Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Mum was often bored with life. Basically need to avoid that — e.g. remain only bored with JOB.

She stared at these lines, the forward tilt of her own handwriting. Why was it that, when in a bad mood, her mother had always tried to find ways of making everyone’s character feel foreseeable? Everything people did or said was anticipated and discounted in advance. ‘Oh, you would say that.’ ‘Well, that’s typical.’ She was a lecturer in Linguistics. Some days she saw cliché in everything. There was nothing malicious about it, probably. Her dad always said it was a symptom of The Depression. You could tell he capitalised it. But she seemed fully convinced that everyone’s personality was locked on a single predictable track — except hers, because you could tell she thought of herself as unusual. It seemed to Freya that her mother, trying to reinforce this sense of herself as unusual, would sometimes make herself happy when she wanted to be sad, and sad when she ought to have been happy, and angry for the sake of being angry. She was committed above all to contrariness, was she? She wanted to keep people on their toes.

Some mothers threw parties. Mine threw crises.

She was quite pleased with these last two sentences. She thought they might one day be the seed of an extremely profitable screenplay. She opened The Colour of Magic under the desk and read a few more pages. Twoflower and the upside-down mountain and the dragons that only exist in the imagination. The characters’ journeys were being controlled by gods playing a board game. She snorted at a line from Rincewind.

‘My name is immaterial,’ she said.

‘That’s a pretty name,’ said Rincewind.

Light teased the lobby walls with slowly shifting mysteries. More clouds arrived outside. The patterns vanished. She checked the Band-Aid supply in the second drawer down in case Barbara decided to maul more guests. Barbara was on her back on the rug with her legs in the air, yellow eyes shining, a trap. Her purrs were alive with staticky crackles.

Fran came up. ‘How’s your dad doing, Frey-doe?’

‘On the mend, thanks, Fran.’

‘That’s what I heard. Awesome. Give him my love, OK?’

People wanted the bare minimum of information. Something that wouldn’t eat into their day but would nonetheless leave them feeling kind. Fran was kind, but she was also bored and busy, and in that respect she was like everyone else who wasn’t famous, and maybe even some who were.

Freya looked down into the grainy swirls of the desk and thought about hearts. Felt the inside of her head loosening to sherbet, becoming a purring whiteness, a long bright corridor reaching out into the distance that was music-video pretty, pure. She wanted to tiptoe through it lighting candles as she went. Madonna. Borderline . What would it be like, to be that awesome?

She blinked. One of her thumbs, today, looked slightly bigger than the other.

The notepad was decorated with dandelions and bits of seed that were forever blowing sideways, trying to escape the page. She flicked past the message about Susie trying to get hold of her and also the message underneath about requested rearrangements to Margaret Thatcher’s room. The key thing, apparently, was to have a number of low-wattage lamps close to the desk, so that her husband, Denis, mysteriously missing a second ‘n’, could get some sleep while she did last-minute amendments to her speech. Dad thought this was a perfect detail: that someone would plan to do last-minute amendments.

She’d need to get out of here in the next few weeks. More than enough temporary staff to take her place. Even if it wasn’t Spain. Even it was just, like, Bognor . Her father said that meeting Margaret Thatcher would amount to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but what actually was the point in doing something you’d never do again? It sounded very much like what her mother called Novelty Value.

Surfer John sidled up to the desk, looking unusually shifty. Could Freya, um, by any chance, um, cover his shift this afternoon? 4 p.m. behind the bar. You know I’m good for it. Didn’t I repay your shift the other day?

‘I’m visiting my dad again.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Surfer John rearranged his handsome hair and allowed a moment to pass. ‘And that would be a long visit, would it?’

She sighed. ‘You would owe me, John.’

‘I love you!’

‘Four until eight, right? You’d owe me.’

‘You’re the best. I’m going to …’

‘Yeah?’

‘Something nice. I’m going to buy you —’

‘A car? A castle?’

‘A fancy dinner,’ John said.

She laughed.

‘No, I am. I’ve got to grab a lift to Camber Sands, and then I’ll book you up.’

With this mysterious promise, John left. A summer-staff kid came to the desk. He leaned on the oak all casual and said, ‘Hi, Freya, how’s your dad?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Shit! Really?’

‘No,’ she said, and saw the excitement drain from his face.

On her break she took a walk and got annoyed. She was annoyed with herself for accepting the bar shift instead of visiting her father. She was annoyed that she had preferred the idea of the bar to the reality of the hospital. She was annoyed with the Royal Pavilion for looking too much like pictures of the Taj Mahal. She was annoyed with the predictably bright fabrics in the bohemian shops on North Laine. She was annoyed with the dismal iron canopy of the station, the fiddly white arches over side streets, the small sleepy bandstands, the half-melted look of the wavy seafront railings. She was annoyed by Surfer John and she was annoyed, most of all, by the Grand. The whole thing looked absurdly self-indulgent. The painstaking brickwork. The well-spaced windows. The cast-iron twirly bits on balconies. The flouncy sections of supporting white stone. Squint and they revealed their silly floral patterns, silly leaf patterns, silly seashell patterns. The whole facade seemed just that: a facade. It was the over-engineered, dramatic film-set frontage for 201 absurdly overpriced rooms in which the only concession to imagination was, what, the slightly varying configuration of the furniture? The building had the quaint lacy look of her grandma’s flat in Hove. Did her grandma even know that Moose was ill? She charged through the revolving door and said hello to no one.

From a shelf under the bar she took a segment of lime and dropped it in her drink. Acid mood. Swirling citrus thoughts. The smell of nicotine competed in the air around her with the sharp vinegary scent of brown sauce squeezed into ramekins. Narrowing her eyes into a kind of safari squint, thinking that she’d much rather be at home watching David Attenborough tapes, she studied the half-dozen drinkers arranged around her. A few of the beige-jacket crowd sitting at a low table, playing bridge and making jokes about their wives. Also a local writer who liked to drink real ale while making notes in his Moleskine notebook. (‘Waves are amazing’ was the only sentence Freya had seen.) And closer, sitting at the bar, a crossword laid out between his arms, was an eccentric guy everyone called the Captain. ‘The Captain of what?’ Freya occasionally asked, but no one seemed to know. Her attempts to get some sense out of the Captain himself on this simple but apparently intimate issue had, as yet, yielded no success. He looked like the love child of badgers. White whiskery sideburns. Liver spots on his skinny cheeks. She stared now into the high frizz of his hair, bluish and electric, separate threads of it startled by light. His age was somewhere north of seventy. The high numbers merged into one another, top floors of a skyscraper, distant.

The one undisputed thing about the Captain was his natural habitat: Brighton’s charity shops and second-hand stores, places where he could indulge his remarkable need to rummage. The Captain had an insatiable appetite for memorabilia. The very best of his discoveries found their way into a small enterprise three streets back from the beach, a ‘cultural institution’ he called the Museum of Lost Content. To most, the museum — of which the Captain was Founder, Acquisitions Manager, Curator and the sole member of staff — was an attic flat filled with junk. But to Freya sometimes it seemed a place of liberating disarray. When the weather was bad she went there on her lunch breaks. The Captain never charged her an entry fee. He never seemed to charge anyone an entry fee. His ability to stay financially afloat was one of several mysteries that orbited his person.