Of course none of them would be there at all if a chemist by the name of C. R. Wright hadn’t invented heroin when he added various acids to morphine in his attempt to develop a new kind of painkiller. Back then there wasn’t a place known as Hope. But heroin was born. And there was no going back. Maybe they could have used a time machine so that people could go back in time and stop Wright from proceeding with his experiments. The man had little difficulty discovering the drug. The year was 1874 and he was in London, in St. Mary’s Hospital. In the building in which Derdâ died twice and came back to life twice. Heroin was invented on the third floor and now every year seven thousand heroin addicts were committed to the second floor where they lay on the brink of death.
Holding a cracked leather bag and wearing her black sunglasses and her white uniform, Anne waited for Derdâ in the garden. She smiled when she saw her step out of the building and she waved to her. But not to say good-bye. Derdâ took ten steps forward and Anne took one. They met one another and stopped. The young girl took her sunglasses out of her pocket and put them on. And the Blues Sisters stepped under the Hope sign on the front gate.
In a gray Seat parked only fifty meters away from the main gate, two MI5 officers watched Derdâ and Anne get into a taxi.
“Now what?” one said.
“We wait and see,” said the other.
A young blond sitting in the back seat stuck her head between the two officers and said, “And what if she complains about us, Dad? You know, she did mention us in court. What if she tries again?”
Without taking his eyes off the Hope sign over the main gate, the driver answered, “Don’t worry about it. The case is closed.”
The driver was looking at the Hope sign. Perhaps this was why he felt overly optimistic. Didn’t everything begin with hope? Considering all that Derdâ had talked about in the trial, the officer thought he could uncover a child porno ring. He went to the address in Covent Garden where fifty-two men and a woman had been filmed. He found a camera left in the apartment and the boy with the glasses who had shot the scene, too. Watching the film he felt his heart nearly stop, as if it had been crushed in a door. His son, for whose sake he had been working overtime to support his education at Cambridge, was the first of fifty-two boys to have fucked Derdâ. No matter how much the son insisted, they had no idea how young she was, and the father could never forgive him. He even considered initiating some kind of legal action against his son.
But the day they first examined the crime scene he and his partner destroyed the camera and the memory card. They prevented Derdâ from saying too much about the event during her trial. But there was something else: They didn’t know about the camera boy’s nosey younger brother. He had already made a copy of the film off the memory card and emailed it to all his friends. The MI5 officers heard about it later. One week before his son and the other fifty-one were due to graduate. The scandal shamed them into leaving school. It blew up when the younger brother brought the film to the Cambridge campus to share with some of the first-year students. He was caught by campus security. A radical feminist professor refused to let the scandal be contained. The university authorities struggled to keep the story from spilling over the campus walls. But to no avail; the scandal came to an end and was sealed with the sentence: “We won’t dismiss you from school, but you will choose to leave yourselves.” So that year’s graduation ceremony at the economics department was sparser than anticipated.
But for now the officer seemed perfectly content as he sat in his gray Seat looking at the Hope sign above the main gate. We are all too willing to be deceived by appearances. Nothing is more important than being resilient enough to cope with life.
In the end, the MI5 didn’t just walk away from Derdâ’s life. They ran.
Derdâ and Anne arrived at Anne’s one-story house in Newbury Park in northeast London.
“Here we are,” Anne said. “My palace!”
Big sparkling windows at the front of the house let in the glowing sunlight. The curtains and the front door were white. A low picket fence ran from the back wall to the sidewalk, framing the back garden. The architecture of the house was simple, giving the impression of a doll house that had been magically enlarged a hundred times. And Derdâ was enchanted. Not because the house was extravagant in any way. For the first time, she was stepping into a real home.
They went inside and threw open the windows, breathing in the fresh air. Three bedrooms and a living room. Anne took Derdâ’s hand and led her to a small bedroom.
“This one is for you.”
A single bed and a small wardrobe. Derdâ turned and hugged Anne.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Anne and Derdâ sat together in chaise longues in the back garden, drinking tea in the setting sun.
“So, my little lady,” Anne said. “Now let’s see, when would you like to start school?”
Derdâ put her tea down on a low table and pulled off her dark sunglasses. She rubbed her chin and said, “I think I’ll just rest for ten years and then let’s see.”
Ten years flew by.
The University of Edinburgh’s main garden was full. People were there to celebrate the graduation of the English literature department, established two hundred years before. It was the first English literature
