Evensong

by Love, John

  “I’ve done your bidding. I completed the mission. I avenged your family. Now I want out of the Consultancy, and I want you to do this last thing for me.”

  “Are you sure about this, Anwar?”

  “Yes. I can’t remain as I am.”

  “We can make you look like her on the surface, but you won’t be her.”

  “Surface will be enough.”

  Rafiq paused, and considered yet again. The whole idea was so insane he kept going over and over it, trying to find reasons for refusing. Psychologically he’s blown to pieces. He’s no use to me now, he’ll never recover from what he’s done. We’ve put a fortune into him, but sometimes with Consultants you just have to take the hit and let them go. Like Adeola Chukwu, when she became Adeola Chukwu-Asika. Also, he was never really one of the top ones, even now. And…what he said. I owe him.

  “Our surgeons will brief you fully, but I can give you some of the details.”

  “Please. I’m good at details.”

  “They can’t make you exactly her size: too many major bones to shorten. You’ll be a little taller than she was, but the resemblance will still be close. Your enhancements will be reduced. You’ll keep some of your abilities, but not enough to face people like Gaetano. The surgery will take weeks, and so will the physiological and psychological adjustments. And we can’t give you her mind, or soul, or identity. That’s gone, Anwar. We only do bodies.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? Or do you really think that looking like her will somehow make you turn into her?”

  “No. I don’t think that.” “Then why do you want this?”

  “So I can go to churches she went to, looking like her. Walkinplacesshewalked,lookinglikeher.Walkinherworld for a while, rather than live without her in mine.” He wasn’t consciously paraphrasing Jim Weatherly’s old song, but he recognised the words when he spoke them. They fitted.

  She has left the front door of her flat open so she can hear them when they enter the hall and walk up the stairs. She expects there will be more than one. Gaetano, certainly, and perhaps Proskar and two or three others.

  She is still shabbily dressed. Her cheap blue jeans are faded and frayed. Her blonde hair is lank and greasy, not coiffed and swirled to hide the sharpness of the features Rafiq’s surgeons have recreated so closely.

  And all this time she hasn’t been able to bring herself to wear a skirt or dress. Anwar has been remade to look like Olivia. Does that mean Anwar could get an erection if he stood in front of a mirror and looked at his remade body? He could, if the remaking hadn’t been so thorough, and if he still had a penis. But Rafiq’s surgeons have thoughtfully given him a clitoris.

  Anwar is long gone. She knows she has to keep thinking of him in the third person. And Olivia, too. She’s neither, and both. She doesn’t know where her identity resides.

  Or where she resides. She has been drifting from one seedy flat to another, from Evensongs at one church to another, but she has always wanted Rochester Cathedral to be her final destination. She remembers that Olivia liked it, and liked the quiet understated companionship of the Old Anglicans. She remembers that Olivia told Anwar that, once.

  The irony isn’t lost on her. The ones who wanted Olivia dead, the ones Anwar had fought and defeated, are now satisfied. The ones who loved Olivia, who fought along side Anwar to protect her, are the ones coming for her this evening. Or coming for me, whoever I am.

  She thinks, how would Anwar feel about all this? He’d loved a woman who’d been abducted and force-fed the soul of a man—an unspeakable man—and the man’s soul started to revert back to the woman’s. And now Anwar is a man’s soul inhabiting the surgically-replicated body of that woman, and knowing, because the body is only a replica, that he’ll never turn into her.

  She knows exactly how Gaetano will feel, though. Gaetano will kill someone who looks like Olivia, knowing she isn’t the real Olivia. Maybe the real Olivia wasn’t what Anwar had killed, either. Or maybe she was. Parvin Marek had died, or had been dying, inside her.

  Which makes her recall another irony. Marek, who’d murdered Rafiq’s family, was also part of Olivia when Olivia was persuading Rafiq to give her someone to protect her life.

  She doesn’t want to go down that road anymore, so it’s almost a relief when, at last, she hears the door to the hall downstairs being softly but precisely forced open.

  “Time,” she says to the ginger cat. It has been standing in her open doorway. It looks back at her, its amber eyes huge and expressionless. “Go. They’ll probably take you back to Brighton with them.”

  The ginger cat walks out through her open doorway. It pauses to look back at her over its shoulder and meows Fuck You. It is not, and never has been, fooled by her appearance.

  She sits in an old stained armchair and waits for them. She hears them entering the hall downstairs and hears their voices (Gaetano’s and Proskar’s, among others) greeting the ginger cat.

  In her bedroom, on the pillow, is the page Anwar once tore out of his book, the page with the first four lines of Sonnet 116. On the floor by the side of her chair she has placed Olivia’s book, the one Olivia gave Anwar and which Anwar took with him along with her cat. She has left it open at the title page, with Olivia’s inscription in large untidy writing.

  You mistimed.

  She considers putting Anwar’s torn-out page on top of Olivia’s spread-open book, but decides the symbolism is rather obvious. And there isn’t time. She can hear them walking up the stairs.

  Author photograph by Gemma Shaw

  John Love spent most of his working life in the music industry. He was Managing Director of PPL, the world’s largest record industry copyright organization. He also ran Ocean, a large music venue in Hackney, East London.

  He lives just outside London in northwest Kent with his wife and cats (currently two, but they have had as many as six). They have two grown-up children.

  Apart from his family, London, and cats, his favorite things include books and book collecting, cars and driving, football and Tottenham Hostpur, old movies, and music. Science fiction books were among the first he can remember reading, and he thinks they will probably be among the last.

  Evensong is John Love’s second novel. His first, Faith, was published by Night Shade Books in 2012.