The Thousand Lights Hotel by Emylia Hall

Author:Emylia Hall [Hall, Emylia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472212030
Published: 2017-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

twenty

Kit had told Valentino that she was going to Capoliveri, as if she were still trying to make him believe that she was really there to write about Maria and Lorenzo. But instead she got on one of the island’s blue buses, and got off it again up the road in Marciana Alta. It wasn’t a deliberate deception; as she’d boarded, she’d just repeated what the girl ahead of her had said. Space was what she wanted. It didn’t matter where.

I need to understand what actually happened, she had said. Your word is the only one I’ll ever have, so when we speak again, please don’t lie.

She’d told him of the deaths: her mother’s, two and a half months ago; his reported own, thirty years before that. She’d spoken with brevity, and a certain pragmatism, as if she were simply communicating the details of someone else’s story. She didn’t tell him of the months and months of Rosa’s illness, how it felt to see the one person you loved, the one person who loved you back, fade before your eyes and there be nothing you could do about it; the hanks of hair that started appearing on the bathroom floor, how the bones in her wrists had begun to stick out like blades. She didn’t tell him how as a child she’d imagined bears coming down from the forest, shipwrecks, duels fought on dusty, sunlit squares – a dozen fantastic ways of dying for her irredeemably flawed father. She didn’t tell him how she’d written the letters of his name into the cup of her hand, sitting on a hard-backed chair on the fourth floor of an impervious building, and beside her, her mum, her lovely mum, lying back on a thin pillow and closing her eyes, a flush spidering across her cheeks. She didn’t tell him how she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of causing pain on top of pain, not when it was so visible, so undeniable, and so instead of finishing what she’d started, she’d told Rosa that they could talk about it another day, when she felt better. When the drugs coursing through her mum’s body weren’t making her speak of things that couldn’t possibly be true.

She didn’t know what to say, but she knew that it couldn’t be any of this.

Valentino’s reaction had thrown her. It was as though she had set a great weight down upon him, and he’d reached out and taken it, his legs bending, his eyes popping, knowing there was no way he could carry it but attempting to bear it all the same. He had accepted what she told him without question, although she’d never said the word daughter. Just as she hadn’t said father either. Then she’d left him, without staying for a word of his story, without hearing a thing that he might have had to say – because it was shocking, the emotion in his response, and she could only pretend that she hadn’t noticed if she quit the room that very moment.

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