Kate Dixon is miserable. So when an e-mail from a stranger offers her a no-strings-attached, three-month-long life exchange, she jumps at the chance. After all: what has she got to lose?

But leaving your life in someone else’s hands is a dangerous game. And Kate’s about to find out just how seriously her opponent is playing.

Yours is Mine

Amy Bird

www.CarinaUK.com

AMY BIRD lives in London, where she is currently dividing her time between working as a solicitor, finalising her second novel, and completing a Creative Writing MA. She loves to read and review books as well as write them, and has also written a number of plays, which have been performed to large audiences and received critical acclaim. Her husband, Michael, writes too and one of their favourite pastimes is to ‘fantasy cast’ films of their novels while cooking up new concoctions in the kitchen. For updates on her writing follow her on Twitter, @London_Writer

I would like to thank all the people who have helped in my journey as a writer over the years. In particular: contemporaries and tutors at Birkbeck and Faber Academy for providing an environment to explore my voice; my family and friends for their understanding when I vanish into my study for hours (/days) on end; and to everyone at Carina (especially the lovely Clio Cornish) for developing Yours is Mine for readers and welcoming me to the Carina family. And extra big thanks to my husband, Michael, for his unerring support, re-reading of re-drafts and all the ‘constructive’ feedback.

If Yours is Mine keeps you on the edge of your seat, pass it on. But please: keep its secrets safe. #YoursisMine

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Author Bio

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Extract

Copyright Page

Chapter 1

-Kate-

The day the invitation appeared in her email inbox, Kate Dixon was ready to give up.

Cards congratulating her on the success of her dad’s funeral the previous week were still pouring through the letterbox of his Kielder cottage. ‘I thought it went well, all things considered’, they said, or ‘He would have been very pleased’. Kate knew the blue silk inside the coffin had been fetching, but she still thought dad would have preferred to be alive. They could be going for a jog, even now, in the Kielder National Park surrounding his cottage, like they used to.

At least Neil had been there to fulfil husbandly duties, the Navy having flown him home for the funeral. He’d even come to the pulpit with her when she’d read, gently caressing her fingers when she began to cry.

“Don’t worry,” he’d whispered, smiling that sweet Neil smile. “I’m here.”

Yes, she had thought, returning his smile, Neil was there. He would protect her, and soon they’d be laughing together again, reminiscing about happier times.

Then Neil had re-bereaved her after the funeral by telling her he had to return to the Gulf for a further three months.

Without Neil to soothe her, Kate sat on the sofa in the cottage, playing the last year back in her mind. She remembered the emptiness in her dad’s eyes when the prognosis had worsened. Cancer’s a bastard, he’d said. He’d been right. Dad had refused a nurse, or a hospice, so Kate had suffered with him.

Dad.

Kate sighed. Trying to push out of her mind his vomiting, his cries of pain, his final night when she’d held him into peace, she pulled herself off the sofa to get her iPhone from the desk. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and found tears forming in her eyes. It happened every time she saw her reflection. How was she supposed to propel that pale ghost of a self onwards? Or summon the energy to move their stuff back to Portsmouth? Or get the composure to don a suit and speak to a client there – or even her secretary? She couldn’t work remotely forever.

Waking the phone, she checked for mail. Come on, somebody must have something to share – Neil if he’d reached the ship, or a social networking update. Finally, the phone vibrated.

‘Want to stop the world and get off – into somebody else’s world?’

The title of the new email was so apposite that Kate couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. She opted for both. This must be junk mail, though, right? She should delete it without reading it. But she didn’t. She touched through into the email.

‘Dear Kate’ it began. At least they’d bothered to personalise it.

‘Bored? Lonely? Frustrated?’

One out of three, thought Kate.

‘Or just want a change? Here is your chance to take a break from your life and step into someone else’s – while knowing that your own life is in safe hands. This is for serious research for me – but a break for you. If you fancy living somebody else’s life (and in a London flat) for a few months and have your own property that you can offer, look no further. Simply reply to this email with a short description of your property location, job (if you have one) and a contact telephone number, or call the number below. Interview and details to be arranged with suitable applicant(s).’

It then set out a London telephone number, and was signed off by someone called Anna.

Nowhere to enter her credit card number, so she wasn’t being phished, Kate thought. Perhaps it was some new market research tool to get information for a dating site or a property search engine? It was surely far too naïvely constructed to be genuine. Who would expect anyone to pick up the phone to do a property-exchange (or exchange lives, whatever that meant) for the purposes of some mysterious research? No, it must be a scam, she decided, as she pressed delete with relish. There may be some poor fools out there unworldly enough to dial a line on divert to some premium rate number, but she would not be one of them.

Still, she thought, how perfect it would be to step away from all of this and leave it to somebody else for a while, without putting her own way of life at risk. It was as if the marketing person behind the ad had seen into her thoughts. She knew that at some point she would have to rouse herself and start the task of sifting through her dad’s belongings and documents and sort out the logistics of returning to Portsmouth. A sudden bolt to a flat in London would be a blessed escape.

The landline phone rang, breaking the daydream. Kate sighed. She supposed she ought to answer it. She pulled herself off the sofa and made her way over the no man’s land of scattered plates and glasses to one of the handset docks and stretched out a hand, balancing precariously over the sofa. No handset met her grasp. Then, from the corner of her eye she saw the phone’s familiar red flashing spreading out from under a crumpled piece of kitchen roll and lunged to answer it. The answering machine picked up before she did. Holding the handset, she listened as the caller left a message, debating whether to interject. The message was from Neil’s mum, who lived in France. Kate would not pick up.

“Hello, both of you – although it’s probably just Kate now. I thought I might catch Neil before he left. I must say I’d hoped to see more of him after the funeral – you didn’t need to take off with him quite so quickly.” There was some noise in the background of the message. “Anyway, I must go now. Ask Neil to email me if you speak to him. Bye!”

Kate flung the phone across the floor.

“Bloody woman!” she cursed aloud. She could not believe the temerity of Neil’s mum to phone her up and criticise her at such a time. True, Kate didn’t have much of a benchmark, her own mum having left twenty years ago when Kate was eight, but she bet they weren’t all like this. As if it was Kate’s fault Neil was away! Kate took their wedding photo from the mantelpiece and clutched it to her chest. Four happy years ago. Or rather, happy four years ago. She remembered the final whispered conversations on the eve of the wedding, Neil reassuring her that absence made the heart grow fonder, that he wouldn’t always be at sea and that when they started a family, it would be different. She’d exchanged vows happy and excited, Neil in uniform, her in white, both in love. Now, a tear rolled down Kate’s cheek, followed by another one, until the wedding picture was in danger of saturation. She wished the world would stop, like the email had said. Whether she escaped into somebody else’s world or just vanished absolutely, she didn’t care. Anything but this.

In bed that night, exhausted from the latest fit of crying, Kate reflected on her lot. It was clear that something had to give – she could not return to her job as if nothing had happened. She needed time to repair herself, before Neil came back to rescue her. Her mind wandered back to the email of earlier that afternoon from the apparent researcher. She thought about the prospect of being in London again. She had studied there for three years at university, done her law exams there, and lived there with Neil for the first two years of their marriage. Then he’d suggested that it would make life easier if they moved to Portsmouth, where his ship was based. She refused at first, but Neil persuaded her with the promise of being able to see him on weekday evenings when he wasn’t away at sea. There was also the bonus that they were able to afford a sizeable house rather than a flat.

Nothing had prepared her for the boredom. In London, when Neil was away, she could take her pick of theatres, museums, cinemas or bars to go out to, with friends or alone. More than that, there was the buzz of living in the capital, its vibrancy and unlimited possibilities to explore. Portsmouth had none of this. Or if it did, she had not found it. It was fine during the week, when she was at work. At weekends, though, uneventful Saturdays would stretch out into drab Sundays, just filling in time until Monday came round again. And always against the backdrop of ships, historic or contemporary, their presence mocking her with Neil’s absence.

Kate pulled the covers over her head. Oh, to be back in London again, she thought, stretching out her toes. She remembered the energy she had when she was there, and the enthusiasm, rather than this empty half-life. Maybe if she went back there again, just for a bit, and did all the things she used to do, or experimented with new ones, she could go back to her old self? Maybe she could just take a couple of weeks by herself in a hotel or a self-catered apartment? She shook her head. She needed a longer break. Lying in bed in the darkness, she saw a possible glimmer of her old vibrant self. The email inviting her to exchange her identity didn’t have to be the work of a scammer or a marketer. Maybe, just maybe, willed Kate, it was the chance she had been looking for.

Chapter 2

-Kate-

Kate sat staring at her mobile, biting her lower lip. Earlier that morning, she’d retrieved the ‘identity exchange’ email from trash. Her finger hovered over the phone number of ‘Anna’. It was just an initial enquiry, she told herself. She could always hang up if it seemed suspect, or even if it didn’t.

Kate pressed her finger down on the screen. There, it was done. Kate waited as the phone rang. She would give it one more ring she decided, then try again later. As she was about to hang up, there was an answer.

“Hello, Anna Roberts speaking.”

Kate’s first impulse, which she only just managed to curb, was to put the phone down.

“Hello?” said the voice again, sounding wary.

“Oh, hi,” started Kate, clearing her throat. “I’m calling about the advert?”

“Which advert?” came the cold reply.

As I expected, thought Kate, her heart sinking – the email must be just one of many ads sent out by an agency.

“Oh, sorry – the email about ‘Stop the world and get off’ and the identity exchange,” Kate clarified. Almost before she had finished speaking, the person at the other end cut in, this time in much warmer tones.

“Of course! Sorry if I sounded abrupt – I get so many cold marketing calls, don’t you? I try and field them as best I can. And then of course I forget that now I’ve put out an advert myself the shoe’s on the other foot!” A torrent of words came down the phone. Kate relaxed. This did not sound like the expert patter of a salesperson. Kate let her continue.

“So I take it you’re interested, then?” asked Anna.

“Well, maybe, but I just wanted to get a bit more information, if I can? The ad didn’t really give that much away,” replied Kate, reminding herself that she was in control.

“Yeah, of course. I don’t want to be sending total strangers my ideas for my PhD! I just wanted to get the right people to call.”

Kate laughed. “Well, here I am!”

“And you’ve no idea how pleased I am about that. So – let me tell you all about it. The basic idea is that you live in my flat near Camden and take over my life there for three or four months. At the same time I would come and try to live your life, as you, wherever you are now. Work, hobbies, love-life et cetera, et cetera – what’s mine is yours, and vice versa. I won’t bore you with the details of the thesis but broadly speaking it’s about the interrelation between property, pursuits and identity – blah, blah, blah. We can have a debrief at the end and see where we’ve got to. Then I get the hard work of actually writing it up!” Anna paused at the end of this obviously rehearsed spiel to take a much-needed breath. “You do have a property to exchange, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, up in Northumberland – we’ve been living in Dad’s cottage up here but he’s, um, well he’s just died. “ Kate’s voice tremored and there came a sympathetic murmuring on the other end of the line. Kate carried on, trying to keep her voice even. “We’ve got a house in Portsmouth but we’re renting that out as a monthly let at the moment. It’s a bit remote up here,” she apologised. “It would be a far cry from London.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” reassured Anna. “I have been outside London, you know – I went to uni in Nottingham. The more remote it is the more I can really embrace the minutiae of what it is to be you. Your husband’s away at the moment then, is he?”

Kate frowned.

“I don’t think I said I had a husband,” she challenged.

There was a slight pause.

“No, no you didn’t. I confess: I’ve been doing a bit of digging on the internet. All your social networking site profiles are public, so I had a look. Bit stalkerish, I know, but I wanted to make sure I only sent emails to people who might be worthwhile.” Anna paused again.

Kate blushed. Of course, she should have realised that if this was a genuine project, Anna wouldn’t be picking names out of a phone book. Her friends had chastised her for not using on-line privacy settings properly. But nobody could steal her identity by just accessing her public thoughts, right?

“Yes, my husband’s away,” Kate acknowledged. “He’s in the Navy, as you may have gathered. He’s due to be gone for about three months. That’s partly why I’m thinking of doing this, to be honest.”

“It must get a bit lonely?” asked Anna.

“Oh, you know, I get by. How about you? You mentioned swapping love-lives – I can’t quite see how that would work. Are you actually seeing anyone at the moment?” queried Kate, adroitly turning the focus of questioning back to Anna. Four years of marriage had taught her she didn’t miss Neil any less by talking about it – and how to divert questions by friends, family and often passing acquaintances. Besides, she wanted to know about Anna’s romantic arrangements and the part she was expected to play – she didn’t want to stumble inadvertently into some kind of swingers’ club.

“There was somebody. But it didn’t work out. It was a shame. I thought he was the one.” Anna sounded wistful, but then caught herself and continued breezily. “Still, his loss really – sure he wouldn’t make that mistake again if he had the choice! There’s nothing doing at the moment, but I’m working on the internet dating so who knows, by the time we set this up you could be in business!”

Kate laughed, pleased the conversation had taken on a lighter tone again. “No worries – I’m a happily married woman!”

“Of course you are. So let’s move on. What else do you want to know?”

Kate considered. She didn’t really seem to have learnt much beyond the thesis (which, frankly, sounded a bit thin, but that wasn’t her problem) and the flat in Camden.

“You said you’re a PhD student. Doesn’t that mean you’ve got students to teach? Surely I’m not expected to do that?” she asked. If she was going to have to take on a job that required her to become postgraduate level in whatever social science it was that Anna specialised in, she might as well forget about this experiment now.

“No, don’t worry,” soothed Anna. “I’ve been allowed a special dispensation because of this project. I’m just doing some freelance proofreading to keep me in funds. You can easily fill in for me – I just get sent whatever they need me to work on, nothing specialist.”

