by Jonathan Lee
“Thought I overheard something.”
“Well, I used to be a swimmer. But now, not so much.”
She wished she hadn’t asked the question about him exercising. It was a little-girl question, for sure.
“You’re very young to have used to bes,” he said.
“Why? Don’t you have any?”
“I’m a few years older than you.”
“Only a few, though.”
He held her gaze. “I suppose that’s true. Old enough to know who the Rolling Stones are, though.”
“I know them,” she said. “I still go to the pool. But I don’t take it so seriously now.”
“Maybe you should write down the name for me. Where do you go? I swam when I was younger too. I don’t really know why I stopped.”
“Probably the chlorine was drying out your tan,” she said.
He was laughing. “This is a natural tan.”
“Naturally.”
“It’s a natural tan and I’m deeply hurt by suggestions it’s not, Freya. Where I’m from, people work hard for a bit of colour.”
“OK,” she said, stirring her lime and soda with a straw and smiling. She wasn’t wearing her name badge. It was pinned to her jacket, and her jacket was on the stool. She rolled up the bright white cuffs of her shirt and took another sip. He’d called her Freya. It was the simplest of all pleasures, the cleanest and neatest, when a near-stranger remembered your name.
“I used to go with someone to the pool,” he said. “And then, when she stopped going, I did too.”
“Your girlfriend?”
“My dad, when I was younger. But then a girlfriend, yeah.”
“And not anymore.”
“No.”
“What happened? Did she sleep with your best friend?”
“You’re funny,” Roy said. “But no, my best friend is…You know, Freya, I’m not sure I’d say I really have one.”
“No?”
He laughed and seemed about to say something important. Instead his face clouded with confusion, or regret. “With this girlfriend, it was all going great at first. This was at the start of the relationship, years ago. We were really young, that’s for sure. But I was convinced I could hear old Cupid calling me, y’know?”
“And then?”
He shrugged. “Turned out to be a wrong number.”
She gave a half-laugh, half-snort—exactly the kind of idiotic thing she was trying to eradicate from her range of responses.
“What happened after that?” she said.
“We used to talk on the CB radio. You won’t know about that. Events took over.”
“Events?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you from again? I can’t remember.”
“I don’t think we discussed it,” Roy said.
“Hey,” she said, reaching over the awkwardness. “Have you heard of Lucian Freud?”
“Freud? Yeah.”
“Do you like his stuff?”
“I guess I…” He shifted on his stool. “The name’s familiar,” he said. He laughed again. “Do I get a drink, then?”
“Shit! Sorry. I’m terrible at this.”
“Swearing at customers,” he said. “Sackable. Do you have a single malt?”
“We’ve got these, over here.”
“Whichever.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not a big enough buff to be fussy.”
She poured him a Glenmorangie, the one her father liked. She made a note to charge a cheaper spirit to his room.
“I thought you were more into vodka,” she said.
His eyes went wide.
“Sorry. One of the things I’ve got to do, when it’s quiet behind the desk, is copy down the room-service records.”
He looked at the window. He had his left hand over the left side of his face. He nodded as if agreeing with something unsaid. “Where’s your dad these days, then? Haven’t seen him around.”
“He’s—well, he’s been a bit unwell.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah. Ice?”
“Definitely not.”
He took two short sips and downed the rest.
“Long day?”
“Yeah.”
“Another?”
He smiled. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“What?”
“Drink a whisky in a top hotel like my life depends on it. I feel more heroic already.”
She tried to figure out if she was being teased. “Depends if you call this a top hotel.”
“Are you kidding? Look around you.”
“That sewage smell yesterday. Would you call that five star?”
“Listen,” he said. “First off, I didn’t smell anything. And second, the hotel can’t be held responsible for everything. An old place like this probably has a lot of two-and-a-half-inch pipes. And my guess is that a lot of these guests”—he nodded towards the card players—“have three-and-a-half-inch arseholes.”
