by Kate Mosse
The reception desk is shiny oak; the brass clock ticks loudly; the walls are painted a leaden green colour that hints at a sanatorium. At the end of the reception desk is a white plastic orchid in a brown plastic pot.
Who are you?
Good question.
The other young woman, the one in front of the desk, is called Maria. Maria has never been asked for identification at a hotel before, but then she has never shown up like this, walking in off the street with no luggage, a small backpack, and a stare in her eyes. A beanie hat is pulled low over her black curls, and there are shadows beneath that stare. The receptionist is slender, with a neat navy jacket, and fair hair in an immaculate ponytail. Her skin is very fine, the only make-up she wears is a slick of pale lipstick. Maria knows how she looks to this young woman. They are each other’s inverse.
Maria reaches into the backpack and hands over a driving licence. The receptionist glances at it and hands it back. She doesn’t write anything down. Maria scans the receptionist’s face for signs of suspicion or hostility, but her expression is a calm, professional blank. Maria thinks how habituated she now is to interpretation, how experienced at watching a face.
In high season the room the receptionist offers – a deluxe double with a sea view – would be over two hundred pounds a night, but it’s a Tuesday in February, and Maria gets it for eighty-five. Breakfast is included.
‘Would you like to pay now or at checkout?’ the receptionist asks.
Maria has two credit cards that she has never used: when she applied for the mortgage on her flat three years ago, the broker told her it would be good for her credit rating to have a couple of cards, or even a small loan, as long as she made the repayments on time. The mortgage companies liked evidence of an ability to service debt. This amused Maria at the time, the idea of a company thinking that being in debt already made her a more attractive proposition. She never uses the cards, and, as she pulls one out of her purse, she takes a quick look to check that she has even bothered to sign on the back. She hands it over. That’s how easy it is, she thinks. She can’t use the joint account, but she has the credit cards. The bill won’t arrive for a month.
Why didn’t I think of this before?
The deluxe room is medium-sized and has mushroom-coloured walls. There is a huge sash window, almost floor to ceiling, that looks straight out over a narrow ornamental balcony with rusting ironwork, across the dual carriage-way to the sea. Maria drops her backpack, sits on the bed, and stares at a distant oil rig, blurred against the horizon, the brown-and-grey water still chopping and falling, the red flag furling and snapping repeatedly. After a while, she closes her eyes, begins to breathe deeply, and falls into a short but intense sleep.
When she wakes it is still daylight: just. She rises from the bed, switches the kettle on, makes a cup of tea, and returns to the bed, sitting upright and sipping the tea while she stares at the flag, the oil rig, the rearing waves. She thinks to herself, quite distinctly, So this is what it feels like, a breakdown. She thinks, To get the full benefit, I must not attempt any decisions, not even small ones.
She sips her tea. She watches the flag.
After a while, she needs the loo. The small bathroom also has a huge sash window looking out to sea, with a net curtain. She thinks, I can watch the sea while I pee, and feels a disproportionate amount of pleasure at this unexpected bonus. She thinks, In the short time I have been in this room, I have become obsessed with watching the water. I never want to take my eyes off it.
She lowers her jeans and sits. The bruise on the front of her right upper thigh has spread and altered: it’s now the size of a side plate, the centre of it still purple but fading to red, almost lacy, at the edges. By tomorrow, she knows, it will be tinged with yellow and green. She finishes on the loo, pulls up her jeans with haste, returns to the bed without washing her hands. She sits there, then, staring at the sea until the light fades and the beach darkens and the flag and oil rig become invisible and there are only the sounds in her head: the blur and blare of traffic beneath the window; the crashing of the waves that peaks above the cars and lorries intermittently; the occasional tinkle of something blowing against a nearby balcony – just the sounds, the lift and fall of them in the dark, that’s all there is. She cannot move.
