The Sudden Appearance of Hope

by Claire North

  “What’s with the…?”

  She dismissed them with a flick of her chopsticks, not looking up from her plate. “My brother’s worried about security.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  “Rafe’s worth a lot of money; I think he’s scared someone might try to kidnap me. It’s ridiculous, really, but then…” I waited, and in time it came. “Our father was killed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She dismissed it with another mouthful of noodle. “It was a long time ago. Officially, no one was ever caught.”

  “Unofficially?”

  A half shrug. This isn’t something that interests her. Then sudden, fast:

  “Isn’t it worrying, I mean, not worrying, not an emotional response, but isn’t it interesting that in a room of perfect people the two imperfect people move together at once, and two societies form – as an anthropologist this must interest you – the beautiful and the ugly, and the beautiful stand and talk and are wonderful together, and the ugly have noodles. Is this something you’ve observed? In your studies?”

  “I… yes. Perfection encourages perfect people to congregate. So does the 106 Club.”

  “And doesn’t that make you frightened?” she asked, watching my face for something only she knew to look for.

  “No, not really.”

  “It should do. It’s not my research, not at all, but the product – the thing Rafe did with it, it’s brilliant of course, pure brilliance, he’s like that. Growing up, I was the oldest, but Rafe was… You see, Dad needed to prove that he was smarter, better than the world. Rafe just needs to prove that he’s better than Dad. So Perfection is an aspiration carved from socio-economic values, not ethical ones. Perfection is wealth, fashion, interest and power. It is glowing skin, pleasant laugh, easy conversation. It is… a thing that the world aspires to, and it is of course very dull, and hugely elitist. I’m not very interesting, you see. I’m my brother’s boffin sister, in fact. ‘Don’t worry about her – she’s into the science stuff,’ he says, and everyone laughs, because it’s funny. You and I are having noodles together, and this is a disaster by Perfection’s standards, cheap food full of nasty chemicals – lose a thousand points – and we are the minority, and we will be looked down upon. Ugly, fat, lazy, not capable of looking after ourselves, bad habits, junk food, junk.”

  Frigid. A word spoken by Reina, the day before she died. The screaming is very loud now.

  Filipa was still talking, high speed, a rata-tat-tat of words, tumbling fast. “It’s easier to be perfect if you’re from a certain socio-economic background. Perfection takes time, effort, and if you’re poor, if you’re struggling then… and Perfection can help with that too, find a way to make the pennies work, learn to let go of things you don’t need, aesthetic lifestyle, simple lifestyle. It’s made for everyone of course, but easier, so much easier, if you’re already wealthy and as an anthropologist, surely you can see – Perfection as a product creates a digital aristocracy, and the imperfect of this world are little better than the serfs.”

  Silence a while. The security man in the booth behind Filipa ordered another glass of mineral water; the guard by the door watched the street.

  Finally she said, “A woman died in Dubai. I didn’t know her name. She died just before we went there for a launch – a disaster as it turned out, a humiliation, a thief got in but… anyway. A woman killed herself. She had severe depression but no one was treating her, I mean, no one helped, even acknowledged it, because it’s not an illness, is it, it’s just something you deal with, right? Anyway. She had Perfection. It didn’t save her.”

  Silence.

  “If you aren’t perfect, then you are flawed,” she continued, staring at nothing much, a piece of ginger pinched between the end of her chopsticks, going nowhere. “Rafe is a genius, but none of this was the point of my research.”

  “What was the point?” I asked, soft, in case we broke the spell.

  “To make people better. Of course. To make the world a better place.”

  She rolled the ginger between her chopsticks, put it back down.

  “I think my brother has taken something beautiful and made it obscene,” she said at last. “That’s why I left the party. You’ve studied Perfection: what do you think?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, found all the easy words were now hard, said nothing.

  “‘Qui tacet consentire videtur’,” she mused, with a half-empty smile.

  “‘He who is silent is seen to consent.’”

  “You studied Latin?”

  “Read it in a book somewhere.”

  “They made me study it at school. Latin, economics, business studies, maths, further maths, piano, singing, speech and drama, computer sciences, French, Russian, Japanese, debating, journalism…”

  “Your school wasn’t much like mine.”

  “We were my father’s legacy. Or rather my brother was. My brother was always going to be better at that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t know Latin – just the famous bits.”

  “Is that famous?”

  “Thomas More, just before King Henry VIII decided to cut his head off. ‘He who is silent is seen to consent’ – he refused to take an oath, but neither did he speak against it. He hoped by his silence to escape the axe. Sorta noble, sorta an arsehole.”

  She laid the sliver of ginger carefully back down, tucked her chopsticks to one side, folded her hands, raised her head, looked me in the eye. “If I were to write the parameters for Perfection,” she said, firm and steady, “I would forgive all cowards.”

  “If you believe so strongly that your brother has done something… with your work, then why do you continue working on it?” I asked.

  “I work on treatments, not the software.”

  “What do the treatments do?”

  “They make people happy.”

  “How?”

  “They… help people feel happy about themselves.”

  “That sounds like a drug.”

