by Claire North
A moment, to consider all this. I could find nothing in it to pick apart.
I wrote, and was surprised to see that I had written it:
_why: What if we worked together? What then?
Byron14: Could you gain access to the 106 club?
_why: I can get into anything.
Byron14: I am not interested in boasts.
_why: I have the goods from Dubai.
Nothing.
I ran my fingers between the keys on the keyboard, the lightest of touches, feeling their shape.
When learning to lockpick, roll grains of salt between your fingertips to increase sensitivity.
I half closed my eyes, felt the tiny irregularities in the keys, dirt stuck to the sides, the raised bump of the letters.
I waited for Byron14 to reply, and wondered if he too was counting his breath.
Byron14: So you do at that. Would you care to resume this conversation in three days’ time?
_why: With pleasure. Thanks for your help.
Byron14: Good luck.
Byron14 was gone.
Chapter 21
Back to the hotel; a hasty pack, a premature checking-out. Has the time come to risk a plane? I look up Sharm el-Sheikh airport; not impossible to smuggle diamonds out, but what if mugurski71 is watching?
What if, what if, what if; the perpetual mantra of the thief on the run.
I count my breaths, looking for that fine line between sensible caution and unwise terror. It is perfectly possible for a man to hold a picture of my face in his hand, and look on my features, and know that the two are the same. In the future, he will remember only holding the picture, not my face, but it is the present tense we need worry about.
Standing in the hotel foyer, I ask the receptionist to call me a taxi.
“Where to?”
Nowhere to go, except the airport.
“I’m catching a cruise ship,” I lied. “I’m going to sail up the Suez.”
Doesn’t matter if she believes me or not; she’ll forget the lie as easily as the truth. The important thing to disguise is digital records. Let any calls recorded to a taxi company hear only reference to the sea.
“Ten minutes,” she said.
I smiled, and walked out into the smiting sun, to find a cab for myself.
The smell of air freshener, the sound of Arab pop, undulations and the tapping of the drum, a mat of wooden beads down the backs of the seats, the high scrape of the violin and twang of electric keys.
Where to? asked the driver.
The airport, I replied.
A nowhere building in the sand. Mountains behind, dust-yellow all around. They were thinking of adding another terminal, extending the runway, as people flocked to the sea. ! Bienvenue! ! !
I bought a ticket to Istanbul, waited in the departures lounge, watching people, watching security, waiting.
Quietly terrifying, going through customs.
I was tempted just to wear the necklace, but no; still too many images of the stolen jewels floating about. Ridiculous plans floated through my mind; a diamond in my shoe, swallowed diamonds in my stomach, in my pockets, in my coat, in the back of my mobile phone where a battery should be… but no. Once a customs inspector finds one diamond, they’ll start looking for them all. Best to just brave it out, and rely on memory failure should I need to run.
Nearly every courier and mule caught crossing a border, is caught because they look afraid.
I stand in the lady’s bathroom and paint a picture of who I want to be. Eyeshadow the colour of the desert at sunset; a smile to charm – weary from travel, wry at the thought of distances yet to be covered, but happy to be going home, relieved and relaxed, a body warmed in the Egyptian sun.
I am not Hope Arden.
I am not afraid.
(My parents would be ashamed of me, if they could see me now.)
I straighten my back, and head towards the border.
Chapter 22
I think I have met someone like me.
I say this with some hesitation, since I can’t remember the experience.
A collection of documents: letters, photos, a snowglobe with the Empire State Building inside, a ticket stub for a show on Broadway. I remember the show, I remember the Empire State, I remember a cold night in November, the snow beginning to fall – but I do not remember having company for any of it.
And yet, in a small lock-up in Newark, there is a plastic box, carefully sealed, which contains within it a photo taken of me and a man, a stranger to my memory, smiling together outside the theatre. Another picture, a face I can’t recall, on Fifth Avenue, waving, a woollen hat with ear flaps pulled down across his head, two green and white bobbles bouncing around his neck. He looks ridiculous. Maybe early thirties? A letter in an unknown hand says he’s thirty-two. If I look at his photograph I can say that he is probably five foot eight, with mousy blond hair, grey eyes, and a mole on his chin. He looks as if he should be overweight, but that is a trick of his features, of eyes too wide for the face that holds them, skin soft, a neck a little too short for the body on which it sits, for look – the camera pulls back and for a moment beneath the winter coat and winter boots he’s a kid, a skinny child who hasn’t yet reached his destiny as a portly old man.
Now I close my eyes.
Now.
And now I cannot remember his features at all, though I saw his photo not a minute ago. I remember writing them, and can write them still – hair, eyes, height – but these are just words, abstract concepts, not an individual. This must be how it is for Luca Evard.
I open a box full of recorded memories, and meet someone who was like myself.
