Paradise City

Esme nods.

‘What was her name? It’s on the tip of my tongue,’ Sanjay continues. He has an astonishing recall for current affairs-based trivia. ‘Ada. That was it. Ada Pink. Sweet-looking girl. Weird that she was never found.’

She lets him burble on, murmuring at intervals to appear interested. Sanjay was perfectly capable of talking for half an hour about the kind of sandwiches he was going to have for lunch that day. The weekly appearance of ‘Pizza Thursday’ in the canteen was a cause for conversational frenzy. After a while, his train of thought peters out and he falls silent. Esme glances at her watch. Only ten minutes till conference. Back to the nudists, then. She’ll deal with Pink later.

CAROL (#u718a0743-1663-5813-9828-8e6b38fbb191)

Carol wakes in the early hours when there is a heavy, pressing sensation on her lower legs and she knows that Milton has jumped onto the bed. Milton paws at the duvet, kneading the feathers like dough before settling himself into the curve shaped by the crook of her right knee, which happens to be precisely the most awkward position for Carol.

Why does he always go for the least convenient option? Carol can barely get through the newspaper these days without Milton walking all over the pages, pushing his head against her face, purring and mewling until she pays him the necessary attention.

She shouldn’t be so hard on him. He misses Derek of course. Derek had always been the softer touch: spooning jellied chunks of Whiskas into the feeding bowl when he thought she wasn’t looking and tickling Milton’s chin until the cat was rolled over, eyes closed, whiskers trembling with pleasure.

Unwilling to disturb him, Carol waits to see what the cat will do next, her senses pricked with the peculiar alertness that comes with the density of darkness after midnight. There is a bit of shuffling, then the sound of conscientious licking.

Oh Lord, she thinks, he’s washing himself. We’ll be here all night – or what there was left of it. She wonders what time it is. It feels like 5 a.m. but she refuses to look at the clock on the bedside table in case it confirms her fear there is even longer to go until daylight. Sleep is such a nuisance these days. The doctor has given her pills but she doesn’t like to take them in case she never wakes up. Besides, she knows what the problem is. She’s not used to the absence on the other side of the bed, not yet anyhow, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. She edges her left foot to the side, like a bather testing the water. For a moment, she convinces herself that her toes are going to make contact with the warm cotton of his pyjamas but instead her foot grazes against the coolness of the sheets where Derek should be.

She shivers, withdraws her leg, wonders how many minutes have passed.

Eventually Milton settles down and starts purring, gently at first but then rising in volume until it becomes impossible for her to ignore. Carol sighs loudly, exactly how she used to when Derek was snoring, hoping he would wake up, be apologetic, give her a cuddle and allow her to sink back into the uninterrupted sleep of one who knows she is loved. But of course Milton would never respond to such passive-aggressive tactics. He is, after all, a cat.

She tries to slip her right leg out from underneath his bulk, but Milton stirs and she is caught between wanting to get back to sleep and needing his company. She lies there, eyes open, legs twisted at odd angles. If she just keeps still and tries to relax, then maybe a tiredness will ‘wash over’ her like it always does in books.

A dull glow from the street lamp outside filters through the curtains, casting a buttery grey light over the bed. She traces the beam of it as it dips and curves across the crumpled duvet and imagines the slopes and valleys of a vast desert, the sand poured across her by some unknown hand as she slept.

She had been to a desert once, with Derek, in Tunisia. It had been a package holiday a few years back, one of those deals he found on the web. He was ever so good on the computer, was Derek. He had always been able to find nice places to stay whereas she never knew where to look. He’d tried to teach her how to do the grocery shopping online at Tesco once but she’d never got the hang of it. And part of her didn’t trust the idea of it anyway: she liked to touch her fruit and veg. You couldn’t smell a cantaloupe melon through a screen, now could you?

The Tunisia deal had been ten days fully inclusive in a four-star hotel on the island of Djerba. Neither of them had a clue what to expect: all they had wanted was guaranteed sunshine, a ground-floor room for easy access and a swimming pool that Carol could lie by and read her books.

When they got there, ashen and sweaty from the flight over, the hotel had exceeded all expectations. It was an enormous white building with marble floors and balconies layered on top of each other like a wedding cake. The staff had been impeccably efficient and polite. Their room overlooked the pool and was only a short walk from reception which was good for Derek, given how bad his leg was.

For the first couple of days, they hadn’t done much, which suited them fine. They’d wake every morning at 7.30, like they did at home, then go to the restaurant for breakfast. The buffet was laden with every type of food: pastries, cereal, cheese, flatbreads, muesli, little bowls of chopped-up dates and several trays of cured meats (there were a lot of Germans, Derek pointed out with slight displeasure. Carol told him to stop being narrow-minded. ‘The war’s over, Derek, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ He’d had the grace to look shamefaced).

