Hotel World

by Ali Smith

  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.

  Is that her name? I asked.

  I’m warning you, she said to me through her unopening mouth. I’m only going to tell you this once, remember? We made a deal. Sekonda was the word written on the watch, the name of the type of watch it was. It’s the first word she said to me. Sekonda? like that, with a question mark after it. Mine’s Sekonda too, she said. She turned her hand palm upward and showed me the face of her watch. It had Roman numerals. Then she said: it’ll have to be sent away. It’ll take about three weeks, maybe more. It’ll cost around thirty-five pounds. That’s average, but it could end up costing more, I’ve no way of knowing. You could buy a new watch for less. So do you want me to bother? Yes, I said; I couldn’t think of any other word to say to her. It has to be fixed by specialists, she said. All the Sekonda watches get sent away. We can’t do them here. Yes, I said, yes, and I took the receipt she was holding out to me and left the shop, the bell above the door clanging behind me.

  I leaned on the wall outside the shop with the ringing bell in my ears. I held my sides with my arms. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I thought how I could go back into the shop and say, your watch is a lot nicer than mine, I’d like one with those Roman numerals, sell me one the same as yours. But I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. I stood outside the shop and listened to my heart ticking. I felt strange, and different.

  Then I realized. I had fallen, and it was for the girl in the watch shop. I was happy. And I had a receipt.

  (I stretched out on top of her in the room beneath the ground. There wasn’t much space; it was lucky I am so insubstantial. The story had made me forget we were dead. But I looked and I saw the grim shut corners of her mouth folded down.)

  So I balled the receipt up in my hand, she said. I kept my hand in my pocket and the receipt warm in my hand. For three whole hours that day I walked the streets as if I owned them, as if I owned the world.

  Then I went swimming.

  It was a warm day in May; I went to the outdoor pool. You remember the one, where they have the old-fashioned cubicles, wooden doors, the kind that swing open and closed like saloon doors from a western?

  We used to love westerns, remember? I said.

  No nostalgia, she said. Ground rules. What was I telling you? Yes. Go and look for the swimming pool too. That day I swam like I’d been born to. I was happy, and the water skimmed me forward. I went back to my cubicle, slung my towel round my neck. I was rubbing my hair dry when I heard something going on, some commotion around the pool. I looked out. Two small boys were pointing at me. Some people were leaning over the side and gesturing down at me from the seats upstairs too. A girl, high up against the sky on the diving board, was watching, people were watching from below and above, all round the pool, even in the pool, leaning up against the edge and blowing water out of their noses; some were laughing. I felt cold run down my back.

  But the cold I felt was just water from my hair; they weren’t looking or pointing at me. Of course they weren’t. They were looking at something near me, next to me. I stuck my head out further to see what it was, and this is what I saw.

  A middle-aged woman three cubicles along was trying to close the doors on her cubicle. Only, the doors wouldn’t shut. She wasn’t that big a person but the cubicles on the women’s side of the pool are small and her stomach jutted out, holding the doors open. She stepped out and tried going the other way in and the doors still wouldn’t shut. They stayed open on the rump of her behind. So she backed out and tried going in sideways, but it was worse. It looked like she had been doing this to-ing and fro-ing for some time.

  I got back down into the water and swam across to the other side. People made way for me, shifted so I could sit on the side of the pool with my legs in the water and see like them.

  I saw like them. Now the woman had given up trying to close the doors and had begun to take her clothes off with the doors open, but there wasn’t enough room in the cubicle for her to lift her arms or bend down so she stood outside it. She took off her shoes. She bent to peel down her tights and we could see the tops of her legs. Someone wolf-whistled. Everybody laughed. She put her arms up above her head to shrug her top off. Her face came out of her clothes, it was red and flustered. She was down to her underwear. We cheered at the swimming-guard who was running round the pool to stop her taking everything off. Another guard picked up her clothes off the tiles. One guard on either side of her, like a police escort for a shoplifter or someone appearing in court, she was escorted out to cheering and clapping. She was barefoot, still wearing her skirt, just her underwear on top. We could see the skin pouched under her arms. A man called at her to cover herself up. I could hear female murmurs of agreement. No room for any water if she got into the pool, never mind room for the rest of us, the man next to me said; he was looking at my wet neck now, and I nodded and smiled because he was flirting with me, and slipped back into the water.

  Afterwards everyone round the pool was high. I could hear them as I pulled my own clothes on over skin still so wet that the clothes caught and snagged on it. When I was on my way out several people said goodbye to me, like we were old friends, like we all knew each other well, had been through something together.

  I was lying on top of my bed that night and my little sister was undressing to get into her own bed. She stared at me. 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.

  In the dark I decided to let myself think a little more about the girl. It was a lot easier in the dark. It didn’t feel anywhere near as risky as it did to catch myself thinking about her with the light on. I thought about her until I heard my sister asleep, breathing like breathing was difficult for her.

  I knew what my sister would think. I thought about what my parents would think; I could hear them through the wall, breathing. What our neighbours would think; they were breathing through the other wall. What Siobhan and Mary and Angela, and all the boys, all my friends from going to the pub, would think. What people who knew me would think. What people who hardly knew me or didn’t know me at all would think. What the people at the outdoor pool, for example, if I were to take off all my clothes there in front of them right down to skin and thumping heart, would think.

  My heart thumped.

  I would go back with my r
eceipt the next day and simply ask for my watch, and the girl would simply take the receipt, find my broken watch, give it back to me, and as she handed it to me over the counter she would simply look up, simply look at me, and see me.

  The next day I went back to the watch shop. I stood outside it.

  The day after that I went to the watch shop, stood outside it.

  I did this for three weeks of working days, including Saturdays. Her day-off varied. Her lunch hour varied. It could be anywhere between half past eleven and four o’clock. Every day of the third week she had her lunch-hour at half past twelve, and every day of that week she opened the door, ringing its bell, waved back to someone still in the shop, let the door swing shut behind her, crossed the pavement, walked over the road, towards me, right to me, and right past me, inches from me. She was beautiful, and she looked straight through me as she passed me as if I simply wasn’t there.

  Falling for her had made me invisible.

  On my eighteenth day of waiting, I let myself look for one last time at the brown back of her jacket as she passed. I went home. I shut myself in our bedroom. I folded the receipt up as many times as it would fold, until it pushed against itself in my hand, and I put it in the music box on my dressing table. It was my mother’s, from the sixties, from when she was a girl. When you open it a plastic ballerina unbends, flicks up and revolves on a pedestal; she has one foot gummed on to it. She only has one leg, meant to be two, stuck together. Her arms are set in the shape of a circle. Her two hands are moulded together above her head, her fingers are melted into themselves. A tune plays as she goes round. Lara’s Theme, from Dr Zhivago. It sounds cheap. I forced the folded receipt into the space under the pedestal at the end of her leg. The music stopped when the lid went down and the ballerina folded. I put the box back and got ready to go out. I was in a hurry. It was my first night at a new job.