Hotel World (16 page)

I’ll come, Penny said. I love horses.

The woman laughed, choked, coughed. She shook her head and held herself. Houses, she said when she’d stopped coughing.

Oh, Penny said. Houses, right. Well, can I chum you along? To be honest with you, I’ve absolutely nothing else to do, at least for the next while.

The woman’s face was expressionless. After a moment she nodded.

She led the way down the side of the warehouse then along a badly lit road, deserted except for three cars slewed outside a Chinese takeaway.

Are you looking at houses to buy a house? Penny said.

Uh? the woman said.

I was just wondering if you’re looking at houses because you’re hoping to buy one, Penny said.

The woman wheezed another coughing laugh. Yeah, she said. That’s right.

They walked past some boys sitting and leaning on the takeaway wall. Hello, Penny said as they passed.
Hello
, the boys mimicked. One of them threw something after Penny and the woman. It was a flattened beercan. The boys fell about laughing, shouted something else. Bye, Penny shouted. Bye, they shouted back.

The woman was limping. For someone with a limp she moved fast and Penny was under pressure keeping up with her.

Have you hurt yourself? Pulled a muscle? Penny said.

Yeah. Playing tennis, the woman said.

You have to be careful with tennis, Penny said. You have to stretch well beforehand otherwise you can do yourself real damage.

The wind blew. They walked for what felt like miles. The woman stopped often to cough. After a couple of tries Penny stopped talking; the silence back made her embarrassed. The coughing made her wince inside. It was possible the woman was an alcoholic. It was all nearly as embarrassing as the crying girl had been. She began to regret leaving the hotel and to think about turning back while she could still remember the way. But if she turned back, she’d have to pass those boys outside the takeaway, by herself this time. Possibly she hadn’t left it long enough yet for the hotel people to sort out the crying. So they
passed from the town into a suburb of the town and the scent on the wind changed from winter-damp metal to winter-damp earth, the smell of hedges and strips of garden. There were rose-bushes dug into the middles of small front lawn after small front lawn; they were bare, or the roses on them were frostbitten.

The woman stopped.

They were outside a window with its curtains open; they could see in. A child, a girl, sat on a sofa reading a book. A woman came into the room, said something. The child rolled her eyes and put the book down. She left the room, shutting a door behind her.

You like this one? Penny said, looking at the house. It was mid-terrace. It was squat and ugly. It would surely be worth little. There was open grass in a square in front of it with several cars parked on it. One had no windscreen.

Shh, the woman said. Or maybe it was just the noise her breathing was making, Penny couldn’t be sure. She stood in front of the window a little longer. Then she started walking again.

She stopped by another lit window several houses down. Penny caught up. Behind this one a man was standing on a chair trying to watch television while a woman measured his legs with a tape-measure.

Do you know them? Penny asked. The woman shook her head. She looked at Penny and her look was fierce; Penny stepped back, alarmed. Behind the window the man had said something which made the woman inside laugh. She laughed as though her lips were holding pins.
He laughed too. She took the pins out of her mouth, held them away from herself in her hand and sank to the floor laughing.

Just when it was getting interesting, when the people had stopped laughing behind the glass and were falling into each other’s arms on the floor, the woman in the coat moved on. Each time they found a window whose curtains were open and whose lights were on, the woman stopped outside it and stood by the gate where she could see. From terrace to terrace, house to harled house with garden after small square garden, their windows too small as if shrunken, the light behind their drawn curtains making squares of tawdry colour in the night, the rooms Penny could see into were full of unlikeable furniture. Repetitious armchairs angled in corners towards corners; worthless stuff piled up or neat, familial, claustrophobic, on shelves and mantelpieces. People in the lit rooms watched televisions, or televisions blared fast-moving light into empty rooms with windows uncurtained open to the dark, and the houses went on forever. There were unmowed grass edgings in front of them, and between their pavements and the roads. It was municipal grass. Penny walked on the pavement. She took care not to walk on the grass at all.