After breakfast, Carol would set up her sunlounger underneath a parasol by the pool, slather herself in lotion and take one of her thrillers out to read until lunchtime. For hours she lay there, stately as a galleon, while Derek pottered about indoors doing heaven knows what with his crosswords and his gadget-instruction manuals he’d brought over especially from England.

‘What do you want them for?’ she’d asked when she spotted him packing the leaflets into his leather satchel. ‘How to’ manuals for digital radios, microwaves, dishwashers, broadband connections and the like.

‘I don’t get a chance to concentrate properly when I’m at home,’ he explained, turning to look at her with an affronted expression. ‘I like to know how things work. No harm in that, is there?’

She smiled, patted him on the shoulder.

‘No love, none at all.’

At lunchtime, still full from breakfast, they’d waddle over to the poolside bar and have a salad or some fresh fish. Derek would drink a bottle of the local beer. Carol would order a fresh fruit smoothie. They’d retire to their room for an afternoon nap and then, in the early evening before dinner, they’d watch a DVD from one of the selection the hotel had on offer. On Golden Pond was a favourite. Carol cried when she saw Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, all shaky with age and set in their ways. There was something so moving about people in love growing old. It’s a future you never imagine for yourself when you’re young. And yet she knew, without quite admitting it out loud, that the characters in the film weren’t that much older than her and Derek.

But on the third day, one of the hotel staff had asked if they wanted to go on an organised excursion to the desert and Derek had signed them up, even though Carol wasn’t sure.

‘It’ll be an experience,’ he said, holding her hand. She noticed the thinness of his fingers, the brittleness of his pale nails.

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ she said. She was nervous of the unexpected. Derek thought it was one of her failings. No sense of adventure. People were always talking nowadays of the need to ‘get out of your comfort zone’ but Carol would really rather stay inside it, thank you very much. If you were already comfortable, why would you choose not to be? That would be like deciding to sit on a hard wooden chair rather than a big soft sofa. It wouldn’t teach you anything apart from the fact you didn’t like hard wooden chairs and she knew that already.

‘Come on, poppet,’ Derek cajoled. ‘It might be fun.’

His eyes were bright at the thought of it. She saw that he’d caught the sun without even trying: his cheeks were pinkish-brown and the tip of his nose was beginning to peel. He was still a good-looking man, she thought, even now, two years shy of his seventieth birthday. His face had filled out as he got older and the extra weight suited him, made him look dignified.

He was five years older than her. When she first met him, at her friend Elsie’s twenty-first birthday party, he had reminded her of a dark-eyed bird: rapid and precise in his movements, his face a combination of angles and planes, his nose beaky, and with a shock of brown hair that seemed to blow about even when there was no wind. He had been skinny, almost too thin, and yet she had seen something comforting in his shape as soon as he walked through the door, bending to fit his gangly height into the small, smoky room. She had felt, even then, that she could tell Derek anything and he would understand. He didn’t need to say anything and still he would be in tune with everything she thought.

‘All right then,’ Carol said, kissing her husband lightly on the tip of his peeling nose. ‘Let’s go to the desert.’

And in the end, it had been amazing. They’d been driven in an air-conditioned jeep across a Roman causeway that connected the island to the mainland and then on to Ksar Ghilane, an oasis lined with date trees and criss-crossed with shallow drainage ditches. The night had been spent in a spacious tent and, although Carol had been worried about the heat, the temperature dropped, and she found that she slept deeply, her dreams accompanied by the rhythmic tautening and loosening of the linen canopy.

The next day, the tour operators had laid on an evening camel ride into the desert.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Carol asked, spearing a fresh chunk of pineapple on her fork over breakfast. ‘You know what you’re like with your leg.’

Derek smiled at her. ‘I’ll be fine, sweetheart.’ He leant back in his chair and stretched his arms out wide. ‘I feel like a new man.’

Getting on the camel had been the hardest part for both of them. The animals were trained to sit still while clueless tourists attempted to clamber on to the saddles, but then there was a moment as each camel stood up when you felt as though you were going to be pitched over and thrown onto the ground below. Carol shrieked loudly, much to the amusement of the Berber guides. But Derek took it all in his stride. He’d grown up on a farm, Carol reminded herself, feeling a little foolish at all the fuss she’d made.

They’d trekked for an hour, just as dusk was beginning to creep in across the flat horizon, giving the smooth, sandy slopes a reddish hue, lit up from the inside like paper lanterns. The desert light resembled nothing she’d ever seen: translucent, shimmering, as though the landscape had been freshly painted that morning and they were the first to walk through it.

Neither of them spoke for the length of the trek. They didn’t need to. They could sense, without talking, the calm happiness radiating from the other.

