brain patterns to algorithms, billions of them, stored as electronic programs. Then they converted them again to something organic, like a virus.”

  “Why?”

  “To insert them into a living brain that had been wiped of its last identity and needed billions more protocols to reorder itself. It spread and grew, like they intended. Lots of empty space to spread and grow into. But they didn’t know it would seep.”

  “Seep?”

  “Souls aren’t the same as software, and bodies aren’t the same as hardware. You can’t just transcribe or transplant them like computer components. They interact. They seep into each other. One becomes stronger, and it isn’t the one you’d think.”

  “So Marek isn’t gone. They’ve got his identity encoded in some electronic or bionic storage device somewhere.”

  “Yes. And if they put it in someone else, the same thing will happen. That’s the thing about taking an identity. You put it in another body, and the other body eventually shapes it like a glass shapes the water inside it. It can look quite beautiful...Of course, that didn’t suit them. I was supposed to be their creature, run the Church for their ends.”

  “Why did they want Marek?”

  “The Church was their counter to religi
ous fundamentalism. Marek was political and secular. And an organisational genius. He thought strategically and played long. All points of similarity to Rafiq, and Rafiq would be their next target.”

  She paused. “I still have the name I had before, but I don’t remember what it felt like to be me before. I made the Church do what I wanted, not what they wanted. When they looked into my eyes and realized Marek wasn’t in control anymore, they decided to kill me.”

  “But you went back.”

  “Do you want to stop saying that, and think of something better?”

  “All right. How about this? How much of you is still Marek?”

  “The dying part.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Why, you want to complain that all this time you’ve been fucking a woman who’s also partly a forty-two-year-old man?”

  “Not fucking. That was just the means. Loving was the end.”

  “Yes,” she laughed, “the end. Do you know what it’s like, having a dying conjoined identity in your mind? Dying but not quite dead? All these years, I couldn’t quite kill it, but I kept it in a state of dying.”

  “I can’t leave it unfinished. I can’t, Olivia.”

  He wasn’t an Othello person, he was a Lear and Hamlet person. Lear and Hamlet ripped the soul out of him, Othello just made him uncomfortable. That scene where Othello towered over Desdemona before killing her and chanted, ridiculously, ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul...’ as if chanting something monstrously wrong would somehow make it right. That was what he was doing now. Different words, but still just as wrong, and still just as inevitable. He had to do it. His feelings screamed its wrongness, but everything else inside him, everything he was, ridiculously chanted its rightness.

  Time. He towered over her in cold perfection. Looked directly into her eyes. “I love you,” he said, and executed a perfect Verb. He turned away before she fell, in two separate impacts, and before her blood started pumping.

  Outside the door of his suite he encountered the ginger cat. Its eyes were amber and wide, and for once it didn’t seem able to meow Fuck You. He had never been in combat with a cat before, but he found a pressure point easily enough, just behind its ear. It would be out for at least three hours. He went back to the suite, got a soft leather holdall from his wardrobe, put the cat inside, and took it with him. He didn’t know why he did it. From now on, he didn’t think he’d know why he did anything.

  He took the maglev to Gateway, left the New West Pier, and walked across Marine Parade to the underground car park in Regency Square where the Cobra would be waiting.

  15

  He thought, The Two Of Her. Two people, one of them my beginning and the other my end. What have I done?

  Scarcely aware of what he was doing, he’d taken the Cobra from its underground lockup. He was now driving it out of Brighton, perhaps for the last time. It was early afternoon on October 22, but damp and murky enough to be early evening. Traffic out of Bright on was heavy and slow and bad-tempered, labouring under a sky that was the same colour as the wet pavements.

  The last words he said to her were I Love You. He’d never said that to anyone before, and he’d never say it again.

  She was the love of his life, and the hate of his life. Bloodpoison.

  Neither of them was perfect: sharp features and strange appetites and vicious combativeness on one side, hook nose and introspection and obsessiveness on the other, self- absorption on both. Once he’d thought they might make a couple, with their imperfections as complementary echoes, but she was right. “Friendship or companionship could never grow out of what we did together.”

  Whereas with Rafiq and Arden, it would. Sweltering sex to begin with, then over the years it would settle into a measured pace. Maybe even children. He liked the idea of them having children.

  He was passing the heavy Victorian wrought-iron boundaries of Brighton Station on his right. The traffic hadn’t got any quicker, and wouldn’t for some time, so he was able to peer in and see the white and silver maglevs inside. Like those on the Pier.

  Everything comes back there eventually.

  They put Marek in her, expecting that his soul would control her body. But her body controlled his soul, though at times only just. How had she held it together all this time? When would he ever again meet anyone even remotely like her? I won’t. I can’t ever come back from this. Mentally I’m finished, and Rafiq will know that. Rafiq knows everything.

