by Ali Smith
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.
Excuse me, she said. I was wondering.
There was someone in the hotel colour of uniform fiddling about at something over on the far wall.
Sorry, Penny said.
The person didn’t turn round, was examining the wall.
Penny tried again.
Could you help me? Do you know how the TV settings work?
She went over.
Excuse me? she said.
The person jumped, turned round, backed off slightly. It was just a girl, blonde, not very old, about mid-teens, maybe sixteen Penny thought. She looked thin and dark-lidded, exactly like she should to be the ideal sixteen, and Penny found herself thinking, she’s just right. Knitwear or fur skins, or something northern-urban-wintry in Lifestyle.
The girl looked cowed, like she might make a dash for the fire exit doors. Then her face got bold.
Have you anything sharp on you? she asked in an accent.
Sharp? Penny said, a little charmed. No. I’m completely unarmed.
Penny smiled. The girl didn’t smile.
A nail file or a penknife, or something with an edge, she said.
I – um. Well, I don’t know, Penny said. Wait. Wait here a minute.
Anything with an edge could do it, the girl was calling after her into the room.
Penny came back out with her make-up bag. I’ve these, she said. Would they do?
She handed the girl her pair of eyebrow tweezers; the girl took them and held them up so she could see their ends. Penny saw the teenage hands turning; they were unlined, pale, susceptible. She looked up. The girl was shaking her head.
Too small, she said.
Penny was disappointed. Are you sure? she said. She emptied the make-up bag on to the carpet. What about these? They’re quite sharp, she said and held her nail-scissors up.
The girl took the scissors and went back over to the wall. She worked at something with the blades.
No, she said. That’s too thin, that bit’s too small. That’s not thick enough. Have you got a two or a ten pence piece?
Oh no, I never carry money, Penny said.
The girl gave Penny a look of such irritation that Penny felt the look pass through her. Then the girl sighed, and glanced towards Penny’s room. Do they give you a knife in there? she said. Or a spoon, a teaspoon, something like that?
A teaspoon? Penny said. Actually, yes, I think so. There’s bound to be, isn’t there? Wait a minute. Hang on.
She upended the clattering saucers and cups on the tray in her room to find the teaspoon; she brought it, triumphant, to the Lifestyle girl at the wall. The girl took it and peered at it. Her eyes were dark-coloured. She looked very striking. She brought her arms up and aimed the spoon, pushed one of the ends of the spoon into what Penny could see now was the head of a screw at the height of the girl’s nose.
Yeah, that’s quite good, the girl said.
Penny’s heart lifted.
But – this bit – won’t – let it go far enough – to get a hold on it, no. No.
Let me try, Penny said.
The bowl of the spoon was too sheer and too curved; its edge wouldn’t fit the slot in the screw. She tried the handle end. It was too broad, it wouldn’t fit at all.
Nope, Penny said. But a screwdriver would do it in a minute. You need a screwdriver.
The girl ignored her. Presumably if there had been a screwdriver downstairs she’d have brought it up with her, Penny thought. Or perhaps she’d forgotten. Perhaps she’d been sent up here to do a job and would be reprimanded if she didn’t do it and was frightened to go downstairs having not done it.
Now the girl was digging at the back of the screw with the spoon.
Don’t do that, Penny said. You’ll hurt the, what’s it called, you know. The grain. You’ll break it. It’ll be harder to get it out if you do.
The girl stopped immediately. For a moment Penny could actually see misery thick as velvet, luxurious, dramatic and gathered like a curtain about to fall over the girl’s head. Then she blinked and the thought was gone.
Hm, Penny said. She looked at the wall instead.
There were screws holding a piece of wall on. The girl had begun to work with the end of the spoon at what Penny could now see was a thin sliver of space, paint breaking where she dug at it miserably, between the wall and the screwed-in extra piece of wall.
Something about the girl’s face, how closed it was, how sure, and how peculiarly pure, made Penny want to do something, anything.
Don’t, Penny said. Wait. I’ll go and look. Just wait here.
This was much better. This was excellent, Penny thought as she pushed through the fire doors and skipped down the stairs. Penny had been spending another dreary night working on another publicity job in another hotel when all of a sudden quite by chance she had become a cog in the mechanism of something really happening. And if I help that girl, Penny thought as she skipped from stair to stair, that girl will always remember me as the nice person who helped her the night she was, was, doing whatever it is she’s doing. And I will always remember it too, and look back on it many years from now as that night I helped the remarkable teenage chambermaid take the screws out of the wall in that hotel.
This was elating to Penny. She had come down the fire exit stairs as if the stairwell were a staircase in a film and herself the heroine coming down in her dress to the ball, everybody at the foot of it holding glasses up in the chandelier light and waiting for no one but her. She was looking (graciously, decorously, in her Southern Belle ballgown) for something sharp, or something with an edge. The fire extinguishers, no. She came back into the plushness (plushness, she thought, that’s a good word, those are good words, plushness, plush) of another floor of the hotel. The framed pictures of local scenes, of cows in a field and a bridge between hills, no, nothing sharp there. The first other person she saw was a woman standing outside the door of a room, and this is how Penny came to meet, that night, one of the most interesting people she’d met in a long time, whom she took at first, completely erroneously and because of the long, rather musky, fashionable old overcoat she was wearing, to be some kind of druggy eccentric guest or maybe even a minor ex-rock star.
