The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 69

A

place.

A

time.

I am

this time.

This place and my head

is killing me.

These are the words I have written on the palm of my hand, big black letters.

My head is killing me.

When did I write these words?

I look around and it is

darkness.

This now, this present tense, this instant, this second, it will be for ever now as soon as I realise it, not a memory, not a thing embedded in the past, but the eternal revelation, an understanding that time does not diminish, an impact that distance cannot lessen and it is

now.

Now.

Now.

That I realise I have been forgetting.

Fairness: a correction.

I think I have known for a while.

A gap between knowing a thing, and comprehending it. Between perception and belief.

Undoubtedly time has been lost, but hours fly by every day on inactivity

office routine

commuting

dawdling, doodling

staring off into space

cleaning

cooking

washing

sleeping

the list is endless, okashi as the scholar said, delightful, delightful, a delightful little list

delightful clap our hands together oh how droll

you’re so real, so quaint, so cute so

fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

I run.

I run, until at last I find a taxi, and that taxi takes me to a tree, and from under the tree I retrieve $5,000 and with it I buy a room in a motel just off Route 101, El Camino Real, the Royal Road, once used by Spanish monks to connect missions and pueblos, now the road from California in the south to the Canadian border in the north, running along the West Coast for more than a thousand miles

fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfucketyfucketyfucketyfuckfuck

The owner of the motel, looking me over once, says carefully, “Cash first.”

I give him cash.

“You got ID?”

I do not have ID.

“You in trouble?”

I am not in trouble. He hears my British accent and wavers. Casual discrimination is all very well and good, but I’m a foreign woman, who knows what problems I might bring?

I put more cash on the table, and he says no more on the subject, except, “We only clean towels on Tuesdays.”

In my room, I discover my feet are blistered. Most are new; some are old. How far have I run? There’s a mobile phone in my pocket, but I’ve already pulled out the SIM card, damned if I’m making that mistake now.

I have a bath, examine my entire body, needle marks in my arms, in my ankles, my wrist, my neck, no memory of when they happened. I explore the top of my scalp with a mirror, feeling my way through the hairs like a gorilla seeking lice, and yes, there, and here also at the back, slight bumps where needles have gone in, someone has been injecting things into my brain and I thought I was so clever, so clever and in control, so fucking fuckety fuck fuck fucking clever FUCK

I look through the photos saved on my mobile phone, find the pictures of Byron’s coded diary, and go to work.