Eventually, with a certain effort of will, she goes back to the bathroom, pees again, and brushes her teeth. She removes her shoes and her socks and her jeans – folding and placing them neatly on the chair in the corner for easy access – and gets into bed, pulling the thick duvet with its slightly shiny cover up over her shoulder, tucking it beneath her chin. Decide nothing, think of nothing. She’s hungry, but she can’t order room service, doesn’t even know if they do room service, as she can’t get up to look at the hotel information folder. Just before she falls asleep, she reaches out to the bedside table and checks that her phone is still turned off, as she has done several times an hour since she left her flat that morning. She falls asleep to the crashing of the waves.
In the morning, she wakes gently. She lies still for a while, eyes closed. The sounds are still there, they colour the room like tea leaves steeping in water, and as they do, she is filled with a sensation she realises she hasn’t felt for a long time: calm. She is lying on her side in a foetal position. Very, very slowly, she unfurls.
She makes an instant coffee, pulls back the curtains, watches the sea in the morning light: it, too, is calmer. The sea is me. Or I am the sea.
Eventually, hunger gets the better of metaphor.
Over breakfast in the deserted dining room, which also overlooks the sea, she does some calculations. In the grey light of day, rested, she feels amazed that she has spent eighty-five pounds on a good night’s sleep. View or no view, she thinks, you could get two pairs of shoes for that. Decent shoes. Paying that much long term is out of the question. She can put it on credit for the time being, but sooner or later that bill will roll in, and she has eight hundred and thirty-three pounds of savings. That won’t do ten nights, let alone the rest of her life.
The rest of her life is too large a thought to grasp. She tries, momentarily. She sips her pleasingly hot coffee, which has come in her own little silver pot, pursing her top lip over the white china cup and taking it in in tiny amounts, inhaling it almost. She tries again: but when she looks beyond the next few days, the weeks and months to come, the enormity of what is to be accomplished, it is as if her imagination shudders and baulks like a nervous horse approaching a high fence.
Six hundred and seventy pounds of her savings came from her Uncle Malcolm – her father’s cousin, who lived alone in a council house in Loughborough and always used to say to her, ‘When I’ve gone, all I’ve got is yours.’ Her father had taken the precaution of warning her not to get excited – Uncle Malcolm was a car park attendant for Tesco, and scarcely had a bean. All the same, when he died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-two, Maria felt guiltily excited to inherit a few hundred quid – poor old Uncle Malcolm. It was the first time she had ever inherited or won anything, the first time anything had come her way that wasn’t earned. She was so excited she had put it in a building society account and done nothing with it because she didn’t want it to be gone. ‘That’s right, duck,’ her father said. ‘Save it for a rainy day.’
Maria and her father both believed in rain. Maria’s mother had died of leukaemia when she was fourteen, and her father had heart disease and hadn’t worked for years. Maria had grown used to the idea that orphanhood was looming, had grown into it, and in due course her father died when she was twenty-two, leaving her just enough for the deposit on a one-bedroom flat in a new development on the edge of the Recreation Ground, where, on Sundays, she was woken by the malice-free shouting and swearing of the local five-a-siders and the occasional bump of a football against the boundary fence.
That was one of Matthew’s observations of her, very early on. On their second date, they walked along the canal towpath after dark, and in a tunnel he stoppe
d and pushed her against the wall. They kissed for a long time in the cold and dank. He pressed on her, his weight, the rough cloth of his jacket with its folds of pockets and buttons and zips, and murmured into her hair, ‘Maria, Maria, you’re an orphan, you’re all alone …’ She cried, then, a little drunk from the wine at dinner, and he held her for a long time, until her feet began to go numb inside her thin suede ankle boots. After a while, he pushed the dark, crinkled locks of hair away from her damp face and looked at her, and she closed her eyes then, knowing he was watching her. He bent his head, to kiss the butterfly-fragile skin of her closed lids, one after the other, then her salty face, and said, ‘You’ll never be alone again, now,’ and something inside her melted and let go.
And even now, sitting sipping coffee in this crumbling wedding cake of a hotel, she can feel that warmth, inside, if she thinks about it, how good it felt, the release of it, to give it all up after all those years of being brave.