Kate nodded to herself. She could do that. Years of study had made her a quick and precise reader. Besides, it sounded like a fair swap. “That sounds ideal,” she said. “I’m a solicitor, but because of my dad being ill I’ve just been working up here on editing a book on commercial leases,” she explained. Kate suddenly became conscious of what she was suggesting. The firm would be furious if they knew that she was contemplating handing over her responsibilities, not to mention their intellectual property, to a comparative stranger. And what if the firm wanted her to do other work, back in Portsmouth? She wasn’t sure she could stretch the book task out for three months. And even if she could, would Anna be able to do it? Thinking aloud, Kate added, “I say editing, but it’s mostly proofreading and sense-checking at this stage.”

“That sounds manageable,” Anna confirmed. “Look, I know the work side of things is a real concern for people, but don’t worry – we can sort that out.”

“I’ve got professional duties, you know?” Kate continued. “I wouldn’t be able to give you any client access or anything.”

“Oh, of course, I wouldn’t think of it!” Anna exclaimed. “The last thing I want to do is get anyone struck off! But it sounds like work isn’t top of your list of priorities at the moment – so do you think you can still pursue this?”

Kate chewed on her bottom lip. All the work concerns were very real. But she did not want to lose her chance on this swap by sounding as if she had gone cold.

As if reading her thoughts, Anna continued, “Of course, it would be a shame for me if you think you can’t do it – I’ve had a fair few other enquiries and I’m meeting people next week. I’m keen to get something finalised fairly quickly – I’m sure you understand.”

Kate quashed her concerns. “Who said I couldn’t do it?” she countered. “Meeting up sounds like a great idea.”

“Excellent!” said Anna, sounding relieved. “I’m having one-to-one sessions with people at the flat – that way you get to see where you would be living. I’ll fill you in on other details face to face – like the drama class I’m enrolled in.”

“That would be perfect, thanks,” agreed Kate. An acting class sounded fantastic – it was a long time since she had done anything like that.

They agreed that Kate would come to Anna’s flat the following week, Kate’s first venture beyond the confines of Kielder for months. Anna insisted on paying the travel expenses and for a night in a local hotel.

“OK, Kate – looking forward to meeting you next week!” concluded Anna.

It sounded like this might actually happen, Kate thought as she put down the phone. She might actually live in London again, and get back to her old self! She had images of curling up on a stylish sofa in ‘her’ London flat, reading through an exciting new novel to proofread it before heading off to her acting class (or maybe to the theatre). True, Kate would have to appraise Anna carefully when they met to make sure she could actually trust her to take care of the house for three months, but on the basis of the call it seemed genuine enough. Even if she decided not to go for it, she still got a free night in a London hotel – there seemed to be nothing to lose.

It wasn’t until she was on the train to London that Kate realised that she hadn’t given Anna her name during the phone call the previous week. Anna clearly knew who she was – she had been talking about Kate’s husband on the call, and the social networking page. She thought she remembered Anna addressing her by name at the end of the call.

Kate puzzled over this. How had Anna known who she was when she hadn’t given her name? She went back over the call in her head again, frowning to herself. Then her brow cleared. It must have been her saying that she was living up in Northumberland. In the first few days when she went up there she remembered posting an entry on her site while her dad was asleep. Anna must have linked that as an identifying feature – if she had been targeting particular people she must have been familiar with their distinguishing characteristics. Slightly odd that Anna would have seen that profile entry as it was many months ago, but she was a PhD student after all – readily available web records must present no challenge to her. There was nothing sinister about it.

Reassured, Kate let her mind fill with excitement as the train hurtled towards London, and her possible new adventure.

Chapter 3

-Anna-

Kate had taken the bait. Anna knew she would. Anyone would, personally selected in that way. People were arrogant, flattered that someone should want to take over their life. Kate was no different from all the rest. Anna had banked on that, and been proved right. Kate had sounded keen on the phone. And so she should. How could anyone wanting to escape their life resist the opportunity Anna offered? London, freelance working, time to explore life. Anna’s life. Too tantalising not to bite. Now Anna just had to reel her in.

She looked at her watch. Kate would be here soon. About time. It had taken long enough to set this up. Now she just wanted to get on with the experiment. Odd to call it an experiment, though, when she knew the outcome. She had done more planning, research and deep thinking than the average student and she knew that meant it would be perfect, once it started. Still, she would have to be diligent. Everything had to be ready, neat, hidden. Latent. Nothing to scare off the potential participant. Another quick look round the flat wouldn’t hurt, make sure everything was in place. Living room was fine, bathroom looked fine. Hang on, no, not fine. What was that candle doing on the floor? And that crayon? She kicked them across the corridor into the spare room with all the other detritus and shut the door to prevent a fresh escape. They could stay there for now, until they were needed.

Bedroom must be fine – mustn’t it? A quick glance over the bed, the floor, the dressing table. She took a sharp intake of breath. That photo should not be there. Far too compromising. There were some things strangers shouldn’t see. Not that Kate was really a stranger – Anna had done her research well. She picked up the picture and studied it. The photo was captured in her mind, but she still liked to reminisce over the physical object. Stroking it, Anna smiled. It could come on the exchange with her.

The door buzzer rang. It must be Kate! She mustn’t keep her waiting. She must be the perfect host. Anna took a deep breath, then ran to the intercom. It wasn’t until her hand was on the door latch that she realised she was still holding the photo. She felt dizzy at such a grave mistake so narrowly avoided. If she’d gone to greet Kate with a photo like that, it could spoil everything, put Kate right off. This was too important to ruin with a gaffe on that scale – this was Anna’s route to the future she had planned out. The future she deserved. Or at least would deserve if she didn’t make stupid mistakes before she had even got the set-up in place, she chided herself. Anna rushed back into the bedroom and tossed the photo quickly behind the dressing table. She would retrieve it later. Now she had to concentrate on Kate. Anna greeted her over the intercom and made her way downstairs to let her in. She would finally meet Kate face-to-face.

Anna wasn’t worried about that, although her subconscious had tried to claim otherwise. It bored her with dreams about falling. Rebelliously, night after night. In the dreams, there was a door opening into blackness and Anna would try to close it but would fail and fall headfirst into emptiness. Every so often, in a stratum of nothingness, there would be the glimmer of a movement, the possibility of a person, and a wonderfully beautiful face would spin out at her, an Amazonian goddess, all powerful thighs and long flowing hair. Anna would try to grab hold of her as she fell but the goddess wouldn’t save her; the vision was an illusion, a delusion, and Anna’s plummet continued down, down, down, past more spectres, more ghosts, who would not help stop her relentless descent. The contents of her flat were falling down the abyss too, somehow ricocheting off surfaces she couldn’t find, splintering and fragmenting as they did so. They shattered, the disintegrated pieces catching her up and embedding their shards in her skin, making her bleed. She looked back up from whence she came, and saw there was a shadowy male figure standing in the doorway, hurling the objects down onto her. She couldn’t make out who he was, but she could guess. He wasn’t welcome, but if he had to be anywhere her subconscious was the best place for him. Anna wasn’t going to have any truck with her subconscious, after all. She could and would keep it entirely separate from the rest of her. She would not allow it to give her doubts, particularly if the best it could do was to give her dreams about falling. Everyone had those – it was clearly just going through the motions, making a feeble attempt at getting her to reconsider. Granted, the dreams were pretty intense and Anna sometimes woke up shivering in anguish and feeling as nauseous as if she had spent the whole night falling down a tunnel. Her own fresh take on morning sickness. But she had a goal, and she was going after it. The nightmares were for night-time. They could remain there. Her subconscious could occupy itself in its nightly play-times however it wanted to. The conscious was Anna’s realm, and she was in control of it, of the situation, of everything.

True, meeting face to face would be a challenge. On the phone, people couldn’t see your face, read your expression, couldn’t judge you (or see you judging them). But Anna had prepared herself. She was confident she could control her emotions. She would be polite, positive, charming. She was curious now to see who she had brought to her doorstep, see what they were really like, drink them in, weigh them up, compare herself to them. Downstairs would be Kate. Anna would need to assess if she would be able to pass herself off as Kate, if she wanted to. That would be fun, it would work, Anna would enjoy it. She resolved to relish the moment when the door opened.

Besides, if it got difficult, she could just zone out, think about the future. She liked thinking about that. She had not slept last night for the excitement. It wasn’t that she had tried and failed. Anna didn’t do failure. Not in reality. She just didn’t go to bed. She wanted to sit up and think about the exchange, plan exactly what she was going to say, how to do the hard sell. And once the deal was done, what it would mean. What she would be about to achieve, and how good the result would be. A secure future, the life that she wanted. She could daydream indefinitely. No, not daydreams. Conscious plans. That she worked hard to achieve. And which Kate might be about to help her out with.

An extra dab of concealer had been necessary under the eyes this morning – Anna didn’t want people to think her life was tiring – but it did the trick. She was Anna again: calm, composed, poised. No evidence of her unrest remained, save that the bed looked even more fresh, inviting. It should do the trick. Anna would do the trick. Let the flat seduce Kate, Anna’s lifestyle woo her, the prospect of being Anna persuade Kate to let Anna live Kate’s life. Then Anna would get what she wanted.

Chapter 4

-Kate-

Kate shifted on her feet as she waited for Anna to open the door. She wished the other girl would hurry up before she lost her nerve. She smoothed down her hair and clothes again. It had been a bit of a walk from the hotel and she was feeling slightly windswept. She ought to have got a cab, she chastised herself. Unkempt hair suggested untidy living, which was not a great advert to somebody you were trying to swap flats with. She just hadn’t been able to resist the chance to walk. In part, she wanted to convince herself that she could still navigate around London; if she was a Londoner by nature if not by birth as she kept telling herself, she should be able to take the side streets without getting lost. She had forgotten that when she actually lived in London she would just have got a cab. It was amazing the excuses she had been able to think of to justify a ten-pound taxi fare, and having neat hair was one of the least tenuous.

It was the London buzz that had really compelled her to walk, though. As she had come out of the tube station on her arrival, she had been hit immediately by the vibrant pulse of the city she had not been to for two years. The scale of the noise and the crowds was much larger than she was used to, but far from being bewildered she breathed it all in, and relaxed. It was like coming home, she thought, re-entering the world of infinite possibilities. She had quickly checked into the hotel and deposited her bags, then bounded out onto the street again, ready to embrace the capital. She had been slightly disappointed to find she was staying in a small hotel off Euston Road rather than somewhere more glamorous in the West End, but the room was clean, it was only for one night, plus Anna was paying so it wasn’t such a bad deal, Kate told herself. Anyway, as a true Londoner, she should be happier staying out here rather than in the dead centre with all the tourists.

She’d furtively snatched a glance at the print-out from Streetmap that she’d brought with her, and set off. She was excited about meeting Anna. She had tried doing a search for her on the internet but her endeavours had yielded little result: there were too many Anna Robertses to choose from. She had ruled out Anna Roberts the curling champion, Anna Roberts the burlesque dancer, and indeed Anna Roberts the wannabe bull-fighter. No real basis for that, just a hunch. So she was going in cold. There would be a lot to find out in that day’s meeting.

Kate had soon found herself outside the door of the block of flats that Anna lived in. She was slightly underwhelmed by the building’s appearance. It was shabby, with paint peeling off the windowsills and scrawls of graffiti on the walls. She noted with distaste that the yard in which the building stood was strewn with litter, and had a pile of discarded furniture in one corner. She wouldn’t fancy going down there on a dark night to put the rubbish out – she only hoped the black metal rat poison containers placed strategically round the walls were actually refilled, although that seemed somewhat optimistic given the general down-at-heel feel the place had. Looking around her, she tried to notice the positive features. In its favour, there were some decent-looking cars parked in the yard, and the location was very good – there were assorted small shops and restaurants on the adjoining road and she had noticed it was only been five minutes’ walk from the tube. She imagined the ease with which one could pop home, change quickly and pop out again to dinner, maybe grabbing an emergency pint of milk on the way back. A far cry from the current reliance on cars and infrequent bus services in Kielder and Portsmouth. Besides, having seen a range of properties in her time renting, she knew the outside décor may just mean a landlord who took a relatively relaxed view of his obligations or an overstretched council, and that the inside may be a hidden gem. Accordingly, she had convinced herself to press the appropriate buzzer to announce her arrival and waited for Anna to appear, smoothing down her hair and clothes and composing her features for a greeting to ensure the impression she made was a good one.

The door opened. There was the customary moment before identities were confirmed and greetings were exchanged to allow the two women to appraise each other. Kate took in what she saw. In front of her was a willowy brunette, wavy long hair flicked back from a long slim, naturally made-up face, wearing a stylish but low-key combination of a loose white linen shirt and combat trousers. Kate mentally regretted her choice of the more formal dress and the impact the wind had made on her neatly straightened hair, which she saw the other woman take in with a hint of a supercilious raise of a perfectly groomed eyebrow. Still, they were the same build, and although Kate had gone for a slightly more high maintenance style than the other woman, she had made a considerable effort getting ready that morning and knew that overall she looked good – or at least would do when out of the wind. Neil would have been proud.

Having apparently completed her assessment, the other woman brought a smile to her features and held out her hand.

“Hi – Kate? I’m Anna. Glad you found me OK. Come in.”

Kate shook the proffered hand firmly, and followed Anna upstairs, taking in the common areas of the building while responding to Anna’s predictable but courteous questions about the journey and the hotel. The building was slightly more presentable inside than out, although the carpets were somewhat worn and the paint at the bottom of the walls was scuffed, presumably knocked by the comings and goings of furniture and bags that marked the rental market. Anna stopped on the second floor and unlocked the door.

“Welcome!” she said, looking back to Kate. “Let me give you the grand tour and then we’ll sit down and talk it all through.”

