Hotel Alpha

by Mark Watson

  The more the hotel came to mean to me, the less we discussed it. Howard and Sarah-Jane and the Alpha made up half of my life; my family the other half. But the two sides remained separate. When I set foot in the Alpha each morning, I forgot what was outside the doors.

  It was not until the late seventies that the Yorks had their own child: a boy they called Jonathan David, who immediately came to be known as JD. There was plenty of room for him in the Yorks’ household, which was the back half of the Alpha: five floors of rooms invisible to guests, accessible via a concealed door and a passage which now rang with the sound of the baby’s wailing. Sarah-Jane wore pullovers and jeans instead of the frantically patterned dresses she used to favour. Howard – who was almost forty when JD arrived – responded to the change by travelling more; or perhaps it was simply that, by now, he was in great demand. He had written a book about the hotel’s success; he lectured all around the world on business. He was sought after for conferences, invited to the opening nights of musicals. We continued to be one of London’s most popular spots. We entertained Henry Kissinger and the Rolling Stones. A football team, which had won the FA Cup that afternoon, brought the trophy into the atrium and handed it round filled with champagne. This sort of thing happened every other week in the Alpha.

  If he enjoyed being a celebrity, Howard was also increasingly conscious of the responsibilities it brought. The hotel had always lent a hand to deserving or merely cash-strapped folk, as we had to that man Saunders who was let off his bill; we had tabs that were never called in, we gave away free meals. Sometimes this was, of course, strategic. Mike Swan, the editor of the feted Swan Hotel Guide, never paid a penny for anything when he made his visits, and we always received the highest possible recommendation in his books. But more often the handouts were purely philanthropic. If someone appeared at the front desk in need of shelter, I was instructed to let Howard know at once: almost always, they found their way onto the guest ledger. This had happened a few months before the fire, in 1984.

  The guests were a mother and her three-year-old son, Charles – though she called him Chas. ‘Guests’ had always struck me as a strange word for the people staying in a hotel: it implied that they were invited, when in fact they had invited themselves. In the case of Chas and his mother, even that was putting it too strongly. Life had blown them here: how, exactly, I did not want to ask. Obviously the husband had left, money had run out. The child had matted brown hair and large, light brown eyes; as his mother spoke to me, he flitted about the atrium, stopping to look at a flag which had been set up for the visit of an Arab dignitary. He reached out a hand and touched the flag as if it were precious, glancing over at me to see whether I minded. I winked back.

  ‘We’ve got nowhere to go,’ said the woman, who was wearing a faded black dress with a hole in one shoulder and a pair of cut-off jeans.

  We put them in Room 77, on the top floor. I got used to seeing the lady, whose name was Roz Tanner, and took rather a shine to Chas. My own children were teenagers by now; I brought in rubber balls and jigsaw puzzles they had long outgrown, and watched as Chas, a studious little chap, cantered across the floor after a ball, or sat studying a puzzle. This went on for a while. Roz helped out in the Alpha Bar when Chas was asleep, or waited on tables in the restaurant. Howard and Sarah-Jane got to know her; she became part of the place, in the way people had before. In the way we all had. We talked about finding her a permanent position.

  That was the first thing on my mind when, in panic on the back stairs, Howard screamed the number 77 at me. As if a reel of film were unspooling, I saw the past twenty years unravel before me, from that magical afternoon when Howard escorted me past the queue of candidates through the doors, right up to the moment just now when I had parked the Mercedes on the forecourt.

  The moments were melting as fast as they always did in this place. Roz Tanner and her little boy were trapped in their room; the room was in flames; the whole of the Alpha, and everything it meant to us, might be about to go up with it. Howard clutched at my wrist; tears were bulging in his eyes. There was a momentary chill in seeing this man, my hero, so pathetically stripped of his powers. To look at him in that moment, anyone would have said that fortune had finally caught up with him. But that would have been to underestimate what the man was capable of, what could happen if he wanted it to.

