by Claire North
Sleeping wards, half-sleeping patients.
Beep beep beep, a monitor has detected something wrong, waking the entire room, who squeeze their eyes tight shut and lie very still, in the hope that by ignoring the sound of the machine beep beep beep it will go away, just go away!
A spill of light from a bed where a woman has given up on sleep, put her headphones on, pulled the TV screen on its artificial arm close and now watches last year’s movies, a surgical drain filling slowly with fluid down one side of the bed, a five-litre bag gently swelling with urine on the other, the tube strapped to the inside of her thigh.
I am my feet
stepping
stepping
stepping.
A moment to recover breath. I sit in the big brown chair next to a woman on an oxygen feed, her eyes shut, her curly hair pushed up high across the pillow behind her head, her hands folded one over the other and back straight, like a pious funerary statue in an ancient church. She slept, and when I could breathe a little better I opened up the small cupboard by her bed, pulled out the green bag of patient belongings, and stole her jeans and a shirt and a fifty euro note. Left her the credit cards and the rest of the cash, apologised silently and bundled these goods into my robe.
Hobbling back to my bed.
Gender-segregated wards, no point going into the men’s unit, a nurse by the door saw me and smiled, might make a fuss, will forget. A junior doctor, badge round her neck, asked me if I was all right. I said yes; had just needed to pee. Did I need a hand getting back to bed? No. I’d be fine, really.
The woman with the headache was asleep at last in the bed opposite mine when I returned. I stole her smartphone – just for a little while – and was surprised to see how many calls she had received, from people with familiar nicknames, text messages laden with love and care, to which she hadn’t bothered to reply. With the volume turned all the way down, I sat in the chair beside my bed and ate plums and licked my lips and looked up Hotel Madellena.
It was easy to find. Not a news outlet in the world hadn’t picked up on the story and run with it. Explanations abounded – environmental catastrophe being the most favoured – but mass hysteria, terrorism, a virus, and at last, and most pooh-poohed, brainwashing, were all suggested to explain the images that were being pumped out to the world, streamed across YouTube and Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Images not merely of the dead; images of the killing too.
Here: the CEO of a TV manufacturing company smashing his wife’s head into the wall, and she wasn’t resisting, resigned almost it seemed to her fate, dropping silently to the floor when his work was done. There: a weather woman calmly drinking the blood of the man whose throat she has just slashed with her nail file. She sits on her haunches, then looks up suddenly, startled, like a fox caught prowling by a wolf, sees the camera, doesn’t perceive it as a threat, and slowly goes back to feasting.
Here: a TV pundit, famed for his comical yet racist views on immigrants, women and homosexuality, a man who specialised in dismissing people and ideas with the immortal argument “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”, winner of last year’s “sexiest man on entertainment TV” award, quite happily beating a waitress to death with a chair. The padded seat fell out after the first few strikes, but he carries on with the frame regardless, long after she stopped moving.
Facts and figures.
Of the three hundred and twenty-nine people caught up in the events at the Hotel Madellena, only ninety-eight were confirmed dead, with a further forty-two in critical condition. A surprisingly low number, really; but that that is the difficulty of trying to physically kill someone with your bare hands.
Of the remaining victims/suspects (the line was blurred), fifteen were in custody, one hundred and eleven were receiving treatment for various non-critical injuries and the remaining sixty-three had escaped unharmed and were being interviewed by the police, when not being interviewed by the media.
Quoth the head of reception: They just went mad. They went mad. All of them: they just went mad.
I looked for Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, and there was a picture of a body being taken to the morgue.
I looked for Filipa Pereyra-Conroy, and there was no information. Nothing. Not merely a media blackout, but a silence on the internet, a dead space where her name should have been, only Google cache recalling the faintest trace of articles that had been, stories which might once have carried her name.
That was interesting. That implied she was still alive.
A statement from Prometheus:
deep regrets
losses
profound condolences
full investigation
criminal acts
etc., etc., etc.
Words that had no meaning.
I looked away from the phone, and the woman who I’d stolen it from was awake, watching in silence.
I stood up.
Hobbled across to her bed.
Put it back where it had come from.
Went back to my own berth.
Climbed beneath the sheets.
Rolled over.
Closed my eyes.
She said nothing, and no one came.
Chapter 95
In the morning, Dr Dino came round around, saw my chart, said it was a disgrace, that I would be within my rights to cry neglect, and being so senior, people mustered at his command, and in the drama of the moment a cannula was removed, a dressing checked, while he stood glowering at all who obeyed before finally, the information now before him, declared that I was doing very well and I needed to speak to my insurance provider as soon as possible.
So saying, he left, and I interrogated one of his juniors, who had flawless English, about how to treat myself, once I was released from hospital.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “We’ll give you all that information when discharged.”
“Indulge me,” I replied, “so I don’t feel neglected.”
She blanched at little at that, and answered all my questions without further complaint.
