Hotel Alpha

by Mark Watson

  ‘For the love of Christ!’ the person burst out.

  There was no ignoring that. I asked if I could help.

  ‘Do you know anything about computers?’

  ‘I’m not bad.’

  ‘This laptop was working half an hour ago. Now I can’t … it won’t turn on.’

  ‘Are you trying to connect to the net?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said the woman, ‘I’m just trying to get the computer on so I can type something up quite urgently.’ Her voice was posh and precise. It sounded like she was secretly furious at the way things were unfolding, but containing the fury with a decorous effort. There was something interesting about her smell: it provoked a thought which I could not quite access.

  ‘Is it the battery?’

  ‘Fully charged. I always have it charged. Maybe the hard drive’s packed up or something. Oh, shitty hell.’

  The expression made me want to laugh, but it was hard to tell quite how much force was behind it.

  ‘What exactly is the thing you need to write up?’

  ‘It’s a piece,’ she said. ‘I’m a journalist. But there’s two thousand words of stuff already on that machine. I’ll have to use one of these computers and try to remember what I wrote before. Christ, it’s going to take me all night. Do you work here?’

  I told her I did; it was easier than explaining. Her swivel chair squeaked as she moved closer to me and I suddenly got a much clearer impression of her. Her breaths were audible; she clicked or tutted while thinking. Like Howard, I gathered, she was a noise-maker, she commanded space. As to her smell: it was salty and shiny, somehow elemental, like the sheer smell of flesh, the stuff of a person. That must be it, I realized: no perfume. It was almost like a feeling, a touch, rather than being a smell at all.

  ‘Feel free to ignore me,’ I said, ‘but if you want some help typing it up, I can do two thousand words from dictation in, I would think, well under an hour.’

  ‘Are you busting my balls?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Why would you want to help me?’

  ‘Well, just if you need a hand.’

  ‘It’s pretty boring stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s about Iraq.’

  ‘I don’t call that boring. I’m writing about cross-trainers.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Exactly. I’m Chas, by the way. Who do you write for?’

  ‘Kathleen. I’m freelance, but this will go in the Independent.’

  Should we shake hands? I hoped not. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her, anyhow. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  By way of an answer I flexed my typing fingers. My head was low over the keys, my shoulders hunched, as they had been since she arrived. I hoped she hadn’t had a chance yet to get a proper look at my face, wanting to defer the moment as long as possible.

  ‘It’s daybreak in Basra, in Southern Iraq near the border with Kuwait. Basra is B-A-S…’

  ‘I know it. Don’t worry.’

  For half an hour we worked together. Her subject was the likely invasion of Iraq which – in her view – would spuriously follow on from the current Afghanistan situation. I pretended not to be agog at the idea that I was spying on an opinion piece by a journalist whose words Howard had undoubtedly read out at some point. It was as if a chunk of the Internet had come alive and was talking to me in person. The spell was only broken when Kathleen hesitated in the middle of a paragraph. ‘I’m going to have to look this up, actually,’ she said, ‘or Kirsty will have my balls on a plate.’ Among all the surprise swearing, I particularly liked the way she kept referring to her fictitious testicles. ‘Can you put into the search engine …’

  ‘I’ll let you do it,’ I said, passing the laptop towards her.

  ‘Work has been saved,’ it announced.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Kathleen, ‘my computer doesn’t talk to me like that.’

  The game was up. ‘It’s because I’m blind.’

  ‘You can’t be,’ she said.

  ‘I think I’d know by now if I wasn’t.’

  ‘You’re … actually blind?’

  ‘One hundred per cent.’

  ‘Pissing Christ!’ Kathleen exclaimed.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it.’ I squirmed in my swivel chair, aware of her eyes scouring my warm face.

  ‘But then how the hell can you type like that?’ she asked. ‘And how did I not notice?’

  You didn’t notice because I quite deliberately never moved my face from the screen,’ I said. ‘And I can type like this because, since I first got a computer, I’ve basically done little else. But there’ll be spelling mistakes, I warn you. I have a program which spell-checks out loud, but … ’

  ‘Hang on,’ Kathleen interrupted, ‘are you Chas York, then?’

  ‘How could you know that?’

  ‘What, you don’t think people have heard about you?’ she said. ‘I have got this right, haven’t I? Howard York rescued you from the fire? And you’ve always lived here and now, now you work for that frightening lady?’

  ‘Lara Krohl. Yes, that’s me.’

  ‘Has anyone ever done a profile piece on you?’ she asked.

  ‘I haven’t exactly sought the limelight. I’ve only been out of this building about ten times in my life.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘All right, four. I was trying to sound cool.’

  ‘Fuck a duck.’ She paused, and then: ‘I was just going to ask if you fancied getting a drink once this nonsense is over.’

  I almost thought I’d misheard her, and there was a pause as I tried hastily to chart the currents of excitement and confusion which were swimming around me. She misread my hesitation and began to backtrack.

  ‘But, no big deal, I … ’

  ‘No, that would be … that’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘There’s a bar here.’

