‘Hello, Rosie? Sorry I haven’t been able to –cough, cough– speak to you directly –hachoo– but I won’t be able to m-m-makeachoo, it in today.’ At this point the caller just gave up trying to speak in sentences and simply croaked: ‘Flu.’ Then hung up.
I listened to the message two more times before my brain accepted what my ears were telling me. It was Lola and she was off sick. This shouldn’t really have come as a surprise, given how rough she looked last night, but my heart thumped quickly in my chest and it had nothing to do with the black coffee I’d drunk at breakfast.
The sound of muffled talking and groaning pipes roused me from my shell shock. I needed to set the tables and the buffet breakfast out in the dining room ready for the guests to start coming down at seven. And a lot of them would be down at seven on the dot, as though they thought they might miss the best pickings if they slept in until eight. Some people seriously didn’t know how to enjoy a holiday.
Since it was partially self-service, dealing with breakfast on my own wouldn’t be so difficult, and as soon as I was done, I could try and get hold of my mum.
I had just finished bringing in the carafes with the fresh milk, water and juice to the dining room and was arranging the pastries on a platter when Olive and Matilda, the elderly sisters, appeared in the doorway, arguing about who had owned the little red tricycle that Father Christmas brought one year.
I spent the next two hours bussing tables, making small talk with the guests, bringing out cooked breakfasts and steaming pots of tea and coffee, so I had no time to ring my mum and ask her what to do about staff being off sick. At nine, the last guest wandered off, leaving a trail of croissant crumbs behind him. But that wasn’t my problem because the cleaners would be down shortly to tidy up after breakfast, once they’d finished making up the rooms.
I darted through to the office again and dialled my mum’s mobile number, but it kept going to voicemail. She was probably at the hospital with Grandad, organising getting him discharged. I didn’t leave a message but by the time I’d hung up, the light was flashing on the main phone. I punched in the code again, somehow hearing ‘The Imperial March’ fromStar Warsin the tones of the number keys.
Two more coughing, spluttering, I’m-too-sick-to-come-in calls. One from Mabel, who I’d thought was upstairs cleaning the guest rooms, and the other from Charlie, the bartender for that evening. This was getting ridiculous.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to find the hoover, let alone get all the crumbs up from the dining room floor. Didn’t the guests know where their mouths were? As soon as I got the dining room tidy, I went upstairs to track down Elise, our other cleaner, in the hopes I could get her to work late and finish making up the rooms. I couldn’t find her anywhere, so I headed back downstairs to the office and realised that I’d missed the note to the side of the whiteboard rota telling me that she had to leave early that day to pick up her daughter from her mother-in-law’s. I had no choice but to finish the remaining rooms myself.
This time when I traipsed back upstairs again, I used the main staircase. There was a huge window on the turn up to the first floor that overlooked the grounds on the east side of the hotel, and you could see past the fountain and rockery, to the wide expanse of lawn that was used for tennis and badminton in the summer. With the trees set further back, all morning the sun had an uninterrupted path through the large panes of the window and the simple stained-glass floral design in the upper curved section. Beams of blue and green and yellow light played over the warm wooden stairs, catching at the glittery edges of the garlands wrapped around the banisters, and it was a much nicer journey to take when I was facing cleaning duty.
Cleaning was the worst. I’d always hated housekeeping duty. I could never get a bed to look neat and plump and inviting when I made it, and as for bathrooms…cleaners deserve medals in my opinion.
One hour later I was interrupted/rescued from the tedium of replacing toilet rolls by the hotel mobile phone. Someone was at the reception desk. It was barely midday and I was already running around like Wee Willie Winkie.
When I got downstairs, Julius Mundey was lying in wait.
Apparently, Julius didn’t live that far away, just outside of Hastings, so I had no idea why he stayed at the hotel so much. I guess that’s what you do when you have more money than sense and an inexplicable desire to make life difficult for other people. Julius was a vegan and also allergic to practically everything and he hated noise and he liked everything to measure up to his ridiculous standards. My mother, bizarrely, thought it was some kind of compliment that someone as fussy as him kept coming back to us.
I thought it was a pain in the arse.
‘Good afternoon, Ms Keenan. I’ve been waiting here for twenty minutes.’
‘I’m sorry. What can I do for you?’ I slipped behind the desk and casually dropped the toilet roll I’d accidentally brought with me, to the floor.
‘Are you short-staffed? It looks like you are short-staffed.’ He swept a glance around the lobby, as though we usually had employees lined up around the room just waiting to jump to his command.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him about the flu epidemic, but he probably would have called for the whole place to be fumigated.
‘Just Christmas. Everyone needs time off to do their shopping and…er…stuff.’
‘But you’re a hotel. Surely you should add to your staff numbers during the holiday period, rather than let them all have time off?’
‘You know, I wholeheartedly agree. I will pass that suggestion along to the manager. Is there anything else I can help you with?’
‘My pillow. It wasn’t the hypoallergenic one I requested.’
‘Oh, really?’ I tapped his name into the computer and checked the information under ‘special requests’. There was a tick in the box to confirm his requirement. There was no way my mother would have forgotten, but ‘the customer is always right’.
‘I’m so sorry about that. I’ll get it swapped in time for this evening. You’re in room two, yes?’
‘Yes. And change the sheets too – I don’t want any of those feathers irritating me. They wiggle their way out and scratch. I’ll come up in awful hives.’
‘Of course, that’s not a problem.’ As long as I found the time to do it. The thought of Julius with big, red rashes all over him would surely be enough to remind me.
He sniffed and gave a little nod, as though deciding whether or not he was satisfied.
‘What’s for lunch today? The menu hasn’t been updated outside the dining room.’
I couldn’t stomach apologising again, so I just pulled a concerned face.
