Hotel World (8 page)

The hotel room is a collection of stuff, all matching. There is a fridge with drinks and chocolate in it; on the front of it Else read the notice:
Welcome to your Global Minibar. This Minibar is laser-set. Anything removed from the Minibar for more than twenty seconds will automatically register on your Room Account. A list of our Minibar Prices can be found in your Global Information Brochure. Global asks that you please do not store anything of your own in the Minibar, as this will trigger laser reaction.
Global Hotels. All Over The World
. The bed is good. It smells of a kind of cleanness that even shops full of things that haven’t been used by anyone yet don’t smell of. A small folded card on the pillow reads:
Please ring 0 for one of our staff to come and turn down your bed when you are ready to retire.
Global Hotels. We Think The World Of You
. Else wondered when she read it if this is because there are so many covers; that the bed, being so thick with them all, needs two people if you want to pull them back. There is a carpet in the room, and cups with Gs on them; a kettle, a teapot and little packets of coffee and teas. There are several sorts of teas. Else has looked in a drawer. There was a hairdryer.

On the back of the door,
Room Tariff. Global Hotels. All Over The World
. A huge mirror. Else didn’t look. The room has seven different lamps. Else has switched on only one. Hanging in the wardrobe, whiter than a ghost, a dressing gown made of towel. In the bottom of the wardrobe, a piece of stuff with a picture of a pair of shoes on it. A piece of paper. Else read it in the bath.
Valet Service, Name … Room … DRY CLEANING, suit 3 piece £10.50, Suit 2 piece £8.40 Jacket Trousers Overcoat £5.40 each garment Overcoat £10.80 Anorak/jerkin £5.80 Knitwear £3.90 Dress – day £5.00 evening £9.00 Skirt – plain £4.00 pleated £7.00 Silk blouse/shirt £6.00 Tie £3.00 waistcoat £4.90
. The piece of paper is on the floor of the bathroom next to her clothes, wet from her hands from
her reading it in the bath. Else will have to dry it (she can do it with the hairdryer) before she puts it back in the wardrobe.

After the man/boy who had shown her where the room was had closed the door, Else had stood at the side of the room. After a few minutes she sat on the edge of the bed. It is a high bed; her feet were off the floor. She sat on it for a while reading about the things you can eat here tonight. Hamhock terrine pancetta salad taglionne of prawn w. garlic and parmesan venison sausages pommes purée crème brûlée grand marnier and seasonal fruits parfait. Then she had started to cough. Then, when she was finished coughing, she had tried to get the window to open, but it wouldn’t, or she couldn’t. Then she had decided to have a bath. She had taken off her boots, her socks, her jeans, her coat, her top jumper, her next jumper, her shirt, her undershirt and her vest, and carried them through to the bathroom where she could keep an eye on them.

Now she is in the hotel bath, looking at the taps.

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.

She had forgotten about that.

She doesn’t have any of those things any more, that she had in her pockets then.

They’re just taps. They’re just stupid fucking taps. All they can do is do what you make them do. They can’t do anything else. Anything, Else. She reaches forward and turns the handle on the hot tap. She turns it as far as it will go. Water creeps up her sides. When it’s too hot to stay in the water, she gets out, leaving it running, and when the water level comes to the edge of the bath she reaches to pull the plug out. The chain is too hot to touch. She wraps her hand in one of her socks, puts it in the water and yanks the chain up and her hand as fast as possible out of the sock. Almost as fast as water goes out of the bath, water is smashing back into it out of the tap. She sits on her clothes in the steaming bathroom.

She has decided against using the towels; they are too white, folded in their gross wedges on a glass shelf next to the toilet. In the bedroom she dries herself down on her jumper. She drapes the wet jumper over the radiator.

Someone in the next room or the room above is watching TV. Else can hear muted voices changing and muted music crashing into itself and making no sense.
There is rain on the window. She switches the light out. If that girl with the hood whose money she’s got was sitting opposite now, she’d see Else with no clothes on standing in the window.

That’d maybe be worth thirty quid, Else thinks.

There’s nobody at all outside World Of Carpets. There’s almost nobody on the night street. A car passes; its engine is nothing but a swishing noise.

Else realizes the windows of the hotel are thicker than normal windows. They won’t open.

She’s too hot.

She watches another car pass. The lights of cars are always brighter on a wet road. The lit-up words of the World Of Carpets neon sign in the showroom’s window throw colours on to the rainy pavement; orange, red, yellow; sleety rain mashes the colours. She wonders what it would sound like to stand behind the showroom glass, whether the rain can be heard there, whether the cars going past will be louder. She imagines sleeping in the showroom for the night. That would be something. It would be airy and cool in there. You could choose a different pattern of carpet to sleep on every night. You could choose it by the light that the neon sign gives out. You could roll out carpets that nobody has ever set foot on, be the first person in history ever to set your foot on them.

What about her blanket and her bag in the rain? Her stuff will get wet.

She should go down and get it.

She could go down and check whether the showroom has a back door, or a back window. She could go across there now. The rolls of carpet go right up to the ceiling. There’s so much carpet in there.

When her jumper and sock are dry, she’ll go. She’ll get her things, and if there’s no way into the showroom round the back she’ll go to the multi-storey car park on Bank Street.

First, though, she could sit on the bed and count her money. She could pile the coins up, pennies separate from twos, twos separate from fives, fives separate from tens, tens separate from fifties, fifties separate from pounds in a neat sorted line, like an accountant out of a story or novel from a hundred years ago when the counting of pennies mattered so much that whole characters could be devoted to it.

