Hotel World (12 page)

Later tonight, however, Lise will leave the hotel carrying a wastepaper basket full of small change.
Tomorrow morning when she wakes up slumped over her kitchen table she will find the wastepaper basket by the washing machine and will count the change; it will come to nearly twenty-five pounds. She will be pleased. She will remember paying for a hotel breakfast out of this money, and buying some croissants and a pint of milk for her own breakfast from the all-night bakery on her way home. The croissants will be in the bag still under her work clothes. She will split them open, put them under the grill and run downstairs to the shop for butter. She will eat them heavily buttered for lunch and feel rich, unexpectedly lucky. All tomorrow evening her work clothes, which she hasn’t had time to wash, will smell of the faded scent of croissants.

The code on the door
: 3243257. Unless these numbers are pressed in the correct order on the code-box on the door, the door will not unlock. This is normal safety procedure.

In six months Lise will be unable to remember this code. She will never need to remember it again.

Holds the receiver in the air
: Lise, excited, cannot decide whom to call to tell about her act of letting a homeless person have a room in the hotel for the night. The friends who would understand what she’s done all work for the hotel too, and could mindlessly or mindfully betray her to authorities. Other friends who don’t work for Global wouldn’t understand its full rebellious significance and the combination of temerity and courage it has taken. Lise is torn for a moment with the idea of calling her mother,
Deirdre O’Brien, who would understand the ramifications of the act but to whom Lise, at this mid-twenties stage of her life where her judgement and resentment of her mother are more weighty than her understanding of their complex relationship, has no real wish to speak, wanting instead to have adventures whose power is in their being withheld from, rather than gifted to, her too-fast aging, formerly publicly embarrassing, mother.

9
: The number which must be dialled first for an outside line from Global Hotels.

Still high with what she’s done
: This evening Lise, by inviting a homeless person to reside in the hotel for the night free of charge, has probably broken all Global Quality Policy. In doing this, she has made herself feel better.

Lise has seen the homeless woman quite often outside the hotel in the past. The homeless woman sits in the sun, wind, sometimes rain; she resembles a buddhist meditating, her palms up and open. Lise has thought it must be a rough life but a good life, a freed-up life. She thinks the shift in homeless people over the past few years is an interesting one; old drunk men and middle-aged mad women before; now, younger and younger. Lise, unable to make out the age of the homeless woman in front of her at Reception, was also unprepared for the strong smell she brought into the lobby with her, though she is still pleased to be doing someone the world of good for one night. In a spontaneous act of generosity, she will list Room 12 on the computer for tomorrow’s Room Service
Full Breakfasts. (Though a moment later she will panic about this and then erase her listing because it bears her initials; the computer is running under her shift password. It is, however, more or less safe to have involved Duncan; Duncan is taciturn, and Bell and Burnett are both still a little afraid of him after the accident and are unlikely to question him about it, should anyone find out. She is hoping, as he takes the homeless woman up the stairs and as she waits for him to come down again, that the scam might excite him out of the LBR tonight and maybe even into some conversation, like in the old days.)

Drums her fingers on the desk
: In a rhythm approximating the opening lines of the first verse of Neil Sedaka’s 1962 UK chart hit, ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’. See above,
Instrumental version of ‘Breaking’ etc
.

The fabric of her lapel
: Global Hotel uniforms are 78 per cent polyester, 22 per cent rexe. They induce perspiration.

Waste bin
: Lined with plastic, this waste bin contains only an emptied Advil blister-pack (Lise’s) and a plastic container labelled St Michael Pasta and Spinach Salad With Tomato and Basil Chicken, now empty except for the used white plastic fork (originally belonging to Mr Brian Morgan, guest in Room 29, who asked Lynda Alexander, day shift Reception, to dispose of this when he checked in at 2 p.m.).

Smear of blood
: Type A Positive.

Name Badge
: Name Badges are part of Global Quality Policy. The Quality Policy Training pack (UK1999)
states:
Quality is doing things the way they should be done, first time, every time. The way we measure quality is to find out just how much money we spend sorting things out. We spend over one day in every four sorting out things we’ve got wrong. We have a lot of very complex processes, which people at different levels contribute to. The Quality Programme is about getting people to do better all the worthwhile things they ought to be doing anyway. If we can do things better and cheaper, we can handle growth more easily, have happier customers, happier staff and happier managers
.

Nobody on the staff at this branch of Global is quite sure what any of this means, other than that it’s something to do with the difference between good and bad and the need for better. The main change brought about by the installation of Global Quality Policy has been the wearing of first-name Badges by lower staff, and full-name Badges by line managers and managers.

Surveillance cameras at the front of the hotel
: The wiring of the surveillance cameras through to the Security Office at the rear of the hotel building was carried out (under slack supervision) by an apprentice electrician. The front unit power cuts out every time a chambermaid catches the wire with the side of her trolley wheeled at a certain angle along the back corridor.

The system not functioning properly has given Lise the opportunity to offer Room 12 to a homeless person in the knowledge that nobody from Security will have been able to record her actions.

Her neck is hurting
: Lise’s glands are raised in her neck, under her arms and in her groin. At present she is aware only of a slight discomfort under her ears and chin which she imagines is coming from too tight a neckline on her uniform.

The clock on the computer
: The clock is at present running 12.33 seconds ahead of GMT.

