He gets up and perches on the end of the bed but it’s impossible getting a hold on anything, it’s all birling about the brainbox. He stands up and moves toward the bundle of clothes by the table, picks up the overalls and gets them under his arm. He claws a fistful of coins from the wardrobe drawer and leaves the room into the ever-lit light of the corridor.
His limbs are stiff as he walks and he’s not feeling totally in the present, no at all in fact — he feels half asleep, the dream still pulling, like drag chains, behind him.
The laundry room is empty. He goes in and gets a punnet of powder from the dispenser, and puts the overalls into one of the washers. He sits on a chair and watches them spin and flump through the glass; shuts his eyes and tries to see her.
The sound of a door opening and footsteps in the corridor. One of the housekeepers is at the doorway with her dressing gown wrapped about her, a pissed-off look on her face. She comes toward him and bends down, putting a hand on his shoulder.
‘You should go to bed now, yes?’ she says with a small sad smile, then she is away.
Chapter 20
The butter bucket. Daft but you get fixed on it, studying how full it’s getting, sat there on the ledge where the waiters scrape the butter dishes into it; a measure of how busy the service is. And then you start guessing what level it’s going to get to, is it going to beat the record and all this. Daft. But it keeps the sanity. The busiest shifts, it’s best taking a deep breath and getting stuck in, no a word between the two of you, each in your own worlds, the machine booming, the baldies shouting through for pan collections, and the ping of microwaves in the kitchen going ten the dozen like a sweet shop after school closing.
He gets put on Wash 2 now as well, which is pretty much the same story as Wash 1 except you get pish-wet through to boot. In the quieter moments, he talks to Dia, and a little bit to Eric now, who near knotted himself the morning he came in with his overalls a size snugger from drying them too quickly. ‘Staff food is good, hey?’ And he’d had a right chuckle at him. ‘Must be, aye.’
One thing he’s noticed: the lull before service starts, the waiters come past the hatch with a tray of teas and coffees for the kitchen. It’s the same story with beers too, when the chefs go into the restaurant at the end of the night for a drink. There’s times when he’ll be pure murdering for a drink himself after a shift, but the other KPs don’t seem bothered. Maybe a religious thing. Or maybe because it’s normal just, it’s the way it goes and they accept it. One shift he asks Dia about it, how they never get brought a tea in. Dia laughs. He pats the top of the machine.
‘The machine does not drink tea,’ he says. A strange way of putting it, but he gets the point.
Later the same shift, he tells Dia he saw the meeting in the staff room.
‘It is terrible, terrible, they do this. These people’ — and he chibs a handful of teaspoons toward the restaurant — ‘we must not give them one inch, or they take the mile.’ Mick can’t help smiling at the phrase, but the head chef comes through that moment and they both quieten up. When he’s gone, Dia tells him what the story is, with one eye watchful of the throat into the kitchen.
The housekeepers, he says, are wanting to go on strike because they aren’t getting their correct pay. Some dirty chicanery it sounds like too. The hotel has started only clocking their hours for the time they actually spend in the rooms. So if any of the guests decide on a lie in or a lumber before breakfast, and don’t vacate when they’re supposed to, the housekeepers have to wait without being paid for the time.
‘Serious?’
Dia nods slowly.
‘How do they know? How they know the cleaners aren’t in the rooms?’
‘They spy.’
‘Aw, that’s terrible.’ He pulls the machine down and starts a new cycle. ‘And ye’re joining in yourself, well, if they strike?’
‘Yes. If they can do this to them, they will do this to us.’
The whole of the basement staff are in on it, he finds out soon enough. Too bloody right. Dia’s no wrong, what he says. Give them an inch and all that. The next meeting is called one morning, wee nods and whispers after staff food, and he goes along to it. It’s no exactly organized. The staff room is a fair rabble getting when he arrives, and for quite a long time nobody is looking too sure when it’s supposed to start, until a few of them begin shushing their fingers and one of the women stands up on a chair. It’s the one he saw in the manager’s office. She speaks in Spanish, but he gets the gist. The finger jabbing away. She’s good; she holds the room. A certain kind of magic that starts to happen when a person stands up like that and gives a voice to all these disgruntleds listening in.
After a few minutes, she starts saying it in English, ‘No pay, no work,’ and the KP boys are joined in with the clapping. Obi and Vincent are here as well. He claps with them. It feels good, being part of it. At the same time but, there’s a sense of being cut off, all of them, cut off. They’re clapping in a basement and there’s nobody else here. It’s hard no to think how small they are. When the work-in was starting and Bertie was climbing up on his brazier, everybody heard about it. That’s how it succeeded. Everybody joining together to support them — the miners, the Dutch, the Beatles — there’d been eighty thousand on the march through Glasgow. Eighty thousand! And, as well, they were actually building something then, they weren’t striking, they were actually keeping the work going, how could anybody argue with that? A strange kind of work-in it would be if they tried that here, scrubbing lavvies that haven’t been sat on, plates that no food has touched. No the less, no the less. It is good, what they are doing. It is crucial.
He goes to the next meeting as well, a smaller affair with only a handful of the housekeepers and him and Dia. More of it is in English this time. A couple of the women get up and tell how much pay they’ve had nipped the week, or which rooms hadn’t surfaced until the back of eleven. He keeps quiet, listening. Leaves when Dia leaves. When are they going to get doing something about it, is the question he’s wanting to ask. If there’s going to be a strike, who is behind them?
A day off. The thought of hauling himself up and out of the hotel, buying a mini television, making a phone call. Easier staying in his room, hidden, safe, a few cans left.
Without a window and any shifting of light, it’s hard keeping track of the time. There is the alarm, obviously, but that only points what the hours and minutes are, it doesn’t give a proper sense of the here and now, passing. It is marking time, but it’s not his time that it’s marking. A noise in the corridor. Voices coming past, gradually fading. Do terminal patients feel the time in a hospital, laid out on a ward? When the brain and the body are losing their functions, shutting down, sparked and lulled by drugs. Do they know how long they’ve been there, or do they stop feeling the hours — the long stretches between grapes and colostomy changeover speeding up as the mind slows down?