Evensong

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.