‘Stay here,’ said the driver. ‘This is a good hotel. It’s better for you.’
The hotel owner didn’t speak any English, or he wasn’t joining in.
‘We don’t want to say here,’ said my girlfriend.
‘Yes,’ said the taxi driver. ‘You do.’
‘No. We do not.’
What followed was a fair amount of back and forth until I played what I hoped was our best card and flat-out demanded that he drive us to the offices of the transport police in Heraklion right now. I might even have banged on the table. It was impressive stuff.
And it did the trick.
‘Fine, of course, if that’s what you want. I’m just trying to help you,’ said the driver as we followed him out to his car, as if this had been his attitude all along.
Here’s what I did next. Under the advice of the recently discovered hard thing inside me, I sat behind the driver for the return journey. With what seems now to be a disturbingly icy and detached sense of clarity, I positioned myself so that I could quite easily get my arm around his neck to restrain or strangle him if I felt that to be necessary, and from there could go on to kick at the steering wheel and run us off the road if I needed to. I should say that I was completely prepared to do these things, and wasn’t panicked. It felt like there was a current running through me, but I was focused, still, practical. I’d never found myself functioning in this mode before, and have never experienced it since. I remember assessing the situation, not like a chess player but like something with a mouth full of sharp teeth. The driver had to face forwards, operate the car, keep his eyes on the road. I was behind him. I had an overwhelming advantage. I remember thinking that – I have an overwhelming advantage. Thinking about it now is still unsettling.
Thankfully, the driver did take us exactly where we wanted to go, all the while explaining that he was only trying to help us out. He pulled up in front of the transport police building in Heraklion and then offered to drive us to the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story, as it was just a couple of blocks away.
‘Okay, yes. You should do that. Thanks,’ said my girlfriend, struggling to find the right words for the situation.
A minute or two later, we were standing on the pavement outside the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story, catching our breath and being pleased, more or less, with how we’d handled things. It was our first real challenge, and we’d asserted ourselves, come out the other side feeling like seasoned, capable travellers.
We went inside.
My girlfriend began to notice it straightaway, but it took me a little longer. At that point, I was still preoccupied with what had happened, and still thinking over the scary operating mode I’d found myself running in on the return journey. Its existence went against a lot of the things I’d always thought about myself, and I could see there would need to be some time and thought to integrate it into the overall picture.
Preoccupied as I was with these thoughts, it took me a few moments to pick up on the look my girlfriend was giving me.
The look said what the fuck?
I raised my eyebrows. What?
She tipped her head towards the receptionist.
At first I didn’t understand what she wanted me to see. The young woman looked normal enough, though she gave us a couple of nervous glances while trying to do something with the check-in computer. Moments later, it became clear that she couldn’t get it to work. What was that look? Was she embarrassed? Finally, she gave up and began searching around for what eventually turned out to be a cupboard full of room keys.
Why couldn’t she find the room keys?
That’s when I saw what my girlfriend was trying to tell me.
My stomach lurched a little – the realisation was so strange.
This woman was dressed as a receptionist and standing at a hotel reception, but she wasn’t a receptionist. She was pretending. She’d been standing here, in uniform, pretending to do a job that she didn’t actually do.
Why?
I looked around the lobby seriously for the first time.
We were standing in a large, grand building. Opulent. Faded.
Dotted around the place in small groups were perhaps a dozen older Greek men in suits. They were all staring at us. Staring a little aggressively, I thought, but much more than that, staring with surprise and incomprehension. The way you might stare if a pair of zebras wandered in off the street.
And another thing, when I turned back to the reception, I saw that it wasn’t just clean and orderly as I’d first supposed; it was sparse, under-dressed – it looked like a set.
This might sound crazy but my now ex-girlfriend and I have talked about this a lot in the fifteen years since it happened and we’re both of the same opinion: the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story had put a lot of effort into appearing to be a hotel, but it wasn’t a hotel at all. It was something else entirely. What? We still have no idea.