The woman had been looking apologetic as Penny approached, even before Penny had asked her about whether she had anything sharp. Then, after Penny had asked her twice, she shook her head.
There’s something happening up on the top floor, Penny said. You don’t happen to have any change handy, do you?
Uhm, the woman wearing the coat said. She looked astonished. She looked to her left and then her right. She seemed shy.
All we need is a coin, Penny said. There’s a screw kind of thing in the wall, which we’re trying to unscrew. We think we could unscrew it with a small coin.
Yeah? the woman said. Then she said, But some money is thinner. Than other money is.
Penny laughed, delighted by the idea of thin money. The woman stared at her, amazed.
What it is, is this, Penny said. She leaned forward, confidential. We’re trying to get something off a wall, she said, as far as I can gather. The, the whatever it’s called, I don’t know, the slot that’s cut into a screw, you know, is about this big. She held up her finger and thumb, almost touching.
The woman in the coat p
eered at the spacing between them.
So if you happened to have a two or a ten pence, Penny said.
Um, the woman said. She stepped away. Change jingled somewhere in her coat. Penny laughed again. Then she looked down at her feet, surprised. They were suddenly cold. Water had changed the colour of the suede of Penny’s boots. The carpet beneath them was waterlogged. Penny lifted one foot then the next to look at the dripping soles.
Damn, she said. These are new.
Room’s, eh, leaking, the woman said.
This made Penny laugh too. The woman gaped at her, so she put her arm through the woman’s arm and swung her jingling up the corridor.
Come on, she said. Come up with me, it’ll be fun. It makes a change, fun at work. I’m Penny. You are?
I am what? the woman in the coat said.
Penny roared with laughter.
Have you got anything sharp? the girl turned from the wall saying to them both, for all the world as if she’d never seen Penny before, when Penny and the woman arrived out of breath on the top floor landing. Penny was a little put out.
This lady here has everything we need, she said, keeping her arm round the woman’s shoulders and leading her in, because the woman in the coat had taken two steps back towards the fire doors, pulling against Penny’s hold. Now she had slipped out from under Penny’s arm, squatted down where she was almost as if she’d been ordered to, and began emptying handfuls of money out of her coat on to the carpet. One hand and then the other came up and out, full of change. It was astounding, Penny thought, to see so much loose change in the one place at the same time.
The woman shook her coat, felt inside the lining, dropped a last few coins.
Some of it’s mine, she said.
The girl sorted through the coins with her foot. Oh yeah. A phone rang, she said.
What, my mobile? Penny said.
I don’t know, the girl said. A phone in there. It rang, then it stopped.
Right, Penny said. Was it a high pitched kind of a ring? Was it, did it play a little tune kind of thing?
I don’t know, for fuck sake, the girl scowled. She got up, turning money over in her hand, and went towards the wall.
Penny had decided she didn’t particularly like the teenage girl. She wondered if the hotel management was aware of the attitude of some of its staff. She went back to the room and checked her mobile for messages, but there weren’t any and nothing flashed on the hotel phone to suggest any message had been left for her there. She checked her wallet in her jacket pocket in the wardrobe to make sure her credit and bank cards were all still intact. She checked in her bag for her chequebook and looked inside her suitcase to see if anybody had been through anything.
Out in the corridor there was money splayed over the carpet as if part of the carpet’s design.
Paint, the woman was saying.
The girl looked at Penny. What’s she saying? she said.
Oh, Penny said. Don’t any of them fit? She leaned down and picked up a handful of coppers. Have you tried them all? Apparently, some money is thinner than other money, did you know that?
Paint, the woman on the floor said, shaking her head. Stuck.
I can’t understand what she’s saying, the girl said.
Oh, Penny said. Won’t they undo? What a shame. After all that.
She tried a one pence piece in one of the screws. It fitted, just, if she forced it hard, but the screw wouldn’t move. She tried again. She changed the angle of her grip on the coin. It wouldn’t move.
It’s the paint, she told the girl. Because the screw has been painted over, it won’t untwist.
The girl’s face fell; it looked wild, then lost, then life went out of it. Penny began to make contingency plans. Otherwise this story would end, this evening would slip away unsolved, she’d be back in her room in a minute writing meaningless copy, and anyway Penny couldn’t stand to be beaten. And it might make a good story. So she could, for instance, if she wanted to be nice (and if the teenage girl was prepared to be nice, in turn, to her) go back into the room and try the telephone directory for an all-night supermarket. If she found one, and surely they had them here, they were everywhere nowadays surely, she could ask them if they stocked power tools. If they did, she could give them a credit card number; she could give them the paper’s credit card number then claim it back off expenses. She could phone a taxi service, give them the card number too and get them to deliver it plus receipt to the hotel. If there were no all-night stores, or if the all-night stores didn’t stock power tools, she could ask the person at the taxi service whether any of his or her drivers owned power tools they’d drive over to the hotel at a moment’s notice if she made it worth their while –
Then it moved.
