The bag she had. She had this see-through plastic bag with a white zip across the top. I think it might have come with a pillow, or a duvet cover, something like that. It was a heavy-duty bag with proper white rope handles, completely clear with no product name, so you could see all the contents inside. Everything she had with her, all her belongings, if you like. From the outside you could see her purse, her medication, her tissues, her reading glasses, her passport, the key card for the hotel room, bits of newspapers she was keeping for later. A book she was never going to read. Her mobile phone, switched off. Things taken from the hotel room like free pens.
And chocolate. Lots of chocolate.
What are we only children? That’s what she said to me.
Not that she was stuck for a bag. She could have got herself any bag she wanted, only handbags were never a great priority in her life. That see-through bag was perfectly good, she said, too good to be thrown out. She held on to it for environmental reasons, obviously, but also to let people know that she was not the kind of woman who would spend a lot of money on a designer bag, that’s not who she was. She wasn’t here to make a big impression, it was only a bag to put her things into. I think she was making the point that her life was very open, nothing to hide. It could only have been her bag and nobody else’s, unmistakable. And it was handy being able to see into the bag from the outside while searching with her hand inside at the same time. Her hand became one of the items in the bag and the plastic made a squeaking sound while she was looking for something, her glasses, checking to make sure she had her glasses, with the wine-coloured frames. She had only recently bought them in New York and she told me that the optometrist had nice breath. She tried to get him into conversation, but all he ever said was look up, look down at the floor, look at my left ear. And the same thing again for the other eye, look up, look down, look at my right ear. He was so close in front of her that she got the smell of blackberries on his breath, like blackberry jam.
We’re only children. That’s it. We’re only just children, she said.
She liked to imagine that every day was the first day of her life. She loved being at the Adlon, a bit of luxury, she said. The foyer was wide, with a section cordoned off at the centre for tables and chairs where people sat having coffee and cake, a glass of champagne, like they had done for years, I suppose. There was a high dome lit up in the middle of the ceiling and a balcony overlooking the foyer where people could look down from above at the people below. The reception was to the left as you came in, that’s how I remember it, and a cocktail bar to the right. And there was a long marble corridor leading away to the back past the elevators. It was a calm place, all in all, even when it was busy, with a piano playing most of the time and voices chatting and the sound of the elevator doors. She loved meeting new people, for example the hotel staff. She got into conversation and made friends with them right away, asking them questions, personal questions like do you believe in ghosts? Do you have a boyfriend? What do you think of Lady Gaga? And they always responded truthfully, out of courtesy. She talked to them like she was one of the hotel staff herself, which she was once, long ago, in London, a chambermaid, if that’s what you still call room service now. She was like one of them, having a chat to fill in the time, keeping them from their work.
Her room was bigger, more deluxe than mine, overlooking the street with all the action. My room looked out over the inner courtyard with the flower garden. There was possibly a bit too much décor, if you ask me, needless use of natural resources. Wood panelling around the rooms, all very heavy and executive. Corporate, would that be the right word? And the bathrooms were something else, very spacious, marble tiling, beautiful towels that looked to me like they had never been used before, that was the feeling you got at least. Everything was very new and old-looking at the same time, new old. The place had been completely reconstructed since the wall came down, with no trace of the old place left, only the name and the reputation.
Sometimes I wonder what people get up to in hotel bedrooms, what mad things went on before me. It doesn’t bear thinking about, she said. Leave it alone, you don’t want to imagine. Because she worked as a chambermaid in London years ago and she’d seen everything that was worth imagining. It was her job to erase the evidence. A hotel bedroom is meant to have no trace of the previous occupants. Maybe all they ever get up to is look into each other’s eyes and say each other’s names, out loud.
So we’re all ready to go and she takes out the list from her bag. I’m pushing the wheelchair along the corridor towards the elevator. I call the elevator and she hands me the list to give to the driver when we see him.
We’re not going to call him the driver, she says. Are we?
We can call him Manfred.
Does he mind being called Manfred?
That’s his name, I tell her. Please call me Manfred, that’s what he said to me.
She wants to know, does he have much English?
Yes.
Don’t tell him, she says, will you?
She would prefer Manfred not to know about her condition. It’s not like her to withhold information from people, but keeping Manfred free from knowing that she is dying is not such a big lie, everybody does that.
She would rather not have to explain. She probably doesn’t want to go over those medical details again. What the doctors said, how they waved the X-ray around and then left her alone in the corridor. How they came back and told her that in spite of the bad news, she was as healthy as a trout. Her heart was in excellent condition, and her blood pressure was perfect. They were talking about her like spare body parts, she told me, as though they could reassemble the best available parts from a number of women into one decent woman they could stand over. The nurse even remarked about her elbows, how did she keep them so young, she had the elbows of a ten-year-old.
I’ve let him know you’re a writer, I tell her.
He doesn’t need to know any more than that, she says.
He thinks you’re my mother.
She laughs at that. Me, your mother?
Everybody loves mothers, I say, and she laughs again, with all her lungs.
I wouldn’t know how to be a mother, she says.
Ah that’s not true.
She’s not my mother, only Manfred has picked up that impression somehow because she’s a good bit older than me, in a wheelchair.
Just to be clear about this, she was definitely not my mother and there was no romance between us either, nothing like that in the past, no previous history. We were not attached to each other or living together like lovers, or married, or related in any compulsory way, like her family. We were good friends, that’s all. We met when things were a bit upside-down, for both of us. She was older in years, in books, in everything. She didn’t mind me knowing less than she did. She didn’t mind not knowing the first thing about cooking, I wouldn’t let her near a kitchen. We clicked, I suppose, just telling each other things, having a laugh. We took each other seriously, but not all the time. I used to call around to play with her dog, Buddy, throwing her shoe across the room to make him go after it, while she was reading. She had the ability to read as if there was nobody else in the world outside the book. Even with me running around her chair and Buddy after me, she would continue reading, even when I was hiding the shoe behind her back so that Buddy would have to jump right across her and the book would go flying out of her hands, only then she would look up and say, Liam, I’m going to kill you.
Manfred is waiting at the reception by the time we get down. As we come out of the elevator he is walking towards us and I get the impression that he has been walking towards us for some time, maybe hours, maybe days, maybe always was walking towards us. How did he know when to start walking, I’m asking myself. He’s got a shaved head and you wouldn’t say he’s overweight, just very big all round, in a physical sense, he does weights, it’s obvious. He’s wearing a suit and tie and his chest is expanding to an enormous size as he puts out his hand, smiling. The