Hotel World

I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust.

Because now that I’m nearly gone, I’m more here than I ever was. Now that I’m nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I’m silent forever, haha, it’s all words words words with me. Now that I can’t just reach out and touch, it’s all I want, is to.

The hands of my watch were stuck at ten to two, though that wasn’t the right time. I took it off my wrist and put it on the counter and the girl behind the counter picked it up to examine it. She held it in her hands. Her hands were serious. I looked to see by her face what it was going to cost me, and when I did, when I saw her brow furrow as she thumbed and turned and shook my watch, when I saw the moment of concentration pass across her face as she held its face in her hands, I couldn’t help it. I fell. She sells watches, all different kinds, and watch straps, and watch batteries. She sends people’s watches away to have their insides cleaned out so they’ll work again.

What you looking at? she said. I had been looking. I had been gazing, without even realizing, at the shape of her body, at her stomach and the place where her pants covered her, and I had been thinking about what the girl in the watch shop’s body would look like if it didn’t have any clothes on it. It was the first time I had ever, ever thought such a thing, about anyone, and I felt shame in my gut and spreading all up and down my body. Nothing, I said. Well don’t, fucking weirdo, my sister said and turned her back on me to pull her pyjama top on over her head before she unclipped her bra. When she turned round again she wouldn’t look at me, but her face was red, like she was ashamed too. She got into her bed and snapped the light off and we were in the dark.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

& since she was fast since she was so incredibly fast I bet she’d be pleased I’m sure she’d be pleased how fast I like to think she is light as air lighter than it now like those pictures they take of car headlights in cities where the cars are going too fast to leave anything of themselves but their lights as they go so fast past the camera it is like that with her I am sure I think she could go round town all day & all night if she wanted at a really amazing stream of light & speed over the tops of the buildings she could even dive out of the high windows of that hotel she would just float she wouldn’t fall she wouldn’t have to because now she can tread air too not just water like people who are only alive well that’s what I think anyhow

& since in the end when you went & you went with legs & arms all I know I know upside down stuck in I know & then it was all over all of it the broken tops of all the waters over & done with still listen Sara even though you couldn’t even though you couldn’t move couldn’t do anything about it listen to me you were fast you were really really fast I know because I went there to see tonight I was there & you were so fast I still can’t believe how fast you were less than four seconds just under four three & a bit that’s all you took I know I counted for you

The girl who works in the watch shop has never done this with anyone else’s watch. She is surprised at herself. S. Wilby stood outside the shop, for days, shy and slight, undemanding, intriguing, looking down at her feet all the time. She had pretended not to notice S. Wilby. She doesn’t know why she did that. It seemed the thing to do. She wasn’t ready. The timing was wrong. It was embarrassing. It’s embarrassing now, when she thinks about it, and when she does she can feel small wings moving against the inside of her chest, or something in there anyway, turning, tightened, working.