Evensong

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.