Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  And then I grabbed her. I honestly don’t know what I intended to do next. To shake her? To beat her against the ground? To rape her?

  I never found out because next thing I was in the pool with those little shining fishes darting away all around me.

  “I don’t think I told you I was in the British national judo team,” said Angela from the bank.

  “No. Now that you mention it, I don’t believe you did.”

  Angela:

  There was a moment there, looking down at him in the water, when I really panicked. I’d made the wrong decision! I was trapped with a violent brutal man without any possibility of escape!

  Then I got a hold on myself. Don’t be so silly, I told myself. You made a choice between this and death, that’s all, and death will always be an option. (Maybe that’s how my ancestors thought too, out in the cane fields? It’s this or death – and death will always be there for us, death will never let us down)

  Tommy:

  I climbed out of the stream. My anger had vanished, the way anger does, so you wonder where it comes from and where it goes to and whether it’s got anything to do with you at all.

  “Since we’re the entire population of this planet,” I said, “I guess we’ve just had World War One.”

  That made her laugh. She took my hand again and then we lay down together again in the moss, as if nothing else had happened in between.

  Angela:

  “Hoom – hoom – hoom” went a starbird far off the forest as we pulled back from each other.

  I thought to myself, well there is something about him that is okay. And I cast back in my mind and realised that I’d read many, many bad things about Tommy – that he was a serial adulterer and a liar and all of that – but I’d never actually heard it said, or even hinted at, that he ever hit a woman or beat her up.

  And I thought too that, after all, I had been a fool to go straight for the place that would hurt him and frighten him the most, even though, God knows, I had a right to be angry. No one reacts well when you deliberately prod their deepest wounds. And there was some wound in Tommy, some old wound to do with love.

  Of course I knew that the time would soon enough come again when I would hate him again and want to do everything in my power to hurt him. There would be a World War Two and a World War Three and a World War Four. But this peaceful place we were in now would still be there, I thought. With any luck it would still be somewhere to come back to.

  “Aaaah! – Aaaah! – Aaaah!” called back a second starbird, far off in the opposite direction to the first one.

  “Hoom – hoom – hoom,” returned the first. It had got nearer since it last called. It was just across the pool.

  “They don’t give a damn, those starbirds, do they?” Tommy said. “They don’t even notice that great wheel burning up there in the sky.”

  Tommy:

  Angela didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to. I was just speaking my thoughts aloud.

  But then, five or ten minutes later, after we’d been lying there in silence all that time looking up at the stars, she spoke:

  “No they don’t,” she said. “You’re right. This dark Eden, it’s just life to them, isn’t it? It’s just the way things have to be.”

  We Could Be Sisters

  Nature is profligate. All possible worlds exist. In one of them there was once an art gallery in Red Lion Street, London WC1, and its manager was a woman called Jessica Ferne. On one particular grey November day, when Jessica was thirty three, she spent the morning in her office as usual. She made phone calls about her next exhibition and then experimented on her PC with images of the art objects that she planned to exhibit, trying out different arrangements and juxtapositions. Then at lunchtime she put on her jacket, gave some instructions to her secretary, and walked through her gallery and out onto the street. As ever each exhibit stood alone – a pair of mummified hands, a flashing light, an assemblage of human bones – each one contained and separated from the rest of the world by its frame, its label, its pedestal.

  Outside an electric cleaning vehicle went by and then some lawyers in robes. Red Lion Street was part of a subscriber area, but at the end of it were the open streets of London, where anyone could go. The boundary between the two areas was marked by a gate with a uniformed security guard in attendance. As Jessica approached it an elderly woman tried to walk in through the gate and it started bleeping. The guard stepped forward and politely refused her entry.

  “But I am a subscriber,” she complained. “There’s some mistake.”

  A jet fighter passed high overhead – it was part of the city’s ever-present shield against aerial attack. The guard suggested to the elderly lady that perhaps her clearance was out of date and that she needed to check with the network. Meanwhile Jessica passed through the gate in the other direction, unimpeded, and there she was, in High Holborn, in the open area. She was not frightened exactly but she quickened her pace and, without even thinking about it, she began to monitor the people around her, checking for sudden movements or suspicious glances.

