Hotel World (2 page)

hooooo I am today. What a fuck, for always, for ever and ever world-without-end with an end after all, amen. I’d do it again and again. I go every night since I fell last summer (my last) up to the top floor, and though the lift is gone now, to God knows where, removed out of something akin to good taste (notorious, a tragedy, not-spoken-about, a shadow-story, my dying got into the papers one day and blew away the next, a hotel has to make a living), the shaft is still there suspended behind the stairwell with its grave promise from up all the way to down, and I throw myself over and it’s all I can do, hover in the hollow, settle to the ground like boring snow. Or if I launch myself in, make the special effort to fly down fast to hit the stone, I go straight through it as if the stone is water, or I’m a hot blade and the stone is butter. I can make no dent in anything. I have nothing left to break.

Imagine diving into water, water breaking round your shoulders to make room for you in it. Imagine hot or cold. Imagine cold butter disappearing into heated-up bread, gold on its surface, going. There is a word for heated-up bread. I know it. I knew it. No, it’s gone.

Here’s the story. When I hit the basement whoo I was broke apart, flaked away off the top of me like the points of flame flake off the top of a fire. I went to the funeral to see who I’d been. It was a bit gloomy. It was a cold day in June; the people had coats on. Actually it is very nice, where they buried her. Birds sing in its trees, and the sound of far-away traffic; I could hear the full range of sounds then. Now the birds are far away, and there is almost no traffic noise. I visit quite often. It’s winter now. They’ve put up a stone with her name and her dates and an oval photograph on it. It hasn’t faded yet. It will, in time; it gets the late afternoon sun. Other stones have this too, the same kind of photograph, and the rain gets in and as the seasons move round the stones, heating them up and cooling them down, condensation comes and goes inside the glass over the pictures. That small boy with the school cap on, way across the moundy grass; that elderly lady, beloved wife; that young man in his best suit twenty-five years out of fashion; all still breathing behind their glass. I hope ours will do that breathing thing too. Hers.

Under the ground, in the cold, in the rich small smells of soil and wood and dampening varnish, so many exciting things are happening to her now. Maybe the earnest ticklish mouths of worms; anything. We were a girl, we
died young; the opposite of old, we died it. We had a name and nineteen summers; it says as much on the stone. Hers/mine. She/I. Knock knock. Wooo-

hoooo’s there? Me. You wooo-

hoooo? You-hoo yourself. Someone has cut the photograph of her so it will fit in. I can see the tremor of careful scissors round the edge of her head. A girl’s head, dark hair to the shoulders. Closed and smiling mouth. Bright and shy, the things she saw with. They once were greenish blue. The head in the glass oval is the same one in the frames in the different rooms of the house, one in the front room, one in the parents’ room, one in the hall. I chose the saddest people and I followed them to see where we’d lived. They seemed vaguely familiar. They sat at the front in the church. I couldn’t be sure. I had to guess. I thought they were ours, the people, and I was right. After the funeral we went home. The house is small; it has no upstairs, no place for a good fall. A chair in that house can take up almost one whole wall. A couch and two chairs fill a room so there is hardly any place for the legs of the people sitting.

A dog was barking at me two houses away. A cat shivered through me where her ankles had been, rubbing up against air. More funeral people came and the house got even smaller. I watched them take tea in the lack of space she’d lived in. I went to her room. It was full of two beds. I hovered above a bed. I came back through. I hovered above the sad. I hovered above the television. I hovered above the hoover.