At midday, three policemen arrived, but they didn’t go to my bed, but to the room next door, and I shuffled in my tight white socks into the ward to eavesdrop, standing with my back against the door while they talked to a woman, a fashion designer, who’d been at the Hotel Madellena when the world went mad, and had broken her leg falling down some stairs as she fled the scene.
No, she hadn’t seen much.
Yes, it had been terrible.
No, she didn’t know how it had started.
Yes, she’d help with enquiries, if she had to.
No, she just wanted to go home.
No, she wasn’t one of the 206. She’d just been there to help a client with her clothes and make-up. She had a tie-in with Perfection. It worked well – she’d got some incredible clients, and made them beautiful.
That seemed to make the cops happy. I wondered what they’d have done if she had admitted to having Perfection herself.
In the early afternoon, Byron came.
She was dressed as an old woman, playing an old woman, shuffling in with the rest of the families come to visit their loved ones, leaning on a walking stick she didn’t need, sporting a slouch she didn’t have, holding a photo of my face, which she checked carefully, now, and now, and now.
She must have visited half a dozen wards before finding me, and on finding me, bent to check her photo again, smiling to herself like a dear old gran who’s no bother to no one, a brilliant performer, a consummate liar, I had to admire her, and seeing my face in her hand, and then seeing my face staring at her from the bed, she smiled again, and hobbled to my side.
A few paces away, I raised my hand and said in Arabic, “If you come one step nearer, I will scream.”
She replied in the same language, with a slight Syrian accent, “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“You fucking stabbed me, you crazy mass-murdering bitch.” I wasn’t shouting, wasn’t even angry, the wo
rds came and they were true, and that was all there really was to it.
Others, looking at us. They’d forgotten me, but they’d remember her, the little old lady in the hospital speaking Arabic, though she looked about as Syrian as a broccoli. The recollection endangered her more than me, I realised, and I smiled and added, “Your limp is beautiful, but I can make you memorable.”
“May I sit?” she asked.
“No.”
“I called the ambulance for you, at the hotel. They wouldn’t have found you otherwise.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I have photos – you were upstairs, behind a closed door, in a place where no one should have been. I’d paid off security; they weren’t coming back. Beautiful, important people were dead or dying in the room below you. You would have bled out long before anyone saw you, if I hadn’t made the call.”
“Thanks, great, next time someone stabs me I hope they have the same instinct.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Fuck that.”
“You were going to stop me. You understand I couldn’t permit that to happen.”
“Fat lot of good it did. Why are you here?”
“I wanted to find you, to make sure you were alive. I looked in the Paolo in Venice, but they were overflowing, so I came here. I wanted to apologise for having to injure you in the execution of my mission.”
“I might scream,” I replied. “I might just scream just to see what happens. See how long it takes Gauguin to come, you can have a competition, just the two of you. How fast can you get out of a straitjacket? How quickly can he pull a trigger?”
“My actions…” she began, a half step towards the bed.
I raised one hand again, stopping her, warning. “I swear,” I hissed, “a scream to fucking burst your fucking ears.”
She stopped, backed away, left hand turning gently, placating, palm towards me, fingers of her right still locked round her walking stick.
Quiet between us, for a while. In the bed opposite, the woman with the sour face was watching, fascinated. Ignorant of the language, perhaps, but our bodies spoke poems. I forced my features to settle into something neutral, felt my hands fold into my lap, the slow exhalation of breath which, another time, I might have counted as it passed. Not now.
At last she said, “In America—”
“You tried to brainwash me.”
Surprise flickered over her face. “No.”
“For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have a rest.” Something in her eye, a little exhalation, I kept going, because I could, Hey Macarena, all the boys wanna dance, Macarena Macarena. “Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.”
Hey.
Macarena.
Silence a while. Then: “You agreed to the treatments. In San Francisco, you agreed.”
“How do you know that?”
“I wrote it down.”
“Do you believe everything you write?”
“Do you trust everything you believe?” she replied.
Is it possible? Did I agree to treatments? It is, of course, possible. Of course it is.
“You tested your protocols on me?”
“We conducted some basic limit-testing. Not to make you violent. But to see what could be implanted. According to my records, you agreed to that as well. You said it was worth it. You said that if that was what it took to destroy Perfection, you were willing, and you didn’t mind being remembered for it, so long as you were remembered.”
Again, a lie?
I look back into the past, into the dead space I cannot remember, and I see…
… another Hope Arden, looking back.
A woman who hasn’t yet sung the Macarena, a liar and a thief, the seducer of Luca Evard, a woman who survives, who counts and breathes and walks across the desert and the decisions she makes are
… questionable, at the best of times.
She fades from view, and only I remain.
“I’m not sure I believe you,” I said at last. “But I don’t think it really matters now, does it?”
“I behaved badly, at the end,” she sighed. “I was becoming paranoid, my own memory loss in your presence, I was… fearful, I tested things, pushed at boundaries, I have notes which say—”
“You were fine,” I corrected. “I stole your journal: you were fine. I don’t mind telling you that now. It makes me happy to know you’ll forget it.”
