Hotel World

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.

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.

Some of the other things policemen and policewomen have said to Else over time: […]

You’ve got a home. Everybody’s got somewhere. Go home now, there’s a good girl. (a man)

Move along now, Else, we can’t have this; you know we can’t. (a woman)

Ever thought of working for a living? The rest of us have to. We can’t all just loaf around like you. (a woman)

(whispered) Now I’m telling you straight and I’ll only tell you once. You want a good raping, and you’re for it. You let me see you in here again and you’ll get it. I mean it. That’s a promise, not a threat. You hear me? Hear me? Eh? (a man, at the station)

Else can see her head and the side of her face, quite close to Else’s own eye; up close in the light from the hotel the surface of the white of the woman’s eye is pitted and unhealthy. Else braces herself. But the woman is not looking at Else at all; instead she is staring out across the road into space. The embroidered badge on the lapel of the uniform says, in browns and greens, GLOBAL HOTELS. Stitched in white on the breast pocket there are small words. The top half of the circle says: all over the world. The bottom half says: we think the world of you. Else looks down hard at the ground. There are little bits of broken glass and grit in the crease where the hotel wall and the pavement meet.

She has been important before now. This is not the first time she has been it, and it is not just people in hotels who are it. There was the journalist last year, or the year before, in the spring, who brought a photographer with her who was photographing the things people on the street have in their pockets. Else emptied her pockets on to the pavement and the man photographed the things. The photograph was for a Sunday paper. The insides of Else’s pocket have maybe been seen by thousands of people. The journalist had written down Else’s name; the people who read the paper would have read that as well as seeing the things in the picture; the word of her name and the photograph of what was hers would have passed through the eyes and into the brains and maybe the memories of what could be millions of people.

Lise wasn’t well.

Well: a word that was bottomless, that went down into depths which well people estimated, for fun, by throwing small coins then leaning with their heads over the mouth of the hole and their hands cocked behind their ears listening for their coin to hit the faraway water so they could make a wish. What could well people find to wish for, having everything already? Unwell: the opposite of well. It ought to be a place where things levelled out, a place of space, of no apparent narrative. Nothing could be possible there. Nothing could happen there, for a while.

For a minute there she thought she’d gone soft. For a minute there, the universe had shifted. But no. Good. As she read out the last two numbers of the cheque, she felt it; crude to put it like this, perhaps, with what had happened outside her door earlier that evening, and what was happening on the hotel television screen right in front of her, right then. But something inside her which had been forced open had sealed up again. Good, she thought again, pleased with herself first for the initial extravagance of her act, and next for being able to, crucially being sensible enough to, put a stop to it. If you were poor, you were poor. You couldn’t handle money. Money was nothing but a problem if you weren’t used to it. It must be a relief, to have none. It was no accident that the words poor and pure were so alike.

WORLD HOTELS

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world if you’re anywhere near a Global Hotel. You could be, literally, anywhere. You could even be home. For work, for relaxation, for the ideal get-away-from-it-all, and for stylish, spacious bedrooms whose unique individual design is just one of the classy hallmarks of the Global Hotel phenomenon, you can’t beat them. They’re good.