Evensong

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.