Robyn
There’s very little that goes on in hotels without the head house keepers knowing about it. It’s not that I’m a nosy parker, none of us are, it just happens that our jobs have us in places where we see and hear things we’re not supposed to. And it’s not our fault when people forget we’re there, taking us as part of the furniture.
I reckon it all goes back to the days of servants – the upstairs, downstairs mob - when the hoi poloi carried on, quite shamefully sometimes, while the staff, unnoticed, worked on quietly around them. My job? I love it to tell you the truth. I think it’s a damn rare opportunity for a devoted people watcher like me when you can be part of people’s lives like a fly on the wall and be paid for it.
I don’t enjoy being treated like shit although that sometimes happens. Some people, usually ones who should know better in my mind, have no idea how to behave towards other folk, especially in public. But we can always get our own backs. They have no idea what can happen to them or what a pissed off house mouse can do to them or their gear. They might suspect but they’ll never, ever know for sure.
I remember thirty years back when I was learning the ropes. The old crone who was in charge of training me got a serve from a guest for not cleaning his shoes properly. It wasn’t her fault. In those days the shoes went to the night porter who did them during the quiet, early hours of the morning if he was still sober. She tried to explain, not about the night porter being pissed, of course, but the guest went into a rage, complained to the manager and he gave her a week’s notice. It was tough in those days. There was no union or right of appeal and the old duck wouldn’t have stood a chance of scoring another position.
Later she had me on watch in the corridor while she planted some special potion from an aboriginal mate through his clean undies. She reckoned it would make the skin around his wedding tackle erupt into weeping sores that would fester for weeks. She wasn’t finished with him either. The next day his wife found half a love letter, addressed to him, on the room floor and the other half was, of course, in his jacket pocket. Real steamy writing it was, copied right out of a sex magazine I heard. It must have been good because you could hear the screaming half way across Brisbane and when he emerged, red faced, and very red elsewhere we hoped, after being kicked out by his wife, the old house mouse was in the corridor to meet him. She pointed at his shoes as he went by and asked him if he’d stood in something nasty. The manager thought it would be a good idea to reinstate her after that.
Today’s Sunday. Being a boss now I’m not normally here on weekends but my off-sider, Sue, she’s on holiday. She’s great. I can leave the place to her without a qualm, knowing she’ll do the right thing every time. She doesn’t get much for the extra responsibility so I make sure I look after her with time off whenever she needs it. Bricks like Sue are like gold and without her the job would be a lot harder.
Strangely I met her through her sister, Janine, who worked here a few years ago. Janine got mixed up with the chef, Paul Fellows, and left to have a baby. Carla, she must be five now. I saw her a year ago and what a lovely looking child, although she seems a bit overly nervous. Now, Fellows, there’s a nasty piece of work and dangerous, I reckon. Sue keeps me up to speed on his drinking and violent ways and neither of us can work out why Janine stays with him. I kicked my husband into touch years ago just for being a dirty pig around the house. He couldn’t understand that to expect someone to clean up after him day in and day out was one of the worst forms of insult.
I’ve had a few men in my life since winning my freedom but nobody really special until now. Not that I haven’t been open to it. At fifty I still reckon I can put a fair few younger chicks to shame. I’ve never had great looks but, luckily, what I had have stayed. I’m not one for admiring myself either but there’s nothing wrong with what I see in the full-length mirror. ‘A racehorse’ Chris tells me and apart from a bit of tummy and the odd stretch mark I’d agree with him. My best feature has always been my eyes; that gets the fellas interested. Green as limes I call them and as big as them too. They take all the attention away from my crow’s feet and laugh lines and you’ve got to have a few of them to be alive, haven’t you?
My Chris, he’s done a lot of jobs, but, at the moment, he’s a servo operator out where I live in Keperra. That’s a battlers’ suburb in the west of Brisbane towards Samford. Actually the houses have come up a bit in value there, which surprised all of us long term residents. The thing is most of wouldn’t want to move now anyway. We’ve got to know each other over the years and there’s a lot of helping out goes on in our streets.
I first noticed Chris not long after he started at the service station when I listened to him dealing cheerfully with one grumpy bugger after another and managing to get the best out of them. Everyone blamed him for the fuel prices, drink prices, chippie prices, everything. He was a natural, caring and friendly without tolerating any rudeness, giving people things on tick when he shouldn’t and selling cigarettes with an encouraging word to try to give them up.
That’s where I came in. I’d stood in the aisles for long enough, fascinated by his smooth patter and appreciating how much effort went into what he was doing, before venturing up to buy my smokes. He looked at me so knowingly when I said they were for my sister that I instantly confessed they were for me. Then I couldn’t shut up. I stood at the side of the counter talking between him serving his customers. I gave him something I’ve never shared with anyone before - the entire run down of my life. And he listened to me. He heard what I was saying instead of waiting for a chance to get a word in, then take the floor for hours like most men I’ve met.
