by Ali Smith
She puts her finger in her mouth: The body’s logical urge towards natural antiseptic.
The finger is reddened: The local inflammatory response of the body’s coagulation system.
She walks across the room with brisk purpose: In six month’s time, Lise will be incapable of walking across a room with brisk purpose. She will be almost incapable of walking across a room. Even the thought of a word like brisk, the ghost of the word passing across her mind, will have the capacity to cause her anxiety. One night in her sleep (which for ten months of her near-future life will be a restless, pierced state) she will dream that she is on the back of a black and white pig and that the pig is galloping, almost flying, at a dangerous speed over a landscape, fluid beneath her, that looks like Wales or the Scottish borders. When she wakes up from this dream she will be exhausted and panicked. Her heart will feel burnt. Her leg muscles will hurt where she gripped the pig in her sleep. This will be one of the low points of her early invalidity.
She straightens her uniform: Lise has momentarily forgotten that the surveillance cameras are off and that the straightness or otherwise of her uniform will not tonight be reported to or recorded by any authority.
No one there: Not literally true. There are some people outside on the street, passers-by in cars and on foot. This no one particularly refers to the fact that there is nobody on the pavement opposite, where Lise is expecting or hoping to see the adolescent girl who has been sitting on the pavement or sheltering in the shopfront opposite the Global.
She can’t see anyone there: Anyone here refers to the same no one, above. Lise is sure she recognizes this girl from the funeral of the dead chambermaid, Sara Wilby. Sara Wilby (19) worked briefly at the Global before falling to her death the previous May in a freak accident, the tragedy of which was reported on both local and national news (25/26.5.99) and caused first, the three-day closure of the hotel and second, escalated demand for rooms on the hotel’s reopening, demand which remained high well into late summer with locals and members of the general public all keen to see the location of the death.
Global Hotels made it compulsory for members of staff from this branch to attend Sara Wilby’s funeral. After the funeral a joke went round the hotel staff combining the Doris Day song ‘Que Sera Sera’ and the dead girl’s name. Lise can’t remember the wording of it now but she remembers it was a relief to pass it between themselves, illicitly like a spliff, as they all did at work in the weeks after the funeral in the hotel kitchens, in the hotel storerooms, and walking back and fore in front of the door of the boarded-up basement. Jokes the punchlines of which were, for example, Well and truly shafted or Sara Wilby in a lift or Because she offered to go down on him had been Chinese-whispered up and down the stairwells of the hotel right into the autumn months, though by now they have, so to speak, died down.
Lise had spent time on one of the same rotas as the dead girl. The dead girl had had dark hair, but it was a Saturday, busy, and there was always new staff coming and going, there were always new chambermaids, chambermaids have high turnover. (High turnover: a phrase full of punchline potential.) Sara Wilby’s family had stood at the church door. All the people who worked at Global filed past, bosses first then undermanagers then administrative staff then Reception then Security then Maintenance then Kitchen then Cleaning, and shook hands with them. A couple of weeks ago Lise realized that that’s where she knew the girl from, the girl who had been sitting outside across the road. Lise had seen her at the church door as they all went past in their hotel uniforms. Lise thinks she may have shaken that girl’s hand.
Tonight Lise went out of the hotel to speak to her. She was going to ask (but the girl ran off) if there was anything she could do, if there was anything the girl wanted, money or a coffee or food or anything, if she’d like to come in and warm up in the hotel, if Lise could do anything for her or help her in any way. Can I do anything for you? Can I help you in any way? She had had the words ready.
Lise knows that she (Lise) must have known Sara Wilby. She was on that same rota for the first of the two nights Sara Wilby worked at the Global. She definitely must have spent some of that evening’s time with Sara Wilby, she must have spoken to her, they must have exchanged at least looks if not many words. But though she’s tried, she can’t really remember anything about it. She can’t even remember what Sara Wilby looked like that night, two nights before she died. It is much easier to picture her from the photographs in the papers and on TV than to try to remember. The photographs in the papers and on TV seem to have wiped Lise’s memory of the real Sara Wilby even cleaner.
It’s for this reason, for exactly this blank in the memory where there’s almost no face, almost no body, nothing but the near-empty outline of a person not known – and also because she is a nice person herself, and just in case there’s anything she can do – that Lise is keeping an eye out for, has just checked outside one more time for, that girl who has been spending her evenings sitting on the steps of the carpet showroom opposite the front of the hotel.
The lobby: All branches – British and international – of Global Hotels have identical lobby design by Swiss interior designer, Henri Goldblatt. To list all regulated details here would take up too much space; Goldblatt’s original blueprint featuring several specific furniture and fabric manufacturers is over ten pages long. For front-of-lobby flowers, on page 6 for instance, Goldblatt specifies stargazer lilies.
Global International plc Board and Shareholders believes that site duplication within still-individual architectural structures reinforces attitudes of psychological security, nostalgia, and preserves the climate of repeated-return in worldwide Global clientele.
