Hotel World (7 page)

Now again. The woman in the hotel uniform is saying something but Else is dizzy and can’t hear properly. She
looks at the woman’s shoes. They are recent and fashionable; they have thick soles of the kind of moulded plastic that looks industrial and prehistoric at the same time.

The woman gets up. She stops, stoops down again and picks up something. Here, she says to Else, holding out her hand.

In her thumb and forefinger is the one pence piece Else couldn’t reach earlier.

Else nods, takes it.

Yours, the woman says. The one that got away. Nearly.

The woman straightens her back, and goes. She stands at the kerb again for a moment surveying the street, up then down.

Bye, she says over her shoulder to Else.

She walks back along the road and up the steps and disappears through the hotel doors. Their revolving glass flashes, dark then light then dark then light. Else holds the penny above the small pile of change by her knee. She drops it. It makes a single small clink when it hits the other coins.

Someone goes past, loaded with shopping.

(Sp sm chn?)

Nothing doing. Nobody else about. Else covers her money with the edge of her blanket. She pulls one foot out from under her, slow. Then the other, slow. She has to stop to cough. She tries to cough quietly, because they can hear her in the hotel. She gets to her feet by pushing against the hotel wall behind her. She is dizzy; she spits. It is always like this when she stands up after sitting. She gets her
breath back and waits for the traffic to thin, then she sets out. The kerb; remember to step down. One step, then the next, then the next, then the next, then the next; halfway there. A car; wait. Another car. Now. One step then the next then the next, go on. The kerb; step up.

Else’s heart jolts with delight. She coughs. She laughs. The girl has left the money and the money is still here.

She sinks down on to the step and counts it. Not bad, about thirty-two, thirty-three. Thirty-three quid in so short a time, good going. Ten times as much as Else has made. That girl could have made even more if she’d shown them her face. All the same. All the same. It has been a good day, Else thinks, one filled with luck, so far at least.

From over this side of the road you can’t not see the hotel. It’s like the street exists just for the hotel to be there in it. It sits squarely before her like a huge obedient dog. It is lit up from outside; up-lights spaced all along its front make it look rich, expensive and strange. Flagpoles jut out of it with no flags on them; flags are only in the summer for the tourists, Else supposes. With its awnings either side of its door, the building has a kind of face. The awnings are the eyelids, the word GLOBAL scarred across them both. As the building goes upwards its windows get smaller. Some of them are lit. None of them is open. Expensive drapes make each of them dramatic. She can see standard lamps standing between curtains. Round the ground floor at the front of the hotel are spike-topped
railings painted white. Else remembers a girl at school who had a scar under her chin from falling on to some railings; a railing had gone right through her chin and mouth and tongue. She had had stitches.

The hotel’s front door, massive in comparison to even the biggest of its windows, has the head of a child or angel or cupid carved above it in the keystone of its arch. The head has a feathered wing coming out of it, just one wing, its feathers spreading all the way round the sides of the face like an elaborate beard. A man once stood there carving that face, slicing lumps out of stone as if stone was cake or bread. The hotel building is quite old-looking. Else wonders how much the man was paid. A lot. Enough. Pennies, then. She wonders where the stone that was removed to make the head and its feathers, and the other curves of carving round the doors and the lower windows, went in the end.

She begins to pick up the left money. Winter-dark, winter-cold, winter-empty town. The streets have emptied. She won’t make any more tonight.

It is starting to rain.

She could move to the pitch outside the video shop if there’s nobody else already there.

The woman from the hotel said it would get colder. It’s already cold enough for Else to be feeling it.

She could go to the winter-shelter.
The rules of the Winter-Shelter are as follows
:

1. This Winter-Shelter is only for the use of people who would otherwise have to sleep rough.
   
2. No drugs or alcohol are permitted on the premises of the Winter-Shelter.
   
3. Customers of the Winter-Shelter are expected to behave appropriately when in the Shelter.
   
4. Customers are requested to behave with respect and consideration to our neighbours on their journeys to and from the Winter-Shelter each day.
   
