Hotel Alpha

by Mark Watson

  ‘Well, it all sounds pretty nice now you’ve explained it.’

  ‘Oh, you’re not having it. It’s endangered.’

  We were onto a second bottle before too long. The wine slipping down my throat was like a series of kisses, and the sensation reminded me of drinking with her in the Alpha Bar a year ago. Words galloped out of me.

  ‘I don’t know if you can imagine how much difference you’ve made. How many things I can do now which wouldn’t have seemed possible.’

  ‘Well, it’s the same for me,’ she said. ‘I would never have believed, a year ago, how much time I could occupy a hotel room without paying a single … ’

  ‘Oh, don’t make a joke out of it,’ I found myself pleading. ‘Say something real.’

  ‘You complete dick-bag Do you think I would have walked around in a spa, a year ago, all confident like I am now? Or walk into a restaurant full of pretty people and feel good about myself?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you, did I?’

  ‘All right: well, I’m telling you. I wouldn’t have. All that is you.’

  We held hands across the table and I thought about all the people who would love to be living my life at this moment.

  ‘I want you to come,’ she said.

  ‘Come … ?’

  ‘On the march. It would mean a lot to me.’

  ‘What, it would mean a lot to you if it was a million and one people, not a million?’

  ‘To have you there on a big day. Something I’ve put a lot of work into publicizing and drumming up interest for. You know. Just to have you by my side.’

  I heard myself agree to it, and as her hand tightened round mine, it felt as if it had been the right thing to say.

  The second annual singles’ night was meandering to its end in the Alpha. A mawkish ballad floated out of the bar. Howard and Lara were standing at the entrance, said Kathleen.

  ‘Your boss is giving out leaflets for something or other …’

  ‘Oh, yeah. We do PR for all these singles nights. There’s one for Christians soon. And one for naturists, which Howard has said they can do here.’

  ‘There’s a crowd round Howard,’ Kathleen said. I could feel the weight of bodies and hear ragged, tipsy cheering. ‘He’s … what’s he doing? Some sort of trick. Oh, he’s juggling.’

  ‘He does do that.’

  I felt as if I’d seen his face a million times: turned eagerly to his makeshift audience, grinning in a way that was assured of their love, yet winningly asking for more of it.

  ‘Now he’s balancing … what the fuck?’

  ‘Balancing a chair on his face. Yeah. It’s one of his party pieces.’

  Again I could all but picture it: his face turned up towards the skylight like a performing seal’s, the chair’s back legs miraculously supported by his forehead. Whoops and whistles echoed. Kathleen took my arm, but Howard had seen us.

  ‘Say hello, everyone,’ he said in a voice so loud and assured he might indeed be addressing everyone in the building. ‘This is my son, Chas.’

  The applause now swivelled around like a sprinkler.

  ‘Been out tonight?’ asked Lara.

  ‘Our restaurant not good enough for you, mate?’ Howard teased. The tug on my arm was almost violent this time, and we were in the lift almost before I had tossed a reply back over my shoulder. Kathleen was stiff and hot in the airspace next to mine.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m not good enough for you,’ she said, ‘that’s what he meant. Always the same thing.’

  ‘He was only joking.’

  ‘You didn’t see his face.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I do apologize for that.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  When the lift doors opened, she went out a few paces ahead of me, and as I followed down the corridor I didn’t know precisely where she was. It was, just for a moment, as if she had been claimed back by the darkness which had given her up to me on this night a year ago.

  The cries of the housekeeping staff, as they went knocking on doors, landed heavily on my ears. My head felt wrapped in a layer of grease. Kathleen came from the bathroom and kissed me, showering me in a film of droplets and laughing as I cried out in surprise.

  ‘Get up!’

  ‘I don’t feel too good.’

  ‘You feel hungover. Surprise. Come on. Up! Big day!’

  I rolled out of bed; in the shower, putting my feet in the puddles she had left, I flashed back to the nasty exchange in the lift and tried to put it out of my brain.

