Transmigration (11 page)

 

 

Fletcher, who had no fancy for the climb down, was tempted, but he said:
"And have everybody know? No, thanks, Anita. Please try to forget
anything happened."

 

 

His leg was over the sill. He wanted to get Ross away immediately,
because there was no telling how long he could hold him.

 

 

Anita said no more, but watched silently as he traversed the roof, climbed
down to the coal cellar and then jumped for the wall. When he was safely
in the lane, she closed the curtains and withdrew from sight. Before
that, however, he heard the click as she set the catch of the window,
perhaps for the first time.

 

 

Fletcher strode off along the lane.

 

 

--I knew you were there, you bastard, Ross said.

 

 

--I doubt it.

 

 

--Why do you think I asked if Fletcher committed suicide?

 

 

--It struck me as a reasonable question.

 

 

--Think I didn't know you were there? I've felt you all along, pale ghost
of a pale poltroon. You didn't bother me, Fletcher. Not till now. I knew
you had no power. Why didn't I guess that if you had anything it would
be negative power? Power to stop me doing something . . . That's all
you've got.

 

 

--Perhaps you're right. I'll think about it.

 

 

--Get out, Fletcher! Get off my backl

 

 

--I can't, just like that. I'm sorry, but there it is. I've tried.

 

 

--I know you were Judy. She kicked you out. Even she kicked you out. Till
now, I let you be, not seeing any harm you could do. Now I'm going to
kick you out.

 

 

--Go ahead.

 

 

There was a brief struggle. Ross went on walking, directed by Fletcher.

 

 

Fletcher remarked gently:

 

 

--It's not as easy as you seem to think.

 

 

--That kid got rid of you . . .

 

 

--Yes, but I was desperately keen to oblige her. I hated being a girl. I'm
not so sure I want to leave you.

 

 

Another struggle left Ross-Fletcher steadily walking under Fletcher's
total control. Fletcher observed:

 

 

--One thing I've found is that I'm either up or down. It's a see-saw.
When I was Judy, I was in total command. Yet when I let her speak to me,
she took over. In the end, I was a ghost, as you said. With you, it was
the other way. I didn't know you even suspected my existence. You were
in control. But in the last few minutes . . . Ross, here's a turning. I
want to go left, back to your digs. See if you can go right.

 

 

Ross could not go right.

 

 

He blustered:

 

 

--I want to go this way too.

 

 

If Ross had been a decent man, Fletcher thought, I'd have been ashamed
of myself, horrified of myself, as I was in Judy's body, knowing myself
to be a blight, a disease, a scourge, an excrescence. But with me in
command, this Ian Ross can't be any worse than he's been. He's bound to
be better. With me in him, the world is a better place.

 

 

--I heard that, said Ross. But there was fear in his response. He didn't
know if he could get his own body back. His earlier confidence was
gone. The see-saw was up, and he was down.

 

 

I was good for Judy, Fletcher thought with satisfaction. That was a pure
accident, but an accident that worked out all right. I've no idea what I
did . . . maybe merely sending messages along channels that have always
been closed opens the circuit permanently. I stepped into a brain that
was almost entirely switched off, and I switched it on. Apparently it
stayed switched on . . .

 

 

--You're sensational, Ross snarled.
--Now will you get the hell out of my mind?

 

 

--No. I don't think, as of this moment, I would if I could.

 

 

Ross reached his lodgings. For a moment or two, after he and Fletcher
in one body reached his apartment, it seemed that a battle royal would
take place.

 

 

But Ross had drunk a lot of beer. He could scarcely keep his eyes
open. He managed to hang his clothes up on the floor and get his pajama
trousers on.

 

 

Then the beer caught up with both of them, and they slept.

 

 

 

 

Fletcher, awakening first, pondered idly and more contentedly than usual
on the strange mechanisms of possession.

 

 

He could be Ross, but why? Was there any purpose? He had not particularly
wanted to be John Fletcher, and he could see no point in being Ian Ross.

 

 

That he might possibly do some good as a parasite -- many natural parasites
performed valuable functions -- gave him some hope. He could not help
being what he was now, any more than a human being could help being
born. Yet he loathed and despised his role as a disembodied Master,
dominating some unfortunate person who surely had a right to live his
own life, however badly.

 

 

Only the case of Judy gave him any real grounds for hope. She was his
Galatea: he had made that girl, or at least given her the chance to
make herself. Of course at present she was a weird mixture, partly a
thirteen-year-old with little or no experience of life, partly an ascetic
academician . . . even he could not guess all the elements that were
in her. But she could amount to something; he felt sure she was going
to amount to something, and that was something that had been beyond the
capacity of either John Fletcher or Judy MacDonald of a few days ago.

 

 

Unfortunately he could not see any possibility of being able to make
anything of Ian Ross.

 

 

Gradually Fletcher became aware that Ross was with him; a sober,
subdued Ross.

 

 

--Is it to be a fight for my body? Ross asked.

 

 

--I hope not. I'm perfectly prepared to die, you know. The trouble is,
I can't.

 

 

--We can't live together in peace, obviously. It's got to be war
between us.

 

 

--If you can think of any way to get rid of me, as Judy did, I won't
resist.

 

 

--You'll hop into some other body and take another poor devil's life
from him.

 

 

--That I don't know. I'll try not to. Anyway, what's that to you?
All you want is to get rid of me.

 

 

There was a long pause during which Ross carefully guarded his
thoughts. They could both do that. Fletcher was puzzled, somehow aware
that Ross was not doing the obvious thing, considering ways and means
of ridding himself of Fletcher.

 

 

At last Ross said:

 

 

--Talk to Anita for me.

