Chapter 2

Okay, there were enough requests for more, so here ‘more’ is. For anyone just browing who has no idea who any of these strange people are, take a look here and then read the next two entries. If after that, you still don’t know who any of these strange people are, then perhaps I should consider an alternative career.

But enough. Time for…

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Chapter 2
Archie had been thinking. Back in his bed-sit, there was a lot of time for thinking. He didn’t like television. Given the slightest provocation, Archie would tell people that he “preferred live theatre to that rubbish on the box”. But then he never went to the theatre. He hadn’t been to the theatre in twenty years. Archie was as meticulous at home as he was in work, and his fastidious attention to detail filled up a lot of the space that a companion, or a television, would have taken up. He owned one knife, one fork, and three spoons (one teaspoon, one dessert spoon and one soup spoon) and every night, each was scrupulously polished with a clean cotton napkin. It was, Archie reflected as he smoothed away a smudge, the only way to get silver really clean. No polish. No disposeable clothes impregnated with ‘silva-shyne’. Just good old-fashioned elbow grease. In the smooth surface of the spoon, Archie could see his face moving, each feature in turn bulging and contracting as he moved the spoon towards the light to check it. There. Perfect.

His cutlery had been purloined from a previous job in a hotel.

Not stolen! For years Archie had worked overtime at that hotel. All of it unpaid. All of it demanded, not requested. After three years of careful dedication to the hotel, one day behind the bar he’d used the calculator and a paper napkin to make an accurate estimate of the amount oweing to him. It took the whole of his shift to calculate an hourly total – he spent at least fifteen minutes puzzling over one troublesome weekend the March before last. Had he worked extra hours that day then taken time off in lieu? Or should he deduct against that weekend the bottle of cheap whiskey they’d given him at Christmas? The final hourly total, he was confident, was accurate to within a few minutes. The monetary total, which took him onto his second napkin, made his eyes water.

The value of four pieces of cutlery had been trifling in comparison. That evening, on the way home, his pockets were heavy with what he considered just one small part of his rightful earnings.

But polishing the silver could only take so long. And reading by the light of the standard lamp in the corner was all very well, but his glasses needed new lenses in them, and the letters on the page were blurry and difficult to make out. So when the silver was put away, and the book (always a weighty biography from the local library) had been placed back on the shelf, Archie got to thinking. Dreaming. Reflecting upon his day. And this time, he thought that perhaps he had been a little harsh to the girl who’d turned up the previous day. Just because one temp upped and left, another was rude to the customers, and another ‘disappeared’ at the same time as all the money from the bar that night, didn’t mean they all would, he told himself. Just because one teenager swore in the street didn’t mean that they had all lost sight of standards of proper behaviour.

After all, even he had been a teenager once. A lanky, sullen, slip of a teenage boy with wanton brown eyes like pools of chocolate, as he’d been told by a particularly articulate admirer. He dreamed some more.

The next morning as he prepared himself for work, raking a comb through a ruler-straight parting, he raised a finger to his reflection.

‘You were being judgemental again, weren’t you?’

His reflection seemed suitably chastised.

‘Well don’t be. Judge not, lest ye be judged.’

His reflection cocked an ironical eyebrow at him. ‘Interesting choice of quotation, don’t you think?’

‘That’s enough of that.’

Archie turned away, huffily. He had always talked to himself. But he had come to suspect he was doing it too much.

‘When one’s reflection starts pointing out the ironies in one’s own sentences, and trying to score points against oneself’ he said, heavily, ‘you know you’re in trouble.’

His reflection’s eyebrow slid up still further: ‘You’re at it again.’

He swung away from the mirror, adjusting his bow tie with nimble precision by touch alone, then sat down on the bed.

He had been too harsh with that girl – Lizzie, Elizabeth. She might be a nice girl. He would make an effort today.

The next day he smiled broadly at her, as she slunk in the door. She was late. She was always late, and she didn’t know whether to be cross with herself for being late, or cross with anyone who might notice that she was late, and might be cross with her. In the absence of any firm decision, she decided to be cross with everyone.

“Back again?” he bowed deeply to her and she shuffled away.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Back again?’”

“Yeah, I got that, but what was the bow for?”

“Just a greeting.” Perhaps overdone, he reflected. In fact, definitely overdone. But too late now.

Lizzie flared up. Maybe she shouldn’t have come back. Maybe her Mum was right. “Besides, what do you mean, ‘back again’? Hoping I wouldn’t come back? I need the money, don’t I?”

“Do you always answer questions with questions?”

“Do you always take the piss?”

Archie backed off, embarrassed. “Well fine.”

“Just leave me alone.”

“Fine.” Archie’s face, always ebulliently pink, was flushed to cerise, and he stomped away muttering under his breath, then stomped back to wave a finger in her face, “but don’t come asking me to sign your time-sheet on Friday!”

Lizzie laughed harshly, “Don’t you worry, old man. That’s Veronica’s job.”

“That’s MRS Symons to you!” Archie was purple by this point.

At the edges of the hotel, the strain was showing. A veneer of smartness was ill-papered over cracks that showed through in the winter sunlight. Beds that appeared soft and sumptuous were layered with thin duvets, old pillows, and wayward springs that dug themselves into sleepers. With the staff, too, there was the perpetual air of strain. Cumulative wear. Like the years of silent neglect and verbal abuse that lead a quiet woman to a kitchen drawer and a knife that will slide cleanly between two ribs.

As Veronica took Lizzie around the rooms to clean them, she warned her,

“Now don’t you go poking around these rooms too much. You’d be surprised what you find lurking under the surface.”

And Lizzie was. Surprised and appalled. When she heard a rustle as they turned the mattress over in Mr. Blackheath’s room, she peered in curiously.

“What’s that?”

“Best not to look.” said Veronica tartly, but too late. Lizzie’s curious eyes had caught sight of the glossy pages of a magazine. More than one magazine, a whole stash of them carefully inserted in-between the mattress and the sheet. “I said, ‘best not to look’! Believe me now?”

continued…