by Claire North
Standard uniform requirements for female cabin crew:
• 5'2" to 6'1" in height, with body weight that is proportional to this height.
• Regulation skirt, not trousers.
• Hair in one of fourteen regulation styles. If worn in French plait, end of plait not to exceed 1.3 inches.
• Powder and lipstick to be worn as a minimum requirement for make-up.
• Handbag must be carried over the right shoulder.
• Hat to be worn at all times, over the right eye.
The seat next to mine is empty. I pull on my seatbelt, tugging it a little too tight around my middle, lean back in my chair.
The door closes, a clunk as we’re sealed from the outside world.
I half close my eyes.
A man sits next to me.
He wears a linen suit, a white cotton shirt, glasses balanced on the top of his head. His watch has a thick leather strap, but the face is constructed so you can see the gears turning beneath, a skeleton watch, £450 at a pinch, more indulgent than his shoes (£60) or his haircut (£15) – a thing that perhaps carries meaning for him. I wonder if I should steal it, but decide the strap is too wide, it won’t fit, and besides I’m not in the mood.
I glance up at his face, and he is known to me, and he is mugurski71, pulling the flight magazine from the chair back in front of him, flicking through, eyebrows drawn, face crinkled, considering Black Sea holidays and resorts on the Aegean.
I look away.
Can he remember my face?
Impossible: we haven’t met, he has no picture in his hand to compare against my features.
Yet equally impossible: coincidence. _why and mugurski71 do not meet by chance, not like this.
The plane begins to taxi to the runway. The cabin crew perform safety checks, seatbelts, lockers. With perfect painted smiles they indicate the emergency exit here, there, air masks, lifejackets, stay calm, save yourself, then the kids.
I pretend to read my magazine, he pretends to read his.
How has he found me?
“The money.”
He spoke so calmly, eyes turned still to the pages in his lap – Detox to perfection with our 5* holistic getaway – that I wasn’t entirely sure he’d spoken at all.
Then he spoke again.
“I followed the money. Once we concluded you had stowed away on the cruise ship, I sent people ahead to watch the ports, see who disembarked, who checked into what. The day the ship arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh, an Australian passport cleared customs, which wasn’t on the ship’s manifest. We found you as you checked out, but you used the same account for both the hotel and the flight to Istanbul. I had to run to make this flight, which is undignified. My name is Gauguin.”
He held out one hand, club-fingered and pale, his eyes still not rising from the magazine. I declined to shake it.
“You’re talking to me?” I asked.
“Yes. I am.”
“I don’t know you.”
“I work for Prometheus.”
“I’m afraid that means nothing to me.”
“The flight to Istanbul is approximately an hour and forty minutes. The magazines run dry after barely ten minutes of entertainment.”
Silence.
I gave up pretending to read, sat back in my chair.
Counted backwards from ten.
“Gauguin, right?”
“That’s right.”
“French post-impressionist artist, died 1903, days before he was due to start serving a prison sentence for libelling the governor of the Marquesas Islands. Have you seen Tahitian Women on a Beach? There are two women by the sea, a pattern in the sand, as if they’ve been doodling, a pipe, some tobacco, not used. They have flowers in their hair.”
“You know more about it than I do.”
“Then why call yourself Gauguin?”
He shrugged. “It’s a name. I can use something else, if you want.”
“Gauguin is fine.”
“And you are…?”
“You can call me Why.”
A push, a rise of engine, the wheels come up, heads go back; I glance out of the window to watch the dust outside give way to the sea, and there’s the town, barely bigger than the airport that serves it, five streets of luxury, a nowhere place in the desert. He waited until the sound of the engine had slowed, the flight levelled off, before folding his magazine perfectly, precisely, into the pouch in front of him.
“There are some questions we’ll need to ask,” he said.
“What questions?”
“About the robbery. How you accessed the 106 Club in Dubai; how you got into the party. How you escaped. Why you targeted Prometheus.”
“I targeted diamonds.”
He smiled at nothing much and said, “My employers don’t see it that way. Only a fool steals from a party, in the manner in which you did. Anyone reasonable would have targeted the safe, or while the jewels were in transit.”
“I’m a better thief than I am a safe-cracker,” I answered, honestly enough.
A stewardess leant down, interrupting before Gauguin could open his mouth to reply, took our cups, promised a trolley service with light refreshments still to come. Gauguin thanked her courteously; I didn’t have the heart.
When she turned away, I said, “If you knew I was on this flight, why not simply wait until I reached Istanbul?”
“Pressures of time.”
“You’re playing catch-up.”
A shrug: he’s here, isn’t he?
“You brought guns to our meeting in Muscat.”
“You sent a prostitute.”
“Guns,” I repeated. “Sometimes it’s not paranoia.”
He shrugged, a busy man in a busy world.
“You want diamonds, right? I heard you made a deal – your guys help get the diamonds back, the UAE invests in your company?”
A flicker across his face, the tiniest twitch to his smile, and I’ve made a mistake, a right balls-up, and I will have to walk away soon and let him forget. But he’s between me and the aisle, so I added, “I don’t have the diamonds with me now. You want them, we’re going to have to negotiate.”
