The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas

Author:Scarlett Thomas [Thomas, Scarlett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

23/09/2021

The hotel is rather charming. It sits like a plump little king at the end of a dusty driveway, all pomp and hauteur, as if it’s just ordered a bowl of peeled grapes and is waiting for them to arrive. It has a quaint majesty, so out of place on this small island. You almost want to pat it on the head and say, There there, your highness, the grapes will come soon. The owner is called Isabella. She has the same baffled look of everyone here. Is it something to do with the light? Isabella apparently inherited the whole place from her dead husband, a much older man who for some reason I picture wearing a ragged vest and drinking bottled beer every night on the veranda. Although if he had been elegant and white-shirted that would perhaps have chimed more with the place. In fact yesterday I saw a picture of him, and he loomed moodily out of a too-small chair with a broken nose and gold watch, but when I tried to press Isabella for more details she pretended not to have understood me and said she had to go and boil some eggs.

“I will lend you a boy,” she says to me today, after breakfast.

“I’m sorry?” I say. But then I realize she means she has found me a guide to go to the refugee camp, which I’d asked her about yesterday.

She is a woman of few words, but she has been kind to James, who has not been feeling so well these last weeks. It’s difficult to know what to do when your husband has found God, and you haven’t. It’s not that I didn’t try. But our long quest across the US, with all the big trees and big egos and big gurus—for me it was about travel, movement, escape, and for James it was about finding stillness. But such is the case with so many marriages of our vintage, of course.

James says that God gives you sickness or troubles when he knows you can handle them, when you are strong enough. He persists in seeing his own weakness as a strength. But this is not about James. And I will write no more about James, after the last time.

The boy arrives late. I want to call him something else—a man, a bloke, a guy—but he is a slip of a thing in his high-waisted shorts and cut-off Lou Reed T-shirt. Where does one buy clothes like that around here? I have found only one acceptable shop on the island, but you would not be able to buy anything genuinely stylish there, or proper moisturizer, or good makeup. Yet the boy has traces of makeup on his face. Scrubbed black eyeliner that has not quite gone from the corners, something electric blue. He reminds me a little of the fa’afafine I encountered in the Pacific all those years ago, with his slender wrists and the way he walks. The dark pink of his full lips.

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