I walked home that night feeling quite dizzy until I realised that I’d done all the talking and knew absolutely nothing about him. I was so embarrassed it took me ages to go back but he just beamed when he saw me and asked me out for a meal.
I stayed for ages that night, helping him to restock the shelves and clean the fridges. Boy, those guys work hard for their money and I know it isn’t much. Not for being on your feet for hours in one spot, dealing with shoplifters, angry customers, people driving off without paying, and always with the possibility that some nut’s going to want stick a knife or hypodermic at your throat for your till money.
Well we haven’t started living together but I think it’s close. He’s round my place most nights and adores my cooking, but begs me to feed him less. He is overweight and I think he’s really sensitive about that so I’ll help him trim down. His face is really kind but he has a funny little beard that’s a bit dated and doesn’t really suit him. Maybe when he’s slimmer he’ll find he doesn’t need the hairy face to hide behind after all. The amazing thing is that he never says anything about my smoking. Although I couldn’t ever have one around him he knows I still weaken when I’m at the Magic Stick. That’s something I have to work on.
I thought today at the hotel was going to be an impossibly big day because the entire Russian delegation was checking out early, leaving us with too many rooms to have done in time for check-in. That’s when Linda, the new manager, impressed me again. She is shaping up to be the best thing this hotel ever had. Together we went through the forecast for Sunday and worked out just how many rooms we needed with a couple up our sleeves for the odd walk-in. The girls I had on could easily strip the linen from all the rooms, make up only the ones required and then hold the rest over to Monday. That’s when we could bring in extra staff without busting my budget with the Sunday pay rates and we could easily finish the rooms off. She’d made a possible nightmare into a dream run.
It would probably bore some people to death but the work day always starts in my favourite place - the linen room. Airless, well it has to be to stay clean. And the cleanliness, that’s what turns me on every morning when I flick on the light and smelt the racks and shelves of freshly laundered sheets. Not that I’d admit that to anyone, they’d think I was a bit cuckoo and probably into sniffing all sorts of weird things. I’d once worked in a dump of a place that tossed their bags of dirty linen into the same room as the clean stuff until it could be picked up. It stank in no time and we could never get that stale, dead body smell out of the room.
Talking of dead bodies, I once had one right here in this hotel. It was really bizarre. At about eleven one morning, an hour after checkout time, my last room to strip was still locked with a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the outside handle. I knew it was a guest who was leaving that day so I called reception to see if he’d paid and gone. Of course they hadn’t seen him so I was going to have to knock him up.
I’m not too keen on that. People can be really grumpy and sometimes a guest will extend another day or have a late checkout and reception will have forgotten to tell us. I remember a different time when I had no answer from repeated knocking and went in, expecting to find the room empty. Oh, no, far from it. There was a wild threesome in progress and what these blokes were doing to the girl still makes my nether regions twinge. The girl noticed me because I was a bit green at this game and slow to retreat because my jaw was trailing on the ground. As I backed out I had to fight to stifle a giggle because she gave me a huge wink, rolled her eyes and, at the same time, faked a huge yawn. Well I think it was faked.
Anyway on the morning of the dead one I did the usual door knocking and then went in. At first I thought there’d been one of those ritual murders. I knew I was supposed to get out, lock the door and have reception call police but it was so odd I had to have a closer look. I wish I hadn’t. A guy, maybe early thirties, was on his back on the bed wearing a diver’s rubber wetsuit. A hole was cut in the crotch where his willy was sticking out and he still had hold of it. I could see from the door that he was dead because his head was at a funny angle and his eyes were staring really wide at the ceiling. But it wasn’t until I got up close that I could see something like a rope around his neck. That gave me the jitters so I was quickly off out of there squeaking, ‘murder’ like a demented mouse.
It turned out not to be murder or suicide but an accident. The cops said it was something people did to have a good time but this one had gone a bit wrong. I was confused until a lady cop explained that the sensation of coming off was super enhanced by near-death strangulation. This guest had used a thick rubber band on his neck that must have been too tight. I was speechless, never having heard of such a thing but the cop told me that it was quite common and variations on the rubber wetsuits were cross dressing, school uniforms and the odd fairy outfit. We both had a quiet laugh at that. It was only that the cop seemed to have a sense of humour I asked if she thought he’d managed to succeed before he’d died. She just smiled and said that the evidence suggested that he died a happy man.
There’s one aspect about my job that drives me nuts. I’m a tidy person and I suppose it’s this work that makes you that way, but there’s something I can’t keep under control and that’s my ‘office’ if you want to call it that. That’s the a small lockable room at the back of the linen room that I managed to cram a tiny desk into. That desk, always clear at the start of the day, is soon overflowing with junk. I don’t mind the paperwork, like invoices from the laundry service, deliveries of soap and cleaning products, staff attendance sheets and job applications. It’s the layers that are added as the day progresses, broken toasters, kettles, cracked crockery and lost property battle for space with replacement uniforms, trolley parts and all sorts that people dump there until you’d never believe a desk was under it all.
