Hotel World Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be left alone by the staff. She looks up. The sky is the ceiling. It closes in, dark early. On the highest ledge of the buildingopposite, the starlings have gathered and are settling and unsettling with flurries and jousts of their feet and beaks. Starlings’ eggs: pale blue colour. They build nests with grass and feathers, sometimes with bits of litter, in trees or eaves or holes in stonework. They are real city birds. Their chests are punctured with stars. They swarm and turn in one grand gesture in the sky at dusk.
    Dusk has already happened; the street between the buildings is lit by streetlights and the lights from the hotel front, the shop lights and the lights on passing cars. Else’s neck hurts from looking up for so long. She drops her gaze down the side of the building. Yes. That girl is back, sitting on the steps of the World Of Carpets showroom. Yes, it’s her. She’s making it a habit. Everybody knows this is Else’s patch. But that girl acts like she doesn’t. She’s got her hood up, but it’s definitely her in there.
    Else watches the girl. The girl watches something off to the side of Else. Else stops watching. Someone is passing, and is acting like she’s noticed Else but decided to ignore her; most people don’t see Else there at all, so it’s a reasonable bet with one like this that if Else asks, she’ll get.
(Cn y spr sm chn? Thnk y.)
    Two ten pence pieces.
    Put a ten pence piece in your mouth and bite down and if your teeth are soft they’ll break on it. Which metal is harder, silver or copper? It is not real silver. It is an alloy. She will look it up in the encyclopedia in the library next time it rains, if the library is open. She has looked it uponce already, but has forgotten. She is pretty sure it’ll be the ten that’s harder; it stands to reason. One time, she and Ade filled their mouths with as much as they could. He could get a lot more into his than she could; he had a bigger mouth, ha ha. It bulged his face out like a hamster; she could see the shapes of the edges of the coins pushing against his beard. It gives you a heavy head, money, if you fill your mouth with it.
    It makes her laugh to think about. Laughing hurts. The money had been covered in saliva in their hands; he spat his into her hands, it came out like a kind of shining sick. You can have it, he said, you need it more than me. Jesus, they must have been drunk or out of it or something; they knew the dirt there is on money and they still put it all into their mouths. The taste was metal. After that when Ade had kissed her he tasted of metal too. He passed a ten pence piece into her mouth, in past her teeth and off his tongue, flat on to her tongue like a communion wafer, she held it on her tongue like it would melt, then opened her mouth and took it out. The date on it was 1992. God. They’d kissed all
(Spr sm chn?)
    the different sizes of coin they had on them, back and fore, like a game, to see what each felt like.
    Else tries to remember.
    She can remember the taste of the kiss more clearly, even, than she can really remember Ade, what he looked like, his face. A whole time can reduce down to a single taste, a moment. A whole person down to the skelf of aself. Sometimes now she rubs a coin on her jumper and puts it in her mouth; silver tastes cleaner than copper. Copper tastes like meat gone off. The edging on a penny and a two is smooth; the edging on a five or a ten is cut with little grooves; though they’re small they feel big to the tip of a tongue. The tongue-tip is sensitive. The weight of a pound is actually surprising. Else remembers being quite surprised. Nemo me impune lacessit. That’s the promise of it. That’s what the tip of the tongue can trace round the edge of heavy money.
    The taste of it is always on her fingers, always lurking at the back of her throat. Or maybe the taste of money, or love, is just the same taste as the taste of catarrh.
    Else looks up, across the road. That girl over