Hotel World Read online

  Lise was lying in bed and staring at the light-fitting. It was tiring just to lie in bed and stare upwards. Pains were jolting into Lise’s head up through her neck. Inside her head they were kicking in the lining of her brain. They smelt of dung and animal. They trampled everything she knew. They were heavy as a herd of bison. They raised dust. Beyond the dust, the noise: write down the things you can remember for me, the poet-mother was saying. Write down your symptoms, the lady doctor was saying. Fill me in, the government form in her hand demanded. Bring me apples, bring me something, the Country Store lady, dainty and wholesome, was singing.

  Bring me something. That was maddening, not to be able to remember what the missing something was in the Country Store recipe. Did it have two syllables or three? Lise couldn’t remember. You never taste the oil. You only taste the food. There was nothing to make a rhyme of in the Mazola song but the word Mazola itself. Thank God. It was a relief. It was simple, corn oil.

  How to fill in the rest of this form

  Please use the boxes in the More Information sections of each page to tell us in your own words how your illness or disability affects you in doing day-to-day things. Tell us about

  pain, tiredness and breathlessness you feel while you are doing day-to-day things

  pain, tiredness and breathlessness you feel after you have done day-to-day things

  You do not need to attempt the activities set out in the questionnaire. Tell us whether or not you could do them, based on your experience of your illness or disability.

  If you need extra space, please use the box on page 18.

  Lise was lying in bed. Was she lying? Was she faking, lying, in bed? The form made her ask herself. It made her nervous. You probably aren’t ill. Prove to us how ill you really are, it said. She moved as little as possible. She let the pages fan open above her head until she found page 18. It was near the end of the form. The space on it was about six inches by six inches. She would have to find something to fill it with. She let her arm fall; it had been in the air long enough for it to hurt.

  She could fill it with something Deirdre would like to be told when she came at four.

  Deirdre would probably have liked, for example, to know things like this. How the chambermaids Lise had known at the hotel, or at least the more spirited of them, had a practice of wiping down the toilet seats of exceptionally messy rooms with the face flannels of guests. That they enjoyed trying on clothes that had been unpacked by guests into the wardrobes and drawers of rooms when the guests had gone out of the hotel. That the going-through of guests’ bags was mandatory. That a favourite thing to do was to switch on the battery-buttons of expensive cameras that had been left in rooms, so that the batteries in rich people’s cameras would silently run down without them realizing.

  Deirdre would also have been fascinated by the amount of spitting there was, blind random spitting regardless of who the guest or how big the tip, into room-service food and restaurant food in the kitchen of the average Global Hotel, and she would have been especially taken with the number of types of bacteria (including several usually found in urine) which could have been identified by a simple scientific examination of the surfaces of the peppermints left for guests signing in or out to help themselves to in the large misted-crystal bowl on the Reception desk behind which her daughter had worked for eighteen months after leaving college and before falling ill.

  To be frank, Deirdre would have been delighted by or with any information at all, like being told about how heavy the sheets were for the maids to carry (sheets are remarkably heavy, and hotel staff are not generally allowed to use the guest lifts), or how new girls were taken by Mrs Bell into the room behind Reception and made to practise in their lunch hours with the ends of toilet rolls until they could fold the edges of the tissue to the right angle. (Not just to please me, Mrs Bell would say, rapping her pencil on the desk, but to show that care has been taken in preparing the Global’s bathrooms; what’s the watchword, girls? Customer Care. One new girl had been sacked, ostensibly for uncleanliness, but really for suggesting Mrs Bell’s watchword was two words.)

  Or, simply, unromantic unadorned information like how each member of staff received a piece of paper with a room chart on it in his or her pigeonhole every morning at six which told them which guests were staying and which weren’t. This would have been of some use to Deirdre perhaps, or how the trick in Reception, when no bosses were around and it wasn’t too busy, was to answer the phone saying Good evening, Global Hotels, can I help you? Just one moment please, I’ll put you through to Room Availability, then to push button 9 (which relayed Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23 through the receiver into the listener’s ear), lay the phone on the desk, wait as long as you dared, push button 9 again and say into the same receiver, in another voice, as if you were another person, Room Availability, Global Hotels, can I help you?

