Unconventional

by Maggie Harcourt

  “Hi!” I arrange my face into my best I’m-busy-but-delighted-to-help expression. I know it’s the right one. I’ve practised it in the mirror.

  “I’m Lucy, from Eagle’s Head?”

  Eagle’s Head. Books. Something about books. That’s literally all I’ve got right now.

  “How can I help?”

  “I was wondering…we have a new author, and would it be possible…?”

  “You need another pass?” I have a list somewhere. I know I do…

  “Lexi! Bags!” Nadiya hisses at me. I glance over at the bag pile. We’re down to maybe fifty. If we run out of bags, the queue grinds to a halt and everyone starts getting grumpy. Plus I get my dad breathing down my neck again. Bags. We need bags. I need to get bags. I have never needed bags as badly as I do at this moment.

  “Lucy. Umm. Lovely to meet you. Yes. Pass. I don’t have any extra passes here at the moment, but if you want to double back and head to guest registration on the other side of the main lobby, one of the team will get you sorted out. Just ask for Sam, and tell her I’ve sent you over. She’s basically dressed like giant asparagus. You can’t miss her.”

  “Great. Thank you.” Lucy the publicist picks up her bag and heads back down the line.

  Eagle’s Head. Why does that ring a bell?

  “BAGS, LEXI!”

  “Shit. Yes. Sorry.” I press a button on the walkie-talkie. “Mike? Can we get a couple of hundred swag bags up to registration, please? Yep. Now. Like, actually now? Thanks.”

  The call comes over the walkie-talkie during the late-lunchtime lull. At first, I try to ignore it. It’s only half past one, and I’m already officially shattered…but one does not simply ignore the call of the walkie. It’s my dad – and while I don’t catch all of what he says, it doesn’t matter. I definitely get the word “pineapple”.

  “Pineapple” is the code word.

  “Pineapple” is never good.

  Bede hands what feels like the thousandth bag over the desk and looks at me with horror. “Did he just say…?”

  “Yes. Yes, he did. Pineapple. Pineapples everywhere.” I jab the talk button. “Pineapple. Understood. On my way to the ops room now.” I stuff the walkie into the back pocket of my jeans. “Can you tell Sam if you see her?” I ask.

  Bede nods. “Where is she anyway? She’s meant to be taking over from me on reg.”

  “I haven’t seen her since this morning.” I crawl out under the desk. It’s the quickest way. Not the most elegant, but who needs dignity?

  “Can you call her or something? I’m starting to lose all the feeling in my legs. Plus I’m starving…” he shouts after me.

  I half-walk, half-jog down the main corridor, dodging between groups coming out of one of the programming halls. Marie – one of Dad’s senior staff – is standing by the double doors, directing the queue waiting to go in for the next panel. She opens her mouth to say something…but closes it again when I mouth the word “pineapple” at her.

  She shudders, and I hear her say, “Good luck.”

  The ops room door is ajar.

  I take a deep breath.

  My father, the hotel manager and Sam are gloomily huddled around a petite, pixie-like woman, and a slightly frazzled-looking guy who is only a couple of years older than me – which would probably make him her assistant. I recognize her immediately. She’s one of our guests of honour – which would explain why Sam’s here, and not switching with Bede. The guest is an actress; I remember seeing her check in to the hotel last night. I remember, because she had one of those incredibly tiny dogs with…

  Automatically, I check the room for a dog.

  I see no dog.

  There is no dog.

  There is no dog, and the guest of honour is crying.

  Oh no.

  Pineapples everywhere.

  The dog, it turns out, is called Bangle. Bangle has – not to put too fine a point on it – done a runner from his hotel room and is now at large somewhere in the hotel.

  Probably.

  The first thought that lands in my head as Dad explains the whole sorry saga is: the dog has its own hotel room?

  The second is: Bangle? Really?

  Not that I’m judging or anything.

  But…Bangle?

