The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 80

Plane Manchester — Paris, train Paris — Nîmes.

TGV, sleek and grey, winter in France, the snow falling silent outside the window, low valleys in the north, flat plains in the south at the foot of the Alps, the mountains distant against the gathering darkness.

I ate a croque-monsieur, hugely overpriced, and resurrected my rusty French reading Le Monde and listening to the radio on a set of headphones. I hadn’t had time to prepare, so stole a couple of wallets in the Gare de Lyon, keeping the cash and discarding the rest; stole a mobile phone, bought a new SIM from the tabac at Nîmes station.

This is not unworthy.

I am a woman with a cause, to struggle righteously, great struggles, worker struggles, racial struggles, gender struggles, rights and battles and marches and

this is not unworthy.

I steal to live, I live for a cause.

I am a sublime thief.

Impressions of Nîmes:

Unflashy but pretty, a little Paris for the south without the burden of being Paris. Medieval heritage prized over its Roman one. Fantastic chocolate shops, hugely overpriced. The smell of perfume, the sizzle of meat on the grill, children demanding the latest toy, the newest pretty fluffy thing, their gloves sewn together on long strings, a cold winter coming.

The University Hospital, a megalith, a city within a city, bow down before the French medical system all ye who enter here, a monument to 1960s brutality, you had better be very ill indeed when you step within.

This is the place where survivors of the attack at Lefevre’s book launch would have been taken. I tie back my hair, pull my coat tight around my chest, and head inside.

Easy to find the room of Louise Dundas; it’s the only room with a police guard outside. I steal scrubs, ID badge — hospitals like this are big enough that there’s always something that fits the bill — smile at the policeman, he asks me what I’m doing, I say, “Checking fluids,” and he hears something medical, so waves me through.

Louise Dundas lies, as Meredith did, handcuffed to the bed, asleep. Her heart rate is 72 BMP, her BP is 118/79, she is as fit and healthy as you would expect of any woman who had Perfection, who could afford her own personal trainer and to-your-door delivery algorithmically constructed vegan diet plan. A girl, maybe twenty-four, twenty-five, who simply went insane at a poetry reading and attacked seven other guests before she was restrained, as Byron watched.

No sign of Byron now, of course, but that is to be expected. No sign, alas, of Dundas’ phone or personal belongings, blood-splattered as they would be. Taken away by the police. I gently try to wake the girl, but she’s fast out. I wonder if any drugs will be of use, but the door is opened before I can go far in my quest, and in come a man and a woman, she someone unknown, he…

… a face I know very well indeed.

“Good evening, ma’am,” his French is perfect, of course, newsreader-flat, “how is Mme Dundas?”

A moment in which I stumble on my lines, but it’s all right, it’s okay, he’s a stranger in a police-guarded room, though curiously the cop is gone from his chair outside; I’m allowed a moment to count quickly backwards from five and say,

“Sedated, but her stats are good. You are…?”

“My name is Mr Blanc,” he replied, offering me his hand, which of course, I shook, for why wouldn’t I, I’m a nurse, he’s a polite stranger enquiring after a patient’s health, of course I shook it, hygienically iffy though it is.

“You are not a relative?”

“No — we work for the insurance company.”

He doesn’t say which insurance company, and doesn’t offer ID. The woman is already moving round the bed, examining the girl’s face, her nails, her hands, her fingers. I nod and smile, making quickly for the exit, then hesitate by the door. And why not? I stop, I turn, I smile at Mr Blanc and say, “Is it Perfection?”

The woman looks up fast, an answer far more expressive than Mr Blanc’s slow smile, half turn of his head, gentle shuffle of his feet to bring his body, a little bit at a time, into full alignment that he might look at me. “Why would you say that, Mme…?”

“Jouda. Mme Jouda.”

“What about Perfection, Mme Jouda?”

“Do you work for it? I know Mme Dundas used it,” I said with a shrug, a slight tilt of my head, nothing to be concerned about. “I know she received treatments.”

“And how do you know that?”

“She said as much, before she was sedated.”

“Did she? Did she say so?”

The woman, frozen like a wading bird, uncertain if death circles above, or food swims below. Do you feed and die, your back exposed to the enemy, or stand still and starve?

The man who calls himself Mr Blanc has gone by a few other names before: mugurski71, Matisse, Gauguin, a fixit man for Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, ex-spy, sometime lover of Byron14, of course it makes sense for him to come here. He would be looking for Byron too.

