Upgrading

by Simon Brooke

  I worry that Vinny will tell Jane about my new “job.” He doesn’t, apparently, but probably not because he realizes it will embarrass me, I think he’s just forgotten or he simply can’t believe that I have actually gone and done it. Not that it’s any of her business but somehow I don’t think she’d approve. She would either condemn it as a form of prostitution or fall about laughing at the thought of a “gigolo,” a moustachioed smoothie in a smoking jacket. “Well, hell-eau!”

  I think the latter would be more painful. In fact other than my little conversation with Malc about my new role, I realize I don’t want anyone else to know about it. How would I explain it to Sami? Sami, who thinks not putting the lid back on a pen is pretty decadent. What on earth would Debbie say? Saint Debbie. “Hi, Mum, guess what?” I don’t think so.

  It’s dawning on me that I’m about to devote a huge amount of time and effort to something that, depending on which way you look at it, is either laughable or disgusting. Taking a quick side-ways glance at Jane, who has her feet curled up underneath her on the settee, and then looking down into my half-empty cup while she and Vinny watch the telly, I decide to keep this a secret. They’ll laugh on the other side of their faces when I’m off that office treadmill and not relying on a monthly financial fix.

  After we’ve finished our tea the phone rings and I go into the kitchen to answer it. It is Marion to ask what I am doing. I know she likes to hear that without her my life is a drab, impoverished grind so I am tempted to say something about clubbing together for a take-away but I think that’s pushing it a bit. She tells me that she has booked us on a flight for Paris on Saturday morning and coming back Monday morning. I hope I sound pleased without being too desperately keen.

  It’s only when I put the phone down that I remember that I’ll need another morning off work.

  Jane brings the cups back into the kitchen while I’m considering how exactly to phrase this hopeless request. She shoots me a look. A disapproving look. I’m just standing here, minding my own business in my own kitchen, for God’s sake.

  She begins to fill the washing-up bowl, squirting detergent in from a height and rolling up her sleeves. I get the feeling a point is being made here.

  “I’ll do that if you want,” I say, as much to break the silence. She looks across at me quizzically. “I said I’ll wash the mugs up.” Now she looks at me as if I’ve offered to wipe her nose for her or wash her knickers.

  “No, I’ll do it,” she says. Too tired to move, I find myself watching her. After a moment she looks across at me. I look back at her, holding her stare. Her smooth white skin is slightly flushed by the hot water. “Can’t imagine you washing up.”

  “Why not?”

  She doesn’t answer. I ask again but I know the answer.

  “Oh, just too cool,” she says, turning to look at me and rolling her shoulder almost imperceptibly. I smile at this seductress with soapy hands.

  She stays over that night. She has Vinny’s bed and he sleeps on the settee. The next morning she has gone by the time we are up. While we rush round, ironing shirts, gulping at mugs of stewed tea, scraping margarine onto charcoal toast, I ask Vinny about her.

  “She’s just a mate,” he says over babble of the radio. “Did the same course at uni, she doesn’t know if she wants to be a graphic designer after all, though.”

  “You schtump her?” I ask.

  Sitting at the table in his boxer shorts, Sergeant Bilko T-shirt and thick, saggy black socks, Vinny chases some stray Rice Krispies round his bowl then he thinks about my question for a moment. “Come on, mate,” I say. “It can’t be that difficult to remember, it’s not like there’s a whole harem of conquests to think through, is there?”

  “There’s a few, locked away in this card-index memory,” says Vinny, tapping the side of his head. He scratches under his arm and smells his fingers distractedly. “I was actually thinking what it would be like to schtump her.”

  “Nice tits.”

  “True.”

  We both sit and think about them. I look at my watch.

  “Christ, I’d better get a move on. She got a boyfriend, then?”

  “She did have one.”

  “Are they still together?”

  “Nah, they split up after finals. He was supposed to be revising with this other girl in their tutor group but between you and me, I think some of the revising was, you know, done in a horizontal position.”

