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.
1. If I had Perfection, and the treatments had worked, I would be memorable.
2. If I were perfect, I could never be my mum’s friend.
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.
Chapter 77
There is a place, on the edge of Nottingham: a grand old house with a view of the Trent, fields that flood often in winter, oak trees shedding curling leather leaves, a dog playing in the grounds, the residents, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes in that strange place that does not conform to your meagre emotional understanding, but living – for all this – living.
A walk up the path on a blustery day, my umbrella turns inside-out, is pressed down hard by the wind from the east. Trousers soaked up to the knee with water and mud, where did you park the your car demands the receptionist, I didn’t, I reply, I took the bus and this is an outrageous notion but who is she to argue?
I sign in as me, as Hope Arden, just this once, in just this place, and climb the stairs to the second floor, while a woman, fifty, head on one hand, fingers clenched tight, descends on a stairlift on the other side, and smiles as we pass each other in the middle.
An old house, but the corridors have been converted to medical dullness and I c
ount the doors, the steps, the windows and the cracks in the wall until I reach her room, and knock twice and let myself in and as I do,
Gracie, my baby sister, looks up from her chair by the window, and her face bursts into a smile and she says, “Hope!”
Chapter 78
I find that I am…
… changing.
Things I steal for:
• Survival. I have, in recent months, attempted a few legitimate jobs, but it is hard – so hard. I have a profile on a website, with a picture of myself smiling to camera; I’ll clean your house, trim the garden hedge, fetch shopping, wash your car, walk your dog, deliver your parcel, repair your bike. Sometimes people contact me, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes I steal so that I don’t starve, to keep a roof over my head, and I will not feel remorse for living. I will not.
• Information. Byron14, where are you? Steal police database, steal ID of a man with contacts, steal knowledge, steal CCTV footage, steal a server, steal a network, steal whatever it takes to find her. Byron14 – what are you doing now?
• Justice. I live by my own code. I am a god, my eyes clear because no one sees me. I am the enlightened one. I am a criminal and a hypocrite. I am a pilgrim, struggling in jihad. I am obscene. I am wrong. I am righteousness.
The day I stole £65,000 from a defence lawyer in Doncaster whose speciality was getting people-smugglers off, I felt… proud. Not the ecstatic pride of a job well done, not the glee of Dubai, not the adrenaline rush of diamonds in my hand. The pride of… myself. Of who it was I was becoming. Not just thief. Thief who was also me.
I stole his money and cleaned it through fifteen different accounts, breaking it apart and rebuilding, scattering it through the internet before at last re-coalescing it into a hundred different cashpoints across the north-east, sending lump sums of £200 – 800 to the home where Gracie lived, a charitable donation, a promise of more to come.
The manager of the home, a needy, nervous lady, was at first excited, then frightened, then angry about these sudden donations. They presented that most dreadful of problems for anyone settled into a cushy position – change. With cash coming in, it was now possible to alter things, to have better food at dinner, or think about putting new thermostats into the rooms, or fix the leaking roof in the southern corner, or maybe save the money to buy a van for the house so they didn’t always have to hire when they went on trips, or to get another night-nurse for the patients who needed twenty-four-hour care or… or…
“We can’t spend it! It might stop!” she exclaimed after nearly £6,000 had arrived over the course of four months of gentle donating. The next week I donated £1,000, to make a point, and the manager shrieked in despair, her hands quivering like flytraps in a gale, “Who is doing this to me?!” and by a unanimous vote of the governor’s board that following week, the problem was removed from her power and work began immediately to install more handles in the corridor and bathroom areas for patients who would otherwise struggle to walk or use the toilets unsupervised.
The week they gave my sister a new wheelchair, lighter than the old, narrower around the hips and with footrests that locked in position, I wheeled her round the garden hollering, “You shake my nerves you rattle my brain! Goodness gracious great balls of fire!”
