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.

Superior place leaving nothing to be desired, she said to the empty room round her. The room responded by closing in on her. Its walls loomed down, its ceiling lowered like the threat of bad sky.

The bathwater had been lukewarm. Penny had called down to complain. In any case the water that came out of the taps had looked rusted, was yellow-coloured; the ceiling needed redone in the room; everything had pretended luxury and been slightly shabby. There were unidentifiable scrape marks on the wall nearest the door; there had been a buzzing noise on the room’s TV on the tuning of Channel 4; the carpets had been more worn than they at first seemed; the pencils, pens, stationery had been of reasonable quality only; the shampoo had been watered down; the complimentary tea and coffee brands had been unimpressive.

This was much better. This was excellent, Penny thought as she pushed through the fire doors and skipped down the stairs. Penny had been spending another dreary night working on another publicity job in another hotel when all of a sudden quite by chance she had become a cog in the mechanism of something really happening. And if I help that girl, Penny thought as she skipped from stair to stair, that girl will always remember me as the nice person who helped her the night she was, was, doing whatever it is she’s doing. And I will always remember it too, and look back on it many years from now as that night I helped the remarkable teenage chambermaid take the screws out of the wall in that hotel.

From over by the lift doors she called to the girl, crosslegged and weeping, leaning against the disfigured wall. The hollow socket of it sagged open above the girl’s head.

Someone’s on their way up, Penny said in a cheery voice. Won’t be long now.

At the bottom of the shaft, colourless in the dark, there was a shoe and a crumpled uniform, both still warm, both going cold. There were three or four coins, maybe more. There was a broken clock. Its plastic shell was shattered and its face was in bits.

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.