Some of the things (concerning love) which members of the public have said to Else over time:
Fancy warming me up? (a man in a tailored suit)
Excuse me. I was just wondering if a twenty pound note in fair exchange would be any use to you? (a man in jogging clothes)
I am having a terrible day. I don’t know what else to do. I’m at the end of my tether. I don’t know who else to speak to. (a woman, crouching down and speaking near Else’s ear, putting her arms out to be held as she spoke. Else thought about it afterwards. She had let the woman sit like that with her arm through hers for nearly half an hour; she had made herself available to her because it had been a long time since anybody had given her the excuse to think they were using her name like this. I don’t know what, Else, to do. I don’t know who, Else, to speak to.)
Sure I can’t tempt you? I’ll give you a fiver? (the man in the suit again)
How old are you? Would you like to come home with me? (a woman in smart business clothes)
Want to come in the van, darling? I’ll play you a tune. No? Sure? I’ve ninety-nines and everything. We can easy stick a Flake in it. (two men through the window of an ice cream van stopped at the traffic lights)
Are you okay? It’s a cold one, today. How are you doing? See and keep warm now (a youngish woman, just being nice. But isn’t it the same thing? Else wonders; doesn’t it all come down to the same thing? Ninety-nines and just being nice, variations on the same tinkly tune?)
How much? (a boy, about thirteen. Else saw he was blushing round the back of his shaved hair. She charged him ten pounds, got the money up front and took him to the multi-storey car park. It was evening; Deck D was quiet and lit-up; there, in the smell of petrol and exhausts, on the concrete flooring between the back and front fenders of some small city cars: love. Occasionally now he passes her in the street. He’s older; he hangs around with acned friends wearing tee-shirts with the names of American heavy metal bands on them. He looks hangdog, looks the other way. They never give her any hassle. He never gives her any money.)
Someone in a uniform has come out of the hotel’s revolving door and is standing on the steps. A uniform generally means move along. Else stops, mid-cough. She becomes completely still. She has seen spiders and woodlice do the same thing. She is good at it. She will not be noticed.
When she next dares to look up the woman in the hotel uniform is crossing the road between the headlights of fast cars. She sees her reach the other side, straightening her tunic at the kerb before she goes on. She sees how close she gets to the girl with the hood up before the girl realizes and is on to her feet and away down the alley along the side of the World Of Carpets showroom speedier than any bird away from a sudden cat.
Sht, Else says out loud. The girl’s gone. She spits the catarrh she’s been holding on her tongue out beyond the lining of her coat. She looks at where the girl was. Shit. She starts to cough, and the coughing rips deep into her till she can feel her insides split apart in a pink and riotous cartoon zigzag like she has the ripped-bone mouth of a shark opening from her throat down to
All right? Excuse me? Okay?
Else opens her eyes. The artificial stuff of the hotel uniform is over her head. It reflects streetlight. She shifts. She starts to gather up her things.
No, the woman in the uniform says, quick, putting her hand out. No, it’s all right, I’m not. Stay where you are, I’m not.
Then the woman squats down next to Else.
Else can see her head and the side of her face, quite close to Else’s own eye; up close in the light from the hotel the surface of the white of the woman’s eye is pitted and unhealthy. Else braces herself. But the woman is not looking at Else at all; instead she is staring out across the road into space. The embroidered badge on the lapel of the uniform says, in browns and greens, GLOBAL HOTELS. Stitched in white on the breast pocket there are small words. The top half of the circle says: all over the world. The bottom half says: we think the world of you. Else looks down hard at the ground. There are little bits of broken glass and grit in the crease where the hotel wall and the pavement meet. Some of the glass is green, some white. She can tell in the dark. Near it, a coin-shaped flattened wad of old chewing gum, part of the surface of the pavement. So many of the things on the street were close to people, intimate with them, even inside their mouths, before they ended up here.
The woman in the uniform is younger than she looks. She is sighing. She turns towards Else. Else looks away again. Four cigarette butts, two tipped, one lipsticked, one untipped, white and split, with shattered tobacco spilling out of it. One roll-up with its end pursed closed, a stained mouth itself.