The paint round it had split, making a small sound; the screw had shifted backwards a little in its spiral; the girl, tense beside her, had breathed in, ah.
Easy. Now. Let’s see what else we can do, Penny said, her heart suddenly high.
Because Penny had done it, whatever it was. With a twist of each screw she broke the paint on the top four and loosened the whole top row far enough for half a (small) hand to slip behind the wall-panel. Then the girl and the woman took one side each and pulled. The girl’s feet came off the ground. More paint split. Wood split. Sound split. They both fell backwards as the panel broke off the wall and fragments of snapped wood flew round them. Old air flew out, fusty. Dust flew out, hovered in the air, settled down through it to the hotel carpet.
Penny and the woman and the girl put their heads into the void.
But there’s absolutely nothing there, Penny said.
Deep, the woman in the coat said. Her voice echoed a little as she leaned in. Jesus, she said. The eep and ees of what she’d said magnified round their three heads.
The girl said nothing.
Penny coughed. It was dusty. She backed out into the overhead light and saw that the wall had a gaping hole in it, black and rectangular, a space where a painting ought to be to cover it or where a wall-safe might have been blown out by outlaws. Her finger and thumb were numb at the tips, raw, red and scored where she had gripped the money and twisted the screws; the design on the money had imprinted itself in her skin. She rubbed the tips of her fingers together. She felt cheated. The panel, warped and half-broken, was leaning up against the open door of her room. She had helped take it off and behind it there had been a long shaft of nothing at all.
Penny knew she was slightly shocked. She sat down on the carpet. Shards of wood and flakes of white paint lay in among the scattered money and the eyeshadow, the eyeliner, the lip gloss out of her make-up bag. The woman in the coat was doing something with the money behind her; she could hear the soft plink of coin on coin. Penny picked up a splinter of white wood. She poked it into her finger to see what she could feel.
Nothing.
The nothing that ran the length of this hotel like a spine had appalled her.
What did you think was behind there? she asked the girl. There was panic clawing up the inside of her throat. What did they send you up here to look for? she said.
The girl was running her hand along the edge, where the wall ended and the space behind it began. Large jagged bits of wood were still screwed on where wood had broken but screws had held. They jutted out like white teeth in the mouth of the hole in the wall. The girl leaned into the hole as far as her waist and Penny was filled with the urge to catch hold of her ankles in case she fell in, but just as she was about to lunge across the room the maddening girl unbent herself out again, strolled across the hall and picked up a handful of coins. Now she was throwing coins in, one by one, dropping coins out of her hand. Money fell into the dark, inaudible.
Have either of you got a watch? the girl said. She looked from Penny to the woman then back to Penny again.
Ah, Penny said. No. Because I’m one of those people who can’t wear them, listen, this is true. Whenever I put one on, whenever I have one anywhere near my body for an
y length of time, not just on my wrist but even if I’ve got it in my pocket or in a bag, if it’s a digital one its numbers go completely mad, flashing and speeding up. A fuse or something blows, whatever it is inside the watch. Ordinary watches, the wind-up kind, even watches that already behave completely normally on other people’s arms, won’t work on mine, I had one that went so fast that it looked like I was passing whole hours while other people’s watches had gone for ten or fifteen minutes. Or instead they slow down and then just break, just stop, short, never to go again, like in the children’s song, you know, except that I’m not an old man, and I’m, obviously, not dead. You know, she said. My grandfather’s clock, you know the old song.
Words rushed out of Penny. She explained everything. Telling them both the story had made her forget to panic. The girl waited until Penny had stopped talking, and turned to the woman in the coat.
Have you got a watch? she said.
The woman shook her head.
Penny was invisible. Then she remembered. There’s a clock in my room, she said. It’s in the bathroom, for some reason. I was wondering why a hotel would put a clock in the bathroom. Why? she asked the girl. Is it in case people will miss the check-out time because they’re in the shower or in the bath? Anyway, if you were in the shower or the bath, they’d steam up, wouldn’t they? The faces of them, I mean. So you wouldn’t be able to read what they said. But you probably have special anti-misting fluid for cleaning the faces with.
The girl said nothing. She looked at the door of Penny’s room.
Shall I go and look? Penny said.
As Penny stomped through she noticed a line left in the suede of her boots, where the wet place was drying. Damn, she said to herself. Damning buggering damn. Look at that. What I get for getting involved. Ten past nine, she shouted back through.
Has it got a third hand? the girl called.
Penny brought it out. It was a black art-deco-like clock. It had a small stylish sticker on its base, Property of Global Hotels.
It’s ten past nine, she said.
