Take the Next Road on your Left (9)

The hotel wasn’t far, less than five minutes drive, which only served to increase my acrimony. Behind the reception desk was a rather attractive brunette. As I approached and opened my mouth to introduce myself the phone rang and she picked it up pushing her hand out to stop me in a mock apology.
“Hotel Excelsior, can I help you?”
It was her. To be honest as soon as she dismissed me with that pathetic gesture I prayed it would be her. As she spoke she moved backwards toward a rear room and began conversing in whispers; a personal call.
Three full minutes later she turned her attention to me
“I’m terribly sorry sir. That was an important reservation I had to take”
“The pictures, a nightclub or maybe just the pub?”
“I’m sorry sir?”
“Where is your boyfriend taking you tonight?” I accentuated.
She coloured vindicating my guesswork, but ignored the question
“Can I help you?”
I took a deep breath. Somebody has to pay for it sugar; for all the crap I’ve had to put up with today and you’ve just volunteered.
“I have a reservation for the one night here. My name is Lucrii, Charlie Lucrii; would you like me to spell it for you?”
“Please” she replied and pointed her nose at the register
“L – U – C – K – Y” I deliberated
“I don’t have that. There’s a Looseree here; L – U – C – R – I – I, if that’s how it’s pronounced” she countered impertinently.
“Do you have a Flaherty perhaps, spelt F – L –A – T – L – Y?”
She lifted up her nose. It seemed twice as curled as it had before she bent down. Houston – the eagle has landed.
“Oh, you weren’t at the…”
“Police station…yes”
Dumbfounded she searched frenetically amongst her limited cranial synapses for an explanation to exonerate herself.
“Look Mr Flarty…” She paused straining for conviction. “We get a lot of crank calls here” she continued absorbing nothing but her own desperate attempts to rationalise her innocence in hanging up on me in my hour of need. “Between bank robberies, witnesses and silly names…well I don’t mean silly, and it was a bad line…” (It wasn’t) “…and this is a very popular hotel and we’re short-staffed and…”
I cut through the crap. “Is Hardman still here, Brian Hardman?”
“Oh he was the gentleman you were asking about earlier? I thought he…”
“Before you even begin to think it neither he nor his name is the least silly”
She smiled, more fearfully than apologetically, and her contrition was almost as nauseating as her insolence.
“He organised the Sales conference you hosted today. He was due to stay overnight along with some of the other delegates”
“I’m afraid he’s cancelled”
“Shit”
“He did seem rather incensed. He lost the deposit on the room; I doubt if we’ll fill it now”
“Really, a minute ago you were the busiest hotel in the country”
She chewed the inside of her left cheek. “Some of your colleagues are still here - in the bar I believe”
“Arseholed I bet. No, I don’t want to see anybody. Can I have my key please?”
“Certainly; would you like someone to take your bag and show you to your room?”
“No thank you. I just want some piece and quiet. Which way?”
“The lift is just around the corner alongside the bar”
“What about the stairs?” Reps are lazy by nature. There seems little return for all that physical effort. There was no danger of running into one of them on a stairwell.
“Just behind us here, through those double doors. But it’s the fifth floor”
“Good”
I don’t know which one of us was more relieved to be rid of the other.

The room was adequate, no more than that. The usual facilities adorned the top of the usual cheap wooden sideboard with drawers which contained the usual brochures of things to see in town. They appeared less corpulent than others. No wonder they’re stuck in the bar, I thought, this is probably about as exciting as it gets in this dump.
Nothing worse than drifting around a city centre at night looking for action that just isn’t there. Point me in the right direction; show me the best nightclubs, the top restaurants, life is full of people farting about getting nowhere.
I looked out of the windows to the streets below. Even in the late afternoon I could see one guy paralytic, bouncing his way home off a succession of lampposts, road signs and phone boxes. If he missed one he’d be fucked I guessed. He’d just keep staggering sideways until he hit a car or a wall. Maybe a good wallop would put him back on course like a fluke shot on a snooker table that hits numerous cushions before rolling happily into a corner pocket.
I lay down without undressing. The car lights and occasional blue light flashed across the banal ceiling. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep. I was exhausted but overtired. I stared at the mini-bar but resisted. If I drank myself to sleep I’d have a stinking headache in the morning and a shitty drive home ahead of me.
