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