The woman was watching more people watching television again. Penny shuffled, put her hands up her sleeves, made cold noises. Brr, she said. The woman flinched; her held-up hand told Penny to be quiet again.

Penny went over to lean against a lamppost; she was
angry. She opened her bag under the light of it to see if she had any paracetamol with her. She didn’t. She was getting a chill. She was getting a headache. It was fucking buggering damnably freezing. They passed from a rough street, the houses patched or boarded and the gardens dog-chewed, into a richer set of streets where the cars were in better shape and the gardens full of cut-back clematis and winter pansies recently planted.

This is a much nicer place to buy, Penny whispered, confidential.

The woman was staring in at a middle-aged woman wearing a bathrobe, drinking something out of a mug and eating something orange off a plate. Occasionally she glanced down at a newspaper on her lap, other than that she gazed ahead of her. There was no light flickering. Possibly she was listening to music, or the radio. Possibly she was sitting in a silent room. Penny memorized the name of the road up on one of the walls of a house on a corner. It would be okay, slightly better, to take a taxi from round here. But she had taken her mobile out of her bag and left it at the hotel, it was still next to the hotel phone, and she had no money with her to call a taxi with. Christ, Penny thought. Damn. Her heart sank. She panicked.

But the woman in the coat had money with her, she had plenty of change, Penny knew this, she had seen her put it in her pocket on the hotel landing. Her heart rose. There would be a callbox somewhere. And if Penny was somehow left on her own here, anywhere around here (it
sank), she could always reverse the charges to someone at home or at the paper and have them call a taxi for her through Talking Pages (it rose again), who could find numbers for anywhere in the country regardless of where you were phoning from.

They crossed a grass embankment, Penny lagging behind, worrying all the way across it about whom exactly to phone. Then she began worrying for her boots. On the other side, in a street of pleasant semi-detached villas, a clean-looking elderly lady wandered about in the middle of the road between the lines of parked cars.

Hello, Penny said. We’re out looking at houses. Aren’t you cold?

The elderly lady wasn’t wearing a coat. She told Penny she was looking for her cat.

She’s never been out this late, the elderly lady said. I just turned around and she was gone. It’s not like her. I don’t know what to do.

Don’t worry, Penny said. Have you checked all round your house? She might be asleep in a cupboard or under a bed. Cats are very independent. They can look after themselves. Go inside, it’s cold. She’ll come home by herself. She’s probably there now.

She’s black and white, the elderly lady said. Have you seen her?

No, Penny said.

She has a white spot here above her eye and a white bib. She never goes out. She must have slipped out when the lifeboat people knocked on the door. She must have
gone out when I went to get my purse. I never let her out. She never goes out.

The woman in the coat had gone, limped far in the distance, was turning a corner. Penny couldn’t believe how far. She panicked again. She said goodbye to the elderly lady who didn’t hear her, was bending to look underneath a car. Penny ran to keep up. The heels of her boots slowed her down. Ahead of her, the woman disappeared, hunched and limping, over a railway bridge.

Finally Penny found her sitting on a bench made of concrete outside what looked like a small shopping centre. Behind her was a library and a couple of shops. One was a shoe shop and had Christmas decorations round the shoes in its window. The other had been emptied and closed-up; its window was dark, bare apart from a banner which said 50% OFF EVERYTHING; its insides were stripped. Its sign said: Hiltons Simply The Best. Penny couldn’t work out from what was left of it what it was that the shop used to sell. It depressed her. She turned to look in the opposite direction. In the distance there was a racketing noise; she could see two boys on skateboards throwing themselves against concrete slopes behind the shops.

That’ll keep them nice and warm, Penny said.

The woman’s face was deep down inside her coat. Her breath came out of a gap between two buttons.

