Hotel Alpha

by Mark Watson

  Kathleen was delighted. ‘I will have your children for this.’

  ‘I won’t take you up on that immediately.’

  Was I too keen or too remote? If I could see her face, would I know how to proceed? It was a ridiculous question to ask, but it clawed at me all the same. I tried once to explain it to Graham. ‘I don’t know, if I could see her face, whether I would know what to do. Or whether I’m so far away from understanding the idea of human expressions that it would be like … like looking at a page of hieroglyphics. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I think so, Chas.’

  ‘It’s crazy; I’ve seen faces, but I’ve got no memory of them. In a lot of ways I hardly even know what a face is.’

  ‘It’s a bit like a foot,’ said Graham, ‘but higher up.’

  On Bank Holiday Monday I met Kathleen in the noise and throb of the atrium. She took me decisively by the arm. JD had brought someone called Holly from his extensive girlfriend roster. Lara included herself in the introductions. I heard the four-way dialogue of assessing and sizing up, all the silent exchanges, the instant judgements acknowledged by nothing more than a wavering note in the voice.

  ‘Nice to meet you!’

  ‘You, too!’

  There was the scrape of a chair, then another a moment later.

  ‘Right here,’ said Kathleen, a piloting hand on my arm. JD began to say something. ‘Oh … ’ Kathleen began to apologize.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ JD muttered.

  I gathered they’d both moved a chair for me at the same moment, and I had chosen hers. Holly giggled nervously. Silk slunk beneath my hand as I set it down.

  ‘I’ve got a dress on,’ Kathleen explained. ‘It’s sort of fawn. Matches my eyes roughly.’

  ‘Well, that’s useful for Chas, isn’t it.’ JD’s voice was pepped up, full of challenge. Lara made an amused, faintly admonishing noise. Holly and Kathleen cradled the conversation until it breathed more easily, but it was only a temporary reprieve. During the main course, Afghanistan came up: JD had a couple of Sandhurst friends who, he said, were excited to be ‘seeing some combat’. I heard a whisper of fabric and a little sigh of the chair as Kathleen readjusted herself. Lara was on to it like a sniffer dog.

  ‘You don’t look like you agree over there, Kath,’ she remarked with a trace of malice.

  ‘I don’t, personally, agree with the war.’ Kathleen swallowed; the printed page was where she preferred to argue.

  ‘You don’t think we have a responsibility to fight against people who’ve killed thousands of innocents?’ Lara asked, as neutrally as if she were getting Kathleen to pass the salt.

  With fortunate timing a gong struck: Howard was shushing everyone to attention for one of his auctions. He was going to perform a trick, he said, and the winning bidder would be told how the trick worked. ‘Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,’ he hectored the guests. ‘You will never again meet a magician who will tell you how to do this. They threatened to kick me out of the Magic Circle for this. But I pointed out I wasn’t in the Magic Circle.’

  Kathleen laughed beside me, and I felt as if I’d won the laugh myself. Howard continued with his nonsense, bringing out a papier-mâché elephant which Graham complained was ‘very nearly the size of the real thing’, and making it disappear from a wardrobe in a manner which by all accounts was pretty miraculous if you could see it. I allowed my indignation at JD and Lara to break up in a tide of white wine, from a glass which had been topped up each time it was out of my hand. The afternoon began to sag and ooze, and now Howard was giving a speech, telling the well-worn story of the day he first stood right here and dreamed of a hotel, and they were naked in front of the police, and he said ‘we’ve got music on’.

  ‘I think I’ve heard that before,’ said Holly.

  ‘Howard’s famous for this. For passing stories off as his own,’ Kathleen told her.

  ‘How do you know?’ JD came in as quickly as an actor at a rehearsed cue; he seemed to have been waiting for another chance to fight. ‘You’ve never been to one of these before.’

  ‘I’ve … I’ve just heard about it,’ said Kathleen.

  ‘You seem quite an expert on things you’ve heard about,’ Lara observed. I felt the glow from Kathleen’s face as if my hand were there.

  ‘Do you realize that Dad organizes this every year, sometimes twice a year, and feeds all these people, and everyone’s got an opinion, but no one could do half of what he’s achieved?’ JD’s mouth was half a pace ahead of him; his words tripped out like unruly children. ‘That’s what he’s “famous” for, mate.’

