High Dive

by Jonathan Lee

  There were only a dozen or so guests at the hotel who had no links to the Conservative Party. They’d made early bookings that needed to be honoured. Marina spoke to them all. Would it inconvenience them terribly if the bar was closed on Thursday night for a private event? Was there anything she could do to assure them that the increased security presence was no cause for concern? A whole room on the first floor was given over to specially ordered fax machines, two word processors, and something called a Laser Printer. Most of the male staff had visited the printer. They came back with tall tales about its innermost functions. A man who’d just moved into one of the new housing developments in Hove, where 200-year-old oaks had recently been cleared to make space for smooth driveways and neat unvarying gardens, came and gave the summer staff an “interactive workshop” on Improving Posture and Dressing to Impress. He was Austrian and his whole strategy seemed to be based around the idea that if you dragged people’s insecurities into the headmaster’s office and exposed them to ridicule, the insecurities would go away.

  “So you think these tights are flattering for you, yes?”

  “Um,” said Sally Woo.

  Freya’s father was desperately worried about all the CCTV they were installing. He said he hadn’t expected so much noise. Men in overalls drilled holes. There were cameras on each of the landings, cameras at the ends of the corridors, cameras directed at the stairs, cameras high on the walls of the restaurant. She stood with him as he watched a new camera bracket being affixed. The installation was slow and methodical. Moose said his big regret was requesting that they avoid putting power cables along the skirting boards. They’d gone up into the ceilings instead. He was worried they were weakening the overall structure. “If lightning strikes, this place’ll go to ground.” There was high colour in his neck as he fretted and questioned. She had a sense that if she left him alone he might fall over again and this time he might not get up.

  “Is this really necessary?” he said. “All this surveillance?”

  His words made the men in overalls yawn. They continued their work in silence, smiling at each other whenever a female guest walked by, or a hip-swaying member of staff like Sasha. Her father popped another of his pills.

  —

  Climbing the stairs. Moving past scraps of paper. Reminders of her progress were taped to the walls: “you’ve just Reached step 15 of 45!”; “you’ve just Reached step 27!”; “step 33! The museum of lost content is NEAR!!”

  The Captain’s handwriting was a mess of red crayon. The oversized exclamation marks gave the staircase the vibe of a blood-drizzled crime scene. None of the dusty-stern professionalism of museums she’d visited on school trips. Sternness wasn’t in the Captain’s manifesto. His aim was “to make history personal.” She liked the sound of this, but wasn’t sure how the toy panda that always sat slumped in a dusty funk on step 36 fitted into his plan.

  Two steps at a time, her lungs feeling huge. She had an idea that spending time with Surfer John was making her fitter and another idea, less spacious and admittable, that he was not an entirely healthy presence in her life. There’d been no contact from him today. He’d avoided her in the reception area.

  There was a sign on the wall saying “ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE.” Someone had scrawled “ONE MELANOMA” at the end.

  She reached a landing striped with light from a low window. She looked out at the sky. So small, so high, a kestrel. That or another of the hovering birds. She couldn’t say for sure. On the sill were hairs and parts of dead flies. She turned and caught sight of herself in a tall dirty mirror. She saw in her face no information, no misinformation, only a person trying to be profound. On impulse she wrote “Ha” in the dusty glass. She stood back looking at her mirror image, the “Ha” above her head. Then she wrote “cliche” and stood back again. She couldn’t remember if the accent was acute or grave. She missed French lessons, the basic escape of them. Her old red tennis shoes were decorated with Tipp-Ex, a move she now regretted. The lines had sunk and smudged, taking on the shape of a shaky mistake.

  Ribbons dripped down from the door frame, each of them loaded with stitched-on bells—bells from cat collars, and dog collars, and two bigger ones that seemed to be from bicycles. She passed through them and found the Captain pouring water from a jam jar into a tiny kettle. It looked very much like one of the kettles they had in the rooms at the Grand. The Captain informed her that he wasn’t due a tea break for another half an hour but that a man without a flexible schedule might as well be dead.

