ART HOTEL

Ali Smith

My mother came down to the docking gate to say cheerio to us. For a moment I didn’t recognise her. I thought she was just a woman working at the hotel. She had her hair scraped back off her face and tied in a ponytail and she was wearing clothes so unlike her and so not quite right for her shape that it took me a minute to work out they were her sister’s work clothes, the uniform they made the women and girls here wear, white shirt, long black pinafore apron/skirt thing. The men and boys who worked here got to look more casual. Their uniform was designer jeans and white t-shirts made of stuff that was better than what ordinary T-shirts get made of. The women and girls weren’t allowed make-up or earrings or necklaces etc. and my mother looked smaller, duller, scrubbed clean and cloistery, like serving women from humbled countries look in films on TV.

How is she doing today? Leif asked. How long will she be ill? my own sister asked. My mother gave my sister a look for being rude. Then she shrugged at Leif. Two weeks, Leif said, three? As long as till September? The faraway word September hung in the air round us in the weird tradespeople space and my sister looked at her feet. Leif looked at the walls, concrete and stone, the huge lit candles in the glass jars burning pointless against the daylight. Christ, he said. My mother shook her head, nodded her head, nodded from one to the other of the two statues the hotel had on either side of the docking entrance, shook her head again, then put her finger to her mouth as if to smooth the place beneath her nose, graceful, but really to quieten Leif and us.

They were life-size, the statues, substantial white stone, shining. They looked churchy. They looked related but they were separate. One was of a sad-looking beautiful woman with a cloth round her head exactly like a Virgin Mary and with her arms cupped, open and empty, one hand upturned and her eyes downturned, either closed or gazing down at her own empty lap, at nothing but the folds in her clothes. The other was of the bent body of a man obviously meant to be dead, his head turned to one side, his arms and legs meant to look limp but at the angle he was at on the floor just stiff and awkward, sprawled but frozen, rigor mortis like he’d rock from side to side if you pushed him. Look at that. Talk about pity, Leif said. So this is what happens to art when you think you can make it a hotel.

My mother looked panicked then. She told Leif in a formal-sounding voice, as if she didn’t know us, that she’d be in touch. She did a thing with her head to remind us about the cameras in the corners, she kissed us with her eyes, and then, like we were guests who’d been quite nice to her, she hugged each of us separately, polite, goodbye.

We traced our way back through the crowds of tourists to where we’d left the campervan by using Google streetmap. It was easier to navigate by the shops than by the streets, the names of which were elusive, so we went towards Chanel instead, biggest thing on the map. Now Gucci. Celine. Strange when we finally found the far side where Alana’s flat was, a place not even registering on Google as a place, that Leif got in on the driving side, because it was my mother who always drove, she was good at the campervan which was notoriously tricky, he was going to be less good, less sure of it, which is maybe why he made us both sit in the back even though the passenger seat was empty. Maybe this was to stop us fighting over who got to sit up front. Maybe he just didn’t want to have us watching him too close while he was concentrating.

He turned the ignition. It started. We’ll give it a month then we’ll come back and collect her, whether Alana’s job’s still on the line or not, he said as we left the city. But it was a good thing. It was all in a good cause. Alana was our mother’s sister. We had met her only once before, back when we were too small to know, and she’d been too ill for us to see her this time, but because of our mother she’d keep her job, and we could have our mother all the other summers, we could learn from this summer that this was what family did and what you did for family, and it was a very busy place Alana worked, and it needed its staff, we’d seen that when we’d walked past the night before trying to catch a glimpse of my mother working, hoping to wave hello as we passed. But we couldn’t spot her, there were so many people, the inside restaurant full, the outside front courtyard restaurant full too, of people the like of which I had never seen, not in real life. They were so beautiful, coiffed and perfect, the people eating in the restaurant of the place my mother was working, smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people. I saw a table with what looked like a family at it, a woman, the mother presumably, elegant, raising her fork, it had a piece of something on it and she put it to her mouth rather than in her mouth, as if she were automatonic, then her arm and hand put it back down on the plate, then raised it again, next to her a boy, elegant, stirring indifferently at what was on his plate and staring into space, then the man, the father maybe, rotund but elegant, dressed as if at an awards ceremony on TV and scrolling a phone instead of eating, then a girl, I couldn’t see what she was doing but she was elegant even though she had her back to me. It was like they all had their backs to me. Their disconnect was what elegant meant. It was like something vital had been withdrawn from them, for its own protection maybe? maybe surgically, the withdrawal of the too-much-life from people who could afford it by people masked and smelling of cleanness, inserting the cannula, them sitting in a clinic, its reassuring medical smell, offhand one after the other baring a shoulder, offering an arm.

