The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 76

The strangest thing.

A funny feeling.

I bought a French passport off a guy in the Bronx, a proper professional, his ID on the darknet an alpha-numerical tangle that expired the instant he had cash in hand. He’d done a good job too, right down to stamping it with an entry visa from the Canadian border, a couple from Turkey and one from India. I complimented him on his efforts, and he shrugged, great rippling basketball shoulders, and said when he was working it was like nothing bothered him, yeah.

I went to Fifth Avenue to find something fashionable to steal, but nothing leapt to mind, and that night I went to a casino off Eighth and West 36th and counted cards and lost a little but won more, and at one point a security guard stood behind me, and counted cards with me, but someone dropped a cocktail and started screaming at the man who’d bumped into her, and that briefly diverted the guard’s attention, and when he turned back, he’d forgotten what he was doing there.

Standing at JFK waiting for the plane, I saw a woman with a beautiful silver bracelet set with amber, and I went to steal it, and then stopped myself, and didn’t, and sat back down, and when a few minutes later she saw me, and I smiled, she smiled back, and her day was fine.

The cashier phoned her manager when I paid for my flight to London entirely in cash, but I showed her the paperwork from the casino and explained that I’d got lucky, but never had a bank account in the USA.

“You know you can’t take all that currency across customs, don’t you?” said her manager, and that was okay, I replied, I had a friend in the British embassy who was going to handle it for me. Then I sat in the toilet and counted out $9,990 from my stash, put the rest ($2,681.55) in a brown envelope and dropped it into the donations box for “Bioliving New York — for a greener city for all our children”. They stopped me at customs, and counted out my cash.

“Sweet,” said the lady who helped me re-pack my bag. “Ten bucks short of all the paperwork.”

“I had luck in the casino,” I explained with my best comedy-French accent. “Going to start again, a new life. You can only take what you carry.”

“Swell,” she exclaimed. “I always wanted a clean break, but you know, who doesn’t?”

I flew economy class, half watched a couple of films. A man in a grey suit fidgeted all the way to London, flinching at every bump of turbulence. Sometimes he looked at me and saw someone new, but he didn’t care. His fear would have wiped away all details of this journey, even if I weren’t his companion for the long journey home.

Home.

London.

Hotels, B&Bs, places I know, the river, the winter sun setting behind the London Eye, dog walking on Hampstead Heath, kites flying, is this home?

I took the train to Manchester. Straight streets between stiff, industrial architecture. Short cathedral tucked in between a shopping mall and roaring traffic. Museum dedicated to football, galleries from warehouses, town hall snaked round with trams, stone columns, red brick, not enough trees, crossing the canals at the lock gates, clinging to the black iron handles as you edge, one foot at a time to the other side. The screech of the railway line, the cyclists ready to pedal through the Pennines, is this home?

I ate chips in Albert Square while a steel-drum band played, went to the pub for a quiet pint, put a quid into the fruit machine, lost, and caught the train from Piccadilly to Derby as the sun went down.

Derby.

Is this my home, is this a thing that matters, a place that has some meaning? More than flagstones and concrete, bricks and tar?

I took a hotel room near the station, an ExpressPremierExclusiveSomething, room the size of a cupboard, sheets superglued to the surface of the bed, everything too hot, curtains too thick, night too dark, pipes creaking, slept like a stone.

Walking through the streets I hadn’t walked through for I didn’t know how long. Shops I had hung out in as a kid — CDs, DVDs, three for a tenner, four for fifteen quid, bargain, if you liked what they had. Phone shop, accessories; cases with owls on, hair extensions, toe rings, the tattoo parlour we’d never quite managed to go into as kids, despite bragging.

Is this home?

I walked, slow, taking my time, a tourist again, and let my feet carry me, a long slow journey, past my old school — the voices of my teachers, You’re not very academic, are you? — if you could see me now. The library where I took shelter those first few weeks, the taekwondo club gone, hatha yoga now, a baby-friendly session on Fridays. My parents’ house. A light on in the living room, but no one there. But wait, wait a little, watch, and someone comes in, an old man, a man grown old, who’s decided that dammit, if old is what he is then you just watch him, he’ll do the whole business, the whiskers, the cardigan, the slippers, the corduroy trousers — my dad has waited his whole life to wear corduroy trousers, and now that he’s old no one will stop him, you’ll see. He watches the TV, a medical documentary of some kind, something about food, good foods, bad foods, fatty foods, skinny foods, foods for your liver, food for your brain.

