Strange Hotel

by Eimear McBride

  So.

  When I entered the room, the curtains were already shut. I never looked out, or bestowed sleep, on the hotel residents across. Didn’t notice a bus. Didn’t look at the street. Didn’t invent the J’accuse of an inanimate object. Never watched him walk off down the road. This version has its own consistency. As mentioned before, by the act of leaving, I may already have been different. It’s plausible at least. In which case, I may not have been as predictable as I think. But herein lies the rub of the antithetical thread: envisaging how other choices might have constructed the life you’ve actually lived. Years could atrophy in the ciphering of it and as I’ve no wish to embark on a mid-life crisis – although I think we can already take that as read – it would probably be to no avail anyway. We cannot know what we were not or what we were not to become. Besides, why should I permit myself this alternative view? Its companion in logic I have always refused: the claim of not recognising yourself in your past or of failing to possess any significant insight into the whys of what you did. Despite the mess, and so much mess, I’ve consistently forbidden myself those spurious comforts because …

  I knew myself.

  I always knew myself.

  Which means that kind of declaration is as impossible to make as denying the inescapable state of knowing myself has invariably made matters worse.

  Well now.

  I do like all these lines of words but they don’t seem to be helping much with keeping the distance anymore.

  Maybe I should add more again?

  Maybe I should ruthlessly edit?

  Maybe I should stop fucking around with language? It’s not improving matters at all.

  Funny, how unbearable I’m finding all of this, considering I’m only imagining it. I’m only confirming by deliberation what I once avoided by instinct – a future rife with regret. Which is not, in the current circumstance, wholly un-useful to do. In fact, it’s most likely very useful to do and I should carry on. But then I’m sure, somewhere within, the answers are already flashing red to my dishonest questions. Because I know my grammar-frantic logic is only that. I’ve never had the slightest interest in being a trier-on of hats and, really, I’m as prone to contrariness as I ever was. Just because I can analyse from any which way up, doesn’t mean I should.

  Certainly, it doesn’t mean I’m obliged to.

  And, of course, I could just stop.

  I could remove my eye from the spyhole and cease concocting all of this. I could hop in the shower. I could order up breakfast. I could go back to bed for a couple of hours and leave last night where it, proverbially, lay. I could forget this room I’ve imagined for myself, in which I’ve chosen to think I am safe. All of those options might be better, easier anyway. Then again, with the angst already stirred up perhaps I should gallantly embrace my choice of ‘no more options’ and get to the bitter end? Yes, perhaps. Why not run the whole godforsaken business to earth and finally, finally be done? Too soon, too soon might be the cry but when have I ever listened to that?

  Go on then. Run it down.

  Besides, no outcome need be set in stone.

  Well … that’s not what you have just been saying.

  But.

  Just go on.

  Pick it up from …

  Pick it up from here:

  He had still left. I was still that. I am still at the hotel – I assume – standing bewildered. This is still the version in which I don’t cross the room or make a beeline for the window. In this version I go to the desk. I turn on a lamp and let it illuminate whatever it wants. Perhaps I investigate the stationery drawer and wonder about keeping the pens? But I wouldn’t want to risk him incurring any additional expense. In all honesty, I can’t imagine it, giving a damn about headed notepaper or monogrammed envelopes. Perhaps I switch on the TV instead? And while even that is hard to credit, as I’m discarding what really happened, then anything might have, isn’t that how this works? And why can’t I? Why shouldn’t I? Who would have blamed me if I’d left? No one, not really, apart from myself. Even he offered to get me this room because he’d thought I, conceivably, might. After all, this was also the first time in his life that his devils had been lined up publicly and called aloud by name. Well, spoken of in a dimly lit room to a woman with whom he was also in love. But a woman he knew was possessed of a few devils of her own, albeit differently. That’s how he thought of it, I’d say. She had devils alright but none, as yet, she’d been complicit in the making of so he couldn’t know how I’d react. Of course, that was all less important to me – bent, as I was, on biting into everything. But then, I didn’t know how the past worked, not until much later on. Still, I heard the words and in time learned to read the shape. In some ways, for him, I became the shape. After all, I stayed. How could I not? And I go from this room to the room where he sat. I remember his face in the final words of it, like we were both up on some high place and a millstone had been lashed to his leg. As I sit again on that reimagined bed, I have no idea who sits here.