 

 

Astonished, Fletcher made no reply.

 

 

Ross went on fiercely.

 

 

--I've got to have that girl. I'd have had her last night if . . .
No, don't turn away in disgust. What right have you to be disgusted at
me? Fletcher, I know most of your sorry history. The broad outline has
leaked through from you, if not the details. You could have been saved
if only you'd met the right girl and had the guts to go all out for her.

 

 

--For you, of course, the answer to everything is sex.

 

 

--Hell, didn't your forty-three wasted years teach you anything? What
was the keynote of that unregretted character John Fletcher? Not just
failure. Not really failure at all -- you couldn't have failed in
everything even if you tried, which I suspect you did. You got a First,
didn't you? What was wrong with you was loneliness.

 

 

Again Fletcher made no reply, wishing Ross would change the subject.

 

 

--And fear, Ross added.

 

 

Fletcher, acutely uncomfortable, was at the same time surprised and
discomfited. Ross was not after all entirely selfish and insensitive. His
judgments could be disconcertingly penetrating.

 

 

--Fear?

 

 

--Well, caution, self-consciousness, wishing the earth would open up
and swallow you, that kind of thing. And another thing -- inability to
communicate. You didn't even talk well, do you know that?

 

 

--I know that.

 

 

--I was surprised to learn you were a graduate. You mumbled and hesitated
like a skid row wino. Yet it seems you were fluent in French and German,
so much so that Judy liked to hear you talk French even though she
couldn't understand it. . . .

 

 

This was intolerable. Fletcher would have been uncomfortable under
analysis by Anita, but he could have stood it. To be analyzed by Ross
was torture.

 

 

Fortunately the analysis was over, at least for the moment. Ross went on:

 

 

--Anita liked you. That kid Judy obviously loved you, as far as she
was capable of it. She's not so sure now, but that's understandable.
I don't suppose once you've been right in anybody's mind, or vice versa,
love is possible any more. Man and wife are supposed to be one flesh,
but they're still supposed to have two heads . . .

 

 

--Why do you want me to talk to Anita?

 

 

--Hell, Fletcher, try to see what I'm getting at. I've never found any
way of getting what I wanted except going out and taking it. But that's
not going to work with Anita. We all know it, you, me and her. You talk
to her.

 

 

--On your behalf?

 

 

--Fletcher, I'm going to show you something. I'm going to show you
me. After that, maybe we'll understand each other.

 

 

That was all the warning Fletcher got. Then, in the mind of Ian Ross,
he was suddenly enveloped in, surrounded by, submerged in the nineteen
years of Ross.

 

 

 

 

Ross was an orphan. His parents were killed in a car crash three weeks
after his birth, on their first night out together in more than six
months.

 

 

They would have loved him. They were very young and devoted to each other,
but not very wise. Their crash and death had been entirely their own
fault; the responsibility of Harry Ross, then eighteen, a year younger
than Ian Ross was now.

 

 

The baby passed to the care of an aunt and her husband, dutiful,
childless people who could never have slept in peace again if they
allowed the child of Harry and Mary Ross to go to a Home.

 

 

But they failed to give him one.

 

 

They found little Ian, chiefly, dirty. He was always soiling himself
and had to be cleaned by one of them. Up until the baby's arrival, the
house of Meredith and Gastone Doyle had been one of the most immaculate
dwellings in the civilized world. Later, when Ian began to walk he always
managed to find puddles to fall into, animal excrement to tread on,
and disgusting objects to trail back with him.

 

 

They tried hard and patiently to train him, and, of course, they
succeeded. On his first day at school he was the cleanest, shiniest,
most immaculate small boy the teachers and the other pupils had ever
set eyes on. He was also a precocious prig, begging to be punctured.

 

 

Little Ian was punctured many times in the next ten years. He asked for
it. Uncritical of the standards of Meredith and Gastone Doyle, he was
critical of everything he encountered outside them.

 

 

All this might not have mattered, but the most signal failure of the
Ross aunt and uncle was their failure to exhibit (and probably to feel)
any affection for the child they had never wanted and had accepted only
owing to their strong sense of duty. They were not only always correct,
they were very fair. Later on, when they knew a little more about growing
children, they congratulated Ian on every success and chided him only
for failure he could and should have avoided. But they never took pride
in his success.

 

 

When, much later, hn Ross studied psychology, as many others did
because of his own need for reassurance and justification, he found
many significant things in what he learned, as such people always
do. What struck him most was the confirmation that the human mind often
went perversely by opposites. The son of a miser was a spendthrift;
the daughter of a nymphomaniac was frigid; the children of religious
fanatics were pagans.

 

 

Yet there were things that could not be reversed. In particular, a child
who had never known warmth could not be warm.

 

 

So Ross prospered at school and was correct and dutiful. Then Meredith and
Gastone, who had always regarded Ian's parents' death as their own fault,
were killed in a crash themselves. They left their not inconsiderable
possessions to him.

 

 

In other respects, Ross developed as far from the teachings and examples
of Meredith and Gastone as possible. He drank, he gambled, he swore,
he fornicated, he blasphemed, because they did not.

 

 

Yet he could not love, because they did not. And now he ached for Anita.

 

 

--Thank you, said Fletcher.

 

 

--For what?

 

 

--Honesty, said Fletcher.

 

 

--I can't help it, Ross retorted.
--I would if I could but I can't. That reminds me, have you ever heard
the line from some nonsense poet "What would you do if you were me to
prove that you were you?" It seems revoltingly relevant.

 

 

--Anyway, there's no point in my talking to Anlta. You know my abysmal
record.