She laughed too long at this.
“Simple physics,” he said.
They talked about the electrical business he owned. She asked if he wanted the same again. He said, “Unfortunately I can’t stay.” Despite never expecting him here, never expecting really to talk to him again, this felt very much like a fresh blow.
“How’s all the planning for the PM’s arrival going, anyway?”
“OK, yeah.” A reprieve. “She’s asked—there’s all sorts of requests.”
“Yeah?”
“Special foods. Special drinks. Cameras.”
“Cameras,” he said.
“They’ll be installing a load of them.”
“Of course. But already?”
“No, a week or so.”
He was silent for a moment. “I wonder if you’ll get to hang out with her, with Maggie. Probably her schedule’s pretty packed. You’ll need to locate a free window or two while she’s here. Catch up with her views on apartheid.”
“Apartheid?”
“Yeah.”
“It looks pretty complicated.”
“Once you know the score, it’s pretty simple.”
“No! The schedule.”
“Oh.” He smiled. “Fair play.”
“It’s changing all the time. There’s a lot of ifs and buts. Look.” She picked up her jacket. She took the document out of her pocket and put it on the bar. Roy Walsh looked at it for a long while. She was grateful to have steered things back onto a subject she knew something about, territory where she could hold her own.
“I see what you mean,” he said.
“You’re interested? I mean—you’re into politics?”
“Me? No more than the next man. We’re all into it, aren’t we? It’s just a case of whether we know that we’re into it or not.”
This seemed to her like an intelligent thing to say. It reinforced an idea she had of him as someone whose intelligence came from experience rather than books. Again she felt very young in his company, and when she thought of Surfer John and, worse, the boys she knew from school, it was like they belonged to a completely different gender to Roy Walsh.
In the bottom of her pint glass, all lime and soda sucked away, her face looked like a big pale moon of things never done. Skiing, waterskiing, sailing, sex in water, sex where the guy takes you from behind. The baking of seasonal biscuits, jalapeño peppers, Michael Jackson live, sushi, body piercings, bungee jumps, sky-dives, waterbeds, yoga, a Coke float made with more than two flavours of ice cream. Argentina, Botswana, Cambodia, a whole alphabet of adventure. But it was a face with potential, she thought.
“Shall I write down the name of the gym and the pool for you?”
“Please,” he said, standing.
When he’d gone she leaned against the bar alone, rolling the word please through her mind. She put the schedule back in her pocket. Possibly she was an over-thinker. It was something she’d been thinking she should address. A dark spot at the edge of her
field of vision was swelling and shrinking.
When Surfer John returned from Camber Sands he presented her with a stick of Brighton rock. He thanked her and hugged her. He looked at her strangely. It was as if he was seeing something new.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said.
He asked her when she was free for the fancy thank-you dinner.
It had begun to rain outside, water rushing down the windowpanes in long wobbling lines, a heavy downpour that left her quite content.
5
Two hours before Marina was due to arrive, Moose awoke open-mouthed. He began to try to climb out of bed. An orderly came and helped him stand.
Shaky legs. When he’d checked into this place, his legs had been strong. The hospital was bad for his health. There was no other conclusion. Blisters on the heels of his feet, nappy rash on his arse. No man should ever have to utter to his daughter the words “buy me buttock cream, please.” Making his way to the bathrooms, stooped and slow, he passed people whose eyes made him think of clouds and whose bodies made him think of bed sheets. Faces shining, suffering. An old lady on crutches. Child in a wheelchair. The damaged life in these corridors made God a senseless brute. What a team he’d become a part of! A group bound together by mistakes of the mind and body, errors and accidents and sharp turns for the worse. A four-cheese pizza would be wonderful. The sad tiled floor was unyielding.
