‘Hello?’ I called out, but only the empty echoes of ghosts replied.
I walked over to the closest pool. The side that faced the centre of the room began as staggered steps, descending into the pool’s conservative depths - at a maximum of five feet, this was for relaxing in, not swimming. The water lapped at the toes of my shoes. I dipped my finger up to its knuckle; it was pleasantly warm, like a bath run just right.
A shame then - though not surprising - that I hadn’t packed my swimming trunks.
I made a quick trip up and down the length of the spa room. Nobody. And if someone was in the changing rooms they’d left no ripples on the water, and were making no sounds that I could hear.
Go on, live a little, a tiny voice in my head told me. I wasn’t going to get many more chances, after all.
I kicked off my shoes, not worrying if I scuffed the heels. I bundled my jacket, tie and shirt in a neat pile atop the nearest bench. Then my trousers and socks joined them. And then, checking one last time that nobody was watching, and my hammering heart insisting that somebody would come through those suctioned double doors at any second, I wrenched off my boxers and sprinted into the pool.
That was more like it. The thrill I’d expected back at my bedroom window was not quite at its peak, but there was something. And at least something was better than that dull numbness, that dumb, hellish nothingness. What did it matter if I got caught, anyway? After that night there would be no repercussions, no consequences, no guilt or shame or reason.
I let myself float. I was in a bathtub built for standing, in liquid heat rising up to my head. It was calming, serene. I’d been letting my hands rest atop the surface like a man overboard at sea, so I let my body rise too. And there I lay, the front of my body bobbing in and out of the water, letting the moment wash over me.
Peace. No sound but the gentle lapping of waves at the side of the pool - waves that I alone had spread.
This time I let the memories come, watching them climb over my defences and leave me open. I thought of Chloe, of her shoulder-length brown hair and mousey smile, of the feeling of my hand running over the slopes and curves of her body. The way her eyes turned young and bright when she’d see me cross a crowd towards her. And then I thought of Sam and felt guilty that he wasn’t the first to arrive in my mind, as if I was putting them on a stage and ranking them. My son. My only boy. I saw him as a newborn, saw him as a toddler, and saw the beginnings of the man he would have become, even at four. I saw his boyish grin, his lion’s mane of dark and ever-knotted hair, his scattergun freckles which sure as hell didn’t come from my side of the family.
But those memories were fleeting, gone as quickly and as soon as they flashed into focus. The hourglass was empty, and something had to fill the space. A something that was as inevitable as it was torturous.
Though I was deep in the waters of the hot bath, I felt a sudden chill. Flakes of snow drifted down around my head, settling on my shoulders. I tried to shake the memory from my mind, but the more I shook the more it dug its claws in, growing to fill its space like a toxic gas. I could see it all as clearly as if I was still there, still walking towards the car exactly three years ago to the day.
My breath rose like smoke from a Victorian factory, reminding me of the habit I’d shaken back in my mid-twenties. My hands, clad in thick woollen gloves, held a plastic bag in which hung three bottles of water, a bag of chocolate buttons and a box of nicotine patches. I may have quit the smokes easily enough, but Chloe struggled. Over my head was plunged a deerstalker, for reasons I could not fathom. Certainly none related to fashion.
The car watched me cross the lot. I’d parked it next to one of the pumps, and as the only patron of the petrol station I’d been spoilt for choice. Whilst all around it the snow was building into fields of white, the forecourt’s roof shielded its grey and oily concrete, so that it resembled a solitary and final full stop on a blank page. Its neon lights danced out across a lonely night sky, waving at the stars.
Who would have thought it would snow in April? That would teach us for planning a family getaway to Scotland rather than Barcelona. And a harsh and violent lesson it would be, too.
Drawing closer I could see Chloe going through her handbag, searching for what turned out to be tissues. Two hours into the north and she’d developed a cold. Standard. She smiled at me through the glass, though it was as much a question as it was happiness. I nodded and raised the plastic bag a little. Her grin became more natural; no more cravings for Chloe.
Sam was in the back seat, trying to use the lights of the petrol station to read his Spider-Man comic book. He was angling it towards the window and craning his neck to make out the pictures. How ironic that I wouldn’t buy him a reading torch for the back of the car, in case it distracted me while I was driving. He looked up at me and waved as if I was returning from a stint abroad in the army rather than just popping into the shop; I reached into the bag and brought out the packet of chocolate buttons. His face lit up, an image that seems burned into my retinas for all I can do to stop remembering it.
And as I watched myself pull the handle on the car door, all I could do was scream not to open it, not to get in, not to turn the key in the ignition… Not to drive away down that icy narrow road. Yet still I did, unheeding. Still I drove off on that cold and fateful night.
I heard not a crash but a splash.
I jerked myself upright, no longer standing in the icy throes of Glencoe but the warm and once-soothing soak of Le Petit Monde’s bath. All I could hear now was the gentle lapping of pool water - the ripples left after something deadly has snaked its way into the deep.