  “It’s not. It’s… this isn’t how I wanted it to work, it’s not… not right yet, but my brother funds it. Rafe got the money and no one else would let me do the things I do, so I needed him, we had to make a bargain – he’s always making bargains you see, and I have always been a coward. You believe that, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have. Always. It’s why I chose the treatments. He’s done something with it that is… But one day with the technology, giants on the shoulders of giants, we’ll build something… good. Happiness for everyone. One day we’ll get it right.”

  Happy: to be pleased, delighted or glad.

  Favoured by fortune.

  The experience of pleasure, or joy.

  Happiness: a lie, constructed to ensure that we never find it.

  “Are you happy?” I asked, and she didn’t answer.

  I pushed a couple of notes under our bowls, squeezed my hand tight said, “Come on. Let’s go walking.”

  She didn’t speak, but neither did she resist as I led her away.

  Chapter 43

  A night-time walk through Tokyo. The electric district, almost brighter than the day, manga manga everywhere; girls with huge spoon eyes waving their neon arms above the doors, tiny pale-faced creatures in school uniform on the covers of the comics in the window; men with swords and spiky hair fighting great monsters, families of blue-eyed cats, descendants of Hiroshige’s red-ribboned cat as it plays with a string, picked out in bright, wet inks.

  Bars with girls dressed in French waitress uniforms, cartoonish, black puffed sleeves and little white aprons. Teahouses where the matrons wore soft silk robes and bowed to the visiting guests – not a geisha house, not like the houses of Kyoto, the geisha were something else entirely, but a pleasant, tatami-matted alternative where the tea was hot and there was a corner for the visitors to charge their mobile phones.

  Fish tanks in the windows of the restaurants, full of live, prowling monster
s. A fugu chef demonstrating the range of knives he uses in the dissection of his poisonous dish – not the dissection process itself, which requires three years of training – but the delicate tools for pulling out liver, ovaries, slicing away strips of flesh, cleaning, grating, peeling, scrubbing.

  “Poison: tetrodotoxin,” and it takes a moment for me to realise that it is Filipa who is speaking, not me. “Contained mostly in the liver, ovaries and the eyes. Acts in a similar manner to sarin. No known antidote. Paralyses muscles, leaving patient conscious but asphyxiating. A thousand times more potent than cyanide. Cure—”

  “Respiratory and circulatory support – artificially maintaining life – until the poison is metabolised by the body and excreted away,” I concluded, and she beamed, and wrapped her arm into mine and said:

  “Did you learn that in anthropology?”

  “There’s many cultures where people eat poisonous mushrooms, frogs, fish and herbs to achieve a heightened state. A thousand years ago, LSD would be sanctified.”

  She grinned, a genuine flicker of delight, and as we walked together through the hot night-time streets, her security never far behind, she said:

  “‘Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running in them.’”

  “‘Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth.’”

  She laughed – a surprisingly childish sound, and immediately pushed her hands over her mouth to silence the unlooked-for sound. Removing them slowly, she said at last, “I was made to read the Meditations at school, and hated them.”

  “But you quote from them now?”

  “Something stuck from the exam. You?”

  “I read it a few years ago.”

  “Anthropology?”

  “Long flight, I think.”

  “Marcus Aurelius,” she mused, “born April AD 121, died…”

  “AD 180, Vienna – Vindabona, yes?”

  “Succeeded by Commodus…”

  “… a disaster emperor…”

  “Assassinated 192, maybe in the bath but the sources are dubious, the statues cast down; the senate declared him posthumously an enemy of the state…”

  “A gladiator, loved to fight.”

  “The beginning of the end, Gibbon said. The bit of that book where the history got interesting,” she replied, and stopped, so suddenly that I nearly stumbled over her grip on my arm, an anchor holding my body in place even as my feet tried to walk on by. “It isn’t… perfect… to have knowledge,” she stammered, the joy stripped away. “Perfect people aren’t knowledgeable, they aren’t… wise. That’s what my brother says. Knowledge is for show-offs and people who don’t get out of the house enough, we’ve got Google, Wikipedia. Knowledge is a place where sexy should be. Clever is sexy, the sociopath genius, the smartest man in the room, but that’s clever that doesn’t need to work, that’s not investing in knowledge, spending time at work, that’s just… being brilliant. Being brilliant is sexy, not working hard. Sexy sells. That’s what Rafe always says: sexy sells.”

  The two of us, frozen in the middle of the street, arm in arm. Men stared as they walked by, heads turning though their bodies kept on moving, necks swivelling to gawp, wondering at our story. She was crying, silently, holding my arm, crying. I let her cry a while, held her close, felt her snot and tears on my shoulder, wanted to cry myself, why is that, when I hear a child cry on the train it makes me sad, see a stranger weep and feel tears come to my eyes, a weakness, perhaps, a place where emotion hasn’t become accustomed to the extremities of feeling.

  “Filipa,” I breathed, as she pulled away, rubbing at her face with her sleeve. “What is Perfection?”

  “It’s the end of the world,” she replied. “It’s the end of everything.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, to ask, anything, offer, anything, but one of her security men stepped close, a tissue held in one hand, a mobile phone in the other, murmured, “Ms Pereyra, are you okay?”