  2

  CHAS

  As it was quicker than typing, I ‘wrote’ this by dictating into a computer, which transcribed the words onto the screen with something close to one hundred per cent accuracy. Close, but never exactly. Various people have checked over it, but there’s no knowing that they didn’t add something here or there, or change something not quite to their liking. This is the problem for a blind man when relying on interpreters. Machines aren’t quite accurate enough because they don’t have feelings. Humans aren’t quite accurate enough because they do.

  I grew up in strange circumstances, to say the least. I was blind, my parents were not my real parents, and I lived in a hotel. Until the age of almost five, I had no way of knowing any of this was strange. There was nothing to compare it with. I didn’t wonder about others’ lives any more than any five-year-old does. There was just mine. It consisted of listening to Sarah-Jane walloping pots and pans about as she cooked dinner, pressing the occasional button to join in with JD’s computer games, sitting at the front desk with Graham, who said ‘ha, ha!’ when he laughed as if the words were written out in a caption. It meant being tucked in at night by Howard, his scent of cigarettes and leather jacket and a subtler smell of nights out in a world I didn’t understand yet. After he left the room there was always a momentary sad pang and then the rustle of JD on the top bunk above. There was the xylophone of the slats that held his bed above mine, the sigh of his mattress as he shifted his weight about, and then the miraculous coming of morning: the smell of toast, Sarah-Jane’s threats to ‘knock someone’s block off’ if they left their shoes where I could trip over them.

  Shortly before my fifth birthday we visited the zoo, and the afternoon ended badly: a wasp got into my ice cream and stung the inside of my mouth. My memories are pixelated by pain. I cried out through a throat that felt as if it was filling with blood. We went to Accident and Emergency – the Royal Free in Hampstead, I’ve found out since – and a practice nurse took Howard’s name and mine and then asked:

  ‘And are you the father?’

  ‘Er,’ said Howard. ‘Not the … not the biological father, no. Adoptive father.’

  At that specific moment it made little impact on me. I recall the cold of the nurse’s hands and her speech about how brave I had been. Back at the Alpha there was a song and dance, as Graham put it, because an angry wife had hurled her wedding ring high into the balconies and nobody could find it. It was only that night that I snapped out of sleep with a sense of dread.

  The inside of my cheek was throbbing. I wanted to go back to sleep, but there was no way of knowing how to get there. The realization that I was always going to be in darkness descended on me with a sudden and terrible force. I began to cry. As ever, there was no way of charting the night to know how much of it was left, but after a while there was the rattling of the bed slats and a good-natured muttering, and I heard JD’s feet on the steps that connected the bunks. He slid into bed beside me, pushing me against the wall.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘How come I’m blind and you’re not?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Why are you suddenly asking about that?’

  ‘I just want to know.’

  ‘There was a fire,’ said JD after further hesitation, ‘and your eyes got burned.’

  ‘Where? Here?’

  ‘Not in this bit, but in the hotel, yeah. You were staying here with your mother. She died. Howard saved you from the fire and now you live in our family.’

  Another pause followed this barrage of big facts. JD cleared his throat.

  ‘Are you going to be all rig
ht now? I mean, have you stopped crying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Cool. So is it OK if I go back to sleep?’

  I stared into the invisible. I had known forever, of course, that I could not open my eyes, that there was nothing in front of me, but perhaps never quite understood that it was not the same for other people. Snot massed treacle-like in my nostrils and I wailed. JD stirred and complained, but didn’t wake this time. Eventually the door creaked and Howard was on the edge of the bed, the outdoor smell of him invading the room.

  ‘What’s up, mate?’

  ‘I’m blind,’ I said, ‘and you aren’t even my dad.’

  ‘How do you … where did you hear that?’

  ‘I heard you talking about it in the hospital. And … ’

  Howard scrambled in next to me and laid a big arm across my chest.

  ‘We’ll have a chat tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a family talk about this. For now, you need to get some sleep.’