  He invited her to lower her bottom onto the flat head of a stuffed crocodile. He’d overlaid the croc with various blankets. Taxidermy was one of the Captain’s many interests but he’d admitted, on one of her previous visits, that dead crocodiles might be offputting to a certain kind of museum-goer, hence the blankets. He’d also expressed a distaste for people who killed deer and put the antlers on their walls. “Taxidermy’s one thing, but I can never trust a man who mounts animals.”

  “So, has it been quiet, the last few days?”

  “No no,” the Captain said. “Lots of trade, lots of trade. Visitors. Susie was in here the other day, actually.”

  “My Susie?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “I humbly disagree,” the Captain said.

  “No, it’s just…well, she never seemed that interested in this place.”

  “Oh, right,” the Captain said, eyes falling. She saw that she’d upset him.

  After scratching at the spidery veins on his cheeks the Captain shifted in his chair. As he did so the chair squeaked (the same squeak as always) and he jumped up in surprise (the same surprise as always), his eyes becoming rigid. He gave the chair a comprehensive assessment and sat down again with maximum slow-motion caution. He’d made a claim, back in June or July, that JFK had once owned this chair. It was a standard plastic chair with metal legs, a piece of furniture as unpresidential as any you could find, but there was something attractive in the idea that a clunky mediocre thing could have supported an extraordinary rear. You wanted to believe it. You thought, What’s the harm?

  She took in the product names and logos, the shine and tilt of crowded objects, the press of shapes and colours. A radio was on low and behind the churn of static there was solemn classical music playing. The area they were sitting in was the section of the museum that the Captain called Reception, the Curator’s Office, the Membership Enquiries Room, and/or the Gallery of Modern Items Which Haven’t Yet Been Lost. Behind him golden trees bloomed on silver wallpaper, and on corner shelves there were leaning piles of paper, large jars of gobstoppers, two small gnomes with chipped hats, and a wooden sign saying “Admire the Artist’s Craft or Get the Hell Out.” Actually the “C” of “Craft” had been scratched away; only a shadow of a curve remained.

  To her left, a half-dozen tables of different heights and designs bore their different loads. Each heap represented a category of items the Captain was “considering.” The principal question in any such assessment was apparently this: would X item one day be of interest to those studying “the way we live now”? There were silver moon boots, mittens on strings, and Cabbage Patch Kid dolls which, despite their unanimous chubbiness, were somehow suggestive of Susie. A mirror framed by a soft piping of Silly Putty. One Reebok Freestyle shoe with red laces. A see-through plastic box of cap guns. A see-through plastic box of spud guns. Two partially completed World Cup sticker albums (Argentina ’78, Spain ’82). An allegedly life-sized cardboard cut-out of the Jolly Green Giant. Finally he showed her a tub labelled “The Adventures of Slimer Hi-C Ecto Cooler” and a framed picture of Michael Jackson holding hands with E.T.

  “Cost me nothing but time,” he liked to say, surveying the clutter around him. But it was clear that all this had cost him a lot of time. Years, probably. Most of a lifetime spent collecting. He said what he loved was the euphoria of completion—getting a whole set of a particular stamp—but he also said that most of his projects
resisted wholeness. A given category was rarely finite and there was always, also, the pull towards finding more impressive examples of what you already had. She thought of this place as basically a home for strays—items orphaned or dismissed. There was a lustre of love to it all. You needed to leave your cynicism at the door. Things otherwise neglected or forgotten. Give them some space and say they matter.

  The Captain did kind of smell. But it was a comforting smell: that warm, dark, dusty-cupboard scent. He smelt of the attic where the Scrabble set lives, where the Christmas decorations are stored, where the spare tennis racket you’ll probably never need lies on top of the inexplicable Subbuteo set. He smelt a little bit like the school did when you went back during holidays with a friend, maybe to check it was still there, maybe to use its fields for a run, and found that it was only half a school now, because a school was not fully itself without the human scuttle, the morning whispers, the clatter of locker doors, the laughter and bony bodies and lipstick swaps, the screech of rubber soles skidding around corners, the soupy clouds of sprayed deodorant, bra labels examined to confirm or refute claims as to sizing, tired arms draped over deeply scratched desks. Repetition. Lists. To go into school during the holidays was to be upset by its emptiness.

