Green. Dark green. Deep, mossy colour made all the more depressing by the dim light of the hotel. It’s an empty, dingy room with a tough bed and a typewriter that looks old-fashioned even for early 40s.
The wallpaper is slowly, anxiously peeling off the walls, and no amount of glue can do the job. Sometimes the sound is so intense that it almost muffles out a couple having sex in the adjacent room as well as someone else groaning on the other side. The story doesn’t come. It doesn’t even know if it wants to be a novel or a play or perhaps a Hollywood script.
As for the sound of the hotel, it goes something like this:
If you can hear it, that is. The music. Because mostly it’s not for you, the one who’s inside, but for the outsider looking in. For the audience. Barton can only hear the green, mossy wallpaper coming unstuck. Sound that is mixed with dangerous groans of a big man as well as the delirious moans of love-making.
Also, there is a white sheet of paper blanking you with indifference. A strange box by the typewriter. And there are questions asked by some pretty girl lying on the beach, hanging over your desk like a cruel dream.
‘What’s in the box?’
‘I don’t know’.
‘Isn’t it yours?’
‘I don’t know’.