Is this it?
Byron stands at the end of the bed, silent, watchful, not running, not attacking, not defending or denying, merely a woman in a time, in this moment.
Is this it?
Is this the end of my path, is this how my mum felt when she reached the edge of the desert, and looked towards the city and thought, that’s not so much, is it?
Then she said, “I once set all the clocks ten minutes fast in my house. I was always running late for things, and so I set the clocks fast. For the first few weeks it worked well enough, and I’d just about make it to meetings on time. After a few months, I forgot that was what I’d done, and I was punctual for everything. Then one day a friend was round, and he said ‘Your clock is ten minutes fast’ and I remembered what I’d done, and suddenly I was late for everything again, because I knew – and could not forget – that all my clocks were fast, and in the end I had to set them back to the real time and just leave at an appropriate hour.”
She stopped, as abruptly as she had begun, and silence settled again.
Then, again: “I thought I dreamed that there was a mouse dead in my bread, and one day I cut open a loaf of bread, and a mouse was inside, and I couldn’t tell for a moment the difference between my dream and reality. Had I had this dream, or at the moment of finding the mouse had I invented this dream, making myself a prophet? Thought can travel through time, you see, memory reinvents itself, making the past something that always has been, now, in this second, now, for ever. You can’t ever really trust your own memory, your own mind. Reality, time, the past, it’s as fickle as a dream, when you look back on it.”
Again, she stopped.
Again, silence.
“After I met you, I recorded myself for days, just alone in my cottage, just to see if what I remembered was what I actually did. But then I looked at the tapes and I realised the futility of my own actions, since I could tell myself that I remembered performing the acts I saw myself do, at the very instant I saw myself doing them. The mind tricks itself to certainty, I think. I think when you are alone, that is the only thing the mind can do.”
Silence, again, a while.
“I’d be your friend again, if you’d let me,” she said. “You and I. Juries are told to disregard the past, historians write their books as if the ancient world were unfolding now. Today Caesar rides to Gaul. Now Perfection dies in Venice. The past is a very loose concept at the best of times. Do you understand?”
Silence.
Is this it?
I cross the desert, I wait for the train, and at the end, the one person who waves from the platform, the mirage in the dust that turned out to be true, is her?
No. Not quite her. Old and bent, she is needing this, needing me, and she is so terribly, terribly alone.
One thing left: something I have to say.
“Filipa took the treatments.”
I found myself unable to look directly at her, so focused instead on the wall behind her left shoulder, studying its infinitely flat quality of grey.
“Oh?”
Slight interest, no more.
“She killed her brother, I think.”
Again: “Oh.”
“I tried to stop you.”
“I know. I saw you, watching. Knew it was you. Couldn’t remember your face, but knew it had to be you. Wrote it down. Probably saw you more, forgot to write it. Can’t remember now; that’s all right.�
��
“I would have killed you, if I’d had the chance.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I will destroy you, if I can. Are you recording this? Doesn’t matter either way. Remember or forget, each has its cruelties. If I can, I will destroy you. It is… I want to say ‘right’. I used to think I knew what right meant. Then I didn’t know. Now I think I understand it again. Go away, Byron14. Go away and forget.”
“You are…” she began.
“Miraculous?”
“Yes.”
“You envy me?”
“Yes.”
“You are wrong. You are wrong. Go away. By the time you’ve got to the door, you’ll have forgotten that you saw me. By the time you come back round again, I’ll be gone. Go away and forget, Byron. Go away.”
She stood, frozen a while, leaning now on her stick for actual support, one shoulder higher than the other, brow locked low.
“Perfection is dead,” she said at last. “We killed it.”
“We killed a lot more than that,” I replied, and, as she didn’t seem to be moving, turned my head, looked away.
A movement at the end of my bed. I glanced down. She laid the voice recorder on the sheets between my feet, the system still running, light on. She didn’t smile, didn’t meet my eye, but left it there and, with her old lady’s limp, walked away.
Chapter 96
I discharged myself on the fourth day of my stay. They’d forgotten to feed me, forgotten to check my notes, forgotten to change my cannula, and after four days of the doctors being outraged at the state of things, and nothing changing, I left.
Stolen clothes, stolen money.
I could walk, but found myself aching all over, legs heavy as if from a marathon, though I’d covered barely a hundred yards.
I called a taxi, looked across at the flat nothingness of Mestre, beige houses behind beige walls, beige apartments looking out at shuttered stores. Northern Italy is beautiful, where the history remains, and industrial and drab where modern times have imposed.
At the station there were only so many places to go. I caught the train to Milan, where all those years ago I’d stolen diamonds from a man who believed in beauty, back to my favourite hotel, to the room next to the room where once I’d lain back on crisp sheets and dangled jewels between my fingers, giggling at my own brilliance.
