Hotel World Read Free Page A

sitting so lostly in the chair. Her mother.
    I could do the self in the oval on the headstone without even trying; it was easy, slight smile but serious; passport photograph for entry to other worlds. But my favourite toperform was the one with the left-behind sister in it too, a picture the sister kept hidden in her purse and only looked at after her parents were asleep or when she was in a room with a lock. Both of them sat on a couch, but the gone girl was caught in the middle of saying something, looking away from the camera. That one was my masterpiece, the angle of movement, the laughing look, the still more about to be said. That one took effort, to look so effortless.
    From summer to autumn I did all that I can. I appeared to the father. I appeared to the mother. I appeared to the sister. The father pretended he couldn’t see. The more he saw, the more he looked away. A wall crept inches higher from his shoulders round his head; every time I came he added a new layer of bricks to the top of it. By autumn the wall was way past the top of his head, swaying, badly bricklayed and dangerously unbalanced, nearly up to the ceiling in the living room where it knocked against the lampshade and sent light and shadow spinning every time he crossed the room.
    I came only twice to the mother. It made her cry, made her miserable, jumpy and fearful. It was unpleasant. Both times ended in tears and sleepless weeks. It was kinder not to do it, and so I left her alone.
    But the sister drained me with a terrible thirst. I couldn’t appear enough for her. With the trophy, with the red lights coming out of my face, with the passport smile, with the laughing things unsaid. Every face I made drained and disappeared into the fracture that ran thelength of her body. Summer passed, autumn came and she was still dark with thirst; if anything she was thirstier, she wanted more, and the colours were fading. When winter came I stopped. (It has been easier since then, I find, to appear to people who don’t recognize what they see. I looked at the cracked face of the sad girl and knew. In the face of so much meaning it is easier to have no face.)
    Above me the birds singing, further and further away. Each day a little further, more muffled, like wool in the ears. (Imagine wool. The rough-thready rub of it.) I sat an inch above the grave on cushy air. It was Saturday afternoon; I was bored with upsetting the family, bored with appearing to random people who didn’t know who we were. The leaves were paling on the trees. The grass, neat and new, was greying for winter, and her underneath the sodden carpet, soil piled and turned for four luxurious feet above her. I looked at the passport in the oval, the face of the shape we had taken together. Down through the soil she slept. She couldn’t come up. But I could go down. Down through loam and the laid eggs of many-legged creatures, and the termites, the burrowing feasty maggots, all waiting for it to break them open, the season after winter, I forget the word for it, the season when the flowers will push their heads regardless out again.
    Down I went far further than stupefied bulbs till I passed through the lid of the wooden room, smooth and costly on the outside, chipboard-cheap at the centre. Onelast time I slipped into our old shape, hoisting her shoulders round me and pushing down into her legs and arms and through her splintery ribs, but the fitting was ill, she was broken and rotting, so I lay half-in, half-out of her under the ruched frills of the room’s innards, cold I reckon, and useless pink in the dark.
    The things she saw with had blackened. Her mouth was glued shut. Hello, she said through the glue. You again. What are you after?
    How are you? I said. Sleep well?
    (She heard me!) Fine till now, she said. Well? What? This had better be good.
    I just want something, I whispered, to take to the surface. Just the one something. It’s Saturday. Did you know? Your sister planted crocuses