The lobby of the branch at which Lise works smells of good carpet, distant restaurant food and stargazer lilies. In bed ill in six months’ time, Lise will be unable to recall the precise scent of the Global lobby. In two years’ time, on holiday in Canada and desperate to get out of a sudden spring snowstorm, she will shelter in the Ottawa Global and as she enters its lobby will unexpectedly remember small sensory details of her time spent working for Global, details she would never (she will think to herself afterwards, surprised) have imagined she even knew, and which remind her of a time in her old gone life before she was ill and before she got better, a time which she has almost completely forgotten she had.
Takes the pen out of her mouth: In the course of the evening Lise’s saliva on the end of the pen slowly evaporates into the conditioned air of the lobby. It will be an hour and forty-five minutes before the pen is completely dry.
Where the guests stand: As Lise passes in front of Reception she briefly imagines, as she always does, what it would look like to see herself working behind the desk. She imagines, only for a moment, that she is the well-dressed young woman who came in earlier, someone whose stays in hotels like this one are paid for with the credit card of the national Sunday broadsheet for which she works; someone whose year of birth is the same as Lise’s yet whose clothes come from shops where even the air hanging over the clothes is exclusive; clothes blessed by the smell of money, unbuyable in this town or this part of the country even now in new postmodern Britain, in any case unimaginable on any real body with any real walking, working or sweating to do. She imagines that, standing there signing the forms, she sees herself (Lise) on the other side of the desk; a hick stranger, a good but unimportant worker. A neat no one – it is important, behind Reception, to wear hair tied back and to wear ‘subtle’ make-up. There Lise is, there she can see it, her subtly made-up face above her Name Badge, sleek and smiling, emptied of self, very good at what she does.
This imagined moment makes Lise, in reaction, feel stronger, better, angrier, more determined from the base of her spine to her shoulders. It fills her head with foul language. Also, although the hotel is quiet tonight with many good rooms free, Lise has given this woman one of the less pleasant, smaller, less viewy rooms on the top floor. In a calculated shift of social power a little later tonight Lise wi
ll enjoy punching the number of the room (34) into the Reception phone and letting it ring, just once, at the other end, so she can imagine the woman full of dashed expectation, hand hovering above the receiver.
Lise has also thought she might, much later tonight and provided she can catch the night staff off guard, take the security key off its hook on the wall and go up to the top floor, let herself silently into the rich woman’s room and stand over the rich woman in her bed as she sleeps unawares. This is an act Lise has fantasized about before tonight, though not yet carried out, being generally too nice a person. But tonight, for Lise, anything is possible (or at least, many more things than are usually possible; see below, Still high with what she’s done). Also, at the moment Lise’s sensitivity about money is heightened. Last week when she put her cash card into a cash machine outside her bank the machine kept the card. When Lise went into the bank the next morning to ask for it back the assistant behind the counter refused to give it to her. The assistant, who was much younger than Lise and who regarded her with blunt suspicion, said the card was property of the Bank and that Lise, about whose overdraft the Bank was extremely concerned, was now to be issued with a new card which would allow her to take out only a fraction of the money paid into her account by her salary cheque. The account is called the Solo Account. It is usually given, Lise has discovered, to people aged fifteen. The assistant asked for Lise’s chequebook so she could make a note of its details. When Lise passed it through the hole under the partition, the assistant ripped the book in two and put it in an envelope and the envelope in a drawer which she locked. We cannot allow you to write cheques any more, Miss O’Brien, the assistant said. This chequebook is property of the Bank.
Later tonight, however, Lise will leave the hotel carrying a wastepaper basket full of small change. Tomorrow morning when she wakes up slumped over her kitchen table she will find the wastepaper basket by the washing machine and will count the change; it will come to nearly twenty-five pounds. She will be pleased. She will remember paying for a hotel breakfast out of this money, and buying some croissants and a pint of milk for her own breakfast from the all-night bakery on her way home. The croissants will be in the bag still under her work clothes. She will split them open, put them under the grill and run downstairs to the shop for butter. She will eat them heavily buttered for lunch and feel rich, unexpectedly lucky. All tomorrow evening her work clothes, which she hasn’t had time to wash, will smell of the faded scent of croissants.
The code on the door: 3243257. Unless these numbers are pressed in the correct order on the code-box on the door, the door will not unlock. This is normal safety procedure.
In six months Lise will be unable to remember this code. She will never need to remember it again.
Holds the receiver in the air: Lise, excited, cannot decide whom to call to tell about her act of letting a homeless person have a room in the hotel for the night. The friends who would understand what she’s done all work for the hotel too, and could mindlessly or mindfully betray her to authorities. Other friends who don’t work for Global wouldn’t understand its full rebellious significance and the combination of temerity and courage it has taken. Lise is torn for a moment with the idea of calling her mother, Deirdre O’Brien, who would understand the ramifications of the act but to whom Lise, at this mid-twenties stage of her life where her judgement and resentment of her mother are more weighty than her understanding of their complex relationship, has no real wish to speak, wanting instead to have adventures whose power is in their being withheld from, rather than gifted to, her too-fast aging, formerly publicly embarrassing, mother.