They ate the salmon, the salad and the little sandwiches and they left, shaking hands with the man at the door, the father. They were relieved to be leaving. The blackness dispersed above the heads of most of them when they reached the garden gate and clicked it behind them. I went back inside the house to examine the left people. There were three. The woman was the saddest. She sat in a chair and the unspoken words which hung round her head said: although this is my home where I have lived for twenty-two years, and in it I am surrounded by family and familiar things, I do not rightly know any more where it is that I am in the world. The man made tea and cleared dishes. All afternoon while tea was being drunk or was skinning over he collected up cups on a tray and went through to the kitchen, filled a kettle and made more tea, brought cups back again full of it. In the kitchen he stood, opened a cupboard door, took nothing out of the cupboard, shut the door again. The still-alive child was a girl, another one. She had a fracture of anger starting under her yellow hairline, crossing her forehead and running right down the middle of her face, dividing her chin, her neck, her chest, all the way to her abdomen where it snarled itself into a black knot. This knot only just held the two halves of her together. She sat hugging her knees below the framed photograph of the gone girl. In it we were wearing a tie, shy, and holding a trophy in the shape of a swimming body.

There was some salmon left on the plate. I was wondering how it would taste. The man came through,
took it away, scraped it into a plastic bag in the back yard. It was a waste. He could have kept it. They could have eaten it later or tomorrow and it would have tasted as good, better; I wanted him to know. I looked at him sadly, then shyly, then he saw me. He dropped the plastic bag. It rustled down on to the broken flagstones. His mouth opened. No sound came out (I could still hear perfectly then). I waved my swimming trophy at him. He paled. He smiled. He shook his head and looked through me, and then I was gone again and he threw the salmon away. A whole half a side of a fish, and the bones would have been easy to pick out, it was perfectly cooked. It had beautiful pinkness. This was last summer, my (suddenly) last. I could still see the full range of reds then.

So I practised the school photograph which was on top of the television. The face was innocence and tiredness, the age thirteen, a slight squint in the, the. The things she saw with. I honed to perfection the redness in them in another picture, one with other girls, and all the girls in the blur had red lights and mock boldness coming out of their faces and drinks in their hands. I checked to see I was performing the right girl. There she was, hiding at the back. I worked hard at the warmth of her look in the picture on the mantelpiece, the one with her arm round the shoulders of the woman now sitting so lostly in the chair. Her mother.

I could do the self in the oval on the headstone without even trying; it was easy, slight smile but serious; passport photograph for entry to other worlds. But my favourite to
perform was the one with the left-behind sister in it too, a picture the sister kept hidden in her purse and only looked at after her parents were asleep or when she was in a room with a lock. Both of them sat on a couch, but the gone girl was caught in the middle of saying something, looking away from the camera. That one was my masterpiece, the angle of movement, the laughing look, the still more about to be said. That one took effort, to look so effortless.

From summer to autumn I did all that I can. I appeared to the father. I appeared to the mother. I appeared to the sister. The father pretended he couldn’t see. The more he saw, the more he looked away. A wall crept inches higher from his shoulders round his head; every time I came he added a new layer of bricks to the top of it. By autumn the wall was way past the top of his head, swaying, badly bricklayed and dangerously unbalanced, nearly up to the ceiling in the living room where it knocked against the lampshade and sent light and shadow spinning every time he crossed the room.

I came only twice to the mother. It made her cry, made her miserable, jumpy and fearful. It was unpleasant. Both times ended in tears and sleepless weeks. It was kinder not to do it, and so I left her alone.

But the sister drained me with a terrible thirst. I couldn’t appear enough for her. With the trophy, with the red lights coming out of my face, with the passport smile, with the laughing things unsaid. Every face I made drained and disappeared into the fracture that ran the
length of her body. Summer passed, autumn came and she was still dark with thirst; if anything she was thirstier, she wanted more, and the colours were fading. When winter came I stopped. (It has been easier since then, I find, to appear to people who don’t recognize what they see. I looked at the cracked face of the sad girl and knew. In the face of so much meaning it is easier to have no face.)

Above me the birds singing, further and further away. Each day a little further, more muffled, like wool in the ears. (Imagine wool. The rough-thready rub of it.) I sat an inch above the grave on cushy air. It was Saturday afternoon; I was bored with upsetting the family, bored with appearing to random people who didn’t know who we were. The leaves were paling on the trees. The grass, neat and new, was greying for winter, and her underneath the sodden carpet, soil piled and turned for four luxurious feet above her. I looked at the passport in the oval, the face of the shape we had taken together. Down through the soil she slept. She couldn’t come up. But I could go down. Down through loam and the laid eggs of many-legged creatures, and the termites, the burrowing feasty maggots, all waiting for it to break them open, the season after winter, I forget the word for it, the season when the flowers will push their heads regardless out again.

