Yours Is Mine

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.