Evensong

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.