The Sudden Appearance of Hope

by Claire North

  I didn’t care.

  I would live.

  On Siraselviler I bought a bowl of spiced yoghurt and lamb served with scalding rice and ate it in great shovelling mouthfuls. From an ice-cream house, the walls decked out with pictures of cartoon characters with ice-cream cones grafted into the frame – Princess Jasmine and Aladdin sharing a couple of cones on their magic carpet, the Pink Panther licking his lips with satisfaction, a half-devoured strawberry cone in one hand – I ordered lemon and honey with extra sprinkles, and ate until my belly hurt.

  From one of the dozens of mobile phone outlets that lined the street, I bought a cheap handset with a cheaper SIM card, and accessed my email.

  Parker hadn’t replied.

  As the sun set, the lights brightened on Siraselviler, and a patter of light rain began to fall. I stood a while, letting it wet my hair, run into my skin, enjoying it like the sleep I hadn’t yet had, before wandering into the nearest universal-brand of universal-store that sold the same universal-clothes that you could buy anywhere, and dressing myself like a tourist.

  Chapter 34

  Why counting?

  A lesson learned from my dad. A common trick in the police: when you’re sitting opposite the bastard who you knew did it and who won’t say a word; when you show that bastard the pictures of the old woman he beat, the child he robbed, the woman he raped and his face doesn’t even flicker, no surprise, no regret, just “no comment, no comment”, when you think you’re going to punch him in the face, shake him by the throat and scream, Say something, you bastard, show some fucking humanity!

  at that moment, instead, let out a slow breath, and count backwards from ten.

  Ten nine eight seven six five four three two one.

  You can always get the fucker on forensics anyway.

  Not that my dad ever swore. Not worth it, he’d say. People are just people, doing people things. Sometimes they’re stupid, and sometimes they’re desperate, and a lot of the time it’s just bad luck. Don’t get your knickers in a twist over people.

  By midnight, Parker still hadn’t replied. Had these been normal circumstances, I might have found a casino, somewhere to count the cards; but Istanbul had shut its casinos years ago, and I didn’t have the contacts to find where the gambling was now.

  Reluctantly, I went back to the bunk bed in Zetinburnu, and slept badly, and dreamed of sand.

  Forty-nine hours after I’d contacted him, and thirteen stolen wallets later, Parker replied.

  Dear Hope

  I’m sorry to disappoint, but I don’t deal in these things any more. Should you need help, I suggest you approach an embassy or consular authority. I wish you luck,

  Yours faithfully,

  Parker

  What did I feel?

  I had no memories of this man, no face to hate.

  Was he just a fantasy in my mind, a dream?

  Was he real?

  (Was I?)

  If I had been in Newark, and had access to the box where I stored my memories of him, I would have torn them to pieces and, as they burned, I would have rejoiced in the murder of the flames.

  I tore the dressings off my burns.

  I walked through the street in three-quarter shorts and a strappy top so people could see my still-blazing injuries.

  On the tram, I stole a wallet from a woman who’d looked at me with contempt, and fumbled the grab, and as she began to scream and cry thief, thief, thief, I slapped her across the face and ran away, until my lungs burned again and I couldn’t remember where I was or how I’d got there.

  No one would remember me as I stood upon this corner, gasping for breath.

  There was only now.

  The now in which I opened the stolen wallet, tore the contents out, ripped the money to pieces, snarled like an injured animal, sat on the pavement, remembered I was alone.

  This now.

  I stand up.

  The now is fading.

  Those who saw it, forget it.

  Now it is gone.

  Now I am walking.

  Counting my steps.

  And gone.

  On my seventh day in Istanbul, I bought a laptop, loaded up Tor, and went looking for Byron14.

  He was hiding, tipped off perhaps by my silence, or by my looking, or by some other action of Gauguin’s. I posted up the following:

  whatwherewhen: For sale. Perfection base code, unencrypted. Full 106 Club database with names and bank details. Total access or your money back.

  Byron14 was there in less than twenty minutes.

  Byron14: I am interested in your product.

  whatwherewhen: Hello, Byron14. I hoped you would be.

  On the ninth day after a man called Gauguin nearly burned me alive in a warehouse in Istanbul, I struck a deal with a stranger by the name of Byron14.

  I said: I need papers, cash, clean, untraceable.

  Byron replied: I want the base code of Perfection. Do I take it you do not, in fact, have this?

  Not yet, I confessed. But you help me, and I will rip Perfection apart. I will tear Prometheus to pieces, I will…

  You seem to be taking this quite personally, Byron mused.

  You’ve got some fucked-up shit with Gauguin, haven’t you? I retorted.

  No answer for a while, then,

  Fair enough, he said. Okay. Let’s make a deal.

  Byron14 was as good as his word. Within twenty-four hours of making our bargain, fifty thousand lira in mixed bills was waiting for me in a brown jiffy bag at a post box in Beyoğlu, and twelve hours after that, a forger by the name of Emine contacted me informing me her services had already been paid for and when would I be able to meet?

