The people who bought prescriptions in Boots the Chemist yesterday are feeling better, worse or the same. Some have colds. Some have infections. Some have nothing wrong with them. Some feel drowsy and ought not to operate machinery today. Some have temperatures going up or coming down. Some have healed in their sleep and will wake up refreshed. Some have found, or will find when they wake up, that taking medicine has made no difference at all to how they feel.
The people who queued outside the cinema to see a film yesterday are either awake or asleep. A small percentage of them remembers seeing the film at all.
The driving instructor is drinking Horlicks for breakfast; caffeine makes her jumpy. She is thinking of the feel of the learner driver up inside her. Her husband is having trouble with his tie. She is smiling and answering the questions he asks her, thinking of the feel of the push of the boy up amongst her clothes in the car.
The learner driver is awake in bed going over the lessons he’s had so far. Is she a good teacher? his mother asked him last night (his mother is paying for the lessons). Yes, he said. He blushed. She’s a really good teacher, he said, she says I soon won’t need dual controls and that with the right number of lessons I will easily pass. He has ten more lessons lined up. He is wondering what else he will learn.
The woman who runs the café is waiting in the quiet that comes before the rush every morning. She has made herself a bacon sandwich and is reading today’s paper. It is about unnatural perverts again; it isn’t as good a story as yesterday’s, about the people eaten by sharks. But it raises her moral certitude, which makes her feel cleansed.
The man whose son drove off yesterday, leaving him waving on the pavement, is looking out of the back window into his garden. He has put up bags of nuts on the tree for the birds. The winter birds delight him. There’s a chaffinch. There’s another chaffinch.
The man who was angry at the lovers pawing each other at the bus stop yesterday is asking his wife to help him fix his tie. Come here, she says, and takes it out of his hands and threads it round his collar and back into itself, over, under, tightened, down. She kisses his cheek. He goes through to the hall and looks in the mirror; he is angry, though he can’t think why. He opens the front door, shouts goodbye.
The lovers drunk at the bus stop yesterday are in bed. He is trying to sleep a little longer, but his hangover hammers his eyes open whenever he closes them. She is awake, tapping ash from a cigarette into a cup. She smiles down at him; bleary, he smiles back.
The builder is sitting on a plank sticking out of a loft extension three storeys up in the air. He is about to wake any people still asleep in the nearby houses with his drill. It is time they were up anyway. Someone, a girl, goes past on a bike. He waves down to her. He doesn’t know her. She doesn’t know him. She waves back. Morning, love, he calls. He is cheered up. He puts his drill down, looks out over the neighbourhood and begins to whistle the tune of a song he knew when he was a boy.
The woman who was struggling along the road yesterday opens one of the awkward things she was carrying then. It is a plastic container of orange juice as big as her upper body. The more you buy, the cheaper it is. She balances its weight against herself and fills four glasses. She puts them on the kitchen table, one in front of each child.
The woman too large to fit into the swimming pool cubicle is on her bed. She is reading a book and eating a banana. Her cat has made a nest for itself in the folds of her stomach. It has spent the last quarter of an hour grooming and cleaning and is now purring up at her with eyes full of love.
The girl who works in the watch shop is just out of the shower, dry now, sitting on the end of her bed. Her hair is all over her face. She shoves it back behind her ears. She straps her watch to her wrist. It is not her watch. It belongs to someone else, a customer. A girl came in with it in the summer and hasn’t been back to collect it yet. It is a really nice watch; there are hundreds like it, all made the same, but this one’s strap has been softened by being worn so that the feel of it is warm, and it’s keeping good time since it was mended. When she does come back to ask for it, the girl who works behind the counter is ready to say, Hello, here it is. I was wondering when you’d be back for it. I didn’t think you’d give up on it. It’s a really nice watch. She won’t mind, the girl thinks every morning when she puts the watch on. S. Wilby, it said on the packet in the filing drawer; the girl checked through the files for it when Mr Michaels was away at the sales conference, and found it and opened it, took it out and looked at it. For weeks on end the watch had been shut in a drawer of mended watches, all sealed in separate packets and ticking away to themselves. S. Wilby. £27.90. Water in the mechanism. Twenty-eight pounds; quite a hefty charge for a watch like this one. She put a line through it in the file-book and wrote the word default next to it, cancelled it on the computer, folded the invoice up and put it in her pocket. She took her own watch off. She slung this other watch round her wrist. The buckle slid into its usual groove. She and S. Wilby have similar-sized wrists.
The girl who works in the watch shop has never done this with anyone else’s watch. She is surprised at herself. S. Wilby stood outside the shop, for days, shy and slight, undemanding, intriguing, looking down at her feet all the time. She had pretended not to notice S. Wilby. She doesn’t know why she did that. It seemed the thing to do. She wasn’t ready. The timing was wrong. It was embarrassing. It’s embarrassing now, when she thinks about it, and when she does she can feel small wings moving against the inside of her chest, or something in there anyway, turning, tightened, working.
The girl who works in the watch shop has looked up all the Wilbys in the local phone directory and written down their numbers. One day she is going to have guts enough to call them up one after the other and ask whoever answers if there is an S. Wilby at this number whose watch is still waiting to be collected.
In the kitchen she pours cereal into a bowl, then milk. Her mother is at work. Her brother isn’t up yet. She gets a spoon from the draining board. She checks the face of the watch. Nearly eight. She will have to walk to work, he isn’t up. She will leave in quarter of an hour so as not to be late.
Every morning she thinks it as she fastens the watch on. It is today. She will put her bare wrists on the counter and say, I’ve come to pick up a watch, for Wilby. The girl in the watch shop will show her the watch on her own arm. I hope you don’t mind, she will say. I kind of took a fancy to it.
She finishes her breakfast, glances down at the watch. She’ll go in five minutes. She gazes out of the window into the garden.
Look, it’s keeping good time, she is planning to say. And listen, no charge. It’s on me.
Morning. One bird lands, then another. The tree shakes slightly. Rainwater jolts off the branches and falls, a miniature parody of rain.
remember
you
must
live
remember
you
most
love
remainder
you
mist
leaf
WOoooo-
hooooooo
oo
o
Ali Smith, Hotel World
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