Hotel World Read Free

same one in the frames in the different rooms of the house, one in the front room, one in the parents’ room, one in the hall. I chose the saddest people and I followed them to see where we’d lived. They seemed vaguely familiar. They sat at the front in the church. I couldn’t be sure. I had to guess. I thought they were ours, the people, and I was right. After the funeral we went home. The house is small; it has no upstairs, no place for a good fall. A chair in that house can take up almost one whole wall. A couch and two chairs fill a room so there is hardly any place for the legs of the people sitting.
    A dog was barking at me two houses away. A cat shivered through me where her ankles had been, rubbing up against air. More funeral people came and the house got even smaller. I watched them take tea in the lack of space she’d lived in. I went to her room. It was full of two beds. I hovered above a bed. I came back through. I hovered above the sad. I hovered above the television. I hovered above the hoover.
    They ate the salmon, the salad and the little sandwiches and they left, shaking hands with the man at the door, the father. They were relieved to be leaving. The blackness dispersed above the heads of most of them when they reached the garden gate and clicked it behind them. I went back inside the house to examine the left people. There were three. The woman was the saddest. She sat in a chair and the unspoken words which hung round her head said: although this is my home where I have lived for twenty-two years, and in it I am surrounded by family and familiar things, I do not rightly know any more where it is that I am in the world. The man made tea and cleared dishes. All afternoon while tea was being drunk or was skinning over he collected up cups on a tray and went through to the kitchen, filled a kettle and made more tea, brought cups back again full of it. In the kitchen he stood, opened a cupboard door, took nothing out of the cupboard, shut the door again. The still-alive child was a girl, another one. She had a fracture of anger starting under her yellow hairline, crossing her forehead and running right down the middle of her face, dividing her chin, her neck, her chest, all the way to her abdomen where it snarled itself into a black knot. This knot only just held the two halves of her together. She sat hugging her knees below the framed photograph of the gone girl. In it we were wearing a tie, shy, and holding a trophy in the shape of a swimming body.
    There was some salmon left on the plate. I was wondering how it would taste. The man came through,took it away, scraped it into a plastic bag in the back yard. It was a waste. He could have kept it. They could have eaten it later or tomorrow and it would have tasted as good, better; I wanted him to know. I looked at him sadly, then shyly, then he saw me. He dropped the plastic bag. It rustled down on to the broken flagstones. His mouth opened. No sound came out (I could still hear perfectly then). I waved my swimming trophy at him. He paled. He smiled. He shook his head and looked through me, and then I was gone again and he threw the salmon away. A whole half a side of a fish, and the bones would have been easy to pick out, it was perfectly cooked. It had beautiful pinkness. This was last summer, my (suddenly) last. I could still see the full range of reds then.
    So I practised the school photograph which was on top of the television. The face was innocence and tiredness, the age thirteen, a slight squint in the, the. The things she saw with. I honed to perfection the redness in them in another picture, one with other girls, and all the girls in the blur had red lights and mock boldness coming out of their faces and drinks in their hands. I checked to see I was performing the right girl. There she was, hiding at the back. I worked hard at the warmth of her look in the picture on the mantelpiece, the one with her arm round the shoulders of the woman now