Various people have suggested all the obvious things – a gangster hang-out or some sort of front for a criminal operation, a brothel – but none of these feels right; these explanations seem too straightforward, too recognisable, and this wasn’t that at all, this was something other.
Imagine wandering into a David Lynch movie, or into the Overlook Hotel during the Jack-Nicholson’s-losing-his-mind part of The Shining. That’s the closest I’ve ever been able to come to describing the experience. It felt unsettling; it felt all wrong.
After the not-receptionist had found us a room key, a not-porter – equally confused and horrified – had shown us upstairs, through empty, silent, shabby corridors, to our room.
The room was about as convincing as the reception.
We slid a chest of drawers in front of the door and didn’t sleep very much.
In the night there was a series of loud bangs, but no sounds of movement, no mumbled voices of any other guests. For a hotel, it was very quiet indeed.
Early the next morning, we headed into Heraklion to cash in some travellers cheques.
‘And what hotel are you staying in?’ asked the cashier.
‘The-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story,’ my girlfriend said.
The cashier stopped writing. I can still see this so clearly – she stopped writing and looked up at us slowly with barely disguised alarm.
‘The-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story?’
‘Yes,’ said my girlfriend. ‘Why? Is there something wrong?’
‘No, no, no,’ the cashier backtracked with a nervous breeziness. ‘Of course not. It is a very nice hotel.’
We wandered through the streets in silence for a little while after that.
Eventually, my girlfriend said, ‘I’m trying to help you.’
‘What?’
‘I’m trying to help you. That’s what the taxi driver kept saying over and over to us yesterday, wasn’t it?’
It was.
Oh shit. It really was.
‘I think we should get our bags,’ I said.
‘I think so, too.’
And reader, that’s exactly what we did.
STEVEN HALL is a writer working in books, TV, audio drama, and digital/interactive storytelling. His first and only novel, The Raw Shark Texts, has been translated into 30 languages and has successfully avoided becoming a film on several occasions. In 2013, he was named as one of Granta magazine’s Best Young British Novelists.
Sleepless in Samoa
MANDY SAYER
It was supposed to have been a romantic week in the tropics, all expenses paid. My boyfriend, Louis, was researching Western Samoa for a screenplay he was about to write, commissioned by an Australian film producer. We hadn’t been together long, about nine months, and were still swimming in the early waves of lust. I packed vintage pornography and a satin bag filled with recently purchased sex toys.
On the plane I was introduced to some of the more unusual
aspects of Samoan culture: a native returning home was so morbidly obese, due to an unhealthy Western diet, that he could not fit into the toilet cubicle. Two resigned attendants came to his rescue, holding up blankets around him in the aisle while he dropped his trousers and aimed his piss through the open door and into the bowl. Beside us sat a perfectly coiffed female impersonator, replete with false eyelashes, heavy make-up, and bee-stung lips. Louis later explained to me that the person was a fa’afafine, a boy who’d been raised from birth as a girl, not unusual in Polynesia, especially if a family has no daughters. Most of them made a living in Samoa by performing in cabarets.
We landed on the island of Upolo late at night. Through the open windows of the bus from the airport, I glimpsed traditional thatched huts, bamboo pavilions, and market gardens. The air was cool and fragrant with the scent of frangipani. No wonder Robert Louis Stevenson had chosen to live and write here, I thought. The place was an exquisite paradise.
At the registration counter of the famous Aggie Grey’s Hotel, we were the last to check in, and were assigned the final available fale, or traditional hut, in the complex. It was so far away from the main building, however, that we were unable to find it on a map, a piece of paper so riddled with circles and squiggly paths that it looked like an Aboriginal dot painting. After returning to Reception, perplexed and confused, we were assigned a teenage porter who led us on a ten-minute walk along labyrinthine tracks until we reached the chain-link fence that bordered the property. Here, at the end of the very last row of huts, was our very own fale, built in the shape of a hexagon and thatched with palm leaves. I didn’t mind being so far from the hotel’s restaurants and swimming pools; the distance would be a bonus, I reasoned, and would provide us with even more privacy and peace.
