by Claire North
Could you be perfect, I wondered, without being white?
£9.99 for 125ml of “royal skin whitening cream”. Apply liberally. Gently lightens and tones.
“We give you best room, Ms Smithi,” the woman behind the counter said, bobbing in excitement at the sight of a customer in this autumnal time. And then yet more, more, how her delight soared when Byron walked through her door.
“This your friend?”
I turned to look at Byron, and she for the very first time came up to me, stood not a metre away and replied in a flat, southern English accent, just like Gauguin, “We’ve only just met, but I think we’re going to be friends.”
“Yes,” I replied, and my breath was fast, my heart so fast, I felt the beat of the blood in the side of my throat. “Good friends.”
They gave her the room next to mine. Our balconies adjoined. I stood, watching the sea break against volcanic rock, listening to the call of seabirds as they tracked a boat heavy with fish across the waters. The wind, first cool, grew cold, and I let it settle through my skin, slowing my heart, my blood, my breath, until at last Byron came out of her room, and stood on the balcony next to mine, divided by a low fence of woven twigs and a couple of potted plants.
At last she said, “I didn’t see you come into the hotel.”
Already, our encounter forgotten.
“Or on the ferry,” she added.
She fears me; an interesting and not unwelcome development. Byron14 prides herself, perhaps, on her powers of observation, and yet here I am, appearing as if by magic, and that is astonishing, and she is afraid.
I cannot stay in this hotel long; if we are the only guests, the owners are going to be perpetually surprised when they see that I have a key.
“Cup of coffee?” I suggest. “Something to eat?”
“I was thinking I might go for a walk around the mountain. Having come this far.”
In no rush: an assertion of her power. She knows I’m not going anywhere.
“That sounds nice. I’ll see you when you get back.”
She does not go for a walk around the mountain. If she could remember telling me her intentions, she probably would have acted on them. I go running along the beach. The shore is shingle, that turns into sand beneath a shield of hanging trees. I find that I am tired after only a few minutes, and return up the hill to the hotel.
I write a time, a place – the hotel restaurant, hastily cleaned for its unexpected guests – and slip it under her bedroom door.
Shower.
Change.
Plan, backup plan, backup for the backup. Stick too rigidly to a plan, and you may drown in it, but fail to plan ahead, and you will drown for certain.
I wondered where Luca Evard was, and if he thought about me at all.
Chapter 56
The Korean national dish is kimchi.
When travelling, it is important to have an open mind. It permits you to engage in conversation with a stranger, to compliment your host, engage in discourse and find some limited perspective.
I say this as one who tried kimchi with an open mind, and thought it was disgusting. Perhaps, aficionados say, I have not tried the best kinds.
Basic ingredient: cabbage, though cucumber or scallion may be used. Season with brine, chilli, ginger, radish, shrimp sauce, fish sauce, etc. Bury in an earthenware pot, perhaps with a dash of fermented shrimp to help the process, and leave underground for a few months, until the dish is nicely mulched. The first Korean in space, Yi So-yeon, was sent to the stars with some of the most expensive kimchi known to man, after it was specially treated to remove the most harmful bacteria and decrease the odour. Who wants to spend six months in a space station reeking of Grandmother’s finest fermented vegetables?
Byron14 was already downstairs, at a table by a wide window that looked towards the sea. We were the only two in the restaurant. As I sat, our hostess put kimchi on the table with the menus, just to get us into the spirit of the meal.
Quiet, a while. The clouds across the sea were turning false-night dark, cutting off the sun, blocking out the sky. The smaller ships were heading to port, the larger freighters seemingly stationary on the horizon, until you looked again, and found they were gone. The light of the restaurant reflected our faces back to us against the glass. I hoped Byron had been to the toilet before she left – I would need her uninterrupted attention.
At last she said, looking at me
(for the first time)
(this time)
“Do you have Perfection?”
I put the USB stick on the table between us.
A flicker in her eyes, a slight pulling in of her breath – surprise? Excitement? Perhaps both.
“That’s it?” she asked, eyeing the USB stick.
“That’s it.”
Her eyes lingered a moment longer than perhaps she wished, then rose to look at me, an active effort, conscious will. Intelligence in every part of her, intelligent enough perhaps to play dumb, to smile and nod at the stupidity of others, no pretence now, she was happy for me to be afraid.
“All this run-around, and you give it to me over dinner?”
“I thought I’d let you pay for the meal.”
Byron speaks, soft voice, clipped English accent. “I confess myself perplexed. Why this journey? Why such hassle?”
“I needed to speak to you alone, face-to-face, in an isolated environment away from danger.”
“Why?”
“Meeting on my terms gives me control of the situation.”
“There are ways to exert control without taking risks.”
“Words are complicated. I needed to meet you.”
“Well then,” she said at last. “Here I am. Was it worth it?”
I tapped the table top, the length of my index finger brushing against the USB stick. “You tell me.”
Silence between us. Busy, fluent silence. Impressions made, images found. I let her look, met her eyes, defiance, me, my gaze, let her stare and draw every conclusion she can, it is nothing, it is only now.
A storm building out to sea, no thunder, no lightning, just the wind and the waves, a blotting out of the light.
