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 her 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.
“Bye,” I said, and as Mum looked up she seemed to blink something out of her eyes before whispering, astonished and afraid, “Who are you?”
“I’m Hope’s friend,” I answered. “I was just staying the night.”
Silence.
My mum, frozen in the kitchen door, broken egg shell oozing clear juice between her fingers.
“Who’s Hope?”