The bathroom mirror told him he belonged. His eyes were bloodshot and a mask of pallor still clung to his skin. There was no mistaking it: he was in the kind of condition where it’s advisable either to thoroughly pull yourself together or to thoroughly let yourself go. The latter held all the allure. No more play-acting! Become a one hundred per cent mess! And meanwhile the rest of the world’s men could carry on pretending, grinning, lifting their chins—putting space between themselves.
Great palmfuls of water were required to dampen his hair’s enthusiasm for adventure. A few licks sprung up the moment he put down the comb. He shaved with an inch of luke-warm water lurking sunless and shallow in the basin. Listened to a man behind a pockmarked door straining to squeeze out a turd. Splashed his face, zipped up his washbag, went back to his hospital bed.
This morning Freya had visited again. She’d brought him a plant. He was grateful for the plant. A plant was a perfect gift. Earlier in the week an old diving friend had turned up with a whistle that made different types of birdsong when you blew it. One of the drawbacks of having a surname like Finch was that a surprising number of people, at Christmas or on birthdays, thought it appropriate or amusing to give you bird-related gifts. Singing bird clock (green). Singing bird clock (brown). You Can Toucan can-opener.
Sometimes he felt that close friends liked to turn him into a bit of a caricature, the hapless hotel guy who used to be good at everything he set his mind to and was now thrillingly—perhaps even transcendentally—mediocre. When he played along to the idea they had of the arc of his life, everything was fine. They loved him to act flat and be one of humanity’s genial, self-deprecating disappointments. But when he said something unexpected, something that was too harsh or too true or which he hadn’t thought through—maybe reminding them that they owned their own fair share of badly blown dreams—they treated him like he was a bit of a spoilsport. So these days he kept quiet. Kept quiet just as he had when Antonia and Brian from the hotel had visited this morning. He could see it in their eyes. They’d come with the specific purpose of ensuring that the heart attack hadn’t happened to them.
The plant from Freya was positioned on the faux-oak bedside table, sharing surface space with a water jug and a copy of the Guardian. The front-page headline read “PM’S POPULARITY SINKING,” but the poll referenced in the body of the article showed Thatcher holding on to a narrow lead over Labour. There was also a ten-page pull-out about the birth of Prince Henry of Wales. The baby prince looked tricksy, sardonic, chubby, blotchy, and would hopefully cheer up his sad-eyed mum. Freya had claimed the plant was scentless, but the cheerful lily-pad-like foliage had a distinctive peppery perfume. Every hour or two he’d sneeze, and sneezes hurt his heart, his back, his arms and his eyeballs. The pain often dwindled down into a small knot above his Adam’s apple, where with the aid of water it could sometimes be swallowed down.
Where was Marina? She was late, late.
On his third day ever at the Grand, after their shifts had ended at exactly the same time, he’d asked Marina if she fancied a drink.
“Maybe some other time,” she’d said. And then, when he pressed her a little: “You know, I’m not going to sleep with you.”
He thought he must have misheard. “Sorry?”
“I’m not going to sleep with you,” she repeated.
“Sure,” he said. “Right.”
It had been a very exciting development. Here was a woman, a beautiful woman, a new woman who didn’t know the ins and outs of his every mistake, and she was thinking about not sleeping with him.
Unfortunately Marina had, since then, been true to her word. The Grand’s Guest Relations Manager wouldn’t give him love. He knew he’d never be able to lie on tangled bed sheets with her, his ear against her belly, listening to the secret squelches of her stomach. He’d come to terms with all this long ago. There was the time he’d asked her to the cinema “as a friend”—universal code for Please Sleep With Me. There was the time he’d asked her, when they’d been spending an increasing amount of their spare time together, to join him on a weekend away in a luxury hotel in the Lake District to “check out how our competitors do it”—i.e. I Adore You. On both occasions she had politely declined and had leaned forward to give him, as if by way of consolation prize, a squeeze on his upper arm. Oh, those arm squeezes. They left him longing for her more deeply than before. Less sharply, perhaps, but more deeply—an old injury that creaks on cold days.