Later, they sat around a campfire and were given delicious couscous to eat in clay bowls. The Berber guides sang and played drums and encouraged the others to dance. Derek, exhausted from the ride, declined but Carol found herself wiggling and jiving and clapping her hands along with a pair of dreadlocked Scandinavian backpackers.

They slept in sleeping bags underneath the open sky. The stars, like everyone had said they would be, were brighter but Carol was most taken with the blueness behind them, which was clearer, deeper than at home. She sensed, if only she could reach out and touch it, the sky would feel like velvet against her fingers.

When they got back and printed out their photos, none of the images did justice to their shared memories. It is one of the things that makes her most sad, she thinks now, shifting uneasily underneath the duvet: the knowledge that there is no one else alive who would have experienced the same things as she had, with whom she could lean across the table and say, ‘Do you remember when … ?’ and be assured of a complicit smile, a nod of the head, a hand patted with familiarity and love.

Milton has stopped purring and fallen asleep. Carol, shifting her right leg, feels the jab and tingle of pins and needles. There is a moistness on her cheek. When she wipes at it with the back of her hand, she is surprised by the confirmation of tears.

Stupid, really, she tells herself. Stupid to cry over something that you can’t do anything about. She takes a deep, raggedy breath. She feels wide awake.

Admitting defeat, Carol looks at the alarm clock. It is one minute past five in the morning.

BEATRICE (#u718a0743-1663-5813-9828-8e6b38fbb191)

Beatrice sits on a plastic bench in Trafalgar Square, waiting for the night bus to take her back to Bermondsey. Her legs are aching from an eight-hour shift of cleaning and folding, wiping and sponging. But the most tiring part, she finds, is the endless tramping up and down the long, windowless corridors that wind through the hotel, each one identical to the last so that it would be easy to forget where you were unless you had the room numbers to remind you. At work she misses the daylight most of all. The building seems hermetically sealed, kept alive only by recycled air. At Catholic school back in Uganda, she’d read a book by Virginia Woolf that talked about a hotel being a place where even the flies that sat on your nose had been on someone else’s skin the day before. That is how the Rotunda felt: arid, stuffy, loveless.

Normally, she didn’t mind it too much. She had been a waitress for a short time at the Hotel Protea in Kampala when it opened, serving ladlefuls of posho to rich tourists and Kenyan businessmen, and she had got used to the peculiar rhythm of hotel etiquette, the small niceties that would ensure a bigger tip. Once, a white man had left her a $50 note simply because she had brought him a citronella candle when the mosquitoes started buzzing. She had noticed him when he walked into the restaurant, skinny and worried-looking, wearing a beige money belt and two mushroom-coloured bands round his wrists that were meant to protect tourists from insect bites except they never did. His face had been flush with relief when she brought the candle. It gave Beatrice pleasure to see it and, for a brief moment, she had felt valued.

The Mayfair Rotunda was different because she worked behind the scenes and hardly ever got tips. Every day, she cleaned up after people, emptying their bins of used condoms, scooping out their hair from the plugholes, wiping the mirrors free of toothpaste flecks. It was draining work with minimal satisfaction. Beatrice liked things to look clean but then she would come back the next day and the room would be in disarray, as if she had never been, as if she didn’t exist.

Today had been particularly bad. The man in Room 423 … she shudders to think of him, pressed up so close against her she could feel the bristle of his stubble against her neck, could smell the rottenness of his breath. A coil of anger tightens in the pit of her stomach. How she hated men like that, men who believed they could take what they wanted and treat her like meat. She feels humiliated – not for herself but for them, that they could be so pathetic.

It is part of the job, she has come to realise. Bitter experience has taught her it is better not to resist but to be pliant, to allow them to do their silly business and get it over with. All the maids have the same problem: oversexed businessmen and adulterous foreigners. They tend to clean in pairs now, each one doing an adjoining room, so that if anything ever gets nasty or goes further than you want it to, you can scream out and bang the walls. Otherwise, if you’re not being asked to do anything you don’t want to, it can be a handy way to make extra money. Some of the girls have regular clients. Ewelina, from Poland, has a guy called Franz who comes over from Austria every month and has given her a Rolex watch. Beatrice is pretty sure it is fake but hasn’t the heart to tell her.

But the man today – the fat one in the robe, with hairs growing out of his nose – had not paid Beatrice. Once it was over, he’d tightened his belt, patted her on the bottom and leered at her, as though she had been a willing participant, as though she had wanted him to rub against her until he came. Stupid idiot. Beatrice had stared at him sullenly until he’d been forced to look away. She left the room without replacing his bottle of Chablis or drawing his curtains. She hoped she wouldn’t get in trouble for that.