  Either way, Bangle is a very small dog in a very big hotel full of people who aren’t exactly looking out for a dog the size of the average pencil case. What if he gets out of the building? What if somebody treads on him?

  Sam takes the hotel room and the upstairs corridors. The assistant takes the stairwells and lifts. Dad takes the lobby and the convention floor, giving me a stern look that says he’ll be co-opting more of my staff to help with that…which leaves me with the service areas. Looks like instead of ducking into the Feminist Harry Potter panel, I’ll be spending the afternoon crawling around the housekeeping storage areas, shaking a packet of dog chews. Excellent. I’d so much rather be doing this.

  And anyway, who gives a dog its own room?

  “Dad…” I grab his arm as we step back out into the corridor. His face looks ashy-grey in the artificial light. We’ve never had to deal with this kind of problem before. Guests getting sick, guests oversleeping, guests missing their trains or (one time) completely forgetting that they were supposed to be here. We’ve had all those, and over the course of his whole glorious career, Dad’s had plenty more. But a Small Dog On The Loose? That’s a new one.

  “Just do your best, Lexi.”

  “It’s a dog. A tiny, tiny dog. There is a lot of hotel here – it could be anywhere!” I hiss at him. He smiles back through the open door at the tearful actress – who is now dabbing her eyes with the corner of a handkerchief and glancing around to check who’s watching. I’m tempted to tell her there are no cameras in the ops room, but I imagine that would go down like a lead balloon, so I don’t.

  “Exactly. It could be anywhere. So start looking.”

  “It’s probably at the bottom of her handbag and she just can’t see it.” This sounded funnier in my head. Out loud, it isn’t funny at all.

  “This isn’t a wallet, Lexi. It’s her pet.” He looks at me. I open my mouth to say something back, but he’s right. Tiny dog. Big hotel. Lots of people. Anything could happen to Bangle – most of it very not-good. Dad knows what I’m thinking though, and he shakes his head. “We can talk about the animal rule tomorrow morning. Right now, we look for the dog.”

  “Bangle,” I say, wondering why we even bother having rules. There’s the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, like he’s trying not to smirk. But he has his game-face on.

  “Bangle,” he says firmly. “Now go.”

  The service corridors of the hotel go on for ever. I thought the convention floor was big, but it’s nothing compared to the warren of passageways and storage areas down here. There’s a whole room just for storing sheets. It’s like I’m Alice and I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. You know, if the rabbit hole involved lots and lots of laundry. A slightly open door near the kitchens leads to a huge pantry full of sacks of flour…and two chefs dressed in checked black-and-white trousers and open white catering jackets, sitting on a pile of them, smoking. They’re almost as surprised to see me as I am to see them, judging by how fast they try to hide their cigarettes. I explain the dog problem before they recover enough to start shouting at me – I’m not technically supposed to be poking around down here. They look at each other. Then back at me.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve seen him, have you?” I ask. “He’s about this big…” I hold my hands up. He really is very small.

  They variously frown, shrug and shake their heads. Right. Helpful.

  I’m pondering the big steel doors into the hotel’s massive industrial kitchen – and thinking exactly how much I don’t want to go in there and tell them the convention that’s already making their lives quite hard enough, thank you, has managed to lose a dog – when my walkie-talkie chirps. Bangle has turned up, unharmed…in the wardrobe of his
own bloody room, which the frazzled (and possibly useless) assistant had managed to shut him in without noticing. Sam opened the door, he bounced out, crisis over. Everything is fine.

  Fine is a state of mind. I’m starving, knackered and standing in the middle of a gloomy hotel service corridor that doesn’t feel a billion miles away from something in a horror movie, flickering overhead fluorescent lights and all. I’m sweaty from running around looking for a missing pet that wasn’t actually missing, I’ve walked for what feels like miles and – what’s worse – I’ve absolutely no idea how everything’s going upstairs on the convention floor… And when I get back up there, I’m going to have to deal with a sulky team who’ve had to cover for me and Sam while we’ve been off on our magical mystery tour. Yes, they’re my friends…but friendship only goes so far.

