‘No,’ she said.
‘Yes. People do this. A small group in the know. Seasoned travellers. Downstairs, the person at the front desk apologises and assigns you a different room — probably a better one, because no one wants you complaining twice. Then they get housekeeping to check out the reported smoke-smell. Housekeeping confirm they can smell it too. Front desk send a bottle of wine up to your new improved room, though by then you’re already drunk.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘When you move rooms on the same day you check in, it leaves virtually no trace.’
‘What if I emptied out the whole minibar, though? Everything.’
‘That’s what I’m saying. In a way it’s even less suspicious. We get loads of faded rockers staying. It’s not unusual to be asked to empty out the minibar completely, before they arrive, and therefore not unusual for the minibar attendant to discover that he needs to completely refill a given minibar. Applying charges — it’s not his job.’
The nurse sat down on the end of the bed and then got up again, shaking her head, ringlets swaying. ‘You win. My mind is blown.’
‘The other thing is, at the end of your stay, when they apply the minibar charges to your bill, you could just say, “No, I didn’t have anything from the minibar.”’
‘That simple?’
‘Yeah.’ Why was he saying all this? Why was he spreading the word? ‘The truth is no good front-desk agent will accuse a customer of lying, whatever the situation. You think we want to go through your bins looking for little bottles? They know the minibar attendants make mistakes. Peer in. Mess of bottles. Ticking little items on a chart. They know papers and room numbers get mixed up. Human error. They know other fallible people copy those details onto the guest’s bill. They know some temp-staff maids drink a couple of gins while they clean and then blame it on the customers. They know summer staff sneak into vacant rooms and have a party. The only thing that shows you’re lying is if you give an over-complex excuse. If you just say, “Didn’t have anything,” we take it off your bill in a heartbeat, and then you eat and drink for free.’
She gave him such an excellent smile.
Performance.
He experienced a moment of thinking this hospital wasn’t so bad, of thinking the enforced removal of all motion from his life might even be a blessing. But the feeling did not last. He was napping three or four times a day. In the afternoons he was nicely heavy with doziness. Quickly it began to amaze and depress him that, during these colourful breaks in consciousness, time still seemed to pass. He woke to find a trolley had moved. A clipboard had disappeared. Situations changing and him playing no active role at all. And he was tired, too, by the effort of recalibrating all the reference points in his life. Having one heart attack increased the likelihood of others. Dying at fifty of an exploded heart was a distinct possibility now. That would mean his twenty-fifth birthday — twenty-fifth! — had been a halfway point in his life. He resented all the months spent having showers, the weeks spent brushing teeth, the days driving lost along thin grey roads with a map spread out on his knees.
IV
ONE OF THE final times she saw Roy Walsh was in the bar at the Grand. The morning had been lit by worries for her father. The afternoon had been overcast. She spent most of it behind the desk.
George the Doorman came inside. He took his top hat off. He glanced at the list of returning VIPs taped to the inner rim. With a brisk hand he combed his hair. She watched him go back to his preferred position on the pavement, a safe distance from any awning-based birds, until eventually a customer arrived. She checked him in and it was painless right up until the moment when she smiled and handed him the key. He looked at it with something like disgust and announced that he’d like a free upgrade. Why did so many people wait until after the admin had been done? If they asked politely, pre-allocation, you were so much more likely to meet their needs.
‘I’m with Britvic,’ the new guest said, as if this should mean something to her.
She lied and told him there were no suites available. She said the King of Nairobi was staying. That statement almost always put people in their place.
She went back to her Jumbo Jotter pad. Worrying about her dad had loosened other thoughts about her mother. It was like a buy-one-get-one-free kind of deal, except you didn’t want the paid-for thing and you didn’t want the free thing either. She’d been trying to set some of her ideas down.
Mum was often bored with life. Basically need to avoid that — e.g. remain only bored with JOB.
She stared at these lines, the forward tilt of her own handwriting. Why was it that, when in a bad mood, her mother had always tried to find ways of making everyone’s character feel foreseeable? Everything people did or said was anticipated and discounted in advance. ‘Oh, you would say that.’ ‘Well, that’s typical.’ She was a lecturer in Linguistics. Some days she saw cliché in everything. There was nothing malicious about it, probably. Her dad always said it was a symptom of The Depression. You could tell he capitalised it. But she seemed fully convinced that everyone’s personality was locked on a single predictable track — except hers, because you could tell she thought of herself as unusual. It seemed to Freya that her mother, trying to reinforce this sense of herself as unusual, would sometimes make herself happy when she wanted to be sad, and sad when she ought to have been happy, and angry for the sake of being angry. She was committed above all to contrariness, was she? She wanted to keep people on their toes.
Some mothers threw parties. Mine threw crises.
She was quite pleased with these last two sentences. She thought they might one day be the seed of an extremely profitable screenplay. She opened The Colour of Magic under the desk and read a few more pages. Twoflower and the upside-down mountain and the dragons that only exist in the imagination. The characters’ journeys were being controlled by gods playing a board game. She snorted at a line from Rincewind.
‘My name is immaterial,’ she said.
‘That’s a pretty name,’ said Rincewind.
Light teased the lobby walls with slowly shifting mysteries. More clouds arrived outside. The patterns vanished. She checked the Band-Aid supply in the second drawer down in case Barbara decided to maul more guests. Barbara was on her back on the rug with her legs in the air, yellow eyes shining, a trap. Her purrs were alive with staticky crackles.
Fran came up. ‘How’s your dad doing, Frey-doe?’
‘On the mend, thanks, Fran.’
‘That’s what I heard. Awesome. Give him my love, OK?’
People wanted the bare minimum of information. Something that wouldn’t eat into their day but would nonetheless leave them feeling kind. Fran was kind, but she was also bored and busy, and in that respect she was like everyone else who wasn’t famous, and maybe even some who were.
Freya looked down into the grainy swirls of the desk and thought about hearts. Felt the inside of her head loosening to sherbet, becoming a purring whiteness, a long bright corridor reaching out into the distance that was music-video pretty, pure. She wanted to tiptoe through it lighting candles as she went. Madonna. Borderline. What would it be like, to be that awesome?
She blinked. One of her thumbs, today, looked slightly bigger than the other.
The notepad was decorated with dandelions and bits of seed that were forever blowing sideways, trying to escape the page. She flicked past the message about Susie trying to get hold of her and also the message underneath about requested rearrangements to Margaret Thatcher’s room. The key thing, apparently, was to have a number of low-wattage lamps close to the desk, so that her husband, Denis, mysteriously missing a second ‘n’, could get some sleep while she did last-minute amendments to her speech. Dad thought this was a perfect detaiclass="underline" that someone would plan to do last-minute amendments.