Hotel World (15 page)

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 any 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.

The girl took it. She shook her head. She held it for a moment, turned it in her hand. Then she put her hand into the wall and dropped the clock into the hole too.

Damn
, Penny thought.

First, they heard the sound of nothing at all. Then they heard the clock hitting the bottom of the shaft with a faraway plastic snap. Damn, Penny thought again. I
knew
she was going to do that.

Do you think it’s broken? she said out loud.

Definitely broken, the girl said nodding, blackness under her eyes.

Do you think it was designer? Penny said.

She dared herself to the edge of the hole, dared herself to look down.

How on earth will we get it back? she said.

Dark. Nothing. A shaft of old air. She decided she’d claim that there had never been a clock. She stepped back away from the wall; it was a mess; it was nothing to do with her. If challenged she would write a letter of complaint on
World
paper saying they were charging her for something she’d never seen, the use of which she’d never had.
There was no clock in my room on the dates stated. I refuse to pay for the disappearance of something which as far as I was concerned wasn’t there in the first place. I am not responsible
.

If something is missing from my room I suggest you look to your own staff for the reparation of all relevant damages and absences
.

Furthermore I wish to complain about the noise and mess made by members of your staff carrying out some kind of buildings alteration programme in the corridor outside my room remarkably late in the evening for this kind of procedure on the night of my stay at your hotel
.
This was disturbing not just to myself but to other guests too, and was something for which we were neither prepared nor given any apology
.

The girl was talking.

But if it was heavier, she was saying, it’d fall a lot, a lot, uh, quicker. Something that weighed more would fall more quickly because it’s heavier. Something, something a lot heavier, would fall faster. Would it?

Well yes, obviously it would, Penny said.

No, the woman said.

No offence. But of course it would, Penny said. Say you dropped a grand piano down that hole. That’s assuming I had a grand piano available in my room to give you to drop down it, she said (pleasantly, pointedly) to the girl. Then a grand piano would obviously fall much more heavily than the clock you’ve just dropped down there.

A grand piano, whole, shining, falling and unassembling at the bottom of the void into sticks and strings in slowed-down motion, the flat gloss civilized surface of it crushing and splintering into cacophonic sharps, marrowbones and cleavers wavering up in the dark like broken reeds by a riverbed.

No, the woman said again.

The piano vanished in Penny’s head. Penny hated to be contradicted.

The woman was piling the twos, tens, twenty pence pieces together in mounds on the carpet; she sat in a mass of silver and copper.

Galileo, she said as she sorted the money. Dropped a
pea and a feather off the leaning tower of Pisa. Both hit the ground at the same time.

Yes, Penny said, but if we’re talking in real terms. A grand piano will fall much more heavily than a clock, a clock will fall much more heavily than a coin, a coin will fall a little more heavily than a pea –

No, the woman said again. It won’t. She stopped what she was doing. She weighed different coins in her hand for a moment, then put them carefully down on top of the other coins.

Anything that gets dropped from the same place above the world, she said. It would fall at the same time. Roughly. But if they’re very different shapes like a feather and a pea. Then the feather has a bit more push against the air because of its shape. But not much. But if. Imagine. If it was on the moon instead. There’s no air. So a feather, a pea and even a piano. If they were all dropped above it they would reach it at exactly the same time. I mean the moon. It would be a bit slower, that’s all. If it was the moon. There’s only really about six times more gravity here. If it was the moon and the world you were talking about. And the things being dropped, even a piano. So small really. A piano, a pea, a feather, a coin, anything. All much the same, everything. Because what push against it that we’ve got here hardly counts. It makes everything as small or as big as everything else.

She stopped, and thought. Though it
would
be a lot different, she said then, if you were dropping two things at the same time and the sizes of them were, like, really
different. Like if you dropped something like a coin or a pea. And you dropped a planet, size of the world maybe, alongside it.

She pushed the five pence piece mound to one side. She brought the fifty pence piece pile and the pound coin pile towards herself by cupping her hands round them and began placing the coins on top of each other in columns, counting them as she did.

Penny knew the woman was wrong. She opened her mouth to say, and looked down, and she could almost see the nothing coming out of her mouth. This was a good reflex, after all; Penny wouldn’t want to offend the woman in case the woman was somebody. The woman could be anybody. Who knew? It was good that she could keep quiet under pressure. But the nothing she said curled out of Penny’s mouth and wound itself snake-like round her neck. It hissed; it was going to strike. Penny hated it, nothing. She hated her imagination, it was full of snakes, dead animals, and unexpectedly beautiful smashed-up pianos. This was turning into a very unpleasant evening.

