30

Vera had provided in her plan for multiple delays in crossing borders, but we made such good time that we reached Simferopol a day ahead of schedule. A procession of worn-out people passed through the train station with wrinkled Asiatic faces and those third-world suitcases: big fake-tartan laundry bags, full of cheap Chinese goods for sale. A sign over the station toilet said ‘Washing footwear is prohibited’. Just outside it, an old woman was sitting in the dust selling a single sinister-looking fish. ‘Fresh flounder!’ she croaked.

It seemed unwise to linger in a town of any size so we took a taxi to Chufut Kale, an abandoned cave village, where the only other visitors were a man called Dimitrii Muranov and his family. Muranov told us he was a poet, and at the slightest hint of incredulity from Nicholas, he went to his car to fetch two volumes of verse from a cardboard box in the boot. One was a book of love poems to his first wife; the other a book of love poems to his second wife, a blonde girl he called his Lolita who looked barely older than her fifteen-year-old stepdaughter. Nicholas thanked him for the books. Muranov inscribed them, explaining as he did so that he was also in real estate. He offered us a ride in his cramped car, but we had the taxi driver waiting for us at the foot of the hill. We crept off without saying goodbye. Nicholas flipped through the books as we drove back to Simferopol.

‘She’s still with Caspar,’ he said, though neither of us had mentioned Leonora’s name. ‘They’ve moved into a big house on Chepstow Road. Last time we spoke, Leonora was about to have lunch with Candy Go. Can you imagine? They have the same Pilates teacher.’

In the days we had been travelling, my speech had begun to show marked improvement, and though I was still unable to form whole sentences, our singular connection meant that Nicholas was often able to guess my thoughts after one or two words, and in this case none at all. Muranov’s wives, the poetry, the young children in the limestone caves: by some strange alchemy, these things had made both of us think of Leonora.

It meant there was something exhausting about being together. We were open books to one another. We couldn’t outrun each other’s consciousness. Wherever one of us went to hide, the other was there before him.

*

Rain was pouring down in Yalta when we finally arrived after the two-and-a-half-hour trolley-bus ride; the mountains obscured by mist and the sea a queasy mass of grey.

Nicholas and I sat in the half-light of a basement bar called the Black Muscatel and drank sticky Crimean wines.

I’ve lost my liking for alcohol. It just makes me nauseous and more uncoordinated. But Nicholas knocked the tumblers back in the Russian style and it loosened him up. He helped himself to more wine and then offered the bottle to me. I reached out to cover my glass with my hand and sent it crashing to the floor. I felt his disappointment at my clumsiness, his anxiety that no one would believe what I’d gone through, that he would fail and let down Vera.

At 10 p.m., we boarded the ship, queuing in the darkness with the other passengers on the clanking gangway. That night I had my first post-Procedure dream: I saw Vera in the blinding sunshine at the Yassawi mausoleum, but the dome above it was gilded like the Temple of the Rock and Vera was dressed all in white. She beckoned to me and as I leaned over she whispered in my ear: ‘The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.’ At that instant, I awoke and saw Nicholas in the bed next to mine. Our eyes met and I knew he had woken from the same vision.

*

The Dimitrii Shostakovich was a cruise ship and her route across the Black Sea had a consequent lack of urgency. She put in at Odessa for one night before doubling back on a south-easterly course to Trabzon. A good half of the tour party – many of them Finns and Belgians – disembarked in Odessa to go sightseeing and visit the opera. Nicholas and I remained on board. We played ping-pong in a windowless steel exercise room; sportingly, Nicholas played left-handed to compensate for my disability.

At mealtimes, he ordered dishes from the menu that I knew he didn’t like. He ate honeydew melons and pork cutlets with manufactured enthusiasm. His intention was obvious: he wanted to stress our differences.

To say that Nicholas and I had complicated feelings about each other would be an understatement. But I know that in some way my existence was a liberation for him. He didn’t know what the future held – who does? – but he was facing it with a new lightness. At times he missed his old life terribly, Leonora and the children; at others he was beginning to glimpse the possibilities that lay ahead. I think he saw that he had come to the end of something. He had burned out a self. Someone else could be Nicholas Slopen. He would start afresh.

At the same time, our sameness, our redundancy and the potential for future conflict gave rise to terrible thoughts. I took heart from the fact that the torment of the Procedure itself, which is one of the constituent experiences of my identity, was to him a blank. The memory of the suffering I had undergone reassured me of my singularity.

Nicholas consoled himself with a different rationalisation. At root, there was always something patronising in his attitude towards me. Being conditioned to the idea of his uniqueness, he had the notion that he was the original, I the copy. He had no understanding of how profoundly I feel that, far from being a copy, I am an enhancement. I am the best of him. Nor could he imagine how powerfully I am attached to Lucius and Sarah. My love for them wasn’t, isn’t, a simulacrum of his. It’s primary, non-negotiable, agonising. Each night, we lay in our cabin in silence as the ship cut slowly across the Black Sea. The darkness was full of unanswerable questions. I thought of my children.

31

I had my second session with Dr White today and my overriding sense was of how much I miss Dr Webster. White is about fifty, a second-row forward run to seed, but still with all the hearty’s machismo and swagger. It makes me wonder once again about the motivation of someone who voluntarily spends their time in the company of lunatics. Who is really suffering from messianic grandiosity?

White bristled with hostility towards me from our first session. Today, he started with almost the same words, warning me that he was no pushover. He accused me of being up to the same tricks that I was with Dr Webster and said I’d find him a tougher customer. ‘I’m not going to swallow any of your bullshit,’ he threatened.

I asked him what a strict Freudian would make of that declaration. He looked at me sourly.

We spent most of the session in silence. At the end, he suggested that he’d withdraw my computer privileges if I didn’t show more sign of complying. He could see this panicked me. ‘I want you to think long and hard, my friend,’ he said, in a tone that was anything but friendly.

*

Nicholas and I got back to England on September 25th 2009. We travelled from Southampton to Victoria by train and took a black cab to Colliers Wood. Nicholas and Leonora were in the process of selling the house and Nicholas had rented a tiny one-bedroom flat on the high street. I followed him to the top floor, using the bannister to lever myself up the stairs. Misha Bykov was waiting for us inside. His body seemed to fill the living room. The curtains were drawn.

He and Nicholas exchanged muted greetings in Russian.

‘It’s not exactly what we hoped for,’ Nicholas said. He put his bag in the bedroom and hung our coats in the hall cupboard.