The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 105

She made tea. She left the teabag in hers, and barely dribbled any milk.

I sat at her kitchen table, watching her work, filling matching green mugs from a calcium-clad kettle, before setting the cups down on knitted round mats and taking a seat opposite me.

“Thanks,” I said, and drank.

“You’re welcome. I’ve got biscuits, if you…?”

“I’m all right, thanks.”

“If I’d known you were coming I’d have brushed up on my homework. As it is, I feel like I don’t know anything about you.”

No effort to disguise her accent, not any more. One leg folded over the other, one hand across the other, her body at an angle in the chair, turned towards me, but with room to rise, to move, to fight, if she needed to.

“My name’s Hope,” I repeated. “I’m a thief. We spent some time together in America.”

“I know I spent time with someone I can’t remember — I have months of notes and recordings in the loft. Did I stab you? There’s a note saying I stabbed you.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I’m very sorry about that. I assume it was necessary?”

“I was about to stop you committing mass murder.”

“Ah — right. How are you now?”

“I healed.”

“I went looking for you in the hospitals. I remember that. Didn’t find you though.”

“You found me. You didn’t keep the recording.”

“Why not?”

“I think you didn’t want to remember its content.”

“Why, did I say something stupid?” A flicker of doubt, a sudden thought. “Did I tell you how to find me?”

“No, no, nothing like that. But you seemed to want something from me which I was unwilling to supply.”

“You can’t be cryptic, not about things like that.”

“Are you recording this conversation?”

“No — like I said, you caught me by surprise.”

“Then what does it matter? You won’t remember.”

“Then what does it matter,” she replied, “if you tell?”

I drank another sip of tea.

Silence a while, save for the whistling of the wind from the sea, the promise of rain yet to come.

“Are you here to kill me, Hope?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why are you here?”

I didn’t answer.

“How did you find me?”

“Your glasses.”

“My…”

“I went to every optician in Scotland.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“How long did that take you?”

“A few months.”

“Why Scotland?”

“Your history. The way you described your home. The telephone from Wapping, the signal came up here. Sometimes it’s dangerous to cross international borders; stick to familiar territory. Had to eliminate possibilities.”

“And someone remembered — no, of course they remembered. It’s a dilemma, when you need to disappear. If you try to vanish in a large city, blend with a crowd, you increase your chances of being detected by technology. Cameras, cards, chip and pin — data is hard to avoid, these days. So you move somewhere remote, somewhere the cameras haven’t come yet, and of course…”

“People remember.”

“Yes.”

“You said you envied me, once.”

“I do. You can vanish without a trace, and avoid conflicts such as this.”

“And personally? Do you envy me personally?”

She hesitated, sucking in her lower lip, rolling the mug of tea carefully between her fingers. Then, “Yes. In a way. I imagine that your condition leaves you free of certain considerations. You cannot plan — no, you can plan, but you cannot… agonise, shall we say, for the future, because you don’t have one. Is that too harsh? Is that unfair?”

I shrugged; neither fair nor unfair, true nor false — carry on.

“Nor can you wallow in the mistakes of your past, because the only person who knows them is you. Those you have injured, whose lives you have destroyed — the ones who would seek vengeance or cry out for justice — they have forgotten you. You have done material harm, yes, but emotionally you are a blank. Your actions are a lightning strike, to them, an act of God, or chance, not a human thing, not an actively conspiring mind seeking their downfall.”

Actus reus: guilty act.

Mens reus: guilty mind.

I commit a crime, and only I remember my guilt.

“You have a kind of freedom,” she said. “Free from the eyes of the world; free from a kind of suffering. It is, in its way, enviable.”

Silence a while.

I asked, “Is it hard? Do you find it hard?”

“What?”

“Answering to yourself.”

“No,” she replied, soft as the sea, steady as the stone. “Not any more.”

“What you’ve done…”

“I find my conscience clear. You are forgotten, and no one comes for you. I am remembered, and here you are. And I am fine with that.”

“I think I despise myself, some of the time,” I said.

She shrugged: so what? Get over it.

“I look at my life, and find it full of failings.”

Another half tilt of her head. Again: deal with it.

“I find that the only way I can survive is in the present tense. If I look at my past, I see loneliness. Loneliness and… and mistakes made of loneliness. If I look at my future, I see fear. Struggle. The possibility of much pain. And so I look only at now, at this present tense, and ask myself, what am I doing now? Who am I now? For a while this was my great discipline, now, and now, and now, who am I now, now I am professional, now I am calm, now I am exercising, now I am speaking to those who will forget. Now I am a self that I wish to be, now I am a picture of who I have to be, now. Now. Now.

