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.When Tamsin was born, her mother Liz had her placed for adoption.Tamsin was not a wanted child.She was the child of a rape for one thing and this did not help, but as a matter of fact she wouldn’t have been wanted anyway, for Liz didn’t have an ounce of maternal feeling in her.But Liz’s mother and her sister and her brother and the people in the pub where she drank every night, they all told her she was a selfish cow and how could she give up her own flesh and blood? They all told her they didn’t want anything to do with a selfish cow who would give away a little baby that never asked to be brought into the world.And all this was not easy for someone like Liz to withstand.Time split and in some of its branches, Liz gave way to the pressure and asked for Tamsin to be returned to her, as was her legal right, before the adoption went through.In other branches Tamsin was adopted by the couple who’d been caring for her since birth, two earnest young doctors who couldn’t have children of their own.They renamed her Jessica.Jessica Tamsin Ferne.This is what Tamsin and Jessica worked out between them as they walked in the open streets.Tamsin had not had an easy time of it.After getting her back, her mother had grossly neglected her.One of her mother’s boyfriends had abused her.In the end the authorities had taken her back into care.But they left it too late and were unable to settle her anywhere.She moved between many different foster-homes and residential units, in and around the big social housing project outside Bristol where she had originally lived with Liz.Jessica on the other hand had been raised in Highgate by the two earnest doctors, who sent her to private schools and took her in the car to ballet classes every Saturday morning and violin lessons on Wednesdays and extra French every second Thursday.But once, thirty-three years ago a single baby girl had lain in a crib with these two different futures simultaneously ahead of her.Not to mention other futures that neither of them knew about.“You must come home with me,” said Jessica.“I’ll phone my work and say I’ve had to go home.”Tamsin smiled as she listened to Jessica lying to her secretary.When Jessica had finished they looked at each other and burst out laughing, like co-conspirators, both of them noticing how alike they were, how at some deep level they understood one another, whatever their different histories.And each of them was thinking simultaneously that at last she’d no longer be alone.Both of them, however, had thought this many times before, if only ever very briefly.In Jessica’s case she’d thought it for a short while just a few hours previously in the Laotian restaurant with Julian.And yet Julian hadn’t entered her thoughts, even for a moment, since Tamsin said, ‘We could be sisters’.Jessica led the way to her car, but as they turned up Red Lion Street the gate began to bleep, for only Jessica had an LSN card in her pocket.“Excuse me!” called out the guard.“Can you…”When they turned towards him, each with the same irritated expression, he was speechless.He knew both of them by sight, for Jessica often walked through his gate and Tamsin often begged outside it, but it had never until now occurred to him to compare them.*As the guard wouldn’t let Tamsin into the West Central Safe Streets Zone, Jessica had to fetch the car and pick Tamsin up outside it.There were problems at the other end too.As a resident subscriber of the Docklands Zone, Jessica was allowed to bring in visitors, but they were still required to show their national ID card at the gate.Tamsin had no ID of any sort.She may have been born in Bristol but this didn’t alter the fact that she was an illegal immigrant from another universe.So she hid in the luggage compartment of the car, and in that way Jessica smuggled her deviant alter ego through the security barrier within which she herself had, at considerable expense, chosen to live.She was taking quite a risk in doing so, for the penalty for deliberately violating the LSN security rules was to be automatically barred not only from the Docklands Safe Streets Zone but from all the other LSN Zones in London as well.So she would lose both her home and her job if she was caught.An elderly neighbour from two floors up stared at them in the lift: Jessica in her chic outfit and Tamsin in a jumper and jeans which gave off the sickly odour of clothes that have been slept in.They were both giggly and excited, each in her own way feeling released from a long oppression.“People usually call me Jess,” said Jessica.“People usually call me Tammy.”“Do you want some wine?”“You are so fucking posh aren’t you?”“Well you’re so fucking common.Do you want wine or not?”“Yeah great.Haven’t you got a bloke or kids or nothing?”“Nope.I did have a bloke but I chucked him out.I never wanted kids.”“Me neither.Like mum.”Tamsin sipped the wine and looked around.“You must be rich! I bet you’re one of those that go on foreign holidays every year.Thailand, India… all that…”“Well I’ve never been to another world, though.I can’t even imagine what that’s like.”“They’re just the same as this one, except for stupid little things, like the phone boxes are a different colour, or the money looks different, or the estates have different names.Just stupid little things.When you start shifting you think you are going to find a place where it will be better, a magical place.But you soon give that idea up when you’ve done a few shifts.It’s always the same old shit.It’s always the bloody same.”“So why did you keep doing it?”Tamsin walked to the doorway of the room and looked out, clutching her wineglass against her body with both hands.“Once you start its hard to stop,” she said.“You’re not looking to get anywhere any more, not really.It’s the shift itself that’s the thing.All these worlds going by and you’re not in any of them, you’re just falling and falling through them.In the middle of a shift the worlds go by so fast that it’s just a blur.”She looked into the kitchen, into the bathroom, into the main bedroom.Jessica followed her patiently.“I’ll tell you a weird thing about shifting, though,” Tamsin said at length.“You know those little flick-books you can get? The ones where you flick the pages and it looks like one picture that’s moving? Well, it’s a bit like that.All those blurry worlds sort of merge together and you see something else which isn’t in any of them.And it’s like a huge tree, a massive great tree, but with no roots or leaves or nothing, no ground or sky, just branches growing all the time in the dark, growing and growing, and splitting off from each other all the time as quick as anything…”She looked into Jessica’s spare bedroom, which had once been the den of Jessica’s motorcycle courier boyfriend, Jeff.“And you think if only you could see that tree properly,” she said.