But to my left and my surprise I saw not the tail of some underwater beast or the sinister horned spine of a crocodile lurking up from the London sewers. A head stuck out from the water two pools from mine, female and blonde and looking at me with a silent blankness.
Perhaps it was my nerves, perhaps it was the way her hair was slicked back and down the sides of her face, but it took a good few seconds before I recognised her as the woman from out on the hotel steps. It took another few seconds for me to remember that a man staring at somebody in an otherwise deserted spa could be deemed worrisome at the best of times, let alone if said man had been lying naked on his back only moments before. I started to feel an itchy antsy feeling crawl up inside of me.
I looked away, watching my toes shimmer in the water and putting all my energy into wishing I could dissolve into nothing like candy-floss in a puddle. Then I glanced back up at her. She was still watching me, bobbing there in the water like a beautiful sea mine, her face not moving an inch.
Bloody hell, I thought. How on Earth am I supposed to get out without her seeing me in my birthday suit? Jesus - what if other people come in after her? And why is she just staring at me like that?
Ah. Bugger. She had to walk past me to get to her pool, didn’t she?
‘Don’t do it, George.’
I almost drowned myself in surprise.
‘You hear me, George?’
Yes, believe it or not the woman from the steps was actually talking to me. Her words flowed in silky French tones, soft and slick, each syllable thrown away and forgotten.
‘You don’t have to do it. There are other ways… other paths. I could show you how to walk them, if you’d let me.’
Her eyeliner was smudged and running, but it only made her all the more mesmerising. She was floating a little higher in her pool now, or perhaps standing; I could see rivers and droplets running down her bare and perfect shoulders.
Who knows where the night would have taken me if only I’d been willing to whistle the same tune. I have my suspicions as I’m sure you will too, in time, but I guess we’ll never know for sure as the only thing I could muster as a reply was:
‘I’m sorry, do I know you?’
Still no smile from the mysterious and aquatic Hollywood beauty.
‘Yes, you do. But perhaps you don’t, and certainly not yet.’
I was starting to feel uncomfortable, and not just because of my temporary deficit in swimming attire. Forget her movie-star appearance; if there’s such a thing as a crazy scale, this woman was coming in on the heavy side.
I was about to sacrifice dignity for the sake of sanity and dart over to my clothes, hands cupped strategically, when I heard more sounds of splashing from across her way.
She was rising out of the pool, her back towards me, turning her head to look back at me one final time.
‘When one door closes, a window opens. Don’t forget that.’
She walked up the steps leading from the depths of the pool and good God - I’d say she was wearing nothing but a smile, but she seemed to have left even that in the changing rooms. I felt a supernova erupt somewhere inside my stomach, felt its fire run through every nerve of my body. I watched the water run from off her like African waterfalls. I watched it rush over curves of young and flawless skin that I knew a man of my calibre had never been destined to see. But whilst my breathing grew heavy and my head started to pound, it was not lust that washed over me but a choking guilt. To be wanting someone so badly, and so totally, on that day of all days… It felt like a betrayal. And three years or not, to me it was exactly that. My eyes were glued to this naked starlet and yet all I could see was Chloe, smiling that questioning smile from the passenger side window of my Honda Civic.
I shook my head, pinched the bridge of my nose and scrunched shut my eyes. I was sure I was imagining it; that I was alone in the spa, that no woman was trying to tempt me with riddles and skin. But when I looked up again there she was, wrapping a towel around herself, walking away without so much as a single glance back towards me. It was as if she’d been alone in the pool… as if our conversation had never taken place at all.
She passed through the opposite set of suction-heavy doors and was gone.
I stayed in that water for a good while longer, wondering what in the name of all things unholy was going on in that goddamn cursed hotel. Ever since I’d woken that evening things had gone from strange to stranger still. I didn’t want people to pity me, or tell me that they knew me, or even to tell me that I knew them. I just wanted to be left alone, and clearly the only place I could guarantee that was in my room.
Looking like a wrinkled manatee with legs I climbed out of the pool and hurried my way over to my clothes. The fresh towels made light work of the wet and soon I was dry enough to check my watch. It had just gone eleven.
Christ, have I really been down here for that long?
Then it struck me. It had been a dream. The memories, the woman, the gap in time; I must have fallen asleep whilst floating in the water, carried by a current of my own making, carried far, far away from there or anywhere.
Sure. You just keep on telling yourself that, Georgie-boy.
I pulled my clothes on in a hurry. My shirt stuck to my shoulder, where I’d missed a spot when towelling off. My socks seemed to have shrunk and were fighting back against my ankles. I rustled my hands through my hair, trying to give it something that might have been mistaken as shape, in a dim room.
And then, still standing still amongst the silence and hoping things would stay that way, I marched a path towards the twenty-eighth room on the sixth floor, the room where everything would come to an end.
Despite all the charm of an old fashioned key, a swipe or scan keycard really is more convenient. Although all keycards are required by international law not to work until you’ve tried all four angles of approach twice over, at least you don’t look like a pillock so inept he can’t even turn a key in a door. Everyone assumes you’re either a thief, a moron, or both.