5. The Winter-Shelter opens at 5 p.m. and closes at 9 p.m. Customers will be asked to vacate the Shelter by 9 a.m. of the following morning.
   

Else doesn’t use the shelter when she can help it. It is a room full of deafening sleep, the coughing, snoring and shouting of dozens of sleeping or out of it people. The multi-storeys (there is a choice of three) are better, quieter, can be warm enough, depending, and you are less likely there to have to talk to anyone or have sex with anyone, depending which security man is on. There is nothing there but the sheen of empty cars and the oil-stained places where cars were and will be. The top decks are reliably quiet after eleven at night until seven in the morning. You can often find money there. It falls out of the pockets or the hands of the people looking for change for the ticket machine. There are lights that stay on all night. There are low walls that cut the wind out. There are good places to lean. There are cameras; it’s safe. Nobody bothers you, depending.

She has a choice.

The flying head on the front of that hotel. What if you could grow feathers out of you like hair? That would be
something, if your head could detach from your body and fly about by itself. Else wonders where her head would go, if she could take it off and hold it in her hands and then fling it up and set it flying, leaving her chest and her stomach and her legs and her waving-goodbye arms, her head soaring by itself up past the huddles of freezing starlings. The sky would open. The roof of it would come off. She would be so careful up there. She would avoid aeroplanes. She would perch on her neck-stem at the very tops of trees, she would land on the spike of the top flagpole (careful not to let the spike pierce through her chin) and she would look down. She would survey the ground. The whole town would be below her.

Down there, over there, she sees her remains; her sleeping bag, her blanket, her day’s takings. Where she sits each day is piled like a mistake, like rubbish, against the edge of the hotel.

She stops the imagining. It will make her go mad.

A taxi stops. Someone gets out and pays through the window, goes up the hotel steps and through the door.

She could stay in the hotel.

Tonight she could stay in a hotel.

That woman who offered her the room in the hotel; it is never as chancy, an offer from a woman, as it is from a man. That’s common sense. Women aren’t as strong, usually, and anyway they’re less likely to give you a hard time, although they’re just as likely to be lying. But she could check it all out. She could make a real noise if it wasn’t okay. There’s bound to be other people in a hotel.
A hotel has a staff who have to clean out rooms, or at least every few days they do. There would always be somebody about, eventually, if she was in any trouble.

No strings. Who knows what it means?

It could mean money.

It could mean something foul.

It could mean something good.

It could even be a disguise, a shorthand, for something that might make her happy.

Or it could mean something she doesn’t know, can’t know yet, something else. Something, Else. And there’s no denying this has been a lucky day, so far. She leans backwards, stretches to touch the doorframe of the carpet showroom. Touch wood. This has been quite a good day. Whatever the game, it might be worth, in the end, her own room with a bed in it for the night.

She drops the girl’s money in handfuls into the pocket of her coat, where it falls down into the lining.

She will cross the road and take the change she’s folded under her blanket and put it in her pocket too. Then she will walk up the road like someone who is going to stay in a hotel. She will pass under the flying head. Now she can’t tell any more whether she’s just imagining it, as she pushes through the revolving door and into the blast of heat and the scent of meats and sauces that the air in a hotel is. Nobody stops her. She is walking on carpet that sinks like gracious mud, past chairs that are as big as she is. Nobody has stopped her yet. The reception desk comes up to her shoulders. The person behind it is on the
telephone. She looks different, more frightening, in the light. She is speaking very loudly, and in an accent that has been clipped into a style. Something is clipping at her words as they come out of her mouth. Else imagines the clipping is being done by pinking-shear blades; narrow strands of irrelevant material stripped back, soft-tooth-edged, off the receptionist’s words, dropped and wavering down to the floor and landing round her feet under the reception desk, like the swathes of speech that come out of the mouths of people in cartoons and holy pictures drawn and painted centuries ago.

The receptionist presses a button, holds the receiver away from herself and turns.