The computer can provide information on hotel guests, staff, international tariffs and more general Global matters. It lists in its staff files (to which only certain members of staff have access) the payment details and home addresses of all members of Global staff, including those of Joyce Davies, chambermaid, who lives at 27 Vale Rise, Wordsworth Estate, and will first thing tomorrow morning be fired from this branch of Global Hotels by Mrs Bell, who believes (having been assured first by both Lynda Alexander and Lise O’Brien, day and evening shift Reception, that Room 12 has been unoccupied) that Davies has neglected to attend to Room 12 over a period of two days and is therefore directly or indirectly to blame, in the absence of any responsible hotel guest, for damage caused to the Hotel by a bath left to overflow. The cost of damages, £373.90 for replacement and drying, will be removed from Davies’s final paycheck.

Lise, behind Reception, is at work
: There she is, Lise, behind Reception, at work.

The lobby is empty.

In a moment, she will glance at the clock on the
computer and see the moment when the number changes on it, from a 1 to a 2. She will be pleased to see it happen. It will feel meant.

That is then. This was now.

Lise was lying in bed. She was falling. There wasn’t any story like the one you’ve just read, or at least, if there was, she hadn’t remembered it. All of the above had been unremembered; it was sunk somewhere, half in, half out of sand at the bottom of a sea. Weeds wavered over it. Small stragglers from floating shoals of fish darted in and out of it open-mouthed, breathing water.

And even if she had remembered it, what use would the memory be now anyway? If dropped into water, for instance, like soluble aspirin, would it dissolve throughout to form a solution? Could it even partially numb the aches of all the kinds of quotidian pain that aspirins can? Light and fevered, Lise’s world spun; in its spinning the names of all its places were loosened and jettisoned off the sides of it, leaving seas and countries nothing but blanks, outlines waiting to be rediscovered and renamed, their longitudes and latitudes stretched and limp as done elastic. It spun so relentlessly and fast that its bridges spontaneously combusted, its buildings burned, its skies were implacable. Its birds on their jabby ashen sticks sang dusk and dawn and daytime apocalyptic choruses. You only taste the oil, the blackbird sang on the charred garden fence. You puts me in the bath, the wood-pigeons whooed deep in the flaming sycamore leaves. Bring me
good things to eat, the swallows squealed as they fell through smoke and rose and fell again.

Somewhere – it was promised – there would be cleanness, a scrubbed-fresh feeling; there would be cornfields, trees, air, pure healthy foodstuffs; there would be goodness, simplicity, clarity; there would be balm for sore limbs.

Lise was asleep.

Four o’clock.

Lise’s mother put her key in the lock, turned it, pushed the front door and came in. She did all this with conscious tentativeness. Her hand held itself back so that it almost shook.

She came through to Lise’s room quietly. She got her face ready to say hello. Lise was asleep. The hello face wasn’t necessary. Her mother kept it in place, in case Lise should wake up.

It was seven steps from one room to the other in Lise’s flat. Her mother crept through to the kitchen, held her breath, pulling the door over so Lise wouldn’t hear the rattling of the bags. She breathed out, opened the cupboard. She unpacked into it the things in tins and boxes; tuna, beans, mackerel, muesli. She put the tomatoes and the new potatoes and the salad and the salad dressing and the gravadlax and the small organic fruit yoghurts in individual pots into the fridge. Soon she would buy Lise a new fridge, if Lise would let her. She put the fruit in a breakfast bowl and, after she’d wiped the
breadboard down, the bread on the breadboard. She put the soup carton by the cooker for later, ready for when Lise would wake up.

Lise’s mother opened the door; it creaked again. But Lise hadn’t woken. Quiet she crossed the carpet to plug the telephone lead into the wall-socket; quiet she sat down on the carpet, leaned against the wall and watched her daughter, the fearless child Lise, the imperturbable twelve-year-old, unreadable sixteen-year-old, unruffleable girl, impenetrable adult, Lise. Lise lay in the bed. She was pale, crumpled, frowning, dark, sleeping. She breathed unevenly.

Everything in Lise’s mother’s body hurt, because it hurt just to be near her daughter. Lines were edging themselves into her face as she looked at her. She looked at the bed instead. There were papers on it. Without disturbing Lise, she picked the booklet up off the bedcover. About you – continued. Standing. We need to know if you have any difficulties standing. By standing we mean standing by yourself without the help of another person or without holding on to something. Using your hands. Please tick the first statement that applies to you. I cannot turn the pages of a book. I cannot pick up a two pence coin with one hand but I can with the other. Seeing. Speaking. Hearing. I cannot hear well enough to understand someone talking in a normal voice in a quiet room. Controlling your bladder. Tick one box only. Other information – continued. Please use this space to tell us any thing else you think we might need to know.

There was something written in pencil in the box on this last page. Lise’s mother held it up to the window light so she could read it. It was hard to make out. It was two words. It seemed to be the word
bath
and then the word
singeing
, or the word
singing
.

She put the form down on the bed. She watched Lise breathe. She watched the nothing happening in the room. She would keep watch until Lise woke up.

She leaned forward to put the back of her hand against her daughter’s forehead, to test her temperature. Gently she lifted the hair off Lise’s face, tucked it behind her daughter’s ear, away from her eyes. She sat back again, up against the wall of the room.

Ah, love.

With one finger of one hand Penny typed words. With the other hand she pressed numbers on the hotel TV remote control.

Classic, she typed. Ideal.

A country and western star on the TV screen told the camera how much God loved Nashville. He loves it, she said. It’s a place in America, a part of America, that’s especially loved by God.

Fawless, Penny typed. She deleted the F and replaced it with an l. Then she put the F back on the front again.