They sit like this for what seems a long time to Else who counts, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, the stitching on her blanket and the spaces between the crochet.
The woman snorts down her nose, like she is daring herself. She shakes her head.
Else looks hard at her own sleeve. Her hand. The top of her boot (her foot in it, asleep). Grime in the lines between the paving slabs. A cracked slab; something must have hit it hard; three cracks have spread from its centre. Her own spit, from inside her lungs, over there catching the light on the stone.
Listen, the woman says.
Though Else is still looking down and away she puts on her listening face, just in case. She is being careful. She doesn’t yet know the uniform’s game.
Do you want a room for the night? the woman says.
Ah. Else is not surprised, not really. Very little surprises her now anyway. She says nothing. She keeps looking down.
I work in the Global, the woman says. It’s supposed to get even colder tonight. You’ve a bad enough cough; I can hear it all the way along in reception –
Else flinches.
– and it’s supposed to get to minus six windchill tonight. We’ve a lot of rooms. Nobody in most of them. You’d be welcome to one of them.
Welcome, Else imagines the word, like it’s written on a mat. Yeah, right. Now she will have to move pitch because people in the hotel can hear her coughing.
Of course, it would be for nothing, it would be for free, the woman in hotel clothes says as if she’s suddenly angry at herself. You could get warm. You wouldn’t have to pay or anything. No strings.
Of course, Else thinks. Three things which come into Else’s head in the few seconds after she hears the phrase No Strings:
It is ten years back. She is in London. She has only been there for a couple of days and she has almost no money left. She is standing outside Camden tube station, and a man comes towards her. He looks all right. He looks clean, decent, like a Conservative party canvasser. He has money in his hand; it is new-born money straight out of a cash machine, not even creased. He says he will give her these three ten pound notes he is holding if she’ll just come with him to his hotel room. She isn’t to worry. She can trust him. No strings. He holds the money out. She can actually smell it, it’s so clean. She takes it. The man waves down a taxi. She hasn’t been in a taxi since she was a child. She sits on the long seat and the man sits opposite her on the folding kind. He looks distinguished. He looks a little like her father. He ignores her. They get out of the taxi at a station; King’s Cross, she knows now; she didn’t know then. Opposite the station there is a fast-food place. Outside it, written up above its doors on a sign, is a list of everything the place sells, spelt out, one letter after another. She points it out to the man while they wait to cross the road. Look, she says. SALADSPIES. It’s funny. But the man isn’t listening. He takes her by the shoulder as they cross the road and, still gripping her shoulder (she will have bruisemarks for about a week after), he pulls her up a sidestreet and buzzes an entryphone at a door in a wall. Someone somewhere inside presses something else which opens the door. He pushes her in. The stairs smell of disinfectant. Up two flights he opens another door with a key and shoves her inside the room. There is a man standing by the window. There is no furniture in the room, no carpet, nothing in it, not
even a chair. Get her to sit down, the man at the window says. I gave her thirty pounds, the first man says. He glares at her. There’s only the floor to sit on. She quickly sits down. The man shadowed with the window behind him is looking her over. He comes across the room, nodding his head, muttering under his breath. When he is right up next to her he puts his hand inside his overcoat and takes something out. It is a book. He opens it and holds his hand up above her head, inches from her hair. He smells of hair cream. For hours as she watches the light change, from mid-morning to afternoon to early evening light, the two men take turns to chant over her with their book open above her head. They call for her to be saved and to be forgiven. They talk about her as if she isn’t there. She gets up and leaves, when one takes a toilet break and the other is in a kind of trance. The buzzer door slams itself after her and she’s back in the street. People go past her. Nobody looks at her. She throws up into a litter bin. Immediately after this she’s hungry. Back round the front on the main road, she orders a kebab at the fast food place. She hands over one of the ten pound notes and puts the change in her pocket, where the other two notes are folded. Your sign’s funny, she tells the man who’s cutting the meat off the revolving stick. It is when she could still say whole words. Your sign. It says you sell salad spies. Salads. Pies. But it’s just one word on your sign, so it looks like salad spies. The man doesn’t understand. He looks at her only once, when he hands over her food. He has kebab fat in his moustache. It must be a good place to work, if he gets to eat there.