  Or how, when you work in a hotel, whatever it is you do – whether it’s smiling at guests on the front desk or spitting in food in the kitchen, stripping beds of the smells of people or smoking against the rules out on the fire escapes, whatever – presses you hard, with your nose squashed and your face distorted and ugly, right up against the window of other people’s wealth, for which employment you are, usually quite badly, paid.

  All of these things, countless more things like this she would have loved to hear, found useful to know, if only Lise had been able to remember them. Certainly making an effort to think about the hotel at all had brought something back into Lise’s head today, for instance. But she couldn’t quite get to it. It was something about baths, about a bath, something to do with a bathroom, and instead of it, in front of it in her head, was the voice of the TV-advert bottle of bubble bath singing along to the pictures of the bathtime children and their joyful mother. Your Matey’s a bottle of fun. You puts me in the bath. I’m fun for everyone. I’m always good for a laugh. And while they splash in the tub. Your Matey gets them clean. So you don’t have to scrub. No matter where they’ve been. There’s one more thing to tell. Your Matey gets things right. So I cleans the bath as well. There ain’t a mark in sight.

  The singing bottle was shaped like a sailor. He danced around superimposed on everything Lise was trying to think. There were added s’s on put and clean, to make the bottle’s song sound more like real sailor’s idiom. Remembering this made Lise, lying still and dizzy in bed, feel comforted. There were things after all, even minute details, that she still knew perfectly. She smiled, wan in the wan room. She wondered if the Matey song would be any use to Deirdre. Perhaps she should write it down for her. She would find the pencil. Singing bubble-bath bottle. That was something. She would write it on the form.

  Sitting in a chair We need to know if you have any difficulties sitting comfortably in a chair. By sitting comfortably we mean without having to move from the chair because the degree of discomfort makes it impossible to continue sitting. By chair we mean an upright chair with a back, but no arms. Please tick the first statement that applies to you. Tick one box only.

  I do not have a problem with sitting

  I cannot sit comfortably at all

  I cannot sit comfortably for more than 10 minutes,

  without having to move from the chair

  I cannot sit comfortably for more than 30 minutes,

  without having to move from the chair

  I cannot sit comfortably for more than one hour,

  without having to move from the chair

  I cannot sit comfortably for more than two hours,

  without having to move from the chair

  This form reads like a kind of poetry, she thought. Maybe Deirdre could use it, too. Maybe Deirdre wrote it. Maybe Deirdre is right. There is a kind of poetry, bad or good, in everything, everywhere we look.

  Her eyes hurt. She closed them. Visionary. Poetic. Revelatory. Mystic. Yeah, Lise thought behind her closed eyes. It’s true. Being ill is revelatory. It reveals to you exactly what well people think of ill people. They
put flowers on the bed or on the table. They look at you with widening eyes. You look like death, they say, and then they laugh and add quickly, like it’s all a joke, you look about as good as I feel. Then they look embarrassed (like they’re letting the side down, ill people). Then they try to think up some imperfections of their own, and spend the hour telling you about them. Some of them expect to be made tea, or even lunch (you can’t be that ill). Others are frightened to touch anything. They breathe, self-conscious, testing every breath. They look to the side of you as if you aren’t there. They leave as soon as possible. For days after their visit they test themselves, listening for the press of glands and the slightest velvety creeping of skin, the tenderness of throat, the small knock-knock of symptoms. Who’s there? Vi. Vi who? Vi Russ, we met at your friend’s house, don’t you know me? Don’t you recognize me? Let me in. One day (maybe) Lise would be well enough again to go to someone’s party and someone would ask her in that way that means who are you, what do you do, and Lise would answer with her new job description. I’ve been ill. I could not sit comfortably in a chair for more than thirty minutes. Now I cannot sit comfortably in a chair for more than two hours. It’s hard work, but I’m getting better at it. And someone has to do it.