Kate was pleased to find that her supposition had been correct. The flat itself was an immense improvement on the building’s exterior. Anna led her through to a large open-plan living room and kitchen, with the hardwood floors and artistic lighting that had come to typify the image of a desirable London residence. It was furnished in neutral colours, with a simple but stylish wooden dining table and chairs and comfortable-looking tan leather sofa. The kitchen surfaces were made of what looked like granite.

“It’s all fake, of course,” cautioned Anna, following Kate’s gaze. “I like cooking but there’s a limit to how much rent I can pay – the landlord clearly did a good job with some plastic coating!” Kate smiled understandingly, and they moved through to the next room. Anna opened the door onto a double bedroom.

“This is my room,” she explained. “The bed takes up a fair bit of space but it’s so important to have a double, I think – it would just be such a demoralising admission of singleness otherwise!”

Kate nodded her agreement, only half listening, trying to take in as much of the flat as she could. True, the room was slightly on the small side, she thought, but it had been furnished with exemplary taste, almost like a show home with its complementary shades of blue on the walls and bedclothes, and abstract print hanging above the bed. There was a mirror hanging over the dressing table by the bed, and full-length mirrors on the wardrobe – Anna was clearly a girl who liked to look good, and Kate could easily imagine herself getting ready to go out with friends or into London. Kate came out of her thoughts to see Anna scrutinising her quizzically.

“Sorry!” started Kate. “Just thinking what it would be like to live here.”

“Well, that’s the idea,” bantered Anna, looking pleased that Kate was giving due consideration to the proposition. “I love having the big wardrobes. I would stick some of my clothes in the loft to make way for you – I know the idea is to do a swap, but I think perhaps swapping clothes would be a step too far, don’t you?” continued Anna, looking Kate up and down. Kate felt vaguely offended by this glance, and moreover that she was meant to, but then pulled herself together – it would indeed be strange and perhaps a little unhygienic and uncomfortable to wear a stranger’s clothes. True, as she had noted earlier they were of roughly same build, but that did not mean their clothes would fit each other in all respects.

“Come through to the next room,” Anna instructed her.

Anna took Kate through to the bathroom. It was small, but again elegantly executed, with a powerful looking shower hanging over the bath, with tiny eggshell and beige tiles on the walls, and larger ones on the floors.

“There’s another room in there,” said Anna, pointing to a closed door, “but I’m embarrassed to say it’s not fit for human eyes at the moment – I use it as my study slash spare room slash laundry room slash general dumping ground. You get the idea. I promise you it will be spick and span by the time you move in, if you do, but I just haven’t had the chance to do anything with it in time for these interviews.”

Kate nodded and smiled, following Anna back through to the sitting room and sinking down onto the soft leather sofa. She thought back to when she and Neil had lived in a flat this size and the scramble of shoving things under beds and into the linen closet in the five minutes before visitors arrived, shutting the door on the mess as the intercom sounded. They joked about it now, with all the space Portsmouth had given them.

“Red or white?” asked Anna. “Or some kind of soft drink?”

“Oh, red please. Thanks.”

As Anna poured the wine into some large tea glasses, Kate sat and looked around the room in more detail. She was pleased to see there were more clues to Anna’s identity than she had found on the internet. There was a framed degree certificate from Nottingham University alongside a picture of what she assumed must be Anna on her graduation day and a poster from the Wellcome Trust Collection advertising a high-brow exhibition on identity. It was all as she had been led to expect, all absolutely in keeping with what Anna had told her. If walls could be turned into a calling card, this was a prime example of how to do it.

Casting her eye around to the kitchen, Kate’s eyes focused in on a postcard pinned to a notice board that was otherwise adorned with business cards of local tradesmen. It looked like a scene from the Alps. She and Neil had been over there with his family a few times, and she advanced across the room to see if the picture was of anywhere she knew. Seeing her approach, Anna quickly moved to take the postcard down.

“I was just wondering where it was from,” began Kate, suddenly conscious that she was being somewhat nosy. “It looked like Switzerland from over there.”

“Um, no, Nepal, actually,” corrected Anna.

“Nepal? Really?” queried Kate. She had been sure it was the Alps.

“Yeah, my brother went there a while ago – he travels a lot. Don’t really get to see him much. And you clearly don’t see the Alps much!” She folded the card and thrust it into her back pocket. “Now, let’s have this wine!”

Anna handed Kate a glass. Kate was surprised by the abruptness with which Anna had changed the subject, but she accepted the proffered glass and they sat together on the sofa.

“So, let’s get down to business,” said Anna. “Do you fancy living here for three months?”

Kate confirmed enthusiastically that she would. All in all it seemed very liveable-in and stylish, and after all it was in London.

Anna continued. “Great. I’ve been meeting with other people and, quite frankly, I’m not sure I would trust them with my home. They seemed to be good candidates from my research but they turned out to be a little rough around the edges or just plain odd when I met them. And one, well let’s just say she seemed to have personal hygiene issues – that would not be a nice smell to come home to in three months!” Anna gave a mock shudder. “So really, apart from the girl I’m due to see tomorrow, you’re probably my strongest contender.” She paused and took a sip of wine, looking at Kate.

Kate smiled, pleased both that she had clearly surpassed the ranks of other people Anna had spoken to (although admittedly the hurdle didn’t seem too high) and that she seemed to be in with a chance of being selected for the project. She nodded for Anna to carry on.

“Now,” Anna continued. “Let’s talk about the more interesting part of this – the identity exchange. Ideally, you become me, and I become you. Not in a legal sense, of course. But it won’t have escaped you that we look passably similar – enough for someone checking a proof of ID to be convinced. That was one thing that made me pick you.”

Kate shifted uneasily. She didn’t like the idea of someone going around masquerading as her. Anna noticed this.

“You look concerned. I don’t mean I want to go around opening up bank accounts in your name, although we’ll come onto that later.”

Kate choked slightly on her wine at this, but Anna carried on regardless.

“Just think – if you turn up at a class, or the gym, that I’ve enrolled in and want to use my name, and vice versa, which you will have to for this to have any more purpose than a pure property exchange, you may need some kind of ID. That’s all I’m saying. And people who have served me at places before may have a vague recollection of a brunette of certain height and shape, but be hazier on the face, and so will accept you as me – and hopefully that will cut both ways.”

Kate nodded thoughtfully, and tried to uncrease her brow from the frown that had settled there. Anna continued.

“Those are really just details, ways of facilitating the bigger picture – let’s not get bogged down in them. Besides, if someone did commit fraud against you while you were staying here, you’d have a pretty good idea who did it!”

Kate smiled. That was certainly true. If this was an identity theft scheme it was a pretty blatant one.

“The main point is that I think I’ve got plenty to offer you. The drama course will be really exciting – I’m kind of regretting handing that over to you. I got a recommendation from a previous course tutor and it was pretty competitive to move up to the next class.” Anna hesitated. “You can act, can’t you? I saw from my research you’ve done some am-dram things in the past, but I don’t want my name to be muddied!”

“Yes, I can act, darling – don’t worry about that!” Kate trilled, putting on her best ‘luvvie’ voice.

“Good. I’m not kidding, though – it’s a big commitment taking on someone’s name and their life. You need to take it seriously.”

Anna held Kate’s gaze, looking earnestly into her eyes. Kate returned the stare, piqued at the suggestion that she was being flippant, but keen to show that she was worthy of trust and took the venture seriously. After all, she was asking the same of Anna.

“Apart from that, there’s the proofreading, which I mentioned. The proofs come through about once a week, and you have another week to turn them round. It will keep you fairly busy, but I know you like reading, so I think you’ll enjoy it.”

Kate nodded. Anna continued in a similar vein, extolling the virtues of the local gym and pool, the brilliant South African restaurant nearby, the wonders of 24-hour food and wine stores, the ease with which she could jump on the tube to go to the fringe theatre housed in a nearby pub. And then there was the question of the tempestuous internet relationship. Anna had apparently encountered someone calling himself Luke on-line at a dating chat site and initial banter had led to outrageous flirting. She hadn’t met him, but as Anna put it someone who flirted that sexily just had to be gorgeous and if he wasn’t – well, what did it matter for now? Kate would be entrusted with the task of keeping him warm for Anna, and as she was flirting for someone else’s advantage, it would be entirely guilt-free.

In short, it sounded perfect, thought Kate.

Anna had to be somewhere for 4 p.m., so the meeting ended early. It was agreed that Anna would call Kate the next day once she had met with the other contestant, as Anna took to calling her after a second glass of wine, and let Kate know if she was still interested. Then they could meet again to sort out the finer details.

Kate was therefore left to her own devices for an evening in London. She had studied the hotel’s Time Out magazine industriously earlier, and thought she recalled an evening performance of a new translation of a Sartre play up at a pub theatre in Highgate. She had plenty of time to wander up there, perhaps browse in a bookshop, and get herself a drink or two before making her way to the theatre. She tipped her head back and exhaled, her mind and body relaxed by the wine and her spirits rejoicing at the thought of her North London evening. This was where she belonged and – assuming that Anna thought her fitting – where she would stay for the next three months.

Chapter 5

-Kate-

Bright and early (well, 11am, which felt early enough) the next morning, an ever so slightly fragile Kate presented herself on Anna’s doorstep. She had enjoyed herself immensely the night before, but was rather wishing that her enjoyment had not been based quite so much on the very nice but very full-bodied South African wine that she taken to in generous quantities before, during and (she groaned to herself in painful recognition) after the play. She had felt so alive the previous evening in Highgate. She was well-used to going to the theatre by herself, having had to get over any self-consciousness once she realised that when Neil was away she could either live in a cultural vacuum, only go and see things that her friends also wanted to see thus missing out on a great deal given the tastes of her limited social circle in Portsmouth, or just go out by herself. She opted for the latter. Occasionally she bought two tickets in the vague hope she could persuade someone to come with her to a night of experimental theatre, but as she had not yet found a friend with such an insatiable desire for watching people be anything but themselves, more often than not she went alone.

She did, however, appreciate the change from being a solitary member of a mass audience where there was very little interaction, to being in the more intimate atmosphere of a fringe venue, with a select audience of individuals who she began to build in her mind as acquaintances if not friends by the end of the evening, as she learned to identify their laughs and examine their profiles. She had even unbent so far as to make pretentious small talk about existentialism at the bar downstairs in the interval: Was she bound by her decision to order a pre-interval drink? Had she really ‘owned’ her choice if she opted for a glass of whatever house red was open? By ordering red at all was she truly exercising her freedom or unnecessarily binding herself to her vision of herself as a ‘committed red wine drinker’? And other such meaningless trivialities that somehow seemed very on-message at the time. She had felt very cultured and very alive and very cool, and had in fact told herself this in the mirror of the hotel bathroom before wending a less-than-straight path to bed.

She could remember very little about the play itself, although she did recall that she had seen fit to give it a slightly wobbly standing ovation. This may not have been entirely appropriate given that the play ended with the three characters acknowledging that they are to torture each other forever in an eternity from which there was no escape, but Kate told herself that she was applauding the actors rather than the characters and the predicament in which they found themselves. Besides, the man of the piece was cute, Kate had decided, notwithstanding the furrowed brow that he seemed to feel was a pre-requisite for existentialist angst.

Kate was slightly annoyed with herself for having lived it up quite so much the night before when she knew that she was out to impress today, but not quite as annoyed as she or her throbbing temples were with the – in her view – wholly unnecessary intensity of the door buzzer, compounded by the shrillness of Anna’s voice over the intercom. Kate was sure Anna’s voice had been less high-pitched yesterday. Pulling herself together, and trying to remove the scowl from her face, Kate had a quick swig from her water bottle and waited for the door to open.

It was eventually opened by a slightly harassed-looking Anna. The sleek long hair of yesterday was pulled back into a tight ponytail and her clothes seemed to be covered in a light veil of dust.

“Come on, in you come. And let me give you these!” welcomed Anna brusquely, handing over a set of keys to a puzzled-looking Kate.

“What, you mean…?” Kate began.

“Yes, that’s right, it’s you! I saw the other person this morning. They weren’t up to it, frankly, and I cut the meeting short. I’ve spent the rest of the morning cracking down on the mess in the spare room. Come on up!” Anna strode up the stairs, leaving a slightly dazed Kate in her wake. The hangover had put her at a slight disadvantage in social interaction, granted, but the announcement of her success seemed somewhat peremptory. It might have been a given to Anna, but it certainly wasn’t to Kate.

Still, deliverance style aside, it was good news, thought Kate, as she began to follow Anna upstairs, at a slightly less vigorous pace than Anna’s. When she got upstairs, Anna had already gone into the flat, leaving the door open. Kate went in, closing the door behind her and putting the chain on, feeling a new sense of responsibility in her imminent proprietorship of the property. She noticed that the intercom system was newly encased in bubble-wrap, and queried this with Anna. It transpired that the system was broken – the button you pressed to listen to the outside world when the buzzer downstairs was pressed was permanently depressed, which meant said outside world was sending and receiving messages over the system continuously. This got rather irritating, and the bubble-wrap was a temporary solution until the landlord came and fixed it. Explanation given, Anna continued into the flat and Kate trailed behind her. The idea of constant communication with the world outside was not a promising one but she supposed she had wanted more human contact in London.

Anna was standing expectantly in the living room.

“Right, let’s get down to business. There are quite a few details to sort out. I’ve put together an action list,” she said, motioning Kate to sit at a table, which Kate did, after weakly requesting a coffee. Coffee being duly delivered and gratefully gasped down, they delved into the detail.

