“I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“They made me a guest in their land and now I’m paying it back.”
Warden might have been touched if not for the state of his room. “I don’t suppose I’ll need your band to get—”
“For everything, and then there can’t be any argument.” As he wondered who she was saying might start one, she said “You wouldn’t want to upset anybody.”
“How do you think I’d do that?”
“Someone makes the bands for us. It’s a local craft and it helps our economy. Have you got yours with you? I’ll show you what I mean.”
Warden fished the wristband out of his breast pocket. It had formed a loose knot that he had to disentangle from his fingers. The manager spread it on her palm to display how intricately woven the strands of green material were, in a reiterated pattern Warden thought could be as ancient as it was elaborate. He was peering at it out of politeness, though it hardly compensated for his room, when she said “You’ll appreciate it better on.”
Before Warden realised what she meant to do she slipped the band onto his right wrist. At once it was so snug that the band might have been designed for him. He felt a hint of moisture that put him oddly in mind of a kiss, and then it was gone. “What is it made of?” he said.
“That’s their secret,” the manager said and raised her eyes from his wrist. “Was there something else you wanted?”
“There aren’t any towels in my room.”
“We’ve had a day of changing rooms. We won’t forget you, Mr Warden.”
Was she admitting newcomers had demanded to be moved? He meant to insist on that himself, but not until he’d experienced how bad his room might be. He ignored the wristband, which felt slightly tighter, while he asked “So when could I have some?”
“As I say, all my people are occupied just now,” she said and turned her back on him. He was struggling to believe he’d been dismissed when she said “You can have mine.”
She brought a towel from a room beyond the office behind the counter. It felt damp and was half the size Warden would have expected a bath towel to be. Was her gesture intended to disarm him? “Thank you,” he barely said.
“You’re welcome. All our guests are.” She rested an unnecessarily maternal gaze on him until he stepped back from the counter. “And do call me Win,” she said.
“Win.”
“Short for Winifred,” she said as if she’d made her name sound too triumphal. “I hope you’ll enjoy your stay with us, Mr Warden.”
He might have retorted that it was up to her and her staff to make sure he did. He could have taken her comments for disguised appeals, and might something of the kind have prompted the inexplicably positive online reviews of the Mediterranean Magic? He’d already seen enough to justify the hostile ones—“deserves to be bulldozed”, “not even fit for dogs”, “you’d be better sleeping on the beach” and dozens more from guests who weren’t even fully boarded—and the complaints the travel operator had received. “I’ll do my best,” he told Win and made for his room.
He always did his best on behalf of the customers. While he took pride in investigating wherever the firm sent him, posing as an ordinary holidaymaker or an invisibly average hotel guest, discovering the worst often left him feeling mean, and so did knowing that most of his reports left their subjects unsupported by his firm. It was the owners’ fault if they didn’t raise their standards, and he was helping the customers who paid his wages, but how many staff might Warden have put out of a job? He had to remember that if they’d attended to their work he mightn’t have needed to do his. He might even have been out of a job himself.
He draped the towel over a rickety rail in the bathroom and set about emptying his suitcase. When he tried to open the drawers under the wardrobe the handle of the topmost came off, and the front of the lower drawer creaked outwards before the rest of it staggered free. Once he’d unpacked he used his phone to photograph all the failings of the apartment, and then he ventured out for dinner.
The restaurant was another of the concrete blocks that made up Mediterranean Magic. Through the holes it had for windows Warden saw an assortment of trestle tables scarcely covered with checked cloths and provided with a variety of seats—benches, folding chairs, even the odd stool. As he followed a family into the restaurant, a man hailed the father. “Aren’t you coming out to a taverna, Dick? You’re never going in there twice.”
The man he’d addressed was just as wilfully bald, but the sun had rendered his scalp pinker. “Tell us about it when you’ve been, Stan.”
“Last night you said you weren’t eating here again.”
“We can change our minds, can’t we? We’re getting what we paid for.”