He smiled at nothing much, turned away, examined the buttons in the plastic ceiling above our heads, the fans blowing in cold air, the illuminated seatbelt light. “No,” he murmured. “No, I think not.”
Silence.
I waited, he waited, and the realisation began to dawn that this man could out-wait the ice age. A childish desire in me; I counted to one hundred, then counted back. Still he waited. I leaned my head back in my chair, ran my mind over my body, feeling each little ache and pain, readjusting my posture so my back was straight, feet on the ground, knees together, shoulders relaxed. Still he waited.
I permitted myself to play out a few scenarios in my mind, and they all ended badly.
I focused until my mind ached on the faint grey pattern woven into the fabric that covered the seat in front of me, and heard myself say without quite knowing from where the words came, “Perfection killed a woman I knew.”
Does he react?
No audible gasp, no nod, no frown. What does he do?
He stares at nothing much, and adjusts his cuffs. I watch him do this, and wonder if he’s even conscious of the act. With the index finger of his right hand he explores the inside edge of his sleeve, feeling the stiff fabric, probing for irregularities. This done, he tugs, once, twice, on the cuff, bringing it into alignment with the bone down the inside of his arm.
Radius, ulna, humerus, scapula, clavicle. Hip bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the knee bone, now hear the word of the Lord…
“Was that why you stole the Chrysalis?”
“No. But it made it more satisfying when I did.”
He nodded, said nothing. Is he also reciting all the bones in the body to himself, is that his mechanism? Femur, patella, tibia, fibula, tarsals, metatarsals, phalanges, how does he not move, how does he not blink?
<
br /> I can learn a lot from Gauguin, but now isn’t the time.
Then he said: “Tell me about your relationship with Byron14.”
I was less surprised than I thought I’d be. The question had been one of many that circled around my possible list of scenarios, a hovering curiosity on the edge of my mind. “Who’s Byron14?” I replied.
“Byron14 is the individual who you have been in communication with for the last few days via Tor,” he murmured, staring at nothing much, cufflinks rolling between his fingers. “Byron14 is a killer and a terrorist. What have you been discussing?”
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said.
“Are you sure you can’t hold it?” Like a schoolteacher at an exam.
“Yeah – no.”
As I tried to stand, he grabbed my wrist, face turned upwards, eyes fixed on mine. I felt something brush against my leg, thought it was my seatbelt falling away, but the pressure remained. His eyes flicked down; mine followed.
The knife was ceramic, of course, and only four or five inches long, with a blue plastic handle. Four inches are three more than enough. The angle of his arm, where he held it against my femoral artery, obscured it from all but my inspection, the curve of his fingers along the back of the blade making it look like, perhaps, at worst, he was touching the side of my leg. I sat back down slowly, and the knife followed my journey, before returning back inside Gauguin’s jacket.
My heart, my breath.
I closed my eyes.
“You wouldn’t risk it,” I said at last. “Not on a public flight.”
“I have a very slim chance of being arrested,” he replied. “You’d die for sure.”
“Can’t help you dead.”
“You aren’t helping now.”
“Can’t do anything at thirty-five thousand feet.”
“That’s fine; we’ll land before you know it.”
My heart, too fast, breath too quick. I tried to count and the numbers were tangled, come on, come on!
I found I was trying to remember Parker, forcing myself to picture his face as I had seen it on the photograph. I could see the photograph in my mind’s eye, but his features were flat, unreal, and I bit my lip until I tasted blood. A list of characteristics – mousy hair, pale grey eyes, a mole on the right side of his chin, large ears, small nose – these are just words, they are nothing that has meaning.
“Just relax, Why,” said Gauguin, leaning back in his chair, eyes half closed like a man about to sleep. “Just stay calm. Stay calm.”
My mum, walking barefoot across the desert.
I close my eyes, and feel the sand beneath my feet.
“I’m calm,” I say, and it is true. “There’s really nothing to worry about.”
We fly north-east, towards Istanbul.
Chapter 24
Five weeks after my friends, teachers and family began to forget me, I vanished from their memories altogether.
It was a simple thing – so simple.
Coming home on a Tuesday, I found half my stuff had gone, given to charity or my baby sister.
“Why’d you throw my stuff out?” I asked Mum, not shouting, not screaming any more, but quiet – so quiet.
“I didn’t touch your stuff,” she replied, looking at me bewildered. “There was just a lot of junk in the spare room.”
“That’s my room.”
“Yes, that’s what I meant. In your room.”
I gave up going to school.
I had lost patience after being welcomed to my French class for the seventh time – Bonjour, comment tu t’appelle? Bienvenue à l’école – and introduced to my oldest friends day in, day out.
For a while, being the new girl was okay, and I made the most of it. I smashed the window of Mr Steeple’s little Ford Fiesta, in response to four years of quiet, institutionalised bullying I had received from this shiny-skulled teacher.
“Dum spiro, spero, Ms Arden?”
“What?”