  So often since then memories have dog-eared themselves but that night, in isolation, remains incomparably itself. Even after all these years, it still shows spectacularly clear and hurts like splinters in skin. The quiet we went, studying it. Him staring at his hand. The twitch on his cheek. ‘That’s horrible,’ I’d said. ‘I know,’ he’d agreed and gotten off the bed. Somewhere in that rented house someone else had come in. We’d held onto ourselves listening to them go up the stairs, into their room. Ah, that’s where the idea of a TV comes from – we’d heard them turn theirs on. I had envied them their distance from us. That was when he’d said, ‘If you want to leave, I’ll sort you out a room.’ And I’d imagined myself in some clean white bed, falling asleep, safe from it. ‘It’ as if he and his history weren’t intrinsic, which, as it happens, I think was sort-of true. Is that now the same for me too? Extrication isn’t what I’m pursuing though. Not really, not anymore. What I remember next is how I answered him. But to place myself in this imagined room, I must say something different like ‘Yes, I think you should,’ or ‘If you don’t mind, that might be for the best.’ I wouldn’t have been cruel to him about it, not ever, just cruel enough to go. And, as I said, he wouldn’t have been angry, not even taken aback. He’d probably have nodded. Dressed. Gone to the door. Put on his coat. Waited for me to get into my clothes. I doubt he’d have said another word, except – perhaps – as I packed up, ‘Don’t worry about your other stuff. You can collect it whenever you want.’ And I’m certain he’d have carried the bag for me – I would’ve been too mortified to insist he didn’t. That would’ve been an indignity, for both of us, too far. Then he’d have locked up. We’d have gone down the stairs and walked to whichever hotel he had in mind. Or maybe already knew. Somewhere nearby because of the hour. But not somewhere awful, for reasons already described. What is the point of this exercise again? All of this is long past done. He was not a man from whom I wanted to run, nor was I the type of young woman who thought the world could only work in one way. The crux is, a faint heart was never it, never the difficulty I struggled with. Quite the opposite.

  But.

  All these years later, I’m still thinking about that night. In some ways I think I’ve never stopped circling it, niggling at what it meant. About him. About me. It is my brightest, my one unalterable memory. No matter what use I put it to, it never fails to bloom. So, if in every life there must be a touchstone, then this one is irrefutably mine.

  Because.

  That night I heard a story that might have made me run. I learned how the body I had loved and touched had lived another life. Pitilessly, physically. In its recountment, guiltily. Even, when younger, brokenly, in ways similar to mine. And the unforeseen repercussion of hearing it was finding myself in the dark and adrift from the very person I had been throwing caution to the winds with. Not that it had never been previously intimated. It was more the all-engulfing nature it took which provided the ferocious surprise. After all, I knew he was mo
re than twice my age and, naïve as I was I wasn’t that naïve, so … what else would he have been at? Nowadays, I assume it was that naïveté though which beguiled him into those tells – and by ‘beguiled’ I mean beguiled himself for, in spite of this morning’s suggestion of plot, I was never a one for games. I didn’t think of myself as anything like bait. I would have considered that poor, preoccupied, as I was, with telling the truth – a folly I still struggle to resist. No matter. To the matter. I think it’s safe to assume it was the guilelessness which drew him a little open, then persuaded him to a little more. And I had no idea what was going on, until I knew everything. ‘Well, what harm can she do?’ he later said was what he’d think or ‘Why worry? She’ll meet a boy her own age soon and I’ll be off the hook. Fun while it lasts, with no foreseeable risk, et cetera et cetera.’ All fair weather, I suppose, until he fell the whole way in and knew he had to tell out everything. Then we both found ourselves, unpreparedly, pinned by the weight of what his words brought. That night, tonight – if I’m doing my imaginative homework – I saw/see the world anew. That adulthood could be no freer of what had already been. All the awful evidence plain in his anonymous rack-up of bodies. The self-proliferated lies. His long revulsion at the satisfaction so little money can buy, and should not buy, which he already knew but had already done. How he’d lived with it all, for a long time, and not much of it well. And I saw his loneliness. I believed in it – it was as clearly on display as a horsehair shirt. But still I had flinched from its embodiment, as he knew I would. As he didn’t know I wouldn’t, if he were telling me now. Well, not from some of it because I am no longer in a position to judge – not that my judging him was the point. Only he thought that should be my right. I never wanted to, or truly did. Nevertheless, it left us both wrecked in its wake, for a time at least. Catching us and hobbling us where we had not thought to look, as if we believed, once exposed to the air, there might be no afterwards. But everything is about afterwards, as I have come to know. After it back then, I remember sitting on his bed, willing myself not to be afraid because I understood that whatever he had done – and been – was just bindings around a person who was really someone and that real someone, in his turn, saw beyond the bindings around me. That we two, regardless of the injunctions of our histories, were about to try another way through.

