Amy Bird - Yours Is Mine

That evening started off slightly differently. When the waiter went away with her menu she was so intent on looking out of the window at the London evening, the black cabs going by, the diners on the pavement across the street, couples wandering along at a leisurely pace caught up in their own lives, jostled occasionally by impatient businessmen or a lone evening runner, that she hardly noticed when the walnut and pear salad appeared in front of her. It wasn’t so much that these were scenes she wouldn’t see in Portsmouth – with the exception of the destination indicators on the fronts of the buses, this could in theory be any city almost anywhere. To Kate the difference seemed to be more about the possibilities, and the variety of the places that these people could be coming from and going to, perhaps they themselves as yet undecided as to the latter, combining to create a vibrant buzz of potential. Waiting for the steak that would follow the salad starter, Kate nursed the elegant wine glass and the window again held her attention. This time she looked at her reflection and practised saying in her head “I am Anna Roberts. Pleased to meet you” and “I’m Anna, Anna Roberts” – and then for a bit of fun, “The name’s Roberts, Anna Roberts” with a mysterious Sean Connery-esque wiggle of the eyebrows. She stifled a giggle. She generally tried not to laugh by herself in public, unless she really couldn’t help it, and felt it would be even less excusable to be caught laughing at her reflection.

Diverting as this was, by the end of the steak she was becoming a little bored. She was, she felt, at the cusp of something exciting and it was totally amazing that she was embarking on this experiment, and she herself was totally amazing for doing it (her self-satisfaction having the particular intensity and warmth that a large glass of shiraz often gave her) and wished to tell someone about it. She reached for her mobile, thinking that she would send someone a text to say she was in London, maybe followed up by a call – a lot of her university friends and some colleagues were still based there. Then she realised there were two problems. First, she had agreed with Anna that neither of them would tell anyone they had embarked on the swap as to do so would bring them out of character, and talking to friends of their ‘real’ selves would remove the focus on the social environment created by the other. This alone might not quite have been enough to stop her, diligent though she was, but there was a second more practical point that she had forgotten in her desire to communicate – the mobile phone she had in her bag did not contain the numbers of her friends. She and Anna had swapped phones, and so she did not have any pre-programmed numbers. Like most people in her generation she was almost solely reliant on her mobile to give her the numbers of her friends. There were a few she knew by heart – Neil’s mobile, of course, the office number, and the land line numbers of a couple of friends who had managed to establish themselves in the property market early on and so hadn’t had a string of rental properties with the consequent constantly changing phones – but those people would either not be available or, if they were, may not appreciate a tipsy call at this time on a Friday evening.

Besides, going through this complication in her head was enough to check Kate’s initial impulse. She shouldn’t be thinking of breaking the rules of the experiment on the very first evening, she rebuked herself, and vowed that she would follow the terms of the agreement with Anna. Sure, the point of the exercise for her was to have fun, as Anna had reminded her, but there was the responsibility and trust that Anna had placed on her – and she didn’t want to have to lie in her report back to Anna. The drink was no excuse for falling prey to temptation. Sobered up by her narrowly-avoided fall from grace, as well as irritated by the fact that the lively texts she had been composing in her head could not come to fruition, she gulped down the last of her wine and mineral water, put down a tip and left the restaurant.

As she exited onto the pavement she was vaguely aware of someone calling out a name behind her. It wasn’t until that someone tapped her on the shoulder that she became aware they were calling to her.

“Ms Roberts?”

It was a waiter. She looked at him blankly.

“Your card?” and he handed her a credit card.

“Oh, yes, of course, that’s me!” she said gaily, laughing in an attempt to hide the fact that she had been completely thrown by the use of that name – it was the first time she had been addressed by the assumed appellation, after all. She must have left the card on the table by mistake. Smiling, she took the card, and made her way to the tube, using Anna’s pass to go through the barriers. Well, someone else had now accepted her as Anna Roberts, so she now just had to do the same.

- Kate-

Kate spent the next afternoon prepping herself for the start of the drama class. She had not intended this to take the whole afternoon. She had got up in reasonable time, efficiently taken herself off to the bookshop on Gower Street and had returned the triumphant possessor of what looked like a good book of women’s auditions speeches. She had flicked through it while eating a hastily-prepared sandwich (courtesy of the food and wine store – she really was getting back into the metropolitan method of just buying food when it was needed, glad to be free from the weekly suburban supermarket drudge) and had settled upon a speech by Viola from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night . She planned to have a quick coffee, crack on with learning the speech, then spend the rest of the afternoon looking at the proofs that had arrived the previous day. So far, so many good intentions.

She had made pleasing progress initially, reading through the speech, familiarising herself with where it came in the play. She was reading it out loud for the second time whilst parading round the room when she realised there was a problem. She had thought about the characterisation of Viola, and how she would feel when she realised that the beautiful Countess Olivia (believing her to be the man that she was disguised as) had fallen in love with her, whilst Viola herself was in love with the Duke of Illyria. She felt she had pretty well mastered Viola’s emotional turmoil through a good use of varied tone and pace. However, what she had not done was think about how Anna would approach the piece.

Kate became involved in a difficult and somewhat frustrating debate with herself. If she had truly grasped the essence of the part of Viola, then surely it would not matter whether she was playing her as Anna or as Kate, because she would have captured the true Viola-ness of the character? But then on the other hand, she was only playing her as an actor of her own capabilities and understanding, drawing on her own internal resources to think about how Viola would feel in the circumstances, and adapting her intonation and modulation from her own experience of how she, Kate, herself would react to that situation. Perhaps what she ought to be doing was thinking about how Anna would react, or at the very least how Anna would interpret the character? Perhaps she had to be Kate playing Anna playing Viola (in a soliloquised reprieve from playing Cesario)? Anna did say she had certain standards to maintain, after all.

Kate ran her hand through her hair and flipped it over to the other side. The only difficulty with the ‘What would Anna do?’ approach was that she didn’t really know enough about Anna to know how she would tackle the role, never mind the situation in which Viola found herself. She thought hard, marshalling what little she did know about her opposite number. Anna had been pretty focused and business-like through the exchange process, particularly on the second visit, with a strong drive and energy propelling her to closure. Kate thought about the obvious awareness that Anna had of her good figure, the casually stylish dress sense, the cool way in which she had gone into a coffee shop as her first act in Kate’s life. This and the impeccable design of the flat and the collection of jazz that graced the shelves convinced Kate that Anna would be a very cool, sophisticated Viola, maybe quite sensual and sexual in her desire for the Duke, not given to over-indulgence in emotion or sweeping gestures. Kate would have to shelve her own usual depiction of Viola, frank and almost childlike in her honest and zealous puzzling over the situation in which she found herself. Thus resolved she tried again.