Intruder
The night was hot and unending. Allington couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t sleep, the resentments of the evening curling up next to him, breathing down his neck, wriggling closer in the more he scrunched his eyes closed.
‘I shouldn’t have thought so, sir.’ And then that smile. A blend of knowing indifference and bemusement. A smile that said, you best be on your way now, sir, this is not the place for you, is it, sir? The memory replayed over and over, the smile looming above him like a boot waiting to come crunching down. After all these years, Allington was still terrified of handsome waiters. Their open-shirted braggadocio sent his tongue hurtling back down his throat, kept his dignity hostage; he expected them to turn him away, or seat him as far from the windows as humanly possible, in some backroom by the fridges where he might be placed on an upturned bucket, welcoming every new humiliation as a suicidal slug might greet the arrival of a salt shaker. Somehow, it was even worse when a pretty woman served him, because when they smiled, it was as if they were actually pleased to see him, and even a man as proudly rational as Allington was susceptible to that sweet-natured a lie.
The recommendation had come from Rocco, when he had been forced on the same trip the year before. He would ask about it on Monday. Did you try the veal? Gorgeous wasn’t it? Allington could pretend he had got in. He had, after all, spent fifteen minutes scanning the menu before entering the restaurant. It was brief but impenetrable and printed in a tiny black font on creased white paper, the first of several indicators of the place’s boastful insouciance. His meal had been selected before he crossed the threshold, so he could very well claim to have found the scallops delicious. But no, alas, it would feel even worse, having been shunned from the feast, to then draw himself in after the fact. In the same way that children eventually stop inventing summer romances, as cover for the intense sabbatical of affection they face at term time, there are some lies that simply sharpen the truth being concealed. Better, instead, to tell Rocco that he did not venture out at all. A migraine kept him indoors. Very plausible.
That was the main injury; getting turned away from Rocco’s small plate place, despite, and this was the thing that really tore him up, the restaurant being only three-quarters full, and at 8:30pm. This wasn’t Spain, for goodness’ sake, there wasn’t to be a throng of late arrivals, these were the dwindling stretches for coffee and shared desserts, the exact time for the lone diner to swoop in. No, Allington could only conclude that they did not want his custom. Especially as he had chosen to wear the short-sleeved patterned shirt his sister had bought him for Christmas, which she insisted fitted him perfectly, but clearly tugged open around his stomach and made his arms look like uncooked dough.
Thus launched the hideous walk back to the hotel, pangs of hunger trembling against unspoken rage. It was just his luck, the dashing waiter at the door, finding all his weaknesses with one quick glance, and all the people allowed in watching his failed attempts to join them. Allington took in the meagre other options. A pub called The Bloody Lamb, which he briefly approached before seeing a few too many larger men sat outside. They were in football shirts and sounded Welsh. He buckled down the road, to a friendly looking takeaway joint called Simply the Fish, but then caught eyes with an attractive teenage girl who was sharing some nuggets with a male friend in a hoody, and then got trapped imagining himself alone on a street bench, trying to negotiate a large haddock with flimsy wooden cutlery, dabbing paper napkins with ketchup and tartar sauce, with the world walking past, their eyes finding him eating cheap food messily, glimpsing loneliness clad in blue cotton.
So, he took refuge at the hotel, in the all-purpose dining area adjacent to the lobby. It was bigger than a Munich beerhall, but empty as a garden in winter. The carpets smelt of bleach, and the walls carried photos of pelicans and families eating ice cream. He camped out at the bar, the domain of an Australian man with bleached blonde hair, who moved glasses around and offered him a series of sympathetic looks. The menu was as concise as the small-plates place, because the hotel only served burgers after 9pm. Allington ordered the Double-American, a tower of grease and stodge which now sat in his stomach, purring unhappily.
‘Look at that beauty,’ the barman said, while Allington fumbled around for his book; a dreary paperback called Mother Dear which sapped his brain with every leaden turn of phrase. He tried to finish it in bed but gave up after a plot twist revealed one of the main characters was actually a horse. Instead, he practiced his speech for the conference: “Revolutionise your workforce TODAY”. He despised that particular emphasis. Everyone was always telling Allington that the future was here, while he was still dipping his toes into the present. He was to preach to a room of office drones on how they should embrace the technology that would, in time, replace them. And then it would come for management too.
Despite all this, it was the waiter that kept him awake. Not the greasy food, not the collected minutes of his life lost to fear or indecision, nor indeed the fact that the current professional purpose of his life was to draw up the ladder to younger recruits and then, to fatten his employer’s bonus, defenestrate himself in the name of efficiency. No, it was the cruelly handsome waiter, who wouldn’t have thought there was a table. There either was or there wasn’t, why be coy, why draw attention to the comical unlikeliness of Allington’s endeavour? How unprofessional. How infuriatingly self-assured. Being à la mode, now that is the comical endeavour, for the tide turns swiftly and leaves many inhaling sand on the shore. The wisest among us eschew all trends other than those solely practical developments. Soon that cocky young man and his small plates will be considered passé, while Allington, having never been in fashion, could never truly be accused of being out of it either. And with that satisfactory thought, he flipped his pillow over and rested his right cheek against the cooler side. Then the handsome man’s smile flashed up again, and Allington scratched his forehead furiously. It was helpless now. He would not sleep. Last time he checked the clock, it was nearly 1am. That might have been five minutes ago, might have been fifty. It was now the witching hour, where foxes wonder through abandoned streets, and insomniacs curse at evermore illuminated ceilings.