  I laugh at the thought of horizontal revising. Poor Jane. I know how she must have felt. That realization that you’ve made a fool of yourself, that you were so wrong.

  “What was he like, this bloke?” I ask Vinny. Why do I care? I’m strangely pleased by the reply, though.

  “Good-looking bastard. She seems to go for smoothies.” He gives me a slow, sly smile.

  “Don’t know what you mean by that. What does she do now?”

  “She works in Paperchase in Tottenham Court Road or something.”

  “Yeah, paper planes you mean?” Vinny scrapes something from under the nail of his big toe which is sticking through one sock. “She’s taking a year off, you know, before she moves out of the slip road of studentdom and into the fast lane of middle management. Nice girl, though.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say casually, examining my hand-in-work with the iron-razor sharp creases in all the wrong places.

  “You interested, then?” asks Vinny leeringly.

  “Oh, no. Well, I don’t know.”

  “Of course, you’re a professional now,” he sniggers.

  “Don’t tell her about that, for fuck’s sake. Oh, you haven’t, have you?”

  “No, I’d forgotten about it, actually.” He thinks for a moment and then adds “Just don’t mix business and pleasure, that’s all. Now, I think you’ve done enough damage to that shirt, give us the iron.”

  On the bus to work I am thinking desperately how to ask Debbie for more time off. By the time my stop has come I am convinced it is my right and she cannot stop me.

  “Hiya,” I say, putting my head round the door of her office. It is separated from the rest of us by glass partitioning. There are also Venetian blinds that can be closed when Debbie is sacking someone. In fact I suggested to her one day that she should just write on them “Another one bites the dust.” It would certainly serve to motivate the rest of us “self-starters.” She laughed. She used to laugh a lot at the things I said, way back when I first arrived. I was the class favourite. One of the girls told me that Debbie spent ten minutes in the ladies’ loo talking about me and wondering whether I was available. Debbie sacked her the following week.

  This morning Debbie just looks up at me and says “Hiya” wearily and then goes back to some spreadsheets on her desk.

  “I’m just going to take Monday morning off if that’s OK,” I say quickly.

  Her eyes move off the spreadsheet but stay fixed on her desk.

  There is a pause.

  “Let’s see how it goes,” she says coldly.

  “OK. It would just be the morning,” I say and go back to my own desk.

  Sami is just sticking a yellow Post-it on my phone.

  “This guy wants a repeat for next week,” she says, pulling her incredibly long dark hair away from her face. “And a discount.”

  I look at the name and number on the paper, which mean nothing to me, and throw them in the bin.

  “Well, he can shove it up his bum.”

  “Andrew. You can’t do that. You’re so rude.”

  I laugh. “Sami, you’re so polite.”

  “I know,” she smiles.

  And so it continues—the daft, amiable banter ping-ponging between us all day long. The feigned lunacy that is the only way to stay sane in an office. We should get one of those signs “You don’t have to work here but …” Oh, never mind.

  By Friday, I am feeling as excited as a kid. I haven’t been to Paris for years and even then it was a student expedition with Helen and another couple on such a tight budget t
hat we had to sneak one of the girls into the hotel at night and have sandwiches for every meal apart from the last night when we went for the 55F menu at a little restaurant with aluminium cutlery and tables topped with chipped, yellow formica.

  I first met Helen when I carried her books home from the library. It was in the third week of her first term at university, I’d already been there a year. Sweet, isn’t it? It was a cloudless, sunny day but with long, autumnal shadows and a cool breeze blowing across campus. She was walking back from the library through campus and I was strolling over to the Union to meet some friends for a lunchtime drink. I saw this girl staggering along: her arms were struggling to contain a pile of books and she was stopping repeatedly, grappling with one old hardback after another to prevent them from escaping. But her face was completely calm.

  “Thank you,” she said when I made my offer. I was surprised by her cool acceptance. I had expected her to laugh and look embarrassed or to say, “Oh, don’t worry, thanks,” but she just handed over some of the books and we set off to her hall of residence.