Down I went far further than stupefied bulbs till I passed through the lid of the wooden room, smooth and costly on the outside, chipboard-cheap at the centre. One
last time I slipped into our old shape, hoisting her shoulders round me and pushing down into her legs and arms and through her splintery ribs, but the fitting was ill, she was broken and rotting, so I lay half-in, half-out of her under the ruched frills of the room’s innards, cold I reckon, and useless pink in the dark.

The things she saw with had blackened. Her mouth was glued shut. Hello, she said through the glue. You again. What are you after?

How are you? I said. Sleep well?

(She heard me!) Fine till now, she said. Well? What? This had better be good.

I just want something, I whispered, to take to the surface. Just the one something. It’s Saturday. Did you know? Your sister planted crocuses above your head last week, did you know?

Who? she said. What? Fuck off. Leave me alone. I’m dead, for God’s sake.

I need to know something, I said. Can you remember the fall? Can you remember how long it took us? Can you remember what happened before it? Please.

Silence. (But I knew she could hear me.)

I won’t leave, I said, until you tell me. I won’t go till I get it.

Silence. So I waited. I lay there for days in the box room with her. I irritated her as a matter of course. I played with her stitches. I slipped in and out of her. I went in one ear and out the other. I sang songs from West End musicals (oh what a beautiful morning; all I want is a
room somewhere / far away from the cold night air; cheerio but be back soon; sue me, sue me / shoot bullets through me / I love you), I sang them into the back of her skull till complaints rolling around from the neighbouring graves made me stop. Then I stuck her fingers up her plugged nose instead, tweaked her earlobes.

I missed three whole rise and falls of the sun (precious enough days to me if not her, lying now with her pockets full of soil and a dusting of soil over her so snug and safe in her shaft of days and nights that go on and on and on end-stopped by no base basement) before at last she said unblinkingly:

All right, all right. I’ll tell you. If you promise to go away and leave me in peace.

Okay, I will, it’s a deal, I said.

You swear? she said.

On your mother’s life, I said.

Oh Christ. My mother. Ground rule number one. No reminding me, she said. And number two. Only the fall; no more, nothing else.

Okay, I said. That’s all I want.

How much do you know? she said through teeth clamped tight. How far back do I have to go?

Well, I know about taking the dishes out of the little room, I said. I know about being careful. I remember curling into the room, tucking our legs in like someone not yet born, but I can’t remember why. And I remember the fall, wooo-

hooooo you bet I do.

I kicked our legs against the thin-wood walls. I could feel she disapproved. With the sigh of one dead she said:

It wasn’t a room. It was too small for a room. It was a dumb waiter, remember? –

(That’s the name, the name for it;
that’s
it; dumb waiter dumb waiter dumb waiter.)

– and here’s the story, since you’re so desperate for one. Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it’s too late.

Too late? Too late for what? I said.

No interrupting, she said. It’s my story, this is it: are you listening? I fell in love. I fell pretty hard. It caught me out. It made me happy, then it made me miserable. What to do? I had expected all my life to fall for some boy, or some man or other, and I had been waiting and watching for him. Then one day my watch stopped. I thought maybe I’d got water in it and I took it to that watch shop across from the market. You know the one?

No, but I’ll find it, I said.

Good, she said. 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. She stands there surrounded by watches in cabinets, watches in cases, watches all up and down the walls, I had no idea there were so many different kinds of watch you could choose from, and all of them stopped, with their hands pointing to different, possible, times of the day. The only working watch in the shop that morning was on her arm, ticking into the warm underside of her wrist. She opened the back of my dead watch and checked the battery. Sekonda.