Hotel Alpha

by Mark Watson

  But it didn’t happen; his brain felt as if it were tossing and turning, flipping over in his skull and jumping at every sound – a siren on the street below, a fly buzzing in a corner – like a nervy kitten. He lay there for half an hour. Anthony’s mum was reading a book while his dad tried to sleep. There was the buzzing of the fly and the flick-flick of the pages and a series of peevish coughs from Dad. Then, when their bedside light had clicked off, and when they presumably thought Anthony was asleep, they began to argue in whispers.

  ‘Finished with the bloody book, have you?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Thought you were going to be reading it all night.’

  ‘Why do you care how long I read for? I’m not doing it to … get at you, am I?’

  This little exchange ended with a sarcastic little sniff from Dad, a noise he’d honed over the years to be absolutely unbearable to Anthony’s mother. As usual, she went for it.

  ‘What the hell is that noise supposed to mean?’

  Anthony could feel himself getting hot. He wriggled from his side onto his back and lay flat, looking up towards the ceiling as the occasional traffic rumbled below. They didn’t seem to care any more whether he was sleeping or not. He rolled onto his front and buried his face in the pillow, which was really a cushion from the sofa since this wasn’t a real bed but a camp bed. Somehow he was in the way just by being here: he was somebody you had to get a special bed for. He plunged his face right into it so all he could feel was the cushion, its slight roughness, the contours of its patterning. He lay like that for a few minutes, trying to make sure they couldn’t hear that he was crying. The secret tears stole into the pillow-mush around his face. He sniffed accidentally a couple of times, but nobody reacted. When he felt like he might be about to suffocate and finally raised his face to lay his head down on top of the pillow rather than plumb in the middle of it, the conversation had changed. It was quieter now, more menacing.

  ‘Do you see why I can’t trust you?’ his father was asking.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Mum said, and although Anthony didn’t recognize the word, he could tell that it was a wrong thing to say. Dad’s reaction confirmed it for him.

  ‘Don’t you dare use that language with him in the room.’

  ‘He’s asleep.’

  ‘Do you see why I can’t trust you?’ Dad said again, and this time Mum let out an answering breath, a gasp as redolent of despair as any words could have been.

  ‘I’m just telling you what it feels like,’ said Dad.

  ‘When are you going to give me a break?’ Mum asked. ‘When are you going to accept what happened?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Dad.

  Then there was silence, or at least no talking. For a little while Anthony thought he could hear someone crying through the wall in the next room. Then he realized it was coming from the bathroom and it was his mum. He felt that whatever his dad had been accusing her of – and he couldn’t begin to guess what, specifically, it was – her crying in the en-suite bathroom proved that it was true. And in any case, Dad is Anthony’s hero. He has a collection of cigarette cards with Leeds United players on, and told that frightening ten-year-old that he’d be ‘dead meat’ if he messed with Anthony again, and can do such a good impression of Fred Flintstone.

  So it has to be his mum’s fault that things are like this: that his parents are fighting and Anthony’s pillow-cushion is wet with his own tears. He likes Mum, but it has to be someone’s fault that he feels this lousy, so it has to be hers.

  The girl who was served the ice-cream sundae on the table next to Anthony’s earlier this evening is now at home in her bedroom in Barnet, which has a name plate on the door with the name ROSALYNN, a name she already dislikes, painted in rose petals. Here too an argument is in progress. But there’s no doubt what this one is about.

  Earlier tonight, Rosalynn played in the North London Schools’ Orchestra (under-8 division) as part of a concert given by seven- to eleven-year-olds and attended by a score of parents whose enthusiasm ranged from lukewarm to alarmingly fervid. Rosalynn’s daddy was meant to be there. He swore he would be there – that’s the phrase her mummy is now using as she screams into the telephone downstairs, the words muffled by the plasterwork so Rosalynn can only pick out her fury in the shape of them. She was playing second violin. Her dad made some joke about second fiddle’ which she didn’t understand; that was last time he was here, a fortnight ago. He’s away a lot, her dad, because his work is important – whatever it is. But the understanding was that he’d be there tonight.

