She hobbled forward a few steps along the silent ruined avenue (while in the other London, cars swerved around her, pedestrians turned and stared and Lily patiently plodded behind her as if the two of them were Good King Wenceslas and his faithful page).
“I’ll tell you what though,” Clarissa said, pausing again. Her face was screwed up with the pain of her injured foot, but her tone was nonchalant. “If you felt like calling the council and asking them to get hold of someone physical to come and help me out, I would be grateful… Only my dratted car has QUITE RUN OUT OF POWER you see, so it’s not going to be able to get me back.”
“I don’t have any money,” said Lily. “Is it an emergency do you think? Shall I call the emergency number?”
But of course Clarissa couldn’t hear her.
It was getting dark as she limped into Piccadilly Circus. The buildings were inert slabs of masonry, all those thousands of coloured light bulbs on the old advertising signs were cold and still, and the statue of Eros was more like the angel of death on a mausoleum than the god of physical love.
Some gusts of rain came blowing down Regent Street. Clarissa’s lips and fingers were blue with cold and her whole body was trembling. (Lily was amazed: she had never seen such a thing, for consensuals are never cold.) Clarissa was in great pain too – the broken bone in her ankle had slipped out of place and felt like a blade being twisted in her flesh – and she was tired and hungry and thirsty. Too late she realised she had left her flask of coffee behind in her abandoned car.
“You’re a fool, Clarissa Fall,” she told herself. “You don’t look after yourself. One of these days you’ll just keel over and the rats will come and eat you up. And it will be your own stupid fault.”
Then she remembered her low-res companion.
“ARE YOU STILL THERE LILY?” she bellowed. “Did you make that CALL FOR ME? I’m just going to get across to the statue there and then I’ll turn my implant on and WE CAN TALK.”
She hobbled to the base of Eros and then reached up to the implant switch behind her ear. The colour, the electricity, the teeming life of a great city at night came flooding instantly into the desolate scene. There were people everywhere, and cars with shining headlamps and glowing tail-lights, and black taxis and red double-decker buses full of passengers, lit upstairs and down with a cheery yellow glow. But above all there were the lights, the wonderful electric streams of colour that made shining moving pictures and glittering logos and words that flowed across fields of pure colour in purple and red and green and yellow and blue and white.
“Ah!” cried Clarissa in rapture, “almost like when I was a little girl and the lights were real!”
“I told you they was lovely,” Lily said, like a pet dog that will wait an hour, two hours, three hours for its mistress to glance in its direction, and still be no less grateful when the longed-for attention finally comes.
Clarissa turned, smiling, but the sight of Lily’s cartoonish moon-face had an unexpected effect on her. She felt a stab of pity for Lily and at the same time revulsion. Her smile ceased to be real. Her pleasure vanished. She felt the bitter cold of the physical world pushing through, the needle-sharp physical pain nagging at her from her foot, the physical ache in her head that came from tiredness and dehydration.
Lily sensed her change of mood and the simple line that represented her mouth was just starting to curve downwards when Clarissa switched off her implant again. Lily vanished, along with lights, taxis, buses and crowds. It was very dark and quite silent and the buildings were dim shadows.
“The thing is, Lily,” Clarissa announced to the empty darkness, “that you consensuals are all just like these lights. Just moving pictures made out of little dots. Just pictures of buses, pictures of cars, pictures of people, pictures of shop windows.”
Deliberately turning away from where Lily had been, Clarissa turned the implant on again and watched the lights come back. But there was no thrill this time, no exhilarating shock, nothing to offset the cold and the pain. It was no different really from changing channels on a TV set, she thought bitterly, and straight away reached up to flick the implant off again. But now the switch, which was designed to be turned on and off a couple of times a day, finally broke under the strain of her constant fiddling with it and refused to stay in one position or the other. Clarissa’s perceptual field now flickered randomly every few seconds from the consensual to the physical world and back again – and she couldn’t make it stop. She stood helplessly and ineffectually fingering the switch for a short time, then gave up and sank down to the ground at the foot of the statue. What else was there to do?
“Did you call up the council, Li…” she began, and then the consensual world disappeared. “Oh dear. LILY, ARE YOU STILL THERE?… Oh you are, good. Did you call the council only I think I ought to go home now… Lily? LILY! ARE THE COUNCIL GETTING HELP?… Tell them I don’t want Agents mind. Tell them to get some physicals out. They’ll be cross with me, but they’ll come anyway. I don’t care what Richard said.”
Actually, whether she liked it or not, Agents were coming, four of them, from different directions, from different errands in different parts of London. They were still some way off but they were on their way. The Hub had sent them, having contacted Richard Howard and been told by him that we physicals wouldn’t come out again.
Later Richard began to worry about what he’d done and called me.
“I know it seems harsh,” he said, rather defensively, “but I do feel we’ve got to keep out of this, don’t you agree? Clarissa’s got to learn that when we say something we mean it, or she’ll keep doing this stuff over and over again. I mean she’s in Piccadilly Circus for god’s sake! Even Clarissa must be perfectly well aware that she couldn’t go into central London and get back again in that silly little car of hers. She obviously just assumed that we would come and fetch her. She just banked on it.”
I was as furious with Clarissa as he was. I had spent the afternoon raking leaves and tidying up in my secluded little garden. I had just eaten a small meal and taken a glass of port and was looking forward to a quiet evening alone in the warm behind drawn curtains, making some preparatory notes for Chapter 62 of my book ‘The Decline and Fall of Reality’. (I had dealt in Chapters 60 and 61 with the advent of the Internet and the mobile telephone and was just getting to what was to be the great central set-piece of my whole account: the moment where the human race is presented for the first time with incontrovertible evidence that its own activity will destroy the planet, not in centuries or even decades but in years, unless it can reduce its physical presence to a fraction of its current levels.)
“Bloody Clarissa! Bloody bloody Clarissa!”
Why should I give up the treat of a quiet evening and a new chapter, when she herself had deliberately engineered her own difficulties? I absolutely dreaded going into the centre of London at any time, as Clarissa surely knew, and yet here she was calmly assuming that I could and should be dragged there whenever it suited her convenience. And yet I knew I had to go to her.
“I can’t leave her to the Agents, though, Richard. I know she’s a pain, I know we’re being used, but I can’t just leave her.”
“Oh for goodness’ sake, Tom, it’ll teach her a lesson,” Richard said, hardening in his resolve now he had my own flabbiness of will to kick against. “How will she ever learn if we don’t stay firm now? It’s for her own good really. And anyway, the Agents can’t be called off now. You know what they’re like.”