by Claire North
“It is clear that these individuals were not in their right mind, when they perpetrated these bloody acts,” said a legal expert, drafted in from the University of Bologna. “The question seems clear – were it not that the 206 had chosen to have their brain chemistry altered. Does this choice render them culpable? This is what the lawyers will be arguing…”
A quick piece of mathematics.
Five lawyers to a legal team, £200 an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, a year of trial – £2,080,000 per annum in legal costs, if you were lucky. Legend said the defence team for O. J. Simpson were on $20,000 a day.
Average monthly wage in:
• USA $3,263
• Turkey $1,731
• Kazahkstan $753
• India $295
• Pakistan $255
GDPs, according to the International Monetary Fund:
• Gambia: $850,000,000
• Djibouti: $1,457,000,000
• Apple Inc.: $182,795,000,000
Funds donated to combating the Ebola outbreak of 2014 – 15:
• United States: £466,000,000
• World Bank: £248,000,000
• African Development Bank: £91,000,000
• Germany: £81,000,000
• Gates Foundation: £31,000,000
• China: £20,000,000
• Mark Zuckerburg: £16,000,000
I turned on the radio.
“Hey Macarena!”
Drove on, into the night.
Chapter 103
On my third month driving through Scotland, and on my thirteenth stolen car, I caught the ferry from Ullapool to Stornaway, stood on the back deck and smelt spring, salt, petrol fumes and cheap beer, watched the land pull away behind the ship, felt the wind tear at my hair, and it was
good.
No anger, no frustration, merely the open sea.
In Stornoway (population 9,000; football teams Stornoway Athletic vs. Stornoway United, rivals to the crown) I walked the two hundred metres from the ferry port to the first optician, opened the door to the little jangling of a bell, pulled out my crumpled picture of Byron, her spectacles and my police badge and said, “I’m looking for…”
“Mrs MacAuley, aye!”
The optician, a cheerful man with white hairs around his chin and eyebrows that stuck out from his face like two grey umbrellas, sheltering his eyes from rain and sun, stared at me in my silence, eyes wide and face curious, a man not used to strangers, let alone Lothian Police so far from home.
The quiet stretched between us, a long, long while, until at last he blurted, “Are you dead or what?”
“Excuse me one moment,” I said, and walked out of his shop.
I paced round the block, counted to one hundred, then marched back in and tried again, police badge in hand.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m looking for Mrs MacAuley.”
“Aye,” he replied, staring again, friendly, curious, meeting me for the very first time. “She comes in here to get her prescription.”
I held out my police badge. “I’m investigating identity fraud,” I said. “We think Mrs MacAuley might have been a victim.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
“The investigation is large. The thieves have been travelling far. Some of their victims may not even know they’ve been targeted, their details used in crimes.”
“What manner of crimes?”
“Insurance scams, mostly.”
“And you say she might be a victim? Why would anyone want to steal Mrs MacAuley’s identity?” Not denial, not rejection of my premise – merely a man who spent a lot of time alone in a shop, talking to himself, now talking out loud, musing over a dilemma.
“Can you help me find her?” I asked. “Do you know where she lives?”
“Oh sure, I’ve got the address somewhere round here.”
He opened up a screen on a computer, an ancient, chugging thing whose buffer, as you typed, struggled to form words.
“Here – it’s a bit of a drive, you know where you’re going?”
“I can find it.”
“I wouldn’t trust your phone, if that’s what you’re thinking. Don’t have much of a signal out here.”
“I’ve got a map,” I replied, copying down the address. “I’ll be fine.”
“Good luck to you, then.”
“Thank you.”
And there: she was found.
Chapter 104
I drive as one in a dream.
I can’t decide: is this land beautiful, or is it bleak? Is bleak beautiful?
Grey stone juts from the thin green grass, poking into a grey sky.
A withered tree, bent sideways by the wind, sweeps clawed fingertips of black twig out towards a tuft of brown, scratching grass that grows on nothingness.
Pylons runs along the brow of a shallow hill.
The water from a pond, or pool, or from a nameless protuberance of water that changes so often with the seasons that no one has bothered to name it, spills onto the road, flooding it to half the depth of my tyres. I drive through slowly, listening to the sloshing around my wheels, and pick up speed again on the other side, heading towards the beacon of an abandoned croft.
Flatness, greyness, emptiness. Sometimes the land rises sharply, then sinks almost as fast. Most of the time it is washed smooth by water, flecked with salt that has thrown itself inland like Poseidon’s buckets.
Stones fallen from the hills, how did they get there? Sharp teeth of white, like a cathedral cracked by thunder, sitting growing yellow moss, from nowhere, of nowhere.
A cottage in the shape of a beehive, no road to its door, no power to it either, looking down towards a loch, the mouth of the bay where it hits the sea, brown with mud and sand.
Is this place beautiful?
Is it the end of the world?
As night falls, I take refuge in a farmhouse, the number given me by the woman who sold me a meat pie (what kind of meat? – no, forget I asked) from a van parked on the side of the road.
