We went for a little way in silence before he said, ‘Can we be friends?’
I wanted to say yes, and I wanted it to be true, but I didn’t see how that would work.
‘If I came back…’
‘Then I’d have to make up some story about how we met. I’d have to lie… I’m not good at that.’
‘Leave it to me. I’m good at making up stories. Stories and songs,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You know, it’s just as well we didn’t go into that hotel. It had a hungry look about it. I have a feeling that if we went in, we might never have come out again.’
I was happy to let him change the subject, and to listen to something that was not about us. The fanciful story he began to tell turned into a song. I wondered if he was making it up as he went along, like he did with his song for me, although it seemed so much more polished and clever, it must have been something he’d already written. But I think I was the first, and maybe the only person to hear it.
I wish I could remember the words now, or even the tune.
All I can recall is the title – ‘The Hungry Hotel’ – and that it was somehow both whimsical and sinister, scary and sweet at the same time. But how did it end?
It cheered me up, it wiped out the whole estranging experience of the afternoon and the unhappiness we both felt at what was a necessary, unavoidable final parting, and it also filled most of what remained of our journey, down into the city, and back to the parking lot of the bar where we had first met. There was nothing going on, and only a couple of cars parked out back at that hour on a Sunday evening.
‘You sure this is where you want me to leave you?’
‘I don’t want you to leave me.’
‘Stop it.’ I was only annoyed with myself for that unfortunate turn of phrase.
He sighed. ‘I know you don’t want to hear it, but I have to say it—’
We spoke at the same time, our voices overlapping:
‘No you don’t.’
‘I love you.’
Tears started in my eyes. I had to bite my lip not to say it back to him.
One last time we kissed, and then we parted.
A year later he was touring Europe with his new band and I was honeymooning with Marshall in Mexico.
A few years after that, when I was a wife and mother, juggling work and family life, too busy and too happy to have any regrets or even think about the past, I would have forgotten all about him if he hadn’t suddenly gotten famous.
Fame is relative, of course; he was already well-known in certain circles, as a performer and a songwriter, and he’d written a couple of hits that had made him rich. I’d sung along to one of them in the car never knowing, or even wondering, who had written it. It was only when he married a real celebrity – the mega-talented, sexy young singer who’d made hits of two of his songs – that his face as well as his name began to appear all over the place.
I saw him on TV very late one night, as I was trying to feed the baby, my dull eyes fixed on the screen where a music video flashed hypnotically. At first I thought I’d fallen asleep and only dreamed it was him I saw playing the keyboards, dancing (badly) with the singer, dressed like Charlie Chaplin, doing the funny, cane-twirling walk as the music swelled and the singer laughed, and finally in a clinch with the beautiful, sexy singer, the camera zooming in on their lips as they kissed.
And after that – he was with his wife on the red carpet at some event; snapped by the paparazzi; bounding onto the stage with a big grin to accept an award; speaking earnestly to a popular talk-show host; his picture in magazines like Heat and People; on the Internet, popping up, usually with her, whether I wanted to know or not.
I wanted to say that I had known him – that it was me he had picked before he met her. But if I could not tell Marshall (and I couldn’t; more than ever, now, I did not dare) I could not tell anyone. It had to stay my secret.
That was probably just as well. Even if I had confessed all to Marshall before we were married, and if he had admitted in turn to some small infidelity of his own, and we had agreed to forgive and forget, and truly had – even if I could now, in good conscience, talk to others about this famous person I’d bedded – well, how could I? What price reflected glory? I was no groupie, to brag about the notches on my bed-post.
Anyway, his stardom was fleeting. The marriage ended; he moved to Berlin to be with his new girlfriend, a designer of bizarre and expensive footwear, and although he continued to write songs and published a book of whimsical short stories, his fame now encompassed a smaller, or at least a different, sphere, and made no impact on the world I lived in.
