All that
is visible, the light trail of the walking stick’s antler crown moving back and
forth so fast as to effect an actual arc scratched pale upon the background
night viewed on the hotel’s two security monitors.
Brother
Skunk, lost in himself and rocking on his heels, anchors the inverted pendulum
to the car park’s tarmacadam between stationary vehicles.
cog: Can
you turn the brightness up, or the contrast maybe?
It’s
so utterly quiet in the reception area, the drone of residual electricity
coursing through surrounding machines creates for itself early in the shift a
deaf spot into which it quickly disappears, and thus now, their voices across
the lobby at habitual volume compete with nothing, no disturbance to the
perpendicular stretch of ground floor bedrooms beyond which the car park hosts
this distraction from their insatiable a.m. hunger
cog: between three and five every
morning, every fucking morning, and it’s like being, it is that
sensation of being gnawed by something, and something big at that, and every
night, I thought I’d get used to it, but I haven’t, I haven’t at all. At the
start I thought the meal would take care of it, but it, even after I’ve eaten,
it’s still there. I’ve eaten, but it’s still there.
cog:
Can you see him yet?
cog:
I’m watching what you’re watching. You’re the man at the controls
right? Try the back cameras, see if the angle...
The
night-porter switches POV to no avail; the walking stick newly etching its pale
existence in a now flattened crescent.
cog:
You won’t see him until he stands up, but...
cog:
Well make him stand up then. Get out there and throw a stone at him, or
cog
(laughing): Absolutely right, and just hope it doesn’t hit either of those
cars. What would it cost to retouch the paintwork on the Bentley, do you think?
cog:
Well go poke him with a stick then, hand-to-hand, rouse the
cog:
Fuck off, you do it.
Back
in May, when the hotel’s sole permanent resident had left to have her baby, it
had been assumed amongst the staff to be nothing more than a temporary absence,
her room to be kept fresh for their return. But then the bright flowers had to
be changed, and changed again, and the room’s maintenance now included dusting
the fading paper-wrappers of the gifts donated by each department. In the
distension of following days, her checking out established itself as something
else, and in rumour: she had left to raise the child in her native Canada; had
lost the child and returned home; had moved north with her partner; had died
even. With this sudden cut to a year’s ubiquity of her presence and the
extending permanence of recess following, many staff felt their lives
punctuated with a need to reassess, and the percentage turnover increased.
Thus
months later, and an almost willed inability to acknowledge the existence of
ghosts and angels, of living in the midst of actual history as it occurs, deems
incognisant the hotel’s duty manager and night-porter, even as the stick’s
movement now halts, and Skunk climbs it to his feet.
The
muted orange glare of the overhead lamps illuminates the bald patches of scalp,
the bareness offsetting the scabbed blood even on the low-res monochrome
monitors.
cog:
Christ a’mighty!
cog:
Ohhh fuck. He better not try coming in here. Oh fffuck.
Limping
out to the centre of the car park, Skunk bends to wedge the near-empty whiskey
bottle between his boots, up to stand arms outstretched, one bloodied hand
clutching his support, resembling some alopeciac Old Testament prophet to speak
of doom awake badly miscast in a Levi’s commercial before the sudden launch of
his stick across the darkness like some crooked javelin, the exertion of which
throws him over backwards, the bottle now horizontal, finally empty as the
rattling shaft of wood recedes.
In
reception:
cog:
Shit! Put the floods on. Put the floods on Tony.
cog:
Are they over here? I thought they
cog:
Wait wait wait
and the car park bursts suddenly from
orange into whitelight around Skunk as he carries away his bottle
amongst these new shadows of himself.
