Boutique Hotel

J. was walking up to his room from the party, drunk and with little command of his legs and arms. In the poorly lit hallway he exhibited his drunkenness, colliding with doors and making exaggerated movements in the hope that he would come face to face with a person from his youth and be forced to explain himself. He pressed the button for the elevator and waited for what seemed like minutes, but if he was impatient he concealed it well. “Why should I be in such a hurry?”, he asked himself, not dismissively, but as if to construct a table in his mind of all the things that could possibly cause someone to make an enemy of an elevator. When the doors finally opened with a dissonant screech, he remembered that his room was infact on the first floor, and registering this as a characteristic display of absent-mindedness he abandoned the machine entirely. Abhorred, he ascended the stairwell at great pace, taking the steps in twos in what he could only have described as an attempt to salvage the time he had lost waiting for the elevator.

Sullen and exhausted, J. made a bee-line to his door, apparently giving up on the attempt to draw attention to himself in his inebriated state. On the way he stopped in his tracks to examine a picture frame which hung on wall. It was a grainy photograph of four extravagantly dressed women standing atop a set of bleachers so that they were elevated them several feet above those surrounding them. They were clearing posing for the camera, paying it more attention than the spectacle itself. However, as is often the case with beautiful women, their labored carefree expressions appeared even more natural than the surrounding spectators, whose squinted eyes and focused, blank expressions made them appear utterly miserable. J. stood frozen in his place, staring at this photograph and then at the caption, ‘British models at the Melbourne Cup, 1967’. He wondered if they were still alive and if so, if they remembered this particular day. He wondered if their daughters aspired to be models, or if they had even had children. He pitied them, but mostly he pitied himself. “If i’m ever remembered, I don’t want it to be as a single seagull in a flock, darting for discarded food”, he thought to himself. “I don’t want to be a pillar of a bridge, buckling under cars, soaking and miserable from choppy wind and waves. I don’t want to be a button on an elevator someone presses to get to their room so that they can fall asleep watching television.”