And: she is fourteen and just home from school. It is four o’clock and Mr Whitelaw and she are having sex in the front room. He was here when she got home. He has been here, he told her, all afternoon, fitting her mother’s Venetian blinds all over the house. He is in his forties. He looks like Patrick Duffy in Dallas, only a bit greyer. Her mother is upstairs in the shower. She won’t be able to hear anything because of the boiler. Christ, Mr Whitelaw is saying. His face is gleaming with sweat, his forehead has furrows in it. They make her think of the run-rig system of farming in Scottish History III. His eyes are fixed on something just past her head. The Woody Woodpecker Show is on the TV in the background. She can hear the music and the drilling noise the bird makes when it laughs. It strikes her that Mr Whitelaw could be watching it over her shoulder. Christ, he says again, as if he hates that programme. Then he says: Elspeth. Let go. Of my back. You’re too tight. Don’t hold on. Your nails are. Jesus. Let go. You little. For fuck. She is doing it wrong. She is holding on too tight. She has to hold on more loosely. For the life of her she can’t think how to do it. Then she remembers the puppet Snow White that hangs on the back of her bedroom door. She imagines it like it would be if she were to take it off the hook and lay it out on the bed with its arms and legs loose on their strings. She pretends her arms and legs are like that, nothing to do with her, can only be made to work from above. That’s. It, Mr Whitelaw is saying. He scrapes her backwards and forwards over the corduroy. She thinks of the puppet’s nose, made of a small tube of wood stuck on. There is a Pinocchio puppet with an adjustable nose made by the same people who make the Snow White. It makes her want to laugh, when she thinks of the nose and she thinks of Mr Whitelaw jutting out of his boiler suit when she came in the door. She has to not laugh. She tries to think of something different. I had strings, but now they’re gone, she thinks. There are no strings on me. She thinks in the jerky tune from the film as her head hits the arm of the couch. Eh, Mr Whitelaw is saying. Good girl. Elspeth. That’s a. Good.
Then: she and Ade are walking around Bristol in the middle of the night. They are down near Brandon Hill when they find an old man lying half in the road and half on the pavement. He is pretty drunk. At first they can’t make out what he is saying, because of his accent. My legs, he is saying. I can’t get up. My legs are not working. Your legs are fine, Ade tells him. Come on, now. They stand him up on his legs. He smells of whisky and new leather. They hold him up with their arms round his shoulders. I can’t walk, he says the whole time they walk him home. My legs have given out on me. He tells them he is seventy-two and tells them where he lives. You’re blessed, so you are, he says. You got me my legs back. Will you come in for a biscuit? I’ve a Family Box. He lives in a room in a block of other rooms. He switches the light on inside the door. There is a toilet at one end with a curtain that can be pulled round it. There is a sink, and some cooking rings at the other end. There’s a bed in the middle of the room. The old man falls on to it. My legs, he says, are not working right at all. Ade’s eyes are wide, he is staring. He points at the man’s legs hanging off the bed. The man is wearing long cowboy boots with his trousers tucked in. They are shining; elaborately stitched; their leather is fawn-coloured and unmuddied. They have fringes at the knee and at the ankle. Within minutes the man is asleep and snoring. Ade pulls the boots carefully off the man’s legs. They decide to stay the night; Ade thinks the man won’t mind. There is a piece of cut carpet, quite big, by the side of the bed; she and Ade can fit most of themselves on it though Ade’s feet are on the linoleum and hers would be too if she took them off Ade’s shins. She flexes her toes. She runs her foot over Ade’s legs; she feels how hairy they are, and how taut and good his muscles are, running the length of him. In the morning when she wakes up the first thing she will see is Ade’s worn old boots there beside the amazing cowboy boots. Ade’s boots are the shape of his feet. Laced through their holes, the green waxy string that keeps the boots on Ade’s feet is knotted at its ends so it won’t fray. That morning she will stretch the length of herself on the piece of crumby carpet and yawn, Ade breathing at her ear, and watch as the sun moves its white light across the two pairs of boots. She will remember it, that morning, that sun, those boots, as one of the times in her life when she was completely happy.