After a while, the NHS declared that it was unfair for the home to have such a generous private donor without spreading the goodness around, and I did see their point, so continued donations gently on the side even as funds were siphoned off to other projects around the trust, and as the money dribbled away, began to look for someone else who seemed a worthy
worthy, how strange this new use of worthy
target of my nefarious expertise.
And then, eleven months after I’d lost her in California, Byron was back.
Chapter 79
Perhaps nothing.
A three-hundred-word article, thrown in as trivia, less important than what celebrity did what to whom, or which prime minister’s wife was snubbed at what event, or whether immigrants were causing a strain on the bus services of Tyneside.
But it caught my eye, and I looked a little closer, and it was Byron.
A report from a book launch in Nîmes, a swanky affair, celebrities and the unsung wealthy elite gathered to hear their spiritual guru, Marie Lefevre, spirit-healer and mystic, launching her latest title: Soul of Love, Spirit of Truth, a book demonstrating that the path to great business and romantic success was through knowing your past lives.
I looked at a picture of Lefevre, and she was beautiful, stunning, perfect. The perfect man on her arm, the perfect smile, the perfect life. And I looked at pictures of the people gathered at the event, and they too were beautiful, rich and full of big ideas about time and space and their own position within, and I envied them, and wanted to be that beautiful and confident and memorable too, but then I saw the after-pictures, and even the beautiful bled, it seemed, and even the beautiful needed seventeen stitches to their faces and necks before the doctors would let them go.
Their attacker was Louise Dundas, an exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally lovely member of the gathering, who, listening to Marie Lefevre read one of her favourite bits of poetry, had suddenly, inexplicably and without warning attacked her fellow guests.
No – not just attacked, whispered the social media, hastily censured. The girl went insane.
In a statement issued by a somewhat shell-shocked Marie Lefevre after:
“We deeply regret the actions of one member of the gathering at today’s launch. Sometimes people who do not know themselves do extraordinary and violent things; the path to truth can be frightening and we are very sad to hear of how many of our loyal readers were injured in this event. We will of course co-operate fully with the investigation and wish peace, love and the eternal light to everyone caught up in these tragic happenings.”
Flicking through the photos from that night, the blood and the chaos, the out-of-focus shots as people fled for their lives, one man bleeding out as the insane girl bit deep enough to puncture the veins in his wrist, I saw terror and horror and chaos and
Byron.
Right at the very, very back, Byron, her face half turned away, moving like the crowd for the exit
there she was
Byron.
A copy of Marie Lefevre’s book under her arm, her head down, a pearl necklace at her throat, a few mere pixels against the chaos of the screen but it was her, it was
Byron.
A question for the survivors of the event.
What was happening before Louise Dundas went insane?
An answer, unanimously rendered: Marie Lefevre was reading a poem.
Question: what poem?
The answer, less unanimous through poetical ignorance. Eventually enough came together to pick the answer from the chaos, and it was this:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
“SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY” BY LORD BYRON, 1813
I found Louise Dundas’ Facebook profile, trawled through its contents – photos of her on a yacht, with friends at a club, hugging her dog, trying new shoes, grinning hugely to camera as she stands beneath the departures board of Heathrow airport, a straw hat with corks on set at a rakish angle over her head. A catalogue of a life lived high, full of acronyms, OMG, LOL, WTF!
And there, of course, there, three months ago, the post I was looking for.
OMG so excited starting treatments today!!!
From that post onwards, the acronyms declined, as did the photos of her being silly. More and more she became what the treatments wanted her to be – beautiful, confident, unobtainable, untouchable, perfect.
Going to Marie Lefevre’s exclusive party tonight, she wrote, the day of the attack. Very
excited to hear her speak – so inspiring, so truthful and giving.
That evening, I went to my sister’s room – you’re new here, aren’t you? – said the receptionist as I signed my name, and I kissed Gracie on the forehead and said I had to go, I’d be back soon, and she tutted and replied,
“You must keep your promises.”
“I promise,” I murmured. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I sat in silence on the train to Manchester.
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.