cog:
You’re gonna get it in the ass, baby. You want it in the ass? You want it in
the ass? I’m gonna fuck you in that fuckin’ ass.
cog:
Oh my God yeah, stick it in me. Pound my fucking ass. Pound my fucking ass.
cog:
Yeah you know that.
Despite
having become accustomed to these wanderings being punctuated by the sound of
rhythmic bursts of actual sex, albeit distorted by the slow Doppler of her
walking, she here recognises the noise as dialogue from one of the films looped
across channel 16, films to which she has lately been so attentive she can
pre-empt those utterances as follow, doing exactly this as she continues on
along the corridor. More for her own amusement than anything else, she delivers
both parts in a monotone so impassive as to void them of all sexual currency.
ache1:
Yeah you know that. Okay now roll over baby and hold ‘em open for me. Oh my God
yeah. Yeah. Spit on my ass and get inside me. Oh baby yeah pound my fucking
ass. You know that.
It
is God only knows what hour of the morning, and she is taking what has already
become her habitual random wander through the hotel’s corridors, corridors
empty now of everything except herself, and accompanied only by the regular
padding sound of her footsteps measured out upon the carpet.
Dressing
in pyjamas allows her at least the illusion of domesticating this territory,
the space become less alien beneath her bare feet; she enjoys the obvious
disparity between her own lack of shoes and those pairs as have been left out
for the nightporters to have cleaned by morning.
Each
night she waits until the hallway beyond her room goes quiet, until with some
hours having passed after the all-too audible removal of her dinner tray and
its sink-washed freight an absolute silence incrementally drowns out all
passing noise, each sound snuffed one by one from out her hearing: first the
families, next the couples, then finally those others like herself, the alone.
Only
when eventually confident of its persisting and continuous emptiness (often a
question more of simple conviction than any notion of elapsed time) will she
then let herself out into the corridor, tapping for reassurance at the keycard
tucked inside her pyjama top pocket with a hand that bears written across its
palm, for those first nights at least, the number of her current room, and each night
refreshed until such times as she would no more forget it than she would the
date of her own birthday or the colour of her mother’s eyes; the other hand
forever occupied with its carrying of her little vinyl E.T. figure.
ache1:
Pound my fucking ass. Pound my fucking ass.
With
all the guests hopefully retired, the only individuals she might encounter now
are staff, the nightporters already aware of her status but paid only to engage
her as they might any other guest, a customary greeting, polite yet reserved,
as they pace out their security routes, remove or reposition polished shoes,
and, toward shift’s end, feed the coming day’s newspapers beneath selected
doors.
She
smiles to recall her one contingency, that were she to encounter anyone at all
she would pretend herself a sleepwalker, an idea as quickly abandoned in the
dawning ignorance of just exactly how someone affected by such a condition’s
movements might differ from her own.
Too,
there is her understanding that these walks are not just exploratory, or
exercise, though by default as much as anything they are indeed both. Rather,
they are symptomatic of trauma and its denial; while she has little trouble
sleeping, in the wake of her operation there has been a total absence of dreams
which has made this sleeping an exhausting and thus self-defeating endeavour.
So
she is aware she walks to walk from out herself the desperate sense of
loneliness and unease recognisably nothing more than her past dragged into this
present, and in such fosters hope to prevent its assimilation, to move on
eventually unencumbered; she is pacing out her own boundary between before and
after, that self she was, or thought herself to be, and what she has become.
With
every step now she attempts to comprehend the texture of the carpet only
through whatever pressure she can exert upon it with her toes, imagining its
imprint upon the soles of her feet as she watches each appear and disappear
beneath her, over and over, round corners, through doorways, climbing stairs,
the noise they make soft, remote, and indistinct.
The
silence and solitude can only lend themselves to introspection, and she walks
wondering how many girls, how many women even, sharing just that fragment of
her own situation would relent, permit themselves to engage in monologue that
ghost with which each knows herself to walk, suffocating that already
untethered little soul with that surfeit maternal grace.
