Hotel World

by Ali Smith

  & since it has been good since then to have some reasons for it & for getting up & breakfast & more of the same & another day again

  & since breakfast can actually I forgot taste & smell like really good

  & since Sara you used to smell of specially cleaned water & since now you are nothing but air you are not even air any more I don’t know what you are

  & since when you used to set the table after we got home from school you used to hit the sideboard with the sides of the knives along to whatever was playing on the radio or whatever was on the TV

  & since I have the photo of us at Christmas time last year it is in the cabinet under the dictionary he won’t find it there neither of them will so she won’t be upset by it either it is okay to have it

  & since you would laugh about the hoover & the handkerchief thing & the pink stuff in the cup I know you would

  & since there was that day when you pulled my hair really hard

  & since you got into real trouble when mum brushed my hair & it all came out in a big clump on the brush

  & since it hasn’t ever grown back properly there since then

  & since you could swear better than anybody

  & since you covered my arm in bruises after I told about you swearing

  & since I went to Bourne’s on my first day in my new blazer & all those girls from your year your friends crowded round me at the south gate saying was I your little sister I don’t know if you knew they did that

  & since I will always know off by heart I will not forget the sound of you breathing in the dark

  & since there was the night when I was eleven when they played the old song about the long and winding road on the radio & for some reason I don’t know why it made me frightened that the earth was full of dead people even the earth round the flowers outside in the garden though I didn’t say anything I was in bed you were in the other bed you said what’s wrong are you scared you knew I was without me having to say anything you went through to the kitchen & made toast & brought it through & climbed in we ate it I fell asleep on you I woke up the next morning & the plate was still on the bed on the blankets the crumbs on it so that proved it happened

  & since you could hold your breath for so long under water

  & since you could walk on it water I mean because there was the time there was almost nobody else in the pool I was up in the spectator gallery you were below me you were treading water at the deep end I was amazed I remember wondering how come she can do that stay on the surface of the deep water like that as if she is just running on the spot how come she can float like that on nothing

  & since maybe now you can walk on air too

  & since wherever you are now I know you will be keeping us me & mum & dad safe

  & since you were there you were definitely there all those times at the pool I saw you I can see you now up there on the top board high up much higher than the spectator seats so we were all looking up at you looking down at the water there’s always the moment before you jump when you wait just for a split second it looks like you might not do the dive you can back out of it if you want as if so what who needs to do it & then all the same you always did it you stepped forward sent the board down then up down then up your arms out & you were off into the air falling it was always so fucking brilliant you would flash easy through the air like the air was stretched out beautiful like I don’t know what like a fish like a hot knife through butter like you just diving as usual into water

  & since in the end when you went & you went with legs & arms all I know I know upside down stuck in I know & then it was all over all of it the broken tops of all the waters over & done with still listen Sara even though you couldn’t even though you couldn’t move couldn’t do anything about it listen to me you were fast you were really really fast I know because I went there to see tonight I was there & you were so fast I still can’t believe how fast you were less than four seconds just under four three & a bit that’s all you took I know I counted for you

  Morning.

  The garden is wet after last night’s rain. Winter, with more winter to come; the place is shabby already with the leftovers of the year and it will be three more months before everything dies down and spring can begin to be seen.

  The tree is hung with yellows and reds, small inedible apples clawed or dropped. Either way, on the tree or on the ground, they’re for the frost. There are leaves left on the branches but the new leaves behind them, sealed shut inside, are inching them steadily off. The lilac is bare. The rhubarb has furled up and gone underground. Two of its huge summer leaves, left over the lawn-mower to protect it from rain, are stuck and rotting on the metal of the blades and frame. The new grass looks singed where the cold scuffed across it. The forsythia is a straggle of dead sticks. But the cranesbill is still flowering. The marigolds are flowering. The daisies and the campanula are finally flowering. The rock rose hasn’t stopped flowering. There are little flies suspended in the air, new and reckless. The feverfew is green. The snow-in-summer is green. The strawberry patch is still producing the occasional green strawberry under the leaves at the edge even this late in the year. The birds pick at them if they find them; there are still plenty birds in the sky, the garden, the gradual revelation of branches.

  Morning. Already some of the ghosts are out and about.

  A Marks and Spencer carrier bag snagged by the wind on a fence can call the ghosts of a thousand middle-aged ladies back to linger by the jumpers and cardigans once more, wandering the aisles and fashions of the not-yet-open store, yearning to finger the wool of the sleeves of the new winter lines if only they could, to hold clothes up against them again and to smell the scent of the new, with the ghosts of their husbands waiting by the door, arms folded, bored, eternally impatient.

  High in the north on a street in a town in the misty, cold-bound Highlands, the ghost of Mrs M. Reid is back in front of what used to be her shop, where she sold sugar-sticks and humbugs, gums and liquorices, peppermints, lozenges, chocolate moulded into shapes, new factory-made sweets, fudges she made on the premises herself at the back where there’s now a square of tarmac for a car park. So many tooth-rotting things displayed in jars and sold here to so many people for so many years; the bagging them, weighing them, wrapping them, taking the money. Yesterday two men broke the shop sign off the front above Keiths’ the Stationer, because Keiths’ the Stationer is getting a newly designed sign, and underneath on the shop front the original sign is still there and this is what it says, what it’s said under there for seventeen years, what it’s said in the dark under all the other signs for over a century since Mrs Reid had it painted and opened her shop after the death of her husband, a man who had forbidden her to open a shop because it would embarrass him, a man she hadn’t much liked, a man about whom the people of the town, sucking her peppermints in the Free Church on a Sunday, discussed the rumour they’d confected that she did it herself, with hot chocolate made the foreign way by melting down squares of it over the heat and adding poison for rats; none of which concerns her now, stately and fin de siècle written up in paint that hasn’t faded, back above her place of business for the light of one more day: Confectioner ~Prop. ~ Mrs M. Reid.

