Hotel World Read Online Free PDF Page A

coloured threads that made it no one else’s name in the world.
    I want to ask her the name again for the things we see with. I want to ask her the name for heated-up bread.
    I have already forgotten it again, the name for the lift for dishes. It has tired me out telling you her story, all you pavement-pressing see-hearing people passing so blandly back and fore in front of the front door of the hotel. I lose the words; like so many chips of granite tapped out of a stone to make the shape of a name, they litter the ground. I came up through the ground. A mouthful of ground would be something, dark and meaty, turfy and stony and pasting the tongue, graining under it and between the teeth like mustard. Or a handful of ground; grassy turf and the layer of earth crumbing down like good cake-mix if you rubbed it between fingers and a thumb, thickening like paint if you ran it through with a little spittle.
    If I had spit, or fingers, or a thumb, a hand, a mouth.
    You could put ground in your mouth, couldn’t you?
    You, yes, you. You have a hand. You could hold the earthin it. I came up through the earth and I couldn’t keep any of it. I flew over flyovers groaning with the weight of their traffic. I saw rubbished grass round the edges of stations; a dumped fridge; a burnt-out car; a piece of old furniture rotten with rain. I saw the pool open beneath me. It was drained and empty for the cold months. Dark was coming. Old leaves blew in circles down at the deep end.
    On both sides the rows of doors rattled, fixed shut for the winter. A sparrow waited till the leaves settled, and hopped about at the bottom of the pool, cocked its head. Nobody there. Nothing to eat.
    I have a message for you, I told the sparrow and the empty pool. Listen. Remember you must live.
    The top board barely swayed beneath me, troubled by thin air.
    Where could I go? Back to the hotel. On my way I saw a wall of faces shifting and falling like water. Here they are: I saw a young woman struggling along a road; she was carrying awkward things. I saw a man on the opened-up roof of a house, white dust all over his hair and bleaching his nose; he had a pencil behind his ear. I saw a line of people; a man with his hands down the front of the skirt of the woman standing with him in the line. He was lifting her up by the groin; they both laughed, they had the faces of happy drunkards. The other people in the line stood between politeness and anger. I saw inside one man’s head; he was considering knives and blood.
    I saw an old man with his hands raised after a muchyounger man who was driving away in a car full of things. The old man kept one hand in the air till well after the car had gone, then he stood at his garden wall in the birdsong and the nothing. I smelt pastry, faintly. In the cafeteria a woman was sitting at a table reading a newspaper story about a family who had gone on a boat trip and had all but one been eaten by sharks. She read it out loud, severed legs and bitten heads, to the woman behind the counter who was laughing, horrified. Cigarette smoke curled and caught as she laughed, staining her throat. I saw one car in a remote car park in the early evening rain. It had an L on the front and an L on the back, and inside it a boy and a woman thudding against the seats. Ah, love. The full weight of an other. The woman held a clipboard under her arm, her other arm around the boy, who was boiling. Steam rose from them both and slid itself across the windows of the car.
    I told them all.
    I told all the people in the cinema queue. They were waiting to see something. I told all the people in Boots the Chemist. They were waiting for prescriptions. (Imagine a glorious cold in the nose. Imagine a tweaking chirping thrush in the groin. Imagine being a colour, and feeling off it.) I went to the supermarket; the aisles were straining with foods. I told the check-out girls. They were waiting for Saturday afternoon to be over. It was their worst day.
    Remember