  ‘Oh, stop making trouble!’ Holly scolded him, and soon the argument had fizzled out again, but it had left me with that heat at the back of my neck which I associated with a younger, more helpless version of myself, and with a fury at JD. After dinner Kathleen touched my elbow and said she was going up to Room 25 to work. JD melted away into the atrium’s ruckus. I was about to flop into self-pity when a familiar hand landed on my shoulder.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Howard’s smell was festively enhanced: it had booze and sweat in it, and the glow of a man well sunned in the limelight. Sarah-Jane’s cosy essence came piping in from the side. I pointed my face towards the whole comforting package of them.

  ‘JD and Kathleen didn’t get on.’

  ‘Oh, he’s being a real arsehole today, is J,’ said Sarah-Jane. ‘Kathleen seems lovely.’ I was so cheered up by this that I didn’t reflect how odd it was – yet another person having an opinion of Kathleen. ‘Let me talk to her, love,’ Sarah-Jane went on. ‘Where is she?’

  I explained she was upset, had gone off to the room. Howard and Sarah-Jane scoffed in unison as if this were a laughably thin bluff. ‘Take a drink up to her!’ said Sarah-Jane. ‘What’s she drink?’

  Before I had finished the word ‘Prosecco’, Howard was badgering a bellboy to bring the best bottle we had. ‘On the best tray we have. And the best glasses, as well, to be on the safe side,’ he shouted after him. ‘This is what it’s all about,’ he said, and I imagined the expansive arm gestures, the hand round Sarah-Jane’s waist. ‘A bit of class. This is how I wooed S-J.’

  ‘I seem to remember you put your hand down my knickers in the stockroom.’

  ‘She’s got no sense of romance, your mum.’ Howard laughed.

  The bellboy arrived next to me with the stacked tray. Their laughter carried me into the lift, out onto the second floor. I wanted to be like them, effortlessly in love, wisecracking, a rosy past with the promise of a rosy future. I asked the boy to put the tray down outside Room 25. From the atrium below, faint noise floated up over the balcony, like the voices of guests long gone. My stomach was fizzing.

  ‘Room service.’

  I heard her voice from inside, a little wary. ‘Oh, I didn’t order …’

  ‘Hurry up, will you,’ I said, ‘I’m fucking blind.’

  Kathleen’s laughter melted into a croon of joy as she pushed open the door.

  ‘Would have been awkward,’ I said, ‘if it turned out I did have the wrong room.’

  ‘You’re a miracle-worker.’

  I took two steps into the room and launched immediately into my speech. ‘I’m really sorry about JD. I think he was just drunk. Or, well, I don’t know. I don’t … we’re not as close as we used to be.’

  There was a pop-and-plonk as she poured out the drinks. Her glass touched against mine like a hand brushing another. We sat next to each other on the bed. I felt her foot swing out and nudge against mine; felt the plush contour of her thigh against my trouser leg.

  ‘I guess the main thing is, I’m an outsider,’ she said. ‘Any outsider is going to be looked at with a bit of suspicion. You and the Yorks have been a self-enclosed thing for so long. And then the Alpha is a bit of a world all to itself anyway.’

  My instinct was to say she was wrong. The hotel was famous for welcoming strangers: that was how I had originally come to be here. How could the Alpha be a closed
world when it flung its doors wide open every day? How could she say that outsiders were unwelcome when everybody came here as an outsider and felt straight away like a regular? But then I had never approached the place as a visitor. I kept quiet.

  ‘Plus I’m a hack. Lara tells them which journalists to like and which ones to dislike. I suspect I’m on the dislike list. And, you know, Howard was never wild about journalists, was he, and I suppose that’s trickled down to JD.’

  I was wrestling with the strangeness of it: having these people whom I knew so well spoken about with a detachment I could never feel towards them. ‘What do you mean? About him and journalists?’

  ‘You didn’t hear about the Mike Swan thing?’