  *

  When Jessica was a child, growing up with her adoptive parents in Highgate, you could travel from one side of London to another, on a bus, on foot, in a car. But Jessica was thirty-three now and the map of London had become a patchwork of subscriber areas, reserved for those who could pay, and open areas in between for the rest.

  Jessica lived in a subscriber area in Docklands: the Docklands Secure Community. It was managed by a syndicate of subscription companies called LSN, which now controlled almost all the subscriber areas in London apart from a few exceptionally expensive ones for the seriously rich. And Jessica had just walked out of another LSN area, the West Central Safe Street Zone, where her art gallery was located. Within the Zones, burglaries and street crime were almost at zero. Beggars, illegal immigrants, known criminals and suspected trouble-makers were all excluded. Everyone you met had been checked out. And there were TV cameras on every street and LSN detectives constantly on patrol.

  ‘It’s not like the good old days,’ said the LSN ad in the Tube. ‘It’s much, much better.’

  The syndicate even ran special trains between the Zones, which didn’t stop at the stations in between. There was even talk of special freeways.

  *

  Outside, in the open areas, things were different. Violent crime was commonplace and in some neighbourhoods there was more-or-less constant low level warfare between rival gangs and religious groupings. Holborn, where Jessica was now, was not an especially rough area – LSN was actually in the process of negotiating its absorption into the West Central Zone and, in preparation, had already begun augmenting policing there with its own security force – but still, as soon as you passed the gate you could feel the difference. There were beggars for one thing and there were street performers who did not confine themselves, as in the Zones, to designated Street Entertainment Areas.

  Today there was a pair of jugglers. They were very adept, making their spinning clubs pass between them so smoothly that it gave the impression of a constant stream, as if the clubs were flowing of their own accord round some kind of force field. If either juggler had faltered for an instant the pattern and the illusion would collapse, but neither of them ever did. The appearance of smooth flow was created by precise rhythm, thought Jessica, and the illusion of weightlessness depended on the law of gravity to bring the clubs back to the jugglers’ hands. These little paradoxes pleased her. She smiled and tossed a coin into their hat. A sharp-eyed beggar noticed this largesse and at once shot out his hand.

  “Any spare change, love? I haven’t eaten yet today.”

  Jessica looked away, quickening her pace.

  “Go on, surprise yourself!” said the next beggar along, this time a woman.

  “Sorry, no change,” said Jessica.

  She noticed the woman beggar had extremely fine blonde hair, very like her own.

  High up in the cold blue sky, a pilotless surveillance
plane passed above them.

  *

  Jessica was having lunch in a Laotian restaurant with an artist called Julian Smart. He had told her that, on principle, he only ever ate outside the safe zones. Inside, apparently, the food had no flavour. He was about her own age, currently enjoying a rapidly growing reputation in the art world, and he was very good looking. Last night Jessica had been so excited about this meeting that she’d not been able to sleep. It was true that this morning in the gallery that feeling had vanished and she’d felt strangely indifferent, unable to connect at all with her previous night’s excitement, but now once again she felt as excited as an infatuated teenager.

  “Jessica! Hi!”

  He kissed her. She trembled. He seemed ten times more beautiful than she had remembered him, passionate and fiery. She could not believe that he was interested in her. She could not believe that she had ever doubted her interest in him.

  But Jessica was exceptionally ambivalent in matters of the heart. She had never had a sustained relationship with a man of her own age, though she had several affairs with older men, and had recently ended a two-year arrangement with a motorcycle courier ten years her junior, who she had taken in to live with her. Equality was the hardest thing, and yet what she longed for the most.

  They ordered fish soup and braised quail. He showed her some pictures of his latest work. It consisted of a sequence of images, the first of which was a banal photograph of a couple feeding pigeons in a park. In succeeding stages, Julian had first drained the scene of colour and then gradually disassembled it into small numbered components like the parts in a child’s construction kit. The final image showed the pieces lined up for assembly: rows and rows of grey pigeons numbered 1 to 45 on a grey plastic stem, grey plastic flowers (50 to 62), grey plastic trees (80 to 82), grey plastic hands and heads and feet…

  “You’ll have to come and see it though,” he said as she leafed though the pictures. “Come over and see it. Come up and look at my etchings. We can go for a drink or something.”