An orderly had smuggled him a packet of cashew nuts. He’d hoped to obtain them for no more than 50p, but in the end had handed over an outrageous £1.20. The market here drove hard bargains: a captive audience, more buyers than sellers.
The strip lighting was unagreeable. The spongy walls exhaled an inertia. A nurse came and apologised again on behalf of Mr. Marshall that they’d had to give his private room to a “patient in need.” What this ward needed was a skylight. Or: a sculpture here and there. Or: a jaunty purple chair. Redecorate! He did not dare to think of the hotel except in flashes, its soft-lit elegance and luxury. He longed for spring, could not face another winter of freezing winds, cold fronts skidding in from the sea, wet gloves dropped on pavements, the counterfeit solidity of snowmen, iced dog shit in the gutters, snow scraped from the King’s Road kerbs…
Come on, old man, stay positive.
—
“Am I disturbing?”
He opened two eyes and closed a mouth. Marina.
“I.”
“Yes?”
“It’s good to see you, Mari.”
“Good,” Marina replied. “Are you enjoying your stay?”
He hauled himself into a sitting position. “The service isn’t bad, now you mention it.”
“No?”
He rubbed his face. “Francesca came in yesterday and said it gave her an idea. She’s going to get all the Grand’s carpets ripped up. Replace the vacuums with a couple of mops.”
Marina smiled.
“Is everything OK?” he said.
“With staff?”
“With the building. With the preparations for the PM.”
“Of course. And I’ve brought a friend to see you.”
“A friend?”
“Yes.”
“I must be losing it,” he said. “I can’t see any friend.”
Marina leaned forward in her chair and spoke into a space south of the mattress. Briefly Moose sensed movement. “Are we ready?” she said. “Yes? One, two, three, surprise!”
The surprise came in stereo and very nearly killed him. Held aloft above Marina’s head wa
s a tiny boy with a wicked grin, no more than two or three years old. He had long eyelashes and an extraordinary mop of thick dark hair, shiny as a freshly tarred road.
“This is Engelbert,” Marina said. “Remember me talking? My nephew. I’m taking care of him again today.”
Engelbert took a lolly from his pocket, spun the wrapper off and started sucking. He looked quite happy suspended up there, his tiny jeans hanging low, his red T-shirt looking snug.
“He’s a good workout actually!” Marina’s face reddened. “The little man is quite heavy!”
Moose watched as Engelbert was lowered onto Marina’s knee. It struck him as another of the universe’s myriad unfairnesses that this kid had so much life ahead of him and would spend at least some of it in Marina’s lap. “Well,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Engelbert.”
Engelbert responded with a blink.
“Is that…?” Marina said. “The pool…under the curtain?”
“Yep. The guy’s not well. I didn’t want to make a fuss. I’m sure they’ll deal with it soon.”
He was remembering—what was he remembering? Freya as a four- or five-year-old, perfectly viciously cute, capable of breaking the heart of a passer-by with a smile or poked-out tongue. Daddy, why doesn’t sick look the same as what you’ve eaten? He’d made a note of that somewhere. An early inkling of genius.
Marina had spotted the file on the floor by the bed. “You are working?”
“No, just catching up on correspondence.”
“Don’t make it a habit,” she said.
“Give me a quick debrief,” he begged.
“You are addicted.”
“Debrief, please.”
“There are no new guest problems. Nothing to worry about.”
“What about the punching incident?”
“Nothing to worry.”
“Is there going to be litigation? Do we need to tell the GM?”
Marina wrinkled her nose. Engelbert sucked on his lolly. A nurse stared at the vomit and looked at her watch. “Do you want to?” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Tell the GM.”
“Well, I suppose it’s dealt with now, is it? And the guy probably had it coming.”
Marina nodded. “These men.”
“Yeah.” He tried to arrange his face into the expression of a man who was not one of these men but who was, nonetheless, a man. “By the way, for the napkins, I’m definitely leaning towards conference blue now. A supplier in Scotland.”