She’d need to get out of here in the next few weeks. More than enough temporary staff to take her place. Even if it wasn’t Spain. Even it was just, like, Bognor. Her father said that meeting Margaret Thatcher would amount to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but what actually was the point in doing something you’d never do again? It sounded very much like what her mother called Novelty Value.
Surfer John sidled up to the desk, looking unusually shifty. Could Freya, um, by any chance, um, cover his shift this afternoon? 4 p.m. behind the bar. You know I’m good for it. Didn’t I repay your shift the other day?
‘I’m visiting my dad again.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Surfer John rearranged his handsome hair and allowed a moment to pass. ‘And that would be a long visit, would it?’
She sighed. ‘You would owe me, John.’
‘I love you!’
‘Four until eight, right? You’d owe me.’
‘You’re the best. I’m going to …’
‘Yeah?’
‘Something nice. I’m going to buy you —’
‘A car? A castle?’
‘A fancy dinner,’ John said.
She laughed.
‘No, I am. I’ve got to grab a lift to Camber Sands, and then I’ll book you up.’
With this mysterious promise, John left. A summer-staff kid came to the desk. He leaned on the oak all casual and said, ‘Hi, Freya, how’s your dad?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Shit! Really?’
‘No,’ she said, and saw the excitement drain from his face.
On her break she took a walk and got annoyed. She was annoyed with herself for accepting the bar shift instead of visiting her father. She was annoyed that she had preferred the idea of the bar to the reality of the hospital. She was annoyed with the Royal Pavilion for looking too much like pictures of the Taj Mahal. She was annoyed with the predictably bright fabrics in the bohemian shops on North Laine. She was annoyed with the dismal iron canopy of the station, the fiddly white arches over side streets, the small sleepy bandstands, the half-melted look of the wavy seafront railings. She was annoyed by Surfer John and she was annoyed, most of all, by the Grand. The whole thing looked absurdly self-indulgent. The painstaking brickwork. The well-spaced windows. The cast-iron twirly bits on balconies. The flouncy sections of supporting white stone. Squint and they revealed their silly floral patterns, silly leaf patterns, silly seashell patterns. The whole facade seemed just that: a facade. It was the over-engineered, dramatic film-set frontage for 201 absurdly overpriced rooms in which the only concession to imagination was, what, the slightly varying configuration of the furniture? The building had the quaint lacy look of her grandma’s flat in Hove. Did her grandma even know that Moose was ill? She charged through the revolving door and said hello to no one.
From a shelf under the bar she took a segment of lime and dropped it in her drink. Acid mood. Swirling citrus thoughts. The smell of nicotine competed in the air around her with the sharp vinegary scent of brown sauce squeezed into ramekins. Narrowing her eyes into a kind of safari squint, thinking that she’d much rather be at home watching David Attenborough tapes, she studied the half-dozen drinkers arranged around her. A few of the beige-jacket crowd sitting at a low table, playing bridge and making jokes about their wives. Also a local writer who liked to drink real ale while making notes in his Moleskine notebook. (‘Waves are amazing’ was the only sentence Freya had seen.) And closer, sitting at the bar, a crossword laid out between his arms, was an eccentric guy everyone called the Captain. ‘The Captain of what?’ Freya occasionally asked, but no one seemed to know. Her attempts to get some sense out of the Captain himself on this simple but apparently intimate issue had, as yet, yielded no success. He looked like the love child of badgers. White whiskery sideburns. Liver spots on his skinny cheeks. She stared now into the high frizz of his hair, bluish and electric, separate threads of it startled by light. His age was somewhere north of seventy. The high numbers merged into one another, top floors of a skyscraper, distant.
The one undisputed thing about the Captain was his natural habitat: Brighton’s charity shops and second-hand stores, places where he could indulge his remarkable need to rummage. The Captain had an insatiable appetite for memorabilia. The very best of his discoveries found their way into a small enterprise three streets back from the beach, a ‘cultural institution’ he called the Museum of Lost Content. To most, the museum — of which the Captain was Founder, Acquisitions Manager, Curator and the sole member of staff — was an attic flat filled with junk. But to Freya sometimes it seemed a place of liberating disarray. When the weather was bad she went there on her lunch breaks. The Captain never charged her an entry fee. He never seemed to charge anyone an entry fee. His ability to stay financially afloat was one of several mysteries that orbited his person.
‘The eighth wonder of the world,’ he was saying now. The tatty leather elbow patches on his red jacket squeaked against the bar as he shuffled on his stool. Freya assumed he was talking about his museum, or reciting a crossword clue, but she was wrong. He was referring to Marina. She entered the bar area pink-cheeked, pneumatic, holding a dusty lidless plastic box topped with crayons and Lego. The card players at the table to the left became tremulous of eyebrow and low of voice. The Captain cracked his fingers. A silver pendant bobbed helplessly on the swell of her breasts. An unusually low-cut little number. Lately Freya had felt herself slipping into a rivalry of delicate dimensions.
‘Freya, darling, do you mind if I leave this box behind the bar?’
She shrugged. ‘We’ve got kids staying?’
‘No, it’s my little nephew. My sister is ill. I’ve got him with me later today.’
‘I didn’t realise you had a sister.’
‘Seven,’ Marina admitted.
‘You’ve got seven sisters?’
‘Yes. And one brother. But he adds nothing.’
‘Zone Three,’ the Captain said, tapping his knuckles three times on the bar.
‘I’m sorry?’ Marina said.
‘Seven Sisters. Between Finsbury Park and Tottenham Hale, in Zone Three, if I’m not mistaken. London Underground. Also a term to describe a loosely linked collective of Stalinist skyscrapers in Moscow. Yes, an unusual combination of Russian baroque and Gothic. Saw a couple of them after the war.’
Marina, rarely flustered, looked flustered. It was interesting to observe. She blinked and gave the Captain a quick strategic smile. ‘See you soon!’ she sang.
‘When you say “during the war”,’ Freya said, ‘which war was that, Captain?’
The Captain coughed.
She looked at the Walkers Crisps order form in front of her. A little job left by John. How was she supposed to know what flavour crisps Conservatives preferred? In his Memos With The Bad Puns In The First Paragraph, the GM kept telling everyone to ‘bolster supplies’ and be ‘ready for anything’. He made it sound like they were going to war. It was the most boring war she’d ever been involved with.
She was hungry. The Captain reached into a jacket pocket. He pulled out a yo-yo and a curled Post-it note. The Captain’s pockets were renowned throughout Brighton as sinkholes of buried treasure and sedimented knowledge. In pub quizzes at the Cricketers he was on occasion asked to leave his jacket behind the bar. There was a fear that the weight of encyclopedic wisdom lurking in its various compartments might tempt him to cheat (or, as the Captain himself put it, fleece, hose, bilk, diddle, rook, gyp, finagle, cozen, swindle, hornswoggle, flimflam). He pressed the Post-it note onto a London Pride beer mat, wrote something on it with a biro borrowed from Freya, and then put the note and the biro in his pocket.