  I could hardly believe it even as I held the door open for her a little while later and felt the swish of her skin as she passed me. I had come to this room to avoid meeting people, but the opposite had happened: somebody had entered my life from the great unseen beyond, and – although I tried to hold back the idea – it felt already as if she might stay.

  ‘I still don’t understand how you can manage so well if you literally can’t see a thing.’

  Around us, the end-of-evening noise could have been from almost any night in the bar: words fired at departing companions, lacklustre witticisms, the feeling of life and excitement draining from the place like bathwater. Within half an hour Ray would be starting to shoo the final clingers-on from the premises.

  ‘I manage the same way as you,’ I said, repetition. I know this place like the back of my hand. Better than the back of my hand, in fact. And I pretty much don’t go anywhere else, as I’ve said, so … ’

  ‘But you must want to. You’re obviously interested in the world around you. Don’t you want to travel?’

  I could sense, from the vibration, her legs jiggling back and forth. ‘Well, the universe is kind of theoretical to me. Whether I was in here or in Egypt, it would still be the same thing.’

  ‘Not really. If you went to Egypt, you’d smell the spices in the market, the quality of the air. You’d experience it as a new country just like a sighted person does. You’d hear them shouting from the minarets. You’d smell the sewage in the river.’

  You’re really selling it.’

  She laughed. I didn’t want her to sense how scared I was of everything outside the Alpha; how little appetite I had for it. I took a third large swig of the Prosecco that Kathleen had ordered. There was the brash shock of it in my mouth, and a nearly instant sense of being taken away. I kept a firm hand clasped round the champagne flute: there’d be no mishaps or spillages, no reminder for her that I wasn’t normally in this situation.

  ‘How did you get into journalism?’ It sounded, as I asked it, a hopelessly banal question.

  ‘I went to hack school. I worked for local news, was
hoping to be one of those glamorous war correspondents. But I don’t look right for TV.’

  ‘What do you look like?’

  She snorted a laugh. ‘This must be what it’s like meeting someone on the Internet. Er – dirty blonde hair. Dirty as in colour, not literally. It’s hard to describe yourself, isn’t it? I’ve got a big long nose which is a bit of an obstacle, looks-wise. Normal height. Normal-ish weight; I wouldn’t mind being a bit thinner, but it’s not terminal. I look like a normal twenty-nine-year-old woman, essentially. You can tell I have a gift for describing things.’

  Twenty-nine! Women loved younger men, JD had told me recently, as the preamble to an anecdote which involved him having sex in an aircraft toilet on the way to Los Angeles. At the time I was hardly listening – these stories were ten a penny – but now I wished I had him beside me for guidance. I had no idea what I was doing; whether there was a danger of overplaying my hand or underplaying it, whether I should talk more or just keep taking her in. She told me about places where she’d seen snakes swimming in the drains as she crossed the road; places where they fired guns into the air to celebrate a football result and she thought she was being shot at. There were also places she had been shot at. She’d been to Uzbekistan, Biafra, Greenland; even places I struggled to recall the capitals of. We chatted on into the small pocket of night when the Alpha was truly becalmed, when you could stand in the middle of the atrium and hear only rumours of noise from the balconies above: a cough, the creak of a door.

  ‘It’s gone two,’ she said at last. ‘I’m going to be home at fuck-o’clock.’

  ‘You don’t live around here?’

  ‘Nobody but you lives around here. I’m a writer. I live in Zone one hundred.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ I hazarded. ‘I could get you a key to a room.’

  ‘For free?’

  ‘Of course for free.’

  Boldness had sprung my natural defences and was now running me like a different person altogether. The momentum of this long strange night felt implacable.

  ‘Will they even have a room available?’ asked Kathleen.

  ‘There’s one that will be empty.’

  One of the night team gave me the key to Room 25 without any questions: they were used to the strange hours I kept when sleeplessness came, and used to helping me, as everyone was around here. As Kathleen unlocked the door we were met by a strange coolness. The bedsprings cried out in surprise as she flung herself down and sprang back up again.

  ‘This is amazing. Thank you so much.’

  ‘This room’s always here,’ I said, ‘if you want it.’

  ‘Well, next time I’m nearby … ’

  ‘I hope it’ll be really soon,’ I blurted out, still annoyed by my previous remark: of course the room was always there, where else could it be?

  ‘I’ve got a feeling it might be soon,’ she said. I touched her arm vaguely in response, and we traded goodnights. As soon as I had closed the door behind me and heard the automatic click of the lock, I wondered whether I’d been too formal. Another man would surely have ended up staying in the room with her. Another man would have said smoother things, known how to behave.

  Although the events of the night had barely finished, my brain was already replaying and dissecting them in the jittery manner of a rolling news channel. Soon each replay would be a copy of a copy, and the reality would be a little more elusive. I paused outside the door for a while, gripped by the knowledge that she was in that room, would be undressing.

  I went down in the lift, trying the old trick of foxing my brain with a nearly impossible sum. Kathleen kept swimming into my head, in something closer to a visual form than anyone ever had.

  Kathleen visited three times in the fortnight that followed, and each time I ended up borrowing the key to Room 25 and sitting there as she typed.

