“Well if they’re going to be there anyway, I’d better be there too,” I said. “They scare her silly. I’ll drive up there now, so at least there’s someone on hand that she knows.”
I went out into the cold and started up my car. I resented Clarissa bitterly. I dreaded the dark feelings that trips into London invariably churned up in me, the shame, the embarrassment, the sense of loss, the envy, the deep, deep grief that is like the grief of facing a former lover who belongs now to another and will never never be yours again… I was exhausted by the very thought of the effort of it all, not to mention the discomfort and the cold.
When I got to Piccadilly Circus, Agents were just arriving, one emerging from Shaftesbury Avenue, one from Piccadilly and one each from the northern and southern branches of Regent Street. But, huddled up under the statue of Eros, Clarissa couldn’t see them, for when she was in purely physical mode it was too dark and when she was in consensual mode they were invisible. Beside her squatted Lily with her consensual arm round Clarissa’s physical shoulder. Sometimes Clarissa could see Lily and sometimes she couldn’t, but either way she could get no warmth from the embrace, however much Lily might want to give it.
As my physical headlights swept across the physical space, the first thing Clarissa saw was two of the Agents looming out of the darkness and advancing towards her. It felt like some nightmare from her childhood, and she screamed. Then her implant switched on by itself and the lights and the buses and the crowds returned to screen them out. But that was even worse because she knew that behind this glossy facade the Agents were still really there, slowly advancing, though now unseen.
She screamed again.
“Keep away from me, you hear me! Just keep away.”
“Don’t be scared, Clarissa,” said Lily. “I’m here for you.”
But Lily didn’t have a clue. She had never experienced cold. She had never known physical pain. She wasn’t aware of the presence of the Agents. She had no inkling of the other world of silence and shadow that lay behind the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus.
I got out of my car. I had my own implant switched on and I picked my way gingerly over the ground between me and Clarissa, knowing only too well how easily nasty physical potholes can be concealed by the virtual road surface. I was doing my best to ignore the many consensual eyes watching me with disapproval and dislike and I was seething all the while with rage at self-obsessed Clarissa for putting me through all this yet again. How dare she drag me out here into the cold night? How dare she expose me to the illusion of the consensual city and to the disapproving gaze of the consensual people, when all I ever wanted was to be at home behind my high hedges that I had cut into the shape of castle walls, behind my locked doors, behind my tightly drawn curtains, writing about reality.
“You know her do you?” a man asked me. “Well, you want to do something about her, mate. She’s nuts. She’s mental. She needs help.”
I didn’t respond. I had never known how to speak to these people, so manifestly unreal and yet so obviously alive. I both despised and envied them. How tawdry their constructed world was and how craven their meek acceptance of it. Yet how narrow and dull my own world was by comparison, my bleak garden, my clipped hedges, my book, my nightly glass of port, my weekly sally down the road to the Horse and Hounds, the Last Real Pub, to drink Real Beer with the diminishing band of decrepit and barren old men and woman who call themselves the Last Real People.
“She needs locking up more like,” said a woman. “That’s the same one that blocked the Northern Line last month with her carrying on. I saw her face in the paper.”
I picked my way through the traffic.
“Alight Clarissa,” I called coldly as I came up to her, “I’m here again for you. Muggins is here again as you no doubt expected he would be. I’ve come to fetch you home.”
“Muggins? Who’s that?” she quavered. She was afraid it was one of the Agents.
“It’s just me, Clarissa. It’s just Tom.”
“It’s who?” muttered Clarissa, straining to see me.
“He said Tom, dear,” Lily told her.
Clarissa glanced sideways at the cartoon face with its little black dot eyes and its downward curved mouth. Then Lily vanished again, along with the whole Field, and Clarissa was back in the dark physical world. But the lights of my car were there now and, without the distraction of the Field, Clarissa could clearly see me approaching as well as the Agents around me, waiting to step in if I couldn’t resolve things.
Awkwardly, wincing with pain, she rose to her feet.
“I just wanted to see the lights again, like they were when I was a child,” she said stubbornly.
And then she began to spin round on the spot like children sometimes do in play, but very very slowly, shuffling round and round with her feet and grimacing all the while with pain. And as she revolved, the faulty switch on her implant continued to flicker on and off so that, for a few seconds the bright lights and the buses and the cars span around her, and then it was the turn of the darkness that was the source of her coldness and her pain, and it was the dim cold walls of the empty buildings that moved round her, lit only by the headlights of my car.
Lily appeared and disappeared. When she was there the Agents vanished. When she vanished, they appeared. The one constant was me, who like Clarissa could both feel the physical cold, and see the consensual lights.
“Come on Clarrie,” I said to her gently. “Come on Clarrie.”
The old lady ignored me for a while, carrying on with her strange slow-motion spinning and singing a tuneless little song under her breath. People were craning round in cars and buses to look at us. Pedestrians were standing across the road and watching us as frankly as if this really was a Circus and we were there expressly to put on a show.
Then abruptly Clarissa stopped spinning. She tottered with dizziness, but her eyes were blazing like the eyes of a cornered animal.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Who exactly are you?”
It was odd because in that moment everything around me seemed to intensify: the sharpness of the cold night air in the physical world, the brilliance of the coloured lights in the consensual one, the strange collision of the two worlds that my Clarrie had single-handedly brought about… And I found that I didn’t feel angry any more, didn’t even mind that she’d brought me all this way.
I switched off the implant behind my ear, so that I could check up on what the Agents were doing. But they were still standing back and waiting for me to deal with things.
“It’s me, Clarrie dear,” I said to her. “It’s Tom. Your brother.”
The Agent nearest me stiffened slightly and inclined its head towards me, as if I had half-reminded it of something.
“I reckon you’ve had enough adventure for one day, my dear,” I told my sister, flicking my implant on again to shut the Agents out of my sight. “Enough for one day, don’t you agree? Don’t mind the Agents. I’ve brought the car for you. I’ve come to take you home.”
She let me lead her to the car and help her inside. She was in a very bad state, trembling, bloodless, befuddled, her injured foot swollen to nearly twice its normal size. I was glad I had thought to bring a rug for her, and a flask of hot cocoa, and a bottle of brandy.
That strange moon-faced creature, Lily, a human soul inside a cartoon, followed us over and stood anxiously watching.
“Is she alright?” she asked. “She’s gone so strange. What is it that’s the matter with her?”
“Yes, she’ll be alright. She’s just old and tired,” I told her, shutting the passenger door and walking round the car to get in myself.