Hotel World (4 page)

I told them all.

I told all the people in the cinema queue. They were waiting to see something. I told all the people in Boots the Chemist. They were waiting for prescriptions. (Imagine a glorious cold in the nose. Imagine a tweaking chirping thrush in the groin. Imagine being a colour, and feeling off it.) I went to the supermarket; the aisles were straining with foods. I told the check-out girls. They were waiting for Saturday afternoon to be over. It was their worst day.

Remember you must leave.

It was near dark. I found a shop with its windows full
of watches. A girl sat by herself, leaning an arm on the glass top of the counter. Below her were watches. Behind her were watches. She was staring at the front of her wrist where the moving hand on the face of her watch leapt and stopped, leapt and stopped, leapt and stopped.

I passed through her. I couldn’t resist it. I felt nothing. I hope it was the right shop. I hope she was the right girl. She shivered at the shoulders and shook me off.

I put where my mouth had been to the side of her head. I said:

I have a message for you. Listen.

She flicked her head to sort her hair. She scratched at the back of her neck. She put her hand down on the counter again and watched her watch, the seconds, doing time.

Woooo-

hoooooo? Anything this time? No, nothing. I try again, and again. Nothing. Just sleep, coming. Time, nearly up.

It is my last night here. I circle the hotel and conjure stones, dust, soil. Some rooms are small, some are larger. The size dictates the cost.

I coast down corridors, invisible as air-conditioning. I waft about the restaurant from table to table, plate to nouvelle plate. I seep through the kitchen door; out the back five dustbins are stacked against a wall, each full of uneaten things.

I hang in reception like muzak. You will recognize me; I am a far-too-familiar tune. I slide up the shining banisters,
up and up to the top floor, and through the door of one of the rooms and across the carpet and through the top window, and pirouette all the way down the front of the building (to the paving tiled with the name of the hotel, washed down every morning at half past six regardless of the weather or the dark or the light by the tired lady with the bucket and the mop, I shall not see her tomorrow, I shall miss). Woooo-

hoooooo I have a message for you, I tell the black sky above the hotel, and the windows lit at half past four down its sides and back and front, and its doors that go round breathing the people out and in.

Here’s a woman being swallowed by the doors. She is well-dressed. On her back she carries nothing. Her life could be about to change. Here’s another one inside, wearing the uniform of the hotel and working behind its desk. She is ill and she doesn’t know it yet. Life, about change. Here’s a girl, next to me, dressed in blankets, sitting along from the hotel doors right here, on the pavement. Her life, change.

Here’s the story.

Remember you must live.

Remember you most love.

Remainder you mist leaf.

(I will miss mist. I will miss leaf. I will miss the, the. What’s the word? Lost, I’ve, the word. The word for. You know. I don’t mean a house. I don’t mean a room. I mean the way of the      . Dead to the      . Out of this      . Word.

I am hanging falling breaking between this word and the next.

Time me, would you?

You. Yes, you. It’s you I’m talking to.)

Else is outside. Small change is all she’s made, mostly coppers, fives, tens. The occasional coin is still shining like straight out of a Marks and Spencer till, but most of them are dulled from all the handling and the cold. Nobody ever misses it, do they, a penny, that’s fallen out of the hand or the pocket on to the street? There’s one there, just to the side of Else’s foot. Who needs one pence? Fucking nobody who is anybody. That’s quite funny, the idea of fucking a nobody, just a space there where a body might be, and yourself flailing backwards and forwards against the thin air.

If she leans forward she’ll be able to reach that one pence piece without having to get up.

She leans forward. It hurts to lean.

She stops trying. She’ll pick it up when she moves on. She is

(Spr sm chn?)

sitting near a grating through which some warmth rises. This is a good place here outside the hotel, and it’s hers, if she tucks into the wall alcove near the main door, good and decorous enough, far enough along from it to be left alone by the staff. She looks up. The sky is the ceiling. It closes in, dark early. On the highest ledge of the building
opposite, the starlings have gathered and are settling and unsettling with flurries and jousts of their feet and beaks. Starlings’ eggs: pale blue colour. They build nests with grass and feathers, sometimes with bits of litter, in trees or eaves or holes in stonework. They are real city birds. Their chests are punctured with stars. They swarm and turn in one grand gesture in the sky at dusk.