It was agreed – or rather decreed by Anna to an overwhelmed Kate – that in order for the swap to be as complete as possible, the ‘tools of identity’ as Anna termed them should be handed over and certain core principles had to be adhered to. Mobile phones and email account and social networking passwords would be handed over. Whilst engaged in the exchange, this would mean that neither would contact their own family and friends, but could respond to contact from the other girl’s, masquerading as the other girl. They would augment each other’s social networking sites, as otherwise such a long absence of updates could arouse suspicion, but they were not to access their own. Kate provided her passwords, as instructed. She had some reticence about this as it meant giving Anna control of her on-line self. It was a lot of trust to put in someone – you could totally change someone’s on-line presence and it was increasingly difficult to separate the virtual world from the real one (not that the virtual one was now any less real). Still, Kate’s profile was open to the public – she could always check it to make sure Anna wasn’t putting up posts about Kate taking up axe-murdering, paedophilia, or pole-dancing, or any of those other pursuits that are likely to lead to meetings with HR. If Anna went too far, whether for a joke or by design, Kate could always log in herself and make the necessary deletions and/ or explanations.

A slightly trickier issue was that Anna would be seeing and responding to emails from Neil. Kate wondered whether Anna could possibly manage to convince her husband that she was his wife but then pushed aside her doubts – Neil’s emails were irregular while he was away, and she was not always convinced that he read her emails very closely. If Anna crafted an ‘oh gosh isn’t that exciting’ response to his news and wrote about the weather in Kielder and signed off with lots of love and kisses, he would probably be none the wiser.

“Oh, and you have to sign off ‘The one and only’,” Kate added, blushing. “It’s a thing we do. You know, Chesney Hawkes? Perils of meeting at university.”

Anna nodded and made a note.

For her side of the bargain, Anna handed over the password to the internet dating site she used, with (not quite mock) stern instructions that Kate was to look at the profile Anna went by, as well as Luke’s profile, ‘to focus Kate’s mind’ on how she should be writing. Anna clearly only wanted the opportunity keeping warm for her while she was away, thought Kate. She wanted the ultimate prize for herself.

A detail that Kate paid full attention to was the financial proposition made by Anna. Anna suggested that each girl would set up a new bank account in her own name for the other to deposit into it however much money she wanted so that she could use it during the swap. They would each then hand over the card and security information for this account, and the person who deposited the money would reclaim it at the end of the swap. Kate was initially sceptical, worried that she was not only potentially giving money to Anna but also giving her licence to run up debts in her name, and then vanish. Anna seemed a little affronted by this concern, particularly as Kate, focusing in on the detail as she had been trained to do, had expressed herself in rather a blunt manner. Anna reminded Kate frostily that as she had explained at their initial meeting, if the girls genuinely wanted to pass each other off as the other, they would need some identification in order to do this. Besides, if they were to buy things over the next three months, unless they wanted to carry round wads of cash or always have to give their correct legal identity at point of sale thus undermining full assimilation with each other’s identities, they were going to have to use such a device, and it had been the least requiring of trust that Anna could think of.

Kate was still unconvinced by this. However, she reluctantly agreed to carry on with the deal on the basis that they would type out a short-form agreement stating that the monies deposited by one girl [A] in the account in the name of other girl [B] of account number [X] would remain at all times the property of girl [A] and the account should under no circumstances be allowed to go overdrawn, and that should it in breach of the agreement go overdrawn this money would be repaid by the girl in breach before the end of the exchange and if not would be recoverable as a debt, and the girl in breach would use her best endeavours to undo any damage to girl [A]’s credit rating, and any charge, costs, or other expenses incurred by girl [B] in girl [A]’s name or otherwise would be for girl [B]’s account.

Kate was not wholly satisfied that it worked, but thought it may have some use as a last resort, and she always sought to make use of her skills as a lawyer in day-to-day transactions. She contemplated getting it witnessed to make Anna realise that she was serious, but the subsequent loss of dignity at letting someone she knew realise not only that she was embarking on the swap but also to see such a tenuous piece of drafting was too much for her. Besides, Anna was already turning red in indignation as Kate wrote down the paragraph, complete with signature blocks, and if Kate suggested executing it as a deed it might scupper the whole deal. Muttering that she might make some amendments to the drafting before putting it in final form, she allowed an increasingly impatient Anna to move on.

They would each only listen to the other’s music rather than their own, with MP3 players being swapped and CDs being left in situ. This was to ensure they were fully immersed in the other’s mindset. Kate had cast an eye over the CD rack during her first visit, and had been impressed with the collection of jazz she had seen there, although somewhat perturbed by the occasional pre-teen pop album lurking amongst them. Looking again now, she didn’t see the latter genre there. She suppressed a giggle. Maybe Anna had felt she would be unable to live without them and had already squirrelled them away to take to Kielder with her. Addressing her mind to the music Anna would have at her disposal, she made a quick apology that Anna would just really have the iPod to listen to; most of hers and Neil’s music was in Portsmouth, and although it was possible her dad’s 50s crooners might appeal to Anna, it wouldn’t exactly immerse her in Kate’s way of living. An iPod filled with School Disco classics wasn’t a lot better, but at least it was true Kate and Neil.

The only other critical arrangement was work. Kate had decided that Anna would be able to deal with the task of editing the textbook that her firm was producing, but that she could not in conscience give Anna the remote internet log-in details that would enable her to see her work emails. The reputational, not to mention legal, risks for both her and her firm were simply too great. It may be that Anna would have to field the odd call, but work had not been calling much, and if she really could not manage it, she would ring off, blame the poor signal in Kielder, and get in touch with Kate so that she could call them back. On her part, Anna handed over the proofreading training notes and house style guidelines of the publishing house that she freelanced for, advising Kate to cast her eye over them before she set to work. The latest set of proofs would be due to come in next week, so Kate would have a bit of time to read in.

That was the end of Anna’s list. Or at least, of the tangible points.

“I’ve gone through all the concrete points I can think of,” she explained. “The rest of it is up to us. We have to use the raw materials in each residence to identify as closely as possible with the essence of each other’s lives, to take every opportunity to do things as we believe the other person would do them, and to realise that for the next three months we are in a sense becoming new selves that have to be cultivated by living in each possible detail the way the self we are pretending to be would live. Otherwise the experiment will not work.”

Kate surmised from this rather pompous summary that Anna had already started rehearsing the opening paragraphs of her thesis. She nodded her agreement, trying to convey understanding and sincerity. Lofty psychobabble aside, she appreciated the sentiment; it was a big responsibility to live someone else’s life for three months, and to essentially be the research on which they based their PhD. Kate took this as seriously as Anna did.

Anna smiled to lighten the mood. “And of course, you must enjoy yourself too! Make the most of London while you’re here! Forget you’re an old married lawyer and live a little!”

Kate laughed. If last night’s over-indulgence was anything to go by, she would certainly be making the most of it.

They agreed that Kate would return to Kielder and pack up her things, set up the necessary bank account, and then meet Anna at Newcastle station in three days’ time to hand over the keys to the Kielder cottage, the new bank details and mobile phones. Kate had offered to show Anna to the cottage but she had not taken her up on it – it seemed Anna wanted to get an entirely fresh perspective and see what she could absorb from the building and their contents alone. There would be no transition for her; she would step straight into Kate’s life and make of it what she could.

Kate therefore had three days to get ready to surrender her old life, and adopt a new one. Only temporarily, of course.

Chapter 6

-Kate-

The evening before the exchange started, Kate was seriously considering trying to get herself committed as an in-patient to some sympathetic mental institution. She had come to the simple conclusion that she must be mad. Why else would she be considering handing over her property, bank details, work responsibilities and her relationship with her husband and essentially herself to a girl with whom she had spent a grand total of perhaps thirty minutes? She was not sure whether the fact that she knew it was a rash and highly risky thing to do made it more rational and therefore less mad, or whether the fact that she was knowingly putting herself in this predicament made her completely beyond hope. She felt that perhaps in good faith she ought to phone Anna and advise her of her own evidently lacking mental competence, and suggest that both girls lie in a darkened room to calm down before beating a path to the friendly local lunatic asylum. However, the reminder that Anna too was about to make a similar leap of faith reassured her slightly – if more than one person was to carry on in this way, that made it twice as normal and therefore half as likely as being a sign of incipient madness.

There was then, however, the worry that Anna’s motivation could be different from her own. She may just be trying to steal Kate’s money, laughing about her gullibility all the way to the (Rio de Janeiro) bank. Kate contemplated taking out identity theft protection insurance to counter this and had got as far as finding her bank’s hotline, but it occurred to her that no policy would give her cover for willingly handing over a complete ‘please steal my life’ dossier to the would-be thief, at least not without the mitigation of the insured being held at gun-point. Emotional gun-point, or rather ‘knife-edge’, teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, probably wouldn’t count. She reassured herself slightly on the basis that most of her savings investment details were safely locked away in a safe in the loft of the Portsmouth house, and she could pack up the property and financial documents for the Kielder house and take them away with her, and lock her dad’s other documents away in the house. It might not quite be in the spirit of the experiment, but damned if she was going to come back in three months and find the house had somehow been sold. This in itself was a sobering thought and she continued to waiver about the wisdom of the step she seemed to be about to take.

And surely she should at least warn Neil? It was a huge betrayal, was it not, to mislead your husband into thinking he was emailing you, when he was emailing a stranger? She would be mortified, in Neil’s position. Kate may not be a divorce lawyer, but she figured it had to count as ‘unreasonable behaviour.’

In the end it was a text message from Anna that convinced Kate she had to go through with it. Her phone bleeped with a friendly report from Anna that she had just bought her train tickets to Newcastle and was looking forward to the start of the experiment the next day. This gave Kate a fatalistic feeling that the path had already been decided for her and she would have to embark on the swap. She therefore dutifully continued her tidying and packing.

Once that was done, she set about composing a last email to Neil. How did you send an email to your husband in these circumstances? She couldn’t give anything away, or it would ruin the experiment. But she couldn’t just leave without a message.

‘My dearest Neil,’ she began.

The cursor hovered expectantly, awaiting her inspiration. Kate didn’t want to disappoint it.

‘Hope you got to the ship safely. Sorry you had to go away again so soon – and sorry if I was a bit cold. I just miss you when you go, that’s all. And I needed you so much after Dad and –’

Kate found herself crying. Delete, delete – if she cried when she wrote it, she was clearly being too needy. It was meant to be a happy message, her last real contact with him for three months. Wiping the tears away, she removed the last sentence and continued.

‘Thanks so much for all the help moving stuff up to Kielder. It will be good to be together in Portsmouth again, when you’re back.’

Maybe it would be good to be there again, once the experiment was through. Yes, she could imagine that, just.

‘We can go up Spinnaker Tower, like we said, and Fire & Stone – see if they’ve got any new toppings.’

She wasn’t such a fan of heights or pizza. But this was about Neil.

‘And I can tell you face-to-face again how much I love you. For now, I’ll tell you here: I love you. I know you’re here in spirit, and I’m there, and all that. But let’s look forward to when you’re back. Promise I’ll keep myself busy while you’re away.’

Well, she would.

Now, perhaps for a bit of damage limitation, just in case?

‘Sorry if I ever seem a bit odd while you’re away – just because you aren’t here with me. Not myself sometimes.’

She wasn’t sure Neil would like the idea of her being ‘a bit odd.’ It hinted at mental health issues – and he didn’t need to know she should perhaps be committed for signing him over to Anna. She deleted it and replaced it with:

‘If ever I don’t seem myself in our emails, just remember it’s because we are so much better together in person.’

Yes, that would do it.

‘All my love, always, your one and only Kate.’

She re-read the final version. Maybe she should put in some news from home, like usual? Something bland, nothing that would give the game away.

‘P.S. Your mum says hi.’

Resisting the urge to add another guilty ‘I love you’, Kate pressed send. Then she retired to bed with a mug of hot chocolate and a pad of paper. She was composing a list of useful tips for Anna about living in Kielder – taxi numbers, the local food shops she used, the name of her secretary and boss in case they called. In short, all the little details that Kate felt could be important in her day-to-day life – and if not followed, could give the game away to the outside world. Plus she didn’t think Anna would get very far if she didn’t even know where to buy food. Kate didn’t fancy coming home to a skeleton.

The thesis behind the swap still sounded fairly foundationless to Kate. Psychology had never been her subject, but she did not see how Anna could conceivably use this experiment to support a PhD. Fair enough, she knew that it must be increasingly difficult to meet a requirement for original research and ideas, but short of conjuring up a narrative of what memories may be hidden in the photographs around the house, that married couples hung their clothes up in wardrobes together and that being in a house with no stairs might make one lethargic and possibly a bit colder through lack of movement, which Kate didn’t really feel were the core aspects of her identity, she didn’t really see what Anna would get out of it. It seemed like the sort of romantic and over-idealised theory concocted in the excitement of a sleepless night, and continued with the enthusiasm of a student convinced they are about to do something ground-breaking.

However, this was Anna’s lookout; Kate had pointed out to her initially that there wasn’t a whole lot going on in Kielder, but Anna seemed happy with the idea, and if she wanted to base her research on this topic then it was down to her. For her part, Kate fully intended to follow the terms of the experiment as diligently as she could. There must be a lot more she could glean from a London life than Anna could from her life up here, and she had the concrete activities of the pre-booked drama class, a gym pass, and the internet-dating quest to go on. Maybe this was what Anna was relying on – a full report from Kate as to how much of her self she’d felt she retained while living in the London flat, or to what extent she’d felt she was adopting a new self in taking on Anna’s mantle. As she turned the light off, she tried to mentally prepare herself for a new existence the next day as Anna Roberts.

The next day the real Anna Roberts was already at the rendezvous spot at Newcastle Central Station when Kate arrived ready to hand over as planned. Keys, new bank cards and mobile phones were duly exchanged. Kate’s heart was thumping fast as she made the swap, full of anticipation. She imagined Anna was the same?

“You don’t know the half of it!” Anna replied. Anna had dressed in her best London interpretation of country-style tweeds, showing Kate that she was keen to get into role, and Kate had dressed in an urban outfit of jeans and fitted shirt, hair left unstraightened so that the natural wave showed through, reflecting the style of Anna’s hair when the two girls first met.

