guests stand, takes the pen out of her mouth and leaves it on the desk.
There is no one in the lobby as she crosses it. The fauxcoal fire is burning in an empty room.
She pushes the revolving door until she’s at the steps on to the street, the surge of cold all round her. She stands under the Global Hotel sign and tries to see across the road.
She can’t see anyone there. There’s no one there.
She comes back into the surge of heat of the lobby. She straightens her uniform and walks across the room with brisk purpose. She lets herself back into Reception and sits down again. Her finger is still bleeding a little and round the place where the pin broke the surface the finger is reddened. She pushes the skin of her finger until the blood comes out in a perfect rounded bead of red. It is a surprisingly bright red. She puts her finger in her mouth.
Duncan is coming down the stairs, one at a time, slow. His head is down. He passes Reception.
Thanks, Duncan, Lise says as he does.
Duncan says nothing. He goes straight back into the LBR and shuts the door, so Lise talks to the shut door. I’ll call you if we need you, she says. It’s dead tonight.
She flinches at her own words. Shit, she says under her breath. But it’s all right. Duncan won’t have heard it through the combination of the shut door and the noise coming out of the speakers, flooding Reception, an instrumental version of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’. Lise looks at the clock.
6:53 p.m.
Five hours to go.
She watches to see if she can catch the number on the clock changing itself again. But she looks away, just for the mere split of a second, and when she looks back it’s already 6:56 p.m. without her having seen any of it happen or felt any of it pass.
It’s already 6:56 p.m. : Time is notoriously deceptive. Everybody knows this (though it is one of the easier things to forget).
Five hours to go : Because time seems to move in more or less simple linear chronology, from one moment, second, minute, hour, day, week, etc. to the next, the shapes of lives in time tend to be translated into common linear sequence which itself translates into easily recognizable significance, or meaning. Lise is waiting for the next predictable point in the sequence: the time for her to go home. This week Lise is on evening shift. At Global Hotels, evening shift runs from 4 p.m. till midnight when the night staff takes over. In actuality here, when Lise thinks ‘five hours to go’, she still has five hours plus seven minutes till her shift officially ends, and usually there’salso a loss of several minutes at staff changeover with the exchange of hellos and the putting on of coats; on evening shift Lise rarely leaves the hotel before 12:20 a.m.
Tonight, however, Lise won’t leave the hotel building until 4 a.m.
Instrumental version of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’ : Peter Burnett, undermanager of this branch of Global, chooses the music for the lobby. He ensures, by leaving three cds on low-volume repeat-play in the locked cupboard of his office, that nobody will replace his choice whenever he’s out of the hotel building, including evenings. ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’ was originally a summer 1962 UK hit for Neil Sedaka, and a hit again exactly ten years later in July of 1972 when television’s The Partridge Family took it to number three in the UK charts. Some of the words of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’, remembered more or less correctly, are running concurrent with the background instrumental through Lise’s head right now
(don’t take your love
away from me
don’t you leave my heart in
misery
if you go
then I’ll be blue)
without her realizing they are, as she glances at the clock on the computer.
The speakers, flooding Reception : Figuratively speaking. More literally, in roughly an hour and twenty minutesfrom now the bath left running in Room 12 (one of the hotel’s bigger, better and more expensive rooms) will finally overflow and flood
There is no one in the lobby as she crosses it. The fauxcoal fire is burning in an empty room.
She pushes the revolving door until she’s at the steps on to the street, the surge of cold all round her. She stands under the Global Hotel sign and tries to see across the road.
She can’t see anyone there. There’s no one there.
She comes back into the surge of heat of the lobby. She straightens her uniform and walks across the room with brisk purpose. She lets herself back into Reception and sits down again. Her finger is still bleeding a little and round the place where the pin broke the surface the finger is reddened. She pushes the skin of her finger until the blood comes out in a perfect rounded bead of red. It is a surprisingly bright red. She puts her finger in her mouth.
Duncan is coming down the stairs, one at a time, slow. His head is down. He passes Reception.
Thanks, Duncan, Lise says as he does.
Duncan says nothing. He goes straight back into the LBR and shuts the door, so Lise talks to the shut door. I’ll call you if we need you, she says. It’s dead tonight.
She flinches at her own words. Shit, she says under her breath. But it’s all right. Duncan won’t have heard it through the combination of the shut door and the noise coming out of the speakers, flooding Reception, an instrumental version of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’. Lise looks at the clock.
6:53 p.m.
Five hours to go.
She watches to see if she can catch the number on the clock changing itself again. But she looks away, just for the mere split of a second, and when she looks back it’s already 6:56 p.m. without her having seen any of it happen or felt any of it pass.
It’s already 6:56 p.m. : Time is notoriously deceptive. Everybody knows this (though it is one of the easier things to forget).
Five hours to go : Because time seems to move in more or less simple linear chronology, from one moment, second, minute, hour, day, week, etc. to the next, the shapes of lives in time tend to be translated into common linear sequence which itself translates into easily recognizable significance, or meaning. Lise is waiting for the next predictable point in the sequence: the time for her to go home. This week Lise is on evening shift. At Global Hotels, evening shift runs from 4 p.m. till midnight when the night staff takes over. In actuality here, when Lise thinks ‘five hours to go’, she still has five hours plus seven minutes till her shift officially ends, and usually there’salso a loss of several minutes at staff changeover with the exchange of hellos and the putting on of coats; on evening shift Lise rarely leaves the hotel before 12:20 a.m.
Tonight, however, Lise won’t leave the hotel building until 4 a.m.
Instrumental version of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’ : Peter Burnett, undermanager of this branch of Global, chooses the music for the lobby. He ensures, by leaving three cds on low-volume repeat-play in the locked cupboard of his office, that nobody will replace his choice whenever he’s out of the hotel building, including evenings. ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’ was originally a summer 1962 UK hit for Neil Sedaka, and a hit again exactly ten years later in July of 1972 when television’s The Partridge Family took it to number three in the UK charts. Some of the words of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’, remembered more or less correctly, are running concurrent with the background instrumental through Lise’s head right now
(don’t take your love
away from me
don’t you leave my heart in
misery
if you go
then I’ll be blue)
without her realizing they are, as she glances at the clock on the computer.
The speakers, flooding Reception : Figuratively speaking. More literally, in roughly an hour and twenty minutesfrom now the bath left running in Room 12 (one of the hotel’s bigger, better and more expensive rooms) will finally overflow and flood
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