At last she said, “I didn’t see you on the ferry.”
“No. You didn’t.”
“I didn’t see you at the port.”
“No. Not there either. I have questions.”
She half raised her shoulders, chin coming down. “All right then: ask.”
I said, “Who is Gauguin?”
A smile in the corner of her mouth, her eyes turn towards the sea, then to the ceiling, then return to me, taking her time. “He used to work for the government.”
“And now?”
“Now he works for the Pereyra family.”
“Why?”
“Better pension.”
“An answer that means something, please.”
“Guilt, mostly, I think. We used to be lovers.”
So flat, so simple, so easy, a lie? A truth? A truth that sounds like a lie?
She went on, finger running round the edge of the plate of kimchi, not eating. “Rafe and Filipa believe that Matheus Pereyra was murdered. Gauguin feels the same way; more, he feels he should have been able to prevent it. He feels remorse at having failed to do so.”
“Was he murdered?”
“The coroner gave an open verdict. There were ambiguities in the toxicology report.”
“Does Gauguin think you killed Matheus?”
“Yes.”
“Did you?”
She drew in her lips for a second, then puffed them out, smiled, looked at me without remorse or joy, said, “Yes.”
She knows what she will give, she knows what she will take.
“Why?”
“Numerous reasons; do you care?”
“Gauguin connected me to you. If he hadn’t, I don’t think he would have cared. You landed me in the middle of your mess.”
“That’s not entirely true.”
�
�Isn’t it?”
“No,” she mused, assembling her thoughts gently, voice light. “Of course not. You chose to steal the Chrysalis from Dubai. You chose to do so in the middle of Rafe’s most important public event, in front of the eyes of the world. You chose to humiliate him, damage the prospects of Perfection in the UAE. You made your own bed and slept in it, and myself and Gauguin were merely drawn by the snoring.”
“I just wanted the diamonds.”
“Did you? There were other ways to steal them that didn’t involve humiliating Rafe.”
“I wanted…” My words trailed off. I turned to watch the clouds darkening over the sea, a long way off, the horizon vanishing where sea became shadowed sky.
Byron adjusted her chopsticks, waited. In the East, never leave your chopsticks in a bowl of rice when you finish eating; to do so is an offering for the dead. Other traditions: four is an unlucky number, , sì, it has the sound of death, , also always remember that… that… fuck it. Whatever.
She waited for me to grow uncomfortable, waited for my thoughts to run amok, control gone, words and denials spinning uselessly through the part of my brain where discipline should have been. Waited a little moment longer, then said, her eyes indicating the USB stick between us, “I assume this isn’t the only copy.”
“No. Why did you kill Matheus?”
“I’m not sure this is that conversation.”
“It is, believe me.”
She sucked in breath, then let the words all out, controlled and practised. “Perhaps because he was responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people. Not by killing them himself, of course. Matheus was much more than a media mogul; he invested in politics, lobbied extensively, commanded campaigns. This is nothing out of the ordinary; he was a man with money and an ideology. Ideology colours truth. When a paper was produced suggesting, for example, that eating lemongrass was as effective a cure for cancer as chemotherapy, he ordered his editors to run the story. Naturally, the study was written by a crackpot and was instantly dismissed, but he gave it a voice. A policeman gunned down a child, cop called heroic at Pereyra’s command, the child slandered as a thief, irredeemable aged thirteen. The cop was white, the boy was black; it’s a common story. An electoral campaign based on hating the foreigner, the poor, the unknown, every lie of course destroyed by experts – but Matheus Pereyra did not print the views of the experts, but rather… printed the screaming. Always, the world screaming, loudly, screaming.
“Back then I was still working for the government, and one day I got a phone call saying Matheus was going to run a story about an MP’s ex-wife. The MP was being tried for corruption – he had cooked the books, sold £1.3 billion of public assets to a bunch of his mates for £400 million, taking a pleasant £150 million commission in the process. His mates were old uni pals; pals of Matheus too. But he’d also been beating his wife, and one day she had enough, packed up all his records, proof of what he’d done, and went to the police.
“We put her in witness protection, new name, new identity. Matheus found her. The headline was ‘The Face of Treachery’, followed by a four-page exposé, painting her as a drug addict, adulteress, liar. Photos of her, where she lived, her kids. I told them the story was embargoed, court order. Don’t run it; you will compromise an ongoing investigation. I went to the top, to Matheus himself. And he just looked at me and said, ‘Get over it, bitch.’”
She repeated his words distantly, a thing half recalled, made inhuman with too much contemplation.
“The corruption case collapsed, of course, and the MP stood again in a safe seat, and won; and the day after he got the kids back, his wife took an overdose. Didn’t die – these things are difficult to get right. We took Matheus to court for compromising an ongoing case. He lost, ordered to pay a fine of £75,000. He laughed, when he heard that. ‘Get over it, bitch,’ he said and of course he was right. He would do what he wanted, and that was that, and the most you could do was get over it. Words screamed loud enough: ‘The prime minister lied’, ‘It caused heart disease’, ‘The immigrant murdered his landlady’. All those lives destroyed, the suffocation of debate, the raising up of noise over content, the simplification, objectification, the brutal destruction of thought that he committed against all mankind. The dead who refused to take the medicine because lemongrass would work, the guns that were fired because he’s an extremist who took our job, the women branded sluts, whores, bad mothers, the ones who got away with it because they knew which hands to shake – and you wonder why someone would want him to die?”