“So, are you ready?” asked Anna, looking hard at Kate.

“Well, I’d better be – my train leaves in ten minutes!” laughed Kate, feeling slightly giddy now that the moment was here.

“Good. Remember your responsibilities but don’t take it all too seriously – try to have some fun. We’re both in this to get what we can out of it, after all. I want to see if my thesis works and you want to have a break and live it up in London. I’m sure it will be an interesting few months, and thank you again for giving me this opportunity – I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”

With that, she gave Kate a quick pat on the arm, and walked away, cases behind her, across the concourse before disappearing into a coffee shop and out of Kate’s view. Kate stood looking after her for a few moments, reflecting that it was disappointingly underwhelming that Anna’s first act as her should be something so routine as to go and get a coffee. Personally, she would be itching to go and see the property that she had exchanged into, and keen to join the taxi queue so that she could put down all her bags. Maybe Anna was just a more relaxed person, responding to immediate needs – after a three-hour train journey, decent coffee and a pastry was likely to be high up there, she supposed. Maybe she needed to relax a bit more too.

Shaking herself she picked up her bags, looked up at the platform indicator again and set off at a determined pace, narrowly avoiding stepping on a forsaken doll that lay on the ground as she did so. On seeing such an item she always felt a slight pang of sympathy for whatever tear-stricken child and parent would have to retrace their steps to rediscover whatever favoured toy it was that had been selected as a playmate for the journey, only to be lost in a momentary lapse of concentration. Ordinarily, she would have picked it up and handed it in at an information desk, but today she had only minutes before her train departed and she wasn’t going to let an unknown child’s toy hold her back from a new life in London. She hurried to the platform, made her way to the correct carriage, and smiling to herself noted that the seat reservation flashed up with ‘A. Roberts’. She sat down purposefully in the allotted seat. The journey had begun.

As the train pulled out of the station, Kate was absorbed in contemplating her reflection in the window. She did not see Anna re-emerge hurriedly from the coffee shop and cross back into the mêlée of the station to the spot where they had met, hurriedly bend down, and pick up the forgotten doll. The train sped away to London, with each turn of the wheels propelling Kate further and further away from her life as she had known it.

Chapter 7

-Anna-

The wheels of the taxi crunched over the gravel drive of the Kielder cottage. Finally, she had arrived. Anna threw some money at the driver and got out. She breathed in the air. Scented, smelling of pine leaves. She coughed. It was clearly too pure for her, she thought with a smirk. She dragged one of the wheeled bags across the gravel, sending the stones flying in all directions, as the driver struggled with the larger bags behind her. The doll fell onto the ground again. Stupid thing. What was it called? Esmerelda? Hetty? Christina Columbus? Who knew, who cared? It was in her path to the door. She stepped over it. It could wait.

Anna took out the key Kate had given her. She placed it firmly into the keyhole and turned. She pushed open the door. Or rather, she tried to, but there was some post obstructing it. Great big brown envelopes, probably some of the work stuff Kate had been going on about. Anna kicked it out of the way. And then, she was in. The inner sanctum. She began to walk round the room, inhaling it. A masculine scent pervaded it. She smiled. Good to be picking up those small details so quickly. Anna stroked the arm of the sofa as she passed it. Not bad. Comfortable, chenille. She could imagine curling up there with someone. She turned her gaze to the mantelpiece. A photo of Neil. Her eyes lingered. Kate was in the photo too, though. That would have to go – how was Anna supposed to pretend she lived here if Kate’s face was staring gormlessly out at her? She placed the photo face down. She could deal with it later.

She progressed through into the kitchen, touching the surfaces, opening the occasional cupboard, inspecting the fridge. Nothing special. Next, the bedroom. This would be more interesting. She took off her shoes before she entered, and stepping over the threshold allowed her toes to sink luxuriously into the shag-pile carpet, to absorb the footprints that had been there before hers. She went to the wardrobes. She found what appeared to be women’s clothes hanging next to a small collection of men’s clothes. This must be Kate and Neil’s wardrobe, she surmised. Anna leaned into the clothes, hugging them to her, breathing them in. Again, that smell. Did Kate understand how lucky she was to be married to that scent? Probably not. Anna moved to the bed, tried sitting down gingerly on the edge, then threw herself into the centre on her back, moving her legs and arms in a scissor formation over the bed. A snow angel, but with a duvet. A duvet angel. Anna laughed. Devil, more like it, some would say. After lying prone for a moment she swivelled back over onto her front. She saw a framed photo of Neil by the bedside. He would enjoy looking at her from there, she thought, her long hair tousled, cleavage on full display. She reached to pick up the photo of Neil and admired it. He looked good.

There was more to explore though, more to discover, before she could get fully into role. She needed to see it all, absorb every last detail. She went to the dressing table and looked in the drawers. Makeup. She placed it all onto the desk. Mostly unused. Clearly Kate felt happy with her natural beauty. Or else she was lazy. Personally, Anna preferred a glossier look where a man was at stake, but she could certainly take the minimalist route if that was required – she was more than confident with that. Anna regarded her face in the mirror appreciatively. She conjured up an image of Kate’s face in her mind and compared the two. Her own was clearly the fairer. She imagined Neil’s face appearing in the mirror. He would bend down and kiss a naked shoulder as makeup was being applied, perhaps a flirty squirt of perfume making him stand up again. Except, she observed, Kate did not appear to have any perfume, so that would not happen. They did things differently.

She tried the next drawer. Masculine this time. Cufflinks. But were they Neil’s or Kate’s? Anna laid them out neatly on the dressing table. They were shaped as ships and naked ladies. Neil’s, then. Delving further into the drawer she found some aftershave. Expensive, but unused – perhaps an unwanted present, or a replacement for what Neil already had. Anna opened it, tossing the shrink-wrap and the box onto the floor. She applied a small amount to her neck. After all, if he nuzzled her, as he may nuzzle Kate, that was where it would end up.

Anna softly drew her hands over the contents of the drawers now laid out on the table, caressing them, closing her eyes and just feeling the shape of the objects. Opening her eyes again, she stretched out her fingers, leaned back and exhaled. It was so good to finally be here, after all the planning, and the waiting, and the wanting. Every last detail, so precisely thought through. The wedding ring was a good touch. Kate really should have volunteered her own ring, but perhaps that was a bit too much to expect. Instead, Anna had bought a cheap gold band from Argos. It wasn’t much to look at, but what it symbolised was so much more important. She was here to be Mrs Neil Dixon, after all.

And as mistress of the house, she needed to know everything, she reminded herself. More rooms to see. Or at least one more room – she hadn’t found a bathroom yet and hadn’t fancied using the one on the train so the need to find it was rather urgent. Leaving the bedroom, she tried the next door. Bingo. She pulled the light cord. Avocado. Lovely. Not. Still, a decent size, and someone had invested in a Jacuzzi-style corner bath. Things could get pretty steamy in here, Anna guessed. She unzipped her trousers and sat down on the toilet seat, allowing her buttocks to press down firmly against the rim. Neil would have sat on here. It was good to be close to her ‘husband’. Kate probably would have sat there too though, and her ill father. This was a less appealing prospect. Anna changed position into a squat, hovering over the toilet instead as she peed.

Finished, flushing the chain and washing her hands with the twee hand soap that Kate had clearly put out for having a guest, she made her way back into the living room. She continued her exploration. There was a further double room. Rather drab. A couple of foam armchairs with flannel covers, an old divan covered with a brown bedspread and a brown blanket. Must be the dead man’s room. Dull. Anna tried to open the wardrobes. Locked. She pursed her lips – that was hardly the ‘access all areas’ they had agreed. She would have to jimmy them open later. Anna went back to the living room to explore it more thoroughly. She had noticed a desk in the corner of the room. She advanced towards it and tried the drawers. Again, locked. She tutted. Clearly finding a crowbar or similar implement was going to have to be high up on her to-do list.

She stretched and yawned. It could wait though. She wanted to relax first in her new home. She unpacked her very favourite sweatshirt – that sweatshirt – and put it on. Then she retrieved Neil’s photo from the bedroom and reclined on the sofa, using the television remote control to select what seemed to be a film version of Jane Eyre. Not thrilling, but it would do until children’s TV came on later. Some of their dramas were quite good. She plumped up a cushion and placed Neil’s photo on it, so that they could all sit down and watch the film together. Anna provided a running commentary on the film. Photo Neil did not respond. Perhaps he liked to watch films in silence. She stopped talking and snuggled up closer to him. She didn’t want to annoy him. Companionable silence would do just as well. All Anna needed now was some popcorn – she had everything else she wanted. Or very soon would do.

Chapter 8

-Kate-

Kate’s black cab pulled up outside the apartment block. She thanked the driver, let him keep the change (after they’d had such a nice chat it seemed a shame not to) and assembled all her luggage on the pavement. Once inside the building, she began the slow task of taking the bags upstairs in shifts, along with a big brown envelope addressed to Anna that was on the mat. She hoped it might be the first of the proofs that she would have to read, and by claiming the post she felt as though she was committing her first proper act as ‘Anna’. She wondered idly if the police would see it like that, or whether she would still technically have committed a crime by opening somebody else’s post. Deciding that you would substitute yourself for the addressee temporarily probably wasn’t enough to satisfy the law that you had the right to open their letters. But she had consent; they would accept that. She could open the mail without qualms or risk of being struck off the register of solicitors. Kate slid her finger under the lip of the envelope, neatly tore it open and took a peek inside. It did indeed look like proofs. Resisting the urge to sit down on the staircase and commence work at once, Kate put the package under her arm and continued with the luggage.

Finally having brought all of her baggage upstairs, a somewhat breathless Kate fumbled with the key and let herself into the flat and deposited the luggage with a sigh. Closing the door behind her, noticing that the intercom was still cloaked in bubble-wrap (and therefore presumably still channelling the outside world), she walked through the flat, sticking her head into each of the rooms as she did so. The bathroom was clean and tidy, as was the bedroom she had been shown on her visit. She walked with an ‘Aha!’ into the spare room that had previously been out of bounds.

Kate surveyed the room quickly. Not very exciting, she thought to herself, vaguely disappointed that it was not the sort of secret room that would be worthy of Captain Bluebeard but just an ordinary spare room. The walls were the same neutral colour as the others, but had flakes of paint missing, as if blue-tacked pictures had been taken down. There was a single divan pushed into the corner of the room, with drawers underneath it, and a plain white bedspread. A low bedside table stood next to the bed, and a pine writing desk on the adjacent wall. A blue roller-blind came halfway down the window. It was a fairly uninspiring, identikit spare room – clearly Anna had not put the design effort into this room that she had with the others.

Leaving the room, Kate walked through into the main living area, flicking on the light switch. It was as airy and bright as she had remembered, and she flopped down onto the sofa and kicked off her shoes. Tilting her head back and resting it on the back of the sofa, she blew her cheeks out and emitted in the air in a loud puff. Bringing her head back to its normal level, she laughed to herself.

“Well! Here I am!” she said aloud. She sat on the sofa for some time longer, partly recovering from her journey and partly thinking out how the next few days would go. She had the first drama class to go to in a couple of days’ time, and she wanted to go to the big university bookshop on Gower Street to get a couple of audition speeches. She had no idea what they would be doing in the first class and thought she should try to find a couple of soliloquies that she could present if necessary. More immediately, once she had done the modicum of unpacking and perhaps had a quick shower, she fancied a glass of wine and a nice meal in some candlelit bistro looking out onto the street. Perhaps Angel might have something to offer. She felt a slight pang as she thought how nice it would be for Neil to be there with her, then shook herself – these next few months were about her, not about her and Neil. There was a whole lifetime of dinners ahead of them. The whole point of this exercise was to get her back to her old happy self, to make her a more enjoyable dinner companion than the red-eyed wretch silently toying with a plate of microwaved baked beans on toast that had sat opposite Neil last time he was home. Grimacing at the thought of how she had felt so recently up in the isolated cottage, she pulled herself off the sofa and out of the negativity of her thoughts. An hour later, washed and made up and dressed in what she hoped was a sophisticated yet understated outfit of black trousers and aubergine silk halter-neck top, she stepped into the energy of the London evening, new bank card and Anna’s ID in her bag and a spring in her step.

Despite her years of practice of eating dinner in restaurants alone and her determination to regard it as a perfectly acceptable thing to do, Kate still hadn’t quite mastered it. She had developed a particular brand of steely glare reserved for waiters who dared to repeat the ‘Table for one’ back at her in a questioning, pitying tone. She had perfected the knack of eating with perfect insouciance, looking like she was concentrating on her food and enjoying it. She had even managed to get over the conviction that everyone was staring at her and wondering what had provoked her to eat by herself. What she had not quite yet managed to do, however, was maintain this poise in the gaps between eating if she did not have a prop. This may be an evening newspaper, a book or a mobile phone, but she liked to have something to keep her occupied in the time between the order being placed and the food arriving, and then disappearing again, that saved her from having just to think to herself, stare vaguely at the other diners or be plain bored. All the while she would be repeating in her head the mantra that she was a grown mature woman and that if she wanted to treat herself to a nice meal, whilst just so happening to be alone, that was totally acceptable and that in any event she didn’t care what they thought. Sadly the fact that she couldn’t get by without thinking this evidently meant that she did care. It was fine if there was someone else sitting alone – suddenly her unaccompanied eating became more socially acceptable. It didn’t do to stare at the other lone diner too much though, particularly if they were a man, in case they thought you were attempting to open a flirtation, in some fantasy world in which single diners in restaurants do actually saunter up to each other and ask if they can join the other for dessert.

