Hotel World by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

lying in the grass exactly where they left it when they come to find it. She looks like she comes from somewhere with a garden, with garden furniture in it.
    Else imagines the girl a garden and sits her on a sun-lounger. Tall flowers wave their heads. She is drinking a can of Coke. She looks disgruntled. Someone shouts something from a kitchen window. What? the girl shouts back, her head turned, her mouth open. What did you say?
    No she doesn’t. She doesn’t shout anything. It’s winter,there’s no garden, and she just sits there like that, a grey girl on the grey steps of the World Of Carpets showroom opposite in the darkness, watching the hotel.
    She has the stupefied look of the lovelorn. That’s what it
(Spr sm chn?)
    is; yes. She is watching the hotel for someone going in, or someone coming out of it. Some man from up the road, some friend of her parents who’s been having her regularly since she turned fourteen, on her jacket, spread under them on her mother’s good corduroy front-room suite after school, or in the lunch hour, or while her mother is in the shower or out at the shops, and now his wife, or her mother, has found him out, or her father maybe, he’s found him out, he’s out to get him, he’s going to punch his face in, they’re searching for him, and she’s come here to the hotel to warn him, she’s sneaked out of her bedroom, out of the window and down the side of the house because the door was locked, they’d locked her in, she knows he said he’d stay in this hotel if he was ever
    Or. She’s waiting for someone to look out of one of the hotel windows and see her. Maybe some salesman who passes through town twice a month, who’s just loosened his tie and opened the crotch buttons on his work-suit trousers, who’s standing with his shirt-tail out, glancing at the night over the town, and – there, look – he sees her waiting so patiently for him, the, um, the (how would they have met?) the sly shy girl who was doing the teas and coffees at the sales conference two months ago, who teased him and whom he teased over the sugar packets,whose virginity he thinks he pocketed between 10:45 a.m. and 10:50 a.m. in the deserted Conference Room behind the high stacks of seats, quick, because she had to be back serving again on the hour and he had a demonstration to give straight after the coffee break.
    Ah, love. Else, laughing her guts out now, knows it well. Members of the public, for instance, are always asking her for it, as if it’s part of her job to give it out to them for their small change.
    Some of the things (concerning love) which members of the public have said to Else over time :
    Fancy warming me up? (a man in a tailored suit)
    Excuse me. I was just wondering if a twenty pound note in fair exchange would be any use to you? (a man in jogging clothes)
    I am having a terrible day. I don’t know what else to do. I’m at the end of my tether. I don’t know who else to speak to. (a woman, crouching down and speaking near Else’s ear, putting her arms out to be held as she spoke. Else thought about it afterwards. She had let the woman sit like that with her arm through hers for nearly half an hour; she had made herself available to her because it had been a long time since anybody had given her the excuse to think they were using her name like this. I don’t know what, Else, to do. I don’t know who, Else, to speak to.)
    Sure I can’t tempt you? I’ll give you a fiver? (the man in the suit again)
    How old are you? Would you like to come home with me? (a woman in smart business clothes)
    Want to come in the van, darling? I’ll play you a tune. No? Sure? I’ve ninety-nines and everything. We can easy stick a Flake in it. (two men through the window of an ice cream van stopped at the traffic lights)
    Are you okay? It’s a cold one, today. How are you doing? See and keep warm now (a youngish woman, just being nice. But isn’t it the same thing? Else wonders; doesn’t it all come