Transmigration (24 page)

--But you have found some happiness with them, more than you found as
a living man.

 

 

The old man, who had temporarily gained some strength as well as
near-sanity from the arrival of Fletcher, retained the sanity but was
losing strength.

 

 

--I'm dying. For me it is right. My life has perhaps been wasted,
since I failed with the one great chance I had . . . or at any rate,
you say I failed. Your life, I feel, is just beginning.

 

 

He mused for a while, sinking, yet attaining a certain mental clarity
at the last.

 

 

--In one way I was wrong, he admitted.
--Women could and should have helped you. I was wrong to think you had
to be a celibate. But perhaps, as I die, I can give you a push in the
right direction . . .

 

 

Sir Charles Searle died.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 7: ANITA

 

 

He was a woman again and this time he didn't mind.

 

 

Once more he was conscious in a sleeping mind. The personality, the
attitudes, the beliefs of Anita Somerset lay quiescent but available
to him.

 

 

Acceptance of both the general and the particular situation came easier
to him this time, and with acceptance the realization that identification
with any woman was impossible anyway, however willing he might be. What
little was left of John Fletcher was indelibly male; in a man's mind he
could be a partner, but in a girl's mind never more than a stranger. In
Judy's mind he had reached the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.

 

 

Baudaker would be interested, clinically, in the fact now apparent,
that maleness and femaleness were something more than physical, that the
disembodied personality was male or female and never the twain could meet.

 

 

Fletcher's second realization was that there was little or nothing he
could do for Anita. Even as early as this, he was sure from the contact
with her sleeping mind that there was nothing he could give her, and he
found this disappointing.

 

 

True, she was not perfect -- who was?

 

 

Though she was content, though she was what she was and perfectly happy
about it, she was not complete, and it became clearer to him than ever
before what circumstances had to exist before he could enter a mind.

 

 

For his part, he had to be ejected from the mind he was in.

 

 

In addition to that, the mind he entered had to be in certain ways ready
to receive him. Judy, Ross, Baudaker, Gerry, Searle, Anita, all had
certain things common. Not one of them had both parents alive, nor had
had for many years. Not one of them had a brother or sister (though Gerry
for a long time believed he had). All had personality inadequacies. All
in some way, consciously or unconsciously, welcomed him and sought his
guidance. The blind leading the blind, he thought wryly. He was refusing
to give any weight to the strange, grandiose ideas which had stirred in
him during his brief contact with Sir Charles Searle. The old man was mad,
and had made him mad too.

 

 

Anita's inadequacy was the simplest, most normal of all. Almost all of it
could be expressed as female need for a strong male, plus maternal need
for husband and children. The rest arose naturally from a background of
divorced parents constantly fighting over her, and all that that entailed.

 

 

She had to trust someone, and she could not trust Ross, even now. She
was dreaming mildly erotic dreams in which Ross figured, but his face
kept changing.

 

 

Looking into Anita's dreams caught Fletcher up in sleep, and he awoke with
her when the small alarm clock beside her bed shrilled. Since he made no
attempt to conceal his presence, she was in full contact with him at once.

 

 

--Well, hello. I suppose this had to happen. I wonder how long it will
take you to get around the entire population of the British Isles?

 

 

--There's nothing I want less.

 

 

--Oh, don't be silly. You get a great kick out of it. I know I would.

 

 

--You'd have to die first.

 

 

--Well, we all have to go sometime, they say, and I used to believe it
before I met you.

 

 

--You don't seem to mind my being with you.

 

 

--Fat lot of good that would do. I see you've noticed that men and women
are different. You ought to take out a patent on that idea. It must be
worth millions.

 

 

This time, as Anita got up and washed and dressed, the contact was neither
shameful nor awkward. Once more Fletcher experienced the sheer joy of
physical health which, curiously, had been strongest and purest in Judy
and Anita. Perhaps women, particularly young girls, were naturally more
sensuous than men and more conscious of their own bodies. There was
also the fact that both Ross and Gerry, the two young men of whom he
had experience, abused themselves physically in ways which would have
seemed quite crazy to Judy or Anita.

 

 

Breakfast for Anita was a glass of milk and a poached egg on toast.
Again Fletcher noticed that in a curious way the two minds in one body
interpreted the stimuli from the body differently. When Ross had drunk
whisky, presumably enjoying it, Fletcher hated it as if he were consuming
it in his own body. In Anita's body, he would have liked a big platte
of ham and eggs for breakfast, washed down by many cups of coffee. But
Anita drank her milk, ate her poached egg, and was satisfied. Although
they shared the same body, Fletcher remained hungry and Anita was not.

 

 

He had not concealed his thoughts.

 

 

She retorted
--I'm not going to get fat to please you.

 

 

--It wouldn't please me. Tell me, to avoid getting fat, do you always
have to eat like a bird?

 

 

--That's a very stupid simile. Birds eat all the time. They consume
their own weight in . . .

 

 

--You know what I mean.

 

 

--I don't want to stuff myself.

 

 

There was far more behind that than what she said. Yes, girls were
sensuous. She enjoyed her lean, firm body, her lightness, her energy,
her beauty. There were double, triple, quadruple standards which he could
not fathom, even in her mind. She did not want to be a femme fatale,
but she did. She did not want every man she met to desire her, but if
they did not, she would be disappointed.

 

 

--Well, there's a way in which men are just as mixed up, she retorted.
--They all have James Bond fantasies of beautiful girls in diaphanous
nighties beckoning from their windows, yet if it really happened,
ninety-five out of a hundred would run for their lives.

 

 

---Oh, that's ridiculous!