The bands on their wrists and their teenage son’s weren’t quite as prominent as those Stan and his family sported or Warden’s own. When the taverna party headed for the road, Dick turned to Warden. “Some people aren’t happy till they’ve found something to moan about.”
For a moment Warden felt identified. “You don’t think they could have a reason.”
“They only got here yesterday and they’ve been complaining ever since.”
“Have you been here longer yourselves?”
“Twice as long as them and we’re making the best of it. We think that’s what us English do. It’s what Win’s doing, some people might like to remember.”
Having found a plate that wasn’t too chipped, Warden surveyed the buffet that occupied a long table: olives, cheeses, oily salads, dips so watery they bordered on colourless, some kind of raisin bread—no, loaves with flies in attendance. One dip displayed a black olive or else a drowned fly, which helped him decide against sampling any of them. Platters of sliced meat kept company with bowls of rice and a plate piled with greasy potatoes, along with soggy salads indistinguishable from those he’d already left alone. He spooned a few lumps of rice out of a bowl and took a slice of each meat, which proved to be not just as unidentifiable as they looked but so timidly spiced that they tasted less than national. A middle-aged couple at the table next to his watched him eat, presumably because he was a newcomer. “Good?” the woman said, if it was a question.
“What do you think?”
“Good,” she declared, and her husband said “Just as good.”
“As what?” Warden felt he should learn.
“As last night.”
“And the one before that,” the woman said.
When Warden left quite a portion of his dinner, they stared like disapproving parents at his plate. “I’ve had what I need,” he told them, and might have gone in search of a taverna if he hadn’t felt a little sick. He tried to wash away the vague insidious flavours with a gulp of house wine, which only brought them lurching back.
He chewed two chalky indigestion tablets as soon as he was in his room. From the balcony, having managed to decide which of the pair of grubby plastic chairs was less precarious, he watched a sunset gild the goats and set the mounds of refuse in amber until a parched breeze brought a shitty whiff that sent him inside. He felt unusually ready for bed, and made for the bathroom, where the mirror reminded him that he hadn’t taken off the wristband. When he tugged at it, the band yielded just a fraction of an inch, not enough to let him slip it off. Had it shrunk in the heat? Since it didn’t trouble him, he might as well wear it to bed.
He had to bruise his fingers on the remote control before the air conditioning clattered into action. The metal slats kept up a rattle that ought to have denoted more than the tepid feeble draft they let loose. Warden felt compelled to listen for a pattern in the relentless stutter, but eventually he fell asleep. He dreamed he was stored in a clammy bag, and wakened to find he was—wrapped in the sweaty sheet, at any rate. The room was hotter than it had been on his return. As he groped for the control to rouse the chill, his right arm felt unhelpfully numb. The unit on the wall gave a solitary clatter and died with a sputtering flash.
Had he been lying on the arm
? The numbness seemed to dissipate by spreading through him. He fumbled to switch on the light, which showed a thread of smoke hovering above the exposed wires of the unit. The wires had fused together with their rubber sheath, and Warden stared at them until his head began to feel as senseless as his arm had been. Would anyone be at Reception this early? His room had no phone, and he wasn’t going to the office just to discover it was unstaffed. Instead he dragged the sodden sheet over himself.
Despite the heat he wakened well after dawn. He managed to use the toilet by aligning the emaciated plastic seat with the pedestal and holding it there with both hands. When he tried to raise the shower head towards him, having persuaded the water at least to hint at warmth, the screws shifted in the wall. He crouched beneath the enervated downpour and then used the towel, which was still damp. At least the wristband wasn’t wet by the time he remembered he had it on.
Much of the breakfast buffet looked familiar—dips, olives, salads, rice. The cold meats could be last night’s too, sliced thinner, and the hard sawn loaves weren’t new, though the attendant flies might be. Warden left most of the samples he took, earning a dumb rebuke from more than one fellow guest, and went to Reception. “You’ll have had a sleep,” Win said across the counter.
