The Sudden Appearance of Hope

by Claire North

There was instant darkness, like hands round the throat.

A couple in the first-class dining room, I didn’t think I’d seen such beauty before. His radiance, rather than obscuring hers, seemed to set it off, and the whole room turned to look at their entrance.

Reality: the conjectured state of things as they actually exist. I breathe, and in the time the air takes to leave my lungs, I vanish from the minds of men, and cease to exist for anyone except myself.

People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds they’re eager to talk about.

“All thought is feedback,” I said at last, and now her eyes were fixed on me, through me, I had her full attention, so intense I wondered if she would ever forget me, if she could ever forget this moment. “Faced with mounting stress, the body enters an alarmed state. Capillaries dilate, heart beats faster, breathing increases, skin flushes, muscles tense. With each social rejection, pathways are reinforced in the brain which links social rejection with physiological anxiety. Thus reinforced, you are more likely to experience a physical reaction to even slight social discomfort, thus making you more uncomfortable, thus reinforcing the physical and so on and so on. All thought is feedback: sometimes that feedback can be too loud. That’s what I think, anyway.”

“Isn’t it worrying, I mean, not worrying, not an emotional response, but isn’t it interesting that in a room of perfect people the two imperfect people move together at once, and two societies form – as an anthropologist this must interest you – the beautiful and the ugly, and the beautiful stand and talk and are wonderful together, and the ugly have noodles.

Look for the words “perfect woman” and you find bodies. Diagrams, explaining that the perfect face belongs to an actress with smoky eyes; the perfect hair comes from a princess; the perfect waist is barely narrow enough to support the generous breasts that balance on it; legs disproportionately long, smile that says “take me”. Photoshopped features combining the faces of movie stars and models, pop idols and celebrities. Who is the perfect woman? According to the internet, she is a blonde white girl with bulimia; no other characteristics are specified. And the perfect man? He has a wide range of interests, is polite and courteous at all times, handsome and sexually considerate, intelligent, preferably funny, has a high income and his own home, mortgage free.

Okashi, delight, joy, enchantment. An old-fashioned word, much beloved of Sei Shōnagon, who found her delight in the little beauties of this life. A sprig of cherry blossom, delicately borne by a handsome boy. The icy cold of snow falling from a clear sky. I find all this wonderful, she wrote, and marvel that others do not.

I am nothing, I am the slight start in your chest which you later will put down to hiccups, I am the fear that faded as quickly as it came, I am (worthless?) practically forgotten already, as I push past her and run for the door.

Silence between us. He was alert now, four thirty a.m. and the city stirring, sunrise across the sea, watching me, and the thing that had been, the moment that should have been for ever, was fading.

Some thin impressions began to form in her mind, but they were, as she said, like memories of watching a play. She saw Romeo die and Juliet swoon, but it was not her lips the poison kissed, her heart that broke. She was a witness to events that contained her, not party.

In the desert there is always the sound of movement, a busy silence of sand falling beneath your feet. When you are alone, even the quiet is full of monsters.”

I have to define myself, otherwise I am nothing, just a… liquid that dissolves.

Luca Evard’s hand wraps round my throat, and he weeps, and he forgets, and I carry the memory of what he did where he does not and that’s fine another part of the journey. His journey, but I’ll take it for him, just this once. I’ll make the pilgrimage he doesn’t have the courage to take.

A guest at a big party must choose not to perceive the service staff around them. Waiters and waitresses, security men, duty managers, cooks, musicians, technicians, all melt into the background. This night is yours, it is about you and your friends, and the intrusion of strange, prying eyes, of eyes that are not of your world – best ignored, not a living thing at all.

Something we can all admire, but which no one bothers to listen to, because the beauty is in the listening, in the growing complexity, the unfolding of a story, and no one at a party has time for that.

Thought can travel through time, you see, memory reinvents itself, making the past something that always has been, now, in this second, now, for ever.

Should guilty seek asylum here, like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin. The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs; and the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.