Can I help you? she says.

Then she says, Oh. Oh. Right. Can I, can I help you?

Else clears her throat and swallows.

A room? the woman says. For tonight?

Else nods.

The woman glances over her own shoulder; she looks younger when she does that, and nervous. Then she nods back, one nod.

For the one night, she says very loud. Certainly, madam. If you could just bear with me a moment.

She types something into a computer, then types something else. She presses a button. A bell rings somewhere down a corridor. Else gets ready to make a run for the door. Nothing happens. The woman stands up and reaches behind her for a key.

Else stifles a rising coughing. It will make her chest
burst, but she holds it in. The woman waits, her hands on the counter, till Else is ready. Else sees that she’s wearing a badge with four letters on it. L. I. S. E. She wonders what it’s short for.

Room 12, the woman says. Breakfast in our dining room is included in the price.

When the panic crosses Else’s face the woman shakes her head, just slightly. She goes on reciting. Please don’t hesitate to call down if there’s anything we can do for you. Our bellboy will be glad to show you to your room. We hope you’ll enjoy your stay with us here at the Global Hotel.

She is holding out a key. Else takes it. It is attached to a weight that is several times its size. The weight is bigger than Else’s hand and wrist.

Fck sk, Else says.

A shaft of delight, like sunlight, crosses the receptionist’s face.

First floor, she says smiling.

Else is inside. She is lying in the bath and looking at the taps.

She has looked at the little bottles of shampoo and shower stuff, so like the bright unthreatening colours of children’s medicine that she has already opened one and tasted it on her tongue, as if it might have made her cough better. She has looked at the whiteness of the flannel and the cardboard band round it with the G of
Global
printed on it. Someone in a factory or workshop somewhere has
wrapped up the soap in paper so that to use it you have to unwrap it like it’s a gift. There are cotton wool buds and each one is individually wrapped. The fact that they are individually wrapped has made Else miserable. Now she can’t stop looking at the taps.

These two taps have never been anything but dazzling. Every day someone has come in here and wiped them back to being brand new again. In every silver curve of them, in their long noses and the blunt snubs of their gleaming star-handles, she can see herself in a bath, distorted, pink and smudged, squeezed small and tight into the reflection. She has tried to find it funny. A pigmy. A circus freak. But she looms at herself, small and misshapen.

Water gathers at the underlip of one of the taps, wells into a drip and falls – it can’t not – into the bathwater where it becomes more bathwater. Water runs down Else’s face and down her breasts and does the same. Where it hits the water it becomes the water.

She huddles against the side of the bath and watches the taps and herself huddled in them.

What a coughing she’d had though, a really good one, one of the best; but not till the boy/man in the hotel uniform, who kept his eyes lowered all the way up the staircase and along the carpet of the corridor, had gone and the door was shut and locked behind her, nothing but her and the four walls and the bathroom, a whole other room behind its own door. Left alone in the rooms she’d roared and hacked like a lion. She’d bucked and snapped
herself across the luxurious bed; it had hurt like fuck, like she imagines giving birth must hurt. Giving birth to a cough. Congratulations! Proud parent of snot and gob, twins, she hacks out a laugh. The noise she makes echoes in the bathroom and alarms her. The hot no-air in the bedroom had helped, tickling in her throat like a sick-feather. Then the satisfaction of coughing in a room that there’s no one else in, really letting go into the silence of a place that’s yours, a place where there’s nobody to stare (or to not stare, which is, some days, worse). The pure rising satisfaction of dredging them up, your yellow old insides, and into your mouth and out, hawking them into the toilet water, hearing them spittoon in and watching them sink and flushing them out and away; that was good; that was really good; once the door was locked she had hammered at herself like hammering a rock, and broken it and spat it out, got as much of it up as she could into the clean mouth of the rich people’s toilet and now, lying in the bath, with her clothes on the floor in a sweating pile and the sweat running down her, she is exhausted, still weak, bruised all up her muscles by it, but it was worth it, yes.