Something Might Happen by Julie Myerson

Author:Julie Myerson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780316086752
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-10-30T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

IN THE HOTEL RECEPTION, A GIRL WITH FIERCELY PULLED-back hair is chatting on the phone, pretending she hasn’t seen me waiting there. I ask her if Lacey is in. She shrugs.

No idea, she says. I haven’t seen him go out.

So he’s in?

Unless I wasn’t looking at the time.

I ask her if she’d mind calling him. She asks rudely for my name and I tell her.

He says to go on up, says the girl, with no expression at all on her face. Straightaway picking up the other phone to carry on talking. I start up the wide, hushed staircase then have to come back because I don’t know his room number.

Four, the girl snaps.

Up on the first floor, a chambermaid is hoovering the landing. I think I recognise her. She may have babysat for one of us. She moves the hoover out of the way as I knock on his door.

He doesn’t have a jacket on. Just a kind of dark shirt with a blueish T-shirt under. He hasn’t shaved either.

Hello, he says.

Hello.

I can’t look at him. I hold on to my handbag and touch the buttons on my coat and look at the room.

What a surprise, he says.

He offers me the only chair, pulling it out from the girlish, glass-topped dressing table. I sit. Next to me are small careful piles of his loose change.

This is awful of me, I say.

He looks at me with relaxed interest.

Why?

I mean, just barging in like this.

Barge in any time, he says with a bit of a smile.

Yes, I say, but unannounced.

They rang me, he says, from reception.

Oh look, I tell him, you know what I mean.

He has nothing to say to that. He asks me if I want a drink.

I look at my watch. Though I know what time it is.

OK, I say.

He opens the minibar.

Gin, whisky or vodka?

Vodka.

He pours it carefully, hands me a glass.

I take a sip. The taste is blue, metallic.

Do you want something in it?

He passes me a tonic.

Thanks. I pull back the tab and tip it in, watching the quick fizz.

I can smell cooking and bar smells from downstairs. He holds up his drink and looks at me. Far away a phone rings. He keeps looking as if he’s about to laugh.

Well—cheers, he says.

I smile. And dare to look around. The place is very neat. You wouldn’t think a person was even staying in it. As well as the change piled on the table, there’s a wad of folded notes. A large notebook, a couple of pens. A laptop computer. A jacket, his one, flung on a chair. And a towel. A pair of boots pushed carefully under the TV. And a faint, enticing smell in the air—a smell of him.

He moves a newspaper and sits there on the neat, oatmeal corner of the bed and looks at me. He doesn’t seem to feel any need to speak. The silence spills over between us and terrifies me.

You like your room? I ask him.

It’s OK, he says. Apart from the noise of the bloody barrels.

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