  I asked her about where she came from (South London), what she was studying (French) and how she was getting on (very well, because she had covered some of the course work at A-level). I offered my own CV and she asked some questions about it.

  “That was a real help, thank you again,” she said, closing the door to her room in my face.

  Does Helen sound boring? There was never a dull moment with her. She arranged for us to go backpacking, we went to the theatre, she suggested books for me to read and then interrogated me on them. She showed me her Tina Turner collection one day. I was amazed. Then she did an impression. It was really incredibly accurate—the voice, the shuddering dance across the stage. It became our running joke. She’d do it in that post-coital silliness at four o’clock in the morning or a Sunday afternoon.

  That was the thing about Helen—with her pale skin, her big dark eyes and her long straight hair, she looked the picture of serenity but you never quite knew exactly what she was thinking or what was going to come next.

  “This is crap,” she said quietly to the owner of a hotel in the Cotswolds when we splashed out for a weekend to celebrate our second anniversary with some money her parents had given us. He looked astonished—so did I, even after two years of knowing her.

  “Sorry?”

  “I said this room is crap. You think because we’re students that you can give us the smallest, noisiest, most horrible room in the place and we won’t notice.”

  The guy tried to protest but Helen continued, forcefully, eloquently.

  “Our money’s as good as anyone else’s. Can you show me which other rooms you’ve got, please.”

  And he did. And we got a huge room overlooking the lake.

  “Better,” smiled Helen proudly, as she sat on the bed, arms stretched out behind her, legs crossed, a big toe tickling the carpet.

  I sit at my desk virtuously until most people have left. I ignore someone who says “see you on Monday” and when I do leave, at six-thirty, I don’t say goodbye to Debbie in case I remind her of our little conversation the other day.

  At home I gulp down a cup of tea and quickly throw some stuff into a sports bag. The clothes and the bag look scruffy but I remember what Mark said: perhaps she’ll be so embarrassed by the state of my stuff she’ll buy me something new.

  I head off to Marion’s, shouting, “Have a good weekend” to Vinny.

  “You off somewhere this weekend?” he says, opening a bottle of Rolling Rock. He is wearing his oldest, baggiest combats, a khaki T-shirt with a big red star in the middle and tatty Nike trainers.

  “Yep, Paris. Where are you off to?”

  “This new club in Clerkenwell, the Laundry Room. Hang on a minute, Paris? Fucking hell!”

  “Work, mate.”

  Vinny looks confused, then his face brightens. “Oh, that work. Christ, you’re doing well. What’s the number of that agency again?”

  I laugh and slam the front door behind me.

  Over dinner in the tiny garden of a restaurant in Chelsea, Marion mentions that our flight back on Monday isn’t until four in the afternoon.

  “Why so late?” I ask, slightly more urgently than I had intended.

  Marion looks up from her rocket and parmesan salad. “I wanted to make the most of our time there. Is that OK?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, sure.” I carry on eating.

  Oh, God! OK, so we have more time in Paris, which will be great but I could have just about done a half-day in the office, which might have appeased Debbie a bit. Debbie, the office and, in particular, what Tuesday morning holds in store for me, have been on my mind all evening.

  nine

  as she signs in at the Ritz, Marion fires a list of questions at the guy behind the desk. He handles it well, I think, answering “yes, of co’se” or “no problem, madame” to everything she asks him.

  Apparently satisfied, but obviously annoyed that she has found no excuse to reject the suite they have given us, Marion turns away from the desk—the signal that she is ready to go upstairs.

  Two porters struggle with her Louis Vuitton luggage while I pick up my tatty sports bag. Immediately a third guy, my age perhaps, takes it from me anxiously.

  “OK,” I say, giving it up. “Thank you.”

  The five of us walk down the hallway—all thick blue rugs and gilt doorframes. I glance in at a lounge on the left where people are sitting at small tables. I’m struck by how many of them look just as amazed to be here as me. Yes, guys, you’re really at the Ritz in Paris—except that you’re probably paying for it yourselves. A couple walking down the stairs stare at Marion so I walk on quickly to be next to her.

