Lippe Simone - Blank

Darryl was no longer struggling. He sat on the floor behind the reception desk and looked longingly at his severed hand while he rapidly bled to death. The spectacle served to remind Honor of the fleeting nature of life and that she was by now ravenously hungry. She pushed through the heavy purple curtains of the domain of Milo’s former glory and onto the threshold of yet another subtle and striking aberration from the instinctively normal.

Milo’s restaurant was resolutely posh in that way that invariably misses the mark. The tables were small and never-the-less inches apart and uniformly ugly with yellow napkins clashing with royal blue table-cloths and carefully mismatched silverware. Each table had an almost exhausted candle and the room was otherwise lit only by the daylight that fought past the thick castle curtains over two floor-to-ceiling windows. It was cool and quiet and empty of customers but the service staff had occupied the booth in the corner and were squatting like pigeons on the bench and on the table itself and they had gathered between them all the bread-baskets in the building. It was this that Honor, in spite of a lack of experience of the hospitality industry, felt might be out of the ordinary.

Light from the foyer announced Honor’s entrance and the waiters stopped nibbling on sections of stale baguette to look up at her as one mind, causing them to resemble a startled extended family of meerkats dressed adorably in identical royal blue tuxedos. Honor was immediately charmed. So were the service meerkats who until that moment had been unaware that anything more interesting than bread existed anywhere in the world and now in their midst was a female of the species.

The silent stillness lingered for a moment like an awkward encounter at a funeral until the alpha waiter hopped to the floor and loped over to Honor and offered her a basket of butter rolls that were almost entirely free of spit. Honor received the basket as though graciously accepting a lesser entertainment award and took a seat at the centermost table. The maitre d’ crouched on the floor and peered at her over the flower arrangement. More servers approached and one-by-one and eventually simultaneously placed their offerings of baskets of bread, many of them empty, on the table. Honor took it all in with good grace but found herself wishing she’d selected an establishment with a less gimmicky menu.

An expectant hush fell over the service staff as Honor selected from the baskets and the decision itself launched a pushing match the gravity of which was difficult to read. The maitre d’ objected to a basket of sliced pumpernickel placed directly over his butter rolls and he seized the offending waiter’s toupée and flung it across the room. The two busboys struggled without the benefit of language to highlight the advantages of their respective offerings of breadsticks and petits viennoiseries and the grunting grew worryingly unfriendly. Honor endeavored to cast oil on the troubled waters, selecting something from every basket, even the empty ones.

And so the party proceeded largely peacefully until a noise or a movement or a communal sixth sense drew the attention of the wait staff and Honor to an almost invisible door next to the bar and partially concealed by another curtain of royal blue iron. Like the walls the door was a stained oak blackness but it housed a portal window through which shone the shiny, curious faces of the kitchen staff. Slowly the door pushed open and the sauciers and sous-chefs and dishwashers crept into the dining room. At any rate they may have sauciers and sous-chefs and dishwashers but Honor didn’t know what sauciers and sous-chefs were. To her they were men in white outfits not unlike that of the formidable Milo, with the important distinction that where Milo had been armed with a cleaver these men had fruit, an enormous stainless steel bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers, a bag of flour and an entire cooked leg of lamb, carried like a baseball bat.

The objective of the kitchen staff was identical to that of the wait staff, although they were appreciably better prepared for the task of impressing a date. They pushed the waiters aside and their bread-baskets from her table and lay their treasures before her. In addition to a greater quality and variety of wares the kitchen staff, possibly from careful observation of the failure of the wait staff to secure Honor’s favor, appeared to have a greater facility for hospitality. The sous-chef tore strips from his leg of lamb and demonstrated eating it before offering a generous handful to Honor. The salad chef gingerly placed tomatoes in Honor’s lap and the bag-of-flour chef entertained her by creating clouds of white dust.

“Any chance of a glance at the wine list?” asked Honor as she assembled a sloppy and unwieldy sandwich from a bit of just about everything on the table. They understood only that she wanted something else and as Honor dined the staff rallied around the restaurant and into the kitchen and behind the bar returning with all manner of thing that they thought she might like to eat, including flowers and candles and a fur stole from the cloak room. None of them seemed to be exactly what this beautiful and desirable and clearly finicky creature needed next. Finally a busboy presented her with a bottle of mineral water and the staff froze into a concrete trance as she accepted it, opened it, and drank deeply, igniting a run on the bar.

It was then that the factions formed into militant groups delimited by shared interests and similar clothes. The sous-chef or, at any rate, biggest chef, took a leadership role in assaulting the bar which had been occupied by the floor staff, led by the maitre d’. The wait staff, doubtless selected from the more presentable and lithe struggling actors who offered themselves for employment at Milo’s restaurant, were little match for the kitchen staff, all of whom appeared to have learned their trade in the nation’s prisons.

The battle grew violent and then fierce and finally bloody and very soon ceased altogether to be entertaining. The kitchen staff overwhelmed the bar and either developed or remembered an uncanny natural capacity for tenderizing meat. The waiters that didn’t abandon their station and run off in all directions were beaten against the bar’s floor of polished California granite. This left five stout and tattooed kitchen workers bloody and victorious and newly confident of their claim on Honor so when they rose from behind the bar they were varying degrees of enraged to discover that she had left during an entertainment that had been largely for her benefit.

At that moment Honor was touring the back halls of the hotel. The only light was standard blue emergency lighting and the halls and walls and floor had a cloned character to them that gave the staff area of the hotel a labyrinthine quality. She was lost. But she had her sandwich and sense of adventure and there were treasures, it seemed, behind every door. An oversized linen closet — more of a linen hall — yielded a plush robe with the insignia of the hotel over the left breast. Another equally cavernous room appeared to be the liquor store and was lined with shelves of every variation on the theme of hard liquor, from Bourbon and Scotch to grappa and rice wine. The treasures were stacked to the ceiling — about the height of two average sized Honors — and the only uncovered spot was a high window leading to the outside and secured with two-inch bars of exactly the sort, in Honor’s expert opinion, used in zoo enclosures.

The next room was actually two rooms and had two doors and no theme to speak of — it was stacks and shelves and boxes and baggage of everything that the most twisted and imaginative guest can ever contrive to forget in a hotel. It was a predictable lost-and-found of clothes and jewellery and junk but it was also an Aladdin’s cave of fishing rods and bicycles and punching bags and an astonishingly large number of stuffed and mounted domestic animals, accepting that anything more than one taxidermied Dachshund is astonishing.