  Swan had approached Howard, she said, a couple of months ago for an interview. He wanted to do a piece for one of the papers to promote the Swan Guide, whose sales had been falling away. ‘He wanted to ask him about the fire, twenty years on, that sort of thing. Howard was really aggressive, apparently. Said why would anyone give a fuck about the fire in this day and age. That Swan was living in the past. Swan was crying, someone said, round the back of the hotel.’

  The story landed sourly in the room, which was silent around us; it had nothing to add, for all its experience of humans and their dramas. There was the image of this horrible thing, of a middle-aged man weeping, and behind it there was something else that disturbed me – the idea of Howard’s being cruel, perhaps – which my mind did not want to alight on. I told myself she had heard an exaggerated version of the story; or that it never happened at all. It was a relief when she spoke again.

  ‘Also, on a shallower note … ’ Kathleen took a gulp of fizz. ‘Not to sound paranoid, but JD’s girlfriend is stunning. She’s got her come-to-bed eyes and her fuck-me hair and whatever, and she’s on him like a jacket, so he can dismiss a woman like me.’

  ‘A woman like you. What does that even mean?’ I crossed and uncrossed my legs; I could feel a pressure inside me like explosive matter waiting to detonate.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Her voice was clipped and terse, as it had been that first time we met. ‘Why are we discussing this?’

  ‘Because I am really … I feel very strongly about you,’ I said, wincing at the silly, costume-drama sound of the words, ‘and your appearance has, quite obviously, got nothing to do with that.’

  ‘That is very sweet of you.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me. It’s not as if, because I can’t see, you don’t exist physically for me. I can see you in ways you can’t even comprehend.’

  ‘So what do you “see” now?’

  ‘Your smell,’ I said. ‘Smelling you is like … is like touching you, almost. I noticed that as soon as I was first in the room with you.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it, then? Why don’t you do it now?’

  As if in slow motion, Kathleen took my head in both her hands, turned it to face her and pressed it into her shoulder. I kept my head buried there, drinking in her tangy, shiny scent. Her hair fell around and teased my cheekbones.

  ‘How is it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said, ‘like I told you.’

  ‘Feel just down from where you are. There’s a little zip. Can you find it? It’s fiddly’ My fingers grasped for the bite of metal, but hesitated there.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘Yes. It will be so nice to get the sodding thing off. I hate dresses.’

  ‘And is that the only reason?’

  ‘No,’ Kathleen conceded, ‘that is not the only reason.’

  My hand was trembling. At the third try she reached round and made the first inch with the zip. I began to apologize; she shushed me and slid off the bed. ‘I’m stepping out of it,’ she said. ‘And the shoes.’ She kicked them off against the wall as JD used to after school.

  You’ve got no chance with the bra,’ she said. ‘But you can probably help with the rest.’

  My hands found the elastic of her tights and peeled them down until she freed her feet. The grip of blindness had never been so loose. It played no part in my experience. My whole body felt like one tensed, throbbing muscle. I took hold of the even slighter material of her underwear and eased it down.

  ‘So, there you go,’ said Kathleen, her voice losing a notch of volume. ‘Completely naked now.’

  ‘Are you sure you … ’

  ‘If you ask again whether I’m sure,’ she said, ‘I will kick you in the cock.’

  Kneeling in front of her, I pressed my face against her shin, up to her calf, onto the softness of her thigh, wanting to be swallowed up by the flesh. There was a strange urgent sound of which I was only half-aware: I realized she was breathing at an almost panicky pace. As I eased my face into her stomach, she took a step back.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s fine, it’s me.’ She came out with a fearful sort of laugh. ‘I’m not entirely sure I … I thought this through.’

  ‘We can stop.’

  ‘I didn’t say to stop. I just mean, well. I didn’t entirely prepare to be inhaled. I could have had a shower, used some of those little bottles you have in the bathrooms here.’

  ‘This is the whole point. I don’t want you to hide anything. I want everything.’

  ‘Take everything, then.’

  I breathed in her stomach, moved upwards to the long curve of her breasts, into her armpits, and back down until my mouth was nestling against the fuzz of hair where her legs began. She was sighing loudly now. I shuffled forward on my knees, so I was behind her, and plunged my face between her buttocks. When I surfaced she was down at my waist, grappling with my belt. I felt as if my eyes opened, only to close again as I drifted away with her.

