He holds coffee in a plastic cup, and so does she, though neither drink. The steam blows off the surface of the liquid and the two stand there, staring at nothing much, before at last he says, “I have to tell him something.”
The woman, thick black tights, knee-length grey skirt, her hair pulled back into a bun, no rings on her fingers or jewels at her throat, nods at nothing much, and I know her too, remember her name, her smile, sharing noodles in Tokyo, is it you?
Is it you, Filipa Pereyra-Conroy? Is it you?
“Until we know how far—”
She stops him with a nod, eyes fixed on nothing much.
“I’ll make the call,” he says, but is slow to go, hesitating, doesn’t want to leave her alone.
“Go,” she replies, seeing his doubt. “Go.”
Gauguin goes, and only Filipa remains.
I watch her a while, from the shadows, and for a while that is all there is between us. Thought without words, silence without meaning, we stand and the stars turn and this moment is for ever, she and I, and I’m okay with that.
Then she turns without warning, and sees me, and jumps, spilling hot coffee over her hand, and gasps at the pain and steps back, face opening in surprise, then tightening in fear, before opening out again in curiosity. I step forward, hands empty, and say, “Filipa?”
A moment, as coffee drips off her hand, in which she stares into my face and tries to solve me. She takes in my eyes, my lips, my neck, my shoulders, my coat, my arms, my wrists — and sees silver, a Möbius strip rolling for ever into its own geometrical form, and recognises that, both the thing itself, and the meaning of the item, imbued long before I came along to wipe her memory clean.
A realisation.
A revelation, she is brilliant, after all, Filipa is nothing if not brilliant.
“Is it you?” she whispers. “Is it you?”
“You won’t remember me, we met in…”
“You’re the one people forget, you’re…”
She stopped, mid-sentence, turned to look over her shoulder, suddenly aware of the time, the place. Then marched towards me, grabbed me by the sleeve, pulled me away from the door, away from the light. “Is it you?” she breathed again, wonder written on every part of her. “Did you come here for me?”
Not the reaction I’d been expecting. There is something about her tonight that has always been there, a headlong wildness, a speed of words and brightness of eye, but larger, hovering on that tipping point between brilliance and something else entirely.
“Filipa,” I whispered, “I stole Perfection.”
“I know! I know you did! Rafe was furious. He doesn’t believe you exist, but I’ve seen the footage, I know everything — why did you steal it? Was I part of your plan, did I say something to you?”
There wasn’t any rancour in her voice, merely curiosity, a woman trying to puzzle out a thing she has no great emotional connection to. “I stole it for… money,” I lied. “And no, you were not part of my plan. I enjoyed your company.”
“Did you? I thought perhaps I had enjoyed yours too, I seemed very happy in the footage they showed me, and I remembered the night with warmth and assumed that an emotional memory might not have been erased even if the visual pathway was severed, and that therefore maybe you were good.”
No malice, no fear, what the hell is wrong with her? I grabbed her by the tops of her arms, held her tight, looked into her eyes. “Filipa,” I hissed, “you told me that Perfection was the end of the world.”
“Did I? Was I drunk? Rafe doesn’t let me drink, but sometimes…”
“You weren’t drunk.”
“No, I can’t imagine I was. It is, of course. It is the end of the world. And now you’ve made it worse. Although thinking about it, I think maybe it’s a necessary step, the correct plan, a good response to the situation…”
“What’s happened? What’s happening to Louise Dundas?”
Her head, bird-like, tilting a touch to the side. “Don’t you know?”
“No, I don’t. I saw a woman in America, Meredith Earwood…”
A flicker of a frown, a biting of her bottom lip. “I don’t know her.”
“She went nuts, the treatments…”
“You know it’s my fault?” she interrupted lightly. “Although the science is only what people make of it really, split the atom and get the bomb, save the planet, kill the planet, save people, kill people, it’s all the same really fundamentally unless human thought makes it something else…”
She was babbling, her eyes drifting away to somewhere I couldn’t see, my fingers tight in her flesh, trying to hold her in this place. “Filipa,” I whispered, “I can help. What the hell is going on here?”
“Do you want to see? Will the people inside forget you? Will they forget that I was with you?” A tiny giggle at a sudden, happy idea. “Rafe would be so mad!”
“Are there security cameras?”
“No.”
“Then yes; everyone will forget.”
“Good. Good good!”
She grabbed my hand, fingers brushing past the bracelet she’d given me, all those months ago, dragging me towards the door. “Come, come!” she clucked. “Come, come come!” and pulled me into the house.
Walls, painted over boiled pea green. Creaking floorboards covered with speckled linoleum. High ceilings, a brass chandelier hanging uneasily to one side in the central hall. Coats thrown across a dresser by the door, no hooks to hang on. Staff: young, mostly, a few middle-aged executives, turning to stare as Filipa pulled me down the hall.
“This is my friend,” she barked at one man who stood in our way. “She’s an expert.”
A turn of the corridor, a gurney left outside a door. This place was once full of the chattering of the French upper classes, or the quiet silence of wealthy wives left to pine while their men slipped off to more interesting climes and hotter beds. Perhaps in the Second World War it was occupied by German soldiers, the family told to make do or get gone; or no, maybe not, not this far south, perhaps it was a hotbed of quiet resistance, of little gatherings on a Sunday where men and women spoke in hushed voices of their fathers’ guns still hidden under the floorboards.
How it had come to be a medical facility, quietly transformed in the dead of night, I didn’t know, but that was what it was, a large room, perhaps a place that had once been for dancing, now transformed, six beds across the wall, five of them occupied. They were beautiful, even asleep, even with pipes in their veins and electrodes in their skulls, even with goggles over their eyes and nodes taped to their lolling tongues, obviously they were beautiful, in a surgical kind of way. Five slumbering beauties, three men and two women, Louise Dundas in the bed nearest the window, eyes shut, her hair spread out behind her across the white pillow, a sleeping princess.
Two nurses and a doctor overseeing them, surprised to see me, but deferential to Filipa who said, “Can we have the room, please?”
Filipa Pereyra-Conroy, for all that she is not her brother, is still a member of her clan. They gave her the room. “Filipa…” I tried again.
“They are all perfect,” she explained, taking in the sleeping figures with a sweep of her hand. “Germany, Spain, two from France, one from Italy. Nine in America, eight in China, four in India, one in Indonesia, three in Australia, Rafe said fix it, it’s your machines, you fix it, make it better, just like that, boof, like the atom was split in a month, like the apple just fell from the tree splat like—”