Hotel World (13 page)

Classic Ideal Flawless, the computer screen said.

She flicked channels. This hotel TV had a decrypted porn channel, maybe left over from the last guest. Two girls with waggling apparatuses strapped to them were taking turns at each other while a man in leather underpants encouraged them by slapping their bottoms and grunting. Penny watched. Her mouth fell slowly open. She screwed up her eyes. As if it knew she was watching it, as if it had been waiting for her to, the channel crypted over.

Damn, Penny said.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFlawless, the computer screen said.

Penny laughed. She deleted the extra Fs. Words appeared on the TV screen telling Penny to type in some numbers on the remote control to buy the channel back. Penny got up off the bed and looked at the piece of card that hotels put round their remote control sets, but she couldn’t find the pay-per-view digits written on it. She looked under the television, which was silent now, its screen blank. She looked all round the desk and in the drawers. She thumbed through the information booklets about the local restaurants and the local theatre. She climbed back on to the bed, sat crosslegged again in front of the laptop and tried punching random numbers into the remote. 3554. 8971. 1234. 4321. She leaned over and picked up the phone and dialled 1 for Reception. But there was no answer, and when she turned to put the receiver back in its cradle she pressed the channel-forward button on the remote with one of her knees by mistake.

A sharp-suited man in a TV studio was telling something to a man in a sweater, who was standing up in an audience of what looked like old and out-of-work people.

But she’s there, right there, the man in the suit said. I’m telling you, there, yes, there, he said into the microphone. She’s slightly to the left of you, at your shoulder. Who is she? Is she your mother?

Penny lit a cigarette. She blew smoke out; it disappeared above her head.

My mother’s not dead, the other man said. This is my mother here. He gestured to someone sitting beside him in the audience and the camera found her face; it was lined and befuddled, lit up by the sudden camera light so that it looked visited, divine.

Immaculate, Penny thought. Immaculate, she typed.

The audience on the TV was laughing. The man in the suit had suddenly put his hands up over his ears. Whoever she is, she’s really yelling now, he said. Who is she? She’s yelling loud enough to wake the living.

The audience laughed again.

I have an aunt that’s dead, the man in the sweater said. It might be her.

Do you know what she’s yelling now? She’s yelling,
I’m
not dead, the suited man said. He put on a high voice.
I’m
not dead, he said. Don’t call
me
dead!
I’m
not dead!

That’s her, that’s my Aunt Alice, the man in the sweater said. That’s definitely her. That’s uncanny. That’s just what she was like.

Penny pressed the off button; the signal crossed the room invisible; the TV shut down. She sucked the end of the cigarette, blew smoke out in a sigh. All the people who have ever died, still here; ranging and loping over the earth and all its countries, bobbing about in steerage crowds wider than the seas themselves, or standing in bulky lines jammed all over the world like nose-to-tail cars on three-lane motorways into London and packing the cities, towns, shops, offices, rooms, even maybe this
hotel room, standing behind their invisible wall and beating it with their fists and all of them soundlessly shouting it,
We’re
not dead! Don’t call
us
dead!

Uch, Penny heard herself say, and tried to shake it out of her head, but she couldn’t stop the thought which expanded all by itself to include dinosaurs that had been reduced to the imprints of their own vertebrae in rocks and slate, and woolly mammoths as big as houses matted and frozen deep in Russian ice deserts, and lions and tigers shot and skinned, and the beheaded stags she’d seen in drawing rooms and restaurants, the dead pheasants that had hung in her father’s outhouses rotting for better taste. Then the horses and dogs and cats she had known (and her heart contracted, she couldn’t help it, at the thought of their gone warm muzzles, the thought of their hoofs and clawy paws, the unique furred sides of them and the lit liquid of their eyes, the horses bumping around in the grounds of the house, the dogs jumping and rolling and yelping hello, the cats with their tails in the air, vanishing ahead of her along the polished corridors and up and down the main and the back stairs). Not just these, she told herself, to push the thought on and away from what it was making her feel about animals dead and gone years ago. Zoo animals too, she thought blankly, species after species from aardvark all the way to zebra. And what if all the chickens and their eggs, and cows and their calves, and the different kinds of fish, and the pigs and sheep and lambs, all the hundreds of creatures that she herself – just her, nobody else – had eaten over this
half-lifetime she’d had, were waiting there too, and the ghostly chirruping above them of all the birds which had ever flown across her range of vision, momentary visitors to it. All the mice she had ever seen garotted in traps and all the rats and foxes poisoned, dead on their sides with their tongues hung out. The one-day-long butterflies, and the moths she’d watched charring themselves on light-bulbs, and bluebottles swatted, yellow and burst. All the small fruitflies which had grazed her life on their uneven flightpaths, the tiny hardbacked beetles which lived in the roof beams and which she sometimes found in her bed and crushed between her finger and thumb, even the airborne germs that lived and died and passed in their invisible billions through just her system alone. All of them, all of them, all of them, battering the wall she couldn’t see with invisible fists and paws and hoofs and antennae and amoebic thready stem-things, yawling and hooing in all their mute languages, barking and squawking it, snorting and mewing it, mooing and braying and squealing and squeaking and humming and hissing it, Hey, you!
We’re
not dead! Don’t call
us
dead!

What an infernal noise, Penny thought, blinking. What a terrible endless noise. It’s just as well we aren’t actually able to hear it. Remember you must die. Remember you must diet. Penny laughed out loud, got her pen out and made a note of it. But with the TV off and the sound of her own laugh fading she could hear too much silence now, and round behind the silence the anonymous shiftings of people in this dreary building who had no idea
who she was or that she was even there, and the anonymous streetlit scufflings of this dreary one-theatre late-evening town beyond the hotel in the high view from her window.