Dad’s face is neutral, quiet, serene. I study it, enthralled. Hard now, almost impossible, to imagine him chasing crooks. Did this harmless old codger grapple people to the ground, look into the eyes of bad men who knew nasty secrets, tear the truth out of them one lie at a time? Or has he always been here, in this moment, drinking tea and watching TV, and if I return again in another now, will he still be here, frozen for ever?

The door to the living room opens; Mum comes in. Her hair is bright white, cut down to the surface of her skull, and age has made her face something extraordinary. Each part of it needs an atlas to describe; her chin is many chins, still small and sharp but etched with muscle and line, layered one upon the other. Her cheeks are contoured bone and silky rivers of skin, her eyebrows waggle against great parallels of thought on her forehead, her mouth is encased in smile lines and pout lines and scowl lines and worry lines and laughter lines and there is no part of her which is not in some way written over with stories.

She says something to Dad, and Dad moves up, and she sits next to him and he puts one arm around her, not taking his eyes from the TV, and she sits with her knees tucked up, feet hanging off the edge of the sofa, a child-like posture she always chided me for, the indignity, hypocrite!

She dips her digestive biscuit into his mug — this always annoyed him, get your own tea, he’d say, but no, she doesn’t drink tea with milk, what’s the point of that, as George Orwell said, if you want milk and sugar in a cup then just put milk and sugar in a cup, why waste the tea? But milk and sugar in a cup don’t taste so good when absorbed into biscuit and so you see, she dunks her biscuits in his mug. He’s given up arguing. I watch them together, and they are happy. Still in love. Doing just fine.

A moment, a temptation. The Stasi used to be challenged by their instructors — “In five minutes I want to see you standing on the balcony of that building having tea with its owner” and in they went, bluffing their way into a stranger’s house, onto the balcony to discuss… whatever lie they were telling to get there.

I could do it. My mum was no slouch, but she was a hearty law-abiding citizen and if I come from the water company or the surveyor’s office, she’d let me in, of course she would, and I nod and hum at things only I could perceive with my excellent training, and she’d offer me a cuppa tea and trust me all the more because I was a woman, who looked, perhaps, a little bit like her little girl Grace…

… oh and how old is your daughter, Mrs Arden?

… all grown-up now. She had some difficulties as a child, but she’s doing so well now, so well, she’s our little delight, our perfect wonder. Never wanted another child, she was always so beautiful…

And perhaps in the course of my inspection, I would go upstairs to examine insulation in the roof (“I can do you more insulation, better, part of the council’s drive to have more energy-efficient housing…”) and there would be my old bedroom, a guest room now, or maybe a study, a place for Mum to sit in as she sorted out the taxes, she certainly wouldn’t let Dad do them, no head for numbers, doesn’t keep any receipts, disastrous, and I’d say,

You’ve certainly got a lovely home, Mrs Arden.

A bit big for us now Grace has gone, but then it has such memories…

And if I were memorable, this would be the moment in which we bonded. The moment in which I told her that growing up, I too had a little sister who was ill, but who was doing so much better now, and whose favourite film was Star Wars and whose favourite colour was blue, who didn’t know how to lie and she would say,

“You could be talking about my Gracie!”

and we’d have another cup of tea — “Are you sure I’m not keeping you from something?”

and I would say no, no, my last appointment of the day, if it’s not an imposition…

And she’d take my number and I’d take hers because you see, I’m interested in all the things she’s interested in too, angry at the lack of affordable social housing, angry at so many good, cheap homes being torn down and replaced with bad, expensive ones, angry at the language of prejudice and bigotry in our politics, angry at the press, the media — but hopeful for the future, for a youth raised more aware than we were, a coming generation that will do better than the one before and she will say…

“Hope is a beautiful name; if I’d ever had another child, I would have called her Hope.”

And I would say, “My mother once walked across the desert.”

And she would say, quiet now, not wanting to make a thing of it, not wanting to force a connection, implausible, amazing, wonderful, “I once walked a very long way as well. When I first started walking, I was very afraid. In the desert there is always the sound of movement, a busy silence of sand falling beneath your feet. When you are alone, even the quiet is full of monsters.”

Then she would love me, and I would love her, and we would be the best of friends and she would smile whenever she opened the door to me, and give me a hug and introduce me to Dad and say, “This is Hope, and she is wonderful!” and we would spend Christmas together and go walking in the hills and I’d help them with their errands and go on holiday and…

if I were memorable.

And considering this, two thoughts come to mind, seeping in with the quiet as I watch my parents’ house from across the street.

Settling cold, growing dark. Watching them watching.

They are…

in their own, unspectacular way, to which no ballads are written or songs sung, in a domestic, daily, life-being-lived way,

… happy.

I walk away.