Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Mr Marshall held one foot behind him, your basic quadriceps stretch. ‘Nerves are natural, Moose.’ He shifted to the other leg too quickly to reap a reward.

‘You want to hold for thirty seconds at least,’ Moose said.

‘Heart attacks make doctors nervous too. People are always surprised to hear there are still, in this day and age, uncertainties around the most appropriate treatments, yes? Bed rest, for example, has been for most of my career the most simple and established of ministrations for the kind of infarction we’ve been looking at here. But just the other day I read a journal piece — well, was told about one — suggesting that, in a forty to fifty male like you, the prevalence of deadly blood clots in the legs should force a reappraisal even of the bed-rest strategem.’

‘It’s a comfort to hear all that,’ Moose said.

‘Stay off the smokes, yes? The cigars.’

‘I don’t smoke cigars.’

‘Quit smoking. All of it. Assume, every time I stare at you, that what I’m saying is give up smoking. Do that and you’ll be fine. Best thing? Get some bed rest.’

Narcoleptics, Moose thought. Of all hotel guests, narcoleptics are the most highly prized. Shut the door. Leave them be. Rarely hear a peep. When they get hungry they order to the room. You charge them extra even though it costs you less, frees up the restaurant to squeeze in more covers.

In hospitality the thing that killed you was headcount, the sheer size of the payroll in a luxury place. That and the two hundred towels washed each day, the sourcing of vintage lampshades, the touching up of rooms every Monday and Friday: suitcase scuffs, shoe marks, loose plaster, broken mirrors. The maintenance required was amazing but you did it without thinking, just got on with the jobs, and maybe that was the secret? Today he’d spent a lot of time speculating that his life would be better if only he spent a lot less time speculating. He’d been thinking of Viv, too. Her puzzling combination of confidence and insecurity. She was the kind of woman who’d turn up at a fancy-dress party holding a photo of the person she was meant to be.

Mr Marshall had gone. From the corridor came the clinking of water glasses, an affable social sound, restorative and daily. It was the afternoon.

Monica the nurse, laughing.

‘No no,’ he told her. Her happiness was lifting the pain in his chest. ‘I’m serious. Never need to pay for that stuff.’

‘What, ever ? Come on, you’re teasing me.’ Not pretty, no, but something invitingly inquisitive about her dark mouth, the way it was never wholly closed.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘think it through.’ A moment of hesitation, of industry guilt, but it gave way soon enough to his desire to entertain. ‘Try this at my hotel and there’ll be trouble, but here’s the thing. At the desk, at check-in, say you’d like a no-smoking room. Then go up to your room and open the minibar. Mix yourself a couple of gin and tonics, eat a nice chocolate bar, throw the mini whiskies in your suitcase. Then light up a fag, smoke it, flush the stub down the toilet, and go downstairs. Complain that your room smells of smoke.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Yes. People do this. A small group in the know. Seasoned travellers. Downstairs, the person at the front desk apologises and assigns you a different room — probably a better one, because no one wants you complaining twice. Then they get housekeeping to check out the reported smoke-smell. Housekeeping confirm they can smell it too. Front desk send a bottle of wine up to your new improved room, though by then you’re already drunk.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘When you move rooms on the same day you check in, it leaves virtually no trace.’

‘What if I emptied out the whole minibar, though? Everything .’

‘That’s what I’m saying. In a way it’s even less suspicious. We get loads of faded rockers staying. It’s not unusual to be asked to empty out the minibar completely, before they arrive, and therefore not unusual for the minibar attendant to discover that he needs to completely refill a given minibar. Applying charges — it’s not his job.’

The nurse sat down on the end of the bed and then got up again, shaking her head, ringlets swaying. ‘You win. My mind is blown.’

‘The other thing is, at the end of your stay, when they apply the minibar charges to your bill, you could just say, “No, I didn’t have anything from the minibar.”’

‘That simple?’

‘Yeah.’ Why was he saying all this? Why was he spreading the word? ‘The truth is no good front-desk agent will accuse a customer of lying, whatever the situation. You think we want to go through your bins looking for little bottles? They know the minibar attendants make mistakes. Peer in. Mess of bottles. Ticking little items on a chart. They know papers and room numbers get mixed up. Human error. They know other fallible people copy those details onto the guest’s bill. They know some temp-staff maids drink a couple of gins while they clean and then blame it on the customers. They know summer staff sneak into vacant rooms and have a party. The only thing that shows you’re lying is if you give an over-complex excuse. If you just say, “Didn’t have anything,” we take it off your bill in a heartbeat, and then you eat and drink for free.’

She gave him such an excellent smile.

Performance .

He experienced a moment of thinking this hospital wasn’t so bad, of thinking the enforced removal of all motion from his life might even be a blessing. But the feeling did not last. He was napping three or four times a day. In the afternoons he was nicely heavy with doziness. Quickly it began to amaze and depress him that, during these colourful breaks in consciousness, time still seemed to pass. He woke to find a trolley had moved. A clipboard had disappeared. Situations changing and him playing no active role at all. And he was tired, too, by the effort of recalibrating all the reference points in his life. Having one heart attack increased the likelihood of others. Dying at fifty of an exploded heart was a distinct possibility now. That would mean his twenty-fifth birthday — twenty-fifth! — had been a halfway point in his life. He resented all the months spent having showers, the weeks spent brushing teeth, the days driving lost along thin grey roads with a map spread out on his knees.

ONE OF THE final times she saw Roy Walsh was in the bar at the Grand. The morning had been lit by worries for her father. The afternoon had been overcast. She spent most of it behind the desk.

George the Doorman came inside. He took his top hat off. He glanced at the list of returning VIPs taped to the inner rim. With a brisk hand he combed his hair. She watched him go back to his preferred position on the pavement, a safe distance from any awning-based birds, until eventually a customer arrived. She checked him in and it was painless right up until the moment when she smiled and handed him the key. He looked at it with something like disgust and announced that he’d like a free upgrade. Why did so many people wait until after the admin had been done? If they asked politely, pre-allocation, you were so much more likely to meet their needs.

‘I’m with Britvic,’ the new guest said, as if this should mean something to her.

She lied and told him there were no suites available. She said the King of Nairobi was staying. That statement almost always put people in their place.

She went back to her Jumbo Jotter pad. Worrying about her dad had loosened other thoughts about her mother. It was like a buy-one-get-one-free kind of deal, except you didn’t want the paid-for thing and you didn’t want the free thing either. She’d been trying to set some of her ideas down.