Hostage Three Read Online Free Page B
Author: Nick Lake
apartment by Central Park.
On screen, one of the towers was in flames. The room was really quiet at this point. Someone on the TV was saying something about a plane hitting the building, which sounded crazy â and that was ironic, given where we were. It was as if the maddest person in there wasnât in the room at all, but on the TV. At the time it seemed like a terrible accident must have happened.
Then, as we were watching, the second plane hit the other tower and exploded. People in the room started screaming and, even at the age of ten, I knew how absurd this was, to be watching something so insane in the hospital, which was all disturbed people and drug addicts. Suddenly Mom also seemed to realise that this was pretty disturbing for a little girl, though actually I was more puzzled than freaked out by the whole thing. She took me by the hand and led me away, back to her room, but she didnât want to hear me play the violin again.
Looking back, I think that was the last time I really saw my mom. After 9/11, she was never the same. I think now it must have been the strangeness of it: when she went into what was essentially a mental hospital, the world she left behind was a normal one, in which the Russians and the US had finally stopped trying to nuke each other, the West was safe and rich, and everything was right. Then she came out of there into a scary place, a different world, where people who didnât care about security and cars and mortgages wanted to kill you.
Or maybe thatâs not true. Maybe the last time she was herself was when she got out of hospital that time, and I came home from school to find that sheâd covered my room with those little stars that glow after you turn out the lights. Not like some people do it â not, like, a few of them on the ceiling. I mean hundreds of them, thousands of them, everywhere, on every surface, so that, as she put it, I would remember that there is magic in the world . This was the kind of over-the-top thing my mom often came out with. She put them up in my London bedroom, too.
And for ever since then, you turn off the lights in my room and itâs like fairyland, like being in an observatory, with the universe all around you. A lot of the time â when Mom was well, I mean â I liked that.
Then she would get ill again, and everything would be terrible, and the stars would stop being comforting, would become like a prison instead, a glowing prison holding me inside, reminding me that Mom would always be all around me, would always be the biggest thing in my world, but that she wouldnât always be with me.
Mom was often that way. She would give you something amazing. Stars. The universe.
But at some point she would take it away.
The thing about yachts I hadnât realised before: they take a long time to get anywhere. Southampton to the Suez Canal was a month and a half. A month and a half! You could fly around the world, like, thirty times in that time.
The English Channel to Gibraltar was the worst. The sea was really choppy and rough, and for the first week I was just curled up in my en-suite bathroom, making good friends with the toilet. There were times when I wouldâve quite happily strangled my dad for making me do this.
The Med was a bit better. You could see Morocco sometimes, this sandy haze to the south, and occasionally little fishing villages, with white roofs sloping down to the sea.
It didnât exactly feel like a holiday. Most days we were far from the coast, just crawling through the water, which has no landmarks so doesnât make you feel like youâre moving. Itâs more like an endless conveyor belt of wetness and foam, unrolling underneath you.
I thought we might see dolphins, but we didnât.
Time warped and stretched, like Play-Doh. It was August already and it was, like, thirty degrees, and I was over my seasickness by then, so I mostly lay on the deck, with my eyes closed. When
On screen, one of the towers was in flames. The room was really quiet at this point. Someone on the TV was saying something about a plane hitting the building, which sounded crazy â and that was ironic, given where we were. It was as if the maddest person in there wasnât in the room at all, but on the TV. At the time it seemed like a terrible accident must have happened.
Then, as we were watching, the second plane hit the other tower and exploded. People in the room started screaming and, even at the age of ten, I knew how absurd this was, to be watching something so insane in the hospital, which was all disturbed people and drug addicts. Suddenly Mom also seemed to realise that this was pretty disturbing for a little girl, though actually I was more puzzled than freaked out by the whole thing. She took me by the hand and led me away, back to her room, but she didnât want to hear me play the violin again.
Looking back, I think that was the last time I really saw my mom. After 9/11, she was never the same. I think now it must have been the strangeness of it: when she went into what was essentially a mental hospital, the world she left behind was a normal one, in which the Russians and the US had finally stopped trying to nuke each other, the West was safe and rich, and everything was right. Then she came out of there into a scary place, a different world, where people who didnât care about security and cars and mortgages wanted to kill you.
Or maybe thatâs not true. Maybe the last time she was herself was when she got out of hospital that time, and I came home from school to find that sheâd covered my room with those little stars that glow after you turn out the lights. Not like some people do it â not, like, a few of them on the ceiling. I mean hundreds of them, thousands of them, everywhere, on every surface, so that, as she put it, I would remember that there is magic in the world . This was the kind of over-the-top thing my mom often came out with. She put them up in my London bedroom, too.
And for ever since then, you turn off the lights in my room and itâs like fairyland, like being in an observatory, with the universe all around you. A lot of the time â when Mom was well, I mean â I liked that.
Then she would get ill again, and everything would be terrible, and the stars would stop being comforting, would become like a prison instead, a glowing prison holding me inside, reminding me that Mom would always be all around me, would always be the biggest thing in my world, but that she wouldnât always be with me.
Mom was often that way. She would give you something amazing. Stars. The universe.
But at some point she would take it away.
The thing about yachts I hadnât realised before: they take a long time to get anywhere. Southampton to the Suez Canal was a month and a half. A month and a half! You could fly around the world, like, thirty times in that time.
The English Channel to Gibraltar was the worst. The sea was really choppy and rough, and for the first week I was just curled up in my en-suite bathroom, making good friends with the toilet. There were times when I wouldâve quite happily strangled my dad for making me do this.
The Med was a bit better. You could see Morocco sometimes, this sandy haze to the south, and occasionally little fishing villages, with white roofs sloping down to the sea.
It didnât exactly feel like a holiday. Most days we were far from the coast, just crawling through the water, which has no landmarks so doesnât make you feel like youâre moving. Itâs more like an endless conveyor belt of wetness and foam, unrolling underneath you.
I thought we might see dolphins, but we didnât.
Time warped and stretched, like Play-Doh. It was August already and it was, like, thirty degrees, and I was over my seasickness by then, so I mostly lay on the deck, with my eyes closed. When
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