Dusk has already happened; the street between the buildings is lit by streetlights and the lights from the hotel front, the shop lights and the lights on passing cars. Else’s neck hurts from looking up for so long. She drops her gaze down the side of the building. Yes. That girl is back, sitting on the steps of the World Of Carpets showroom. Yes, it’s her. She’s making it a habit. Everybody knows this is Else’s patch. But that girl acts like she doesn’t. She’s got her hood up, but it’s definitely her in there.

Else watches the girl. The girl watches something off to the side of Else. Else stops watching. Someone is passing, and is acting like she’s noticed Else but decided to ignore her; most people don’t see Else there at all, so it’s a reasonable bet with one like this that if Else asks, she’ll get.

(Cn y spr sm chn? Thnk y.)

Two ten pence pieces.

Put a ten pence piece in your mouth and bite down and if your teeth are soft they’ll break on it. Which metal is harder, silver or copper? It is not real silver. It is an alloy. She will look it up in the encyclopedia in the library next time it rains, if the library is open. She has looked it up
once already, but has forgotten. She is pretty sure it’ll be the ten that’s harder; it stands to reason. One time, she and Ade filled their mouths with as much as they could. He could get a lot more into his than she could; he had a bigger mouth, ha ha. It bulged his face out like a hamster; she could see the shapes of the edges of the coins pushing against his beard. It gives you a heavy head, money, if you fill your mouth with it.

It makes her laugh to think about. Laughing hurts. The money had been covered in saliva in their hands; he spat his into her hands, it came out like a kind of shining sick. You can have it, he said, you need it more than me. Jesus, they must have been drunk or out of it or something; they knew the dirt there is on money and they still put it all into their mouths. The taste was metal. After that when Ade had kissed her he tasted of metal too. He passed a ten pence piece into her mouth, in past her teeth and off his tongue, flat on to her tongue like a communion wafer, she held it on her tongue like it would melt, then opened her mouth and took it out. The date on it was 1992. God. They’d kissed all

(Spr sm chn?)

the different sizes of coin they had on them, back and fore, like a game, to see what each felt like.

Else tries to remember.

She can remember the taste of the kiss more clearly, even, than she can really remember Ade, what he looked like, his face. A whole time can reduce down to a single taste, a moment. A whole person down to the skelf of a
self. Sometimes now she rubs a coin on her jumper and puts it in her mouth; silver tastes cleaner than copper. Copper tastes like meat gone off. The edging on a penny and a two is smooth; the edging on a five or a ten is cut with little grooves; though they’re small they feel big to the tip of a tongue. The tongue-tip is sensitive. The weight of a pound is actually surprising. Else remembers being quite surprised. Nemo me impune lacessit. That’s the promise of it. That’s what the tip of the tongue can trace round the edge of heavy money.

The taste of it is always on her fingers, always lurking at the back of her throat. Or maybe the taste of money, or love, is just the same taste as the taste of catarrh.

Else looks up, across the road. That girl over there has her hood up today and people will be giving her less money because they can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl she is. With her hood down she’d make a lot more. Though she’s not doing badly. She’s definitely doing better than Else. But with her hood down, well, she’d do a lot better. Else ought to go over there and tell her. She’s got no idea. Ten past four she got here. She looks fourteen, maybe fifteen at the most; she’s got school written all over her. She’s got

(Spr sm chn?)

good schoolgirl all over her face. Her hair is too bright and well, below that hood. She doesn’t look hard up. Her clothes change. She has more than one coat. She looks like a runaway, but a brand-new, just-arrived-today one. So she gets money easily, of course she does, she looks like the stupefied baby animals looked on the front of the kind
of chocolate box that you used to be able to get years ago, if you compared them to a real cat or a dog. The only thing about her is that she looks miserable, she looks greyed. She’s the colour of ice that’s been smashed in over a puddle. Else feels quite sorry for her.

