Read Hotel World for Free Online

there has her hood up today and people will be giving her less money because they can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl she is. With her hood down she’d make a lot more. Though she’s not doing badly. She’s definitely doing better than Else. But with her hood down, well, she’d do a lot better. Else ought to go over there and tell her. She’s got no idea. Ten past four she got here. She looks fourteen, maybe fifteen at the most; she’s got school written all over her. She’s got
(Spr sm chn?)
    good schoolgirl all over her face. Her hair is too bright and well, below that hood. She doesn’t look hard up. Her clothes change. She has more than one coat. She looks like a runaway, but a brand-new, just-arrived-today one. So she gets money easily, of course she does, she looks like the stupefied baby animals looked on the front of the kindof chocolate box that you used to be able to get years ago, if you compared them to a real cat or a dog. The only thing about her is that she looks miserable, she looks greyed. She’s the colour of ice that’s been smashed in over a puddle. Else feels quite sorry for her.
    But it’s not like that girl wants the money anyway. She doesn’t even see them drop the money in front of her. Every time she’s there it’s the same; she makes a fortune she doesn’t even seem to want in no fucking time at all. Else remembers what it was like to be that age and not to care. It makes them give you more, the people going past, so they’ll matter to you. Some people even offer that girl notes. Else has seen this. They drop to their haunches in front of her and talk, shaking their heads seriously, nodding seriously, and the look on the girl’s face is like someone’s face would be if, if, Else can’t think what. Yes, if that girl woke up and got out of her bed and went downstairs and out on to the street
(Spr sm chn? Thnks.)
    and found that for some reason everybody else on the street, in the whole city, was speaking something she couldn’t, like Norwegian, or Polish, or some language she didn’t even know was a language.
    People go past. They don’t see Else, or decide not to. Else watches them. They hold mobile phones to their ears and it is as if they are holding the sides of their faces and heads in a new kind of agony. The ones with the new headset kind of mobile phone look like insane people, as if they’re walking along talking to themselves in a worldof their own. It makes Else laugh, and it’s sore, to laugh. The sky is the ceiling, the buildings are the walls; she has the hotel wall behind her back now, holding her up. Inside her, another wall holding her upright, it goes from her abdomen to her throat and it’s made of phlegm, and occasionally, when she can’t not cough, when she has to cough, can’t stop herself, the wall crumbles. She imagines it breaking like rotten cement. But it has its uses. It keeps her upright. It’s holding her up just as much as the hotel wall is.
    She imagines where her heart is, the muscles and the blood round her ribs and lungs. She imagines her lungs creaking and hissing, snarled up in blood and muscle like bad telephone lines, already outmoded anyway, and as if someone was trying to wire-up some place that just couldn’t be wired up. Like if someone arrived carrying the telephone wires all waiting to be connected up, got out of his van and found himself standing outside some fucking great castle wall with thin slits in it instead of windows, and it was in the fifteenth century and there was no such thing as electricity.
(Spr sm chn?)
    Think of him, Telephone Man, standing like something over-evolved out of Darwin, post-Neanderthal in his overalls with his wires in coils on his arms and his van full of great rolls of wire behind him and there he is scratching his head like a monkey because there’s no metal grate in the ground he can lift to do the job, and a lady in a wimple peeking out at him through the slit likehe’s a martian come in a