Summary

This chapter introduces Penny, a journalist who works for the ‘Style’ section of The World on Sunday, a national broadsheet newspaper. Penny is staying in a room at the Global Hotel in order to write a review about the hotel chain. She writes only a range of positive adjectives on her laptop — “classic,” “superior,” “ideal” — whilst watching the hotel television. This includes, briefly, a pornographic movie which was left unlocked by the previous guest. Watching a show about ghosts, Penny imagines what it would be like if every living being in history, including animals as well as humans, still walked the earth as ghosts.

After knocking her laptop off the bed by accident, Penny thinks it might be broken, and begins to create a fictional account in her head of how it broke. She imagines telling friends she was confronted by young men in...