The Go-Between

It was inside one of those overnight hotels, the ones which cling to the sides of airports like benign tumours. My stay there was courtesy of the airline after my flight was cancelled, the scratched plastic keycard pressed indifferently into my hand by a receptionist with lipstick on her teeth. The corridor was carpeted with tough wool woven into geometric patterns, blue mottled with green like pond scum. Presumably, the intended effect was to relieve the blanched walls of total lifelessness, but the result was a vertiginous evocation of tube seats, sprawling to apparent infinity.
       My room was that nauseous, irresolute type of yellow that only hotels can manage, and the flickering of the fluorescent lights set me somewhere at the intersection between mild physical discomfort, anxiety, nostalgia, and exhaustion.
       Every object in the room was clinging to the most perfunctory degree of functionality, an inhospitable synthesis of dirt and chemical sterility, built for transit in the way that hospitals and aeroplanes are; introverted bug zappers, suspended high and humming above the organic euphony of the earth. I stood a while under a lukewarm shower which tasted of pennies, stargazed in the mildew
on the walls, put on a robe and lay atop the hard, mummified bed. Everything smelled of dusty upholstery steeped in cheap coffee, and there was a draft dribbling from a rusted window that I hadn’t been able to close. The television was stuck on the shopping channel, and according to the clock at the bottom of the screen it was just past two in the morning.
       In the robe, I sculled through the nicotine yellow air to the hotel bar, my hair damp and curling around my ears. I ordered something amber – which arrived watered down in a dirty glass – and propped my bare feet on a stool.
       It was lit by a departure board, its thin, fleeting coverage of inhabitants churning restlessly like a shoal of sardines. Most were strangers to me, filmy silhouettes laden with cases who shifted at the whim of the planes. Others I knew.
       I had expected New York to be there; he was an insomniac, and his phosphorescent teeth snapped after strange bedfellows and cheap booze like a shark smelling blood in the water. He was leaning against a vending machine in a boxy suit the colour of candy, the technicoloured baubles of light leaping off the junk food packages and illuminating the industrial, tetragon structure of his face. He was sucking down a Tom Collins like it was water, the stem of the maraschino cherry bouncing between chapped lips. He met my gaze and winked. I looked away, remembering the needle marks on his forearms and the disillusioning affair during which I had discovered them.
       Paris carried her age more gracefully than London; divorced innumerably, kept beautiful by the enchantingly derogatory divulgences of her former spouses. London was weathered like a yew tree, clad in what appeared to be traditional hunting attire and – estranged from her profusion of disgruntled family members for a plethora of increasingly unsavoury reasons – she spent most of her time drunk on imported wine. The were locked in a vicious verbal skirmish over a vogue-filled ash tray and two glasses of French red which would, as it always did, end in sex.
       Sydney, who was clearly not of legal drinking age, was sharing a pint with Copenhagen over a game of pool. I had never met Copenhagen but had always admired her; she had faux flowers and little gold adornments woven into her butterfly locs, and the humble softness of her face which shifted lazily upon her mood lent her some passing, poetic resemblance to a cherry blossom. Her voice was like an essential oil, herbal and balmy, dripping through the grain of the felt as she chalked her cue.
       Athens, Corinth, Heraklion, and Thessaloniki, a party of women like the instruments in a string quartet with their sanded curves and dark, soulful interiors, were picking at a selection of over-salted bar snacks with the enthusiasm of starved city gulls, pausing occasionally to hurl commentary
at a football match (which, if the grainy footage and retro graphics were anything to go by, appeared to be a rerun of a game a decade old or more). Their external crassness was forgivable only because I knew them, and I knew that their aggression was a mere byproduct of the sheer enormity of their hearts. Verona was beneath the television, their muscular, nervous body – legs like the powerful hindlimbs of a greyhound – folded in like a paper crane atop a musty old armchair. Their halo of curls was illuminated by the light of the screen, nose submerged in a book of poetry with a glossy dust cover that winked whenever Andorra, stood a few feet away with pink skis propped up against his suitcase, flicked his lighter.
       When Birmingham came stumbling in, his breath already reeking of cider and the first notes of a greeting poised on his flat tongue, I ducked out before he could clap eyes on me, slipping past Moscow who was arguing with the bartender. We were old friends, sort of, and his thickly accented talk of football and politics had a strange way of sucking me in.
       I left them where I’d found them and drifted back through the nicotine-coloured hallway, barefoot and barely awake. My bed resisted me, like it was already trying to force me out. I shut my eyes and waited for morning to collect me, thinking about all the charming lies wedged in the go-between.

_{Em Cornwall, 20, England. Instagram: @emcee_writes.}