Hotel World Read Free Page B

above your head last week, did you know?
    Who? she said. What? Fuck off. Leave me alone. I’m dead, for God’s sake.
    I need to know something, I said. Can you remember the fall? Can you remember how long it took us? Can you remember what happened before it? Please.
    Silence. (But I knew she could hear me.)
    I won’t leave, I said, until you tell me. I won’t go till I get it.
    Silence. So I waited. I lay there for days in the box room with her. I irritated her as a matter of course. I played with her stitches. I slipped in and out of her. I went in one ear and out the other. I sang songs from West End musicals (oh what a beautiful morning; all I want is aroom somewhere / far away from the cold night air; cheerio but be back soon; sue me, sue me / shoot bullets through me / I love you), I sang them into the back of her skull till complaints rolling around from the neighbouring graves made me stop. Then I stuck her fingers up her plugged nose instead, tweaked her earlobes.
    I missed three whole rise and falls of the sun (precious enough days to me if not her, lying now with her pockets full of soil and a dusting of soil over her so snug and safe in her shaft of days and nights that go on and on and on end-stopped by no base basement) before at last she said unblinkingly:
    All right, all right. I’ll tell you. If you promise to go away and leave me in peace.
    Okay, I will, it’s a deal, I said.
    You swear? she said.
    On your mother’s life, I said.
    Oh Christ. My mother. Ground rule number one. No reminding me, she said. And number two. Only the fall; no more, nothing else.
    Okay, I said. That’s all I want.
    How much do you know? she said through teeth clamped tight. How far back do I have to go?
    Well, I know about taking the dishes out of the little room, I said. I know about being careful. I remember curling into the room, tucking our legs in like someone not yet born, but I can’t remember why. And I remember the fall, wooo-
    hooooo you bet I do.
    I kicked our legs against the thin-wood walls. I could feel she disapproved. With the sigh of one dead she said:
    It wasn’t a room. It was too small for a room. It was a dumb waiter, remember? –
    (That’s the name, the name for it; that’s it; dumb waiter dumb waiter dumb waiter.)
    – and here’s the story, since you’re so desperate for one. Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it’s too late.
    Too late? Too late for what? I said.
    No interrupting, she said. It’s my story, this is it: are you listening? I fell in love. I fell pretty hard. It caught me out. It made me happy, then it made me miserable. What to do? I had expected all my life to fall for some boy, or some man or other, and I had been waiting and watching for him. Then one day my watch stopped. I thought maybe I’d got water in it and I took it to that watch shop across from the market. You know the one?
    No, but I’ll find it, I said.
    Good, she said. The hands of my watch were stuck at ten to two, though that wasn’t the right time. I took it off my wrist and put it on the counter and the girl behind the counter picked it up to examine it. She held it in her hands. Her hands were serious. I looked to see by her face what it was going to cost me, and when I did, when I saw her brow furrow as she thumbed and turned and shook my watch, when I saw the moment of concentration pass across her face as she held its face in her hands, I couldn’thelp it. I fell. She sells watches, all different kinds, and watch straps, and watch batteries. She sends people’s watches away to have their insides cleaned out so they’ll work again. She stands there surrounded by watches in cabinets, watches in cases, watches all up and down the walls, I had no idea there were so many different kinds of watch you could choose from, and all of them stopped, with their hands pointing to different, possible, times of the day. The only working watch in the shop that morning was on her arm,