  When the lights came up on the stage, they were brighter than Rosalynn expected, and as she played it was impossible to make out any figures in the dimness beyond. It was only when they finished, and the whole audience was illuminated, that Rosalynn looked over at her mother, a few rows back, with a new haircut, and learned what she felt she had already known: Dad was not there. He had missed it. Like he missed the sports day and the nativity where her brother Simon was Joseph. And always for the same reason, Mum muttered between her teeth as she swung the Mini out of the car park, not waiting to drink coffee and receive sympathetic glances from the other parents. Work.

  ‘But where is he?’ Rosalynn asked.

  ‘He must have been delayed,’ said her mum, not taking her eyes from the mirror.

  ‘But he said … ’

  ‘HE MUST HAVE BEEN DELAYED,’ Mum repeated.

  Then she was sorry for shouting, and as a treat and to make up for his absence, she and Mum and Simon went to a hotel and had dinner. They chatted about how well the concert had gone, and Rosalynn enjoyed the fact that it was late to be eating, and that even Simon (three years older) was impressed with her playing. They talked about the concert and about some of the other musicians and about everything except Dad, the lack of Dad.

  Now Rosalynn rolls out of bed, feet first, and creeps in her nightie to the top of the stairs. She stills every muscle and tries to hush even the feathery sound of the breath creeping through her nostrils. She rivets herself to the ground, wanting to be stone. She is very good at this: in ‘musical statues’ at Flora and Linda’s parties she proved almost unbeatable. Her mother has stretched the telephone wire into the study, but Rosalynn can make out her words now.

  ‘Well, if you can’t make your daughter a priority … ’

  What’s a priority? Rosalynn wonders, the question pressing at her throat so she gives a little involuntary noise. Why can’t she be one?

  ‘I don’t care, Patrice.’

  Patrice is an unusual name for someone’s dad. He was born in Montreal. Rosalynn doesn’t like the way Mum says the name now as if to dwell on that strangeness.

  ‘I – listen, Patrice. I don’t care. Either you make that sacrifice for your daughter, or you don’t. Either we can rely on you – this family can rely on you – or we can’t.’

  Rosalynn knows what ‘rely’ means. It means you can trust someone. You know that they’ll love you. It constricts her breathing for a moment, that her parents can be talking like this. She looks down at her nightie, which has pale blue ponies on it, and hates it for its childishness. She doesn’t feel seven years old; she feels much older, sadly older, pinned down by the gravity of real things. The conversation makes everything in the bedroom behind her – the doll’s house with its ever-content residents, the primary colours of the Enid Blyton collector’s set on the shelves – seem absurd. The only real thing is that her parents don’t like each other. There was a time, there were lots of times (the beach in Brittany, the Easter-egg hunt at Grandma’s) where they liked, loved each other. But now they don’t.

  Rosalynn creeps back along the landing, fearful of being heard: her mum never misses anything. She gets back into a bed which feels cold even when she bundles the blankets around herself, thinking in vain of the phrase snug as a bug in a rug’ which has always cheered her up, but now seems as childish and as suddenly outmoded as everything else arou
nd her. She thinks again of the holiday in Brittany, only a year ago: how grown-up it felt to be drinking cocoa with the rest of the family. She considers going to knock on Simon’s door, but he wouldn’t understand. This is for her to suffer alone, the fact that they cannot rely on Dad. She is the only person who knows.

  She stares up at the ceiling, with the glow-in-the-dark stars Dad put up for her, and thinks about what she’s learned. Ten miles south, Anthony is still not asleep, although his own warring parents now are. The two of them, who sat at neighbouring tables this evening, stare now at different impressions of darkness: Anthony’s studded by the fuzzy orange of the big-city lights outside, Rosalynn’s broken up by the pinpricks of white on her ceiling.