After breakfast – a fat sausage, surprisingly good and herby, bacon a little flaccid, a glistening fried egg, and congealed beans – she goes back to reception. A pale young man is on duty, tall and thin, body like a long drink of water. She wonders if this hotel only employs pale people with fine skin. She hesitates, waiting for him to look up and wondering if she can remember how to be charming. The young man carries on tap-tapping at the keyboard behind the desk with his thin fingers, and looks up one microsecond before it would be obvious he was deliberately ignoring her.
‘I’m Room 212,’ she says. ‘I’m thinking of staying a few more nights. Would you do me a deal if I did?’
Without speaking, he keys her room number into his computer and then wobbles his head from side to side in a small movement, pressing his lips together. ‘Can’t do anything on a sea view room, sorry,’ he says. ‘They’re in such high demand.’
Pointedly, she glances around the foyer, where the only other people in sight are a bulky white-haired man in a motorised wheelchair, and a tiny Asian woman she guesses to be his wife, who finishes tucking a tartan rug over his knees before turning and bustling to the Ladies.
‘Really?’ she says, turning back, fixing the young man with her gaze and thinking, Have you any idea how much I need a break, you skinny git?
He shakes his fine head. His fringe flops. She has the feeling that, if he thought he could get away with it, he might examine his nails.
She rests her arms on the shiny wood of the reception desk and leans forward, hoping her posture is indicative of a woman who is not likely to move away before she has been accommodated.
He gives a sigh that contains only the merest hint of melodrama. ‘Let me see what I can do …’ He taps away. ‘I could give you a reduced rate on a compact double. No view.’
The compact double has just enough room to walk around the bed, and when she looks out of the window, it is into the brick blank of a building she could touch with the flat of her hand if she lifted the sash and leaned out. But she can afford it for another three nights.
She walks a lot. She walks around the shops, the brash, loud chain stores in the Churchill Shopping Centre, where she passes clothes she isn’t looking at along the rails. In the pretty little Lanes, she pauses and stares into boutique windows, looking at the cashmere wraps in skin colours and shoes displayed at angles and chunky necklaces that look so cheap they must be really, really expensive. Occasionally, looking in those windows, she wonders about going inside, just to warm up, but the women behind the counters look back at her in a welcoming manner. She doesn’t want anyone to speak to her; she doesn’t want anyone to be friendly.
At least once each day, she goes down to the beach and stomps along it for a while, tipping forward as she forges against the wind, clenched and braced, enjoying the crunch and sink of the stones beneath her feet, until she is pleasantly exhausted and takes refuge in a café where she sips hot tea from a polystyrene cup and does some more staring. Staring is my job now, she thinks. I’m getting really good at it. This will work, she thinks. Walk all day. Watch telly in my compact cube in the evenings. Go to bed early.
Just before she goes to sleep each night, she picks up her phone from the bedside table and looks at it without turning it on, feeling the shape of it in her hand, the weight of all the messages accumulating inside. She puts it inside the drawer, next to the Gideon Bible, and closes the drawer very gently, as if the phone is a small, sleeping animal and she doesn’t want to risk disturbing it.
On the third morning, as she is crossing the foyer on her way to the breakfast room, the pale young man calls her over, ‘Miss Crossley,’ he says.
She greets him with a smile. They are almost old friends now. She struck up a proper conversation with him the day before, after she lost her key card on one of the beach walks. He ended up confiding in her that his wife is expecting twins, that she is from Romania, and they met over karaoke, that he is excited but nervous about becoming a father. She has worked out that his supercilious air is borne out of a touching if misplaced belief that the hotel he works for is quite posh. ‘Morning,’ she says, cheerily.
He hands over a hotel envelope. ‘Your brother left this for you.’
She takes it with an automatic hand and turns away, scarcely registering the young man’s brief look of disappointment that she doesn’t say thank you, when they got on so well the day before. She grips the letter in her hand as she crosses the foyer, and her knees are weak as she stands waiting for a table at the entrance to the breakfast room. Later, she will query her actions at that point, how swiftly she defaulted to automatic pilot, how normal that felt.
