Chapter Thirty
A Lancashire Lass
“What are you two doing in my house?” Sandra demanded to know as she stared at Matthew and Jayne. “What’s happened? Why is Julia’s car in my drive? And which one of you broke my window?” Then she looked more closely at Jayne. “Why are you wearing my daughter’s clothes?” And when she noticed the mess on the kitchen table she called out, “My radio! What have you done to my radio?” Slamming the door behind her she hurried into the kitchen. “Oh, Matthew!” she exclaimed, picking up what was left of the case.
It took several minutes to calm Sandra down. It took a little longer to explain everything to her, and even longer to convince her that they were telling the truth.
Finally, Sandra said, “I don’t know about you two, but I’m having a cup of tea.”
It was such a normal thing to do, that although Matthew was still hyped up from what had happened at MedTec, it was exactly what they did. Sandra took her coat off and put the kettle on, Matthew finished building the radio into his lap-top, and Jayne went to retrieve the high-heeled shoes from the car.
When Jayne returned, Matthew was clearing up the mess he had made on the kitchen table, with Sandra standing over him like an impatient foreman.
“You missed a bit,” Sandra was saying. “And there!”
“Alright,” Matthew replied as he swept the pieces into the bin. He looked up at Jayne, who was now much taller than him. “My, you’ve grown!” he said.
“I know! Tall, aren’t they?” Jayne said rather pleased with herself. “I must be about five-foot-ten in these! I told you they would fit!”
“They’ll ruin your feet,” Sandra told her. “Take it from someone who knows.”
When the table was cleared of debris, they all sat down to a cup of tea in the kitchen. It was as if they were visiting a friend on a Sunday afternoon. Jayne was still very thirsty, and while Matthew and Sandra were still on their first cup, she had three cups.
“Slow down, Jayne!” Sandra told her. “It’s been a long time since you ate and drank properly, so your stomach will have shrunk a bit. Give it a chance to recover before you throw all that tea down there!”
Jayne put her cup down and said, “That’s a point! You haven’t got any food have you? I’m starving!”
“I’ll make you one sandwich, and that’s it!”
While Sandra was busy making the sandwich, Matthew and Jayne were left sitting next to each other at the table. Matthew felt very self-conscious, mainly because Jayne kept looking at him and smiling, and also because he didn’t know what to say.
Finally he said, “You know, all the time you were sleeping, I never imagined that your voice would sound like that, sort of rough, like.”
Jayne immediately put on a very sad face, and covered her eyes as if she were crying. “Sandra! He’s picking on me!” she wailed. “He’s getting at my Oldham accent! And me a pure bred Lancashire Lass too!”
Matthew was terribly embarrassed. He wished he’d kept his mouth shut, and quickly tried to console her. “No! I didn’t mean your accent! I meant your actual voice was slightly rough, that’s all!”
Jayne wailed even louder. “Now he’s getting personal! And after me having to suffer all those years of smoke from ‘t mills!”
Sandra returned with a plate with a sandwich on it. As soon as she put it down on the table in front of Jayne, Jayne stopped wailing, took her hands from her face, snatched up the sandwich, and announced, “Oh, great! A ham butty!”
Matthew took one look at Jayne’s mischievous expression and knew he’d been had. He dropped his head down on the table in dismay.
Sandra shook her head sadly. “You are very gullible, Matt.”
Then Jayne said with her mouth full, “You like me, don’t you?”
Matthew looked up again. “Is it that obvious?”
Jayne swallowed and nodded. “That and the fact that Sandra and Julia used to talk about you all the time.”
Matthew quickly looked at Sandra who said, “We did nothing of the sort!”
“You did!” Jayne insisted. “You were always saying how he fancied me!”
“Well only a bit!” Sandra admitted.
“Oh, God!” Matthew said, and dropped his head down on the table again. Now he was even more embarrassed.
Jayne chuckled as she ate her sandwich. Sandra stared at her.
“You have a very familiar and wicked sense of humour,” she said. “Especially for someone who’s parents both died only yesterday.”
Jayne stopped smiling. She put down the sandwich and said rather sadly, “That’s because I’m dead, too.”
Matthew looked up again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that Sandra’s right,” Jayne replied. “If I was still Jayne Middleton, I’d be a wet mush right now. But the longer I’ve been awake, the more distant Jayne seems to have become. She’s still there alright, don’t get me wrong. But it’s like she’s a memory of a favourite character in a book I’ve read, or a film I’ve seen. I know everything about her, who she loved, what she wanted in life, everything. But it’s as if she was someone else, someone whose experiences I also experienced, but which I can now be impartial about.”
“That means I failed,” Matthew said in dismay. “Everything I did with the Crays and the implant was designed to refresh your original neural net, and to bring Jayne, I mean you, back as you were, not as someone else. That was the whole point of the project.” Matthew’s voice rose. “If it’s gone wrong we have to find some way to change you back! To make you Jayne again!”
“No!”
Jayne’s denial was very firm, and she could see immediately that it upset and surprised Matthew. She quickly moved closer to him and put her arm around him. And looking deeply into his eyes, she said, softly, “I know you wanted to bring me back, Matthew. And you have. You succeeded. I’m alive again. You should be very proud, and I thank you very much for what you did for me. But Ben Watkins and Glen Tyler ruined everything for you right at the end. They interfered, and it changed me, and I’m sorry about that. But I like the change, Matthew. I like some of the new things that it’s brought to me. I can do lots of things that I couldn’t do before, and I know far more about the world, about politics and business, than I ever used to know before. It’s made me feel more confident, more capable. Stronger. And now that it’s done, I don’t want to change it back.”
Matthew stared back into Jayne’s eyes as if mesmerised, and Sandra said very bluntly, “You’re Julia now, aren’t you?”
Jayne moved apart from Matthew and began eating her sandwich again. “I don’t think it’s that simple. But she’s definitely in here, though.” She tapped her skull. “I remember as much about her life as I do about Jayne’s. But where Jayne was a good girl when she was little, Julia was definitely naughty. Very naughty indeed. And now she’s just plain bad. But it wasn’t all her own fault. I know what she thought about me, about what she thought about all of you. And I even know and understand why she felt that way. But none of it was pleasant. She wanted to kill us all. That’s why I knew where you lived, Sandra. Because she had a file on you. And Matthew.”
When Jayne had moved closer and put her arm around him, Matthew had become transfixed by her. Not just by the way she had stared into his eyes and the expression on her face when she had spoken to him, but also by the closeness of her body to his, and by the sheer power of her. She was so alive, so wonderful, that he had felt suddenly lonely when she had moved away again. But now her words chased away the mood completely. Matthew suddenly had a very sick feeling in his stomach.
“Jayne, do you know where Sandra’s daughter lives?” he asked her.
Jayne thought about it for a moment. “No,” she said finally.
“Good.” Matthew stood up. “Sandra, get your coat and get round to your daughter’s house. And when you get there, phone the police. Tell them everything we told you. Go now. Right now!”
There was an urgency in his voice that alarmed Sandra.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, but Jayne already knew what Matthew was getting at.
“If I know where you live, so does Julia,” she said, stuffing the last of the sandwich in her mouth. “But we still have some time yet. Julia will expect me to go to her house. It’s the most obvious thing. That’s why I came here instead. But it won’t take her long to work out that this is where we went. And then she’ll be really pissed.”