Jonathan Lee - High Dive

He thought he must have misheard. ‘Sorry?’

‘I’m not going to sleep with you,’ she repeated.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Right.’

It had been a very exciting development. Here was a woman, a beautiful woman, a new woman who didn’t know the ins and outs of his every mistake, and she was thinking about not sleeping with him.

Unfortunately Marina had, since then, been true to her word. The Grand’s Guest Relations Manager wouldn’t give him love. He knew he’d never be able to lie on tangled bed sheets with her, his ear against her belly, listening to the secret squelches of her stomach. He’d come to terms with all this long ago. There was the time he’d asked her to the cinema ‘as a friend’ — universal code for Please Sleep With Me. There was the time he’d asked her, when they’d been spending an increasing amount of their spare time together, to join him on a weekend away in a luxury hotel in the Lake District to ‘check out how our competitors do it’ — i.e. I Adore You. On both occasions she had politely declined and had leaned forward to give him, as if by way of consolation prize, a squeeze on his upper arm. Oh, those arm squeezes. They left him longing for her more deeply than before. Less sharply, perhaps, but more deeply — an old injury that creaks on cold days.

An orderly had smuggled him a packet of cashew nuts. He’d hoped to obtain them for no more than 50p, but in the end had handed over an outrageous £1.20. The market here drove hard bargains: a captive audience, more buyers than sellers.

The strip lighting was unagreeable. The spongy walls exhaled an inertia. A nurse came and apologised again on behalf of Mr Marshall that they’d had to give his private room to a ‘patient in need’. What this ward needed was a skylight. Or: a sculpture here and there. Or: a jaunty purple chair. Redecorate! He did not dare to think of the hotel except in flashes, its soft-lit elegance and luxury. He longed for spring, could not face another winter of freezing winds, cold fronts skidding in from the sea, wet gloves dropped on pavements, the counterfeit solidity of snowmen, iced dog shit in the gutters, snow scraped from the King’s Road kerbs …

Come on, old man, stay positive.

‘Am I disturbing?’

He opened two eyes and closed a mouth. Marina.

‘I.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s good to see you, Mari.’

‘Good,’ Marina replied. ‘Are you enjoying your stay?’

He hauled himself into a sitting position. ‘The service isn’t bad, now you mention it.’

‘No?’

He rubbed his face. ‘Francesca came in yesterday and said it gave her an idea. She’s going to get all the Grand’s carpets ripped up. Replace the vacuums with a couple of mops.’

Marina smiled.

‘Is everything OK?’ he said.

‘With staff?’

‘With the building. With the preparations for the PM.’

‘Of course. And I’ve brought a friend to see you.’

‘A friend?’

‘Y es .’

‘I must be losing it,’ he said. ‘I can’t see any friend.’

Marina leaned forward in her chair and spoke into a space south of the mattress. Briefly Moose sensed movement. ‘Are we ready?’ she said. ‘Y e s? One, two, three, surprise !’

The surprise came in stereo and very nearly killed him. Held aloft above Marina’s head was a tiny boy with a wicked grin, no more than two or three years old. He had long eyelashes and an extraordinary mop of thick dark hair, shiny as a freshly tarred road.

‘This is Engelbert,’ Marina said. ‘Remember me talking? My nephew. I’m taking care of him today.’

Engelbert took a lolly from his pocket, spun the wrapper off and started sucking. He looked quite happy suspended up there, his tiny jeans hanging low, his red T-shirt looking snug.

‘He’s a good workout actually!’ Marina’s face reddened. ‘The little man is quite heavy!’

Moose watched as Engelbert was lowered onto Marina’s knee. It struck him as another of the universe’s myriad unfairnesses that this kid had so much life ahead of him and would spend at least some of it in Marina’s lap. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you, Engelbert.’

Engelbert responded with a blink.

‘Is that …?’ Marina said. ‘The pool … under the curtain?’

‘Yep. The guy’s not well. I didn’t want to make a fuss. I’m sure they’ll deal with it soon.’

He was remembering — what was he remembering? Freya as a four-or five-year-old, perfectly viciously cute, capable of breaking the heart of a passer-by with a smile or poked-out tongue. Daddy, why doesn’t sick look the same as what you’ve eaten? He’d made a note of that somewhere. An early inkling of genius.

Marina had spotted the file on the floor by the bed. ‘You are working?’

‘No, just catching up on correspondence.’

‘Don’t make it a habit,’ she said.

‘Give me a quick debrief,’ he begged.

‘You are addicted.’

‘Debrief, please.’

‘There are no new guest problems. Nothing to worry about.’

‘What about the punching incident?’

‘Nothing to worry.’

‘Is there going to be litigation? Do we need to tell the GM?’

Marina wrinkled her nose. Engelbert sucked on his lolly. A nurse stared at the vomit and looked at her watch. ‘Do you want to?’ she said.

‘Pardon?’

‘Tell the GM.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s dealt with now, is it? And the guy probably had it coming.’

Marina nodded. ‘These men.’

‘Yeah.’ He tried to arrange his face into the expression of a man who was not one of these men but who was, nonetheless, a man. ‘By the way, for the napkins, I’m definitely leaning towards conference blue now. A supplier in Scotland.’

‘You are better at this than me. I don’t care much about colours.’ She paused. ‘Are you staying optimistic, M oo se?’

‘That depends. Is it possible to be optimistic about life without being optimistic about your own specific life?’

‘If you’re still thinking in riddles you are all right. Did you cut yourself shaving?’

‘Possibly.’

Moose felt rather than heard Engelbert’s feathery sigh. Time to make some effort. You saw a little boy and you wanted his approval, the future to give the past its blessing.

‘So,’ Moose said. ‘Engelbert. What’s your favourite flavour lolly?’

Engelbert narrowed one eye. ‘Big,’ he said.

‘Good choice, good choice. Size is important. And — next question — how old are you?’

To this Engelbert also said ‘big’, so Moose politely enquired again.

‘ Three ,’ Engelbert said.

‘Nearly three. Still a month to go, haven’t you?’

‘Three,’ Engelbert said, frowning, and Marina conceded the point.

‘Is this perhaps your auntie, then?’

There was a pearl of saliva in the corner of Engelbert’s mouth, on the side swollen by the lolly, and Marina dabbed at it with a tissue. ‘Auntie,’ he said. His stare announced that they’d already covered this ground.

‘And can I assume your mother, Mari’s sister, is a fan of the other Engelbert? The singer?’

The child looked alarmed.

‘Mr Humperdinck,’ Moose said.

‘Urgh,’ Engelbert replied.

‘Humperdinck.’

‘Urgh.’

They had encountered another misunderstanding. Moose decided to croon out a lyric from Engelbert Humperdinck’s classic ‘Release Me’ by way of example.

Engelbert let a decent interval pass, then burst into a shoulder-shaking chuckle. ‘Silly!’ he said, pointing a mini finger at Moose. ‘Big! Silly.’ The joy in his voice was pure — oh, it was pure — instinctive, unimpeachable. It took hostage that childlike part of Moose that was still receptive to balloons and pink wafer biscuits, that sketched small turds in the margins of notebooks, that felt almost three years old.