“Then I met you and now I am all things, I think. Now I am a woman who, in the past, did some shoddy things. Now I am a woman who, in the future, will do better, where I can. Now I am in this moment and I am just this. Just myself. Talking. Just talking, to you. You will forget and now will pass, time will consume your memory and with it, any reality that this moment may have existed but for now, here, we sit, you and I, and are entirely ourselves, speaking. Does this make sense?”

“Yes.”

“All the time I was looking for you, I never asked myself what I’d do when I found you. Never. Refused to ask. It was a question for a different now, a different moment, I would not construct it from fantasy. You think I’m here to kill you?”

“It’s a possibility,” she mused.

“I’m not.”

“Why are you here, Hope?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“It seemed necessary.”

“Again: why? If it’s not vengeance you want then I don’t see…” Her voice trailed off. I stared into my mug.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Then, “All thought is association and feedback,” she said.

I looked up, quickly, studying her face, but her eyes were in some other place, her mind contemplating a different path. “Loneliness is no more than a construction of ideas. I am lonely because I am not with people. I need to be with people to feel fulfilled. And in time you say: I am not with people, and yet I am fulfilled. I have my books, I have my walks, I have my routines, I have my thoughts, and though I am alone, I am not lonely. And in time you say: I have myself, my body and my mind, and people would intrude upon that, and I am lonely, and it is for the very, very best. It is a paradise. Do you know why I chose to be Byron?”

“No.”

“He lived a while in an Armenian monastery. He was as sexy a shagger as any of that lot, but for a while he chose… he wrote that there is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore. Do you know it?”

She beamed. “You’ve read his stuff.”

“I read up while looking for you. I thought it might help.”

“And yet the opticians have it.”

“All the way.”

Her eyes returned now to me, her head turning slightly to the side. “You fear it, no? The dangers of being alone. Of having no one to help you find your path. No friend to say ‘you went a bit too far’, no lover to say ‘you could be tender with your words’, no? No boss to say ‘work harder’ and no shrink to say ‘work less’, no… no society, to tell you how to choose, or what to wear, no… no judgement, to help guide your own? You fear it?”

“Yes. I fear the fallibilities of my own reason.”

“Of course — yes, the madness that comes from a thought process that’s unchecked, from logic that is not logical, but isn’t told so, of course, very wise.”

“I impose disciplines upon myself, discourse, reason, knowledge…”

“To fill the place where society should be?”

“Yes. And to keep me sane. To help me see myself, as others might see.”

“Through the eyes of law, reason, philosophy?”

“Yes. What do strangers see, when they see me? They almost never tell, not the truth, and so I seek to understand them, that I might understand myself.”

“There’s your fallacy,” she interrupted, turning her body now so everything uncoiled, everything facing me. “There’s your mistake. You have a gift, Hope, one of the greatest ever given. You are outside it all; you are free of it.”

“Free of…”

“Of people. Of society. You have no need to conform, what’s the point? No one will thank you for it, no one will remember you, and so you have the freedom to choose your own path, your own humanity, to be who you want to be, not some puppet shaped by the TV and the magazines, by the advertising men, by the latest definition of work or play, by ideas of sex, gender, by—”

“Perfection?”

“By perfection. You choose your own perfect. You choose to be who you are, and the world cannot shape you, unless you permit it. The world cannot move you, unless it is by your own welcoming in. You are free, Hope. You are more free than anyone living.”

Silence a while. Then I said, “Is that why you killed them?” She leant back in her chair, disappointed, a huff of breath. “Is that why you wanted to destroy Perfection? To set people free?”

“We have sacrificed thought,” she replied flatly, voice hard, eyes steady. “We live in a land of freedom, and the only freedoms we can choose are to spend, fuck and eat. The rest is taboo. Loner. Slut. Weirdo. Faggot. Whore. Bitch. Druggie. Scrounger. Ugly. Poor. Muslim. Other. Hate the other. Kill the other. Aspire, as us, to be together, to become better, to become… perfect. Perfection. A unified ideal. Perfection: flawless. Perfection: white, rich, male. Perfection: car, shoe, dress, smile. Perfection: the death of thought. I programed the 206 to kill each other. If I have the chance, I will gather together every member of the 106 I can find, and make them eat each other whole.”

Her eyes, burning into mine, daring me, go on, speak.

I said, “I thought maybe…” And stopped. “I thought perhaps…” Stumbled on the words.

“Go on.”

“I thought maybe there was another kind of story here. I thought perhaps you had seen things or done things or things had been done — but that’s not it, is it? You destroyed Perfection because it needed to be destroyed. There’s no personal tragedy or ancient oath to be fulfilled. You saw a thing that was vile, and you took up arms against it. I think I could admire that, if things had worked out different.”

Silence.

The tea cooled in its cups, the wind blew off the sea.

Then, “I called Gauguin.”

Silence.

“Last night,” I added. “I told him everything.”

