Hotel World

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.

Well. I am a nice person.

It was some time in the future. Lise was lying in bed. That was practically all the story there was.

In a minute she would sit up. Then after she had recovered from sitting up she would try to find the pencil in the folds of the bedclothes, and then she would write the words on the form.

After this she would cross out the word nice, and write above it the word sick.

I am a sick person.

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.

What is happening to you, Deirdre told Lise in all seriousness, three weeks into her bedrest on the first of Deirdre’s happier days as she knelt by the side of the bed and brought her face as close to Lise’s as she could without her eyes losing their ability to focus, is visionary and poetic. It is like William Dunbar’s poem, you remember? Man blown about like a willow tree is blown by the wind? This false warld is bot transitory? Remember? It is revelatory, to be sick like you are. It is a mystic state. Something comes of fevers in this world, girl of mine; prophets had fevers and visions; something will come of it. It’s an ill wind, Lise, an ill wind, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Global Hotels made it compulsory for members of staff from this branch to attend Sara Wilby’s funeral. After the funeral a joke went round the hotel staff combining the Doris Day song ‘Que Sera Sera’ and the dead girl’s name. Lise can’t remember the wording of it now but she remembers it was a relief to pass it between themselves, illicitly like a spliff, as they all did at work in the weeks after the funeral in the hotel kitchens, in the hotel storerooms, and walking back and fore in front of the door of the boarded-up basement.

Lise’s mother opened the door; it creaked again. But Lise hadn’t woken. Quiet she crossed the carpet to plug the telephone lead into the wall-socket; quiet she sat down on the carpet, leaned against the wall and watched her daughter, the fearless child Lise, the imperturbable twelve-year-old, unreadable sixteen-year-old, unruffleable girl, impenetrable adult, Lise. Lise lay in the bed. She was pale, crumpled, frowning, dark, sleeping. She breathed unevenly.

Everything in Lise’s mother’s body hurt, because it hurt just to be near her daughter. Lines were edging themselves into her face as she looked at her.