Hotel World (11 page)

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
: This 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.

She puts her finger in her mouth
: The body’s logical urge towards natural antiseptic.

The finger is reddened
: The local inflammatory response of the body’s coagulation system.

She walks across the room with brisk purpose
: In six month’s time, Lise will be incapable of walking across a room with brisk purpose. She will be almost incapable of walking across a room. Even the thought of a word like
brisk
, the ghost of the word passing across her mind, will have the capacity to cause her anxiety. One night in her sleep (which for ten months of her near-future life will be a restless, pierced state) she will dream that she is on the back of a black and white pig and that the pig is galloping, almost flying, at a dangerous speed over a landscape, fluid beneath her, that looks like Wales or the Scottish borders. When she wakes up from this dream she will be exhausted and panicked. Her heart will feel burnt. Her leg muscles will hurt where she gripped the pig in her sleep. This will be one of the low points of her early invalidity.

She straightens her uniform
: Lise has momentarily forgotten that the surveillance cameras are off and that the straightness or otherwise of her uniform will not tonight be reported to or recorded by any authority.

No one there
: Not literally true. There are some people outside on the street, passers-by in cars and on foot. This
no one
particularly refers to the fact that there is nobody on the pavement opposite, where Lise is expecting or hoping to see the adolescent girl who has been sitting on the pavement or sheltering in the shopfront opposite the Global.

She can’t see anyone there
:
Anyone
here refers to the same
no one
, above. Lise is sure she recognizes this girl from the funeral of the dead chambermaid, Sara Wilby. Sara Wilby (19) worked briefly at the Global before falling to her death the previous May in a freak accident, the tragedy of which was reported on both local and national news (25/26.5.99) and caused first, the three-day closure of the hotel and second, escalated demand for rooms on the hotel’s reopening, demand which remained high well into late summer with locals and members of the general public all keen to see the location of the death.

Global Hotels made it compulsory for members of staff from this branch to attend Sara Wilby’s funeral. After the funeral a joke went round the hotel staff combining the Doris Day song ‘Que Sera Sera’ and the dead girl’s name. Lise can’t remember the wording of it now but she remembers it was a relief to pass it between themselves, illicitly like a spliff, as they all did at work in the weeks after the funeral in the hotel kitchens, in the hotel storerooms, and walking back and fore in front of the door of the boarded-up basement. Jokes the punchlines of which were, for example,
Well and truly shafted
or
Sara Wilby in a lift
or
Because she offered to go down on him
had been Chinese-whispered up and down the stairwells of the hotel right into the autumn months, though by now they have, so to speak, died down.

Lise had spent time on one of the same rotas as the dead girl. The dead girl had had dark hair, but it was a Saturday, busy, and there was always new staff coming and going, there were always new chambermaids, chambermaids have high turnover. (High turnover: a phrase full of punchline potential.) Sara Wilby’s family had stood at the church door. All the people who worked at Global filed past, bosses first then undermanagers then administrative staff then Reception then Security then Maintenance then Kitchen then Cleaning, and shook hands with them. A couple of weeks ago Lise realized that that’s where she knew the girl from, the girl who had been sitting outside across the road. Lise had seen her at the church door as they all went past in their hotel uniforms. Lise thinks she may have shaken that girl’s hand.

Tonight Lise went out of the hotel to speak to her. She was going to ask (but the girl ran off) if there was anything she could do, if there was anything the girl wanted, money or a coffee or food or anything, if she’d like to come in and warm up in the hotel, if Lise could do anything for her or help her in any way. Can I do anything for you? Can I help you in any way? She had had the words ready.

Lise knows that she (Lise) must have known Sara Wilby. She was on that same rota for the first of the two
nights Sara Wilby worked at the Global. She definitely must have spent some of that evening’s time with Sara Wilby, she must have spoken to her, they must have exchanged at least looks if not many words. But though she’s tried, she can’t really remember anything about it. She can’t even remember what Sara Wilby looked like that night, two nights before she died. It is much easier to picture her from the photographs in the papers and on TV than to try to remember. The photographs in the papers and on TV seem to have wiped Lise’s memory of the real Sara Wilby even cleaner.