  ‘Can you help me get to sleep?’

  ‘Well, mate, one way to do it is to count sheep.’

  ‘There aren’t any, are there? And I don’t know what they look like …’

  ‘You don’t need real sheep. Just imagine these funny things coming one at a time. Baa!’ He produced a noise which made me giggle. I lay there counting. Before long Howard himself had fallen asleep, his snores falling into a two-part melody with JD’s above and his heavy arm still round me like a seat belt. I continued to inch my way mentally up the pile of numbers. There was something appealing about the task, about the way it could never end. No matter how many numbers I clambered past, there were still more to get to.

  The following day began like any other. I gathered my clothes, in their unknown colours, from the Clothes Place, and collected my preloaded toothbrush from its designated spot. At breakfast Howard whistled and tapped spoon on teacup like a drummer with the hi-hat. The radio wittered in the background – people with a voice like Graham’s talking about Margaret Thatcher and the Soviets. In the kitchen, Sarah-Jane baked cakes and sang a song about the way to treat a lady. I almost began to wonder if I’d dreamed everything. But in the afternoon, when Howard came back from his meetings, the family talk took place.

  It was all as JD had said. Fire had destroyed the top floor of the hotel three years ago while my mother and I were staying here. Howard hauled me out of the smoke. He took me to a hospital, and later surgeons patched up my face over a series of operations, but my sight couldn’t be restored: the retinas had been too badly burned. While I was recovering, Howard used his many contacts in the media to appeal for my father to come forward. It didn’t happen, and so the Yorks had taken me on. I had been raised by them on these five floors, the shadow side of the hotel.

  ‘I always really, really wanted another little boy,’ said Sarah-Jane, taking my hand in hers. The familiar chunk of her wedding band pressed against my middle finger. ‘Someone to keep JD company.’

  There was the thrum of the washing machine from another room, and – at the other end of the passage – the faint sound of people clattering suitcases along the marble floor, calling to each other in voices which floated up to the skylight. It was rare that we could hear anything of the hotel from here. This was not normally a quiet household: normally sentences jousted for space like drivers cutting in from different lanes. The lack of noise unnerved me. I looked forward to the talk being over.

  ‘We love you very, very much,’ Sarah-Jane went on, with her flat Yorkshire vowels. ‘We want you to think of us as your mum and dad.’

  I nodded, but of course I already had been thinking of them that way; her insistence on the idea made me faintly uneasy. I resolved, more or less on the spot, that I would never ask about my real dad if it was going to cause trouble. Unconsciously I was also deciding that I wouldn’t go into the real world outside the Alpha any more, since if it was full of wasps which could sting you, it might be full of all kinds of other invisible menaces. I’d be perfectly happy with what was around me. What was more real than that?

  "There are things in life we don’t understand, Chas, old mate,’ said Howard with a weighty hand on my shoulder. ‘All we can do is make the best we can out of it. And Sarah-Jane— Your mum and I are going to help you have a great life. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ I agreed, my face upturned so – I hoped – I was looking right at him.

  In bed that night, I thought about the way things had changed. I’d learned more about myself since last bedtime than in the rest of my life put together, but in a lot of ways things seemed reassuringly unaltered. Howard was still the person I turned to. This was still home.

  In my sixth year, there were some attempts to give me an education. I went briefly to a ‘blind school’, where we had to sing a song about a dog called Bingo, the lyrics of which seemed to change each time I got the hang of them, and where a boy engaged me every playtime in a game which involved him pretending to shoot me dead. I asked if I could leave the school, and was given a tutor called Mrs Hopkins who taught JD how to guide me round the hotel, just behind my heel and to one side, his elbow looped in mine. She encouraged me to learn Braille, which I submitted to for a bit, running my hands over the bumps with a scepticism which the tutor struggled to defuse.

  ‘Reading a book this way would take ages.’

  ‘Well, it needs patience, but … ’

  ‘It would take a hundred years.’