But then where did it go? What did the surgeon-remover do with the carefully removed life-serum? How could you protect it wherever you stored it, from everything? the disastrous heat, the gutter dirt, the pollution, the things that changed, the terrible leavetakings, the journeying?

They were so still, so stilled. Was that what endurance was? Is it still life? I’d said out loud as we passed. Is what? Leif said. I’d nodded towards the restaurant we’d never have got into. Even though they’re breathing and moving they’re like the things in one of those old paintings of globes and skulls and fruits and lutes, I said.

Leif laughed then and winked down at me.

Art hotel, he said.

Usually when we were this near home my mother would be driving, Leif would be saying the thing he always said on this stretch of the road about how when you went to different places, places you’d never been, especially if you were lucky enough to travel to a different country, the houses all looked strange, special, like they were houses out of fairy tales, and my mother would be telling Leif that he was getting to be a pretentious old bore the way he always said this when we went travelling. It wasn’t that they were fighting, it wasn’t serious, it would be warmth coming from them in the front of the noisy van, Leif saying it over the top of her complaining, no, because when you went to a new place it was like things were new to the eye, charged with what happens when someone tells a story about something, my mother yelling about how there was nothing new in his same old same-old. Today Leif wasn’t saying anything. It was late. It was still light. But this place on the road where this always happened was so near home that it wouldn’t feel like home without somebody saying it, so I said to my sister, hoping Leif would hear me, wasn’t it interesting that different places you went to could make things be like they were out of a story. But he didn’t hear, or if he did he didn’t say, and anyway my sister was asleep leaning against me on the seat.

I loved the campervan. We both did. We loved the way the back window was a square of glass that opened. We loved the tables, how they folded away for safety when we were driving. We fantasised about dangerous driving with the tables unfolded. We loved all the things in the latched-down (for safety when driving) cupboards, exotic because they weren’t the things we ate and drank with at home. We loved when the campervan roof got raised like a single wing; we fantasised about one day having that wing bit of the roof raised while we were on the road too.

Now Leif nosed the van off the dual carriageway, off the B road and down the smaller road that led home. This was a lane that the campervan was usually almost too big for. Tonight, though, the road was much wider. What’s happened here? Leif said. All the cow parsley gone.

A lot of the hedge growth and some of the bankage of the verges on either side had been roughly shoved back, as if by bulldozer, and in the late light we could see earth and branches and leaves piled away against the shorn shelf of the foliage on either side of us.

Look at this, he said, kicking away some rubble outside the front of our house on the pavement. What’s this? His boot was toeing a wedge of red colour on the pavement next to our front gate.

It was a painted line. His boot came away with a red smudge on the toe.

Someone had painted a line on the ground from where the side of our house met the next house on the terrace, the Upshaws’ house, all the way round the outside of our house to where the back of the house met theirs. The red of the paint was bright in the dust and tarmac. Leif knocked on the Upshaws’ front door. Mrs Upshaw didn’t like people, she was just one of those people who didn’t like people, capable from time to time of leaving a dead rat on top of the things in our bin to let us know we were on borrowed time as far as she was concerned. We didn’t mind, nobody minded, we were happy, my mother always said, both to borrow and to lend what time we had, while we could. Mr Upshaw did come to the door, though. He exchanged a glance with Leif about the line and then he and Leif stood talking and pointing for a bit at the place where the red line stopped abruptly, where it met the outline of the Upshaws’ property.