Nobody was there to see me struggle to get back into room 628, but I was more than capable of making myself feel more worthless than a shadow in the dark.
‘Goddamn piece-of-rubbish idiot,’ I said, my frustration growing on a parabolic scale, not sure whether I was talking to myself or the key. It flapped uselessly in the hollow of the lock, spinning like a lame drill, the tumblers rising and falling but nothing settling into place. I’d had enough of that weird hotel, and was about two seconds from marching back downstairs to give that broom-handle of a concierge a piece of my mind when finally the lock clicked open. I took a couple of deep breaths so that my anger might subside, then walked inside.
Immediately I slumped into the armchair, unravelling my tie and throwing it across the bedcovers. I undid the top two buttons of my shirt, opening a V. And I reached across the table, past the telephone with its neat list of hotel contacts, to my black leather briefcase, ready to pop the locks and open myself to its contents.
My hand reached into nothingness.
I patted the wooden face of the table where my briefcase should have been, my eyes wide with panic. I knew I’d left it there; I hadn’t touched it since before I’d taken my nap and it had been there when I’d gone downstairs for dinner. Believe me, I would have noticed. There’d never been a day when I hadn’t been aware of what was rattling around inside those leather walls, or a day when I’d not known where I’d left it, that day in Le Petit Monde least of all.
My heart was working overtime and I felt ready to throw up. It was like waking up to find your stomach was missing. Or all of your teeth. Somebody had crept up and stolen a part of me whilst I wasn’t looking.
‘No, no, no,’ I wailed, jumping to my feet and pacing around the room. I checked under the table - nothing. I searched the sides of the bed - nothing. I even looked under the bedcovers - nothing. The sheets hadn’t been made, so housekeeping couldn’t have moved it by mistake.
I was close to tears. My whole world was in that case. I could bear all the unease and oddities of the hotel; I could bear the strange visitors; I could bear nothing going how I’d imagined or planned. But everything was for nothing if I couldn’t get that briefcase back before midnight, if I couldn’t remember Chloe and Sam in the way that spoke most to me.
With a rumble and a crack the doors to the bathroom flew open, smashing into the wall and rebounding on their tracks. A man bolted from out behind them and made for the front door, the bottom half of his face masked by a black scarf which trailed down the back of his even blacker jacket. By the time I’d clocked what he had in his hand he’d already thrown open the front door and was sprinting down the corridor.
It was the briefcase, of course. My briefcase.
For the first time in years I ran (if you don’t count when I almost missed the 7:40 to Manchester that one time), and I ran damn hard. I ignored the growing pain in my chest and the hoarseness that mounted in my throat as my lungs bunched tighter and tighter like a boxer’s fist. I ignored the weight of my stomach as its subtle overhang lurched up and down over my belt. I raced out the door and looked right just in time to see the thief turn left into another identical corridor.
I picked up my pace again, not allowing my body enough time to file an official complaint. I turned the corner too and saw him halfway down, fiddling with a set of keys as if his life depended on it. Which it did. I was mad enough to kill, or at least make the bastard wish he’d never been born. The fingers around the handle of my briefcase certainly wouldn’t be doing much more gripping going forwards, that was for sure.
I barrelled down towards him, screaming at him to stop. I was ready to rugby-tackle him to the floor if necessary, though that was largely because I hadn’t a clue how I was going to slow myself down now that I had built up speed.
I was close enough to smell a faintly familiar waft of cologne when the culprit got his door open.
Before it slammed shut behind him I got a glimpse of the room beyond. Only, what I saw made no sense; there was no mini hallway, like there was in my room, and no bed or bathroom or generic paintings hanging on the walls. Instead there was a blinding light and dancing shades of colour, and a great noise as if he’d disappeared into a party, a party that turned silent the moment it went out of sight.
‘You get your arse back out here, you littl
e prick,’ I yelled, hammering at the door. It made no difference; it did not open and there came no sound from the other side. ‘Give me back my briefcase!’
A less angry man might have considered how ridiculous this must have seemed to anybody peering out from their own room. But I was angry beyond thought, angry and alone standing outside the door to 608, all that mattered stolen from me, and all my best and fateful plans torn up and scattered in the wind.
Chapter Five
‘And you’re saying this man stole your… briefcase?’
‘Yes! He broke into my room, stole my briefcase and ran away to room six-oh-eight. What about this do you have trouble understanding?’
Pierre’s eyes left me in no doubt that he was having no difficulty at all in understanding what I was saying. He just didn’t choose to believe it. His arms were crossed, his eyebrows furrowed. His thin moustache seemed to curl into a question mark.
‘I’m just trying to figure out why, sir. And you say you don’t know who the man was, only that he had the keys to room 608?’
‘No, of course I don’t know who he is,’ I replied, feeling my head grow woozy from the stress. The hands on my watch were stepping closer and closer to midnight, as were those of the clock hanging behind the reception desk. ‘And besides, he had a scarf or something wrapped around his head. What kind of man steals another man’s briefcase, anyway? A degenerate, that’s what. He’s probably a pervert, too.’
Checking Out- The Complete Trilogy Page 5
