I have a view of a hotel from my office window. It’s the hotel above the railway station, behind the car park, with a view of the motorway.
In the underpass ‘plaza’ directly below it, with its handful of small businesses, there is a lapdance club. And a café that will sell you things fried and wrapped in cheap white rolls as light and unreal as the cotton wool clouds on a children’s collage. It is not an upmarket hotel.
There is currently a man standing at one of the windows – four from the top, third from the left – and he is naked and masturbating. I’m struggling to imagine what it is that he could possibly be excited about in the view of the top storey of a 1980’s concrete-slabbed car park or the slightly grubby exterior of the ex-school building that houses the office I work in but, to be fair to him; he does not seem that passionate.
The curtain at the window is giving him bother. There seems to be a fault, as it keeps falling across the window – he can’t arrange it to his liking and has to keep stopping to push it back. Or possibly it’s the weather that’s troubling him. Dank and drizzling, with the sky the colour of grubby, sweat-stained sheets. That old
Perhaps he is in town for some unwelcome task, or a boring meeting. Maybe it’s thoughts of quarterly figures and budgets that are making his hand listless, his enthusiasm limp.
Or, can he see us looking back at him? Are there more watching him from the other windows he can see? Is performing for a bored, disinterested audience not the pick-me-up he expected?
He’s turned away from the window now and the curtain, free from interference, creeps lankly down again, leaving a slight gap. I idly wonder if I would hear him sigh if I was in the room, and then go back to trying to decide what to have for lunch.