Now the irritating teenage girl had peeled one of her trainers off. She went and stood by the hole she’d made in the wall. She unbuttoned her hotel uniform overall and took it off, bunched it up in her hand round the shoe. She held the things just inside the hole. The woman steadied a column of coins by her foot and watched. Penny said nothing. The girl opened her hand, let the things fall out of it. Penny wasn’t sure whether she really heard them land or imagined she did, the trainer with the muffled
thud of rubber, the uniform more airy with a light material sigh.

The girl slid down to the floor, leaning against the wall. She looked exhausted. She looked about to cry.

The woman in the coat stood up. She took half of one of the columns of pound coins and some of the smaller change, and let it all fall into the insides of her coat again. The noise it made was jarring.

You know, she said. That they keep Big Ben in London running with two pence pieces? They pile them on the pendulum. That makes it keep the right time.

She gestured first to the hole in the wall, then to the sorted money on the carpet. Yours, she said to the girl. Thirty-two pounds fifty. Minus what you dropped in there.

She stepped over the money and nodded to the girl and then to Penny. Hands in her pockets, she pushed through the stair doors. They swung shut stiff on their hinges behind her.

Penny felt utterly abandoned. Worse, the girl had started, noiselessly, to cry. She had put her head down inside her arms, was rocking slightly, back and fore on the floor. Penny got up. One of the girl’s feet, small without its shoe, had skin that was bare and white just above the ankle sock.

Don’t, Penny said, from where she stood. Oh, don’t cry. Please don’t. It’s all right. It’ll be all right.

The girl rocked and cried. Penny looked round, uneasy. She could just go into her room and shut the door. But the
teenage girl would still be crying out here and Penny, on the other side of nothing more than a thin door, would know (and worse, would maybe still be able to hear it). Or she could go into her room and call another member of staff. Then that other member of staff could come upstairs and be responsible for this member of staff.

Penny picked up the cracked wood panel and carried it away from her door across to a door on the far side of the lobby. She leaned it up against someone else’s room. She checked both her hands carefully for splinters. She bent down and picked her make-up out of the money and debris. She put things back into the make-up bag. She blew paint flakes off her make-up mirror and wiped it clean on a clean patch of carpet.

Back in her own room she pressed the number 1 on her phone. She meant well.

Hello, Reception, a voice said.

Hello, Penny said. This is Room 34. A member of your staff seems to be crying in the corridor outside my door.

Penny pulled her coat on. She slipped the strap of her bag on to her shoulder. She shut the door behind her and tested it to make sure it was locked. She stepped over the piles of coins and crossed the hall. She pressed the lift button and stood waiting for the lift doors to open. The lift took a long time.

From over by the lift doors she called to the girl, crosslegged and weeping, leaning against the disfigured wall. The hollow socket of it sagged open above the girl’s head.

Someone’s on their way up, Penny said in a cheery voice. Won’t be long now.

At the bottom of the shaft, colourless in the dark, there was a shoe and a crumpled uniform, both still warm, both going cold. There were three or four coins, maybe more. There was a broken clock. Its plastic shell was shattered and its face was in bits.

A bell pinged. The lift door opened. Penny got in. The lift door closed.

She put her weight against the revolving door and pushed it round till she found herself on the street. Relief streamed over her, unheated unconditioned air. She had been blessed with the gift of no guilt, or at least the gift of guilt that was never more than momentary, a matter of the imagination only. All she ever had to do was change her air. She stood in the hotel doorway and breathed in, then out again.

It had stopped raining. Penny could see the woman in the coat ahead of her, slowly crossing the road. She caught up with her outside a warehouse. The woman was looking in its window, using her hand to shade her eyes so she could see in beyond the reflective streetlight. Penny looked in too. She saw herself superimposed on rolls of cheap carpeting.

Hello again, Penny said.

The woman saw her, ignored her, carried on peering into the warehouse.

There was a story here somewhere. Penny could sense
it, feel it, as if half-remembered. She was on to something. She persevered.

God knows what all that was about, she said. Cigarette?

The woman shook her head.

I can’t bear it when people cry, Penny said. She lit up, breathed smoke in, blew smoke out. But luckily I was born with the gift of no guilt, she said. What are you going to do now? Where are you off to, anywhere interesting?

The woman shrugged.

Do you want to go for a drink somewhere, Penny said, something to eat?

The woman turned away, said something garbled. It sounded like she said she was going to look at the horses.