Jonathan Lee - High Dive

What exactly had she done wrong? She’d begun to think they had a rapport going, and in no time at all that rapport had collapsed. She wrote it down on a page of the Guest Registration Book — rapport — and it didn’t look quite right.

Derek came over, shaking his head. He was amazing at making guests feel warm and fuzzy, at playing with their kids and complimenting their grandmothers, and at then turning that warmth right down to zero and fixing them with an icy stare. The stare said: ‘Yeah, motherfuckers, time to tip me, you thought this was free?’ It was a strategy that had resulted in him owning two types of car.

‘Wow,’ Derek said. ‘Just, wow.’

‘Lay off,’ she said. ‘I tried.’

‘Too tentative, man. If you’re going to say it tentatively, like, “Oh maybe please maybe can my friend take your bag?” you might as well just do the usual “Can I get the bellman to help you, sir?” No. No no no. You’ve got to tell them, Freya Finch. You’ve got to say “My good friend Derek here will take your —”’

‘Bags, yeah, I know.’

‘Got to help me get my kill rate up,’ he said. ‘This chick is just wow, you know? Like insane expensive.’ He paused. ‘You could hang with us sometime if you wanted.’

‘Derek,’ she said, ‘you’re not normal.’

He shrugged. ‘I thought he was going to be one of those guys that comes up with the balance line. You know, bag balanced on each shoulder. No need to help me! I’m balanced!’

‘I’ll get the next guy,’ Freya said, and Derek traipsed away.

She opened the corporate brochure and continued adding ink to the letters ‘b’, ‘g’, ‘e’ and ‘o’, but the project had lost much of its lustre.

She was happy. Overall she was. But — she played with the yellow master key for Roy Walsh’s room — she’d also been thinking recently that she was maybe suffering from a lack of something, a smallness or thinness, a stuntedness even, like there was a higher plane of being she wasn’t reaching for. Her blatant failure to impress Roy Walsh seemed in some way to confirm this. Wimping out of a progressive haircut was similarly damning. She visualised the higher plane of being as a hard-to-reach shelf in the herbal shop on East Street, but the point about higher planes was that they were, presumably, unimaginable. Like God’s face. Like Tessa Sanderson’s training regime. Like a boy who wouldn’t try and shove your head down on a first date, and who didn’t try and twiddle your nipples like a radio dial. What tune did they expect her breasts to play?

She thought she might pay a visit to the top-floor storage cupboard, where someone usually hid some wine. Then she thought: what if I just let myself into Roy Walsh’s room, walked up to him, took control? She’d noticed lately that lust and boredom shared a bed.

When her final break of the day arrived she took a short walk along the King’s Road, turning back when her fifteen minutes was almost up. A man was collecting for charity. She gave him twenty pence. Didn’t look, actually, at what he was collecting for. Up ahead the hotel looked like a gesture, a huge white symbol for something, but it was surely rare for symbols to come so comprehensively covered in bird shit. Three gulls were perched above the entrance, not looking at each another. Freya watched them fly up as she approached. As the birds settled back down they altered their configuration, one from the edge now taking centre stage, their wings not touching and no squawks exchanged, but a definite team nonetheless.

At 5.15 p.m. a fresh weirdo approached the desk.

‘I’d like to book the restaurant, if I could,’ the woman said. ‘Intimate table with a view, please, for six this evening.’ She leaned forward, elbows on desk, and touched her mouth with her fingers. ‘Intimate,’ she said.

‘Sure,’ Freya said. ‘Actually, you can always do that just through there, in the restaurant, but I can definitely help you here too.’

The woman blinked.

‘I can do it for you. It’s no problem.’

‘That’s what I was hoping,’ the woman said. ‘Good. Good.’ There was a dead fox around her neck. It looked somewhat surprised to be there. She had a way of touching it as her body swayed from side to side during sentences. There was lipstick on her teeth. Her eyes searched various sections of Freya’s face with a grim and happy hopelessness.

‘So you’d like to book a table for 6 p.m. this evening?’

‘Six? No no. Six people !’ The woman laughed like a drain or a minor sewage works. ‘An intimate dinner,’ she said. She played with her purse, emergency yellow, a cyclist on a bike in the dark.

‘That should be fine. What time would suit you, Ms —?’

‘Cooke,’ the woman said. ‘You can call me Mrs Cooke.’

‘What time shall I book you in for, Mrs Cooke? Your party of six?’

‘Oh. Eight o’clock?’

‘Great.’

‘We may be a little late, though, I should warn you. No more than about an hour, though, I would say.’

‘An hour later than eight o’clock?’

‘Possibly.’

‘So more like nine, you might say?’

Mrs Cooke’s smile tightened. ‘Perhaps safer to bring our menus at nine, as it were, yes. Unless you work in increments. No one does, though, do they? Will you be the one serving?’

‘Me? No.’

‘So many people, aren’t there?’ The tongue moved across the two front teeth and further blurred the lipstick stain. Freya tried to meet Derek’s eye, but he was doing his napping-while-standing thing. He only really woke to the rustle and clink of cash.

Mrs Cooke said, ‘What’s the cuisine, would you say?’ and made a rolling motion with her hand.

‘Modern British, with a twist.’

‘A twist ?’ At length Mrs Cooke weathered this blow. ‘It isn’t French, then?’

‘No, sorry. It’s not French.’

She clutched her fox and frowned. A man in a maroon bow tie and matching cummerbund crossed the lobby’s complex rug. The chandelier dripped light onto his wife. He waved at Mrs Cooke and warmly she waved back.

‘They have no politics at all,’ Mrs Cooke whispered when the couple had entered the bar area. ‘Can you believe it? Not even at the local level. Almost as bad as the windscreen wipers. Left right, left right, left right.’

Barbara meanwhile was having her third nap of the day, occurring within a whisker of her first and her second. She had picked, for her rest area, the middle of the lobby floor. When Mrs Cooke’s husband arrived downstairs, wearing the shiny bewildered wince of a baby, he leaned down to tickle Barbara’s tummy, saying ‘Good kitty’ as his spectacles slid down his nose, and she bit him hard on the hand.

CHEF HARRY WAS a ruddy, sarcastic, manic-depressive former professional player of darts who, after one of his strenuous lock-ins at a favourite pub, often arrived at work, Moose had noticed, wearing a shirt with the words HIGH-TON HARRY on the back, several sequins missing. He’d recently added to his repertoire of light lunches on the Grand’s summer menu a Strawberry Risotto with Fine Champagne Jus. It was a dish he generally topped off with what he referred to, in his squeaky children’s-entertainer voice, as Parmigiano Stardust. Tonight, at home, Freya had adapted this into a less fussy and flashy and far more delicious dish, replacing the strawberries with bacon bits, the champagne with extra chicken stock, and the Stardust with tiny planets of proper mozzarella. Moose was spooning additional portions onto a plate garlanded with small blue flowers.

Freya cleared her throat.

‘What?’ he said.

‘I was just thinking.’