The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 25

A thief’s progress.

I began, homeless, on the streets of Derby.

First I stole food — fruit from the grocer, sandwiches, rolls wrapped in cling film — things from the local bakery and market stalls, where I thought there wouldn’t be any electronic surveillance but with crowds to hide in. I stole because I was hungry, and slept at the bottom of the stairs beneath the local library, which led to a community hall where resided the taekwondo, knitting and book clubs, as well as breast-feeding club every other Friday.

On my fourth day I tried stealing from a supermarket, and was astonished when no alarms went off. On the fifth day I tried again, but this time the juice I stole was expensive, and had been tagged, and the alarm sounded, and my heart popped up through my throat like something out of Gracie’s cartoons, but I’d planned for this, and I kept walking, moving quickly into the crowd, and the security guard didn’t even leave his post.

“We’re not supposed to chase thieves,” he explained the next day, when I asked him about his job. “We might get hurt, and that could leave the store liable.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“You know,” he replied, “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just to make people feel good.”

On the sixth day, someone threw beer on me as I slept. I woke, too late to see their faces, but heard boys laughing as they ran away, and on the seventh day I stood by the railway tracks, and told myself that it was time to die, but the trains were suspended that day for a fault on the line, and I lost interest and my nerve.

By the time I saw my friends again, laughing and hanging out at our spot in Westfields, the place we always used to hang together, I’d lost track of time. I stood on the balcony above, and watched my friends below, and they had forgotten too. I leaned against the railing, imagined throwing myself down, head first, tumbling over and over like a gymnast, only no stop, no bounce at the bottom, just white tiles and blood, all over, and my mates screaming and running from my broken corpse, and found that though I could picture every part of my death, feel the wind in my face and the floor vanishing beneath my feet, yet I could not do it.

What was I living for?

I saw a dead rat, flattened on the A38 where it passed Markeaton. Whatever had hit it must have been heavy, fast, because it wasn’t gross, it wasn’t an explosion of organs or blood, it was just rolled down, fur still attached, legs sticking out beneath it, nose turned towards the side of the road, tail behind it, like a carpet waiting to be shaken out. I counted yellow cars. I counted lorries from Germany. I counted suppliers of frozen food. I thought about what I’d look like, flattened like that, my head thin as a pancake, and as the trucks and lorries rolled by, I thought:

Now.

Now.

This time.

Now.

Now I’ll step out.

Now.

This car.

This truck.

Now.

And I didn’t move.

On the twenty-third day of my loneliness, I saw my mum in the centre of town.

She was walking with Gracie in an oversized pushchair, a thing which one day my mum would have to admit should be a wheelchair for her growing child. They were shopping for new light bulbs. I hovered behind them as she made her choices, her judicious demands slowly annoying the acne-plagued boy behind the counter.

And what’s its wattage? she asked, for she always cared about bills.

It seems a very cold light, she tutted. Do you have something nicer?

Grace sat patiently in the middle of the shop, watching a lava lamp. I stood next to her, and at my approach, she turned, and made a little sound, and looked away, and a few moments later I felt a brush of skin, and found that her hand was resting in mine.

“Gracie, stop that!” blurted my mum, scooping her away. “I’m so sorry,” she exclaimed, “my daughter’s a bit like this sometimes.”

“It’s okay,” I replied. “It’s okay.”

I waited then, for what I knew had to happen. For my mum to look at me, smile an uncertain smile, say, “Do I know you?” or “Have we met?” For her to feel a strange, uncommon bond that leads her to turn to me as I stand in the door and say, “There’s something about you…” and invite me round for tea, or ask me my name, or say, “I had a daughter who was like you…” or… some other form of fantasy.

She did not, though Gracie stared at me as Mum pulled her away.

A moment.

Standing by the railway tracks.

The train is coming, the train is coming.

Here.

Now.

Step out.

Step out now.

Out into the railway tracks.

I close my eyes and I can see

my dad walking by

my sister holding onto my leg

my mum, walking across the desert.

Strange, how that image had grown in me.

I painted a portrait of my mum, before her hair turned grey, before she cut it close to look more professional, to be taken more seriously by the men at work.

I dressed her in dusty robes, perhaps lifted in my imagination from Star Wars, or maybe a documentary on the BBC. I gave her a stick to lean on, a sack of water, nothing more. I made her feet bare, hardened to stone as she walked, and then I sat, as lonely as she, upon a dune some few miles off, and watched her — just watched her — walking through the desert of my mind, getting nearer, until her face was visible, and I found that it was mine.

I read a book about the desert, and the people who cross it. For some, it said, the desert is a punishment, torment, exile. The Israelites made false idols and were disrespectful to their god, and for forty years they wandered in the dust, trapped between the Nile and the Sea of Galilee. When the Ottomans killed the Armenians, they marched thousands of husbands, wives, children into the sands of Syria, and there they remain still, white particles of sand-blasted bone that roll away in the wind. Whole peoples have vanished into the desert; the desert eats the people whole.

T. E. Lawrence lost himself and found himself, crossing Sinai. Moses and Job, Confucius on a white bull heading to the west. Muhammad in a cave where a spider wove; Jesus wandered and Satan whispered, and from the sand came prophets and dreams, forty days and forty nights of solitude. Elijah walked in the wilderness; from the desert came John, who lived on locusts and honey, and the loneliness was not damnation, but revelation.

The murderer locked up in a solitary cell. The exile banished from the ones she loves. Lord Byron, on an island in the sea. Robinson Crusoe, talking to the animals, running from the sight of a footprint in the sand. Marco Polo, crossing the world; Galileo Galilei, watching his books burn.

My mum, crossing the desert.

A pilgrim, of sorts.

Alone, you can lose yourself, or you may find yourself, and most of the time you do both.

I stood by the railway tracks as the train roared by, felt the wind of it on my face, saw the blurred-out faces of the sleepy travellers heading home, to their friends, families, jobs, houses, loved ones and acquaintances who would say, “Hey, yeah, I remember you…!” I thought of my mum crossing the desert, felt the world at my back and the sky above my head, and decided that I would live.

I would live.