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.
• Privacy pundits: Perfection is the prime example of corporate intrusion into private lives.
• Fashion pundits: you can’t put a price on individualism.
• Political pundits: it’s so hard to defend against terrorism in this difficult age.
• Celebrity pundits: we’ve been targeted for being beautiful. Society has gone mad.
• Legal pundits: can there be charges against the survivors? Surely they are victims too (new legal code required, fee to be negotiated).
• Online pundits: guys, these stupid bitches had THEIR BRAINS re-written like fuck what the fuck do you fucking expect will fucking happen I’m perfect just the way I am, stupid!
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:
• Assign cards within the deck a value i.e. cards 2–7 have a value of +1, 7–9 have no value, and 10 — ace have a value of −1.
• As the low cards are played from the shoe, add value to the remaining deck i.e. if ten cards of a value of 2–7 are played in a row, the remaining deck has a value of +10. The higher the value of the deck, the higher the probability that better cards are about to be played. As the higher-valued cards are played, deduct points from the value of the deck i.e. once all aces have been played, you have deducted −4 points. A negative value deck is more likely to yield low cards.
Rules for getting away with it:
• Adjust bets. Bet high when the deck has a high value, low when it’s running into the negative. Don’t flee the table; that draws attention.
• Learn how to count cards while doing other things. Dealers can spot card counters; chatting to them will allay suspicion. Tipping generously may reduce the odds of being called out; dealers are human too.
• Consider how many cards are left to be played from the shoe. If you are running at a count of +10 and there are only a few hands left to be played, your odds of a big win are higher.
• Reset your count with a reshuffle. If the reshuffle appears unexpected, the dealer may be onto you.
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.
Chapter 97
Where now?
A place not nearly as impressive on reaching as getting there.
The train through the Alps takes you as far as Biasca, hugging the bottom of a dark forest, the tops of the mountains lost in the clouds. Cold, getting colder, window steaming up.
At Biasca it’s a drive through winding roads, tiny villages, a phone on the side of the road in a yellow box, call if you see an avalanche. Mountains above, sun setting behind, my face in the window of the taxi as we curl through the mountains.
A village, clinging to a narrow road. The road itself is barely holding onto the edge of the mountain. Mushy snow falls. The taxi leaves me outside the one hotel. The hotel has seven rooms, all empty. The matron speaks perfect English; I’ll give you the bridal suite, she says, you should have a hot bath.
The bridal suite is two rooms, a bedroom and a bathroom. The bath sits in the middle of the floor of the bathroom, a terrible waste of space, but I am fascinated by it; where do the pipes go?
You know, said the matron, I genuinely don’t know.
Chapter 98
Gauguin’s house was just out of town.
It clung to a sheer slope of black cliff, giving the impression of an inverted ziggurat. A garage on the ground floor was topped by a larger first floor above, topped by a yet larger second floor that pressed into the jagged stone of the mountain, crowned by a half balcony/bedroom at the top from which you could survey the valley in all its glory, peeking over conifers down to the yellow ribbon of road below.
Finding a front door required walking up a path to the second floor, where you had a choice between a small drawbridge into the house, or a staircase down to a gully and the warmth of a kitchen entrance.
The kitchen was unlocked; the driver waited outside.
I went in.
The place smelt of almonds. A log fire burned in a black stove. Bundles of untouched dried herbs hung on the wall, like a prop, too perfect to ever be used in cooking. A knife block, each blade slotted into its respective hole; a kitchen sink scrubbed to mirror-brightness, a long workbench on which were laid out fresh eggs, fresh meats, fresh spinach and a bowl of walnuts, ready for eating. A kettle on the stove, steam coming from the spout.