  So.

  As far as reasons for all this painful recollecting go, there’s that. However, less dramatically and concealed beneath, there probably lies a greater truth. It might even be the idea upon which I built myself from – almost – my adult life’s first breath. It existed before he and I ever met – although, in fairness, he was to prove a reasonably defining test. And it was knowing that to leave, rather than stay, would betray the most fundamental bargain I’d made which, at its very simplest, read: you be London, and I will rise to that. It’s the kind of deal only youth can strike, in all its ignorance and hope. I won’t even attempt to argue its part. Instead I will merely observe that to have proved unequal to its offer of everything, every kind of life – including all that terrible love – would not only have resulted in youthful illusions lost, I think it would have made a wasteland of me.

  And there it is.

  And so there it is.

  That was difficult. But I got here in the end.

  So now.

  So now, what?

  So now, have you gathered your rosebuds?

  You know what you have to do.

  I do.

  So now, I do.

  I stand in the hotel room I’ve imagined, imagining him walking home. The window, the bare bulb, the carpet, the desk – what would have to be paid for and what I could take – all dimming into generalities of themselves. All losing their reality because they were not and could never have really been. This is the end of imagination. How soon until the cock crows thrice? And all at once so much rides upon not hearing that. Every part of me knowing it is already past time to cross back over this counterfeit room. Put down your fake treachery. Put your coat on. Pick up your bag and unlock the door. Go into the corridor. Call for the lift. Step in, with no thought for what it once was and, as it opens again downstairs, run for all you are worth through the deserted foyer out onto the empty street. Face the glowering lamp but, holding nothing against it, just go to where he last stood. Look then and see the sun hint at itself in the east. Its awkward beginnings dragging into relief the now bus-less roads, the dusty trees, the black paint flaking from wrought-iron railings and beyond, into the morning distance, where his lank figure still retreats. Then, without knowing if every part of me will withstand what’s now coming, in dreadful tests of time, call until he turns.

  And I do.

  Then.

  Turn too and return again from this most fitly resolved past that was never really an option – primarily for its never having been an actual question – to the life which, in fact, exists. The one that requires now going Live to an Austin hotel. The one where the sweat on my palm blurs the view from the spyhole. The one where I listen inside for sounds outside in the hall. The one, apparently, fashioned from my own will. And what does my will think of me now?

  Probably that it’s tired of this tone. Of relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I’m honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence. And that will no longer do. And that will no longer be? This is the day. The hour. The minute.

  And so?

  I am beholden to no past, that much is clear. I am the last one standing in so many memories. Will I decide there can be more again? Or will I procrastinate at this door until the end of my days? Or will I choose to remember that there are some things I already know how to do?

  Austin x

  Pisa

  Paris

  Funchal

  Austin x

  Belfast

  Galway

  Brighton

  Bruges

  Hay-on-Wye

  Borris

  Liverpool

  Austin x

  Bantry

  Helston

  Liskeard

  Edinburgh

  Gothenburg

  Boston

  Austin x

  Dublin

  Dun Laoghaire

  San Francisco

  Austin x

  Inis Oirr

  Listowel

  Besançon

  Toronto

  Brussels

  Prague

  Berlin

  Dublin

  Montreal

  Dublin

  Cork

  Austin x

  Dublin

  Zagreb

  Austin x

  London x

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to my agent Tracy Bohan, without whose prompting this book would not exist.

  Thanks to my editors Alex Bowler and Mitzi Angel, whose patient attention it was in need of.

  Thanks to Fergal McBride, Marietta Smith, Phoebe Harkins and Ross Macfarlane, for their many kindnesses.

  And thank you most of all to William and Éadaoin Galinsky, without whom my life would be very strange indeed.

  About the Author

  Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the Goldsmiths Prize. The Lesser Bohemians won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 McBride was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading.

  By the Same Author

  A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

  The Lesser Bohemians

  Copyright

  First published in 2020

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House,

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2020

  All
rights reserved

  © Eimear McBride, 2020

  Cover design by Faber

  Cover photograph: Tereza, Chichester Cathedral © Eva Vermandel

  The right of Eimear McBride to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–35516–7