He watches me, and I watch back. I don’t mind making an impression.

Does he remember me?

No, but like Byron perhaps he has words filed away in the back of his mind, mantras, repeated actions and hazy concepts which declare, there is a woman you cannot remember, these are her qualities…

If this were a hospital in Iceland, or rural Russia, he would absolutely be asking those questions now, wondering how a woman of my description came to be in this place. But this is Nîmes, and the French have a colonial history as long and ignoble as the British, and the south is full exiles who crossed the waters from Algeria in the 1960s, of travellers from the west coast of Africa, of women with my hair and my skin who are French to their very bones.

So he watches, and I watch back, and at last he smiles and says, “Has she had an MRI?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“A psychiatrist…”

“Is scheduled to see her.”

“I would like my own psychiatrist to attend.” He hands me a business card, M Blanc, no company listed but a telephone number.

“You have your paperwork?” I suggest. “The P77, your proof of policy; you’ll need to take it to reception.”

No idea if these bits of paper are real, but he has no idea either. “Of course,” he replies. “The hospital is aware of my visit. Mme Dundas is being moved, at the family’s request, to a different facility.”

“I wasn’t informed.”

“You’ll find all the paperwork ready.”

“She’s still in a…”

“All the paperwork,” he repeated, the smile still fixed to his face. “The ambulance will be here soon.”

I matched his smile with my own. He was Gauguin, a servant of Perfection, he will smile all the way to the apocalypse. I rolled his business card between my fingers, and went to find a motorbike to steal.

Modern technology makes it both easier and harder to steal cars. Harder, because electric locks and digital codes now all too often require higher levels of technology to beat. Easier, because digital codes and electric locks, once beaten, make it easier to do everything clean, a press of a button, a flick of a switch and hello those open doors, those warm, running engines. There is nothing human ingenuity cannot make which human ingenuity cannot break.

In the South of France, however, the Italian fashion for little farting bikes, barely a scooter with an engine, was still in vogue. Three minutes with a screwdriver did the job, and I was waiting outside by my stolen vehicle when the private ambulance arrived to take Louise Dundas away.

They didn’t wake her, but wheeled her out flat on a gurney, up the ramp into the van. Gauguin and the woman walked a few steps behind; the woman signed papers for the accompanying medic, Gauguin watched the street, saw me, noted me, looked on by, forgot. He was no Byron. I saw no sign of Louise’s family.

Following the ambulance through the night-time streets of Nîmes. I didn’t have a helmet. The air was freezing cold through my coat, my toes growing numb. I’d learned to ride a bike in a ten-hour intensive course (is there any other kind?) in Florida, but it had been a while, and every bump rattled up through my tailbone. Tailbone: connected to the sacral nerve. Kneebone: medial plantar nerve, lateral plantar nerve. Hit the knee in the right spot, it stimulates the plantar nerve, triggering the famous knee-jerk reaction. Elbow: ulnar nerve, possibly referred to as the funny bone for its link to the humerus; perhaps because of the sensations induced when struck.

Knowledge trickled through my mind, and I found it was simply… knowledge.

Not words to calm, not thoughts to focus, not fuck-you knowledge, not knowledge-as-freedom, knowledge-as-pride, knowledge-as-the-place-where-a-soul-should-be, just…

thought.

Where are we?

Straight French roads built on top of their Roman ancestors, trees rising up and curling in, the branches battered to a curve describing the size and shape of the highest and widest lorry to venture down these roads, a tunnel of leaf that cuts out the moonlight, the glow of the main road far away, the ambulance stops suddenly, hard, and I drive by, too close to stop without making a scene. A hundred yards, stop, turn off my headlights, wait, look back to see why the vehicle stopped — but it was for an owl in the road, a curiously stupid animal that sits in their path, blinking, wondering why this machine won’t get out of its way. The passenger door opens, and Gauguin climbs out. He walks towards the creature on the tarmac, kneels down a foot from it, reaches out slow, so very slow, his face caught in the headlights of the ambulance, kindness written on it — but the bird flies away before he can touch it, and a moment more he remains kneeling, before getting back into the vehicle, driving on.

I let them pass me, and know I will have been noticed, and count to twenty to let them forget, before switching my headlights on, and following.