  When they meet, in fifteen years’ time, what happened tonight will still be important. Anthony – Tony – will have an instinctive distrust of women which he will never acknowledge, but which will cloud many of his interactions with the opposite sex. Rosalynn – Roz – will again unconsciously see men as deserters, or betrayers, or people who don’t show up when you need them, but she will have the added complications of low self-esteem and a wild would-be defiance caused by having run away from home. Their romance will, predictably, not last long. But it will produce a child, called Chas, whom Roz loves with the abandon that she applies to every emotional choice, and whom Tony sacrifices the chance to meet, choosing to flee instead, confirming Roz’s opinion of men.

  All this is years away. Tonight, the two seven-year-olds lie at the mercy of sleep.

  FORECOURT, OUTSIDE HOTEL ALPHA, 1984

  They approached me the usual way, the fellow in his grey suit and tie and big glasses, hair smartly combed. ‘Did you see what happened, darling?’

  I don’t care to be called darling by a man I don’t know, but that’s what happens when you’re a certain age. Anyhow, it’s worth it. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I was up there. I was on the third floor. As soon as I smelled smoke, I came out of my room and ran down the stairs – well, as fast as someone my age can run! – because you’re not to use the lift in a fire. I looked up at the balcony and everyone was … ’

  ‘This is wonderful,’ said glasses-man, giving a signal to his camera crew and his producers. ‘Save this, love, this is just what we need.’

  I kept on chatting away, like some ditzy bird, as they set up their equipment, making sure they got shots of all the evacuated guests milling about, and the beautiful old brick of the building, which they’ll use at the start of the report. Then the reporter said to me, ‘Just tell me what you saw, love, and don’t worry about the cameras, and don’t worry, this isn’t live, so we can always do it again.’ All the things they usually say.

  They asked me to sign a form and the sound man held a big microphone on a boom pole over my head, while the reporter pointed the handheld one – which is really just for show – at me.

  ‘Brenda Rogers,’ I said, when asked to say my name into the microphone. They never use that. It’s for their records, and to check the sound levels.

  Then it began.

  ‘Can you tell us, in your own words, what you saw?’

  They often say that. As if I’d be about to use anyone else’s words! Well, I suppose they thought they were putting me at ease.

  ‘I was just in my room,’ I told suit-and-tie, who nodded sympathetically. ‘I heard a commotion and came out onto the balcony. You could smell smoke.’ I’d changed this story from my original one – that I was alerted by the smoke first – because I wasn’t sure if you would be able to smell it with the door shut. ‘I came down the stairs,’ I explained, ‘because you’re not to use a lift in a fire.’ The reporter smiled, thinking what a dear lady I was. ‘There was absolute chaos,’ I said. I’ve used that one three or four times. You can say it about more or less any disaster. "There were people screaming.’ That, too, has never let me down.

  It was all over quickly. The crewman put the boom pole down, muttering about the weight of it, and lit a cigarette – which I thought was funny, in the circumstances. The same thing happened after the Deptford fire. You can never stop people lighting up.

  Suit-and-tie thanked me and told me to look out for it on the news tomorrow morning. As if I wouldn’t know where to find it! He couldn’t say for sure whether they would use my bit, but he said it was likely. I’m sure it is. An old lady is precisely what they’re looking for. Even though I’m only fifty, in fact – not old at all. But I look much older, and that’s what they want. Someone who looks like she’s been around London a long time, seen it all, but never seen anything quite like this. Then they’ll have a young man, probably. Yes, I go well with a perky younger witness. I think that’s why I have the record I do: five disasters, and five appearances on the news.

  With this one, it was very easy to get here in time to pose as a witness: I was only in Marylebone, and someone at the bus stop had actually seen the smoke coming out of the top windows. I headed straight over in a taxi. Speed is very important. With Deptford, I nearly didn’t make it; but they were short of people to talk to – nobody was keen to be on. The Brixton riots were easy because they went on for so long, and of course no one was expecting to see someone like me in the middle of it. But yes, this one could hardly have worked out better. I shall warm up the television a few minutes before the news to make sure it comes on all right.