Else sits on the bed naked and holding her coat, its lining heavy with small metal. She lies back. Her head is on firm cushions. There is sweat on her forehead, or bathwater, she can’t tell. She closes her eyes. Inside her head she can still see the things the photographer took the picture of, the things from inside her pockets, arranged on the pavement. Beside them, her name. ELSPETH. She hadn’t given them her second name.

Things from her pockets in the Sunday newspaper photograph
:

The blue plastic clothespeg.

The pencil she found outside the bookies’.

That postcard, though it got folded and creased, that
she’d sent her mother and father when she went to Venice, of a man in a gondola; an old-style postcard, the colours all that fake kind of bright.

Some fusewire, rolled.

The packet of matches.

The teaspoon.

The comb.

The ten pence piece.

The taste of silver, metallic, rheumy.

The tap is still running, full on, in the bathroom. It sounds like heavy rain. In a minute she will open her eyes, get up and go. She pulls her coat up over her. Inside it small change gathers weight, falls about. She tucks her feet in under the coat. Although it’s warm in the room somehow it’s cold too.

Her blood is pulsing. She can feel it. She can see it. She can actually see her blood, moving inside her eyes, in the collision of light and dark. Her irises behind her eyelids bloom open and shut on the beat of its pulse like the speeded-up heads of light-sensitive flowers or the sensitive shutters of cameras.

About
you – continued.

If you need help filling in this form, or any part of it, phone 0800 88 22 00
.

Tell us about yourself
.

Well. I am a nice person.

It was some time in the future. Lise was lying in bed. That was practically all the story there was.

In a minute she would sit up. Then after she had recovered from sitting up she would try to find the pencil in the folds of the bedclothes, and then she would write the words on the form.

After this she would cross out the word nice, and write above it the word sick.

I am a sick person.

That’s what she would do. She would do it. In a minute. How many minutes were there in an hour? That’s something she used to know, to just know, like people just know things. How many hours in a day, and weeks in a year? That was the kind of thing children knew, the kind of thing you were never supposed to forget in a lifetime. But nowadays there were some days on which she couldn’t remember how many months there were
supposed to be in a year. Or which month it was right now.

It was summer, now, so it was one of the summer months, in the middle. She couldn’t be sure which, or which it was of the months that had thirty days, and which had thirty-one, and which had thirty-two. Or even which day of the week it was today. Tomorrow she would (maybe) be able to.

Today, though, something she knew clearly was:

Mazola

Simply corn oil

Mazola

Lets the flavour through

You never taste the oil

You only taste the food

With Mazola.

The voice that was singing the Mazola song inside her head, the same woman’s voice that had sung it years ago in the breaks between programmes, through the volume-holes punched in the side of the television, was friendly, reassuring. Mazola lets the flavour through. The pictures of the oil bottle and then the hands of a lady, delicate and ringed, letting chips fall on to kitchen paper and then shaking them off again, had demonstrated in a moment to millions how ungreasy the chips were, how little oil they left on the paper.

Lise breathed out. Then she breathed in.

Lise was lying in bed, in her room, in her flat, in a block of tenement flats six floors up, behind windows that
looked out on to the walls of other tenements. Above and below her people were going on with lives. They scraped kitchen stools across floors, opened and shut front doors, turned televisions and radios off and on and shouted messages through the walls of rooms to loved ones or people they lived with. Outside, in the world, people still walked about and did things. For example, they went shopping. They could walk into a shop and not feel faint or dizzy or physically strange just because of the number of people buying things and the number of things available to them to buy all crammed inside the one roofed space with the noise of cash registers rattling out receipts for the bought things and the colours of all the products it was possible to buy swirling shelfily from aisle to aisle.

Shelfily. Was that a real word? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t be sure. She blinked. Black came over her eyes with her eyelids, and lifted off again. Behind the skin and bone at the front of her head the Mazola song began again. Mazola, simply corn oil.

Lise was lying in bed. That was what she was doing. There was something she had to write down. She was waiting to remember it. Thoughts were slowly unearthing in her brain, like turf being turned up by someone she could make out only on the distant horizon, on the edge of a waiting field, a person made so small by distance and so slowed with age or weariness that he or she could hardly wield the spade.

Lise wasn’t well.

Well: a word that was bottomless, that went down into
depths which well people estimated, for fun, by throwing small coins then leaning with their heads over the mouth of the hole and their hands cocked behind their ears listening for their coin to hit the faraway water so they could make a wish. What could well people find to wish for, having everything already? Unwell: the opposite of well. It ought to be a place where things levelled out, a place of space, of no apparent narrative. Nothing could be possible there. Nothing could happen there, for a while.

Instead Lise, lying unmoving in bed, knew; it was as if she had been upended over the wall of a well like that one in the last paragraph and had been falling in the same monotonous nothing way for weeks, down into it like Alice hazily pondering bats and cats, through nothing but languid gravity, in a place where a second of time was stretched so long and so thin that you could see veins in it; and all these seconds, all this time, she (Lise) had seemed to be hardly moving, though in reality the sides of the tunnel were flying up past her at thousands, maybe millions of miles an hour, the curved wall and its slime-cold roughly surfaced bricks only inches from the skin of her nose and chin and the knuckles of her hands and feet, and her whole body tensed, ready, waiting, always about to hit it, the surface of the water.