  ‘But it’s not just books. Imagine you needed to read a … a sign or a notice.’

  ‘Like what?’ demanded JD.

  ‘Well,’ said the tutor – I caught the swishing sound of her skirt as she crossed her legs, ‘say you were at the British Museum. I think – I’m pretty sure they have Braille there. So you could find out all about the … They’ve got ever such a big dinosaur.’

  ‘But why would he go to a museum in the first place,’ asked JD, ‘if he can’t see anything?’

  That was the end of Mrs Hopkins. Others followed, but a lot of my early education came from the family. Sarah-Jane, at night, read salutary Enid Blyton fables about the dangers of stealing gingerbread. JD reported passages from his books about the Hardy Boys, a pair of young detective brothers who thwarted experienced criminals and ‘gave a low whistle’ when a clue came to hand. At every opportunity Howard brought me to the front desk, where I could sit with Graham and listen to the hotel’s heartbeat ticking on.

  Before I knew what any of it meant, I came to understand the rhythms by which the Alpha renewed itself each day. There were the hefty shouts of the housekeeping ladies who wheeled their trolleys around; there was the flurry of footsteps from the morning check-ins, the gathering murmur of lunchtime, and in the afternoon the clink of ice in glasses. There was the delivery of newspapers each morning by a wheezing man who always said ‘I’ll have a little sit-down after this’, and there were the scuttling bellboys who conveyed the papers to guest rooms, where they would be taken in and read over breakfast or left to languish. Mid-afternoon would bring a lull during which Graham and his assistant, a West Indian lady called Agatha, pored over their respective reading matter: autobiographies of rugby players, and the Bible. I would listen to their conversations, conflating each voice with the speaker’s smell: Graham’s the whiff of Brylcreem, which made me imagine him shiny and sharp, and Agatha the softer puff of talcum powder.

  ‘What’s it mean, Graham, “fornication and indecency”?’

  ‘It means … well, misconduct of a physical nature.’

  ‘You mean filthy lust and desires and so on?’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘Why you looking so worried, Graham? You think I ask you to demonstrate?’

  ‘I should be – in the words of that wretched song – so lucky.'

  There was no music in the Alpha. For long periods there were only these conversations to break up the silence, low exchanges streaked with Agatha’s booming laughs, like rocks lobbed into a river. Sometimes the phone would trill with a new bo
oking, or Graham would call one of the shops which supplied our bar and restaurant. ‘And the postcode is N1 1HA. ‘Yes: H for hotel, A for Alpha. We had it made specially. Ha, ha!’ He always thunked the receiver back into its cradle with an emphatic noise which made me imagine telephones were around half the size of people.

  At about the time JD came home from school, guests began to check in again. Graham went through the formalities, rustling his papers; Agatha sorted out their luggage. The two of them had a game, running since Agatha arrived, which involved guessing whether a man, woman or couple would check in next. She had an almost mystical ability to do this, and was leading by several hundred points. ‘I hope to get level by, say, the year two thousand or so,’ Graham predicted once.

  ‘We still gon’ be here, are we?’ Agatha cackled. ‘Old people sitting on our behind, with the guests needing to give us assistance and not t’other way round?’

  ‘Well, where else would we go?’

  When I was seven or eight, Howard suggested that Graham and Agatha try reading me extracts from the papers. Before long this was one of our favourite afternoon pursuits.

  ‘Tensions in Peking continue to run high,’ Graham reported one day. That means – er – well, people in China are not very happy about some of the things that are happening there.’

  ‘Which one is it? China or Peking?’

  ‘Ah, well. Peking is actually in China. It is what we call the “capital” of China. Every country has a capital. London – where we are – is the capital of England.’

  ‘Barbados, Bridgetown,’ Agatha added.

  When Howard came steaming like a train into the atrium that night – there was the grand leather smell, there were the stalled conversations as people pointed him out – I was eager to pass on my findings. ‘More trouble in China,’ I announced, ‘in Peking, which is the capital.’