  Lise was lying in bed. The room swung. The walls shifted then settled again. The idea of even imagining going to a party had frightened her. Every afternoon Deirdre put the telephone plug back into the socket on the wall. Every evening as her mother closed the front door behind her Lise yanked it out again. She could do it without getting up out of bed.

  So imagine Lise’s memory opening, now.

  Imagine that when it did, it was as startling and fractious to her as it would have been had the dead telephone at the side of the bed suddenly started to ring.

  Imagine her heart, leaping. Imagine her mind, sluiced wide.

  Lise, behind Reception, is at work. The clock on the computer reads 6:51 p.m., but at the very moment she glances at it the black 1 changes to a 2.

  6:52 p.m.

  She is pleased to have seen it happen. It feels meant. Then she forgets about seeing it. Her neck is hurting.

  The surveillance cameras at the front of the hotel are out of action, including the one over Reception, so she undoes her top button and pulls at the material round her neck. She looks down at her Name Badge, LISE

  backwards upside down. She undoes the pin on the back of it, unhooks it from the uniform and throws it at the waste bin up at the other end of Reception.

  It misses. It falls down the back. She snorts.

  She gets up, walks the length of the Reception desk, leans down the back of the bin and picks the badge up again. She jabs the tip of her finger with the end of the pin.

  Ow, she says. Shit.

  She slides the pin back through the fabric of her lapel, clipping it shut. She sits back down on the chair. She drums her fingers on the desk. She sees a tiny smear of blood on the desk, and sucks her finger where the pinpoint went in. She wipes at the blood on the desk with the edge of her jacket.

  She is still high with what she’s done.

  She looks at the phone. She picks up the receiver, dials 9. She holds the receiver in the air for a moment. Then she puts it down again without dialling anything else.

  She picks up a pen, puts the end of it in her mouth. She gets up. She presses the code on the door, letting herself out in front of Reception where the guests stand, takes the pen out of her mouth and leaves it on the desk.

  There is no one in the lobby as she crosses it. The fauxcoal fire is burning in an empty room.

  She pushes the revolving door until she’s at the steps on to the street, the surge of cold all round her. She stands under the Global Hotel sign and tries to see across the road.

  She can’t see anyone there. There’s no one there.

  She comes back into the surge of heat of the lobby. She straightens her uniform and walks across the room with brisk purpose. She lets herself back into Reception and sits down again. Her finger is still bleeding a little and round the place where the pin broke the surface the finger is reddened. She pushes the skin of her finger until the blood comes out in a perfect rounded bead of red. It is a surprisingly bright red. She puts her finger in her mouth.

  Duncan is coming down the stairs, one at a time, slow. His head is down. He passes Reception.

  Thanks, Duncan, Lise says as he does.

  Duncan says nothing. He goes straight back into the LBR and shuts the door, so Lise talks to the shut door. I’ll call you if we need you, she says. It’s dead tonight.

  She flinches at her own words. Shit, she says under her breath. But it’s all right. Duncan won’t have heard it through the combination of the shut door and the noise coming out of the speakers, flooding Reception, an instrumental version of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’. Lise looks at the clock.

  6:53 p.m.

  Five hours to go.

  She watches to see if she can catch the number on the clock changing itself again. But she looks away, just for the mere split of a second, and when she looks back it’s already 6:56 p.m. without her having seen any of it happen or felt any of it pass.

  It’s already 6:56 p.m.: Time is notoriously deceptive. Everybody knows this (though it is one of the easier things to forget).

  Five hours to go: Because time seems to move in more or less simple linear chronology, from one moment, second, minute, hour, day, week, etc. to the next, the shapes of lives in time tend to be translated into common linear sequence which itself translates into easily recognizable significance, or meaning. Lise is waiting for the next predictable point in the sequence: the time for her to go home. This week Lise is on evening shift. At Global Hotels, evening shift runs from 4 p.m. till midnight when the night staff takes over. In actuality here, when Lise thinks ‘five hours to go’, she still has five hours plus seven minutes till her shift officially ends, and usually there’s also a loss of several minutes at staff changeover with the exchange of hellos and the putting on of coats; on evening shift Lise rarely leaves the hotel before 12:20 a.m.

