Jonathan Lee - High Dive

The room exploded. Fran had worked in hospitality for the best part of three decades. Her principal complaint about the Grand was that tights weren’t supplied with the uniform.

As the sky over the Channel became a deep purple, only a few fragile coral swirls surviving up high, Moose took a seat in the bar area for his pre-dinner beer and cigarette combo. His Zippo was engraved with the words ‘To Viv, Love Phil’. His ex-wife hadn’t shown much commitment with her smoking. Marina came over, clutching a pack of menthols. Moose provided a flame. The best thing about smoking was that people like Marina sometimes asked you for a light.

He dropped a twenty-pence piece into the till, opened a packet of crisps, pulled up a chair for her. Pictures of famous guests adorned one wall: Napoleon the Third, John F. Kennedy, Harold Wilson.

‘Take a holiday, Moose,’ Marina said. ‘A couple of days you could spare, no?’ She lifted her arms. A little pink yawn as she stretched. He noted once again the miraculous mundanity of her elbows, tiny angry creatures that seemed too awkward to belong to her body.

Technically he was, via a dotted line, Marina’s boss. But the clash of continents in her voice gave the Grand’s Guest Relations Manager a worldliness he couldn’t ignore. Also: he was still suffering a little from The Infatuation. He took to heart everything she said and respected also the fact she didn’t explain too much about her past. Viv used to say there were two types of person in life, past tense and present tense. Viv had seen herself as a present-tense person, which gave her an excuse never to discuss what she felt about a thing that had already happened. She’d dwell on that thing silently instead. Marina, though, was genuinely present tense. She inhabited it. Owned it. Male staff members at the Grand waded through the myths that surrounded her, enjoying the feeling of being stuck. The story that she’d once been married to an adulterous game-show host in Argentina. That she’d previously been a model and a children’s entertainer. That recently, on her thirty-eighth birthday, a woman with short blonde hair had proposed to her in a cafe in the Lanes. No one quite knew what was true.

‘Want one?’ he said.

Marina shook her head.

The first three crisps he ate individually, seeing how long he could keep them on his tongue before succumbing to the crunch. The rest he crammed in quickly.

TAKING A FRESH pen from a drawer, hunching over a 42-page hospitality brochure, Freya began to fill in, with black ink, every pocket of negative space in the letters ‘b’, ‘g’, ‘e’ and ‘o’. At the western end of the reception desk lay ten paper clips, placed there in readiness for a task not yet determined. At the eastern end, in a pool of shadow, the Guest Registration Book: a thick volume containing information on room rates and check-in dates, but also several ambitious doodles of penguins caught in rainstorms and a regularly updated note entitled ‘TOP FIVE LIES TODAY’.

Actually, sir, the singles are all exactly the same size.

Madam, I’m so sorry. If there was any way to upgrade you, I would.

Really, it’s been my pleasure.

The GM enjoyed meeting you too!

Of course I remember you, Mr Norton. It’s really great to see you again.

A guest asked for his key. He had a thin officious moustache on his clammy top lip. It looked like it had crawled there in the search for a warm place to die. She closed her eyes sometimes and saw the whole hotel going up in flames, re-forming as a structure made of pink reservation paper, all the neatly pencilled words settling as ash on the floor, but pulsing a little as they lay there.

Her shift today would run until 7.30 p.m. Her principal role, during this time, was to sit behind this reception desk without falling asleep or killing anyone, in particular herself or a customer. She played with her hair, curling it around a forefinger as she had on multiple previous summers. There were a few guests talking in the lobby. One guest on the stairs doing some kind of back-stretching exercise. In the bar area opposite men played chess and sipped gin and tonics, surrounded by antiquated swank. Jorge the Barman was reading the splayed pages of a newspaper, a skyline of whisky bottles behind him. He was handsome in a damp kind of way.

One of the chess players in the bar area she recognised from yesterday. While her father was in a meeting this guest had called her ‘extraordinarily useless’ for not knowing the name of a shop on East Street. The guest next in line, overhearing this, had been extra nice to her to compensate. A queue for the reception desk often broke itself down this way: nasty — nice — nasty — nice. When a customer had been audibly rude to you, your options opened up. It was possible to give the next guy in line the coffin room and hear no murmur of complaint.

The lobby’s clocks ticked, hands angling for different hours. The air filled with the delicious smell of cakes and scones, the scent mingling with the sweetness of fresh-cut flowers. People padded softly across oriental rugs, pausing to look at art in ancient frames. Still lifes and landscapes. Oil paintings of sea scenes. Glossy ladies with lapdogs. Horses drawn out of proportion. There were an awful lot of kings in capes.

‘Split ends’: the phrase didn’t even begin to cover it. The ends of her hair had been put through a mini blender this week. £8 that trim had cost her. Considering she was paid £1.60 an hour to sit behind this desk, watching people come and go, life actually genuinely passing her by, the price tag was nothing short of criminal. Usually if someone assaulted you it was free.

Lost in the curves and slopes of her penguin pictures, rubbing her dry eyes, she heard the familiar whirr of the revolving door and began to sit up straight. The man entering the hotel now was unusually young: mid-twenties, she guessed. For a September guest he was also unusually good-looking and tall. You wouldn’t hesitate to call him a ‘guy’, and in the wake of peak season most of the men who stayed at the Grand could be better described as ‘chaps’, or ‘fellows’, or some other form of upper-middle-class address you might, if you were a silver-haired person from a similarly creamy kind of background, be tempted to preface with ‘Jolly good’ or ‘Hello, old’. He didn’t have the drowsy smile. He didn’t have the soft, outdated face. He didn’t have a thin tense wife on his arm and he wasn’t even swinging an umbrella.

He made his way from the door to the desk. He was carrying two sports bags, one on each shoulder. He was wearing a good leather jacket. It seemed a little heavy for the weather. Barbara — her foot in the air, her tongue on her bumhole — reluctantly raised her head. She’d been adopted by Chef Harry in the winter of ’79 and had subsequently developed a generous figure, plus certain unresolvable issues with authority. She was not in the habit of making needless moves. Freya had time to wonder if Barbara sensed what she sensed: the guy’s air of competence; the fact he’d probably be a dab hand with a can-opener. She had time to think that he must be here to ask for directions. Time to convince herself that he didn’t plan to stay here at the Grand, with its massive reception desk, an oak shelter for hillocks of fuzzy dust, swamps of chewing gum, several miraculous cobwebs, Snogger Dave’s bogey collection, battered stickers saying ‘Rad!’ and ‘Pow!’ and, until Freya purchased a deadly spray from Woolworths last week, a complacent oversized spider whose death she’d immediately mourned. No one cared about the areas the guests couldn’t see.

He was right in front of her now. She arranged a curl of hair over her collarbone, pointing it towards a space that she might, on a more confident day, have called cleavage. She watched him touch his own hair. It was dark and sharply parted. He was wearing a smart white shirt under his jacket, tucked in at the waist. His stubble was thickest in the cleft of his chin.