, 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?”