My sister touched the paint. She showed me the red that came off on her hands. Towards the back of the house, where the tarmac turned into earth, whoever had painted the line had simply laid the painted line over the loose bits of rubble, easily kicked or scraped free. I found a stick and scraped away enough to make a gap. My sister walked through it like I’d made a door or a gate in it, got the back door key out from underneath the shed and let us into the house.

I stood in the empty front room. Then I stood in the empty bedroom. The rooms had a damp smell like we’d been away for years. Maybe this was just what it smelled like all the time and we’d stopped noticing. But the things in the house on the shelves, and even the actual furniture, looked like so much rubbish without my mother in the rooms.

So I went out and round the front again and stood in the garden leaning over the front gate. I watched Leif talking to Mr Upshaw. I watched his shoulders, and Mr Upshaw’s shoulders. I could feel the grooved wood of the top of our front gate beneath my hand, and what I thought of then was the dog we called Rogie, the stray that had lived with us for a while when I was small, he was a little dog, a wiry mongrel terrier. One day he’d been sitting by the campervan in the station car park when we came out of the cinema, it was like he wanted a lift. So we gave him a lift, to ours, and he settled down in the kitchen and went to sleep straight away, slept the night there. After that he travelled into town with us whenever my mother drove in. We’d let him out in the car park, he’d run off to wherever he was going, we’d go and do whatever we were doing in town, then when we came back to the van he’d usually be there waiting for a lift back home. Then one day he didn’t, he wasn’t. He’s moved on, my mother said, someone else’ll be chauffeuring him now. I thought how he’d been so clever on his feet that he could leap with ease this gate I was leaning on now, a gate, I reckoned, five times taller than him. One spring evening my mother had shaken me awake, got me out of bed, carried me to the window and shown me him, poised, impossibly balanced on this narrow top rim of the gate here, all four paws tensed together neatly beside each other and his whole dog self tensed above them, steadying himself as he watched the comings and goings in the street, turned his head this way, that way, this way. He’s been there like that now for nearly twenty minutes, my mother said, I wanted you to see it.

When I felt the uneven wood under my hand I thought of his clever eyes, his cocked ears, his mustachioed muzzle, how an armchair he’d been sleeping on kept his warmth still in it for a while after he jumped off. Then Leif said goodnight to Mr Upshaw, waved cheerily at the window where Mrs Upshaw was watching behind her curtain, and knocked three times above the rust-tide on one of the orange sides of the campervan. Everybody back in, he shouted. We’re off. Where’s your sister?

He went into the house to get her and came out carrying her in his arms across his chest. She was laughing. Can I sit in the front? I said. No, he said. Can I? she said. No, he said. We belted ourselves back in where we’d been, the seats still warm, and he took the blunt nose of the campervan down the changed lane, back out onto the road and away. Who painted that line round our house? my sister said. I wonder that too, but we’ll probably never know, Leif said. Was it people? she said. Probably, one way or another, Leif said. Why would people do that? she said. People are people, Leif said, people are mysterious, why does anybody do anything? Yeah, but why are we leaving? I said. It’s time to, he said. Where are we going? I said. Where do you want to go? Leif said.

My sister and I, last summer, had seen something that happened to the place where people who travel up and down the country all year round and live in their vehicles usually parked and stayed for a while.

It was a grassy space between two roads, big enough for several caravans. The families who parked here usually came in June and left in July. They’d been doing this for longer than we’d been alive. Their kids were our summer friends. But last summer when we’d gone to the woods someone had filled that grassy space with massive jagged slabs of concrete, slanting and upright, slabs bigger than cars. My sister had burst into tears when she saw it. This was unlike her. She wasn’t easily cowed. Right now, belted in next to me, she was pulling the arms and legs out of the doll she’d fished out of the ground in the back garden and shaking its torso so the small bits of rubble that were rattling about inside it would fall out, then poking it clean with the hem of her skirt before she pushed the bits of body back into their sockets.

