Art Pact 115

"Oh the worst thing about it was just the terrible cold," she said, peering out into the street. The bus pulled up at the lights, stranding her directly in front of an old man in a plaid cap who stared in through the window blankly. He was the same age as her father, but much thinner - a grey raincoat covering up a bony frame that somehow managed to impress itself on the clothes above it in the form of angular eruptions at the shoulder and elbows. From the long sleeves of the coat extended bony wrists that ended in hands white and pink where the strained handles of overloaded orange plastic bags cut into the flesh of his fingers. He looked like a special effects skeleton that had somehow escaped from the studio, donned a hat, and gone out shopping at Sainsburys.

On the other end of the line Donovan muttered something trite about the temperature at which it would snow, and she nodded absently, forgetting that he could not see her. The old man looked up, staring directly into her eyes, and held her gaze for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time, staring down into the back of her mind and robbing her of her train of thought. Then the bus lurched forwards, and he was carried away into the distance behind her.

"That was weird," she said. What was weird, Donovan asked. "Oh, just an old man at the lights. I was sure that - no, never mind. Listen, I was telling  you about the holiday. The hotel was ok mostly, but the room we had was in some sort of weird cool spot in the building. You go outside and it's thirty five degrees, come back in and go to sleep and you'd wake up with frost on your nose. It was unbelievable!"

The bus bumped over a raised zebra crossing, throwing her first towards the back of the chair in front and then sideways into the man with the grey bag. He looked up from his book and frowned at her for a second before letting his face relax into a smile.

"Sorry!" she said, although she was thinking balls to you.

"No problem," he replied, and turned back to his book. Since she was already looking that way, she took her opportunity to glance at the pages. A thick heading in the middle of the nearest page read: "ADAPTATIONS IN MONKEY PAWS", which made no sense to her.

Her hand had fallen to her lap, and after a few seconds she realised that Donovan's voice was quietly and tinnily squawking from the phone. She considered ignoring it, perhaps pretending that the line had been cut off somehow, but she knew that Donovan would just call her back. No, better to tell the story now, get it out of the way.

"What? No, I'm still here. Bus went over a bump, had to hang on to something," she lied. "Anyway, I was telling you about the room. So, we complain to the manager and he says that according to the thermostats in our floor everything is perfectly all right. I thought: bollocks is it. But we met another couple who were in the room two along from us, and they said everything was fine for them. Their room was on the same corridor, same side of the hotel, same outside wall, everything. Jerry thought it must be some freak wind thing, but we were just as sheltered as they were. Then he thought we could be over some kind of air conditioning vent, but we couldn't see anything."

Donovan, of course, suggested a supernatural explanation.

"No no," she replied. "I mean, I won't say I didn't think of it, but you know Jerry doesn't believe in anything, and I certainly don't believe in ghosts. Besides, what ghost would be haunting a single room in a hotel that's only two years old? It would be the most tedious ghost ever. If I did believe in ghosts, I'd certainly be classy enough to only believe in ghosts that had some kind of pedigree. You can't take a ghost seriously if it's recent enough that it might still be on Facebook, can you?"

Around the bus the traffic grew chilly and sluggish, eventually grinding to a halt just at the end of the high street, where it blocked the exit from the old shopping centre in a flurry of little shifts and bumps and a blaring clarion of car horns. A Range Rover attempted to shoulder past the side of the bus by going up on the kerb, but only succeeded in lodging itself firmly between a railing and the car behind, which had moved forward to take up the slack and thereby blocked off the other driver's avenue of retreat. A crowd of pedestrians built up around the trapped vehicle - some clearly just there to observe another's discomfort, some interrupted in the act of crossing the road and now trapped. Someone banged on the Range Rover's bonnet, and a shouting match erupted between the banger and the bangee, who climbed halfway out of his seat and gesticulated wildly at his opponent.

"Listen," she told Donovan, "I might have to go in a minute. Anyway, Jerry bought one of those cheap Taiwanese thermometers. Ugly little plastic thing, but it had a minimum and a maximum temperature thing. We put it in the room, on the bedside table, and what do you think? Thirty-seven in the day, when we weren't there. Incredible! We'd probably have fried. At night, minus two. We showed it to the manager and he got in somebody to look at it. We could tell he thought we were making it all up - probably thought we'd put the thermometer in our daiquiri or something. But do you know what? The service man found that there were electronics gone wrong in the room control. Wired up the wrong way round, or something. Positive feedback, Jerry called it - when the room got warm the system was heating it up even further, when it got cold it was cooling it! No wonder!"