Do you get much custom? I asked.
People come to find me, she replied, as the radio blared behind her.
Do you know where I can stay tonight?
Try the MacKenzies, she replied. They’ve got a spare room.
The room was £10 for the night, and the lady of the farm gave me an extra blanket, “as you’re probably not used to the cold”.
A spider wove patiently in the corner of my room, so used to solitude that it couldn’t process the presence of a human in its den. I ducked under the door of the bathroom, sat on the toilet and stared at a sampler on the wall which declared:
AND THESE SHALL GO AWAY INTO EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT: BUT THE RIGHTEOUS INTO LIFE ETERNAL.
I had no mobile phone signal, but they let me use their landline.
I made one phone call, brief and to the point, thanked them for their hospitality, and went to bed.
I woke with the sun, because my hostess did, marching up and down beneath my window quacking furiously at her ducks.
The ducks quacked, and she quacked back, and they swarmed around her as she threw down feed, declaring quackquack! Quackquackquack, singing along with their clamour. I went up to her and said, “Hello, I’m new here. Can I buy some breakfast?”
A lazy cat sat next to the stove in the kitchen, folded in the solitary rocking chair, one eye open, daring anyone to even attempt to depose it from this, the warmest part of its domain. I steered clear, but the woman scowled and it leapt away, sensing a battle lost before it was begun.
“Eat, damn you, eat!” she exclaimed, seeing me hesitate, and I ate homemade bread with homemade honey, collected from the hives before the bees died back for winter, and she put on the radio loud and did the washing-up and we did not talk, and I didn’t see her husband.
At the end of this meal, as I headed towards the car, she asked, “Where are you heading?”
“To the bottom of the island.”
“Holiday, is it?”
“No. Seeing a friend.”
“Friend, is it?” she tutted. “Well, they do say.”
What they said, and whether it was good, I didn’t ask, but thanked her for the breakfast and turned the heater on inside my car, before getting in and driving away.
Grey sky becomes one.
Grass becomes one.
Abstract painting, colours melt together.
Motion with the paintbrush, they blur, right to left with travel, left to right with the wind off the sea.
Feet on pedals, hand on steering wheel, I never passed the test but I can drive, a survival skill, a discipline, my dad would be furious, breaking the law, a child of mine, but my mum would understand.
You do what you must, when you cross the desert, she says. The rituals you make, the devotions you perform, they are what binds you to yourself. If you do not have them, if you have not found them within you, you are nothing, and the desert is all.
I’m proud of you, says Mum from the passenger seat, smiling at the blurring sky. I’m proud of you, Hope Arden.
Thanks, Mum. Hey – Mum?
Yes, dear?
When you saw the edge of the desert, what did you feel?
Honestly? I felt sad to be leaving the desert behind. But I kept on walking anyway.
A cottage on the edge of the sea.
I parked at the top of a track, too thin to get a vehicle down. How did you get furniture into this house? I wondered, as I picked my way towards the sounds of the water breaking on a stony beach.
You carried it, I replied. You asked your friends down to help, and together you got it done.
Two storeys to a stone house, slate tiles on the roof, yellow-lichen rounded stones in the wall, tiny square window frames, eaten by salt, the glass within coming loose. A white front door. A ceramic cat was stuck to the wall above the knocker, ancient and malign. A few weeds grew between the bricks. Lace curtains hung in the windows. A light was on in a room upstairs. A manhole fifty yards away suggested that at some point recently, pipes and electricity had been run underground, away from the raging winter wind.
I knocked with an iron knocker that grinned beneath my fingers.
Knock knock.
Waited.
A light turned on in the hall, though it was daytime, morning, but the skies were thick enough to cast shadows that grew thicker indoors.
A shadow passed across the spilling glow around the wooden frame. A bolt was lifted, a chain slid back.
The door opened.
Byron peered at me from within a warm, wood-smoke glow and said, “Yes?” Her accent, Scottish, thickened by her time on the isle; her face, curious, open, unrecognising.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Hope.”
A moment.
Memory.
She does not remember me, but she remembers perhaps
a mantra repeated: her name is Hope her name is Hope her name is Hope her name
remembering the act of trying to remember.
She looks at me, at my face, my bag, my travel-worn clothes, my overgrown hair that I haven’t had time to weave into something self-contained, my stolen car parked up the way, and though she can’t remember, she knows.
“Oh,” she said. Then, “You’d better come in.”
I stepped inside, and she closed the door behind me.
Chapter 105
She made tea. She left the teabag in hers, and barely dribbled any milk.
I sat at her kitchen table, watching her work, filling matching green mugs from a calcium-clad kettle, before setting the cups down on knitted round mats and taking a seat opposite me.
“Thanks,” I said, and drank.
“You’re welcome. I’ve got biscuits, if you…?”
“I’m all right, thanks.”
“If I’d known you were coming I’d have brushed up on my homework. As it is, I feel like I don’t know anything about you.”