  He had to stop this relentless spot-picking. He needed to focus on unrelated things. Anything that would take his mind somewhere else. The Cobra, for instance. He’d always wanted a Cobra. It looked like no other car ever made, right on the cusp of ugliness and beauty. Its power wasn’t much in evidence in this foul traffic, but he’d open it up when he got further out of Brighton.

  Thinking about the Cobra didn’t work, though. He felt as empty as if his own identity had been wiped, and there was nothing put into him to fill it.

  And then he thought of something.

  They put Marek’s identity into her mind after wiping her mind clear of hers, and hers came back and shoved Marek’s aside. Does that mean the soul, or the identity, resides in the body and not the brain? No, that couldn’t be. But maybe, however good they were at this, they weren’t good enough. You can never completely wipe a soul away. Some residual traces will always remain, and they’ll always grow back. Like grass will always grow back through concrete buildings, if the buildings are left empty for long enough. Makes you wonder where the soul really resides.

  For a moment he felt comforted and even slightly optimistic at the thought. Then he remembered what he’d done, and realised he was whistling in the dark. No, it doesn’t make you wonder where the soul really resides. It might sound more poetic if the body’s microscopic building blocks, its cells or its atoms, have some residual memory of the original identity. But, more likely, they just weren’t as good at wiping identities as they thought they were.

  And it leaves me no better than I was when I left the Pier. Consultants aren’t alone. Consultants who kill the only two people who ever meant anything to them, they’re alone.

  By now he’d reached the Seven Dials district of Brighton, on the way out towards the Downs. The traffic was still heavy, but he expected it to thin out soon.

  He was driving past the Al Quds Mosque, the new one built on the site of the old one, when he noticed a car following him. It was a Ferrari Octavian—low, wide, with an almost alien beauty, like one of Rafiq’s VSTOLs. He noticed the car because it had been expertly weaving its way through the traffic and was getting closer. It was about five cars behind him now.

  Its colour was distinctive, too. It wasn’t the usual rather vulgar Ferrari orange-red, but a beautiful deep dark red. Like her dress. By now it was only three cars behind him, and he could make out Gaetano’s face behind the windshield. He’d never talked about cars with Gaetano before, but a Ferrari Octavian would seem about right for him. As fast as the Cobra. Maybe even faster. Certainly more conventionally beautiful.

  Gradually, coming out of Seven Dials, the traffic thinned. The buildings lining either side of the road were less densely packed, and the road itself was faster and wider. Time. Anwar floored the accelerator, and the Cobra did what it had always been designed for, both in its original incarnation and in its replica form.

  The car chase that followed was something whose irony wasn’t lost on Anwar, and probably wasn’t on Gaetano either: it was a repeat of the Cobra-Ferrari Wars at Le Mans in the 1960s, though this one lasted only a fraction of the time. The Ferrari was at least as fast as the Cobra, and Gaetano was a driver of almost equal ability to Anwar. He couldn’t quite catch Anwar, but Anwar couldn’t quite lose him either.

  In this fashion, though only for a few short miles, the two cars hurtled out of Brighton in the direction of the Downs. Then Anwar thought, Why do I need to lose him?He slammed on the brakes, downshifted the gears, and did a handbrake turn, so the Cobra was fac
ing the Ferrari as it came round a bend.

  He’d stopped right on the edge of Devil’s Dyke. In the small car park overlooking its northern slopes. He smelt the damp earth and grass, the same smell from before. They both got out of their cars and walked slowly towards each other. I always knew I’d come back here before I left Brighton. I never thought it would be like this.

  “I’m done here,” he said to Gaetano. “I’m going to the Downs to pick up a VSTOL back to Rafiq. You should go back too. We don’t need this.”

  “I can’t,” Gaetano said. “Not now.” There was something wrong about his voice, something thick and choked. He made an odd, swift movement inside his jacket.

  “Don’t go for the gun,” Anwar said. “Or the knife. I’d be quicker.”

  “Then...”

  “Not combat, either. I’d win. And it’d be an anticlimax after the Signing Room.”

  “Why did you do it?” Gaetano’s eyes were red-rimmed. Anwar knew what she’d meant to him, but he couldn’t for the life of him imagine Gaetano actually shedding tears.

  “I can’t tell you. And you wouldn’t believe me anyway. Go back now. This belongs to another time.”

  “I’ll hunt you down,” Gaetano said quietly. “For the rest of my life, and yours. I’ll never stop. I will find you.”

  “I know you will. But it won’t be me.”

  JUNE 2061

  She knows Gaetano is coming. Now. This evening. It will be either here in her flat, or in Rochester Cathedral. She doesn’t want it to be in the Cathedral.

  She decides she won’t go there tonight. She’ll miss Evensong.

  And Gaetano isn’t the only one getting closer. There’s also Michael Taber. She remembers her conversation with him after last week’s Evensong, and thinks wryly, He’s too clever. Surely Deans of Cathedrals aren’t supposed to be like that. Only people in positions like Rafiq are supposed to be like that.

  Rafiq. She thinks of her meeting with him, at Fallingwater, on October 22, 2060.