  Downstairs, the atrium was busy, and outside a couple of dozen protesters were using the forecourt as their meeting point. Each time the main doors opened, the breeze brought in strange reports. Music blared from speakers. Someone was leading chants through a loudhailer. I sat in the bar trying to eat breakfast, wondering who was here, whether someone would tell Lara about my involvement, and what would happen if they did. Kathleen went in and out with her mobile phone, as excited and impatient as a kid. When we got outside, the noise of the protesters was ten times what it had seemed from inside.

  ‘Tony Blair is a war criminal!’ yelled someone inches from my face. There was the cloying sweet smell of weed. Half a dozen people were between me and the doors already, and I didn’t know where Kathleen was.

  ‘No war for oil!’ chanted a group of voices somewhere over my left shoulder. ‘Not-in-my-name!’ they chorused. The voices sounded jubilant rather than angry, as if the point had already been won and this was a celebration. There was a feverish quality to things. This is stupid, I snapped at myself. We’re past the time when big groups of people are frightening. It should have been true, but I didn’t believe it.

  ‘Kathleen? Where—’

  ‘I’m here. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t think I can do this.’

  ‘You can.’

  I was angry with myself for having gone along with this in the grip of drunken adoration, and with her for being so zealous, and with myself all over again for being unequal to the situation. For not knowing how many people were here, how many more of them there would be, how long the march would go on. My stomach squelched and gurgled. The noise dropped suddenly and my heart swam towards Howard’s raised voice.

  ‘I would appreciate it,’ he boomed, ‘if you could clear the path so people can get into my hotel.’

  ‘You should be coming with us!’

  ‘Much as I’d like to “stop the war”,’ Howard shouted back, ‘I have a hotel to run.’

  ‘Lara Krohl and the Hotel Alpha support the murder of civilians!’ cried a woman in a voice as high and piping as a bird’s. ‘The Hotel Alpha has blood on its hands!’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I blurted out, ‘what do you know about the Alpha?’

  There were gasps and shocked laughter.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Kathleen, ‘do you realize who you’re talking to?’

  ‘Does she realize who she’s talking to?’ I retorted. ‘Does she think she can just call Howard—’

  ‘You need to get over this Howard thing,’ Kathleen hissed. ‘Are you coming, or are you going back to him?’

  ‘Chas, mate,’ Howard called at almost exactly the same time from the hotel doors.

  My bowels were overfull, my face felt red. I hated all the well-intentioned people, their chants, banners I couldn’t read, their sense of unquestionable rightness and the things they were saying and thinking about Howard. I began to blunder through the crowd. Bodies parted. Kathleen shouted out my name, but she sounded a mile away already. I half-tripped over a leg, began to stumble; then the hand was on my arm.

  ‘I will thank you all,’ Howard said, nimble and as pumped-up as the protesters around us, ‘to get the fuck out of the way of my boy.’

  The big doors shut behind us and the atrium was warm, humming with activity, clinking glasses and calls, footsteps and wheeled trolleys and telephones ringing. The nest of noise and anger vanished as if at the pres
s of a button.

  ‘Stupid bastards,’ said Howard. ‘Are you all right?’

  I muttered that I was. The toilets in the atrium were the closest at hand. The door felt heavy; from the background gurgle and trickle, I couldn’t tell if anyone was there. I slammed the door of a cubicle and sat with my head in my hands.

  Kathleen would be on her way to Hyde Park already, and I’d let her down; her anger at me would be all churned up with her anger at the war, the whole mixture like fuel, propelling her further and further away. I was here in the Alpha where I had always been, locked away from the world. She was on one side of things; Howard, Lara, everyone else in my life was on the other.

  9

  GRAHAM

  London’s bid to host the Olympic Games was the new thing around the Hotel Alpha. Lara was one of the people in charge of publicizing the campaign; Chas was one of her ‘key men’ on the project. And Howard was contributing in his usual way. He entertained members of the committee; he shook hands, badgered, claimed long-owed favours. A couple of months after the war protest – a protest which had proved fruitless – he welcomed two dozen members of London’s ‘bid team’ to the hotel. They would receive one of Howard’s addresses to pep them up, which was probably necessary since Paris was ahead in the running and the whole business might easily prove a stupendous waste of money. Then they would have dinner, and then …

  ‘Then you, and they, will get drunk?’