  The Captain’s head tilted and his jaw slackened. He seemed to be tuning in to some distant frequency. He coughed. “How’s your father?”

  “Oh, OK.”

  “Yes?”

  She sighed. “Yeah.”

  “Good,” the Captain said.

  “He’s relieved to be home. And to be at the hotel for a few hours each day.”

  “He should be careful,” the Captain said. “A left-hander, is he?”

  “How did you know?”

  “They worry about everything,” the Captain said. “Small matters. A cautious people. Comes from writing in exercise books in youth. The effort to avoid smudges. The need to cock the wrist. It’s admirable, but…”

  He began telling her about a chapter in a book called The Public Image, but at some point during his second sentence there was a staircase-creak and the bright sound of bells. She looked up and saw a thin arm parting ribbons in the doorway.

  “Oh, hi.” The arm belonged to a hairless man. He was one of those people who are all skin and joints: the lean, frantic body of a long-distance runner. There was a small purple bruise on the right side of his forehead.

  “This is Freya,” the Captain said. “Freya, this is Mike.”

  “Hello,” Mike said. He seemed to struggle with the dusty light. Swatted at it, squinting, as if it might be persuaded to go and live elsewhere.

  “Do you want tea, Mikey? I’m manufacturing some.”

  “I was just going to borrow that LP,” Mike said.

  “Ah yes, a new addition.” The Captain foraged under the desk. “Here we are, here we go.”

  “Thanks,” Mike said. “See you later, then.” He disappeared step by step. Only the faint violin music on the radio remained.

  “You lend stuff out? Like an LP library thing?”

  “No no,” the Captain said. “He’s different. Lives downstairs, you see.”

  “On his own?”

  The Captain cleared his throat. “With me.”

  “Oh, like flatmates.”

  “Almost exactly like that.”

  She thought it was good that the Captain had a flatmate. She’d always imagined him alone. “So Mike’s into Culture Club. How old would you say he is?”

  “Even us oldies have preferences,” the Captain said, and she thought she heard a note of reproach.

  “Yeah, sure, I didn’t mean—”

  Preferences. The Captain seemed to be blushing. In the silence a vague idea became crisp and tight. Did the Captain have a lover? A lover who was a man? She’d been wrong on these matters before. She thought about Roy Walsh. She’d hoped for a while to see him at the pool. Like a stupid little girl she’d walked past the gym she’d recommended to him, peering in through the windows in case he was inside.

  “You’re very mysterious, Captain.”

  The Captain grinned a bigger grin than she’d ever seen from him before. He gestured at the room around him. “I have no biography, only this.” He blinked.

  The little kettle began to judder. They listened to it squeal. He made her a tea but left the bag in.

  “How is everything else?” he said.

  “Everything else is good.”

  The Captain put a finger in his ear. He wiggled it around. “Continue.”

  “Well, there’s not much to say.”

  He nodded. The violin music on the radio gave way to the sound of a piano.

  “I suppose one bit of news…”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a sort of boyfriend, I guess.”

  “Ah.”

  “Though not really.” She waited. She wondered what she might hear herself say next. There was that old familiar dread of being misunderstood. “Labels,” she said.

  The Captain retrieved a sheet of sticky labels and held them up with a certain satisfaction. He began humming a tune. He broke off to enquire as to the length of the relationship. The figure was too pathetic to disclose so instead she said, “We’re non-exclusive. I think so, anyway. And he’s a little bit older. But they say that women are more mature anyway, don’t they? So there’s that.”

  The Captain leaned forward in his chair. “Dog years,” he said.

  “But we don’t even really know each other. Not really properly, I guess. And he hasn’t actually made contact today. So it’s not a serious thing, for those reasons alone.”