“Dum spiro, spero, from the Latin as you will know, and its meaning…?”
Empty faces staring at my vacancy, for I knew not a word of Latin and Mr Steeple knew it well, but had taken to quietly humiliating those students who he felt were not taking his mighty intellect seriously enough.
“While I hope, I live, taken from Virgil. I had thought it was apposite to your nature, Ms Arden, but clearly I was mistaken.”
Dum spiro, spero. While I breathe, I hope, taken from Cicero. When he was murdered by the soldiers of the Second Triumvirate, sent by men who had formerly been his friends, he was said to have turned to them with the words, “There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly.” I chatted to a woman at a charity ball about Cicero once, and she nodded wisely and said, “Was he the Roman who wrote all those fart jokes?”
Other actions. Empowered by my predicament, I punched Eddie White in the face. He was the obligatory bully who had reached the peak of his power the day he force-fed Azim pork sausages in the canteen. A religious education class the week before had given him the idea, but his true success came not from forcing the sobbing thirteen-year-old to eat meat that was haram to his faith, but in gathering unto him nearly twenty-two screaming and cheering students who stood by laughing as the boy spluttered and choked. Punching Eddie White was a pleasant fantasy fulfilled. However, within a few hours, everyone had forgotten how Eddie got his black eye, which was why, the next day, I stole Eddie’s phone instead, smashed it with a hammer, and left it on top of his locker. Physical consequences last much longer than any actions where my memory is involved.
Mischief-making was only fun for a while.
The world forgot me, and I lost interest in the world.
As the exams came nearer, I considered hanging around long enough to sit my GCSEs, but what was the point? Paper, ink, my name – these seemed to last, like the diary of a dead man or a piece of frozen footage – but they would mean nothing to me. No future, no job, no life at all seemed possible for me anymore, and so I took to wandering around Derby, looking at things I couldn’t afford to buy and playing games in my mind to pass the time.
Seconds in a minute: I close my eyes and count to sixty, again, and now – again, until my counting matches the passage of the seconds.
Counting: minutes in an hour.
Perhaps now the hour has gone.
Or perhaps now.
Or now.
I stared at strangers who stared back, but no sooner are their heads turned than the memory begins to fade, and so they look
now
and now
and now
and each time they see me it is for the very first time.
And turn away.
I exist in this physical world as sure as stone, but in the world of men – in that world that is collective memory, in the dream-world where people find meaning, feeling, importance – I am a ghost. Only in the present tense am I real.
Now.
And now.
And now.
Then you close your eyes.
And I am gone.
Alone in Derby, forgotten by all, I went to the cinema, watched the blockbusters, then the comedies, until I fell asleep in the back row, and had to be shooed out by the cleaner. I went to the theatre. I’d never been before, but at matinees there were enough empty seats at the back. Some of it was dull. Some made me laugh until my face hurt. Some made me cry.
We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
I cried a lot, at that time.
People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds they’re eager to talk about.
I opened my mouth to speak, and found I had no one to talk to. My parents grew distant, looked at me across the table as if unsure, unknowing; who was this girl, how did she come to be here? Only Gracie remained, my baby sister, for whom every plate was thin, flexible metal; every fork was plastic, every beautiful thing that could be broken by he
r clumsy, grasping hands put up high, out of reach. I’d resented her for a long time, but now I’d sit in her room and tell her about the things I’d seen walking through Derby, and she’d lie with her head in my lap until she was asleep, and I didn’t know if she understood, and it didn’t matter, because she was warm and listened, and that was what I needed.
The day before I vanished entirely from my parents’ minds, they being the very, very last to forget, I wrote my name down a thousand times.
I wrote with lipstick on the bathroom wall.
I wrote with sticks and stones in the dirt of the park.
I wrote with chalk in the street, and with ink on paper, and with blood drawn from a cut in my thumb on the window of our living room and on the back door. I wrote in flowing Arabic, which my mother had insisted I learned to write as she had not. I looked up my own name in Mandarin and Coptic, Cyrillic and Katakana. I wrote on the walls and floors, the tables and books, Hope Arden, Hope Arden, and after a while, I wrote only Hope.
Hope.
Hope.
Hope.
I wrote it on the back of receipts. I hugged Grace and cried, and she let me hug her because sometimes this was what people did and you had to be patient with people. I had a notion that monks would repeat their prayers a thousand times, and that there was something magical in this number which would draw the attention of a creator, and when I was done I went into the living room, and found my parents sitting there, silent.
“Hey, Mum, hey, Dad,” I said, and they both looked at me, and then looked away, their arms wrapped round each other, as if uncertain of anything in the world save each other. There were tears on my father’s face, but I didn’t know why – I had never seen him cry.
“I’m going to bed now,” I said to the half darkness of a TV on mute.
“All right, dear,” my mum replied at last, so slow, so long. Then, “How much longer are you with us?”
I packed my bag that night, and in the morning Gracie held onto my leg, her arms wrapped like an anchor, and I had to prise her free. My mum was in the kitchen, Dad had already gone to work.