  ‘That’s not part of the official schedule, Madman.’ Howard produced his naughty-schoolboy grin.

  ‘I was not, as they say, born yesterday.’

  ‘Suzie can cover it,’ he said, his features softening now into that mollifying expression nobody was able to resist. ‘You should never feel you have to be here every minute of every day, mate.’

  He knew that my duty to the hotel was only part of the equation. Duty to myself had more to do with it. It was a point of pride to stay behind the desk: and all the more so now that it felt less like my own territory than it ever had before.

  Suzie was beside me as the Olympic people checked in. Her hair was newly restyled and smelled powerfully of what she called salon products’, which she ordered via the computer and whose effects on her hair she described in jargon that meant no more to me than Japanese. As the big group collected round the desk in their sweatshirts with the words ‘London 2012’ emblazoned on the front, Suzie got briskly to work. She took a computer-generated code from each person. She rattled away on her PC, allocating a room to each and dispatching a dozen guests to the lifts before I had finished checking in my second. He – a good-looking fellow about Ed’s age, sporting a patently unnecessary pair of sunglasses – stopped me in the middle of ‘breakfast is served between … ’

  ‘I need to get to Heathrow in the morning, for nine,’ he said. ‘Could you find out times for me?’

  ‘I can very likely arrange a car for you, or take you myself,’ I replied. ‘Leave it with me, and—’

  ‘No,’ the young man explained patiently, ‘I’ll go on the train. I just need times.’

  ‘Ah.’ There was the Heathrow Express these days, of course. Guests could go down the road to Paddington and be on their way to the airport in a jiffy. I had not quite got used to it yet. ‘Well, I don’t know the times for that train off the top of my head,’ I apologized, ‘but I shall telephone the National Rail line for you, and then call up to your room with—’

  ‘I’ve got it here,’ said Suzie, peering at the computer. ‘Every fifteen minutes. Ten past, twenty-five past, twenty to and so on.’

  The man slung his bag over his shoulder, snatched the key I had been about to hand to him, and thanked Suzie as if I were not there. And watching him stride across the atrium, with the far-off-sounding LONDON 2012 announced by logos on his clothing, I felt for a minute as if I were not.

  That evening, during a coffee break scarcely merited by the amount of work I had found for myself that day, I slunk in at the back of our main conference room and watched Howard deliver his inspirational address to the Olympic people, who sat with their heads bowed over laptops and electronic notebooks. If any of them found time to look up at the speaker, they would have seen a man who was as comfortable with this time of life as he had been in his twenties. ‘A magician, I like to say … ’

  Here he goes, I thought, with that mingled weariness and love his speeches generally conjured up. ‘A magician is nothing more than an actor impersonating a magician. What do I mean by that? I mean that a lot of life is about confidence and presentation. The best way to reach your goal is to convince as many people as possible that you’ve reached it already.’ There was a stirring of laughter at this observation, and some of the lowered heads bobbed in gentle recognition. ‘Now, when I founded this hotel … ’ he went on in his well-trodden groove, and I retired to make sure the restaurant was ready for them.

  The meal spilled over into a long Alpha night of drinking and shouting and mutual impressing, just as it had been bound to. I dropped in to check on things just after midnight and saw Howard with his arm round Lara Krohl at the bar. Chas was between them, eagerly chipping into the conversation. My spirits rose as usual at the sight of him – at his new ease with people – but they were dashed again as a secondary survey revealed a number of people who were not so happy. There was Mike Swan, the reviewer: he sat alone with a little array of empty glasses in front of him, making his way through gin and tonics, most likely without much of the tonic. This was a common sight, these days; he was always in the corner, looking thinner each time, the patched green sports jacket flapping ever more desultorily around his frame. And there at the bar – a little way removed from all the jollity, and with a strained expression that was also more common of late – I saw Kathleen. With a little effort I could make out the conversation that was riling her.