She doesn’t speak to the young woman who leads her to her table, hardly hears her as she puts the menu in front of her and reminds her to help herself to the continental buffet if she’d like fruit or cereal before her cooked option. She opens the envelope with shaking fingers and sees that inside it is a hotel compliment slip, folded in two. She unfolds it as the young woman pours her coffee, and doesn’t even acknowledge her with a look.
The compliment slip has four words on it, in blue biro.
I am you, remember?
Maria thinks, then, of how when her train arrived in Brighton three days ago, she felt such pleasure at the fact that the station was a terminus – she had come to the end of the line, the edge of the country, and from now on it was the open sea. And it is with a solid and unsurprised kind of feeling, a cold feeling, quite devoid of emotion or panic, that she looks out of the breakfast-room window and sees, standing on the steps of the hotel and looking right at her, a compact young man in a dark-grey coat, staring at her with a smile. He isn’t her brother.
The world closes down, as if a lid is being brought down on a coffin. She can almost hear the thump of the nails being hammered in. In the tiny, box-like room, with the view of the brick wall, Matthew guides her by her elbow to the bed and sits her down. She has the irrational thought that this would not be happening if she was still in the room with the view – as if, somehow, that would have enabled her to fly out to sea. He sits next to her and strokes the side of her face with the backs of his fingers while she looks straight ahead. He talks to her very gently, explains how disappointed he is, how sad he was when he came home to her note, how his first thought was to go down to the canal and sit by the side of it and slash his wrists and throw himself into the water with stones in his pockets to weigh him down. Was that what she wanted? Was it? He has missed her so much. He has been crazy with worry.
Afterwards, they lie together under the shiny eiderdown. He has pulled her close, and his skin feels clammy against hers – the room is stuffy. ‘The thing is,’ he says. ‘I am you. And you are me. We can never be separated Maria, because we are the same person. Don’t you remember? I told you. You were only half a person when we met. And then we met, and we joined, and we became a whole thing, and that’s the way it will always be. We can’t exist without each other.’
She lies next to him, breathing steadily. It has not been too bad so fa
r. There will be more to come later, in two weeks or six weeks or six months. It will come, then. This is only postponement.
She props her head up on one elbow and turns to him, managing a smile. ‘How did you find me?’ she says, still smiling, as if it has all been an enormous game, and that is when his hand comes at her from nowhere, to grab the underside of her chin and force her head back against the headboard with a bang.
The pale young man who works behind reception is still on duty when Matthew comes to check Maria out of her room. Maria and Matthew have come down from the room together, but Maria sits and waits in the armchair on the far side of the lobby, her beanie hat pulled down low.
Matthew stands at the reception desk tapping the edge of his credit card on it while the pale young man looks at his computer.
‘No, it’s all paid for,’ the pale young man says, ‘your sister paid in advance when she checked in, didn’t she mention that?’ He glances past Matthew’s shoulder, across the lobby to where Maria sits, looking at the door.
‘Oh,’ says Matthew, giving a final brisk tap and slipping the card back into a pocket, ‘No, she didn’t, she must have forgotten.’ He slides the key card across the table. ‘We’re all done then.’
‘Was everything OK for your sister?’ the pale young man asks, looking down at Matthew and tipping his head very slightly to one side.
Matthew stretches a smile without parting his lips. ‘Lovely,’ he says, ‘she’s had a lovely break.’
Matthew crosses the lobby and takes Maria by her arm and guides her out of the main entrance, holding her backpack in the other hand. His car is parked in the small car park right in front of the entrance to the hotel.
As they reach the car, he stops and turns her to him, then moves his hand up to the back of her head. He laces his fingers in her hair and pulls her face towards his and kisses her with all the passion of a drowning man. Maria hears a passer-by, an elderly voice say, fondly, as Matthew’s teeth clash against hers, ‘Oh, look …’