She made herself listen instead to the workings of her finger at the keys on the keyboard in front of her on the bed as she picked out the right letters for the right words.

Superior, she heard herself type.

Transcendent.

She thought for a moment, holding her chin.

Leaving nothing to be desired, she typed under the other words. Oh, that’s good, she heard herself say out loud. It leaves nothing to be desired. It left nothing to be desired. If you’re on the hunt for somewhere which leaves nothing to be desired. If you’re looking for the classic place, the ideal place, the flawless place, the immaculate, no. Superior place. Transcendent, no.

She deleted transcendent and immaculate.

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.

Penny sat back on the bed. The bed creaked.

That too, Penny thought. The bed had creaked.

(She thought it just like that, as if telling somebody about it afterwards, even though she was still actually there in the room, thinking it.)

She lay back. Hotels were such a sham. She was bored out of her mind.

She had been bored out of her mind there.

With one foot she inched the computer across the bed away from herself. Then further, further, further again until it was poised half-tipping half-balancing, right on the edge of the bed. With one hard shove she kicked it off. It fell on the floor.

She laughed.

Then it crossed her mind that it might be broken. She frowned.

Damn, she said.

But if it was broken, it might make a good story. Such as: that was the hotel I was going up to stay at when my new Powerbook got broken. Wait till I tell you how. Well. Now. It’s a rough old town up there, though it seems genteel enough, the architecture and so forth. It’s not that their council doesn’t put a lot of money and effort into arts and things, the whole town’s full of sculptures and
murals, you walk through the pedestrianized area and you keep literally bumping into civic art. But, to be brutally honest, I can’t say it’s made any difference whatsoever.

(To whom? What? What happened, Penny? The sound of laying-down of cutlery, the slight clink of held and lifted glasses, the gathering hush of, gorgeous impatience of, satisfied throat-clearings of after-dinner listening.)

First they took my suitcase.

(They
what
? Who? Who took it?)

One of them, standing right here, as close to me as you are now, was actually rifling through my bag, All my cards were in it. Everything was in it, everything I need for my whole life.

(Penny, weren’t you terrified?)

I was, completely terrified.

(How many of them were there, Penny?)

There were five. I think. But I can’t really remember, it’s all a bit of a blank. Anyway there wasn’t another soul on the street. No cars going past, no taxis, nobody. Nothing. My worst nightmare. Honestly I can’t believe what I did next.

(What? What? What did you do?)

Because my throat was dry as sand. But suddenly I heard myself say to the ringleader, this huge brute of about, I don’t know, eighteen –

(Laughter.)

No, listen, listen. This is what I said, I said: If you touch me. If any of you so much as lays a
finger
on me, or on anything that’s mine. And if you don’t tell these thugs
of yours to put my things down at once. Believe me I will bring the full weight of the law down on your head so fast that you won’t know what hit you. And it’ll feel like
this
.

And then I did it.

(Did it? Did what? What, Penny, what did you do?)

I hit the thug nearest to me over the head with my Powerbook.

(What? What? You did what? Laughter, incredulous female and male in-breaths.)

I really did – I hit him with the Powerbook. They’re quite heavy. I can hardly believe it myself, still. You know me. I’m incapable of violence of any kind. I mean, I can’t hit a fly. But there I was, and there it is. I hit him so hard that he fell down, he kind of crumpled on to his knees. And the rest of them, they took one look at him on the ground and they ran, they actually ran, they put my bag and my case down, dropped my purse on the concrete, and they all ran off and left me just standing there on the street. I mean, I had a lucky escape. Nothing was taken. And my bag was fine. My case was fine. But of course when I tried to use the Powerbook it was broken. Thousands of pounds. The weight of thousands of pounds of technology. I’d broken it over the head of a seventeen-year-old thug.

(Laughter, someone saying
knockout
, applause, congratulations, appreciative coughing.)

That was quite good, Penny thought on the bed. It wasn’t flawless, but it was quite classic. It wasn’t transcendent, but it would do.

(But what about the boy? one of the voices in her head interrupted as glasses clinked again and the cigarette smoke swathed itself above the table. Was he dead? Did he get up and run too? Was he left lying at your feet?)

Penny mulled over it to see which she preferred. Herself heroic and shocked and alone on a rainy street with her bags round her feet, the footsteps dying away into the rough rainy northern town. Or herself heroic and shocked and not alone at all, standing with a felled (and possibly rather pleasing-looking) boy curled and bleeding on the pedestrian walkway behind her, her sharp heels close to his eyes; then a hospital, or police, or a taxi, or his parents’ house, keeping in touch afterwards, whatever, something like that. That was an adventure. That –. That was –. That could have been –.

It didn’t matter what it could have been; she was finished with that story because she had leaned over and dragged the computer up on to the bed by its handle, opened it, pressed its start-up button, and it had started duly up, sprung back to life, it wasn’t in the least bit broken.

But she’d lost the words she’d been typing. She hadn’t saved anything. They were completely gone. Damn. She would have to start again. Fucking damning buggering shagging fuck. She hit the machine with her hand, as if the machine had been insolent to her. It rocked on the bedcovers.

Superior, she thought. She opened a new file and typed it in. Superior, yes. But she couldn’t remember the others.

She could hear someone moving about and knocking on doors in the corridor outside her room.

It might be good to get out of this foul room. It might be that all she needed was outside stimulus. Someone outside this room might know another word for superior.

She rolled off the bed and opened the door.