9: The number which must be dialled first for an outside line from Global Hotels.
Still high with what she’s done: This evening Lise, by inviting a homeless person to reside in the hotel for the night free of charge, has probably broken all Global Quality Policy. In doing this, she has made herself feel better.
Lise has seen the homeless woman quite often outside the hotel in the past. The homeless woman sits in the sun, wind, sometimes rain; she resembles a buddhist meditating, her palms up and open. Lise has thought it must be a rough life but a good life, a freed-up life. She thinks the shift in homeless people over the past few years is an interesting one; old drunk men and middle-aged mad women before; now, younger and younger. Lise, unable to make out the age of the homeless woman in front of her at Reception, was also unprepared for the strong smell she brought into the lobby with her, though she is still pleased to be doing someone the world of good for one night. In a spontaneous act of generosity, she will list Room 12 on the computer for tomorrow’s Room Service Full Breakfasts. (Though a moment later she will panic about this and then erase her listing because it bears her initials; the computer is running under her shift password. It is, however, more or less safe to have involved Duncan; Duncan is taciturn, and Bell and Burnett are both still a little afraid of him after the accident and are unlikely to question him about it, should anyone find out. She is hoping, as he takes the homeless woman up the stairs and as she waits for him to come down again, that the scam might excite him out of the LBR tonight and maybe even into some conversation, like in the old days.)
Drums her fingers on the desk: In a rhythm approximating the opening lines of the first verse of Neil Sedaka’s 1962 UK chart hit, ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’. See above, Instrumental version of ‘Breaking’ etc.
The fabric of her lapel: Global Hotel uniforms are 78 per cent polyester, 22 per cent rexe. They induce perspiration.
Waste bin: Lined with plastic, this waste bin contains only an emptied Advil blister-pack (Lise’s) and a plastic container labelled St Michael Pasta and Spinach Salad With Tomato and Basil Chicken, now empty except for the used white plastic fork (originally belonging to Mr Brian Morgan, guest in Room 29, who asked Lynda Alexander, day shift Reception, to dispose of this when he checked in at 2 p.m.).
Smear of blood: Type A Positive.
Name Badge: Name Badges are part of Global Quality Policy. The Quality Policy Training pack (UK1999) states: Quality is doing things the way they should be done, first time, every time. The way we measure quality is to find out just how much money we spend sorting things out. We spend over one day in every four sorting out things we’ve got wrong. We have a lot of very complex processes, which people at different levels contribute to. The Quality Programme is about getting people to do better all the worthwhile things they ought to be doing anyway. If we can do things better and cheaper, we can handle growth more easily, have happier customers, happier staff and happier managers.
Nobody on the staff at this branch of Global is quite sure what any of this means, other than that it’s something to do with the difference between good and bad and the need for better. The main change brought about by the installation of Global Quality Policy has been the wearing of first-name Badges by lower staff, and full-name Badges by line managers and managers.
Surveillance cameras at the front of the hotel: The wiring of the surveillance cameras through to the Security Office at the rear of the hotel building was carried out (under slack supervision) by an apprentice electrician. The front unit power cuts out every time a chambermaid catches the wire with the side of her trolley wheeled at a certain angle along the back corridor.
The system not functioning properly has given Lise the opportunity to offer Room 12 to a homeless person in the knowledge that nobody from Security will have been able to record her actions.
Her neck is hurting: Lise’s glands are raised in her neck, under her arms and in her groin. At present she is aware only of a slight discomfort under her ears and chin which she imagines is coming from too tight a neckline on her uniform.
The clock on the computer: The clock is at present running 12.33 seconds ahead of GMT.
The computer can provide information on hotel guests, staff, international tariffs and more general Global matters. It lists in its staff files (to which only certain members of staff have access) the payment d
etails and home addresses of all members of Global staff, including those of Joyce Davies, chambermaid, who lives at 27 Vale Rise, Wordsworth Estate, and will first thing tomorrow morning be fired from this branch of Global Hotels by Mrs Bell, who believes (having been assured first by both Lynda Alexander and Lise O’Brien, day and evening shift Reception, that Room 12 has been unoccupied) that Davies has neglected to attend to Room 12 over a period of two days and is therefore directly or indirectly to blame, in the absence of any responsible hotel guest, for damage caused to the Hotel by a bath left to overflow. The cost of damages, £373.90 for replacement and drying, will be removed from Davies’s final paycheck.
Lise, behind Reception, is at work: There she is, Lise, behind Reception, at work.
The lobby is empty.
In a moment, she will glance at the clock on the computer and see the moment when the number changes on it, from a 1 to a 2. She will be pleased to see it happen. It will feel meant.
That is then. This was now.
Lise was lying in bed. She was falling. There wasn’t any story like the one you’ve just read, or at least, if there was, she hadn’t remembered it. All of the above had been unremembered; it was sunk somewhere, half in, half out of sand at the bottom of a sea. Weeds wavered over it. Small stragglers from floating shoals of fish darted in and out of it open-mouthed, breathing water.