  As I trail back along the corridor towards the lift, I try to shrug off my black mood. I’m annoyed with Dad – for sending me down here, for letting a guest bring a dog when I could have told him something like this would happen…and also for suddenly presenting me with incontrovertible, un-ignorable proof that Bea is a serious thing, not just someone he likes going for a drink with after going to serious, business event-type conventions. (Who would have thought that conventions about conventions were even a thing – let alone romantic?)

  Yep, that’s what I’m really annoyed about, isn’t it? The wedding thing.

  It’s not that I don’t like Bea, exactly, it’s just that I’m not sure I’m ready for her to become a permanent fixture. I mean, I like the picture on the wall in my hotel room, but that doesn’t mean I want it in my actual room. It would feel alien. Wrong. But it’s not exactly something I can talk to Dad about, is it? Conventions? Yes (provided I can pin him down long enough). My feelings? No. No way.

  Like when he first announced they were getting married – I didn’t even know how seriously to take him at the time. I guess I thought if he actually meant it, Bea would be there too, telling me with him. Plus, you know: date, schedule…all that.

  “I really love her, you know.”

  “I know.” (I didn’t. Not until then…)

  “And I want to do things differently this time. I don’t want to make the same mistakes with Bea that I made with your mother, making her feel like I was neglecting her. I want to be better, be a better husband.”

  Oh, like the conversation wasn’t already awkward enough.

  But…a tiny little patch of fear uncurled, fernlike, somewhere in the middle of my spine.

  “Does that mean you’re going to stop doing the conventions?”

  I wasn’t really asking about the conventions. Of course I wasn’t. I was asking about…life. Our life, his life, what happened next. I didn’t actually believe he’d ever stop: I’m not sure he can. But maybe if he loved her better than Mum…better than me…if he wanted to be better…he’d consider it, at least in his casually dropped into conversation kind of way. It would be a warning bell. Or what if he said he wanted to bring Bea onto the team? Did that mean she was replacing me, somehow?

  “No! Of course not. She may not care much for the fan conventions, but she’s in the business too. She knows how much this all means to me.”

  It wasn’t the most reassuring answer, but it was good enough.

  “Stop doing that,” he said, waving a fork at me.

  “Doing what?” I swallowed a mouthful of coconut rice.

  “That. With your face.”

  “My face?”

  “You’re making that face.”

  “There’s no face. This is just what I look like.”

  “You know what face I mean, Lexi – I’m looking right at you. I thought you liked Bea?”

  “I do!” (In small doses. And at a healthy distance…)

  “Then what is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  In the gloomy service corridor, I poke at the lift button again. It hasn’t lit up, but maybe that doesn’t mean anything. I bash it harder. Bea’s fine – I do like Bea, I suppose – but what if getting married again makes Dad different? He is different with her, but what if it makes him different with me too? He’ll still be Max Angelo – but will he still be my dad? But then what if he doesn’t change, and Bea can’t handle how crazy he can drive people when he’s planning an event, and things go wrong like they did with Mum? I don’t know how he’d cope with getting divorced again. I go cold just thinking about it.

  We were doing fine as we were, him and me… Okay, so most of the time I’m the one who counts as the responsible adult at home, but other than that? I’ve been dealing with Dad’s eccentricities my whole life; it’s part of being my father’s daughter. I don’t understand why things need to change.

  Me? If I got my life running the way I wanted it to, I’d just leave things alone – the same as anybody would, surely?

  My dad isn’t just anybody though, is he?

  He’s an Angelo. And I’m an Angelo and conventions are woven through both our lives. I love them – working at them, planning them, thinking about them – because they’re where I feel safest. They’re what make me feel like me. And right now I feel like that could all be about to unravel.

  I poke the button again. It falls off the wall.

  Umm.

  Stairs. I think I’ll take the stairs.

  Finding Sam on the other side of the stairwell door onto the convention floor – holding out a clipboard and very clearly waiting for me – makes me wish I’d considered that decision a little longer.