Later today I was determined to find another place in the hotel for that stuff or for me. I did have an idea but I would need the grand master key from reception to go for a looksee. That would be later when thing quietened down, meanwhile there was real work to be done.
I’ve always enjoyed the start of shift and now as a department head it’s even better. As soon as reception give me the cleaning adjustments for the extra rooms sold the previous night we get under way. Duties are allocated, uniforms straightened and advice given from the guest feedback forms. And that’s another great Lindaism. Those comment forms were always used to beat us up in the past. Not with Linda. After we’ve checked if they’re fair dinkum (or not some bored idiot amusing himself between rubber bands) we talk about them and blitz how housekeeping’s going to fix up any problem areas and what help I might need.
I trundle into work a couple of hours before the others so as soon as the girls are off and at it I usually take a well deserved coffee break and enjoy a quick ciggie out the back. Today had to be an exception because I had too much to do and it was probably just as well. Apart from the occasional man, being a non-drinker made smoking my only other vice. But it was starting to get to me. The nausea spells I’d been having recently combined with a nasty sharp pain in my chest this morning gave me a real shock. I knew it was all to do with the smokes and I would have to do something about it but isn’t it hard when you bloody well enjoy them?
I gave my chest a good rub on the way up to the restaurant but still had to stop a couple of times on the back service stairs to let the pain ease up. I was heading up there today because Darryl, our maitre de, thought he might have a theft problem with Tamara, one of his waitresses, and I’d promised to help out. It was a day off for him so coming in himself might have looked a bit odd, whereas I was a regular visitor often checking on the state of the restaurant linen.
What a sweetheart that young Darryl is. For all my twenty years at the Magic Stick he would have to be the all time favourite. Some gays can be over the top but Darryl’s so beautifully well spoken, gentle and considerate you wonder how he’s survived the industry and done so well. I’ve worked with countless gay people in my time and come across a few drama queens but most of the time I’ve thought that the industry really suits them. Boy, can they be over the top girly sometimes, fanning themselves with their fingers and squealing around the place, but you can’t fault their fussing when it comes to setting a table right and looking after customers.
Unfortunately Darryl could only survive in the Magic Stick because that pisshead chef, Fellows, is completely unaware that he’s gay and I’ll sometimes watch nervously as Fellows makes his hairy arsed bloke jokes around Darryl. Fellows wouldn’t have put up with Darryl in the restaurant for a second if he knew he batted for the other side and the great lout would probably throw him bodily out of the hotel.
There was something about Tamara that Darryl found a bit fishy. She was a top waitress, experienced and gave great table service so it wasn’t her performance that concerned him. Three or four of the hotel guests had found things missing over recent months and hadn’t been sure enough to complain of actual theft. If it was money from a purse, like a twenty dollar note, others were left behind. A watch gone that could have been mislaid or a bottle of expensive perfume that may have been left at the last hotel. That sort of thing.
Darryl had heard that recently some mixed foreign currency had been taken and only a couple of days later Tamara had been asking where overseas tourists changed their money. Darryl quite rightly worked out that if there was a thief working the rooms the number of cases we’d heard about would be nothing compared to what wasn’t being reported because the guests hadn’t noticed or often didn’t want to say anything. And when property went missing from a room people always looked to the house staff first so I was more than keen to help.
Tamara wasn’t in sight when I got to the restaurant and through the servery doors I could see the kitchen powering up for lunch. I had just got my nose into the linen cupboard when young David, our assistant manager, flew out of the kitchen looking a bit flustered.
‘Hey, David, what’s wrong?’ I sang out.
At first I thought he was going to have a go at me. He’s got a mean turn of mouth when he’s in the mood that one, although he’s never tried it on me. David was a bit short of breath and I couldn’t grasp what he was on about until he’d calmed down a bit.
‘I’ve just had a run in with that moron in the kitchen and had to put him in his place. God he stinks,’ he huffed.
And then I realised that he meant Fellow’s breath. Lord I wish people wouldn’t sling off at each other when they’ve plenty to sort out with themselves. I just agreed with him that, yeah, Paul had a few problems and wondered if I should offer David one of my extra strong smoker’s mints mints for his own knock-me-over mouth odour. And then the cheeky bugger started lecturing me about why the tablecloths were mouldy. I suppose that served me right for fibbing about why I was in the linen cupboard in the first place.
David was up for going out for a smoke in the courtyard but I wriggled out of it by saying I had to check on a new house mouse. Luckily his mobile went off and he had to dash back to reception so I could hang around looking for Tamara a bit longer. Just before he took off I had a really bad turn. The pain in my chest was such a shocker I had to grab hold of him for a moment but, luckily, it passed pretty quickly. I was able to walk away looking okay. But I must admit it did scare me big time and I wondered if I should have it checked out. Not too much later I was wishing I had.