Are we Travellers now? she said. Yes, Leif said, that’s what we’re doing, we’re travelling. Good, I said, because then we’ll see things all over again, and they’ll be new, and the houses will look like they’re different from normal houses.

We drove to a Tesco and parked at the top end of the car park. This was good because we’d have such easy access to shopping. And it’s a twenty-four-hour shop, Leif said, so with any luck they won’t mind us being here overnight.

But in the middle of the night, still dark out, very early, I heard Leif turn over on the table-bed he and my mother slept on. What is that sound? he said into the dark. I sat up. Lie down, Leif said. It’ll just be wildlife. But when we opened the door in the morning we saw that someone had painted a red line tightly round the edge of the campervan.

The line went all the way round and met itself at the little step we’d left by the door for stepping safely out and in. The paint, still wet, was also on this step and a couple of the tyres and their wheel rims, even up the metalwork round the wheels.

We packed away the beds and the bed stuff and folded the table and lowered the roof. We checked the latched cupboards to make sure they were ready for driving. My sister and I belted ourselves in and I got myself at the exact right angle to see the painted outline of the campervan that’d be left behind us. I was keen to see the shape of the van and something in me was pleased that we’d leave this impression, in emergency red, the only bespoke van-shaped painted outline in the whole supermarket car park.

Leif put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing happened. He did it again. Nothing happened. Then the tow truck came. While Leif argued with the security people we took the ten-pound note he gave us and went into the shop. We bought three loose croissants, made a coffee for him in a machine and bought as much cheese and ham as the woman behind the cold foods counter would give us for what change we had left. When we got back Leif’d taken everything we’d need out of the van and packed it into our rucksacks. Mine was very light. While the people fastened the tow truck hook somewhere the rust wouldn’t give under the front of the campervan Leif lined all three of the croissants with the ham and the cheese the woman in the supermarket had sliced for us. He gave one croissant to me and one to my sister. He made one for himself, tore it in half, held the other half up and said, this half’s for your mother.

She’s in another country, I said. It’ll be stale by the time she gets it, my sister said. You best both eat it now, then, he said and he tore the half in half and gave us each half a half more. (I say half a half because it sounds like more than a quarter, and we were hungry.) We sat on the wall outside the supermarket and ate what we had. We watched the back of the campervan as it left the car park. I went to look at the red line. When I came back I complained that the shape left by whoever’d painted round the campervan hadn’t in the end been anything to write home about. It didn’t look anything like the shape of our campervan. It just looked like the markings for an ordinary parking space, except not white.

Now we’ll take that half a croissant belonging to her to your mother in the shape of you both, Leif said.

How will we? I said, now we’ve got no van? We’ve got feet, he said. We can ask for lifts to the port. Then we can ask for lifts from the port. What if no one will give us a lift? I said. Then we’ll use our feet, he said. All the way? I said. What if she doesn’t want us there because the Art Hotel doesn’t allow people who aren’t its guests in? my sister said. I mean they didn’t even want us in that non-space they called the docking entrance and what if she’s not ready for us by the time we get there? I said. Where will we live while we wait for her? my sister said. We’ll think of something, he said. I’ll make some money. Your mother’ll have been paid by then. We’ll buy a new campervan.

But what if they paint a line round you, or round us, round our feet, or even onto our feet, at the port? my sister said. Or before we get to the port? What if it happened any minute now, what if we walk out on to the road and we’re trying to work out which way to go to get to the port and people, whoever, just run at us out of nowhere with a paintbrush? What if they paint the line right over my shoes?

What bright red shoes you’ll have if anyone does that thing to you, Leif said.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveller.

FRANZ KAFKA