At dawn the next morning, I was awakened by a loud, industrial throb that sounded like a semi-trailer idling beside the hut. As I crawled out of bed, I could sense the fale and the floorboards beneath my bare feet vibrating. Was it an earthquake? I wondered. I opened the door and stuck my head outside: in the light of day, on the other side of the chain-link fence I could see a rudimentary building made of corrugated iron and a sign that read Bottling Factory.
Louis pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt and went to complain at the front desk. Twenty minutes later, he returned wet with sweat and told me he’d been fobbed off by the staff, whose ability to speak and understand English had mysteriously escaped them. One attendant, however, had managed to explain, in halting pidgin, that the bottling plant only operated between 6am and 6pm every day, and so shouldn’t interfere with our sleep at night. The relentless revving grew louder, combined with the occasional din of shattering glass. We showered, dressed, and fled the fale. After breakfast in one of the hotel pavilions, we took a stroll downtown, following the curve of Apia Harbour. Curiously, for such a hot climate, and in such glare-filled light, there were few awnings or trees to shade the streets. I’d forgotten to bring a hat and yet every store we entered had none in stock. And then I realised that the obese man on the plane the night before had not been an anomaly: just about everywhere I looked, I saw islanders so overweight that some were hyperventilating and finding it difficult to walk.
We bought some local newspapers and retired by the pool back at Aggie Grey’s. I read that the city was experiencing a feral dog problem, with mongrels roaming the streets and attacking pedestrians in packs. I also read that recently there’d been a series of unsolved murders on the island and that local authorities believed the fatalities were linked. While I cooled off in the pool, Louis made another complaint at Reception about the infernal noise filling our fale, again to no avail.
After dinner that night we decided to have a cocktail in the hotel bar. We hadn’t drained our first martini glasses, however, before another two were promptly delivered to our table. I glanced up at the waiter, puzzled. ‘Those men over there wanted to buy you a drink’, he said, and nodded toward three smiling young men a few tables across, obviously islanders, with broad, sinewy shoulders and necks as thick as palm trunks. We raised the glasses to them and nodded a thank you, and they nodded back. Louis immediately told the waiter to deliver another set of cocktails back to them, whatever they were drinking. Minutes later, the men walked over with their drinks and joined us, shaking our hands and introducing themselves. Originally from Samoa, they were cousins who now lived in Sydney, but who’d travelled back to Apia to settle a land dispute. One man, Paul, was set to inherit his father’s side of a particular mountain, a parcel of land that had been passed down in his family, from generation to generation, to the first-born male, for hundreds of years. The only problem was proving it to the Western courts without the benefit of written deeds. Paul also told us that in Australia he lived in Frederick St in Sydenham, and that he worked in building scaffolding for a man called Tom Domican. Paul bought us another round of drinks and then insisted that we come and stay with his family and experience the true Samoan culture. His grandmother would cook for us and he’d take us to some secret beaches that weren’t on tourist maps. He pressed his phone number, written on a coaster, into my hand and made me promise to call him the following day. Louis bundled me out of the bar and into the cool night air. ‘Well, wasn’t he nice?’ I remarked, weaving tipsily along a path beneath flowering vines. ‘I’d rather stay with his family than in that noisy hut.’
Louis linked his arm in mine and drew me closer to him. He explained that he, too, had once lived in Frederick St in Sydenham, on the same side of the road as Tom Domican’s boss, Neddy Smith, who was a notorious Sydney drug trafficker, thief, and murderer. ‘When Paul says he’s into scaffolding with Tom, it doesn’t mean he’s in the construction business.’ I paused and asked him what he meant. ‘Scaffolding is a euphemism. Paul’s one of Neddy’s standover guys and does his dirty work for him. We’re not ringing him tomorrow. We’re staying the fuck away from him.’
At dawn the next morning I was rudely awakened again by the industrial throb of the bottling plant. I thought of Paul’s generous offer to stay with his family, but quickly dismissed it, particularly after a wave of nausea rose through me and I ran for the toilet to throw up. I felt my face flare with fever; sweat rolled down my temples and cheeks. I wiped my face and retched into the toilet again. My elbows and knees began to burn. Had someone slipped a mickey into my drink the night before or was my unexpected illness merely a coincidence? I groaned and staggered back to bed.