It
is an indulgence she repeatedly refuses herself, and for distraction she suddenly exits out one of the fire doors
into a dimly-lit concrete stairwell, saying as her feet leave the carpet, first
quietly
ache1:
Hey antler,
and
then, with confidence, and with the cold floor burning her bare feet suddenly
to her senses
ache1:
I takes my comfort wherever I can gets it!
Having
climbed the steps’ rough, unfinished surface, she exits into a section of the
hotel she does not recognise, the carpet instantly hospitable and a welcome
relief to her feet, beneath which she feels it to be a degree thicker than its
precedent.
This
corridor appears abbreviated, foreshortened on account of its being lit only by
the overspill from the fire exit and the only other open doorway which she now
approaches, its perished rubber wedge appearing incongruously old in its
context.
Peering
in, she finds the room itself relatively small, and mercifully empty, at least
of people. It is set up for a conference, and as she enters the lighting
suddenly registers that much brighter than the dim stairwell and unlit corridor
behind. She assumes the porter has simply forgotten to extinguish the lights,
or in the midst of preparation has perhaps been paged to fulfil some other more
pressing duty by the front desk. The tables are arranged in a horseshoe, each
boxed neatly in green baize, each set with regular places for the delegates,
and each spined with an irregular vertebrae of small glass bowls piled with
peppermints. In the space between, an overhead projector sits upon a wheeled
stand, its power cable neatly coiled upon the stand’s middle shelf.
Knowing
she might at any moment suffer interruption, at one table’s end she sets E.T.
facing the door as her lookout and then walks the horseshoe’s inner edge with
some deliberation, examining each of the place settings, the stationery branded
with the hotel’s parent chain livery and logo. More immediately attractive are
the little mints, and taking one, she flips it into the air and attempts to
catch it in her mouth. It bounces from off her top teeth with an audible crack,
and rolls under the table, where she kneels to its retrieval, blowing upon it
slightly before popping it into her mouth.
ache1:
Five second rule, all is well.
Sucking
loudly at the hard peppermint, she feels at the teeth with the thumb and
forefinger of her left hand, anxious until she can confirm for herself they
have not been chipped, running her tongue across them, back and again, for
further reassurance.
Taking
her cue from the projector’s orientation, she locates the ceiling mounted white
screen and pulls it down far as it will come. Next she uncoils the power cable,
crawling about the carpet to find the socket, and wincing as she does at this
reminder of her belly’s tenderness. Switched on, the projector’s light is so
bright there is initially no appreciable difference when she turns the main
lights off at the wall. Singly and woven both together, her hands
intersect the beam’s bright core, attempt and fail to conjure anything
coherent in silhouette, while around them motes of dust order and dissolve an
ever-shifting heaven of constellations, spun in the rising heat and draught of
the cooling fan’s exhaust.
Finally,
bored, she replaces everything as it was found, and having otherwise extracted
from the room all imaginable potential, for some time simply sits in one of the
empty chairs, lost in thought. At some point waking sharply from a doze, she
stands and tucks in her pyjama top, taking care not to further rake the scratches
running raw across her stomach.
Still
standing, she begins to sing quietly to herself in the best Scottish accent she
can muster,
ache1:
"Oh Peggy Gordon, you are my darling. Come sit you down upon my knee. And tell
to me the very reason, why I am slighted so by thee."
Momentarily
forgetful, in the time it takes her to recall those words as follow she loses,
or actively abandons, all interest in the song and its singing, opting instead
to stand in silence for how long she later does not even dare contemplate.
Before
leaving, she picks up one of the marker pens from the flipchart gutter and,
having first turned over perhaps a third of the pristine sheets, stands lost
again in thought, until finally she scrawls in thick black capitals
ache1
(writing): EVERYTHING BUT THE LITTLE FISHIES
which
message the entire roomful of delegates will later this same morning observe
seeping slowly into focus, one flipped page at a time.
Retracing
her steps to more familiar turf is an exercise fraught with paranoia, certain any
staff she might encounter are sure to know the source of that single stolen
mint still detectable upon her breath.
Returned
to her room and back in bed, she lies awake another hour, allowing the
adrenalin to ebb from those veins through which it was so recently in flood
until she can finally fall again asleep, cradling her wounded belly with the
very hands from which she is trying to protect herself.