  His accent was American, his eyes didn’t meet mine. She ignored the tissue, kept pulling at her face with her sleeve, and he said again, “You okay, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I’m fine.”

  “They’re missing you at the party.”

  My eyebrows wanted to rise in scorn, but I was professional, I was a thief, and this man was an enemy entering my domain.

  She nodded, sniffed, smiled at the man, sniffed again, then smiled at me. “Sorry,” she mumbled. And again, “Sorry. You are… if it were up to me, I would… but my brother is very… I hope your paper goes well.”

  “Thank you.”

  A pause, nodding at nothing much, security waiting, phone on, connected to someone unseen. Filipa nodded again, half turned, then turned back, and pulled a bracelet from her wrist. It was silver, a thin band turned into a seamless Möbius strip. She held my right hand in her left, pushed the bracelet over my fingers, nodded with satisfaction at the shape of it around my wrist, said, “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  I opened my mouth to say no, it wasn’t… that wasn’t… but thought again, wondered what the words were that would be best for now, and said simply, “Thank you.”

  She looked at me, and I looked at her, and she smiled, and let the security man lead her away.

  Chapter 44

  What is perfection, what does “perfect” even mean?

  Perfect: as good as can possibly be.

  Free from fault or defect.

  Searches on the internet, trawls through books, history.

  Look for the words “perfect woman” and you find bodies. Diagrams, explaining that the perfect face belongs to an actress with smoky eyes; the perfect hair comes from a princess; the perfect waist is barely narrow enough to support the generous breasts that balance on it; legs disproportionately long, smile that says “take me”. Photoshopped features combining the faces of movie stars and models, pop idols and celebrities. Who is the perfect woman? According to the internet, she is a blonde white girl with bulimia; no other characteristics are specified.

  And the perfect man? He has a wide range of interests, is polite and courteous at all times, handsome and sexually considerate, intelligent, preferably funny, has a high income and his own home, mortgage free.

  A Möbius strip. Take a strip of paper, give it a half twist once, tape it together, creating a surface that is non-orientable, the top is always the bottom, the bottom is always the top. Discovered in 1858, but mathematically not fully defined in equation form until 2007, hard to model a thing that goes on for ever, a closed loop without end.

  The silver, warmed by Filipa, now warm around my wrist. I run my fingers round it for ever.

  What was Perfection?

  Maybe Filipa was right. Maybe it was the end of the world.

  I went looking for the 106 Club.

  Surveillance is easy, when the world forgets you.

  Watching the Pereyra-Conroy building from a parked hire car, I began to chart and catalogue the lives of the 106 Club members who lived inside, and no one stopped me.

  A woman getting into a chauffeur-driven car to attend a party may notice the girl on the other side of the street and be surprised, but if she then forgets, surprise is as far as her feelings go.

  A security guard, helping Rafe into his limousine, notices me as he closes the door, and considers me suspicious, but not yet a threat, not on the first observation. When he returns in the evening, he experiences the same thought process again, and again it is the first time he has seen me, and so again he does not raise an alarm.

  I picked pockets, stole bags, broke into apartments. I cloned mobile phones, accessed email accounts, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds.

  I shadowed men to work, women to parties, I stole their names, the names of their cleaners, their tailors, their drivers, their friends.

  In the morning I ran, in the evening I visited temples, bars, clubs, lectures, plays, and in the intervening hours, I studied the 106 Club.


  On the seventh day of observation, armed with foreknowledge gleaned from purloined mobile phones, I followed a party of four 106 men from the apartment to an invitation-only party in Azabu.

  It advertised itself as “Sugarbabes and Sugarboys”, and access was determined by one of two things – by a declaration of an annual income of over $110,000 with financial documents to back up the statement, or by writing a personal application stating why you, the invitee, were so keen to meet your sugardaddy.

  Hi! I wrote. My name’s Rachel Donovan, I’m 24 years old, and I love people. I love meeting people, I love caring for people, I love listening to their stories and jokes, I love learning about the jobs they have and the things they love. If I could spend my life just meeting people and seeing the world, that would be my heaven.

  With this introduction, I attached a picture of myself in a revealing red dress, smiling, all teeth, for the camera.

  I want to meet wealthy men, I explained, because they’ve just seen so much more than I have.

  I want to meet wealthy men and women, I mused, because theft is an art, and you are my canvas.

  I work out three times a week, and am a champion 10k runner. I think my best quality is my smile; it just seems to make people happy.

  The invitation came back within hours. Digital records remember me, and my name was left on the clipboard by the door.

  Sounds at a party. The crowd is vastly international; English is the default language. The waitresses are dressed as geisha girls, but no geisha would wear such shiny wigs or permit a thread of polyester in their glimmering robes.

  “I tried dating, but my money became a problem; women didn’t know how to be around me once they found out how rich I was.”

  “The key to my success? I knew I’d succeed. That’s all I needed.”

  “I have to travel by helicopter now, because it’s not safe for someone like me to be in the streets.”

  “People are complicated; money is simple.”

  “This isn’t prostitution. Prostitution is illegal. This is a mutual agreement between potential partners with realistic expectations.”