Hotel rooms can be avoidant boxes, neutral to the point of anoxicity, functional units of space stripped utterly null. But they can be spaces, too, that hit viscerally, fitted with clinging traces of unease: auras in the aircon, furnishings thick with phantoms, suites with stains beneath the bleach, a threadcount made of overstretched nerves…

Once I checked into a mid-range hotel room carrying my baby son and he reacted to its ordinary three-star architecture with instant violence. His screams were scalp-splitting, echoed for storeys. Because we had no option but to stay, I tried holding to our shaky routine of feed-and-sleep, but he was locked in a panic beyond reaching. Singing to him—my sure-fire resort for the howling stages of any normal day—no longer worked. My voice was no match for whatever eerie frequency his nerve-ends sensed in that strange location. He roared like his world had no lullabies left in it. When I tried putting him into the fold-out cot-contraption his body arched as if I were lowering him to hell. I was a new mum, fresh to the swoops of love and terror that came with the standard role, insomniac on the calmest nights, attuned to my baby’s merest rustling, stirred by even his milkiest murmurs to a state of survivalist fretting. (Maybe the ghost he picked up in that room was me, wound tight by my exit from home: in those highstrung days I was on fire with mother-love but shrill with a sense of our fragility.) Whatever it was about that pale tourist tenement, those layers of concrete and downlight, he could not be consoled. His tantrum was bloodred, epistemological. I paced in the pitch of it, and felt the night filter to infinity. It ended with me behind the wheel, gliding a half-witnessed gridwork of streets, indicators flicking to a sequence of three AM nowheres, his screams slowly quelled by the motoric hum. We circled the town in a kind of shared coma. I didn’t dare take him to the room again.

Is any check-in ever truly clean? It felt like the history of the whole room tunneled through his cries, all its travellers joined in chorus. Or maybe it was a forecast, the decor singing of damage to come, its muted dystopian ambience emitting vibrations—god knows smalltown EnZed seems to specialize in apocalyptic hotel wallpaper. Whatever it was the voice of it lingered, and surfaced in this poem years later, in a section (from a book to come…) titled ‘psychopathology of the small hotel’. It’s a sequence that mostly follows fictional lovers, in and out of rooms of rented amorality, but it widens too, to take in the threshold architecture their lust is set in, panning past dioramas where each inhabitant holds the key to their own cut-price hell. The descant of ‘what this hotel room wants’ came out in a block as thick as the complex I remember from that night, a cold tableaux of chants, statements building in a dead-end room enraged by its own vacancy.

tracey slaughter