Warden started framing a retort, but the effort felt as though a band was tightening around if not inside his head. “Was there anything you wanted, Mr Warden?” Win said.
“Yes, air conditioning. Mine died in the night.”
“Oh dear, what a pest.” As Warden wondered if she could mean him, Win said “I’ll have someone put you in a fan.”
“Don’t you think you’d better get the unit fixed? The wires are bare. It could be dangerous.”
“We’ll look at it if that’s what you want.”
Warden hardly thought he needed to confirm this, and it almost made him forget to ask “How does this come off?”
Win gazed in some disappointment at the wrist he was holding up. “You won’t want to till you leave, will you? Not when you’re all in.”
It would give him access to any facilities he needed to investigate. When his stay was over he could cut the wristband off. He retired to the pool, where a hot breeze sent litter for a sluggish swim and wafted a harsh smell of chlorine out of the water. From a lounger he watched a Mediterranean Magic man trudging about in search of abandoned glasses and any other items that weren’t too much trouble to retrieve. Warden found the man’s somnolent progress close to mesmeric, and wasn’t far from sleep by the time the representative of his firm met new guests from several accommodations in the poolside bar. “Hi, everyone. I’m Rhona,” she cried.
She was a slight girl adorned with a watch so large that it appeared to cast a shadow on her wrist, not unlike a stain. While identifying the attractions of the island on a map she gestured so vigorously that she might have been miming her job. The customers who booked tours with her weren’t fully boarded at Mediterranean Magic. Warden’s fellow guests were more concerned about their rooms, along with the food and other drawbacks. As Rhona undertook to have a word and have a word he found her brightness far too studied, not to say repetitive. He would have liked to overhear what she said to Win if his presence mightn’t have betrayed his mission. She didn’t spend much time in the office, and she was heading for her motor scooter when pink-pated Dick and family arrived at the poolside. Blood was seeping through a large plaster on the teenager’s right shin. “Someone’s been in the wars,” Warden said.
“Used to be,” Dick said with a blank stare. “I’m a civvy now.”
“No, I mean your son. What happened there?”
“Trev didn’t look where he was going,” the boy’s mother said. “Cut himself on there.”
Following her gaze, Warden saw a jagged strip of concrete where tiles should have been at the edge of the pool. He was dismayed to have overlooked the hazard, which clearly wasn’t recent. “Does Rhona know about that?” he urged. “You can catch her if you’re quick.”
“No point in that,” Dick said. “Deb here’s patched him up.”
“Don’t you think it ought to be reported? It doesn’t look any too clean.”
“You’ve got some eyes if you can see through a plaster. His mother put plenty of disinfectant on.” Before Warden could explain he’d meant the concrete, Dick said “You can go and moan if that’s your style.”
Rhona’s scooter departed with a tinny snarl, and Warden gave up. Striving to persuade Dick had left him with a headache like a ring around his brain. It tempted him to snooze beside the pool or in his room, but he ought to stay alert. He went out for a quick tour of the resort in the hope of walking off the tension of the job.
A sandy beach extended for a mile around a bay, though the section closest to Mediterranean Magic was chunky with rubble. Tavernas lined the promenade, and he found more in the winding side streets, where supermarkets and souvenir shops had ousted many of the houses. His roaming only aggravated the tightness in his skull, and he wandered back to the apartments. He was in sight of the block that housed Reception and the staff when he noticed it was opposite a graveyard.
The cemetery was the kind he’d often seen in this part of the world, with many of the graves covered by marble slabs and headed by memorials displaying mementoes behind glass. Candles and lanterns stood on most of the graves, waiting to be lit after dark. Facing the back of the Mediterranean Magic block was a hut composed of wood so old that it resembled a mossy tree. Surely just a strip of moss was protruding under the door, but Warden went to look.
It was one of the wristbands Win used. Though the door had torn the pattern ragged, it was unmistakable. As he walked around the hut, which was windowless, a woman tending a grave met his eyes. She sent him a sign of the cross and murmured a word.
