The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 96

I discharged myself on the fourth day of my stay. They’d forgotten to feed me, forgotten to check my notes, forgotten to change my cannula, and after four days of the doctors being outraged at the state of things, and nothing changing, I left.

Stolen clothes, stolen money.

I could walk, but found myself aching all over, legs heavy as if from a marathon, though I’d covered barely a hundred yards.

I called a taxi, looked across at the flat nothingness of Mestre, beige houses behind beige walls, beige apartments looking out at shuttered stores. Northern Italy is beautiful, where the history remains, and industrial and drab where modern times have imposed.

At the station there were only so many places to go. I caught the train to Milan, where all those years ago I’d stolen diamonds from a man who believed in beauty, back to my favourite hotel, to the room next to the room where once I’d lain back on crisp sheets and dangled jewels between my fingers, giggling at my own brilliance.

Now I lay down again, same sheets, different universe, and closed my eyes and slept.

I watched the news. A newspaper in France was the first that dared to run with the story that the massacre at Hotel Madellena had been created by the use of Perfection. Prometheus threatened to sue the shit out of the offending journal, but the lawsuit quickly died away as other papers joined in, citing in great and exactly researched detail the nature of Perfection, the application of treatments.

Byron was behind the story, obviously, and as the scandal unfolded, pundits from every corner joined in.

I sat in the shower cubicle with a bottle of antiseptic, a bundle of bandages and cotton pads, a roll of surgical tape and all the painkillers I could find, and peeled the dressing away from the knife wound in my side.

Not nearly as bad as I’d thought it would be. I had expected to see a great gash, a vile, oozing thing — but maybe Byron hadn’t intended to kill after all. The knife had gone in, and the knife had come out, and a dark puckering remained, stitched tight shut with self-dissolving thread, no more than an inch across. More spectacular was the bruising, the swelling, the purple-redness around, as the flesh in the vicinity of the perforation had tried to work out what this change in status meant, and was confused to discover it meant very little at all.

I re-dressed the wound, and looked up scientific papers on injury recovery programmes. Physiotherapy, antibiotics, timescales, dos and don’ts, and in a little blue notebook from the general store drew up a plan of action.

Discipline.

I will live.

On my sixth night in Milan, I went to a casino.

Card counting — a basic method:

Rules for getting away with it:

That night I scored nearly €3,000 before they caught onto me, so I scooped up my winnings and went to the ladies’ loo, and waited twenty minutes for them to forget, and played again to bring my total to €8,500 before my side began to ache and I called it a night.

Physiotherapy in a hotel room.

Different hotel, different room, hard to tell the difference.

Leg lifts.

Stretches.

Weights.

Arm lifts — slowly, at first, just in front, not to put too much pressure on the wound.

Frustrating, frustrating! I can run miles at a time, always in control, and here I am

lifting my arms to my shoulders like that’s an achievement, like that means something so fucking

sit a while

and breathe.

Again.

To it again.

On my tenth day in Milan, and over two weeks after the massacre in Venice, I contacted Gauguin.