There was a public phone in the front alcove of the shut library. Penny’s heart rose again. She went over, picked up the receiver. It worked. God. Thank God. That was a
blessing. It was almost time to ask politely, don’t you think we should maybe call a taxi now to get us back to the hotel? It’s so cold, and I have to get back now. I’ve got to work when I get in, it’s been a lovely walk, thank you. But when she sat down on the bench beside the woman for a moment and started to say it, the wind blew a hair into her open mouth. It wasn’t her own hair, or the woman in the coat’s. It was long. It was someone else’s entirely. Penny picked it out, disgusted. Then she held it up in front of her. Its ends blew about.

In a way it was the same, she thought, exactly the same, as watching through the windows of all those houses had been, seeing people who had no idea that anyone was watching them. The women sewing, leaning on their hands, and the TV pictures flickering like open fires in their sitting rooms. The men delicately placing cigarettes between their lips, or asleep, network light shifting on their faces. The endless eating and drinking; she had been watching the eating process all night from outside unknowing people’s houses. Think of it. People, if they’d looked up and out, at the square of black they made by leaving the curtains open or the blinds up in their rooms, would have seen, not black at all, and certainly not people watching them there, but themselves, reflected in the reflections of the rooms they lived in. If they’d switched their lights off, let their eyes adjust to the change, then looked out again, what would they have seen outside their houses? Whom would they have seen? Would they have seen anyone there at all?

It was foul and it was queasily exciting, this humdrum digestive-system exotica of others’ lives; Penny was repelled and energized by it, the knowledge that she could be brought together with someone else by the simple flick of a switch from light to dark, or by a literal thread, by something with the thinness, the genetic randomness, the intimacy of a single hair from a single other head. She held the long hair up in the wind. She let it go. It blew off her glove and she followed it with her eyes along the pavement as far as she could before it disappeared. She turned to let herself take a good look for the first time at the woman sitting shivering next to her on this bench made of cold stone.

The woman looked tired out. Her breathing was short and audible, as if she were breathing through several layers of wet material. Every breath she breathed was shadowed by another separate breath somewhere at the back of it. She looked like she had already been savaged by something stronger than she was. There was something about her; obliqueness in the eyes, tautness around the mouth, deliberation in the way of sitting, all of which suggested she had been unplugged, she was running on back-up power, a kind of energy that was finite. Her hands were closed but their closedness was submissive, her boots hung on the end of her legs as if they might belong to someone else. How she sat, how she moved, how she walked, slumped and alert, frozen and careless at once, was telling. Penny tried to think what of. Partly she was dead to the world. Partly there was something about
her that was more commanding than anyone Penny could at this precise moment in time think of, and it struck Penny for the first time that she had met, in the course of her life so far, literally thousands of other people, none of whom had been at all like this one.

She decided she’d give things another few minutes out here before she went back to the hotel. You never knew what could happen. This was one of the things she liked about herself, that she was so open to experience, to experiences like this one.

She waited politely until the woman had stopped coughing. She took her cigarettes out of her bag again, and then she began.

Sure I can’t tempt you? Penny said.

Bad for you, the woman said.

Don’t mind if I do? Penny said.

The woman shook her head.

What’s your name? Penny asked as she lit her own. What do you do?

Do? the woman said.

You know, Penny said. To live.

Ah, live, the woman said. Her voice, gravelled, came from inside her coat. Penny waited, but the woman didn’t say anything else.

Cold tonight, Penny said.

Clear, the woman said. She gestured up.

Above them the sky was acned with stars. Lovely, Penny said. She shivered. She tried another tack.

What do you think she was doing, that maid in the hotel? she asked again.

The woman shrugged again.

Penny eyed the public telephone behind the woman’s shoulder, but then the woman said something.

She needed to take that wall apart, she said.

Yes, Penny said. She seemed lost, a lost thing. I think she was actually too young to have been working. I was thinking of checking up on it when we get back. What do you think?

She isn’t a runaway, the woman said.

Penny nodded blankly.

It was her money, the woman said.

Ah, Penny said, bewildered. Now I’m lost too, she said.