  7

  GRAHAM

  I had seen a great many odd sights in the Alpha. That man who broke the door of Room 25, and his wife who hurled her wedding ring up into the balconies; a demonstration of a chemical mixture which, injected into the body of a dead person, could preserve their organs for hundreds of years; the American astronaut who was first to walk on the Moon. There was a lady who seemed able to predict the future with almost chilling accuracy, a bird called a cassowary which was capable of killing a man, and a reputed intellectual who swore that he had been visited in his room by a ghost. And four dead bodies, all except Roz Tanner wheeled out of the front doors in the early hours of the morning when as few guests as possible would be around. I had, as they say, seen it all. But in its own way, nothing was quite so queer – and wonderful – as the spectacle of Chas, only months after meeting Kathleen, simply walking out of the Alpha’s doors as if he had not spent most of his life steadfastly refusing to do any such thing.

  Here he was, all of a sudden, early on a cool September evening, standing in front of the reception desk in a running singlet, a pair of plimsolls, and a giant sickly grin.

  ‘We’ll just have a quick trot in Regent’s Park,’ said Kathleen. I’m going to hold Chas’s arm at first, like you hold the back of a bike, and I reckon he’ll get into it.’

  ‘And you … you are all in favour of this?’ I asked Chas.

  ‘About time I got some exercise,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve had some exercise,’ Kathleen murmured, and the two of them fell into snickering. I was reminded against my will of Agatha, the risqué remarks she occasionally brought out of me.

  Chas fairly skipped along with Kathleen, and the doors swung behind them with a joyous energy. I rubbed my eyes and pictured the scene in the park: Chas jogging along beside Kathleen in her T-shirt and leggings, the two of them hooting at some joke between their snatched breaths.

  Not a few weeks into their relationship, Chas had been outside more than in all his previous life. She had lured him to the cinema, and to restaurants, and now the running became a weekly thing. Kathleen seemed to do it a lot; she had a timing gadget which I always teased her about because it seemed unnecessarily complicated. ‘Have you heard,’ I once asked
, ‘of this marvellous new invention called a stopwatch?’

  ‘That’s enough of your cheek, Graham,’ she said, and laughed; but the moment, like many an atrium moment, was snapped off at the end by Lara Krohl. Emerging from the bar, computer under her arm, she offered one of her blunt unsolicited remarks. ‘Getting into shape, Kath, yah?’

  ‘I run a couple of times a week,’ said Kathleen, colouring a little. Lara Krohl continued on her way, having done what sometimes seemed to be her job: remarking, observing, stocking up on the details of others’ lives and making them aware of it.

  That night was a hot one, and Pattie shuffled and sighed and plugged in a fan which made such a racket that sleeping became even more difficult. ‘I really feel,’ I said, as we lay on our backs in the semi-dark, certain people think Chas is theirs, and they’re hostile to Kathleen out of some sort of rivalry. Jonathan David, for instance, and Lara Krohl … ’

  ‘Who’s Lara Krohl?’ Pattie shifted onto her side again.

  ‘I’ve told you about her. South African lady. Chas works for her, and Howard … well, he’s advised by her.’

  ‘Do you think Howard’s got a thing going on with her?’ And before I knew it, we had boarded – as it were – another train altogether. ‘Do you know, Margaret sent me a story from America to look at, something she found on the Internet. It was about a man who’s having an affair with his secretary. Quite a famous man, I think. So, they go on like that for a few months.’

  And Pattie herself went on for what felt like a few months. The description of this Internet flim-flam tired her out at last, and I was left to think about Kathleen and Chas and their courtship.

  Courtship: not a word anyone used nowadays, I supposed, yet it sounded appropriate. Chas was always skittish and chatty before she arrived, forlorn if something detained her, goofy as a drunkard when they exchanged a final kiss in the atrium. It reminded me a little of when I was wooing Pattie and had to hang around on the corner of the road in order to meet when she finished work at the swimming pool. Nobody now leaned on a lamp post in case a certain little lady came by’: they carried telephones, they could change their plans by the second. Chas and Kathleen, though, always met and parted in the same place. Theirs was an old-fashioned affair.