horse
Our mother came down to the docking gate to say cheerio to us. For a moment I didn’t recognize 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 that moment 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. Our 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.
Our mother gave my sister a look for being rude.
Two weeks, Leif said, three? As long as till September?
The far away word September hung in the air round us in the weird tradespeople space. 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.
He said it like a question.
Our 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 with her arms cupped, open and empty, one hand upturned and her eyes downturned, 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. He was obviously meant to be dead, his head turned to one side, his arms and legs meant to look limp. But the angle he was at on the floor made him look stiff and awkward, sprawled but frozen.
Leif gave him a push and he rocked from side to side. Our mother looked panicked.
Rigor mortis, Leif said. So nowadays this is what passes for pity. And this is what happens to art when you think you can make a hotel of it.
Our mother 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 a Google streetmap. It was easier to navigate by the shops than by the streets so we went towards Chanel instead, biggest thing on the map. Now Gucci. Now Nike. 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 our 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 only met her once before, back when we were too small to know, and she’d been too ill for us to see much of 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. It needed its staff. We’d seen that when we’d walked past the night before trying to catch a glimpse of our mother working and hoping to wave hello as we passed.
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 our mother was working. They were 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 off 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, even the ones facing me.
Their disconnect was what elegant meant.
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 in a clinic, its reassuring medical smell, one after the other the perfect family offering an arm.
But then where did it go? What did the surgeon 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.
Copyright © 2025 by Ali Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