  Which it wasn’t, was it? The knowledge went through her in a quick chilly trickle. If it ended soon she wouldn’t even have an excuse to be unhappy. She had a handle on maybe 1 per cent of John’s secrets, and he in turn knew no more than 20 per cent of hers. Probably they were simply killing time with one another. There was probably only a certain amount of time to kill.

  She thought of the TV her parents had bought in New York, off-white with rounded edges, and in the evenings the three of them—her, her dad, her mum—watching reruns of a show called Rhoda. The jokes about sex made Freya suicidal. Shut up, she’d think. Please God, shut up. Can’t you see my parents are here?

  The Captain fell into a very short power nap.

  “Have you ever thought of leaving Brighton, Captain?”

  “What?” He yawned. “Who’s leaving? Me?”

  “Brighton. You think you’ll stay?”

  “Pah! This place is a peach on a plate. Why would I leave?”

  “It’s the sea you like? The air?”

  “No! Whole place. The Lanes. The little shops. All the colour and the culture. The range of resources for a man’s rummaging. The life, if you’re asking. Best place in the world, Brighton. People don’t realise what they have, on the whole. All of us are frogs in warm water.”

  3

  Moose was in his bed in his bedroom in his house. Since his return from hospital he’d been in love with the balding carpet. He’d felt an expanding admiration for the dust on the bedside table. The room belonged to him. The cosiness of real curtains and blankets. Plates and bowls, mugs that didn’t match, the spider on the sill that refused to die. Choosing when to turn the lights off.

  For Moose these were the days of soups in creative flavours: Freya’s mushroom and sesame; Freya’s split pea and celery; Freya’s creamy artichoke hearts lightly fizzed with fried shallots. His daughter the cook. His daughter the marvel. The days of imagining Marina in a small white towel, on a distant beach, the sun, the sand, and reaching down, down under the blankets, and remembering that his hydraulics had been rendered useless by the beta blockers. It was time to get back to full-time work.

  During his first day at the hotel—an hour, no more—there had been champagne and cake, hugs from two dozen colleagues and friends, a kiss on the cheek from Marina. A rush of affection that moistened his eyes.

  On the second day he’d worked for th
ree whole hours. He spoke to a guest in a herringbone jacket. The guest told Moose that without cynicism and sarcasm the modern man was finished. The cross stitch in the weave. Brought to mind the bones of a fish. Moose, so often prepared to put diplomacy first, told the guest that he didn’t agree. Cynicism and sarcasm were all very well, but only if underwritten by a proper depth of feeling. Irony might be the modern mode, but shouldn’t someone sing the virtues of earnestness? This didn’t mean turning away from the darker aspects of a life. It did not mean conspiring to make your days something falsely warm and neat. But it did involve looking closely at the dark stuff, paying attention to its variety of shades, its aliveness, the ridiculous and the terrible, the fart jokes and the tragedies. For to be alive, to be capable of laughter and surprise—this itself was a beautiful thing. All this he said to the guest and in response the guest said, “Churchgoer?”

  Yesterday he’d done a five-hour shift. He’d seen a guest tipping George a ten at the door and intervened when the man reached the desk. “Let’s get you an upgrade, sir.” Head Office wouldn’t approve, but Head Office hadn’t just survived a heart attack. Also: it made good business sense. The softly spoken guy had the label of a luxury airline on his luggage. Probably came to Brighton a couple of times a year, a break before or after business meetings in London, or else he rarely came but had well-off friends who might. Upgrade him and send some wine to his suite. He’ll tell people. They’ll tell people. Men looking for a reliable home for their expense accounts: these were bread-and-butter customers. Certain limits on the kind of room his secretary can book for him without the company’s finance guy expressing some alarm, but a generous allowance for meals, for drinks. And the cost to the hotel? Nothing. The suite was vacant until Thursday anyway. The late checkout associated with a suite jams up housekeeping a little, but only if he actually checks out late, and a businessman rarely does. Creaky cogs in Moose’s brain were turning again. God, it was good to be back.