That evening started off slightly differently. When the waiter went away with her menu she was so intent on looking out of the window at the London evening, the black cabs going by, the diners on the pavement across the street, couples wandering along at a leisurely pace caught up in their own lives, jostled occasionally by impatient businessmen or a lone evening runner, that she hardly noticed when the walnut and pear salad appeared in front of her. It wasn’t so much that these were scenes she wouldn’t see in Portsmouth – with the exception of the destination indicators on the fronts of the buses, this could in theory be any city almost anywhere. To Kate the difference seemed to be more about the possibilities, and the variety of the places that these people could be coming from and going to, perhaps they themselves as yet undecided as to the latter, combining to create a vibrant buzz of potential. Waiting for the steak that would follow the salad starter, Kate nursed the elegant wine glass and the window again held her attention. This time she looked at her reflection and practised saying in her head “I am Anna Roberts. Pleased to meet you” and “I’m Anna, Anna Roberts” – and then for a bit of fun, “The name’s Roberts, Anna Roberts” with a mysterious Sean Connery-esque wiggle of the eyebrows. She stifled a giggle. She generally tried not to laugh by herself in public, unless she really couldn’t help it, and felt it would be even less excusable to be caught laughing at her reflection.

Diverting as this was, by the end of the steak she was becoming a little bored. She was, she felt, at the cusp of something exciting and it was totally amazing that she was embarking on this experiment, and she herself was totally amazing for doing it (her self-satisfaction having the particular intensity and warmth that a large glass of shiraz often gave her) and wished to tell someone about it. She reached for her mobile, thinking that she would send someone a text to say she was in London, maybe followed up by a call – a lot of her university friends and some colleagues were still based there. Then she realised there were two problems. First, she had agreed with Anna that neither of them would tell anyone they had embarked on the swap as to do so would bring them out of character, and talking to friends of their ‘real’ selves would remove the focus on the social environment created by the other. This alone might not quite have been enough to stop her, diligent though she was, but there was a second more practical point that she had forgotten in her desire to communicate – the mobile phone she had in her bag did not contain the numbers of her friends. She and Anna had swapped phones, and so she did not have any pre-programmed numbers. Like most people in her generation she was almost solely reliant on her mobile to give her the numbers of her friends. There were a few she knew by heart – Neil’s mobile, of course, the office number, and the land line numbers of a couple of friends who had managed to establish themselves in the property market early on and so hadn’t had a string of rental properties with the consequent constantly changing phones – but those people would either not be available or, if they were, may not appreciate a tipsy call at this time on a Friday evening.

Besides, going through this complication in her head was enough to check Kate’s initial impulse. She shouldn’t be thinking of breaking the rules of the experiment on the very first evening, she rebuked herself, and vowed that she would follow the terms of the agreement with Anna. Sure, the point of the exercise for her was to have fun, as Anna had reminded her, but there was the responsibility and trust that Anna had placed on her – and she didn’t want to have to lie in her report back to Anna. The drink was no excuse for falling prey to temptation. Sobered up by her narrowly-avoided fall from grace, as well as irritated by the fact that the lively texts she had been composing in her head could not come to fruition, she gulped down the last of her wine and mineral water, put down a tip and left the restaurant.

As she exited onto the pavement she was vaguely aware of someone calling out a name behind her. It wasn’t until that someone tapped her on the shoulder that she became aware they were calling to her.

“Ms Roberts?”

It was a waiter. She looked at him blankly.

“Your card?” and he handed her a credit card.

“Oh, yes, of course, that’s me!” she said gaily, laughing in an attempt to hide the fact that she had been completely thrown by the use of that name – it was the first time she had been addressed by the assumed appellation, after all. She must have left the card on the table by mistake. Smiling, she took the card, and made her way to the tube, using Anna’s pass to go through the barriers. Well, someone else had now accepted her as Anna Roberts, so she now just had to do the same.

Chapter 9

-Kate-

Kate spent the next afternoon prepping herself for the start of the drama class. She had not intended this to take the whole afternoon. She had got up in reasonable time, efficiently taken herself off to the bookshop on Gower Street and had returned the triumphant possessor of what looked like a good book of women’s auditions speeches. She had flicked through it while eating a hastily-prepared sandwich (courtesy of the food and wine store – she really was getting back into the metropolitan method of just buying food when it was needed, glad to be free from the weekly suburban supermarket drudge) and had settled upon a speech by Viola from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. She planned to have a quick coffee, crack on with learning the speech, then spend the rest of the afternoon looking at the proofs that had arrived the previous day. So far, so many good intentions.

She had made pleasing progress initially, reading through the speech, familiarising herself with where it came in the play. She was reading it out loud for the second time whilst parading round the room when she realised there was a problem. She had thought about the characterisation of Viola, and how she would feel when she realised that the beautiful Countess Olivia (believing her to be the man that she was disguised as) had fallen in love with her, whilst Viola herself was in love with the Duke of Illyria. She felt she had pretty well mastered Viola’s emotional turmoil through a good use of varied tone and pace. However, what she had not done was think about how Anna would approach the piece.

Kate became involved in a difficult and somewhat frustrating debate with herself. If she had truly grasped the essence of the part of Viola, then surely it would not matter whether she was playing her as Anna or as Kate, because she would have captured the true Viola-ness of the character? But then on the other hand, she was only playing her as an actor of her own capabilities and understanding, drawing on her own internal resources to think about how Viola would feel in the circumstances, and adapting her intonation and modulation from her own experience of how she, Kate, herself would react to that situation. Perhaps what she ought to be doing was thinking about how Anna would react, or at the very least how Anna would interpret the character? Perhaps she had to be Kate playing Anna playing Viola (in a soliloquised reprieve from playing Cesario)? Anna did say she had certain standards to maintain, after all.

Kate ran her hand through her hair and flipped it over to the other side. The only difficulty with the ‘What would Anna do?’ approach was that she didn’t really know enough about Anna to know how she would tackle the role, never mind the situation in which Viola found herself. She thought hard, marshalling what little she did know about her opposite number. Anna had been pretty focused and business-like through the exchange process, particularly on the second visit, with a strong drive and energy propelling her to closure. Kate thought about the obvious awareness that Anna had of her good figure, the casually stylish dress sense, the cool way in which she had gone into a coffee shop as her first act in Kate’s life. This and the impeccable design of the flat and the collection of jazz that graced the shelves convinced Kate that Anna would be a very cool, sophisticated Viola, maybe quite sensual and sexual in her desire for the Duke, not given to over-indulgence in emotion or sweeping gestures. Kate would have to shelve her own usual depiction of Viola, frank and almost childlike in her honest and zealous puzzling over the situation in which she found herself. Thus resolved she tried again.

“I left no ring with her. What means this lady?

Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her!”

No, too keen, too concerned. She tried again. And again. She finally got through the speech, but the net result seemed only to be that Viola was now being played as a paranoid schizophrenic, veering between total selfish disinterest in all but carnal lust for the Duke on the one hand, and sudden deep emotional attachment to him and concern for Olivia on the other when Kate’s own instinctive interpretation got the better of her. And that Kate was now completely hoarse.

Sighing with frustration after her voice gave way on “It is too hard a knot for me t’untie”, she gave up and threw herself onto the sofa, and the book onto the floor. She reached for the television remote. There was always tomorrow morning before the class, right? And she could get up a bit earlier and start looking at the proofs then. She simply did not have the spirit to try and work out how Anna would feel about the more controversial aspects of punctuation this evening. The virtue of trashy television was that it was surely scientifically impossible for anyone’s brain to remain capable of active thought after about twenty minutes of watching it, and if she was effectively brainless for the rest the evening it wouldn’t matter if she was Kate or Anna.

Unfortunately for Kate’s plans for an efficient morning, she had forgotten another important element of trashy television – its strangely addictive quality. Reality television show had merged into comedy quiz show had merged into statistic-driven investigative journalism exposé. Even more addictive was imagining Neil there beside her, how he would laugh at the contestants, how they would fantasy cast their friends into the shows, how he would reduce her to tears of laughter with innuendo about what was going on behind the TV scenes. It was a square-eyed Kate that had finally pulled herself off the sofa and into bed the wrong side of midnight, and consequently rather a bleary-eyed one who finally emerged from bed the next day after spending the best part of two hours hitting snooze on the alarm clock on the bedside table.

Grabbing a flustered breakfast and a strong black coffee, Kate tried to make the best of what remained of the morning to start on the proofs that had come through to her. The publishing house seemed to be going through a sci-fi phase, Kate’s least favourite genre, and she laid out the three implausibly titled books in front of her, trying to decide which one to start with. In the end she opted for the one with the title that she actually understood, and had got through three chapters largely putting squiggly underlining beneath words that she was sure could not possibly be in the English language, or if they were must be some sort of private sub-set of language that she was not privy to.

After she had been driven to writing rude comments in the margin she began to realise that she might be approaching the task in the wrong way – someone had clearly decided it was worthwhile publishing this book, which presumably meant that they could understand it, and so presumably her role wasn’t to go through the book generally rubbishing it. She also remembered that Anna had in fact left her a guide from the publishing house about what she was actually required to do, and leafing through it confirmed that her role was limited to commenting on typos, punctuation, non-controversial grammar and type-setting. It appeared she was not supposed to query the plot or re-order paragraphs, and particularly not delete the ones she didn’t like. That was someone else’s job, and apparently the sub-plot concerning floating brains engaged in projecting active thought despite being in cauldrons full of so-called ‘space plasma’ was to be allowed to stay. She felt very glad she had started off in pencil and rubbed out her angry extraneous comments and went through the next two chapters restricting herself to more conventional intervention.

Given this set-back, and the pressing deadline of the middle of the following week (why were these books so long – how much was there really left to say about aliens?), she decided there wasn’t time to look over the speech for class again, and so it was a rather nervous and introverted Kate that showed up to the adult education centre after lunch, clutching a sandwich in the vague hope that she would be able to eat it surreptitiously at the back of the class. It felt like being a student again – endless time to do things in, but somehow always rushing from place to place with a feeling of guilt at not having done everything she had intended.

She finally found the room in which the class was being held, after navigating what seemed to be a never-ending network of corridors and passages, taking bites of her sandwich as she went. She was beginning to regret the garlic mayonnaise filling she had opted for – pausing to check her breath quickly she winced – and hoped there wouldn’t be any love scenes, or indeed anything that would require her to stand within three feet of anyone else. She dumped the rest of the sandwich in a bin, quickly checked her appearance in a compact mirror and was pleased to see the rather reconstituted chicken hadn’t managed to lodge itself between her teeth, took a deep breath and walked into the room.

It was smaller and stuffier than she had been expecting, with fraying orange carpets and grey windows which looked like they had been hermetically sealed lest heaven forbid any air should get in. There was a small fan whirring in a desultory fashion on a desk in one corner. The other desks had been pushed to the corner of the room and there were about a dozen chairs arranged in a semi-circle in front of a small white board. She assumed the small area in front of the chairs was supposed to be the acting area. She was unimpressed.

Her feelings were apparently evident to the other occupants of the room. Kate noticed a lady standing at the far side of the white board, regarding her with a raised eyebrow and an amused smile.

“Not exactly the Donmar, is it, but I do hope you will feel able to stay with us!”

Kate blushed and, not wanting to cause offence, began muttering an apology.

“Don’t worry, no offence taken. The college has clearly decided to spend their frankly pitiable drama budget on getting the best staff rather than the best carpets – of which I am hopefully a prime example. Hilary Barnet. How do you do – apart from clearly needing some work on your entrances?”

The woman extended her hand after delivering this speech. Perplexed, Kate just about managed to introduce herself with Anna’s name and slunk to a seat while the woman consulted a clipboard.

“Ah yes, Ms Roberts. You were in the indomitable Gregory’s class last year, weren’t you?”

Kate nodded her assent. If this woman said she had been taught by an indomitable person called Gregory and had recorded these facts in her efficient-looking clipboard, who was Kate to argue?

“Yes, well, I shall expect a lot from you then. I didn’t see you in action, but you’re the only one in the class that got moved up to the intermediate level. I imagine you were expecting to be in the studio like last year?” Kate nodded, happy to agree to the easy feed of questions. “Well, don’t worry, this is only temporary – my schedule says we’re moving to the studio in week three after they’ve finished a two-week short course in there. Who knows, perhaps by then you will have learned how to speak in sentences!” smirked the woman, before turning back round to the white board. Kate gasped. She couldn’t believe how rude this woman was being. She saw a couple of the students whispering to each other behind their hands and shooting her covert glances. Kate was beginning to wonder whether she had just stepped into an alternate universe where rudeness amongst adults was acceptable, or else some kind of time warp which had taken her back into school again but by mistake had put her in the life of someone who had done badly and had been bullied.

She was considering leaving while she could, when a man in the chair next to her leaned towards her and whispered “Don’t worry. She’s actually not that bad. I reckon it’s just with each academic year she gets further and further away from the stage so has to create a grand role for herself in the classroom.” He smiled, brown eyes twinkling humorously. Kate laughed, appreciating the man’s attempt to put her at her ease.

“I’m Ben, by the way,” he continued, extending a hand. Kate could smell a musky kind of aftershave as she leant in to take his hand. Realising this meant he could probably also smell her eau de garlic, she made the handshake a fleeting one, though long enough to notice the soft robustness of his hands.

“Hi, Ben. I’m K- Anna.”

“I know,” he countered, winking.

Kate blushed. It was a long time since she had been winked at. Her dad used to wink at her when she was little, but since then she had found that it usually just meant a best-avoided guy was making a lame attempt to reel in a possible conquest. Neil may well have winked at her when they first met; it was the sort of thing he would do. The wink of this Ben individual was more of a friendly wink, though, she decided, showing her that he would be an ally in the class, rather than someone to be cold-shouldered for having lecherous intent. Besides, if he wanted to flirt, there were less attractive people than him, she acknowledged to herself.

Before Kate had time to respond, the tutor had turned back to the class. She stood in the centre of the semi-circle, and allowed her gaze to fall on each of the students in turn.

