I’d started going down with a virus about a week earlier – chicken pox probably, though I never got it diagnosed – and that morning it had broken out in small pink body-sores. Jenny led the way in, carrying the case, and Christine followed, smiling, alert. She peered intently at everything around her – the patterns on the lurid 1970s carpet, the big old Bakelite light switches, bulbous and stiff as breasts on a ship’s figurehead, the rickety sideboard, even the regulation steel bracket that pulled the door shut behind them with a sigh and a thump. She stared as if it was all completely exotic to her, and all the functions of things were obscure. It made me wonder if she’d ever seen the inside of a hotel before. It was nearly noon but the room was curtained and gloomy and must have smelled of both Michael and me having lain there all day. I think I was the last thing she gave her specimen-collector’s attention to. Here she is, the long lost little sister, Jenny announced. She dropped the case and hugged Christine, as if performing for me, then stepped back to admire her.