A letter, from myself, to myself, written when I was twenty-four years old. A photograph of me writing, then another of a stranger in the same place, 53rd Street Station, waiting for the train to Queens. I remember writing; I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I’m sure there wasn’t anyone with me – no photographer. Why did I write the letter? Because I was bored, maybe, and waiting for the train. Why was I going to Queens? Curiosity. Nothing else. These are the memories I have, and yet I hold a letter which says, in my handwriting:
Tonight I met someone who is like me. Like us. I say “us”, even though I am writing this to myself, for the me who reads this will not be able to recall the events that I remember now, and through forgetting will, in a way, be a different person from who I am now, in this moment. We are the same, I am you, you are me, but we will have experienced the moment of now, this moment in which I write, in an entirely different way, when now becomes then, and then is now.
Tonight I met someone – no, that’s not right. I think we have met each other many times before, but only tonight, only when we saw the photo, did we get it.
We met at drop-in for the St Sebastian Nursing Home in Harlem. You should remember sitting with men and women at the dining table, everyone always delighted to meet someone new, asking about my life, about the outside world. They don’t care that they’ve never met me; they’re always happy to meet someone new, for the very first time. You will remember other volunteers, too, ranging from the charitable to the dispassionate, the vivacious to the inept. Goodwill, I think, is no substitute for training in how to handle patients with dementia; but this is not about that.
What should also be within your mind is the memory last week of the ninety-first birthday of Rose Daniels. A photo was taken of everyone in the dining room, young and old. I enclose the photograph here. See if you can spot the anomaly.
A moment – let’s look at the photograph. In the very centre, beaming from her wheelchair, Rose Daniels, who in the 1970s had been beaten and imprisoned by the NYPD for being an African-American woman who dared to kiss a white man in Central Park, and who in the 1990s, already advanced into her old age, was told by her doctor that she shouldn’t make a fuss about the lump in her breast, because black women always got frightened at the smallest little thing. After the cancer had grown to the point where she
had to have a double mastectomy, she attempted to sue the offending physician, and was awarded five thousand US dollars out of court and a curt letter telling her to go away.
“My husband said that God is waiting for these people in the next life with fire and judgement and righteous retribution,” she’d say. “But I think it’s only proper to give them a taste of what they’re making in this life too.”
Surrounding her, the other inmates of the home. Some smiling; some confused; some with food around their mouths; some dressed so smart they could be going to a wedding. Behind them, the underpaid carers, arms folded across their chests, smiles pinned onto their lips like a tail to the donkey. Lastly, the volunteers. Bobby from 10th Avenue, who lived next to the railway sidings and above the billiard hall and made his living attending focus groups. “My job is to be real,” he explained. “I’m a professional real person.” Maxine from the Bronx, whose mum had died in this home not five months since, and who “Didn’t want to leave the ladies alone, even more now that Mom has left us.” Big B from Morris Heights, who said almost nothing at all and who I thought was cold and thoughtless, until the day I found him holding Mrs Watroba when she started crying, just crying, for no reason at all.
And at the back, in the middle of it all, me, smiling to camera, my hands at my sides, and him next to me, a pale-faced, grinning stranger, one hand resting on my shoulder.
Who was he?
Who is he?
I stare at the photo, and I can’t recall.
His hand is on my shoulder; surely I would remember that?
I close my eyes to remember the moment of the camera flash, and cannot recall skin touching mine.
Answers in a letter – I read on.
Can you see it? I ask. Can you see him?
The photo was put up on a noticeboard three days after it was taken, to remind people of the party. I must have stood looking at it for ten, fifteen minutes, trying to figure it out. I couldn’t. In the end I stole it from the board, and went round the room, trying to spot the man in the picture. Of course, he wasn’t there – the universe is not so neat – but after lunch, as I was on my way out, there he was, coming in. I didn’t recognise him, of course, but I still had the photo and the very fact that I didn’t remember him, made me wonder. I compared his face to the face in the photo, saw they were the same, went up to him, said my name, said we hadn’t met yet, and he said, “No, I’m new here.”
Then I showed him the photo.
At first I think he thought I was some sort of security. He picked up his coat, like he would go, but I caught his arm before he could and said, “No, listen. You don’t get it. I don’t remember you – can you remember me?”
Now he looked at me.
Now he looked at the photo.
Now he looked at me again.
Now he began to understand.
We left together at that moment, we didn’t need to say the words. We went to a diner round the corner, not daring to let each other out of sight, until at last he said, “I have to test this.” His accent is American, East Coast – he says he’s from Maine.
So, he left himself a note – “You know this woman, she is like you” – and put it on top of his coat. I left myself a note too – “The man who sits next to you is like you, he is someone you will forget, talk to him, look at the picture, remember, REMEMBER.” Then he went to the bathroom, and I stared at the photo until my eyes hurt. When he came back, he’d forgotten, but as he went to pick up his coat, he saw the note he’d left himself, and he saw me.
Another item, a note, scrawled in my handwriting, on the back of a napkin from Morris’s Grill and Diner.
Remember, REMEMBER.
