impressive and abominable, complete with crumbling plaster and grimy unlit windows.
What did they intend to do with it? Larger it grew as it approached the surface of the screen from the other side. Soon the band members were obscured by its apparent magnitude, its bogus bulk. It suddenly accelerated, as if on the lip of a cliff, and tipped forward out of the screen. There was no sharp crack of breaking glass. It passed effortlessly through the flickering bubble, tumbled down and shattered on the floor of my room. Pieces of chimney and roof broke underfoot, a jagged edge of rusty guttering gashed my ankle. I drew back in alarm. I had seen many television sets hurled out of sundry hotels, but this was the first time I had witnessed a hotel ejected from a television set. I glanced at the screen for an explanation, but already the picture was returning to a dot. Somewhere a fuse had blown.
Refusing to accept the treachery in this experience, I scooped up a fragment of the model and took it to show my colleagues, who I knew I would never find. I foolishly imagined I could return for the other pieces. I also took my bass, slung over a shoulder. When I left my room, the door slammed inevitably behind me. I explored each corridor of the building, knocking on every door, calling the names of my former friends. Whenever I passed through a chamber, it locked itself behind me in a nonexistent wind. The darkness seemed thicker, the world lonelier. Had everybody evacuated to another universe without informing me? Slowly I was denied access to the majority of the hotel’s internal space. As I entered the kitchens for the first and last time, I made sure of pocketing the few ancient cans of soup I discovered in the mainly bare cupboards.
The band had obviously forsaken me, and now the hotel was following its example. My options were narrowing as I probed the passages and stairways. I was being herded by the slamming doors, the thickening gloom, to a destination unknown, but one I still invested my remaining hope in. Was the building guiding me within itself to a reunion with my comrades? My rational mind doubted it, but my emotions were desperate to believe that, yes, they were waiting for me in some obscure attic room, huddled together with their triumph, a surprise party for me, primed and coiled, requiring only my belated appearance to discharge itself and put my life back to rights.
No such luck. And that’s not too surprising, bearing in mind the fact that my life was never good enough to warrant a return to itself. When I reached the top floor of the hotel, I indeed found a trapdoor set into the ceiling, and a ladder reaching up to it, but when I climbed the rungs and pushed my head through the hinged square, my face emerged not in an attic, warm and itchy with rough insulating fabric, but out onto the roof, slates gleaming in the remorseless rain. I would have tried to climb back down, but I felt the ladder tipping, and was forced to haul myself up and out onto the slippery slope. The trapdoor shut like an apprehended yawn, and my fingers were too wide to fit in the gap around it and hook it back open. I was trapped outside with my sense of failure, high enough in normal circumstances for a decent view over the city, but there was no normality here: this was Birmingham and nothing at all was decent. The sky wept for me.
I went through the expected motions of a stranded adventurer, searching for a way down, peering over the gables and gutters, looking for a drainpipe to slide me to the ground. There were none. I considered jumping to the roofs of adjacent buildings, but the distances were too great, the street too far and hard below. Not being an adventurer but a musician, I gave up at the base of the solitary chimney, too narrow to climb down, too squat to provide any shelter from the rain, and sat with my bass across my knees. I thumbed a few notes, the opening bars of my new cage. I was marooned on the elevated grey of a
What did they intend to do with it? Larger it grew as it approached the surface of the screen from the other side. Soon the band members were obscured by its apparent magnitude, its bogus bulk. It suddenly accelerated, as if on the lip of a cliff, and tipped forward out of the screen. There was no sharp crack of breaking glass. It passed effortlessly through the flickering bubble, tumbled down and shattered on the floor of my room. Pieces of chimney and roof broke underfoot, a jagged edge of rusty guttering gashed my ankle. I drew back in alarm. I had seen many television sets hurled out of sundry hotels, but this was the first time I had witnessed a hotel ejected from a television set. I glanced at the screen for an explanation, but already the picture was returning to a dot. Somewhere a fuse had blown.
Refusing to accept the treachery in this experience, I scooped up a fragment of the model and took it to show my colleagues, who I knew I would never find. I foolishly imagined I could return for the other pieces. I also took my bass, slung over a shoulder. When I left my room, the door slammed inevitably behind me. I explored each corridor of the building, knocking on every door, calling the names of my former friends. Whenever I passed through a chamber, it locked itself behind me in a nonexistent wind. The darkness seemed thicker, the world lonelier. Had everybody evacuated to another universe without informing me? Slowly I was denied access to the majority of the hotel’s internal space. As I entered the kitchens for the first and last time, I made sure of pocketing the few ancient cans of soup I discovered in the mainly bare cupboards.
The band had obviously forsaken me, and now the hotel was following its example. My options were narrowing as I probed the passages and stairways. I was being herded by the slamming doors, the thickening gloom, to a destination unknown, but one I still invested my remaining hope in. Was the building guiding me within itself to a reunion with my comrades? My rational mind doubted it, but my emotions were desperate to believe that, yes, they were waiting for me in some obscure attic room, huddled together with their triumph, a surprise party for me, primed and coiled, requiring only my belated appearance to discharge itself and put my life back to rights.
No such luck. And that’s not too surprising, bearing in mind the fact that my life was never good enough to warrant a return to itself. When I reached the top floor of the hotel, I indeed found a trapdoor set into the ceiling, and a ladder reaching up to it, but when I climbed the rungs and pushed my head through the hinged square, my face emerged not in an attic, warm and itchy with rough insulating fabric, but out onto the roof, slates gleaming in the remorseless rain. I would have tried to climb back down, but I felt the ladder tipping, and was forced to haul myself up and out onto the slippery slope. The trapdoor shut like an apprehended yawn, and my fingers were too wide to fit in the gap around it and hook it back open. I was trapped outside with my sense of failure, high enough in normal circumstances for a decent view over the city, but there was no normality here: this was Birmingham and nothing at all was decent. The sky wept for me.
I went through the expected motions of a stranded adventurer, searching for a way down, peering over the gables and gutters, looking for a drainpipe to slide me to the ground. There were none. I considered jumping to the roofs of adjacent buildings, but the distances were too great, the street too far and hard below. Not being an adventurer but a musician, I gave up at the base of the solitary chimney, too narrow to climb down, too squat to provide any shelter from the rain, and sat with my bass across my knees. I thumbed a few notes, the opening bars of my new cage. I was marooned on the elevated grey of a
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