  “You look happy,” she says.

  “Appearances can be highly deceptive. What d’you want?”

  “Not me. Big Boss Daddy. Can you go check the green room, he says?”

  “Why? Isn’t it where we left it?”

  “Funny.”

  I sigh. “Seriously? I’ve been traipsing round the basement…”

  “Bede’s on his break and nobody knows where he’s gone – and even if we did, he’d be sulking anyway – and I’ve had to draft one of the art team in for cover on registration because Nadiya’s stuck with some crisis in one of the panel rooms…”

  “What crisis?”

  “Would you just chill?” Sam rolls her eyes. “Something to do with a microphone. She’s got it.”

  “Why can’t you do it?”

  “I don’t look after the green room. I only do the mics and soundcheck since…” She tails off pointedly.

  “Ah.” There was an incident last year involving an entire tray of full coffee cups, a table leg, and a very famous writer wearing a white shirt. “Fine.” I snatch the clipboard out of her hand.

  “Love you too!” she yells after me.

  I stick the middle finger of my right hand up at her behind my back as I walk off. Someone dressed as Judge Dredd makes a disapproving sound. “Sorry, Judge,” I mutter.

  Green room it is.

  Our green room – the holding pen for VIPs and guests – for this convention is a small, windowless room with a large orange damp patch on the ceiling. The glamour. Anyone with the right pass is free to drop in whenever they please for as long as they like – but we ask them to definitely, definitely be there at least half an hour before any appearances they might be making. That way, we know where they are when we need them – not like the old days, when I used to get sent to the hotel bar to fetch them out…

  I know. I’m a convention kid.

  Because the green room is technically for people to prepare ahead of panels and events and to decompress and relax afterwards, it’s off limits to anyone without an Access All Areas pass – and is therefore the one place where we have a security guy sitting outside the whole time, just in case someone decides they absolutely have to give their manuscript to that author, or to ask this actor to marry them. Our guard’s name is Rodney, and when he sees me coming he lowers the newspaper he’s reading.

  “Someone’s a ray of sunshine today,” he says, his Welsh accent turning it into a song.

  “You’ve heard about the dog?”
I push the door open – only to step through it and find Bangle himself sitting on the table in the middle of the room, being fed popcorn by Frazzled Assistant. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  On the other side of the closing door, Rodney lets out a cough that sounds suspiciously like a laugh.

  Bangle yaps at me – then growls. Of course he does. Frazzled Assistant offers him another handful of popcorn.

  This is not my life.

  A quick scan of the room reveals (besides my two new best friends) four publicists, three authors, one graphic novel artist and a handful of empty bottles from the “artist hospitality” fridge… Check, check, double-check.

  And a guy sitting on the sofa with his feet on the table.

  I don’t know who that guy is. And he isn’t with anybody. I skim through the list on my clipboard. The list of names with access to the green room goes on and on – but I know most of the faces that go with them. Well, it’s not like this is my first rodeo, is it?

  No face. Well, all right, he has a face. But I’m my father’s daughter, and as well as being brought up to be a retriever of wayward celebrities, I was taught to remember faces. And this isn’t one I know. He’s just sitting on his own in the corner playing with his phone. Something’s not right.

  “Hi.” I clutch my clipboard to my chest as I approach him. “Can I see your pass, please?”

  He looks up and blinks at me a couple of times – like that will somehow make me disappear. “My pass?”

  “I’m afraid the green room’s for our guests. The speakers, their publicists…that kind of thing?”

  “Oh. Right, sure.” He gives me a weird little half-smile. And that’s it.

  “So…your pass?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Nope.”

  Oooookay.

  “Right. So, if you don’t have a pass, and your name’s not on my list” – I brandish my clipboard for good measure – “then I’m afraid you can’t be in here.”

  He smirks, and slides his phone into his pocket, shifting slightly in his seat to look up at me. “Did you seriously just wave your clipboard and give me the ‘if your name’s not down, you’re not getting in’ line?”