 

 

--You'd run for your life.

 

 

With restraint he said:

 

 

--Possibly, but I'm not typical.

 

 

Of course you're not typical. Nobody's typical. But don't fool yourself
that you're different. Nobody's different either. Enough of this idle
chatter. I have to get to classes.

 

 

He managed to talk her into a midmorning snack she didn't usually have,
and naturally she pointed out that obsessive hunger was supposed to
indicate lack of affection.

 

 

--So I've heard, he replied briefly.

 

 

She was not prepared to let it go at that.

 

 

--Now that you're a sort of ghost you can't expect anyone to love you, John.
It may be hard, but that's the truth and you'll just have to face it.

 

 

Behind her, Ross said: "Hello, Maiden. Mind if I join you?"

 

 

"Yes," she said.

 

 

He sat down opposite her. At once she stood up. "So sorry I can't stay,"
she said politely, "but I hear my master's voice. And the prof. doesn't
like to be kept waiting."

 

 

As she left the cafeteria, Fletcher said:

 

 

--Why did you do that? You're not in any hurry.

 

 

For the first time since he joined her, Anita was tense and irritable.

 

 

--You live your life and I'll live mine.

 

 

Fletcher's contact with Anita was less close than with any previous
host. She talked to him easily and casually like a friend she could call
on the phone at any time without even needing a phone. She concealed
nothing from him; there was nothing in her life she had any particular
reason to conceal.

 

 

The only area she would have screened off from him -- but she left it
too late -- was her lack of sexual experience. Ian Ross was being
literally accurate when he called her Maiden or Virgin, as he probably
knew. Fletcher, no longer quite the repressed Puritan he had been,
was amused to find that Anita was quite as ashamed as he had been of
virginity, and put it down to personal inadequacy, as he had done.

 

 

Giving up the idea of concealing her virginal state from him, she explained:

 

 

--If it were a, moral matter, I'd be highly delighted that I'm still
undefiowered, and I'd parade my purity and probably be an unsufferable
prig about it. But morals don't come into it. I don't despise girls I
knew who sleep with anybody they happen to be with when it gets dark. In
fact, I envy them. Look what I'm missing.

 

 

--Are you sure you're missing anything?

 

 

--Well, I'm missing knowing if I'm missing anything, aren't I? I know
what's the matter with me, and I don't need you or anybody else to tell
me. I just won't commit myself. I look so long before I leap that I never
leap at all. Take Ian . . . before your encounter with him, he was just
bloody impossible, and I use the adjective because no other expresses
it. He was bloody-minded, just generally bloody.

 

 

--I know.

 

 

--Now . . . Oh, I don't want to talk about it. Will you kindly shut up,
roll yourself into a ball, or talk about baroque music?

 

 

Their only other bone of contention was Fletcher's appetite. In Anita's
healthy body he was always ravenous, and she couldn't always withstand
his demands. When she was about to ask for salad, he would step in and
order roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and when she was thinking of
something else he induced her to put more potatoes on her plate.

 

 

One night about ten days after Fletcher joined her she deliberately took
off every stitch of clothing and made him look at her in the long mirror
set in the front of the wardrobe in her room.

 

 

--Look what you're doing to me, she accused.

 

 

He looked with a mixture of reluctance and pleasure. Although there
was no awkwardness about being Anita, he always looked the other way,
so to speak, when she dressed or took a bath, most conscious at such
times that in one body two were a crowd, particularly a man and a girl
in the girl's body.

 

 

--Charming, he said.

 

 

--Are you out of your infinitesimal mind? I used to have a genuine 23
inch waist and couldn't bulge if I tried. Now I've got a pot, after
only ten days. Look at it!

 

 

She was exaggerating. Her waist was still tiny and there was only the,
merest hint of convexity about her smooth abdomen. Still, Fletcher saw
her point. He had done Baudaker a lot of good by making him stop smoking
(Baudaker had managed to keep it up and probably would never smoke again),
but if in a mere ten days he managed to put nine unwanted and unnecessary
pounds on Anita, she certainly had a legitimate complaint. As Fletcher
he had been able to eat all he wanted and never gain an ounce. This
clearly didn't apply to Anita.

 

 

Suddenly he took full control of her for the very first time, apart
from the momentary interferences which had led to this accusatory
demonstration, and snatched up a wrap, threw it on and belted it.
She protested:

 

 

--I made you look at what you're doing to me, but surely I'm not as
hideous as all that yet?

 

 

--We're about to have a visitor.

 

 

--You have a private alarm system?

 

 

She turned to the door.

 

 

--Not that way.

 

 

When she realized he meant the window, and guessed that the visitor
could only be Ross, she wanted to scream, set the window catch, or run
from the room.

 

 

--It's not like last time, Fletcher told her.
--He won't hit you.

 

 

Ross was outside, and he saw her looking at him. He saw, too, that she
made no attempt to stop him opening the window and climbing in.

 

 

"How romantic!" said Anita drily.

 

 

"I have to talk to you," he said, "and if I called and rang the bell
you wouldn't see me."

 

 

"So you came in by the window. I agree it's logical. Somewhat
unnecessarily dramatic, but . . . "

 

 

"Anita," he said, leaning back against the window, "I love you and I
always have."

 

 

She was silent, having no answer to this. Her heart started to hammer
and she felt her color rising.

 

 

"Nothing quite like this ever happened before," he went on. "You know
what happened to me, don't you? You know it, and believe it?"

 

 

She nodded.

 

 

"Men have told girls 'I've changed' before, but never with such cause. I
don't blame you for not being impressed by the Ian Ross that was . . . "