It’s for this reason, for exactly this blank in the memory where there’s almost no face, almost no body, nothing but the near-empty outline of a person not known – and also because she is a nice person herself, and just in case there’s anything she can do – that Lise is keeping an eye out for, has just checked outside one more time for, that girl who has been spending her evenings sitting on the steps of the carpet showroom opposite the front of the hotel.

The lobby
: All branches – British and international – of Global Hotels have identical lobby design by Swiss interior designer, Henri Goldblatt. To list all regulated details here would take up too much space; Goldblatt’s original blueprint featuring several specific furniture and fabric manufacturers is over ten pages long. For front-of-lobby flowers, on page 6 for instance, Goldblatt specifies stargazer lilies.

Global International plc Board and Shareholders
believes that site duplication within still-individual architectural structures reinforces attitudes of psychological security, nostalgia, and preserves the climate of repeated-return in worldwide Global clientele.

The lobby of the branch at which Lise works smells of good carpet, distant restaurant food and stargazer lilies. In bed ill in six months’ time, Lise will be unable to recall the precise scent of the Global lobby. In two years’ time, on holiday in Canada and desperate to get out of a sudden spring snowstorm, she will shelter in the Ottawa Global and as she enters its lobby will unexpectedly remember small sensory details of her time spent working for Global, details she would never (she will think to herself afterwards, surprised) have imagined she even knew, and which remind her of a time in her old gone life before she was ill and before she got better, a time which she has almost completely forgotten she had.

Takes the pen out of her mouth
: In the course of the evening Lise’s saliva on the end of the pen slowly evaporates into the conditioned air of the lobby. It will be an hour and forty-five minutes before the pen is completely dry.

Where the guests stand
: As Lise passes in front of Reception she briefly imagines, as she always does, what it would look like to see herself working behind the desk. She imagines, only for a moment, that she is the well-dressed young woman who came in earlier, someone whose stays in hotels like this one are paid for with the credit card of the national Sunday broadsheet for which
she works; someone whose year of birth is the same as Lise’s yet whose clothes come from shops where even the air hanging over the clothes is exclusive; clothes blessed by the smell of money, unbuyable in this town or this part of the country even now in new postmodern Britain, in any case unimaginable on any real body with any real walking, working or sweating to do. She imagines that, standing there signing the forms, she sees herself (Lise) on the other side of the desk; a hick stranger, a good but unimportant worker. A neat no one – it is important, behind Reception, to wear hair tied back and to wear ‘subtle’ make-up. There Lise is, there she can see it, her subtly made-up face above her Name Badge, sleek and smiling, emptied of self, very good at what she does.

This imagined moment makes Lise, in reaction, feel stronger, better, angrier, more determined from the base of her spine to her shoulders. It fills her head with foul language. Also, although the hotel is quiet tonight with many good rooms free, Lise has given this woman one of the less pleasant, smaller, less viewy rooms on the top floor. In a calculated shift of social power a little later tonight Lise will enjoy punching the number of the room (34) into the Reception phone and letting it ring, just once, at the other end, so she can imagine the woman full of dashed expectation, hand hovering above the receiver.

Lise has also thought she might, much later tonight and provided she can catch the night staff off guard, take the security key off its hook on the wall and go up to the top
floor, let herself silently into the rich woman’s room and stand over the rich woman in her bed as she sleeps unawares. This is an act Lise has fantasized about before tonight, though not yet carried out, being generally too nice a person. But tonight, for Lise, anything is possible (or at least, many more things than are usually possible; see below,
Still high with what she’s done
). Also, at the moment Lise’s sensitivity about money is heightened. Last week when she put her cash card into a cash machine outside her bank the machine kept the card. When Lise went into the bank the next morning to ask for it back the assistant behind the counter refused to give it to her. The assistant, who was much younger than Lise and who regarded her with blunt suspicion, said the card was property of the Bank and that Lise, about whose overdraft the Bank was extremely concerned, was now to be issued with a new card which would allow her to take out only a fraction of the money paid into her account by her salary cheque. The account is called the Solo Account. It is usually given, Lise has discovered, to people aged fifteen. The assistant asked for Lise’s chequebook so she could
make a note of its details
. When Lise passed it through the hole under the partition, the assistant ripped the book in two and put it in an envelope and the envelope in a drawer which she locked.
We cannot allow you to write cheques any more, Miss O’Brien
, the assistant said.
This chequebook is property of the Bank
.