‘Fuck this,’ said Louis, after he’d risen, showered, and shaved. Since we’d arrived, he’d complained about the bottling plant noise several times, but the staff at Reception had continued to pretend that they did not understand him. He swept out the door and returned twenty minutes later with two male porters, who proceeded to collect our luggage and convey it along the winding paths and narrow lanes, with Louis and me following, until we came to the main building of the hotel complex. We trailed the porters up a flight of stairs and onto the second floor. One unlocked a door and we were ushered into a huge suite with floor-to-ceiling windows. There were separate living and dining areas, a kitchen, bedroom, modern bathroom, and, most importantly, air conditioning. A wide terrace ran the length of the apartment, affording stunning views of Apia Harbour. ‘This best room in hotel,’ assured one of the porters. ‘This best room on island.’ Before they left, Louis palmed them each a tip.
By this time I was so dizzy and disoriented that I staggered into the bedroom and sat on a sofa. Louis sat beside me and rested a hand on my forehead.
‘How the hell did you manage this?’ I asked, gesturing vaguely around the apartment. ‘A bribe?’
Louis grinned and shook his head. ‘I told them I was writing a travel article for the Sydney Morning Herald about Samoa and their hotel. Suddenly, for some reason, they could understand my English perfectly.’
The cool air and silence were a blessed relief. Louis returned to the living room and I decided to take a nap. I pulled the satin bag of sex toys from my case, popped them into
a bedside drawer, and collapsed onto the queen-sized four-poster. There would be no love-making today or tonight, or even the following morning. I was still wracked with nausea and my joints were on fire.
The next four days passed in a hallucinogenic spiral of sweating, spewing, and shitting. I was unable to eat and so began subsisting on martinis and Panadol. The only reception I could find on the TV was a cable channel that showed one movie repeatedly on a loop. Called Pay it Forward, it was about the karmic fortune gained by committing good deeds to virtual strangers. I continued to read the local papers daily, following updates on the feral dog epidemic, and the recent spate of unexplained murders. A wife and mother of two had been discovered the day before, stabbed to death on her kitchen floor. The woman had had no known enemies and the police, perplexed, could find no motivation. A concerned neighbour, however, had seen a blonde-haired woman running from the crime scene and escaping on a child’s bicycle.
Louis spent most of his time in the living room, researching Samoan history. The screenplay he was writing was an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Beach of Falesa, which Stevenson had written in his home, only a few miles away. The story was about a European man who gets conned into marrying a local girl who secretly is cursed. Louis, too, read the papers each day and discovered an advertisement for a cabaret show, featuring the local fa’afafine exotic beauties, at one of the nearby hotels. We hadn’t experienced any Samoan culture since we’d arrived five days before and so that night I forced myself from bed, showered, and dressed, and accompanied him to the event.
The show was to take place inside a long pavilion with a stage at one end. We sat at a bamboo table at the front and ordered martinis. Curtain Up was advertised for 8pm sharp, but by 9.05 the black velvet drapes remained unmoved. After ordering our third cocktail, we heard some yelling from the back of the pavilion and presently a drag queen in her mid-40s, wearing fishnets and a sequined miniskirt, came clacking in high heels down the aisle, calling to someone behind her, ‘Fuckin’ hurry up!’ We turned to see a chubby white man in his late 20s, wearing cargo pants and runners, struggling to carry all of her luggage and equipment: a 1950s beauty case, a cassette player, several garment bags trailing feather boas. They both ran up the stairs and disappeared backstage. Five minutes later, music began to swell through the pavilion and she appeared from behind the curtain and introduced herself as Fifi. She was wearing a red satin gown, her black beehive sitting like a turret on her head, and holding a microphone. But when she recognised the opening trumpets to Shirley Bassey’s ‘Big Spender’, she lifted the mike and yelled backstage, ‘Not that one, you stupid cunt! The other one! My opening!’
Better Than Fiction 2 Page 13