The club where we had first met was demolished to make way for a towering bank building, and after we moved to Montana, I no longer drove past it, or the intersection where I’d watched him walk away. Before long, there was nothing to remind me of that particular weekend so long ago.
The kids grew up so fast. It had seemed like a lifetime before they started school, but after that, the years went by like months. And then Jesse went away to college. Sarah was still at home, but it would not be long before she moved out, and then Marshall and I would be left alone, to finally have that long-delayed conversation about our marriage. I knew things were going to change, one way or another.
One day I got a letter.
A letter! Who wrote letters anymore? Sometimes charities would try to fool you with an envelope that looked hand-addressed, but this one really was. My name and address were written in blue ink, in a looping casual hand that was naggingly familiar.
Inside, though, there was no note, no explanation, nothing but a grey plastic card with a magnetic strip on one side and an arrow on the other. A hotel room key, offering no clue as to what room in which hotel it belonged.
I looked again at my name on the front of the envelope, and suddenly remembered the letter left in my apartment door twenty-two years ago, and – and I thought of the hotel on the western edge of the city where he had wanted me to stay with him.
But how had he found me now? We had no friends in common; I didn’t think he even knew my married name.
But it should be easy enough to find him. I had not heard anything of him for years, but when I entered his name in a search engine, right below his Wikipedia entry (which read to me as if it had been hacked by a malicious joker) was his own website. It had not been updated in over a year. He did not blog or tweet. The most recent ‘news’ I could find was a three-year-old interview: he had moved to Brooklyn following his divorce and was writing a novel. I could find no clue to why he should have gone to the trouble to find me.
I returned my attention to the envelope, stretching it open and peering inside, as if somehow I could have missed an enclosure. But the only thing I had missed was the number pencilled in a bottom corner; a number, it now occurred to me, that might be a room number.
In what hotel? Surely not the one we’d stopped outside twenty-two years ago, the one that had inspired a song I might think of as his gift to me, if I could actually remember it. But that was in another state, and besides… he knew where I lived.
The postmark on the envelope was local.
He had sent me his room key.
I was sure of it. I still didn’t know why, but the idea that he still thought of me after so long was balm to my soul. And I knew where to find him.
There weren’t that many hotels near where I lived. In fact, until recently, I would have said there were none within thirty miles. The area had been still pretty wild and unspoiled when we bought the land to build our house, but since then, the surrounding acres had gradually filled up with houses, and with the expanded population had come restaurants and banks, a big store, a new school, a church, offices and boutiques, and most recently the ground had been broken for an upscale shopping mall. And near the mall-to-be – I had noticed the sign for it just the other day – a hotel.
He was waiting for me there.
How unlikely; but I so wanted it to be true!
&nbs
p; Like the impulsive, thoughtless kid I’d been two decades before, when I had imagined the whole universe conspired to bring us together, I responded to his desire. I left without so much as a note to tell my family where I had gone.
I parked near the entrance and went in boldly, hoping to look like a registered guest, clutching my key in case anyone asked, but the woman behind the desk didn’t even look up as I marched past to the elevators.
It was only when I stepped out on the top floor that I had second thoughts. I should have called him from the lobby. We’d have lunch. What did I care if the woman at reception, who looked almost young enough to be my daughter, saw us together?
I turned around, but it was too late, the elevator had gone. I pressed the button to recall it. I would start this story over. Maybe I’d meet him in the lobby as he came in from smoking a cigarette – hotel rooms were all no-smoking now. Maybe he’d given up smoking, like everyone else I knew, but even if he didn’t want a smoke, he wasn’t going to sit alone in a hotel room all day, waiting for someone who might never arrive. I’d ask the receptionist to call his room. If he was in, he would come down. If he was out, I’d leave a note. And if he wasn’t here at all, and I had been completely wrong about what the card had meant – I’d go home and forget about it. No one else would ever know.