“Hi,” he said, holding out his hand. “My name’s Parker – the one and only Parker of New York. Except Spider-Man, who’s a jackass.”
“Hope,” I replied. “It looks like we’ve met before.”
“You’re British? Jesus – I guess I must have already asked you that.”
“I don’t remember you asking, though it might be we’ve had this conversation dozens of times.”
“I forgot you.”
“And I forgot you.”
I think he laughed then; I know I did. The absurdity of it – totally daft. But when I laughed, I also wanted to cry, though I wasn’t sad. What would he be like, this mirror image of myself? How did he live? Could we create a thing between us that had meaning?
He grabbed my hand, held it hard, and I let him, because I needed to cling to him too. “We don’t leave each other’s side,” he said. “Not yet; not today.”
We went round the city together. All day, we’ve moved from café to café, place to place, like tourists. The movement is good; as strangers we find new sights, new places, find our voices through walking together, being together. We went to Central Park, had hot chocolate and whisky; went to the top of the Empire State Building; had dinner on Broadway. We don’t leave each other’s side, don’t dare take our eyes off each other’s faces. He proposes scientific tests, says we can time how long it takes for us to be apart before we forget, see if we can remember by touch, with our eyes shut, by sound; he says, this is an opportunity, an amazing opportunity, but even as he says it, I can see the doubt. I stand outside the cubicle in the bathroom and sing when he needs to pee, and he’s shaking with fear as he locks the door, in case he forgets me, and I’m scared also. Remember, I say, remember.
I am interested to know how much you – I, that is, the I that will be you, when I have forgotten – remember of all this. Soon I shall be you experiencing this letter, and what then? Will I remember the Empire State, will I remember chocolate and vanilla cheesecake, the Guggenheim and the way he slid down the plastic seats of the express as we rode through Manhattan? What do you see?
I see the Empire State, New York spread beneath me. I remember the way the cheesecake clung to my fork, sticky, white and dark chocolate marbled together. I remember riding the express train, but no one slid along the plastic seats, and no one was by my side.
Do you remember feeling? Do you remember laughter? Do you remember joy, hope, fear?
I remember… I remember laughing in the Guggenheim, though now I cannot remember what I was laughing at.
I am frightened now. I am frightened that when he fades from my memory, a piece of me will die too. The feelings, the things I have learned, the ideas I have had today, so many ideas, so many feelings, they will die with my memory. I fear that loss. But more, a terror that I must share with my future self. I fear what this means for me. If you forget the joy of this day, then what joy you give to others will also be forgotten, and your life has no consequence, no meaning, no worth. I am a shadow, blasted away by the sun, a meaningless occlusion of light that fades with the day.
Remember. God, please God, please, remember. Remember him. Remember me.
I will put my pen down now.
He will walk away.
He is going.
He is going.
Remember.
There the letter stopped, and he was gone.
Chapter 23
Many years later, I walked up to the customs post at Sharm el-Sheikh airport, stood in a queue of nine people, counted my steps, concentrated on my toes until I could feel each individual end, could define the shape of every part of my feet. They didn’t pat me down as I went through security, and they didn’t bother to check my luggage. In duty-free territory, I bought bad international coffee and a bad international magazine, and waited for my gate to be called.
Colourful pictures, words on a page.
Revealed!! Celebrities without their make-up!
How was Daring Duncan’s first night as a stripper? The full story!
Roisin and Abby’s Feud: Now It’s Personal.
I flicked through without paying much attention, eyes still circling the hall.
This season’s must-haves: get the A-list look.
“She says she loves me, but why’s she so frigid in bed?”
Perfection 106: the insider report.
I stop. Flick back a few pages. Look more closely.
A series of pictures: beautiful people in beautiful clothes. Not a gram of fat between them, no grey hair, no wrinkles, only perfect, cosmetic smiles. Champagne from glasses with twisting spines; gold at the women’s necks, gold in the cufflinks of the tuxedos.
The world’s all the rage for Perfection, the new life-enhancing, you-enhancing app from Prometheus. But only a very few ever earn enough points to be invited to join the 1×106 club. We meet the exclusive few who’ve made their lives truly perfect…
A bewildering tapestry of names and faces. She used to be a PA, but now she’s head of her own media firm. He used to work in the invoicing department of a stationery shop, but now he’s a management consultant, and fabulous. He used to weigh twenty-two stone and was scared of meeting new people, but having earned 1×106 points through Perfection his life has been transformed and he’s just got engaged to the runner-up of Miss Colombia 2009.
She loves her yacht.
He loves his house.
He met his wife through Perfection, the perfect woman, he hadn’t known what perfect meant until he saw her.
“I thought my life was going to waste,” she explains, “but now I realise that I can be perfect too.”
I lay the magazine down as my flight is called, walk to the gate, diamonds temporarily forgotten, the worst of the job done. From here, things should be easy.
A premium-class seat near the door; not quite first, not quite economy. Padding and iced water in a plastic cup. The air stewardess who directs me to my chair wears stunningly red lipstick.
