Hotel World by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

and the wardrobes crowd the room so that there is almost no space in it, and each piece of clothing is pressed flat in its folder, shrunk and airless as if vacuum-packed. Else is dizzy with them. She unpacks the first, and then the next, then one after another after another they pile up round and over her feet and even though she has opened hundreds of them there are still thousands more to unfold, all different, all handmade, all stitched with care and thousands more drawers of them waiting for her to open them. Puffed-sleeves. Tapers and waists. Pinking-shear edges. Zigzagged black braiding. Crimplene and cotton, nylon and wool, polyester and terylene and suede, and each of them is useless; too small, too fragile, too clean, too much; the wardrobes go on forever packed with unwearable love, and in her dream Else knows with a sheering hopelessness that she is asleep and that, untakeable as it all is, it will rip her apart at her seams one more time to have to wake up and leave any of it, one single piece of it with its empty arms, behind.
    It is a nightmare.
    It has got so that Else is afraid to sleep in case it comes, and afraid to sleep in case it doesn’t come.
(Spr sm chn?)
    She tries laughing. She coughs again. Nothing loosens. Her insides are blistered; she knows they are; they look like paint does when it’s been too near heat. Her insidesare burnt-out like waste ground round a condemned building whose windows have been broken and their glass left lying about inside on the floors of its empty rooms. If someone went in there to try and get some sleep, say, she’d cut herself open on the glass. If she sat down to rest she’d sit on broken glass. When Else breathes, when she moves, it feels like broken glass.
    She has shattered her insides, living the way she is. She knows she has. It isn’t funny. It comes over her like misery. She has broken her insides, burnt them out, then heaped them over with ground as if to stop the burning. Beautie, Truth and Raritie. Grace in all simplicitie. Here enclosde in cinders lie. Enclosde, spelt backwards at the end. Nclsd. Shakespearian. Shksprn. The library here in this town is good. She thinks of the library instead. It is better than the one in Bristol. It stays open longer, generally, and the librarians rarely throw anybody out, even somebody getting some sleep. She has been reading metaphysical poets. Truth and Beautie buried be. Or: I am rebegot. Of Absence, Darknesse, Death; things which are not. Poetic darkness, Else thinks breathing carefully, has an extra e, as if a longer kind of darkness than the ordinary kind, and a capital D. Darknesse. Essence of dark. She has read a poem about a boy who acted plays in front of Queen Elizabeth the First, was good at playing very old men and died aged just thirteen. Else also likes William Butler Yeats. I went into the hazel wood. Because a fire was in my head. Go your ways, o go your ways. I choose another mark. Girls down on the seashore. Whounderstand the dark. She can’t be bothered with novels any more. She has read enough novels to last her a lifetime. They take too long. They say too much. Not that much needs to be said. They trail stories after them, like if you tied old tin cans to your ankles and then tried to walk about.
    Else panics. She has been dreaming and now the girl is gone. She can’t see the girl. Is the girl still there? There are people on the opposite side of the road, she can’t see past them. She can’t see her.
    It’s all right. It’s all right. The people go past and the girl is still there. She still hasn’t moved. Her hood is still up.
    She holds herself, that girl, as if she is all bruises. She’s young enough for anything to have happened to her, and the way she stares at nothing it’s pretty clear that something has. But on the whole she looks hardly tarnished; she looks shiny, out of place, like if someone left a spoon in the garden by mistake for a couple of nights, and there it is still