  The wall between not knowing somebody and knowing them quite intimately turned out to be startlingly thin. It all became commonplace so fast: the smell of her breath, the thinking-noises she made with tongue and teeth, her muttered curses as she mis-hit a key, the upward curl of her laugh. I was only now starting to realize how much I’d feared the mass of invisible people out there: now that one of them had appeared from the nothingness and was borrowing my laptop, eating my crisps. Each time she left, I wondered – as on the first occasion – if I ought to have pushed my luck a little further.

  After the third visit she told me she was going to Dubai for nine days. It was surprising how long that sounded, and what a superstitious fear welled up inside me. ‘You will look after yourself, won’t you?’

  ‘It’s Dubai,’ she said, signing off with a cheek-kiss. ‘I’ll be in a hotel with other journalists and yuppies on holiday. I’m not going to Mecca to shit on the Koran.’ I ushered her down to the atrium and wished her good luck as we parted; she seemed surprised, even amused. To her, a flight to Dubai was little different to nipping to the shops; to me, going to the shops would feel like a trip to Dubai.

  The first night of the nine I felt a curious combination of boredom and fear. I tried to focus on six different tasks. At ten, around the time her plane should be landing, I found myself back in the atrium mustering the courage to ask Graham for a favour.

  ‘Something for Kathleen?’ There was a certain twinkle in his voice.

  ‘Yes. She’s just a friend.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything to the contrary’

  ‘She’s been using Room 25 – a few times, now. I just wondered whether I could, sort of, requisition it for her. I mean, just on an occasional basis.’

  My discomfort brought a low chuckle out of Graham. ‘On an occasional basis! Are you going to submit a written request?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t really know how you felt about … about Room 25, generally.’

  Graham cleared his throat. ‘Well, the fact is it’s not been used, really, for a long time. Hardly at all, since Ella and … and Agatha.’

  The mention of the two of them, after all this time, made it feel almost inevitable I would ask the question that had never found its opening before.

  ‘Was it coincidence that she and Ella left just like that? So quickly?’

  As soon as it was asked, the question felt as if it had been unavoidable. Yet we had avoided it for a very long time, and while waiting for an answer I half lost my nerve and began to apologize. Graham swept in with his response before I finished. ‘I honestly do not know,’ he said.

  What was behind the flinty emphasis he put on the adverb, and the even greater than usual fullness of his enunciation? Had he disliked my asking the question, or just the mental route it sent him along? With Kathleen, recently, I had felt – like never before – the frustration of having no face to navigate by, of having only tones of voice, and at a moment like this it was even worse. I pictured Graham, his long stooping shoulders, the last person to see my mother alive, perhaps the last person to see Agatha in this building. All this made me want to scuttle away from the conversation, but uncorked curiosity was driving me forward.

  ‘Did Agatha ever leave an address, or … ?’

  ‘She did not,’ Graham said. ‘She said she would probably go to Florida, where she had family; I think I told you that. She did mention getting in touch when things had settled down. But that did not, in the end, happen.’

  ‘I miss her, sometimes. I know it was years ago. It’s just I never had a chance to say goodbye even.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Graham. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  It sounded like he was talking to himself as much as to me; the voice was coming from a new direction – he had turned his back. I heard the row of keys jangling on their fobs like wind chimes as his hand swept through them. ‘I shall give you both keys to 25, and Howard – well, once again, Howard need not know. Not, I’m sure, that he would mind. But he can be a little wary of journalists.’

  ‘She’s not a gossip columnist or anything,’ I said. ‘She’s a foreign correspondent really.’r />
  ‘I have seen her suitcase,’ Graham assured me. ‘It is battered almost beyond recognition as a suitcase. She is a very charming lady, by the way.’

  When I got back to my room, there was a new email. ‘From: Kathleen,’ the computer said, eliding the h and l so the name came out in an unnatural squelch. ‘Message: Landed alive.’

  That was it: just the two words, but a very different feeling from none. I smiled in the dark, imagining her in Room 25 beside me.

  Howard arranged a separate modem for the room, and without saying much about it we gradually made it an arrangement that Kathleen worked at the hotel whenever she was in the centre of town. This might happen on two consecutive days, or not at all for ten. At any time she could be round the corner or thousands of miles away cowering from grenades. Howard was zealous as usual in getting the most up-to-date technology we could, but there was no gadget which could predict when she might be in touch. There were no rules, there was nothing official. There were only these moments when she appeared from blackness and folded away into it again. I didn’t even voice her name to Howard or Sarah-Jane until just before the May Bank Holiday, when Howard was planning one of his now traditional dinners in the atrium. Kathleen was keen to come; in fact she claimed she would give her left breast for the opportunity. Howard told me he would put her straight on the top-table list.

  ‘Are you sure? You’ve not even met her.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard things.’ Howard ruffled my hair like he used to when I was younger. ‘And it’s great. It’s great for you to meet people. I want you to have that.’ I squirmed in part-pleasure, part-mortification. Was I really such a case, a person whose achievement in recruiting a friend was to be celebrated like a baby’s first steps?