I nodded at nothing much, thought of Luca Evard, tried, without much conviction: “This is the modern world – there are resources, means to find justice…”
“Such as.”
“Truth.”
“Meaningless, if you cannot make it heard.”
“The law.”
“Not if you don’t have money to pay for it.”
“History is full of battles being won by the oppressed against the great.”
“Is it? Cite me a meaningful victory. When the Bhopal disaster hit, over three thousand people died and half a million people were injured or disabled. The outcome? Seven ex-employees of the chemical company were sentenced to two years in prison each and a fine of $2,000. The parent company was fined $450 million and is now the third-largest producer of batteries in the world. Deepwater Horizon, eleven dead and nearly five million barrels of crude oil spilt into the sea. BP fined $4.5 billion. BP profit in 2013: $23.7 billion. Would you like more personal numbers? Inter-racial hatred, discrimination on grounds of religion, gender; reportage on climate change, on scientific development, on medical breakthrough, versus reports on immigration numbers, violent crime and celebrity personality, shall we break down the truth, the bitter, unloved, bloody-nosed truth? Tell me, in a world where wealth is power, and power is the only freedom, what would desperate men not do to be heard?”
“Civil rights, sexual emancipation, freedom of speech, the abolition of slavery—”
“Economic necessities. In 1789 the French rebelled and found an emperor. The Americans found freedom from the British and enslaved the Africans. The Arab Spring bloomed and the military and the jihadists seized power. The internet gave us all the power of speech, and what did we discover? That victory goes to he who shouts the loudest, and that reason does not sell. Have you never heard priests proclaim that the meek will inherit the earth and wondered if the kings of old didn’t smile to hear it? Your reward comes after death. Nirvana. The wheel of life turns and we are elevated from animals to women, from women to men, from men to kings, from kings to gods, from gods to… perfection. And what is perfection now? Not crucifixion, not poverty endured patiently on the mountaintop. No – the perfect life is to have an annual salary of £120,000, an Aston Martin, a £1.6-million-pound home, a wife, two children and at least two foreign holidays a year. Perfection is an idol built upon oppression. Perfection is the heaven that kept the masses suppressed; the promise of a future life that quells rebellion. Perfection is the self-hatred an overweight woman feels when she sees a slim model on TV; perfection is the resentment the well-paid man experiences when he beholds a miserable millionaire. Perfection kills. Perfection destroys the soul.”
Silence.
She had not raised her voice. These words had been spoken a hundred times before, though perhaps only to herself. Across the sea the sun was down, reflection from its passage bouncing off the water and the underside of the clouds, black and gold. Our hostess, seeing an opportunity to strike, darted between us with a cry of “You ready order?”
Byron played it safe, ordered vegetarian, cabbage and noodles, broth and egg. I picked a plate at random and smiled faintly as our menus were collected, glasses taken away. Neither she nor I were drinking tonight.
Silence.
“Get rich,” she said at last. “Get thin. Get medicines. Get a car. Get married. Get perfect.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to know what your life is worth.”
A flicker in the corner of her mouth, contempt, perhaps? She is still unknown to me. That’s fine; I’ll follow her to the ends of the earth, meet her a hundred times until I know her.
“‘Worth’ is a concept almost as dangerous as ‘perfect’,” she said. “‘Worthy’, to be—”
“Important. Honourable. Having merit or value. Possessing qualities that merit recognition and attention.”
“And are we not worthy?” she asked, rolling the end of one ceramic chopstick back and forth between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. “Are our lives devoid of merit? Are we not generous to our friends, kind to strangers, skilled in our areas of expertise, reliable with rent, gentle with children, quick to phone an ambulance when we see a man hit by a car, thoughtful in word and deed? Do we not have worth enough? Are we not already perfect? Perfectly ourselves? Perfect in being who we are?”
“I have no one to measure that quality against.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“Do you have eyes, judgement?”
“And I see the world, but I have no one else’s eyes to measure my own vision against.”
“Of course you do. You have the words of friends and strangers. You have discourse and reason. You have critical thought, which may be trained to the highest degree. In short, you do not need the world to tell you what to be. Especially if the world tells you that you are never good enough.”
“I am a thief,” I said, and for the first time since… I was not sure how long… the words were not proud. Almost… angry, perhaps.
Again, a little shrug: these things don’t matter to her. “Were we living in a different time, perhaps ballads would be sung to your honour. In this day and age, 0.7 per cent of the world owns 48 per cent of its wealth. Is thief such an indictment?”
“Yes,” I snapped, surprised at my own vehemence. “If I stole for a cause, perhaps; if I stole for anything that mattered…”
“It is worthy to live,” she corrected, “when the alternative is to die. Life is precious.”
“But Matheus Pereyra died.”
“And his children built Perfection – life is complicated. It defies mathematical ordering or the scales of justice.”
