[New novella is coming at some point this year. If you like my writing, buy one of my books.]
Photo by Joseph Vary
1145 words
Chantell doesn’t want to leave the baby with her fifteen-year-old niece but she doesn’t have a choice. It’ll be fine. Jordan is four months old now. He will sleep most of the night anyway.
The hotel has called her in overnight – again. Because there has been an incident – again. Usually Aaron can manage Jordon overnight, but when he is on a long haul and sleeping in the cab at some service station, she has to fumble around in her phonebook desperately looking for someone who owes them a favour.
The hotel reception is plainer now than before. Everything that suggested this was a place to relax has been removed. No plants, no trendy hotel art, the shutters pulled over the bar, markings on the carpet where the reception sofas used to be. There is an altercation brewing by the front desk when she arrives between two groups of young men. The reception staff and the sixty-three year old security guard are trying to de-escalate, but not trying too hard because none of them are paid enough to accidentally put themselves in the middle of some imported turf war.
The hotel is packed full and has been for months. Groups of five or more men stuffed into rooms. Every sofa bed opened, every matress pulled out of storage, other beds dragged from she doesn’t know where and none of them match. The official line from management is that families are being kept together. Families entirely of men of a similar age. She’s never seen a family like that.
The rooms are not designed for residency. There’s no storage. So what little floor space there is around all the beds is covered by possessions. Trainers and coats and bags with designer names. Wires everywhere charging multiple smartphones. More phones than there are people in the room. The official line from management is they’re desperately poor. She’s seen poor people on the estate when she was growing up and they didn’t have as much stuff as she can see here.
The hotel is rotting from the inside out. A mass of humans blistering against the walls like boiling water pushing on the lid of a pot. But the management doesn’t care. They’d never be full at this time of year. The hotel is raking it in. The guests are paid for by the government, and the government doesn’t negotiate, it just pays – cost plus.
Not that she has seen any benefit. Quite the opposite. Still on the same wage with 3.5% pay rise when inflation is 11%. Still on the same zero hours contract that gave her the flexibility she wanted before, but now they use it against her. Suggestions by management that there are a lot of people looking for work now and if she turned down a shift… The price of everything at the moment, she can’t afford to take the risk.
The rent has gone up five times in three years. She can’t fight it. Her landlord told her, “The government is paying for houses for refugees. You’ve got to pay the same as the government is paying if you want to stay. Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”
The estate is ballooning with new people. People who she can’t understand and don’t understand her. It takes her fifteen minutes longer to get to work on the night shift because she has to walk the long way around the park on the estate. She won’t go through it at night when they’re loitering. She knows she shouldn’t think like that and what that girl said probably isn’t true. But why take the risk? Half-an-hour extra is fine if it means mummy gets home to Jordan safely. That’s all that matters now.
She just hates that she can’t talk about it. The only people who do talk about it on the estate are real nasty pieces of work. Them that go on marches and shout all that racist stuff. She doesn’t want to be part of that.
But she’s starting to think that’s on purpose. If only the madheads talk about it, nobody will take it seriously. She tried to talk to Aaron about it and he said she had to, “Stop watching those stupid videos on YouTube, if she keeps talking like that people will think she is racist.” But she knows she isn’t racist. She was best mates with the Patels. Used to help out at the restaurant sometimes when they needed more hands. But they moved away, as soon as this started happening. Nobody called them racist.
She just knows it’s bad to bring in dozens of young men into the estate who don’t know the rules, don’t speak the language and don’t have anything to do all day. There’s nothing wrong with saying that, she is sure.
Nobody will tell her directly what happened, but she can tell from what she sees it’s a self-harm incident. If it was a crime, the police would still be here. She feels a deep kick of sympathy in the gut. Nobody is saying it isn’t hard for these people. But the town can’t even solve its own problems. The spice, unemployment, the empty highstreet.
Even though there is nobody in the room it’s a long job. She has to move all the possessions out and move the beds around rubix cube style to make sure she has got all the blood up. She is interrupted by the management several times so that they can take photographs. For what reason she doesn’t know. She’s deep into the night shift and well beyond her break when she gets to check her phone. There are fourteen missed calls, some from Aaron, some from a number she doesn’t recognise, and another call punching her in the face. Something about this feels dreadful and important.
When she answers it’s hard to hear what the woman is saying because there is someone screaming, in a sobbing way, in the background. It sounds like her niece. She can’t focus on anything because it’s so noisy on their side of the line. It sounds like this woman is saying she is the police and she keeps asking, “Are you listening?” She’s not listening, none of this makes sense. They’re telling her she needs to come home now. She’s trying to explain that she can’t afford to leave her shift, she’s trying to provide for her new family, she needs to call Aaron back. The policewoman is saying all these strange and frightening things. “Someone has broken into the house.” “Jordan has been kidnapped.” She can hear someone telling her niece to stay still, something about a sedative. “We’ve already started a manhunt,” she hears. It’s just too much and too confusing, she has to get back to work. Everything feels hot and focused on a small point behind her eyes.
END
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