No effort to disguise her accent, not any more. One leg folded over the other, one hand across the other, her body at an angle in the chair, turned towards me, but with room to rise, to move, to fight, if she needed to.
“My name’s Hope,” I repeated. “I’m a thief. We spent some time together in America.”
“I know I spent time with someone I can’t remember – I have months of notes and recordings in the loft. Did I stab you? There’s a note saying I stabbed you.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I’m very sorry about that. I assume it was necessary?”
“I was about to stop you committing mass murder.”
“Ah – right. How are you now?”
“I healed.”
“I went looking for you in the hospitals. I remember that. Didn’t find you though.”
“You found me. You didn’t keep the recording.”
“Why not?”
“I think you didn’t want to remember its content.”
“Why, did I say something stupid?” A flicker of doubt, a sudden thought. “Did I tell you how to find me?”
“No, no, nothing like that. But you seemed to want something from me which I was unwilling to supply.”
“You can’t be cryptic, not about things like that.”
“Are you recording this conversation?”
“No – like I said, you caught me by surprise.”
“Then what does it matter? You won’t remember.”
“Then what does it matter,” she replied, “if you tell?”
I drank another sip of tea.
Silence a while, save for the whistling of the wind from the sea, the promise of rain yet to come.
“Are you here to kill me, Hope?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why are you here?”
I didn’t answer.
“How did you find me?”
“Your glasses.”
“My…”
“I went to every optician in Scotland.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“How long did that take you?”
“A few months.”
“Why Scotland?”
“Your history. The way you described your home. The telephone from Wapping, the signal came up here. Sometimes it’s dangerous to cross international borders; stick to familiar territory. Had to eliminate possibilities.”
“And someone remembered – no, of course they remembered. It’s a dilemma, when you need to disappear. If you try to vanish in a large city, blend with a crowd, you increase your chances of being detected by technology. Cameras, cards, chip and pin – data is hard to avoid, these days. So you move somewhere remote, somewhere the cameras haven’t come yet, and of course…”
“People remember.”
“Yes.”
“You said you envied me, once.”
“I do. You can vanish without a trace, and avoid conflicts such as this.”
“And personally? Do you envy me personally?”
She hesitated, sucking in her lower lip, rolling the mug of tea carefully between her fingers. Then, “Yes. In a way. I imagine that your condition leaves you free of certain considerations. You cannot plan – no, you can plan, but you cannot… agonise, shall we say, for the future, because you don’t have one. Is that too harsh? Is that unfair?”
I shrugged; neither fair nor unfair, true nor false – carry on.
“Nor can you wallow in the mistakes of your past, because the only person who knows them is you. Those you have injured, whose lives you have destroyed – the ones who would seek vengeance or cry out for justice – they have forgotten you. You have done material harm, yes, but emotionally you are a blank. Your actions are a lightning strike, to them, an act of God, or chance, not a human thing, not an actively conspiring mind seeking their downfall.”
Actus reus: guilty act.
Mens reus: guilty mind.
I commit a crime, and only I remember my guilt.
“You have a kind of freedom,” she said.
“Free from the eyes of the world; free from a kind of suffering. It is, in its way, enviable.”
Silence a while.
I asked, “Is it hard? Do you find it hard?”
“What?”
“Answering to yourself.”
“No,” she replied, soft as the sea, steady as the stone. “Not any more.”
“What you’ve done…”
“I find my conscience clear. You are forgotten, and no one comes for you. I am remembered, and here you are. And I am fine with that.”
“I think I despise myself, some of the time,” I said.
She shrugged: so what? Get over it.
“I look at my life, and find it full of failings.”
Another half tilt of her head. Again: deal with it.
“I find that the only way I can survive is in the present tense. If I look at my past, I see loneliness. Loneliness and… and mistakes made of loneliness. If I look at my future, I see fear. Struggle. The possibility of much pain. And so I look only at now, at this present tense, and ask myself, what am I doing now? Who am I now? For a while this was my great discipline, now, and now, and now, who am I now, now I am professional, now I am calm, now I am exercising, now I am speaking to those who will forget. Now I am a self that I wish to be, now I am a picture of who I have to be, now. Now. Now.
“Then I met you and now I am all things, I think. Now I am a woman who, in the past, did some shoddy things. Now I am a woman who, in the future, will do better, where I can. Now I am in this moment and I am just this. Just myself. Talking. Just talking, to you. You will forget and now will pass, time will consume your memory and with it, any reality that this moment may have existed but for now, here, we sit, you and I, and are entirely ourselves, speaking. Does this make sense?”
“Yes.”
“All the time I was looking for you, I never asked myself what I’d do when I found you. Never. Refused to ask. It was a question for a different now, a different moment, I would not construct it from fantasy. You think I’m here to kill you?”
“It’s a possibility,” she mused.
“I’m not.”
“Why are you here, Hope?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Why?”
“It seemed necessary.”
