Semi-Detached (40 page)

A
shifty man in a grey suit had come half-way down the corridor. ‘I’m just
waiting until I can see the Sheika. I need to talk to her,’ he whined.

‘She’s
not going to see you. I don’t want to see you. You’ll have to talk to the
embassy’

This
was Colin.

Until
the week before, Cohn had driven the Sheika around town in a limousine. He had
been on contract to the hire company ‘But then his company went bust and he was
laid off.’ He couldn’t explain what had brought about such an unlikely
financial failure. ‘But Colin has put a hell of a lot in,’ Mike told me. ‘I
have some sympathy She’s going home the end of next week, and then the
baksheesh will be flying around, and he’s going to miss out, after all that
work, poor bloke.’

Colin
had gone and hired a limousine at his own expense. Whenever the Sheika left the
hotel, he did his best to try to steer her into his car. Several times he had
almost pulled it off, much to the annoyance of the embassy staff. They had
hired a new limousine service and disliked the prospect of losing their crowned
head to a pretender to the post of royal chauffeur.

‘Do we
go out with the royal party?’ I asked.

‘Not
really, no,’ said Mike. ‘Sometimes, if it’s an outing, perhaps, but our job is
to guard the room, even when they’re not here.’ He lapsed into a determined
silence.

So, we
were paid to sit outside the door for twelve hours at a stretch, four pounds an
hour; forty-eight quid a night. I had brought
Dombey and Son
with me. I
cracked it open. Mike watched me. ‘Is that a book, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You
going to read that, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh
right.’

As I
started reading I could feel his eyes on me. Finally, he reached down and picked
up a copy of the
Sun.
I applied myself to the first paragraph. Mike
opened his paper, gazed perfunctorily at the inside page, slapped open the rest
of the pages in quick succession, sighed and threw it aside.

He was
looking at me again. ‘What’s it about then?’ he asked.

‘Well,
I haven’t got very far, but basically it’s a description of the sun coming up
over London, illuminating the houses and waking everybody up.’

‘Right.’
He shifted his massive bulk and plucked at his crotch. Then he settled back and
sucked diligently at his teeth for a few seconds. ‘So …’

‘What?’

‘What’s
happening now?’

‘Well,
Mike, the sun is still coming up, and the morning light is beginning to suffuse
the city-scape.’

‘Mm.’
He cleared his throat noisily, sniffed and made a prolonged guttural hawking.
He leaned over delicately and gobbed on the hotel carpet. He extended a foot
and rubbed it in. He caught me looking at him.

‘I
expect you think I’m an animal, don’t you?’

‘No,
no.

‘What’s
happening now?’ He pointed at the book. ‘Much the same,’ I said and closed it.
Mike was uncomfortable about reading, but then Mike was uncomfortable
generally. Being a bodyguard involved long periods of doing nothing. Mike liked
the totally undemanding ‘work’, but chafed against the inertia involved. He was
not a great conversationalist. Nonetheless there were a few subjects he was
keen to ‘learn’ me: the fact that this was not his real job (his real job was
as a Hollywood extra — ‘I shouldn’t be doing this’), the way the hotel economy
worked and what was ‘proper’.

To pass
the long hours he decided that we should play ‘Spoof.

‘Ever
played before?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll
teach you.’

Spoof
is a game where you try to guess what combinations of coins the other player
has hidden in his hands and match them with the ones secreted in yours. If you
guess correctly then the money is yours: wrong, it is theirs.

I was a
novice. To begin with, much to Mike’s satisfaction, Mike won steadily It
vindicated his perception that students were as thick as pig-shit.

Spoof
was not a difficult game. I soon got the hang of it. I also got the hang of
Mike’s ‘system’. If he won, Mike would start again with 10p. If he lost, Mike
would start with 5p.
He . never varied his foolproof technique at all,
ever. I began to win money from him. It was difficult not to. Mike stopped
chuckling. He became distinctly crotchety. But still, he never varied his
system.