Silence.

“Why?” Incomprehension — I had never seen such a thing in her before, incomprehension, incredulity, barely contained, her fingers white, the veins standing out in the soft folds of her neck, her body shaking with its own stiffness. “Why?”

“Because… because…” I sucked in breath. “Because while I agree with you in almost every possible respect, about everything — Perfection, loneliness, freedom, power, choice — practically everything — I think there has to be a place where it stops. I think there has to be a moment when you turn round and permit yourself to be defined by the world that surrounds you. I am free. I choose to honour the freedom of those who live around me. I choose to honour them. I think your freedom does not do that.”

Silence.

Then she stood up, quickly, turned, poured the last of her tea into the sink, put the cup down on the side, turned, took a deep breath and exclaimed, in one fast burst:

She stopped, fingers shaking at her sides, hauling down air, as if those few words had sucked the oxygen from her lungs. I put my mug down, rose to my feet, my eyes never leaving hers, and replied softly, “Hey Macarena.”

Silence.

She put her head on one side, looked to see if her words triggered anything more — obedience, perhaps, an openness to command — and when she saw no sign of it, she simply smiled and shook her head and said, “Shall we walk by the sea?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“It’s very beautiful round here, I think. When the light is right — when you can see the stars. Sometimes it takes my breath away. Sometimes it’s vile. It changes, moment to moment. Like…” She stopped, caught herself before her words ran away, smiled a shaking smile. “Like the present tense.”

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said. “We’ve got time.”

“I’ll get my coat.”

We walked.

She wore large pale brown boots and a thick dark green coat.

“Made in Stornoway — forget the hi-tech stuff, the Scots got all-weather gear five hundred years ago. Only other people who know what they’re doing are the Scandinavians, and even they’ve gone in for polymer rubbish and polarised glasses these days.”

I said nothing, and walked by her side, coat pulled tight around my chest, hands buried in my pockets. The sky grew heavier and flecks of freezing rain, desperate to be snow, began to fall, biting with fat white teeth where they struck exposed skin, pattering on my back. The sea below exhaled like a troll, rattling stones as the water was sucked back into the deep, breaking breath where it burst against the cliffs. I could see the beauty in it now, the dark-on-dark-on-dark without end. Far away, a tanker crawled between the island and the mainland, heading north, towards Kirkwall and Lerwick, the Arctic Circle and the oil wells, belching fire across the sea.

“Gauguin said he wanted to marry you,” I said at last, raising my voice over the grasp of the wind.

She smiled. “He never asked.”

“But he was going to?”

“He never asked,” she repeated.

We kept walking, her cottage growing small and far away.

I said, “Are you going to run?”

“Run? From the Isle of Lewis, and John on his way? I suppose I could. There might be something to be done. But I doubt it. A refuge is a prison, by any other name.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“About three years.”

“How did you pay for everything? The equipment, the experts, the passports, the—”

“I stole,” she explained simply. “It was necessary.”

We kept walking.

Below, the sea dropped away beneath the cliff, the seagulls perched beneath our feet. The waves crashed and the clouds raced across the sky, running on to an unknown rendezvous. The long grass hissed and the short stones bumped, bumped back against the wind, a Morse code of currents disrupted and reformed, thump thump goes the sea, bump bump goes the earth, run run goes the sky and we, tiny figures in a vast and churning world, walk on.

We walked.

And for a moment, I was the sky.

I was the sea.

I was the grass, bending in the wind.

I was the cold.

I was Byron, walking by my side, and she stopped and turned to face the ocean, then raised her head to the sky, closed her eyes as rain flecked against her face, breathed the air deep through her nose, and counted backwards from ten.

I watched her count, and heard her say, with her eyes still closed, “If they find me, they will have a trial.”

“They won’t have much evidence — I imagine they’ll kill you instead.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “The press, the media, the internet — they’ll make the noise, make the screaming, the screaming all the time, and the truth and my voice will be lost. The blaming and the noise, human things, they’ll make it about human things, not the truth. How can anyone live with it? How can anyone live with so much screaming in their lives, all the time? Matheus Pereyra loved the screaming. I guess these days people love to feel themselves burn.”

“Siobhan,” I said, and hesitated, when she didn’t move, didn’t blink. “Byron,” I corrected. “We can find a better way.”

She opened her eyes, smiled at me, looked as if she would speak, hesitated, raised her head, looked up into the sky.

A sound, half lost behind the clouds. A whoomp whoomp whoomp against the roar of the sea.

A helicopter.

“Look,” she said. “They’re here.”

“Byron…”

She raised one hand, silencing me, and smiling, turned her face to the ocean, and with a little puff of breath, ran for the sea.

She closed her eyes, just before she reached the edge of the cliff, and if she made any sound as she fell, the roaring waters ate it.