But it’s not like that girl wants the money anyway. She doesn’t even see them drop the money in front of her. Every time she’s there it’s the same; she makes a fortune she doesn’t even seem to want in no fucking time at all. Else remembers what it was like to be that age and not to care. It makes them give you more, the people going past, so they’ll matter to you. Some people even offer that girl notes. Else has seen this. They drop to their haunches in front of her and talk, shaking their heads seriously, nodding seriously, and the look on the girl’s face is like someone’s face would be if, if, Else can’t think what. Yes, if that girl woke up and got out of her bed and went downstairs and out on to the street

(Spr sm chn? Thnks.)

and found that for some reason everybody else on the street, in the whole city, was speaking something she couldn’t, like Norwegian, or Polish, or some language she didn’t even know was a language.

People go past. They don’t see Else, or decide not to. Else watches them. They hold mobile phones to their ears and it is as if they are holding the sides of their faces and heads in a new kind of agony. The ones with the new headset kind of mobile phone look like insane people, as if they’re walking along talking to themselves in a world
of their own. It makes Else laugh, and it’s sore, to laugh. The sky is the ceiling, the buildings are the walls; she has the hotel wall behind her back now, holding her up. Inside her, another wall holding her upright, it goes from her abdomen to her throat and it’s made of phlegm, and occasionally, when she can’t not cough, when she has to cough, can’t stop herself, the wall crumbles. She imagines it breaking like rotten cement. But it has its uses. It keeps her upright. It’s holding her up just as much as the hotel wall is.

She imagines where her heart is, the muscles and the blood round her ribs and lungs. She imagines her lungs creaking and hissing, snarled up in blood and muscle like bad telephone lines, already outmoded anyway, and as if someone was trying to wire-up some place that just couldn’t be wired up. Like if someone arrived carrying the telephone wires all waiting to be connected up, got out of his van and found himself standing outside some fucking great castle wall with thin slits in it instead of windows, and it was in the fifteenth century and there was no such thing as electricity.

(Spr sm chn?)

Think of him, Telephone Man, standing like something over-evolved out of Darwin, post-Neanderthal in his overalls with his wires in coils on his arms and his van full of great rolls of wire behind him and there he is scratching his head like a monkey because there’s no metal grate in the ground he can lift to do the job, and a lady in a wimple peeking out at him through the slit like
he’s a martian come in a spaceship because it’s the fifteenth century and there’s no such things as vans. Think of their faces. Laughing makes her cough. Coughing sends – Christ, yes, she thinks as she coughs – a sheaf of fifteenth-century arrows through her chest with all their little flinty hooks and notchy metal edges, and that’s just a small cough, a choked-back cough, because a real cough, she thinks daring herself, taking inch-large breaths, recovering, would shake the foundations and send a whole slab of fortress wall into the moat. A real cough, she resets the muscles in her arms and shoulders, shakes her head, is like the whole fucking National Trust ancient fucking property breaking up into nothing but rubble.

Else is going to have to stop thinking. She’s going to have to stop using her

(Spr sm. Chn.)

imagination. She daren’t laugh again; she daren’t cough again. Who knows what she’ll cough up? Something the size of a baby fucking pig, by the feel of it, covered in fucking pigbristle. Fuck. Cunting fucking. It coughs out of her, satisfying and sore. Laughing makes her cough. Breathing makes her cough. So presumably actual fucking would make her actually haemorrhage. Moving makes her cough; just her shoulders, her head. Else daren’t move, not just yet.

When she does decide to get up, this is what she’ll do. She will go across the road to that girl, like she’s done the last twice, and pick up the money they’ve been dropping at her feet. That’s how they’ve decided to play it, her and
the girl, and that’s how they will play it. First Else gets to her feet. Then she crosses the road. Then the girl sees her coming and runs away. Then Else picks up the money. It’s fair. It’s her right. Everyone knows the hotel is Else’s. But she has to be careful how she plays it. She has to judge it right. If she gets up too soon she could chase the girl away too soon and miss out on potential money. If she doesn’t get up the girl might up and go herself, and what if she took it all with her for once? what if she decided for once that she wanted it? Else steadies her breath. It’ll be fine. In a while the home rush will start, a short while after that the home rush will be over; that girl could make who knows how much more in that time. Else will wait. She’ll sit quietly and wait, because there could be ten or fifteen quid extra in it, say,