Mike
chuckling was more bearable than Mike crotchety Since Mike rarely tired of
playing Spoof, to keep him relatively calm for the next six days we were to
spend together, I had to pretend to lose for a while, and then pretend to win
for a while. With a bit of care we would usually come out even. Hours passed in
our bare hotel corridor playing an utterly pointless, mind-numbing game of total
witlessness. Sometimes, I thought it might be better if I just read Dickens
out loud to him.

There
were bursts of activity, like flurries of snow On the first day at about eleven
came a sudden ‘Grand Hotel’ moment. ‘Aye, aye,’ said Mike. ‘Here they come.

The
Sheika’s entourage bustled down the corridor. The Sheika herself was short and
hidden behind a burkha. Anna, an Anglo-Indian governess, was clucking over a
three-year-old boy He ran ahead of her up the corridor kicking the doors. They
were accompanied by a number of small men in dark suits. Mike stood up. I did
too. They ignored us, opened the door, and all went inside. The door closed. We
sat down again. It was over.

Five
minutes passed. A bell-hop (at least, I assumed that’s what he was) in a tight
pair of trousers with hussar stripes and a bum-freezer jacket (that’s why I
thought he was a bellhop) came around the corner. He had a large trunk on his
shoulder. He was followed by four or five more porters (in varying
bottom-protecting lengths of jacket) with similar cases. They swung them
around, balanced them on their heads and tossed them one to the other. They
were empty.

‘They’ve
been to Harrods again,’ Mike told me. He knocked, and the porters went inside.
A few moments later they emerged empty-handed and went off giggling down the
corridor, and ten minutes after that, they came back round the corner, this
time laden.

‘The
Sheika’s been to the food hall,’ Mike observed. Several hampers of sandwiches,
whole sides of salmon, platters of lobsters in mayonnaise, hams, sides of cold
beef and towers of cream and strawberries were ferried into the room.

‘They’re
going to eat that?’ I asked.

‘No,
no. She’s the number-one wife and she’s the only one who’s allowed to come to
London and enjoy herself, so what she does is load all that food into the
packing cases and trunks and has it flown straight back to the rest of the
younger wives in the harem at home in Qatar, so that they can have a nice
picnic. The Sheika is the main shareholder in Qatari Airlines.’

Did the
Sheika really enjoy herself in London? She spent a lot of time in her suite,
attended from day to day by her crown princes (the men in suits), which must
have been slightly limiting. We once went out with her, when she wanted to have
a picnic of her own. It was the only time she attempted any form of
communication with us. She clicked her fingers and we hurried over. She
motioned to us to go away and sit on the other side of a tree. We had been a
little too assiduously playing at being bodyguards. The first wife of the
Sheik of Qatar had found our presence, quite rightly, a little oppressive.
Otherwise we played Spoof.

The
little crown prince liked to come over and hit Mike very hard around the ankles
with a piece of solid metal tube that he had found in a wardrobe. Mike’s
hugeness was clearly an object of fascination to the little fucker. Mike would
take the full whack across his shins and bare his teeth.

Mike
was philosophical. ‘When they leave, that’s when it’s all worthwhile,’ he told
me. ‘One bloke, he had chauffeured these sheiks around all summer and his last
job was to take them to the airport, so he drove them there and hung about
waiting for the tip, but they never gave it, so he followed them to check-out,
carrying the bags all obsequiously, but they never gave him a tip. He went all
the way with them to the departures gate, but no tip, no nothing. They just
sailed on through. He called after them, ‘Oi, what do you want to do with the
car?’ And they turned round and said, ‘Keep it, my friend, keep it.’

Mike
told this story to a number of people. He told the porters, when they
flourished the fistfuls of flyers they’d just been given. He told it to Colin
the ex-driver, who just looked ever more rueful. He told it to the plumber who
arrived with a sink plunger. (‘I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m a trained heating
operative.’)