Now again. The woman in the hotel uniform is saying something but Else is dizzy and can’t hear properly. She looks at the woman’s shoes. They are recent and fashionable; they have thick soles of the kind of moulded plastic that looks industrial and prehistoric at the same time.
The woman gets up. She stops, stoops down again and picks up something. Here, she says to Else, holding out her hand.
In her thumb and forefinger is the one pence piece Else couldn’t reach earlier.
Else nods, takes it.
Yours, the woman says. The one that got away. Nearly.
The woman straightens her back, and goes. She stands at the kerb again for a moment surveying the street, up then down.
Bye, she says over her shoulder to Else.
She walks back along the road and up the steps and disappears through the hotel doors. Their revolving glass flashes, dark then light then dark then light. Else holds the penny above the small pile of change by her knee. She drops it. It makes a single small clink when it hits the other coins.
Someone goes past, loaded with shopping.
(Sp sm chn?)
Nothing doing. Nobody else about. Else covers her money with the edge of her blanket. She pulls one foot out from under her, slow. Then the other, slow. She has to stop to cough. She tries to cough quietly, because they can hear her in the hotel. She gets to her feet by pushing against the hotel wall behind her. She is dizzy; she spits. It is always like this when she stands up after sitting. She gets her breath back and waits for the traffic to thin, then she sets out. The kerb; remember to step down. One step, then the next, then the next, then the next, then the next; halfway there. A car; wait. Another car. Now. One step then the next then the next, go on. The kerb; step up.
Else’s heart jolts with delight. She coughs. She laughs. The girl has left the money and the money is still here.
She sinks down on to the step and counts it. Not bad, about thirty-two, thirty-three. Thirty-three quid in so short a time, good going. Ten times as much as Else has made. That girl could have made even more if she’d shown them her face. All the same. All the same. It has been a good day, Else thinks, one filled with luck, so far at least.
From over this side of the road you can’t not see the hotel. It’s like the street exists just for the hotel to be there in it. It sits squarely before her like a huge obedient dog. It is lit up from outside; up-lights spaced all along its front make it look rich, expensive and strange. Flagpoles jut out of it with no flags on them; flags are only in the summer for the tourists, Else supposes. With its awnings either side of its door, the building has a kind of face. The awnings are the eyelids, the word GLOBAL scarred across them both. As the building goes upwards its windows get smaller. Some of them are lit. None of them is open. Expensive drapes make each of them dramatic. She can see standard lamps standing between curtains. Round the ground floor at the front of the hotel are spike-topped railings painted white. Else remembers a girl at school who had a scar under her chin from falling on to some railings; a railing had gone right through her chin and mouth and tongue. She had had stitches.
The hotel’s front door, massive in comparison to even the biggest of its windows, has the head of a child or angel or cupid carved above it in the keystone of its arch. The head has a feathered wing coming out of it, just one wing, its feathers spreading all the way round the sides of the face like an elaborate beard. A man once stood there carving that face, slicing lumps out of stone as if stone was cake or bread. The hotel building is quite old-looking. Else wonders how much the man was paid. A lot. Enough. Pennies, then. She wonders where the stone that was removed to make the head and its feathers, and the other curves of carving round the doors and the lower windows, went in the end.
She begins to pick up the left money. Winter-dark, winter-cold, winter-empty town. The streets have emptied. She won’t make any more tonight.
It is starting to rain.
She could move to the pitch outside the video shop if there’s nobody else already there.
The woman from the hotel said it would get colder. It’s already cold enough for Else to be feeling it.