  Assuming that I am on, I suppose I shall have to leave it a few months before I do this again, just in case anyone smells a rat. I’m not sure if they will, though. Besides, it could be that long before anything else happens. It’s not as if I’m in control of the disasters, is it! All I do is hear about them, get there as quickly as possible, and give the best account I can.

  CONFERENCE ROOM, 2001

  It’s quite frankly fucking astonishing that I am still at this party, this so-called engagement party for which they hired this swanky room in a hotel which everyone’s heard of. It’s quite frankly pretty mind-blowing that I didn’t just toss my champagne in Lloyd’s face when that ginger bloke handed it to me and stomp off out of here. I’m quite frankly, and I don’t use the word lightly, flabbergasted.

  The idea that Alistair, who they didn’t even know until three years ago, is a better candidate for Best Man than me is absolutely – and I use the word advisedly – obscene.

  There is a lot to dislike about Alistair, not least his self-consciously modern hairstyle, as if he were twenty-two, not closer to forty, his claim to support a football team he manifestly knows nothing about, the galling affectation which leads him to address people as ‘bro’ as if we were living in Harlem or some such place, the volume of his laugh, which has nothing to do with real amusement and everything to do with signalling his appreciation of the joke to as wide a constituency as possible, his habit of striking up conversation when one is at the next urinal. There is the fact that he claims not to smoke other than as a social smoker’, as if this were a morally superior position, and also the way he rolls cigarettes, as if this were self-evidently better than buying them in packs; worse, as if it were some almost forgotten skill which he alone, among humanity, is in possession of. There is his tendency to introduce himself to women as ‘Ali’ in order to make himself seem younger or more likeable, the implication in his claim to work for ‘the Civil Service’ that he is some sort of governmental high-roller when really he inspects roadworks for the council. There are his fucking ‘designer shirts’.

  But, after all, live and let live.

  Obviously Lloyd and Anita see something in him which – well, no doubt he has his . . . well, everyone is different, aren’t they, and it would be a dull world if we all agreed. Whom they choose to call a friend is their prerogative. Nobody would try to argue that he does not deserve to be at the wedding. He and his woman, his girlfriend or whoever she is, the person he irritatingly refers to as his ‘partner’: they ought to be there, if that is what Lloyd and Anita want; it is their day. It is their day.

  But to conclude that, on the basis of his measly three yea
rs’ acquaintance, Alistair is better placed than I am to fulfil the role of Best Man. Well, it is – and I do not use these words lightly – an absolute motherfucking obscenity of a decision.

  Where was Alistair when a mix-up with the IKEA delivery men led to Lloyd and Anita’s being without furniture until a certain somebody, aka myself, turned up with folding chairs? Where was he during the now notorious tournament of Travel Scrabble which filled the four-hour delay to the flight home from Alicante, but which might have brought about the end of their relationship if a certain somebody, myself, had not suggested a compromise re proper nouns? Is he familiar with the full sweep of Lloyd’s nicknames, which include Android, the Cheesemaster, Lloyd Annoyed, many of them coined by a certain somebody, myself, and does he understand the derivation of all of them?

  Fourteen years of friendship to Lloyd; only for six of those was Anita on the scene. So naturally the finger of suspicion, if I may use the phrase, points at Anita, who perhaps does not understand the calibre of Best Man that she is turning down here. Not, of course, that that calibre has ever been proved. This – and I am loath to dwell upon my personal disappointment, but it has to be said – this was my best chance of a Best Man opportunity. I confess I had regarded it as being almost a foregone conclusion, based on my credentials. The moment tonight when Lloyd tapped his glass and announced Alistair as his Best Man, and Alistair accepted with a mock-modest gesture, and the hair-ruffling and arm-grabbing that went on; those were low moments, very low moments. I waited for somebody to speak up. There was a sense of injustice in the air. Of a palpable injustice. But nobody looked at me. They were embarrassed to, perhaps. They felt that, even by being present, they were complicit in what had happened. In the mistake. In the – and I use this phrase advisedly – in the crime. In the gigantic fucking atrocity of making Alistair Lowden Best Man instead of a certain somebody, me, self-evidently better qualified for the job.