  Tonight, however, Lise won’t leave the hotel building until 4 a.m.

  Instrumental version of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’: Peter Burnett, undermanager of this branch of Global, chooses the music for the lobby. He ensures, by leaving three cds on low-volume repeat-play in the locked cupboard of his office, that nobody will replace his choice whenever he’s out of the hotel building, including evenings. ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’ was originally a summer 1962 UK hit for Neil Sedaka, and a hit again exactly ten years later in July of 1972 when television’s The Partridge Family took it to number three in the UK charts. Some of the words of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’, remembered more or less correctly, are running concurrent with the background instrumental through Lise’s head right now

  (don’t take your love

  away from me

  don’t you leave my heart in

  misery

  if you go

  then I’ll be blue)

  without her realizing they are, as she glances at the clock on the computer.

  The speakers, flooding Reception: Figuratively speaking. More literally, in roughly an hour and twenty minutes from now the bath left running in Room 12 (one of the hotel’s bigger, better and more expensive rooms) will finally overflow and flood not Reception but the bathroom, the room carpet and also part of the hall carpet outside the door of the room. The ensuing mess, found next day, will result in the sacking of Joyce Davies, chambermaid (28).

  The tap left running will also cause three separate complaints from other guests in the hotel between 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. concerning the lack of hot water, complaints which Lise on Reception will apologize for profusely in the standard apology rhetoric of Global Hotels, log in the book and on the computer, and report to Maintenance.

  It’s dead tonight: Lise’s stomach contracts; she has used the unsayable word, ‘dead’, to Duncan.

  Lise talks to the shut door: Thi
s is apt. Talking to Duncan now, Lise thinks, is exactly like trying to talk to someone through a half-a-foot-thick shut door.

  He goes straight back into the LBR: The LBR is staffshorthand for the Left Behind Room; this is where all the things guests leave behind are stored until claimed or passed on to the police or taken home by staff members. It is less a room, more a large cupboard full of shelves and boxes of dated, labelled, alphabetically arranged things including: alarm clocks; batteries; books; all kinds of camera; cassettes and cds; items of clothing including gloves, hats, seventeen pairs of jeans; computer games; packs of condoms and a range of other kinds of contraception; many items of make-up; two mobile phones; unidentifiable presents still wrapped in giftwrap; a prosthetic limb (lower leg); men’s, women’s and children’s shoes (usually in pairs); small easily lost children’s toys; various sizes of umbrella; cassette and cd walkmen, with and without earphones. The LBR smells of damp and plastic. It has no windows. It has a bare lightbulb. Duncan has been spending his shifts in the LBR, only coming out when he has to, for the last six months. He sits in the dark on a box labelled 16 Sept, Rm 16. The box is full of packed daffodil bulbs. Beneath him in the box in the dark some of the daffodils are beginning to sprout inside their packaging, and others are caving in inside their oniony wrapping, starting to rot.

  Thanks, Duncan, Lise says: Most of the Global staff at this branch, at least those who were working here then, are protective of Duncan and his habits; they will happily rap on the LBR door to let him know whenever Bell or Burnett are around so he won’t get caught. Everybody who works there knows Duncan saw what happened, he heard it, he was on the top floor with Sara Wilby when she did it. Newer staff members tell each other in low voices that he should leave or be asked to leave. They discuss the rumour that he refused compensatory redundancy. They discuss what it must have been like, to be there. They discuss suicide. They discuss love. They implicate Duncan. When Duncan goes past, the hush of no one speaking trails in front of and behind him, eerie, like embarrassment. Lise likes to make him do a little work, small things, whenever she’s on with him. She thinks it will be good for him. Lise used to think she might sleep with Duncan one day, when she first worked here. He was funny, he was sociable, he took risks, he was quite handsome. Now it makes her uneasy to be on the same rota as him. She is kind to him. (She is invisible to him.) Secretly she thinks he needs therapy.