  Wanting to share something of herself in return, she told him about the jugglers she had watched on the way.

  “I found it a bit disturbing,” she said, “I found that I’d rather watch the two of them than look at any of the stuff we’ve got in the gallery at the moment. They had something that most artists now have lost: style, virtuosity, defiance… Do you know what I mean?”

  The soup arrived. No, he didn’t know what she meant at all. He suggested using the jugglers as a basis for a video piece, or making them into one of his plastic kits – a row of grey clubs numbered 1-10, and a chart to show what colours to paint them – or getting the jugglers themselves to stand in the gallery and perform as a sort of living objet trouvé. And then this reminded him of a plan of his to stage an exhibition in which the museum attendants themselves were the sole exhibits, with nothing to guard but themselves.

  He laughed loudly and, with that laugh, he finally lost her: it had such a callous sound. He no longer looked beautiful to her. She saw in his eyes a kind of greedy gleam and it occurred to her that Julian Smart couldn’t really see her at all except only as a pleasing receptacle for his own words. She wondered how she could have ever failed to notice that greedy gleam and how once again she had managed to deceive herself into thinking she had found a fellow spirit.

  As she headed back to Red Lion Street she asked herself why this happened so often. She thought perhaps it came from being adopted, raised by beings whose blood was strange to her, and hers to them, so that she had learnt from the beginning to work at imagining a connection that wasn’t really there. But then again it might just be the world she lived in. All the art in her gallery seemed to mock the possibility of meaning, of connection. It was all very subversive but without a cause. It exposed artifice but put nothing in its place.

  Even the jugglers, when she saw them again, seemed weary, as if they longed to let the clubs fall to the ground and leave them to lie there in peace.

  *

  “Surprise yourself!” said the woman beggar, right in front of her.

  Jessica gave a little cry of shock, not just because she was startled, though she was, but also because for a moment she felt as if she was looking into a mirror and seeing her own reflection. But once having collected herself she realised this face was altogether leaner, and had different and deeper lines in it. She is not like me at all, thought Jessica taking out her purse, except superficially in the hair colour and the eyes. And the hair was thinner, the eyes more bloodshot.

  But the beggar said, “We could be sisters couldn’t we?”

  Two jet fighters hurtled by above them.

  Jessica pressed bank notes into the beggar’s hands.

  *

  Well I could have a sister, Jessica thought as she hurried back to the gallery. It’s not impossible.

  She had met her natural mother once, a haggard icy-hearted creature called Liz.

  “Brothers or sisters?” her mother had said. “You must be joking. I had my tubes done after you. No way was I going through that again.”

  But Liz could quite well have been lying. She’d struck Jessica as a woman who spoke and believed whatever seemed at that particular moment to further her own ends. In that one meeting Liz had given Jessica three different accounts of why she had given Jessica up, discarding each one when Jessica had presented her with contradictory facts she’d read in her file.

  Then again, the files had not mentioned a sister either.

  *

  At six o’clock Jessica went back down Red Lion Street to look for the beggar, but she wasn’t there. She drove home through North London and lay awake planning to search the homeless hostels and the soup kitchens, all over London if necessary, all over England. The beggar had a West Country accent she thought. Like Liz, who came from Bristol.

  In the morning, after she’d parked the car, Jessica went down to the end of Red Lion Street again, and again at lunchtime. She spent half the afternoon in her office in the gallery phoning hostels and charities and welfare agencies, asking how she would go about finding someone she had met in the street. They all said they couldn’t tell her anything. Jessica could have been anyone after all: a dealer, a blackmailer, a slave trader looking for a runaway. And anyway Jessica couldn’t even give a name for the woman she was looking for.

  She nearly wept with frustration, furious with herself for not finding out more when she met the woman yesterday. And now it seemed to her that if she could find the blonde beggar again it would be the turning point of her whole life. That’s no exaggeration, she thought. If necessary, I really will give the rest of my life to this search. This is my purpose, this is the quest which I’ve so long wanted to begin.

  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 nam
e?”

  “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).