  We met that evening on a yacht on the Sea of Marmara. The boat was called Good Intention, had high white sides and wooden finishes, a steering wheel with the face of a dragon carved in its centre, and a mahogany cigar-smoking Indian by the door to the bottom deck. Emine was in her mid-fifties, with an almost spherical face framed by an almost spherical burst of grey hair. The walls of the yacht were hung with watercolour paintings of Istanbul, none very good, all homemade. She wore a blue chiffon robe over a white cotton shirt, and as she led me into her workshop beneath the waterline her ankles jangled with jewellery, wooden charms and silver bangles, blue glass eyes to ward off evil. “Come, come, come!” she barked, leading me downstairs.

  Her business was passport reclamation. “I’m an artist,” she exclaimed, “but people don’t appreciate my work, so I do this on the side. Come, come!”

  She sat me down on a stool by a long bench covered in inks and glues, magnifying glasses and bits of computer cable. Opening a blue Tupperware box she started flicking through passports – Turkish, American, British, French, Russian, Indian, Japanese, Egyptian – all acquired from the foolish, the naïve or the dead.

  “Are you British?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to still be British?”

  I shrugged. There are worse passports.

  “You’d make a lovely American,” she exclaimed. “But no, too many people hate America, no good, no good. Iranian? No – wrong face for an Iranian. I can do you Bhutan, no one knows anything about Bhutan, and it’s clean, totally clean, you can use it for eight years no problem, money-back guarantee.”

  “British is fine.”

  “British passports are tricky, tricky! Barcodes, and now they’re putting in chips, I have to get my nephew to help me out with that sort of thing, he’s very good, bang bang, new identity, passport programmed happy good! In the old days,” she added, voice dropping with a sudden wistfulness, “it was just about making beautiful documents. But computers get everywhere now, all the old skills, dying; dying for machines.”

  I smiled my most beatific smile, and resisted pointing out that certain professions, including mine, had proven themselves both flexible and immune to change.

  UK passport photo requirements: professionally printed, 45mm x 35mm; in colour on plain white paper, taken against a pl
ain cream or light grey background. The frame must include your head and shoulders; your head can occupy no more than 34mm of the height of the space, and no less than 29mm. You must wear a neutral expression, with your mouth closed, looking directly at the camera, without any head covering unless it is worn for religious purposes.

  I told her all this, and she looked bewildered. “Just stand still for photo!” she barked.

  The passport she eventually doctored for my purposes was of a British woman who “Went to Bangladesh,” she sighed, “and never came back.”

  I was on a flight for Tokyo the same night.

  Chapter 35

  It was not the first time I had been poor, but I was out of practice. I had assets, years of cash squirrelled away in the event of emergencies, documents and new IDs; but none were in Turkey and too many could be traced by Gauguin. How easily my little empire had crumbled, but strangely I didn’t care. I thought I would feel regret at the loss of belongings, and yet, informing the clerk at the airport that I had no baggage to check in I felt curiously happy. My shoulders rolled back, my head drifted up, and when the plane taxied down the runway, I looked out of the window and found that I was smiling.

  I had nothing in the world to call my own, but I had a passport, a destination, a bargain and a purpose.

  It wasn’t merely the £1.2 million that Byron promised upon completion of the job that gave me a sense of ease; it was the job itself.

  I was going to Tokyo to crack open the little piece of software that seemed to obsess both Byron and Gauguin, whose name had haunted me around my travels between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. I was going to steal Perfection, and it was good.

  I’d asked:

  whatwherewhen: What’s your interest in Perfection?

  Byron14: What’s yours?

  whatwherewhen: They pissed me off.

  Byron14: Is that all?

  whatwherewhen: Reina used it, in Dubai. Reina died.

  Byron14: So? Software didn’t kill her.

  whatwherewhen: It told her she was broken. Every day a reminder: you’re not trying hard enough, not eating, exercising, drinking, being, buying – buying your way to perfection, with Perfection. Perfection is owned by Prometheus, Prometheus flew in Princess Shamma bint Bandar, a deal to be struck, perfect things, perfect truths, perfect way to be Muslim, perfect hajj perfect zakat perfect fucking lives made fucking perfect and Reina was perfect already, she was depressed and never said it, alone and never spoke, she was good and she was fucking good she was the best one of them all and

  I stopped typing, made myself a cup of tea.

  Byron was waiting.

  whatwherewhen: I think Gauguin would have been happy getting the diamonds back and arresting me, if you hadn’t got involved.

  Byron14: You may be right.

  whatwherewhen: I made a mistake when I got involved in this. I stole the jewels out of spite, not professionalism, and here we are.

  Byron14: Perhaps.

  whatwherewhen: If it weren’t for you, I could walk away.

  Byron14: I doubt that.

  whatwherewhen: I’m forgettable – Gauguin would forget me. He’s more interested in you. He called you a killer and a terrorist.

  Byron14: That’s his point of view.

  whatwherewhen: What gives?

  No answer.

  whatwherewhen: You want my help; I hate being a sucker.

  Byron14: The man you call Gauguin and myself were lovers.

  The answer was so simple, so easy, that I thought for a moment Byron was mocking me. But no jibes followed, no sign in our conversation that there was anything other than simple truth.

  whatwherewhen: And now?