‘You
see, what he’s doing,’ Mike explained when the plumber had gone inside, ‘is
unblocking the toilet. They all go and use it, one after the other, and nobody
pulls the chain.’

Unlike
many, Mike was scrupulously non-racist. He never called them towel-heads. ‘They
have different customs to what we do. It’s probably ‘cos they live in the
desert, they have to be very careful about wasting water.’

It
sounded plausible to me. The plumber emerged looking happier. They’d bunged
him for his un-bunging.

But
Mike never told his stories of largesse beyond the dreams of avarice to the
nanny Anna was in her late forties, the daughter of a Welsh train driver. Her
employers paid her twenty pounds a month, and she sent most of it back to her
own husband and daughters in India.

In the
end, disastrously, we missed out on the big bung.

I
hardly deserved it. I had only been there for a week. They left in the early
morning before our shift began. I met Douglas a little later. ‘Mmm.
Interestingly,’ he said, ‘she just handed me two hundred pounds without a word.’

Our
team was broken up. The security company didn’t want to let me go. They had
other work for me. I was transferred to bomb-checking.

In the
mid-seventies, the hotel had been blown up by an IRA bomb. As a result, a small
table was installed in the entrance and two men in blue uniforms were stuck
behind it to examine the hand-luggage of anyone entering the establishment.
Another operative guarded the back entrance. The security company also manned a
little booth at the staff entrance. A typical twelve-hour shift involved
two-and-three-quarter-hour sets on the front desk, and two-and-three-quarter
hours on the back and staff doors. The spare time was given over to ‘breaks’.
There were five operatives altogether: four to check handbags and one to stand
in and supervise.

I was
now in a blue shirt and wearing those rather cleverly designed uniform trousers
with high waists, deep pockets and little buttons that seemed to be able to fit
anybody Nonetheless, this was a bit of a climb-down. I missed the erroneous
status of ‘bodyguard’, but, more significantly, I missed the chair and,
whenever Big Mike dozed, the reading opportunities.

At
least on the front desk, when we weren’t poking about in the bags, there were
still two of us. Brett came from Bromley.

‘I
expect it can get quite busy about lunchtime.’

He
turned and looked at me. ‘I expect it can get quite busy about lunchtime?’ He
put quite a lot rudimentary satire into the riposte. It was neither an
auspicious nor a particularly sparkling conversational gambit. I tried other
sallies, but they were met with barely audible grunts. He had said enough for
the next hour or so.

Brett
was seventeen. He did explain later, in simple terms, that commentary on your
surroundings or state of being was a waste of breath. He was more forthcoming
with the supervisor, who turned out to be his uncle. The two of them agreed
that only mugs would exert themselves to make money. At other times any
challenge to the trance-like state of utter immobility was met with ferocious
annoyance.

During
the day there were bags to be checked anyway Brett opened a case, and it was
full of guns. The man looked him in the eye. ‘The hotel knows all about this,’
said the man. Brett’s uncle came over and peered at them. With the natural
regard that stupid authoritarians have for people with guns he waved him
through.

I
reassured hamburger-smugglers who were trying to avoid the exorbitant room-service
prices that I didn’t give a damn what they took up to their room and tried to
calm Americans who became incensed at being called ‘sir’. (‘What is this? What
is this British fake deference?’) I referred people who wanted to see ‘the
general manager’ about our intolerable intrusion to the concierge.

What
they didn’t realize was that ‘the general manager’ of the hotel was only ever
seen in the lobby once a day at about eight-thirty. He descended in the lift,
an elderly, French, fat man with the demeanour of a dowager in a lavender
garden, and took his tiny white dog out to defecate on Park Lane.

At
night, the hotel became more enjoyably sinister. It hosted boxing nights.
Rather than the mug punters who came in during the day, these were attended by proper
gents (not toffs — everybody hated toffs). The proper gents didn’t tip more. It
was sheer force of repellent personality that impressed. Our job became a major
entertainment.