Angel of the Lobby

The girl lies dying in the gawping mouth of the elevator. Young woman, beautiful, serenity leaking from her veins in red wine puddles, sprinkled with the confetti of stale wedding cake crumbs. Daisy chain of paramedics around the fallen angel, stethoscopes tinkling soft rosary sighs. My wife-to-be looks at me and I look at her and we both know the other wonders most how this affects our dinner plans.

‘Only twenty-three,’ says the receptionist: Slavic, haunted cheekbones, anemic dread. ‘Only checked in two hours ago and then…’ Lazarus awoken. ‘Sad. Arms…’ Her shark-fin fingernail cuts forearm from wrist to elbow crease. ‘Blood everywhere. Room…’ She shivers, swats away the image with that perfect manicure. Same age as the girl now nestled in the lettuce leaf bedsheet speckled with blood in the lobby of this hotel. The virus of the shiver spreads; my wife-to-be catches it, facial colour draining beneath the surface soil of make-up like syphoned oil.

‘Poor girl,’ says the woman destined to be my wife and mother of my sons. Her eyes form a link with the eyes in which the light is flickering, triangulated by the stare of the receptionist hands clasped behind a book of names in the role of anguished witness, a death fantasy shared. Penitent hush thick as mustard gas. Hulking policeman, ex-military gorilla, lurking black-clad behind a potted plant, snub-nosed machine gun hungrily sniffing the air.

‘Shall we go?’ I indicate the front door portal to another reality. My wife-to-be nods, grips her handbag, soaks in one final image of public suicide. Exit stage left. Curtain close shroud.

We descend the steps into a foreign balm sticky as tree sap. Linking arms, we travel the Polish city in search of a restaurant with this memory bruised upon our souls.