Free Hotel World by Ali Smith Page B

they can do is do what you make them do. They can’t do anything else. Anything, Else. She reaches forward and turns the handle on the hot tap. She turns it as far as it will go. Water creeps up her sides. When it’s too hot to stay in the water, she gets out, leaving it running, and when the water level comes to the edge of the bath she reaches to pull the plug out. The chain is too hot to touch. She wraps her hand in one of her socks, puts it in the water and yanks the chain up and her hand as fast as possible out of the sock. Almost as fast as water goes out of the bath, water is smashing back into it out of the tap. She sits on her clothes in the steaming bathroom.
    She has decided against using the towels; they are too white, folded in their gross wedges on a glass shelf next to the toilet. In the bedroom she dries herself down on her jumper. She drapes the wet jumper over the radiator.
    Someone in the next room or the room above is watching TV. Else can hear muted voices changing and muted music crashing into itself and making no sense.There is rain on the window. She switches the light out. If that girl with the hood whose money she’s got was sitting opposite now, she’d see Else with no clothes on standing in the window.
    That’d maybe be worth thirty quid, Else thinks.
    There’s nobody at all outside World Of Carpets. There’s almost nobody on the night street. A car passes; its engine is nothing but a swishing noise.
    Else realizes the windows of the hotel are thicker than normal windows. They won’t open.
    She’s too hot.
    She watches another car pass. The lights of cars are always brighter on a wet road. The lit-up words of the World Of Carpets neon sign in the showroom’s window throw colours on to the rainy pavement; orange, red, yellow; sleety rain mashes the colours. She wonders what it would sound like to stand behind the showroom glass, whether the rain can be heard there, whether the cars going past will be louder. She imagines sleeping in the showroom for the night. That would be something. It would be airy and cool in there. You could choose a different pattern of carpet to sleep on every night. You could choose it by the light that the neon sign gives out. You could roll out carpets that nobody has ever set foot on, be the first person in history ever to set your foot on them.
    What about her blanket and her bag in the rain? Her stuff will get wet.
    She should go down and get it.
    She could go down and check whether the showroom has a back door, or a back window. She could go across there now. The rolls of carpet go right up to the ceiling. There’s so much carpet in there.
    When her jumper and sock are dry, she’ll go. She’ll get her things, and if there’s no way into the showroom round the back she’ll go to the multi-storey car park on Bank Street.
    First, though, she could sit on the bed and count her money. She could pile the coins up, pennies separate from twos, twos separate from fives, fives separate from tens, tens separate from fifties, fifties separate from pounds in a neat sorted line, like an accountant out of a story or novel from a hundred years ago when the counting of pennies mattered so much that whole characters could be devoted to it.
    Else sits on the bed naked and holding her coat, its lining heavy with small metal. She lies back. Her head is on firm cushions. There is sweat on her forehead, or bathwater, she can’t tell. She closes her eyes. Inside her head she can still see the things the photographer took the picture of, the things from inside her pockets, arranged on the pavement. Beside them, her name. ELSPETH. She hadn’t given them her second name.
    Things from her pockets in the Sunday newspaper photograph :
    The blue plastic clothespeg.
    The pencil she found outside the bookies’.
    That postcard, though it got folded and creased, thatshe’d sent her mother and father when she went to Venice, of a man in a gondola; an old-style postcard, the colours all