  Byron14: I doubt he knows what he wants. It is good that you dislike Perfection, and good that you blame it for your friend’s death. You are right, to a degree. It has no mercy for those who do not conform. But you should understand that what you regard as a mobile app is a far more potent tool. It rewards conformity with financial and social advancement. At a hundred thousand points your diet, your exercise habits, your interests begin to habitually skew towards that which the creators of Perfection have dubbed “perfect”. At five hundred thousand points, your speech, your hobbies, your friends are all beginning to be turned the same way. At a million points you are invited to join the 106, where everyone is as perfect as you, and by the time you have reached this target, you are perhaps very different from who you are before. Perfection taps into every part of your life. It monitors phone calls, reads emails, accesses your bank account, tracks your internet search history, uses GPS to trace your location, rides shopping loyalty cards and mines data on your purchase habits, has access to the microphone and camera of your phone, can monitor your sleep, your waking hours, your work habits, your leisure activities. At its most basic it is a tool for marketing. The services you use – health, fitness, food, fashion – the services which make you perfect – are all paying a handsome fee to the app for their referral. At the purely theoretical end of its operation is the truth that Perfection comes with a pre-defined notion of what perfect means, and “perfect” is beautiful, confident, arrogant, rich, pampered and obscene. If there is a new Illuminati for our time, then it is the elite of Perfection, and unlike the legends of the Illuminati which went before, the only purpose of the 106 is to feast and feed. Do you want to destroy Perfection?

  whatwherewhen: I think so, yes.

  Byron14: Do you know why?

  whatwherewhen: Reina died.

  She died and it is obscene. She died and I think, if I destroy it, she would be pleased.

  Byron14: Investigate Rafe Pereyra-Conroy. Visit the treatment centres, learn how they work. Find Filipa Pereyra-Conroy in Tokyo. She has seen the future.

  I wondered for a moment if I was working for a madman, a fanatic.

  A fanatic who had access to money and passports was still useful, regardless of his beliefs. The only reason Byron14 remembered me was because our interaction was digital, a thing recorded in words and symbols. I could back away whenever I chose, without ill-effect. If I wished to.

  whatwherewhen: I am a woman.

  Byron14 took longer to reply than he had on any message we had shared until that time.

  Byron14: Yes.

  whatwherewhen: So are you.

  Silence again.

  Byron14: We are in business, whatwherewhen. That is all.

  So saying, she signed off, and seventy-two hours later, I looked down on the East China Sea, and wondered what it was that I had wrought.

  Chapter 36

  Things I know about Japan, contemplated at thirty-five thousand feet:

  • The sakura zensen, the annual blossoming of the cherry trees, from the southern islands of Okinawa to the north of Hokkaido, is a national news event. Salarymen, the blue-suited servants of the zaibatsu, who work their whole youths to get the jobs that they will keep their whole lives, send their juniors out into the parks to find the perfect spot to sit beneath the trees and contemplate their blossom, perhaps composing a thoughtful haiku on the transience of life on their smartphones, to tweet later.

  • The ancient Shinto shrines with their torii gates that separate the sacred from the mundane, are almost always some form of new. Every twenty or so years, the old buildings are taken down, and new timbers, carved the traditional way, in exactly the same form, will take their place, old and new, all at once.

  • Suicide is the leading cause of death for women aged 15 – 34, and men aged 24 – 40.

  • The manga market in Japan is worth more than $5.5 billion dollars. In 2010 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government attempted to limit images of extreme violence and sexuality in children’s manga, prompting an outcry across the country. The government argued that depictions of children in sexual situations, of rape by both people and fantastical creatures, and the illustration of brutal mass murder was unsuitable for young readers. “It’s an outrage,” exclaimed one artist. “This is government restriction of the free
dom of expression for both artists and readers,” and of course, everyone was right, in their own way.

  A question: why are planes always at thirty-five thousand feet, not ten and a half thousand metres? Has the sky not gone metric?

  I flew into Tokyo as the sun rose.

  A traditional Japanese-style hotel room. Tatami mats on the floor, mattresses in bright neon greens and pinks to be rolled out, a view of a French-style café and a computer-repair shop across the street. A sliding door to the bathroom; a toilet with a control containing twelve different buttons, of which only one was “flush”. There is no international symbol to represent that function best described by the slow release of waters into the toilet bowl to disguise the sound of a woman pissing. The music the toilet could perform from a tiny speaker above the cistern was of five sorts – traditional Japanese, girl-band, boy-band, the sound of birds chirruping, or Rod Stewart.

  Next to my hotel, a love hotel offered its services, pink neon signs inviting courting couples in for an illicit few hours together, no questions asked. The screen between the outside world and the receptionist was opaque, so that no one might see your features. The entrance and exit were hidden from view, but I thought I saw a couple – a man in his fifties, bespectacled, ironed shirt, shoes shined, and a girl, barely seventeen years old, long dark hair and a little pleated skirt, scuttle away with the look of good people caught in a shameful moral trespass. In recent years the government had tried to crack down on love hotels; sex and play were two words they were uncomfortable putting together.