“Welcome! As you will know, I am Hilary Barnet and I am your tutor for the course. As you should have seen from your course guides, we are going to be focusing on characterisation. With the course only lasting one term we’re slightly limited, I’m afraid. The first few weeks will be about improvisation, working out the moods and expression you can bring in character to particular scenarios.”

That sounded great, thought Kate, smiling. She noticed Ben smiling too and they exchanged a brief glance. Kate returned her attention to Hilary.

“Then we’ll do some brief textual analysis and work towards a semi-staged performance of a couple of scenes so you can apply what you’ve learnt and you can perform to your adoring fans, or rather whatever long-suffering friends and family and possibly a dog you are able to round up.”

“I might bring a cat,” whispered Ben. Kate giggled, eliciting a stern glare from Hilary. Kate looked at the floor while Hilary continued.

“It will be quite a journey that we go on together in the coming weeks – a mental and spiritual one, and in some cases, physical, as you explore all that you can give of yourself to a character.”

There was a giggle at the word “physical” from the two girls who had been whispering earlier, and again they shot glances in Kate’s direction. They seemed to have an inexplicable fascination with her. Maybe it was just ‘new girl’ syndrome. Another glare from Hilary silenced them.

“Right. Let’s get down to it. There are a few familiar faces here, and some people I don’t know so well. I know some of you know each other – or may already have taken the bold step of initiating social intercourse” (giggles again from the two girls) “but as befits a first class today we are going to do introduction exercises.”

Kate relaxed. She needn’t have worried about that Viola speech then, she thought, wiping her hands against her jeans, conscious that her palms had been sweating since she had been in the room. She shot a covert glance at Ben. A friend had told her that everyone, in a relationship or not, did a subconscious ‘Would I or wouldn’t I?’ test when they met a member of the opposite sex to assess if they would sleep with them, if it came to it, so why not get it over with, consciously? Shaggy chestnut hair, slight stubble covering a strong jaw, well-defined eyebrows that showed perhaps the slightest signs of plucking to avoid the dreaded monobrow –

“Right, everyone!” shouted Hilary, clapping her hands. “Let’s get started. You two, work together,” said Hilary, gesturing to Kate and Ben, “and we’ll see what we come up with!”

Damn. She’d missed the instructions. Still, it couldn’t be that difficult.

“Why don’t you go first?” said Kate, turning to Ben. He began to speak, his lips plump and full, Kate saw, but a bit on the dry side. As if on cue, Ben moistened his lips. Kate jerked back slightly, hoping she hadn’t been caught in her assessment. Now she felt like the sleazy one – Ben may have winked at her, but she had almost been mentally undressing him.

“So, you got that?” he queried, looking into her eyes.

Damn. Got what?

“Ben Coltham, live in Camden, and my interesting fact (and blatant plug if it’s your kind of thing) is that I’m a trained water-skiing instructor.”

Ah, the old name, home and interesting fact exercise. Easy. Kate had done this before and had a whole host of interesting facts about herself she could use.

“OK, I’m Anna Roberts and –”

Oh, Christ. She had to give interesting facts about Anna.

Beyond the immensely interesting fact that Anna was currently engaged in an exciting psychological experiment that may or may not be a route to identity theft, she really didn’t know anything interesting about Anna. She could just say she was a psychology student but she didn’t just want to be consigned as dull for the rest of the year.

“And, um, I live in Camden too. Great place, Camden, isn’t it? All those shops, and restaurants, and, um, goths. Really great, those goths.”

Come on, Kate, think of something!

“Two minutes left everyone!” called out Hilary.

Kate began to panic, frantically trying to think of anything off the beaten track she knew about Anna. Internet dating! Yes, that would do – it was a bit different, surely, even these days.

“I’m on an internet dating site and I’ve met someone called Luke!” she blurted out, and immediately wished she could bring the words back in. She would now just be viewed as the desperate girl who shared too much information.

Ben looked surprised. Kate attempted to mock-flirt her way out of her blunder.

“What, are you surprised that an attractive girl like me would have to resort to internet dating?”

He paused. “No,” he said slowly. “It’s more the fact that you’re wearing a wedding ring – I noticed earlier.”

Blast, thought Kate, so she was. She looked down at her ring, as if amazed to see it there. She really ought to have taken it off, but she was so used to wearing it that it didn’t occur to her. She thought quickly, wondering how she could get out of this one. Trust this guy to be the sort to notice wedding rings.

“Divorced!” she yelped.

Ben nodded his head. “That explains it then. Pretty recent I guess if you’re still wearing the ring.”

“Um, yes. Pretty recent. Not strictly speaking divorced yet – just separated,” added Kate, hoping that fictitiously separating from Neil would somehow be less faithless to him than suddenly divorcing him, and slightly more of a white lie than the divorce – after all, he was thousands of miles away so they were separated in that sense. And that way she would only have made Anna married in the space of two minutes, rather than also making her go through a divorce as well.

“It must be tough – well done getting out there again on the internet,” congratulated Ben, looking sympathetic and serious.

“Oh, you know, it’s fine, hadn’t been married all that long, and he cheated on me anyway,” lied Kate, feeling she had to add some verisimilitude, while mentally apologising to Neil, Anna, and Anna’s fictitious husband for making him into such a stereotype.

She pulled her ring off and thrust it into her pocket.

“There! That’s off! And I’m back in the game!” she laughed, hoping she hadn’t just made herself sound like a desperate divorcee. Ben smiled at her, but before he had a chance to respond the tutor called the class to order. They went round the room, and five or so moderately interesting facts were revealed, along with three very drab ones, she revealed Ben’s and then they came to him. Ben paused before the interesting fact.

“And Anna’s fact is that she has successfully got rid of a cheating husband. Sure we all wonder how anyone could cheat on her but there you have it – men are bastards!” he joked, ending with a mock self-deprecating shrug. Most of the class laughed warmly, including Kate, who was flattered at the approach he had decided to take, and impressed that he had now twice made the effort to make someone who he had only just met feel better about themselves. They shared a smile and turned back to the tutor.

“How sweet,” intoned Hilary dryly, noting the shared glance. “But a bold choice of opening fact about yourself – well done. Let’s hope you can put some of that pain into your characters and then perhaps it will all have been worthwhile.”

The class tittered nervously, eyeing Kate as they did so. The two girls who had been giggling at Kate earlier were for their part now looking disgusted. Kate felt that their disgust was directed more at her than at the tutor, and felt vaguely disquieted – perhaps they felt she had given away too much about herself in the first class. She was going to have to work them round somehow – she didn’t fancy having two girls glaring at her for the next two months. For now, she shrugged.

“I’ll do my best – but I won’t send him a thank-you card until I’m quite sure I’m about to launch a stunning acting career!” she joked, and sensed the relief of the class that she hadn’t been offended and that it was safe to laugh. She was conscious of Ben smiling to himself beside her.

This short diversion aside, they were again split up into pairs, and began a series of longer exercises. They each had to tell the other about their day so far, using as much expression in their faces as possible, but within the realms of their own usual facial expressions. The other then had to mimic it back to them, trying to use exactly the same expressions and tone of voice that the other person had used. The next exercise was to go into character and imagine something either very happy or very sad or exciting that had happened recently to their character, and describe it to the other person, and again the other person would have to mimic it back. Kate was easily able to conjure up a diverting account of her morning of proofreading and was happy that it was sufficiently true to Anna’s life to be able to pass it off as her. She enjoyed seeing Ben focusing hard on her features, and laughed to see him try to copy her afterwards.

For her ‘in character’ part, she decided to opt for herself, Kate, and related the story of her dad’s funeral. She allowed herself to shed tears. Ben watched her with avid attention, and Hilary on her rounds came to watch them and nodded approvingly at Kate’s pain. Ben didn’t quite manage to conjure up tears, but he squeezed his eyes up and made his voice crack to register the emotion. Kate for her part had to mimic Ben’s character of being a clown in costume who was in a hurry so had to run for the bus in his character shoes. She wasn’t sure she had done a very good job of it, but Ben made her laugh at both him and herself, and as she wiped tears of mirth from her eyes she was pleased that he seemed again to be trying to cheer her up. Going back into the very real pain of her dad’s death had reminded her of how recent her grief was. She saw how quickly she could be sucked back down into despondency again.

At the end of the class as they were packing away, Ben came up to her.

“That was a good session, partner!” he bantered.

Kate laughed. “You weren’t so bad yourself! Not quite BAFTA level, but give it a few more clown stories and we’ll see,” she joked.

“Well, obviously!” he countered, pretending to preen himself. “I’m practising my acceptance speech already! Seriously though, you did some good work this week – not just with the acting. See you next time, and take care of yourself, right? Remember, this Luke guy may write like a Greek god but he may not look like one,” he advised, locking her eyes in his whilst momentarily touching her elbow.

As he walked away, she reflected that this last comment would be slightly crushing if she was actually pinning her hopes for a revival of her love-life on someone she had met on the internet. It was out of synch with his earlier attempts to cheer her up. She smiled to herself. Perhaps he wanted her for himself? Oh well, he could just go on wanting, she said to herself, slipping her wedding ring back on as she left the room. Still, she allowed a slight strut to slip into her walk and the occasional toss of her hair over her shoulder as she walked to the bus stop, in case he should be looking.

Chapter 10

-Jane-

Jane Robinson paused before sealing up the envelope addressed to Kate Dixon. It was the first packet the firm had sent to Kate since her dad’s death – Peter had dictated the letter that morning. In all the fifteen years she’d been taking dictations from him, Jane had trusted his judgment – and really, it wasn’t her place to query it as a humble secretary, she reminded herself. He’d let the human side of things slip this time, though. True, he’d sent flowers for the funeral (arranged by her, naturally, as was the message telling Kate to take as long as she needed which had – Jane hoped – been duly noted in the card by the florist). But less than two weeks had passed since then. This latest letter with the chapter for Kate to comment on could have had an opening paragraph saying that the firm hoped that she was bearing up after her sad news, or something along those lines, before getting to the business side of things, couldn’t it?

It wasn’t Jane’s job to tamper with what Peter chose to write, though, and she prided herself on the accuracy with which she translated Peter’s dictations into the written word. She’d heard one secretary in another firm had been sacked on the spot for deciding to insert a comma where none had been intended, completely altering the meaning of some highly important final-form legal document leading to red-faced explanations to the client and pleading negotiations with the other side’s legal team. Not good.

Plus Jane knew the partners had behaved pretty well to Kate over the last few months. Sitting outside Peter’s office, she had a fairly good grasp of all the office gossip. There’d been the grey-faced conversations between Peter and Kate, and Peter had very rightly said that if Kate needed to take time off to deal with things, she could do. It sounded like a good deal to Jane – sitting in a pretty bit of Northumberland on half-pay reading a book, someone even printing it out for you, making the occasional comments in red before sending it back in hard copy for Jane to run past Peter. He still liked paper, bless him. Less good for the trees, but better for his eyesight, and he seemed to think Kate would feel the same.

Mostly typos, really, Kate’s comments. If it weren’t for the risk that a stray comma or double negative might in the mystery of law change the meaning entirely, Jane was sure she could almost have done it herself, if it meant getting even half of Kate’s salary (she typed up the annual salary review letters as well, so she knew all about that). There’d been some grumblings in the kitchen from the lawyers that they wished they could just sit at home proofreading a book. Still, it couldn’t have been a fun life to nurse your dying father while taking any spare moment to wade through chapters on the apparent subtleties of commercial leases. Not fun at all.

She bet that things would change now that Kate’s father was actually dead – after all, Kate would no longer have to nurse him. Jane knew that was how some of the other partners saw it, that they’d been trying to convince Peter that they should call her to discuss a date for her to return to work. Peter had protested that Kate was doing good work at home, and that although she wasn’t making money for the firm by doing fee-earning work, she was only on half-pay and that might be translated into profits from the book. Plus the firm had been lucky to get her from London and they wanted to hang on to her, not force her out for personal considerations, Peter had argued. In the end, the compromise had been reached of sending her another chapter to review in a shorter time frame than usual to see how she responded, and if she came back with the chapter in time they would know that she was ready to come back to work. Bit underhand, really. Jane didn’t see why they couldn’t just pick up the phone to her and all talk about it like adults, upfront. They had this inbuilt desire to behave ‘strategically’ and to put everything in writing – even if there had been a phone call it probably would have resulted in a carefully-worded attendance note and a follow-up letter or email that she would have to type.

Anyway, it wasn’t her job to worry about it, she decided, sticking down the lip of the envelope. It was 5.30 on the dot and time for her to be going home to Bill. They were doing chicken lasagne tonight – she’d picked up the ingredients at lunchtime. Glass or two of wine to go with, perhaps early to bed. Very nice.

Poor Kate, Jane thought, as she lobbed the envelope in the post-tray, not being able to have those evenings at home with her husband. Couldn’t be much of a life when Neil was away at sea. She’d tried to ask Kate about it over the kettle, but she’d started chattering on about pizza places or something. They’d bump into Kate in town some weekends, in the cinema or along Gunwharf Quays, her and Bill giggling along, having a fun day out. In the moment before Kate saw them she was always looking glum, fretful. Of course, then Kate’s smile came on, everything was very jolly, and of course she was having a super weekend, she said. But Jane had begun to notice a kind of sadness behind her eyes that never quite went away, even when Neil was actually around to join the office party earlier that year. Masked by smiles of course but undoubtedly still there.

Chapter 11

-Anna-

Acting. That’s all that it was. She could do that. She had always been able to, splitting herself in two according to need. Whatever the role was, she was there. This time the role was Kate – good little wife sending emails to distant husband who she thought wanted news of home and would be interested in whether the guttering needed replacing or if she had felt like she might be getting a cold. True, there had been more thrilling roles, but it would be the performance of a lifetime. Once she got going.

