Hotel World by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online

dog away, the coughing hurts, the stuck splinter of herself as a girl hurts, the combination of the coughing and the past gets her in its mouth like a dog gets a rag, and shakes her.
    To stop herself shaking, to stop herself thinking of it, she thinks of them instead, all the gd jb secretaries over time, row after row of
(Spr sm
(pause to cough
too long, person’s gone)
ch?)
    shorthanders, 100-word-per-minuters. Think of them neatly filleting the words, and their wastepaper baskets overflowing with the thrown-away i’s and o’s and u’s and e’s and a’s. But they’re all redundant now, she thinks, allthose scrtries. They’re history. Ha. They’ve all been made redundant by crisp shiny new girls with dictaphone machines and computers which print up what you say at the same time as you’re saying it. They’re probably all on the street now, the scs, doing the same day’s work Else does. She doesn’t need vowels either. She knows all kinds of shorthand. She imagines the pavement littered with the letters that fall out of the half-words she uses (she doesn’t need the whole words). She imagines explaining to the police, or to council road-sweepers, or to angry passers-by. I’ll clear up after me, she tells them in her head. It’s just letters. Anyway they’re biodegradable. They rot like leaves do. They make good compost. Birds use them for lining nests, for keeping their eggs warm.
    Starlings’ eggs: pale blue. Robins’ eggs: white marked with red. Thrushes’ eggs: brown flecks or spots. Sparrows’ eggs: grey and brown covered in splotches. Chaffinches’ eggs: pink with brown tinges. Blackbirds’ eggs: greeny kind of blue specked with brown. She knows the eggs of city birds; she has done since she was a child out in the back garden and looking in the hedge at the blackbird’s nest, the three small green-blue eggs in the bed of grass and hedge-twigs. Don’t touch them, her mother said. If you touch them the mother bird will know and she won’t come back for them and they’ll die. How will she know? Else asked. She just will, her mother said, I’m telling you, don’t. Else was wearing yellow crimplene, it had a pink band at the neck, at the sleeve cuffs and at the hem. It was the month of May, nineteen seventy-nine, avery long time ago. The eggs were beautiful. She took out one of them and held it in her hand. It was light, it could easily break there in her hand. She could easily crack it; just moving a little would crack it. She put it back in the nest beside the other two. Nobody had seen.
    The next day the mother bird still hadn’t come back. Three days later the eggs were cold. The birds inside them would be mucus, their bones wouldn’t have formed properly, would just be elbows of wing.
    Stop crying, her mother said. It doesn’t do any good for those poor baby birds. She handed Else a book, it had birds on the cover. The book made Else feel sore inside. She made herself learn facts out of it. By the summer of the following year, when rare heat shimmered at either end of the road and the nests hidden in all the trees and hedges were full of new fledglings and last year’s eggs were nothing but a bad dream, Else (in a new blue cotton pinafore scooped at the neck, a daisy design sewn on to the pocket) knew these things off by heart: swifts’ eggs were white and long, magpies’ eggs were blue-ish speckled brown.
    Nowadays this is Else’s recurring dream: she enters a room whose walls are lined with wardrobes. She opens the door of the first one and inside on a shelf is her mother’s sewing machine with the thick transparent Cellophane draped over it to keep the dust off. Round it, under it, above it, are drawers. Inside each of them is a complex filing system of folders. Inside each of these folders is a too-small garment. A dress, a cardigan, awaistcoat, slacks, a pinafore. Each piece of clothing has been made for Else. The folders fill the drawers and the drawers fill each of the wardrobes