I couldn’t put the day’s events away in a nice dark hole in my subconscious. My thought processes were racing like a cerebral Indianapolis 500. If anything prevented me from relaxing it was indignation.
I believed in the notion of one-man’s-meat and all that. I didn’t care what people believed in, who they voted for and what they got up to at home. All I required from them was to buy. If they were Catholic, so was I; Conservative – so was I. I’d achieved something through hard work and what I would call strategy losers thought connivance.
I was used to being treated with respect, the sort of respect a guy expected when he reached the sort of income that you saw in the stitching of his clothes, the quality leather in his shoes, the distinction of his accessories and the generosity of his gratuities. Today I may as well have been a sliver of bird shit on a blade of grass about to be hewn by a Flymo.
I lay there for about half an hour kicking the crap out of my two interrogators, screwing that receptionist and leave her begging while I walked away emotionless and dry and strangling Hardman with a rolled up Life Annuity document. Maybe I should go for a walk, but where?
My mother used to walk a lot. I could never see the appeal. It used to piss me off when I was a kid. I’d sit there after school waiting for my dinner and she’d eventually wander in around 5:00. When I asked her where she’d been it was always the same – “Oh, here and there; nowhere in particular”
“But I’m starving Mum”
“Sorry Love, give me ten minutes”
Dad wasn’t like that - straight to work or to the club or ‘footie’. I found out later the only wandering he ever did was in his relationship with Mum. It occurred to me, years later, that she was probably spying on him and his ‘fancy women’.
Then all of a sudden I saw her again, frozen against my windshield; then slowly rolling down off my bonnet. This time, though, her face was a blur whereas it had been vivid at the time, almost as if I’d hit an angel. Where the hell did that idea come from?
Suddenly a strange sensation seemed to envelop me like a blanket; it was shame. All this time I had been lying here engaged in mental fantasies of revenge against those who had imprisoned me in one day of purgatory and this poor girl was lying injured in the local hospital. My pride had been acupunctured sure, but physically I was unharmed and God knows what sort of state she was in.
“I should go and find out if she’s all right” I whispered and a horn blared from the street below in assent. Hospitals though, I hated them.
Last time I was near one was five years ago when the old feller died, aged 61. The excesses had finally ripped all the meat from the bone. He had at least two cancers the doctors said, bowel and another one I didn’t quite catch. It had been diagnosed late but time was insignificant in his case as the disease had storm-trooped its way through his body in weeks.
Pity you couldn’t give cancer my Sat Nav. She’d probably send it to the ear or the ankle; some body part you could probably forgo, especially at his age. Even better she could have sent it to his dick and had that cut off, without it he probably would’ve kept Mum. She never came back for his funeral. I had her address but we hardly wrote to each other at all, even when I had long ceased hating her for leaving me with him, and I had discovered the reason why.
He paraded his successive girlfriends to me as if he were garnering my approval of just which one he should employ for the vacant position of matriarch. I abhorred them even more so that my mother. But the thing that I could never quite exonerate her for was Canada; why of all places would she go so far that I couldn’t visit her?
The first time she wrote me I ripped up the letter before I read it and tossed it away with the garbage. I calmed down around tea-time and went to retrieve it but found that Dad had thrown his unfinished tea on top of it. Neither of us could cook beyond the basics. I fished the pieces out dripping in sauce and baked beans and undercooked chips and vaguely made out the odd half-sentence where the ink hadn’t run away.
The phrase ‘new start’ seemed to figure a lot and there was a reference to qualifications and jobs but, as I never passed any exams, well except for scraping English, it was meaningless. Toward the end I made out the word ‘understand’ and it finished with ‘…become a man’ Well I’d done that, and a very successful man to boot, but I still couldn’t understand.
She wrote a second time after Dad had been cremated some two months. I read all of it this time. There were more apologies which I ignored and a hope that I was doing well. In fact she was sure I was doing well (I never told her what I did) The correspondence ended with an offer to go out there, if anything to permit her to explain her rationale face to face with the son she still loved.
I replied and declined. I was too busy. Maybe someday, soon, I wrote, hoping that circumstances would negate me ever having to and that was the last I ever heard from her; dead too, probably.