  ‘There’s been a lot of scaremongering,’ Lara Krohl was saying. She looked, at this late hour, exactly the same as she always did when breakfasting in the atrium: the scraped-back hair, plain white blouse, the high-heeled shoes and the laptop computer tucked under an arm. She was drinking mineral water. ‘Tony knew this was going to happen.’ She meant the Prime Minister; even after six years, I found it odd for her and even Chas to be on these terms with him. ‘But you ride it out, and sure enough, the backlash, it never really happened.’

  ‘He knows what he’s doing, old Blair,’ Howard agreed. I cast back my mind to when he had been a Conservative supporter; or at least, so it had seemed. He just liked to cheer for the winning team. ‘They’ve nailed it pretty well, the whole thing. Just need to catch the bugger now.’

  ‘They’ll smoke Saddam out,’ Chas put in. ‘He’s not got enough support to hide forever.’

  ‘Yah, and that will be that, pretty much,’ said Lara, sipping her water, ‘unless we’re meant to believe the lefties and Iraq is going to invade us back … ’

  The laugh around the bar had a nastily triumphalist quality to it. Kathleen touched Chas’s arm and pointed to the door. There was a brief exchange during which he tried and failed to change her mind. Then she brushed past me, managing a wink, and walked out of the bar and across the black and white tiles of the floor.

  ‘She seems tense, that one,’ said Suzie. ‘She should think about t’ai chi.’

  I told Suzie she could go home. She blinked and smiled with a sort of indulgent kindness as if, really, it ought to be her dismissing me. ‘Ciao, bella!’ she remarked, trotting out of the place. I waved and said something feeble in reply. Then I stood looking at the telephone on my desk, willing it to ring with a request from a guest upstairs, anywhere on the silent balconies around and above me. The telephone was a replica of the Bakelite one from the sixties, but it had push-buttons instead of a dial, because these days you generally had to get through about ten questions from a recorded voice before hearing a real one. Pattie had bought me the phone from an Internet site which specialized in ‘the favourites of yesteryear’. It was a while since we had been to t
he market.

  Suzie was away the next day, and I hoped that meant I would be kept busy; but the telephone was mute once more as afternoon turned into evening. The hotel was almost at capacity, I believed, though it was hard to be certain as my colleague had checked most people in. I did not keep up the ledger as thoroughly nowadays: in truth I had begun to feel a bit silly doing it in front of her. A song by the Rolling Stones thumped out of the bar; Howard had either requested it from Ray, or was (as he liked to say) on the stereo’ himself.

  I thought about the early years of the hotel, when the telephone never stopped ringing. Where is this restaurant? When is my coach in the morning? Can you arrange a vegan meal to be cooked for a special guest, find an emergency dentist, accomplish this or that miracle in the next five minutes? For a second, the gap between those days and these yawned so painfully in my chest that I had half a mind to go up in the lift and wander door-to-door seeing if anyone needed something done.

  There had been a few nights like this in the past couple of months; I could not dismiss them, any more, as aberrations. The fact was that my job had diminished. For the first thirty-five years of my time here, I had piqued myself upon being a concierge, if not without equal, then at least with few superiors. Who could work harder than I did, or be more devoted to the task? I had failed to understand that my greatest rival in the end would not be another human in a suit and tie, but a coalition of machines. Every guest now had a concierge in his or her own room: one that never slept, knew everything, and was not troubled by the problems of being alive.

  The tradition of keeping a whisky bottle for emergencies had outlived the smoking room: these days it was buried in a drawer of old leaflets and timetables which Suzie never had recourse to. I unstopped it and poured a very small measure into a teacup, glancing about in case anyone was interested: no one was. The bar was quiet tonight, and so was the restaurant. In the process of lifting the cup to my mouth, I inspected the back of my hand: there was a smattering of small liver spots like the ones I used to see on my father’s hand before it clipped me about the temple.