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-toppedrailings 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.
She could go to the winter-shelter. The rules of the Winter-Shelter are as follows :
This Winter-Shelter is only for the use of people who would otherwise have to sleep rough.
No drugs or alcohol are permitted on the premises of the Winter-Shelter.
Customers of the Winter-Shelter are expected to behave appropriately when in the Shelter.
Customers are requested to behave with respect and consideration to our neighbours on their journeys to and from the Winter-Shelter each day.
The Winter-Shelter opens at 5 p.m. and closes at 9 p.m. Customers will be asked to vacate the Shelter by 9 a.m. of the following morning.
Else doesn’t use the shelter when she can help it. It is a room full of deafening sleep, the coughing, snoring and shouting of dozens of sleeping or out of it people. The multi-storeys (there is a choice of three) are better, quieter, can be warm enough, depending, and you are less likely there to have to talk to anyone or have sex with anyone, depending which security man is on. There is nothing there but the sheen of empty cars and the oil-stained places where cars were and will be. The top decks are reliably quiet after eleven at night until seven in the morning. You can often find money there. It falls out of the pockets or the hands of the people looking for change for the ticket machine. There are lights that stay on all night. There are low walls that cut the wind out. There are good places to lean. There are cameras; it’s safe. Nobody bothers you, depending.
She has a choice.
The flying head on the front of that hotel. What if you could grow feathers out of you like hair? That would besomething, if your head could detach from your body and fly about by itself. Else wonders where her head would go, if she could take it off and hold it in her hands and then fling it up and set it flying, leaving her chest and her stomach and her legs and her waving-goodbye arms, her head soaring by itself up past the huddles of freezing starlings. The sky would open. The roof of it would come off. She would be so careful up there. She would avoid aeroplanes. She would perch on her neck-stem at the very tops of trees, she would land
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.
She could go to the winter-shelter. The rules of the Winter-Shelter are as follows :
This Winter-Shelter is only for the use of people who would otherwise have to sleep rough.
No drugs or alcohol are permitted on the premises of the Winter-Shelter.
Customers of the Winter-Shelter are expected to behave appropriately when in the Shelter.
Customers are requested to behave with respect and consideration to our neighbours on their journeys to and from the Winter-Shelter each day.
The Winter-Shelter opens at 5 p.m. and closes at 9 p.m. Customers will be asked to vacate the Shelter by 9 a.m. of the following morning.
Else doesn’t use the shelter when she can help it. It is a room full of deafening sleep, the coughing, snoring and shouting of dozens of sleeping or out of it people. The multi-storeys (there is a choice of three) are better, quieter, can be warm enough, depending, and you are less likely there to have to talk to anyone or have sex with anyone, depending which security man is on. There is nothing there but the sheen of empty cars and the oil-stained places where cars were and will be. The top decks are reliably quiet after eleven at night until seven in the morning. You can often find money there. It falls out of the pockets or the hands of the people looking for change for the ticket machine. There are lights that stay on all night. There are low walls that cut the wind out. There are good places to lean. There are cameras; it’s safe. Nobody bothers you, depending.
She has a choice.
The flying head on the front of that hotel. What if you could grow feathers out of you like hair? That would besomething, if your head could detach from your body and fly about by itself. Else wonders where her head would go, if she could take it off and hold it in her hands and then fling it up and set it flying, leaving her chest and her stomach and her legs and her waving-goodbye arms, her head soaring by itself up past the huddles of freezing starlings. The sky would open. The roof of it would come off. She would be so careful up there. She would avoid aeroplanes. She would perch on her neck-stem at the very tops of trees, she would land
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