bettyhill hotel

A young girl got a job. She was sixteen years old and needed the cash for clothes, make-up, nights standing outside in the cold with her friends drinking cider and smoking cigarettes. She started work in a hotel as a chambermaid. And what a hotel, 100 years old, its additions and deletions had made it a small city of streets and houses, gardens and squares. For a time it became this girl’s world. Even years later, dreaming of a situation in the present - an anxiety for a loved one, a wish, a situation she feared; the characters involved, though from this future time, would always enact their shadow play within the rooms of the old hotel.

The linen cupboard was wood lined; its heavy shelves piled high with crisp planks of sheets. Each one individually folded into a chunky starched rectangle that would remain rigid, even if held from one end. She could stay in there for hours, sorting the sheets and pillowcases, with their embroidered nametags, some were probably 30 years old - made in a time when hotels like this bought in their stocks from Harrods or Liberty’s. Old linen is heavy, four sheets would make her arms ache when carried far along the old and creaky corridors. Only sixteen rooms or so, if the hotel was busy, (and that first summer it was busy), but all to be finished by 4pm, when new guests would arrive, the old citizens having left after breakfast, leaving behind wet towels, sand on the floor and a sticky lump of hotel soap, too misshapen to be surreptitiously reused.

The weather was better than for a long time. The old hotel had hidden warm corners. They captured the day’s heat and stored it. She imagined it warm, even when the winter came.
One day she found a cupboard in the farthest corner of the longest corridor. A skylight let in the sun; she had found the hottest part of the whole building. A sink on the back wall had steps above it. These steps led to a rough door made of uneven planks nailed together. She climbed onto the draining board and opened the door, walked up the steps and into the attic……….

2.
She finds herself in a vast area of widely spaced beams and hardboard. She can see the skeleton of the roof and the overall shape of the back wing of the building without the disguise of walls - light is dimly reaching her from an old, forgotten window half in the attic, half in a room below. (When she looks later she never finds the lower half and figures it must be hidden behind a false wall). The roof is high enough for her to stand upright and the heat here under the eaves steams a smell of dust and the faintest tinge of clean laundry. She realises this is her own smell.
She sees another window, this time in a wall that marks a join to an older part of the building. Glassless, this window is more an opening into a smaller, darker space, it looks out on nothing. Climbing through, over the windowsill, her foot comes down on a boarded floor. This space is a room cut off from the rest of the building. She can’t imagine how it would have once fitted in, why there, she can think of no explanation. Below her feet she hears the chef shouting her name - quietly she climbs back into the main attic and down the steps into the cupboard, trying not to make a loud crash as she jumps off the draining board onto the floor.

3.
All day as she sat in a friend’s house, listened to music and through her evening meal, she thought about the room in the hotel attic. If it had once been used, if the window was once filled with glass, then where were the other rooms on a level with it? Where were the stairs that would have connected it to the floor below? Where was the door? She decided that it must have been unfinished, that a change of plan had left it stranded and hidden in the attic, never used.

4.
She never visits the room again but in her mind, her mind is the hotel. Down below all those people moving and living but the other room remains hidden, unknown and silent, dust floating sometimes. In her dream she places parts of a machine there. The odd bolt, a cog, a wheel a circuit board. She builds as she sleeps, manipulating, tinkering, twisting and shaping - curves and right angles - drops of soldering iron. She is a mechanic, a scientist, a surgeon, a dentist and doctor, a chemist, a biologist, a philosopher, an engineer, cooking up a programme that will infiltrate the rest of the hotel, will retune the workings and set a new course for the entire building. It could fly off on its secret engine or bury itself deep underground. Begin to pick off and eat other smaller buildings, maybe collapse in on itself and lie in its foundations, a small gem of coal. Perhaps it will replicate until all buildings are this building, all people these people. The hotel seems to get bigger in her sleep - the hallway now stretches to Iceland - the lounge covers half of China and the guest’s bedrooms are now continents in their own right, each pillow a mountain range. She keeps building and changing and re-entering data and is only dimly aware that her actions are changing the whole universe - a myriad of stars and galaxies and distant glittering civilizations are lost as the first floor bathroom invades the milky way and the driveway courses out into other dimensions. She is losing the magic of the unknown and the yet to be found in millions of miles of faded red carpet and scuffed blue lino which swirl around her in a vortex of such unimaginable size and power that it sucks in all gods, all souls, all possible futures. The whole of samsara, of shimbhala, of heaven and hell, even the first ever sound is now swirling between tables and chairs, caught in the experiment of a daydreamer who is still so unaware of the consequences of her actions that she smiles serenely as she checks the figures once more.

6.
And beneath her hands, what is being created - what is she crafting there, all alone in her sleep? All voices her voice, all places her place as she sits in the ever expanding circle gazing towards the centre.

7.
What would that being, be like?