Anna was composing her second email to Neil since the exchange, and she wanted to savour the writing of it. She had kept the first email fairly neutral, asking him how everything was going, what he was up to, and signed off with what seemed to be established norm for the number of kisses. She just mimicked Kate.

She had received a similarly bland email in response about what the ship was doing – no locations, she assumed that email wasn’t considered safe enough for that – and lots of strange acronyms which were apparently supposed to denote people or manoeuvres. Either way, quite frankly they did not interest her. These were not the sort of emails that she was in the game for. Neil ought to associate the emails she was sending with lust, desire and longing – surely that was appropriate for one so many miles away that you had not seen for so long. That was where Anna would come in. She could perform this role with her eyes closed. It was time for ‘Kate’ to embark on a new phase of her relationship with Neil, and Anna would take utmost pleasure in ushering it in. That was the aim of the experiment. And its end result. The best sorts of experiments are ones where the outcome is certain.

The rattle and slam of the post coming through the letterbox momentarily distracted her. It wasn’t such a big event though – it could just join the rest of the post on the mat. If someone considered it unimportant enough to send by snail mail, Anna wasn’t about to leap up and grab it the moment it came through the door. Besides, it was Kate’s post. Sure, she was now meant to be Kate, but it did remove that element of excitement. Bills and work are unexciting at the best of times, and someone else’s bills and work are even less enthralling. Anna would get to them in due course. Maybe. She turned her attention back to the computer.

‘My dearest Neil,’ she began.

No, too tame. Too old-married and Jane Austen-like. Kate may start her emails like that, but it was not Kate who was writing. Anna glanced at the picture of Neil beside the computer for inspiration.

‘Hey, sexy,’ she typed. That was better.

‘Longing to be there with you. I know those cabins are small but it would be nice and cosy with me beside you – or perhaps on top of you if that’s the only way to get me to fit in. Or perhaps we should be thinking about how best to fit you in… I’m sorry you’re so busy and have to work so hard – I would love to be there to give you the long, deep massage you deserve. Just think about that to keep you going.

‘Anyway, the bath is waiting for me. I’ve got it just the way I like it – steamy, scented, hot bubbles – can’t wait to feel that water lapping over me while I stretch out and just let the tension of the day flow out of me. It’s a good way to get really *in touch* with myself. I think I may have to stay in there some time, lying back and thinking of… you. XXX’

Anna sat back in the chair and read the words over again. Should she end with ‘The one and only Kate’, like she’d been instructed? Should she fuck! Sweet of Kate to think herself unique, other than uniquely boring. But Anna was all for making things a little different.

Satisfied, she pressed send, biting her lower lip in anticipation of the sort of response her email might elicit. That should start to take the relationship in the direction she wanted it. Kate would want it to go where Anna did too, if she had any sense, if she knew what Anna knew. For now, Anna thought she might just go and take that bath after all. There was no point in lying for the sake of it.

She sauntered to the bathroom and began to run the bath. She lit the candles round the edge. It was no good trying to have a bath with the electric light on. You really couldn’t relax and access full inner contemplation. Plus the avocado colour was more muted in candlelight. It had not been easy to obtain the candles. She had searched high and low for some tea-lights in the cottage the previous evening, but to no avail. Not even a candle for the table. Kate was clearly not a romantic person. Perhaps her father dying around her was a bit of a turn-off. But Neil must have been there occasionally, and Kate really ought to have made more of an effort. Life’s more important than death, though some people don’t act like it. So Anna had ventured out to the ‘local’ shop that morning.

Actually, both local and shop were misnomers. Kate had claimed it was walking distance. Presumably that was what helpful family members had said to Dick Whittington before he set off to London with a spring in his step. Only this seemed further. And it was more of a bartering centre than a shop. In exchange for their goods, it seemed well-established that you had to impart as many intimate details of your life as the proprietor, Betty, deemed necessary and depending on how good the story was, you would be granted access to the goods stowed out of sight behind the counter. Then they would deign to take your money at the end of the transaction, but not necessarily the price that was on the goods (if there was one). If you wanted to be served again in the future, Anna noticed from the customers at the counter – for despite it all, the shop was a popular place – it seemed best practice to say breezily ‘Keep the change’, or ‘And that’s a pack of chocolate Hobnobs for you, Betty’. Usually in shops Anna felt generous if she put one penny change in the charity box next to the till. But if Hobnobs were what was needed to get allegiance from Betty, Hobnobs it would be.

She had tried to browse quietly, but had forgotten she was a stranger. She was therefore exciting and somewhat suspicious. Anna could forgive the owners for thinking she was motivated by greedy and treacherous intent. It was less forgivable for them to make this thought quite so obvious. Anna had felt herself being observed. No doubt with hostile eyes. She flicked her hair over her shoulder defiantly, bent over so that her bottom was roughly level with the counter (might as well give them something to look at) and examined a lower shelf.

“You after something?” said a voice.

Anna thought this was probably directed at her but chose to ignore it. She had every right to be in this shop and conduct herself as she pleased. Footsteps followed.

“What brings you here? What are you after?” came a voice in her ear.

Oh, to answer that question fully! What a surprise they would have got. And Kate never would have been able to walk into this shop again for the shame.

Anna straightened up and regarded the person who had accosted her. It was a he, very grey, very plain, very dull. He was probably espoused to Betty. He looked as though he ate his fair share of the Hobnobs. Indeed, the tell-tale crumbs were still nestling in the fibres of his moth-eaten grunge-coloured sweater. He had probably been attracted by her behind. Betty may well have made him approach her to stop him looking at it or alternatively to stop suspected kleptomania. Anna had always thought people were keen to have new customers. Clearly not Betty and Grey Man.

“Hi, what a lovely shop,” Anna began. Grey Man blushed. God, he actually believed the shop was lovely. “I’m just after some candles, if I may?”

“Candles, hey? Well you won’t find those there, will you, lass,” he had reproached, gesturing to the tinned tomatoes she had been looking at.

She may well do. She’d found rat poison next to canned fruit after all.

“Of course, silly me. Perhaps you could guide me?”

Grey Man blushed even more deeply. It gave an interesting, but not necessarily favourable, splash of colour to his appearance. Maybe if he slopped some of the tinned tomatoes down his front too he could make the hue a lasting addition.

Grey Man’s probable wife appeared behind the counter. He cleared his throat. “Lady here wants some candles, Betty,” he shared.

“Oh, had a power failure have you, pet?” asked Betty. “Renting a cottage I expect? It’s probably

got a meter that you haven’t found. If you tell me the cottage name I can check, if you like.”

For goodness’ sake, just get the candles, you human Hobnob gossip balloon, Anna thought.

“That’s really sweet of you, but don’t trouble yourself - I’d just like candles,” Anna said.

“You’d probably be better off with a torch. I’ll get you a torch,” said Betty.

Get me a torch, and I’ll bash your head in with it.

“I’d really love just the candles,” Anna said.

“You’ll need some matches too, mind.”

Actually, I can breathe fire when I need to, thought Anna. Could burn this place down in one breath – puff!

“That’s so thoughtful of you, thanks,” simpered Anna, wondering how combustible Betty’s sweater would be. The Hobnob crumbs would probably help.

Betty shuffled out to the back and came back armed with some fat church candles

and some matches. Anna smiled sweetly and opened her mouth to ask for floating candles and then shut it again. She would be there for hours if she opened up negotiations again. They would have to have a discussion of what she proposed to use them for. Betty and Grey Man probably wouldn’t understand her bathing habits. Or why she wanted to feel rejuvenated – they were clearly happy being past it.

“That’s perfect, thank you,” she beamed, handing over some cash. “Keep the change.”

Betty looked pleasantly surprised.

You can put it towards the liposuction, Anna thought.

“Buy yourself some Hobnobs!” she said. Boom! More crumbs for the combustible jumper.

“What a nice young girl,” Anna heard Betty say, as she left the shop. Morons.

And so now Anna had the candles. She swirled the water round in the bath with her hand as it gushed out of the taps. She had opted against bubble bath. Kate only had some horribly chemical-looking citrus-fruit mix, which described itself as the perfect reinvigorating start to the day. She could think of much better ones, ideally with male accompaniment. Besides, baths were for relaxing, thinking about life, planning out the future as you reclined back against the bathtub. Not for making yourself turbo-powered so you could run around all day creating stress. Perhaps Kate would be in a more tranquil frame of mind after the experiment was over. Anna laughed. That was not a likely outcome. Kate had plenty to keep her busy in London. Anna had made sure of that.

She shed her clothes and climbed into the bath, turning on the Jacuzzi feature. She used to feel like she was a piece of boiling cabbage when she had these sorts of baths, a few years ago, before she got back in shape. The bubbles would pummel her and the spare flesh on her belly and legs would wobble around in different directions. Not beautiful. Now though she was taut again, like she had been before. Her stomach was pleasingly flat and her thighs were impressively toned. She extended one leg and examined it. Suspender thighs. That’s what a previous boyfriend, she forgot which one, had called them. Perfect for stockings, the inner thighs having that pleasing muscular definition that demarcated them from the rest of the thigh. Most girls – and men – only dreamed of such thighs. She bet Kate didn’t have thighs like this. Or maybe she did once, but she certainly didn’t now. And even if she did, her legs weren’t as long, Anna thought smugly. There was no competition. And there wouldn’t be. Any man would clearly opt for her over Kate. Or live to regret it, and would be sure to correct his choice, given the opportunity. Once reminded.

Chapter 12

-Kate-

Kate was in high spirits as she headed to the acting class at the end of the week. She had spent a happy morning at the V&A Museum wandering round their collection of fashion through the ages, and had managed to get a slot for the popular current exhibition of famous diamonds. She loved the high vaulted ceilings, the ornamental floor tiles, and the care with which the exhibitions were put together – even the ladies’ toilets were a triumph of design. Plus the small sparkling rocks delighted her, her awe of their multi-faceted brilliance against the plush black velvet that housed them reminding her of the beauty that was available to man.

Sitting on the tube afterwards on the way to the college, idly munching through a crêpe she had picked up in South Kensington on her way to the station, she was experiencing one of those rare moments of pure happiness and relaxation that had been so infrequent of late. Congratulating herself on her decision to take up Anna’s proposition, and open to what other opportunities the world had to offer her, she allowed her gaze to meander over the banner adverts above the row of seats opposite her. One particular advert caught her attention.

“Who do you think you are? Who are you really? Who do you want to be?” it enquired, in spiky pink capitals.

“Join us to explore your identity in friendly surroundings – not dry philosophy but real practical tips for living your daily life to get the most out of being you!” There was a website address and a phone number at the bottom of the ad, but little else.

Kate giggled to herself. In her current position, it would be fun, would it not, to go along to something like that and kid a lot of probably very earnest and deep-minded people into a sham exploration of self? She could just imagine them, all sitting in a circle, trying to improve their minds and lives by futile navel-gazing. It was probably some kind of cult, or religious gathering – she wouldn’t be surprised if anyone joining was told the only way to find her true self was through some god or other. It really did seem like too funny an opportunity to miss. Grinning, she wrote down the short website address (she assumed ‘HGS’ must be a three-letter acronym, but for what she did not know – the something or other Society perhaps) and vowed to explore it after class that day.

She deserved a bit of fun, after all. She had been very diligent in applying herself to the tasks Anna had set her. Not only had she been doing well on the proofs, and sent back the completed sci-fi work, she had finally got round to logging-on to Anna’s internet dating site to embark on the task of keeping Luke ‘warm’ for Anna as requested, and had flown the flag as Anna just that morning. At first, Kate had been putting off going onto the site. Although the prospect of guilt-free flirting had initially seemed an attractive one, a silly pastime that would be good for a giggle, the reality of it was slightly daunting to her. It was a long time since she had done any real flirting (flirting with your spouse didn’t count), never mind in a stark written form sent across the ether to a total stranger. In person, so much could be done with the odd failure to break eye-contact, a carefully modulated smile or tone of voice, adroit crossing of legs to graze the other person’s as your legs overlapped, perhaps even some subtle touching of the upper arm if you were feeling confident. And there was so much more possibility for retreat, claiming the other person was misinterpreting the signs, that you were just being friendly.

But with messages and emails, what you said was out there, could be passed round friends, incontrovertible evidence that you liked someone, wanted someone, and were willing to do something about it. She supposed the more experienced flirts would still be able to deny the interpretation that had been put on their words. That was the point of flirting, after all, wasn’t it? Suggesting that there may be a possibility that you were interested, testing the parameters of the other person’s willingness to engage, trying to make them connect you with sexual pleasure, but always keeping that teasing streak going so that complacency didn’t undermine the personal energy and the interest between the two people. She knew she would be doing this as Anna, so would be completely hidden behind that name, but the safety her pride would get from that was balanced in almost equal proportions to the difficulty this assumed identity would present. It was bad enough having to suddenly flirt on-line herself, but it seemed an insurmountable task to tap into whatever dynamic Anna and Luke had established, and try to master Anna’s flirting vocabulary and nuance. It would be pure academic flirting, studying the language they both used to try to emulate the mood between the two, with no personal gain. As it sounded like Anna had been living single for a considerable amount of time, Kate imagined she must have a fairly sophisticated – if not always successful – technique. Kate wasn’t sure she was equal to the demands of modern cyber-flirtation.

It was being good at old-fashioned face-to-face flirting that had got her together with Neil. She had met him at the end of her second year at university when she was considering trying to convert her Law degree to Law with French. He was a student in the Modern Languages faculty and had been leading her group for the guided tours. She had immediately taken to his blond spiky hair, cheeky smile and deep blue eyes – the sort of eyes that drew you in and gave you no option but to stare into them, you hoping that their draw was personal to you, but knowing deep down that the eye-owner was universally acknowledged as hot. She had managed to push her way to the front of the group and get noticed by the occasional quip coupled with demure look at the ground.

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