He tried listening to a podcast. There was a politics show called The Hutch, where a war criminal and an investment banker discussed the headlines over a plate of croissants. Allington listened to this on his commutes. He picked out an especially dense episode discussing interest rates and skipped ahead to a prolonged section where the softer voiced co-host attempted to explain just what went wrong in 2008. It took him back to university, and the gentle fuzz he would feel in his forehead when an Italian professor lectured on marketing analysis. Yet, that night in the hotel, the episode did not sooth as it should. Allington remembered with a sigh that this was the awful nexus in The Hutch’s short history when the other co-host decided to inject more comedy into proceedings. He could feel the chap’s spittle in his ear as he engaged in some nonsense about only being able to afford three extra homes. The headphones were pulled out, the pillows fluffed up, extraneous layers of duvets and bed covers discarded. He sat against the bedframe and tried to think about nothing.
It was then, as he reclined back, and did all he could not to look at the red digits taunting him on the alarm clock, that he first heard the stranger approach. The noise could only be footsteps, slow, measured, slightly swaggering, drawing closer towards the hotel window. Yet Allington remained composed. He believed that danger was a thing that could be blinked away. Everything sounds like danger at this hour anyway. Such was the paranoia of the early morning, where every stray sound, every creak against the floorboards or breath of wind through the trees, becomes an auger of something evil lurking. Even as he unmistakeably heard two hands try and shift his window open, he could picture the disturbance coming from nothing so sinister as a plastic bag caught in a hedgerow. And then the glass pane slid up in one quick jolt, and it was too late for fear or impulse. The murky outline of a head poked through into the room, and the stranger’s eyes found Allington at once, and peered at him, neutral to the point of blankness.
Allington expected a boost of adrenaline to come to his aid. Instead, his body clamped itself to the mattress. He felt like a puppet without its operator. Where were his words now? His mind was too busy trying to iron out the creases of the scene before him. The figure remained still, panting, watching him. Finally, Allington felt a spurt of indignance.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he barked. The shape of the figure did not flinch, nor adjust their position in anyway. They seemed just as surprised to see him there.
‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice. The voice was deep, calm, assured.
‘Yes, hello. What on earth are you doing here?’
No reply. Just an unearthly kind of silence. Allington tried to transport himself into the role of an absent third party, hearing of this event happening to someone else. What would he envision himself doing if he weren’t actually in the room? Almost certainly threaten the stranger with a blunt object.
‘I am quite prepared to hit you with a lamp,’ Allington said, and clasped the lozenge shaped one next to the alarm clock. The stranger did not move.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then. So, you’d better leave, at once.’
But the stranger did not leave. He watched Allington get out of bed, and scramble around with the lamp’s chord before finally disconnecting it, and then march towards the window, holding the electric lozenge above his head, his arms pulsing with intent, his jowls shaping into a snarl.
‘What say you?’ Allington bellowed. He had a habit of becoming more Shakespearean the closer he was to rage.
‘I think I’m supposed to be here,’ the man replied. The stranger spoke so implacably that Allington was suddenly struggling to carry the weight of the lamp.
‘You think what?’
‘I am supposed to be here.’
Allington lowered his blunt object and took a moment to catch his breath.
‘Well, I’m afraid you’re quite mistaken. I am going to close the window, and if you try any of this nonsense again, I will contact the police.’
Feeling as if he had more control of the situation, Allington stepped forward and put his hands on the windowpane. The stranger shifted back as the glass slid down. Night air was banished from the room once more. Allington returned to bed, shaking his head, thinking this was precisely the sort of ridiculous thing that happens in the English countryside. Green and pleasant, eh? No, it’s vast, empty fields, and farms run by bigots, and deviants hiding in the trees. He was content to be the one boulder of decency, capable – and provably, at last – of protecting his own patch. He chuckled and looked back to the window. First, he sighed, then he tutted, then he reached for the lamp again. This was now beyond farce, beyond all reason. The curtains and the moonlight contrived together to outline a leering shadow, remaining exactly as Allington had left him.
Allington wondered whether time might just carry the figure away. But he would not shift, even as his antagonist was spurred once more to his feet, now swinging the lamp’s chord like an angry rancher. The two figures faced off between the sheets of glass.
‘Listen, perhaps you’re not in a good way, but I really don’t see-’
‘I am early.’
‘You’re in the wrong place.’
‘I am early. And I am sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry, just get the Hell out of here.’
‘I should have come in the morning. It will happen then. But do not worry, it will happen very quickly. You will only feel the fall, as you step out, across the wet floor, you will welcome it when it happens because it will end the panic, do you see?’
The voice had no life in it. It shook Allington of his rationale, drew him back into old motions of thought, before he could file the world into its various actualities.
‘I am early, and I am sorry. Truly.’
And then the stranger finally began to back away, and Allington flung open the curtains to see who this tormenter was and gasped to see a face almost emerge in the pale light, a face made by violence, it’s features bloody and askew, the skin white and crinkled, the eyes unblinking. It had no place in Allington’s reality, so he rejected the sight of it and pulled the curtains closed.
Alone, again, as ever, Allington curled up and sighed. He did what he always did when he was frightened, which was imagine how he could fashion the event into a funny story. No use this time, fear was growing, dense as a thicket now, pricking at his skin. He had not felt so defenceless since, as an infant, he had watched his primitive little sandcastles being toppled by the sea. There must be something else to fixate on. He scrunched his eyes together, then found it at the back of his mind.
There, waiting, was the cocky young waiter, so haughty in his youthful good looks, barring Allington from the beautiful people. That was a horror that made complete sense. Allington brought this slight back beside him, and, feeling the night hissing down his shoulder, began to repeat the words that might now take him to sleep.
I shouldn’t have thought so, sir. That was the world as he knew it. That was where he was safe.