“Sorry?” Though he thought she’d said that, he sounded mindless as an echo. “Sorry for what, sorry?”
Her wary gaze moved from the hut to his wrist. “We need,” she muttered and returned to her task.
She must have his economic contribution in mind, but unlike Win, she was apologising. Warden thought it made sense for the graveyard caretaker to earn a little extra with a traditional craft, and perhaps some version of the bands was sold in the souvenir shops. He returned to his room to find the bed as rumpled as he’d left it, and no sign of a fan. Either the sight or the thought of complaining once again made his head twinge like an unhealed wound. He went back to the poolside bar, where the wristband entitled him to free drinks. The house wines came from boxes that didn’t pretend to be Greek, and the barman was the silent sullen fellow he’d previously seen clearing away litter. A greenish tattoo encircled each of his wrists, though Warden couldn’t see exactly what the blurred designs were supposed to represent. They could hardly be meant to bring shackles to mind.
Sour though it was, the wine numbed Warden’s headache. He dozed on a lounger beneath a tipsy umbrella, jerking awake to discover it was the middle of the afternoon. His room still hadn’t been touched. As he marched to Reception he saw he’d abandoned his glass by the lounger. He mustn’t turn into an untidy careless guest—he needed to remember he was here on official business—and he took the glass to the bar, where the morose man gave it an unwelcoming blink.
Win’s look wasn’t too enthusiastic either. “What can we do for you now?”
“When is my room likely to be made up, do you know?”
“We can’t do everything at once.” She sounded like a parent dealing with an unreasonable child. “We’re bringing you a fan,” she said as though promising a treat or an indulgence.
“When you do, could I have a proper towel?”
“What do you mean by proper?”
“I don’t mean yours wasn’t. It was generous of you.” Warden’s lips felt constricted, along with his brain, and it took him some effort to add “I’d still like the kind you provide for your guests.”
“We’ll see about it. Was that all?”
Warden was thrown by
how unreasonable he was being made to feel. He was a guest, after all, and not just that either. Nevertheless he turned away before mumbling “For now.”
As he resumed his place by the pool, having collected another glass of wine from the bar, he saw a woman with a stack of towels making for his block. Shouldn’t he feel more annoyed that she was dealing with the rooms so late? All he felt was relief. He drank and dozed and trudged to the room, where the sheet had been yanked more or less smooth on the bed. A single frayed towel drooped on the bathroom rail. At least it was dry, but the floor remained sticky, and there was no fan. The idea of complaining yet again made his head feel clamped, and he opted for dinner instead.
He was sidling along the buffet, which looked entirely too familiar, when he saw Stan and family following him. “Didn’t you say you were never coming here again?” Warden said.
“We can change our minds, can’t we?” Stan retorted, rubbing his forehead with his wristband, unless the action was the other way around.
“That’s exactly what your friend told you,” Warden couldn’t resist observing.
“Shows we’re friends then, doesn’t it?”
Though Warden wasn’t sure what sense this made, it sounded like a warning. He turned to the buffet, where grease had congealed around the cold cuts, while he suspected the other meats were reheated. He contented himself with salads, and passed Dick’s family on his way to a table. The bloodstain on the boy’s plaster was a muddy brown. “How is he now?” he felt bound to ask.
“Fine,” all three said in chorus, as if they’d practiced the rebuff.
Once Warden saw off some lumps of rice and an assortment of wilted leaves he decided he’d had dinner. He sat on his balcony, wishing he could see the graveyard hut, to determine if its occupant was at work. Leaning out at full stretch let him see a few graves lit by lanterns. He was straining to crane further when the plastic chair twisted out of shape and collapsed under him.
He had to laugh, however ruefully. It was his fault, after all. He would be better off in bed, where he couldn’t do any more damage. In the bathroom he was about to scrub his stained wrist until he recognised the wristband. It was scarcely identifiable as one—more like a raised tattoo. Once he was in bed he couldn’t feel it at all, and the unawareness seemed to reach within his head, expanding into sleep.
Behold Page 13