My stomach growled. Where was that elevator? I strained to hear any sound of it, and stabbed the button several times with no result. I was hungry and impatient. Since I was here, I might as well try the room.
Immediately outside the elevator niche a sign on the wall showed the numbering system and indicated which way to turn. The number I was looking for was on the right, about halfway along the long, curving hallway. I stopped outside the door and listened. The silence was undisturbed. I held my breath and knocked: timidly at first, then more assertively.
Nothing happened.
Then I looked at the brass-colored door handle, set into a brass square with a slot at the top. He had sent me the key so I could let myself in – but suddenly I didn’t want to.
What kind of game was this? Sending an anonymous plastic key card did not constitute getting in touch. What made him think that after twenty-two years without a word, he only had to whistle? No, not even whistle; make me guess and seek for him. But what made me think this was his game?
The back of my neck prickled. Was somebody watching me, silently, through the fish-eye lens of the spy-hole?
I hurried away, back to the elevators, and slapped the button, my breath coming fast and anxious. I imagined Marshall waiting behind that closed door, waiting to humiliate me. But even if, somehow, he knew – that was not his style. I imagined a psychotic, murdering stranger, or him, horribly changed.
‘Come on, come on!’
But the elevator would not be summoned. How long had I been waiting? I shouldn’t even be here. I was wasting time. I charged away down the other curving arm of the corridor, the branch I had not taken. But I saw no sign for Emergency Exit or Stairs, although I went to the very end and then walked slowly back, checking each door as I passed.
There must be a staircase, if only for use in case of fire. It was surely illegal to erect a multi-story building without fire escapes. Most big hotels had more than one. Yet I found no doors that could be opened without a key, and I couldn’t remember seeing any kind of exit sign on the other side, either.
Returning to the elevator niche, looking down the other half of the long, curving corridor, I remembered his song about the hungry hotel, ‘built in the shape of a smile’.
I knew then that the elevator was never going to come, no matter how long I waited. I wasn’t really surprised to find I couldn’t get a signal on my phone. I can take pictures with it, and record this message, but how is that going to help?
Eventually I will have to use the key, because that’s the only thing left to try.
Maybe I’m dreaming, and when I use the key, I will wake up. Maybe it will open an ordinary room, with a window looking down onto the parking lot, and a telephone that works. But I don’t think this is that kind of dream.
I’ve been thinking about my childish belief that babies got made by people dreaming together, and I’ve been thinking about that song he made up for me, and now I seem to be inside it. (I wish I could remember how it ended!)
Maybe we dreamed this hotel together, and maybe the key will open the door to a room where he’s waiting for me, and it will be like the one night we spent together, only it will last forever.
Or maybe it will just be the end.
LISA TUTTLE
Lisa Tuttle lived in Austin in the 1970s, in London in the 1980s, and since 1990, has stayed in a remote, rural part of Scotland. Her short stories have won awards and been widely anthologised. Her first novel, Windhaven, was written in collaboration with George R.R. Martin, first published in 1981, and has since been translated into many languages and frequently re-printed. Her eighth novel, The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief, is a new departure, the first in a series of fantastical mysteries set in the 1890s, and is scheduled for publication in 2016.
LONDON
NICHOLAS ROYLE
Ian is one of those names, isn’t it? I know half a dozen Ians. One or two in their thirties, two or three around my age, and a couple well into their seventies. It’s one of those names that’s neither fashionable, nor unfashionable.
At that time I was working mainly as an editor for a small publisher and I was very aware that editors (and agents) took to social media at their own risk, since it had become one of the best ways for new writers to make their acquaintance. I was being stalked on Twitter by a guy called Ian. Haunted might even be le mot juste, and I don’t know why I say that, rather than ‘the right word’, because, as a self-identifying chippy northerner, I have nothing but scorn for people who pepper their newspaper columns and Facebook posts with French and Latin expressions suggesting the kind of relaxed confidence only an Oxbridge education can instil.
