Tuvalu by Andrew O'Connor Page A

jacket.’
    â€˜I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’
    â€˜But you want to?’
    â€˜I suppose,’ I said, trying to hide a welling desire.
    â€˜Good. We’ll go then.
    The chef gave us a discount and held open the door.
    â€˜I told you it was great food,’ Mami said, phoning for a cab in the deserted alley.
    â€˜Best Chinese ever.’
    I tried to locate the moon but the sky was featureless. Nearby a window was edged open and there came the ticking and soft whoosh of a heater being lit. I smelt kerosene.

    The cab driver wanted to speak English. I could not see him. His bucket seat had swallowed him whole. But I could hear him. He owned a set of ‘World English’ cassettes which he played for us, rewinding the sentences he knew best and repeating them aloud. I offered what little advice I could but he did not understand a word. Mami was far more help. She gave him an explanation of grammar in Japanese, which he ignored.
    â€˜I’m female,’ she said to me at last with a sigh. ‘I look Japanese and I speak Japanese. What the hell do I know about English?’
    Outside her hotel, Mami greeted the doorman. He bowed deeply, asking me if I had luggage.
    â€˜No, just visiting.’
    â€˜Enjoy,’ he said, leaving me to wonder if I had seen the hint of a smirk on his puffy, small-featured face.
    Inside the lobby—a study in opulence—my every whisper echoed uncomfortably. It took an eternity to cross the marble floor and I was relieved when we finally entered the elevator. Mami pressed a button for the twentieth floor and, as the doors closed, reflecting the two of us, my relief turned to dejection. Staring at myself beside such a stunning girl I had the feeling life would defeat me; that whatever I did or did not do in the ensuing hours I would inevitably be drawn back to them, either by regret or nostalgia. Or by both. As if listening to me, the doors reopened for two businessmen who decided, after much debate, not to enter. I suspected I was being given a last chance to flee. The front desk staff all stood stoically with their hands behind their backs, and a bellhop—a trainee—bowed.
    â€˜Home at last,’ Mami said, as the elevator doors finally shut.
    Mami’s hotel room was exactly as I remembered. The front room went on without end and served a hundred different purposes. Mami washed her face in the bathroom, then padded across to the stereo, tossing CDs left and right.
    â€˜CDs,’ she said with a groan. ‘Either the disc turns to shit or the music does. All my best ones have cracks. Look. Look at this.’ I looked at a CD well beyond repair.
    â€˜That was a good CD,’ she said, before glumly adding, ‘I should get an iPod, but there’s something unsettling about those things. They’re so generic, so insipid, so … white . Like little dishwashers.’
    I moved around the room turning on identical lamps. There seemed to be hundreds of them, all with bland, beige covers. Eventually I sat down on her enormous bed.
    â€˜What’s with all these lamps?’ I asked. ‘All your other furniture’s unique. But these lamps are—’
    â€˜There you go talking about the furniture again.’ She smiled. ‘Those lamps? They’re the originals. They were here when I took this place. Everything else I’ve added.’ She pressed play on a remote and moved away from the stereo. I heard a CD spin, then the opening verse of a song—possibly Lennon’s ‘Instant Karma’—until it began to skip and Mami clicked it off with a huff.
    â€˜Lamps are what make hotel rooms into hotel rooms,’ she said. ‘Most people think it’s the minibar, the beds or the chunky phone. Even the Bible, if you’re that way inclined. But it’s none of those. I tossed all of that out because it’s the lamps. There can only be one “hotel thing” when you