1
A smooth midsummer evening. Two-thirds full. Fourhundred-
and-fifty-euro rack rate, two hundred minimum for
a walk-in, although depending on who was around there
might be room for negotiation. The open space of the lobby
was shushed by the thickness of a sand-coloured carpet and
populated by the kind of bodies you would expect – solid,
expensive, a mix of foreign and local. Nobody out of place, all
familiar, everywhere. Middle-aged. Tanned. Jackets and ties.
The smell of heavy perfume. Here for a couple of drinks. Midweek
dinners that cost real money. Occasional mad blowouts
that everybody would enjoy, remember, never regret. But not
tonight. Quiet tonight.
Just walking through the door would let you know you
were safe here. The cool air, the smell of lilies and freesias. The
width and depth of the couches. The low lighting, hushed conversation,
a tinkling water-feature. The benevolent portrait
of a smiling Turkish-looking man who had some unspecified
significance in the hotel’s history.
Piano music, some cliché of easy-listening, drifted down
like cigar smoke from the caged, dark-wood bar. Two girls
were behind the desk at Reception, pretty but within reason,
blonde but not too much. They stood a couple of feet apart,
smiling blankly out across the open space. From any kind
of a distance you wouldn’t notice, but they were having a
conversation. Their lips barely moved. Occasionally one or
other would vibrate with contained laughter. The next shift
was coming on and the girls were giddy with the anticipation
of finishing. They weren’t going anywhere, weren’t doing
anything. Just down to the car-park, into separate cars, a quick
wave to each other and home. But it was the end of the
day and that was always something. One of them flashed a
look around, then, coast clear, checked the time on her watch
and the other laughed again. State of you. Oh, who cares?
We’re finished now.
The night manager, nervous and thin, had arrived and
was in the back office setting the daily audit in motion, a computerized
process that would click and grunt and warble
through the night. A hundred pages of data would print out
and tomorrow an administrator would split that report into
sections and pass them on to a more senior administrator,
who would record the information, file it and then ignore
it. Three weeks into the job the night manager was moving
quickly from unfamiliarity into edgy boredom. The reality of
what he would have to do was beginning to reveal itself, the
unhappy prospect of long slow time that would need to be
served. When he sought some source of comfort in his future,
he could think only of sleep.
The night porters arrived, three of them together. Ray,
Tommy and George. Clean-shaven, ironed shirts and dark
uniforms. Everything in place and all as it should be, but still,
somehow, they looked wrong, ghoulish underground creatures
who didn’t belong to the day, too addled and distracted
to thrive in the night. Personal histories that you could see in
their faces and that you would turn away from. They went
to work in silence, checking stock and floats and the messages
of the day in the book left for them by the day shift, a welloiled
routine that came from years of working together.
The newest recruit, a young Polish fellow, shiny-faced and
blond-haired and smiling, arrived last. The night manager
watched him come, nodding in a curt way to acknowledge his
over-familiar greeting, his friendly wave. It was a bad start
for this guy. In the night manager’s last place of employment
people turned up before the appointed hour. Here it just
seemed to be a loose guideline. Ten past. Twenty past. No
apology or explanation.
But there was no point in making a fuss. Not on a quiet
mid-week night with rooms to spare, only two guests left
to check in and the bar emptying. The first wake-up call
wasn’t until six o’clock. If they kept their heads down and
said nothing, they might get away with it. The night manager
let the girls go. They walked off together, linked at the arm.
The further from Reception they went the louder their
talk became. The door opened into the inner workings, then
closed on their conversation and they were gone.