  Down the country and over the border, speeding away from the massed northern ranks of the ghosts of centuries’ worth of anger-wakened warriors baring their wounds and waving their warty shields, the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales, historic and royal ghost, ghost of a rose, ghost in a million stammering living rooms, ghost again today on the pages of this morning’s Daily Mail, still selling its copies by breathing her back to a life that’s slightly more dated each time, is smiling shy and sweet, as a girl, in a tiara, in a hacking jacket, holding a baby, holding a bunch of flowers, looking off to the side in a fetchingly modest way, waving from a carriage; in a few hours’ time, with the morning well underway, she will float, merciful, eyes full of sorrow, above all the squeaky postcard racks of the newsagents and post offices, above all the teatowe
ls and cups and trays and coasters graced by her graceful full-of-grace face in the many souvenir shops of turn-of-the-century England.

  Low in the south in the hazy city the faded shade of Solomon Pavy, child actor who died aged scarse thirteene nearly four hundred years ago in the summer of 1602, resentfully woken and set loose again every time someone reads the poem written to his memory by Ben Jonson, who knew him when he was a Child of the Queen’s Revels, is loitering in the reconstructed Globe Theatre, quite like it was, though not near good or dirty enough. The mere idea of him roams about backstage, and up in the gallery and balcony. The theatre is closed for the season. It’s too early for visitors to the restaurant or the carpeted corporate foyer. This year here there were many plays on by many different writers of the Renaissance, though Solomon Pavy himself (in the teeth of the mournful poem by Jonson which robbed him of proper and soothing oblivion) chose to favour Will, who wrote the Errors before his birth, the killing of Caesar when he was living, and Cleopatra after his death, to his eternal regret, the boy who only ever got to play old men, who never got to know what a Juliet he’d have made had he seen his salad days, but Juliet go hang for what a Cleopatra – oh happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony – as high-voiced and silent he crosses the wooden stage, out into the barren crowdless space, over the wall in a single vault to hover by the river above the heads of the people up early for work or the people coming home from work who traipse the side of it on the brand-new walkway. And further along the line of the river, murky and continuing, out at the site of the Millennium Dome, historic monument to the temporary whose belled-up insides are filled with panic, bluster, rhetoric and air as the new year edges nearer, the fall of a rope from the roof to the floor calls them back for a moment, the choked ghosts who fell to their deaths on the gibbet that stood there before any Dome did, who swing back and fore past the sleepy nightwatchmen, through wired-up security gates, surveillance cameras recording them, absent.

  Anywhere up or down the country, any town (for neatness’ sake let’s say the town where the heft and the scant of this book have been so tenuously anchored) the ghost of Dusty Springfield, popular singer of the nineteen sixties, soars, sure and broken, definite and tentative, through the open window of a terraced house on the corner of Short Street. Over the streets she goes, and the gardens, the spread of estates and the dump, and the black canal with its fetid banks and the swimming pool and the hotel with its pristine and rumpled rooms and up into the sky, dwindling down into town in a voice so faint now it’s lost, it can’t be heard. Which doesn’t mean to say it isn’t there; back in Short Street there’s no mistaking The Look Of Love, it’s in your eyes, a look your heart can’t disguise; her hair is high on her head and she is kohl-eyed, young, she moves her arms as if she’s holding something close to her, then as if it’s flung or flown away; a look that’s saying so much more than just words can ever say; a look that time can’t erase; she tells everybody who listens, anybody who can hear, that she has waited, how long she has waited, and the neighbours on and round Short Street, who are woken most work-day mornings at seven by the volume of it coming out of 14 Short Street, are lying in bed with pillows over their ears and their heads, scowling into too-early coffee made too fast or weak or strong, shouting abuse at the walls of the bedroom, ringing to leave another message on the council helpline, looking in anger out of the window or the open door in the direction of the noise, grimly listening through it to the eight o’clock news on Radio 4, having details taken down again by the man about to go off shift at the reception desk of the police station, crossing the road so as to knock on the door of number 14 Short Street and, if he or she has the decency to answer the door, to threaten the person with a beating, again, sleeping through it regardless, or listening, even joining in, with the ghost of Dusty who’s nearly done now, whose song is in its last fragile cheap crescendo, as she sings don’t ever go, as the three minutes thirty seconds of song (and behind it all the two-minute, three-minute songs there have ever been about the comings and goings, the gains and the losses, the endless spinning cycles of love and the trivia of living) come, as if on the spread grey wings of common collared-doves descending above a garden to land on the still-wet branches of the crab-apple tree, smoothly, inexorably, down to their close.

  *

  Morning. The lady who cleans the steps every morning, and the paving outside with the word Global tiled into it, has emptied her bucket and put it away with the mop in the store cupboard. She has gone home, hours ago. The word Global is still clean; not many people have walked over it yet.

  The checkout girls who work in the supermarket are eating breakfast in their work clothes in houses all over town (except for the girls who are part-time, and those whose day off it is, many of whom are still sleeping in beds or making breakfasts for children and men).