  “It’s not a bad hotel,” she confides.

  “Mmm,” I say mildly.

  “For Europe.”

  In the lift I am suddenly overcome with excitement. My stomach begins to tingle and my hands shake very slightly. I have made it! Even if she dumps me tomorrow I have stayed in a suite at the Ritz in Paris.

  I try to look as bored and as mildly annoyed as Marion does. I realize that the little guy holding my bag is looking at me out of the corner of his eye, through one of the mirrored walls of the lift. You may well stare, mate. Just look and wander. Who am I? What is the deal? How have I done it? Luck? Hard work?

  Our suite is every bit as vast and luxurious as I had hoped. I wander round slowly, poking at some things, looking in others, trying switches and just absorbing the fact that it’s all ours. It’s bigger than my entire flat at home. Meanwhile the porters scurry round, arranging the flowers, opening doors, double-checking that everyone is ready and unpacking Marion’s cases.

  “I’ll do it,” I say quickly to the guy who picks up my holdall. That would really give the game away. One look at my Gap T-shirts, St. Michael boxers and Next trousers bundled into the bag along with my ancient, toothpaste-smeared Manchester United sponge bag would blow my cover completely.

  Marion pours two glasses of Perrier and gives me one, ruffling my hair and squeezing my shoulder lightly.

  “I think this’ll do,” she says, taking a drink and looking round the room. I nod and put my hand over hers. The porters have finished and look at her expectantly. She picks up her bag from the coffee table and looks inside.

  “I don’t have many Euros yet,” she says. “I hope this is OK.” I try to see the note she gives one of them but I can’t. He seems very pleased with it, anyway. They bow and slip out of the room, the little guy who carried my bag giving me a final look.

  Marion goes into the bedroom. I take the opportunity to look round the living room then go next door, check out the huge white marble bathroom with its telephone, fruit bowl, flowers, white fluffy towels and bathrobes and little baskets of toiletries with the hotel’s gold crest on them. I’ve been in lots of hotel bedrooms one way and another. Minimal comfort, portion-controlled guest-as-a-necessary-evil hotels. But this one is different. It stretches out before me, reve
lling in its own luxury and confident that it can fulfil my every desire, challenging me not to be impressed, not to fall in love with it and the fantasy world it is offering. Drunk with delight at this new experience, I go into the bedroom and bounce onto the bed where Marion is lying with her eyes closed. Enough cool sophistication—that was for the staff. Now I am just an excited kid.

  I lean over, hold her gently and kiss her. She runs a long, red, nail-polished finger down my cheek and smiles wearily.

  “You should rest some.”

  “Oh, OK.” I say, still hyped.

  She laughs. “You’re funny.”

  “So are you,” I say, kissing her again. I lie down next to her for a minute but it’s no good—“resting some” is the last thing I can do. I prop myself up on one elbow and look down at her, again. She opens her eyes.

  “Now what?”

  “Thank you,” I find myself saying. And I do mean it. She might have slightly more available cash than absolutely anybody I’ve ever met but she has taken me to Paris and this kind of trip can’t be cheap and I do appreciate that. My airline ticket cost over £400 and this suite must be a couple of grand per night. Helen used to give me books or CDs at Christmas and birthdays. We’d always have a limit of £15 to make things fair. That seems like a million years ago.

  Marion’s eyes run over my face. “You’re welcome. I know you haven’t had the opportunity to travel much, I know that.” Haven’t I? Oh, OK. I’m about to point out that even people from Reading do go abroad sometimes, albeit not usually to five-star hotels, but I decide this sounds ungrateful so I say what I think she wants to hear.

  “No.”

  “Travel will develop your horizons. You’ll never see anything of the world from that office window.”

  “You’re right.” Well, she is, I suppose, but I’m just glad no one else can hear this ridiculous conversation. Look, she’s taken me to Paris, so agreeing with her is the least I can do. It’s just good manners.