Free Hotel World by Ali Smith

letters on it. L. I. S. E. She wonders what it’s short for.
    Room 12, the woman says. Breakfast in our dining room is included in the price.
    When the panic crosses Else’s face the woman shakes her head, just slightly. She goes on reciting. Please don’t hesitate to call down if there’s anything we can do for you. Our bellboy will be glad to show you to your room. We hope you’ll enjoy your stay with us here at the Global Hotel.
    She is holding out a key. Else takes it. It is attached to a weight that is several times its size. The weight is bigger than Else’s hand and wrist.
    Fck sk, Else says.
    A shaft of delight, like sunlight, crosses the receptionist’s face.
    First floor, she says smiling.
    Else is inside. She is lying in the bath and looking at the taps.
    She has looked at the little bottles of shampoo and shower stuff, so like the bright unthreatening colours of children’s medicine that she has already opened one and tasted it on her tongue, as if it might have made her cough better. She has looked at the whiteness of the flannel and the cardboard band round it with the G of Global printed on it. Someone in a factory or workshop somewhere haswrapped up the soap in paper so that to use it you have to unwrap it like it’s a gift. There are cotton wool buds and each one is individually wrapped. The fact that they are individually wrapped has made Else miserable. Now she can’t stop looking at the taps.
    These two taps have never been anything but dazzling. Every day someone has come in here and wiped them back to being brand new again. In every silver curve of them, in their long noses and the blunt snubs of their gleaming star-handles, she can see herself in a bath, distorted, pink and smudged, squeezed small and tight into the reflection. She has tried to find it funny. A pigmy. A circus freak. But she looms at herself, small and misshapen.
    Water gathers at the underlip of one of the taps, wells into a drip and falls – it can’t not – into the bathwater where it becomes more bathwater. Water runs down Else’s face and down her breasts and does the same. Where it hits the water it becomes the water.
    She huddles against the side of the bath and watches the taps and herself huddled in them.
    What a coughing she’d had though, a really good one, one of the best; but not till the boy/man in the hotel uniform, who kept his eyes lowered all the way up the staircase and along the carpet of the corridor, had gone and the door was shut and locked behind her, nothing but her and the four walls and the bathroom, a whole other room behind its own door. Left alone in the rooms she’d roared and hacked like a lion. She’d bucked and snappedherself across the luxurious bed; it had hurt like fuck, like she imagines giving birth must hurt. Giving birth to a cough. Congratulations! Proud parent of snot and gob, twins, she hacks out a laugh. The noise she makes echoes in the bathroom and alarms her. The hot no-air in the bedroom had helped, tickling in her throat like a sick-feather. Then the satisfaction of coughing in a room that there’s no one else in, really letting go into the silence of a place that’s yours, a place where there’s nobody to stare (or to not stare, which is, some days, worse). The pure rising satisfaction of dredging them up, your yellow old insides, and into your mouth and out, hawking them into the toilet water, hearing them spittoon in and watching them sink and flushing them out and away; that was good; that was really good; once the door was locked she had hammered at herself like hammering a rock, and broken it and spat it out, got as much of it up as she could into the clean mouth of the rich people’s toilet and now, lying in the bath, with her clothes on the floor in a sweating pile and the sweat running down her, she is exhausted, still weak, bruised all up her muscles by it, but it was worth it, yes.
    The hotel room is a collection of stuff, all matching. There is a fridge