“If only you could see it you’d, like, understand [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.When Tamsin was born, her mother Liz had her placed for adoption.Tamsin was not a wanted child.She was the child of a rape for one thing and this did not help, but as a matter of fact she wouldn’t have been wanted anyway, for Liz didn’t have an ounce of maternal feeling in her.But Liz’s mother and her sister and her brother and the people in the pub where she drank every night, they all told her she was a selfish cow and how could she give up her own flesh and blood? They all told her they didn’t want anything to do with a selfish cow who would give away a little baby that never asked to be brought into the world.And all this was not easy for someone like Liz to withstand.Time split and in some of its branches, Liz gave way to the pressure and asked for Tamsin to be returned to her, as was her legal right, before the adoption went through.In other branches Tamsin was adopted by the couple who’d been caring for her since birth, two earnest young doctors who couldn’t have children of their own.They renamed her Jessica.Jessica Tamsin Ferne.This is what Tamsin and Jessica worked out between them as they walked in the open streets.Tamsin had not had an easy time of it.After getting her back, her mother had grossly neglected her.One of her mother’s boyfriends had abused her.In the end the authorities had taken her back into care.But they left it too late and were unable to settle her anywhere.She moved between many different foster-homes and residential units, in and around the big social housing project outside Bristol where she had originally lived with Liz.Jessica on the other hand had been raised in Highgate by the two earnest doctors, who sent her to private schools and took her in the car to ballet classes every Saturday morning and violin lessons on Wednesdays and extra French every second Thursday.But once, thirty-three years ago a single baby girl had lain in a crib with these two different futures simultaneously ahead of her.Not to mention other futures that neither of them knew about.“You must come home with me,” said Jessica.“I’ll phone my work and say I’ve had to go home.”Tamsin smiled as she listened to Jessica lying to her secretary.When Jessica had finished they looked at each other and burst out laughing, like co-conspirators, both of them noticing how alike they were, how at some deep level they understood one another, whatever their different histories.And each of them was thinking simultaneously that at last she’d no longer be alone.Both of them, however, had thought this many times before, if only ever very briefly.In Jessica’s case she’d thought it for a short while just a few hours previously in the Laotian restaurant with Julian.And yet Julian hadn’t entered her thoughts, even for a moment, since Tamsin said, ‘We could be sisters’.Jessica led the way to her car, but as they turned up Red Lion Street the gate began to bleep, for only Jessica had an LSN card in her pocket.“Excuse me!” called out the guard.“Can you…”When they turned towards him, each with the same irritated expression, he was speechless.He knew both of them by sight, for Jessica often walked through his gate and Tamsin often begged outside it, but it had never until now occurred to him to compare them.*As the guard wouldn’t let Tamsin into the West Central Safe Streets Zone, Jessica had to fetch the car and pick Tamsin up outside it.There were problems at the other end too.As a resident subscriber of the Docklands Zone, Jessica was allowed to bring in visitors, but they were still required to show their national ID card at the gate.Tamsin had no ID of any sort.She may have been born in Bristol but this didn’t alter the fact that she was an illegal immigrant from another universe.So she hid in the luggage compartment of the car, and in that way Jessica smuggled her deviant alter ego through the security barrier within which she herself had, at considerable expense, chosen to live.She was taking quite a risk in doing so, for the penalty for deliberately violating the LSN security rules was to be automatically barred not only from the Docklands Safe Streets Zone but from all the other LSN Zones in London as well.So she would lose both her home and her job if she was caught.An elderly neighbour from two floors up stared at them in the lift: Jessica in her chic outfit and Tamsin in a jumper and jeans which gave off the sickly odour of clothes that have been slept in.They were both giggly and excited, each in her own way feeling released from a long oppression.“People usually call me Jess,” said Jessica.“People usually call me Tammy.”“Do you want some wine?”“You are so fucking posh aren’t you?”“Well you’re so fucking common.Do you want wine or not?”“Yeah great.Haven’t you got a bloke or kids or nothing?”“Nope.I did have a bloke but I chucked him out.I never wanted kids.”“Me neither.Like mum.”Tamsin sipped the wine and looked around.“You must be rich! I bet you’re one of those that go on foreign holidays every year.Thailand, India… all that…”“Well I’ve never been to another world, though.I can’t even imagine what that’s like.”“They’re just the same as this one, except for stupid little things, like the phone boxes are a different colour, or the money looks different, or the estates have different names.Just stupid little things.When you start shifting you think you are going to find a place where it will be better, a magical place.But you soon give that idea up when you’ve done a few shifts.It’s always the same old shit.It’s always the bloody same.”“So why did you keep doing it?”Tamsin walked to the doorway of the room and looked out, clutching her wineglass against her body with both hands.“Once you start its hard to stop,” she said.“You’re not looking to get anywhere any more, not really.It’s the shift itself that’s the thing.All these worlds going by and you’re not in any of them, you’re just falling and falling through them.In the middle of a shift the worlds go by so fast that it’s just a blur.”She looked into the kitchen, into the bathroom, into the main bedroom.Jessica followed her patiently.“I’ll tell you a weird thing about shifting, though,” Tamsin said at length.“You know those little flick-books you can get? The ones where you flick the pages and it looks like one picture that’s moving? Well, it’s a bit like that.All those blurry worlds sort of merge together and you see something else which isn’t in any of them.And it’s like a huge tree, a massive great tree, but with no roots or leaves or nothing, no ground or sky, just branches growing all the time in the dark, growing and growing, and splitting off from each other all the time as quick as anything…”She looked into Jessica’s spare bedroom, which had once been the den of Jessica’s motorcycle courier boyfriend, Jeff.“And you think if only you could see that tree properly,” she said.“If only you could see it you’d, like, understand [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]