Ian, who I guessed would be in his twenties or thirties – his thirties as it turned out – followed me one bright, chilly autumn morning when I was sitting at my improvised desk checking Twitter every five minutes because I couldn’t settle to any of the various jobs I was meant to be getting on with. I examined his profile. I liked his photograph. A lilac-tinted head-and-shoulders with severe parting and blurred face, it reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what. In addition, the mini biog attracted me. Like most people who followed me on Twitter in those days, he was writing a novel, but his sounded interesting. He didn’t say much about it, but the title – and I was struck by the boldness both of the title itself and of his announcing it in a public medium while the novel was, apparently, still some way off being finished – was LONDON, with zeroes for Os. I didn’t immediately follow him back, but was for some reason prompted to get up from my desk and grab my jacket.
There was a small pile of post on the floor in the hall. I sorted through it. A circular from the council. A couple of fast-food menus. A brown envelope addressed to someone I’d never heard of. A former resident, I presumed. Jane seemed to get a lot of these and hardly any post for herself.
I was staying at my girlfriend’s place between Stoke Newington and Dalston. She always said she lived in Stoke Newington, a claim that was backed up by her postcode, but her front door was just five minutes’ brisk walk from Dalston Kingsland. I skirted the station and walked west on Balls Pond Road for a few minutes before turning left and then left again into a residential street that would ultimately lead me onto an unusual diagonal back towards Kingsland Road. Jane and I had often walked up and down this street to admire the houses. They had windows that went down almost to the ground, protected by retractable security grilles. We would fantasise about buying one of these houses, a fantasy that required us to believe we had a million and a half in the bank, a million and a half more than we actually had, and then console ourselves that at least we were spared the inconvenience and i
ndignity of living with a retractable security grille.
I walked on down to the canal and then along it for a short stretch and back up the main drag, calling into the supermarket opposite Dalston Kingsland. I found myself standing in the tinned soup aisle holding a basket containing a bunch of spring onions and a lemon. I looked at the Heinz soup cans and thought about Andy Warhol’s soup cans, their endless repetition, and realised that I liked these soup cans better than Warhol’s, because Warhol’s were all the same, whereas these were the same but different – different flavours and, therefore, different text, type and illustrations. I had always liked definitive postage stamps for the same reason – the identical image of the Queen’s head, but a different price, a different colour – and immediately I realised why I had liked Ian’s profile picture on Twitter: because it reminded me of the Belgian definitive stamps of the 1960s that I had collected as a child, with the repeated picture of the Belgian king in various pastel shades.
When I came out of the supermarket I got my phone out and went on to Twitter and followed Ian back, but then a moment later unfollowed him. It was too soon; I didn’t want to appear eager.
I became aware of him keeping an eye on my tweets and interjecting from time to time in some conversation I might be having with a writer or an agent or another editor. He judged those interruptions just right – respectful, but not overly so, confident without appearing arrogant – so that they didn’t feel like interruptions. It was exactly the kind of perfectly judged approach that gives the impression of being effortless and is probably far from it. I daresay he spent hours composing those witty rejoinders and cutting remarks, which were never at my expense, of course. (Oh, how well behaved he was in the beginning.) They were minor masterpieces of irony and concision. After one particularly funny, apparently offhand tweet, I followed him back, and his first direct message arrived later that day. I knew what it would say.
The publisher I worked for had posted a line on their website stating clearly that they were closed to submissions. At the time I was receiving at least two emails a day that would begin, Hi Nick… My friend, the writer Joe Cross, once told me what he thought of people who began emails with Hi Joe. It wasn’t people assuming they could call him Joe that bothered him, but the use of Hi instead of Dear. So, Hi Nick, these emails would begin. I know you’re closed to submissions… But would I make an exception to consider their 100,000-word historical saga? Would I please find time to have a quick look at their dystopian fable? Would I perhaps be able to cast an eye over their series of so-called flash fictions disguised as a novel?
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