‘A bobble hat.’
I screw up my eyes to see if the pattern comes into focus. His latte art is amazing when he has time to make the hearts, rosettes and tulips. ‘Doesn’t look like a hat …’
‘My hand slipped. And you really expect fine art at this time in the morning?’
‘I expect a pom-pom. That looks like an onion.’
‘Next time I’m using a stencil and giving you a boring coffee bean.’
Nosey sniffs. ‘Some of us just get a plain coffee.’
‘I charge her extra for a bespoke package of latte art and marketing advice.’ He grins. His words take me back to an evening at my kitchen table last week, where we worked on my business plan for hours over a bottle of wine.
He tells me to have a good day and starts on her drink. As she chitters away, I make a mental note to turn up when rival customers have descended into the bowels of London.
A few metres on, I’m tapped on the shoulder by a woman dressed in a power suit best suited to a character on an American soap. ‘Daisy! I’m so glad I caught you. I’m dreadfully sorry but I have to pull out of our theatre visit tonight. A work experience idiot has invited hackers into our machines. I’m grabbing a cab into work now and may be stuck there until the end of time. I’ll forward you my electronic ticket in case you can take someone else.’ Strident Single Shot Cappuccino wasn’t over-named. Her voice is so booming I swear they must be able to hear it at the job centre on the main road. ‘I’m gutted to miss out,’ she broadcasts to the nation. ‘Vince Marino picked on a reality TV celeb last week and apparently she got hysterical when he cancelled her. So fun!’ Strident cold-shouldered me for the best part of a year as we queued for our drinks, only thawing a few weeks ago when she overheard Joe and me discussing my social media feeds. She started banging on about a play centred around a viral tweet, with an American actor playing all twelve roles. Joe asked who the actor was and then quickly opted out. I ended up buying a seat in the stalls and then recommending my followers purchase a ticket for something they’d never normally book as part of Thursday’s #TrySomethingNew hashtag.
After dropping the leaflets in my hall, I quickly cover the ground to the Tube. I pick up a freebie paper in the station foyer and flip straight to the crossword to see if I can predict which clues will stump Joe. Although he attempts to fill it in every day, he rarely completes the job. Quickly dissatisfied with my own progress, I skim through a preview of the night’s TV before speed-reading Aurora Storyalis’ latest article. The London journalist is a bulldog– barking and biting at unscrupulous traders on behalf of the consumer. Today her feature is all about an undercover visit to Harley Street, although her red hair and vintage outfits are so recognisable I’m surprised she manages to stay anonymous. I think back to my work experience in a private health clinic while I was doing my degree. I’d imagined myself as a super-professional therapist but ended up answering phones. Zero fun stuff for anyone to investigate.
The train journey passes without incident, and I take Kensington High Street at a slow jog, hoping to catch up with Eva before the start of my shift. Our workplace, Magik Kube, calls itself a new concept in city hotels although the Japanese have been doing it for years– populating a bland space with small pods for commuters who want a cheap, no-frills bed. The blurb on the website reads:‘A time capsule for those short of time’.The fact no one has bothered to change the first letter of capsule into a k to keep the marketing consistent has always irritated me, but the boss’s son dismissed my concerns. Mind you, Kai always scoffs at my input, especially if it involves work for him. A DJ in Ibiza in the summer months, his job is to hang out here in the autumn and winter undermining us while waiting for his father to pass on the hospitality empire. At which point he will undoubtedly put someone else in charge and bog off back to the sun with a bigger budget for flip-flops.
I remove my shoes and open the filing cabinet behind reception. Someone has pinched my slippers. Every guest is provided with a free pair adorned with the initials ‘MK’. Eva pilfers them to wear them in the spa and I’ve always loved them as they’re comfier than my shoes.
‘Have you seen my sliders?’ I ask the girl on the early shift, the latest in a revolving door of agency workers. She shakes her head, reprograms three room cards and requests a break. ‘It’s been non-stop this morning. Someone set the fire alarm off, and all these half-naked backpackers rushed out in a panic. One of them got quite stroppy afterwards and demanded his money back or a free spa package as compensation.’
‘Ha ha, you should have offered him a massage and briefed Eva to give him a good pummelling. Can I nip downstairs to catch up with her and relieve you in five? You can take a decent break today. Kai is flunching somewhere else, so won’t be supervising our schedule or measuring the tucks on our sheets.’ She looks confused. ‘Flirting and lunching … the two things he does best when he’s not sorting out the playlists for nightclubs with sticky floors or annoying us with his ruler.’ The girl nods. She won’t last here. Eva and I are rarities. Eva needs the money to send home to her family while I said I’d stay until I finished my degree, but accidentally became part of the furniture.
I find my friend in the basement spa. Only four and a half feet tall, and barely able to reach across a bigger gentleman, she arrived a few months after me and became famous for a massage that’s firm to the point of brutal. She was once asked by the local undertaker if she fancied jumping ship– he needed someone who could straighten out bodies where rigor mortis had set in, and his juniors were afraid to crack bones.
Eva wears her black hair in a bob, with the fringe so severe it looks like a prison cut. Today, her eyes are ringed in liner, taken beyond the lids like she’s auditioning for a role inCleopatra the Movie.
‘Have you got any spare …’
‘… slippers?’ Finishing my sentence in her clipped accent, she chucks a pair across the small room. They land on the chair where customers put their clothes and valuables. ‘Comfort of life. Get good slippers in Berat.’ The room is dimly lit, and calming dolphin music is playing despite the lack of customers. I can tell she is nervous as she hurriedly smooths the paper liner covering the massage bed and gabbles on. ‘Buy map, make Toblerone of Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece. Find Berat, in Albania, in middle of Toblerone.’
‘I know where Albania is,’ I say, refusing to cut her any slack.
She scrabbles under the chair and holds up a coin. ‘Look! Find pound and pick up. All day have luck.’ Although we always hand in the phones, keys and even laptops left behind by guests we tend to keep the loose change we find lying around. It’s the tip no one who rents pod beds bothers to give. Compensation for the condoms in the sheets, the vomit in the bin, the early, late or split shifts and cramped breaks in the tiny staff kitchen.
‘The superstition is about a penny, not a pound,’ I say sulkily. When she flips the coin to me, I catch and pocket it, but I’m still not letting her off the hook. ‘Give it to a faithful friend and then your luck will never end? I’m not sure how much of a faithful friend you are. At the beginning of a long shift yesterday the last thing I wanted to see was you two ripping your clothes off in the penthouse suite. Talk about sleeping with the enemy.’ For once she has nothing to say. She knows how much I despise our boss. ‘Oh, and I think you’ll find it’s a triangle and not a Toblerone. That’s a chocolate bar.’
‘Like this?’ Eva produces a couple from the pocket of her uniform and waves them under my nose. ‘Two for one offer in Jimmy Chews today.’
‘You can’t bribe your way back into my good books with sweets,’ I say, accepting her gift. I leave the room without offering her the theatre ticket; if I cave now she’ll take it as approval and start snogging Kai in the linen cupboard on the rare occasions he shows up for work.
Chapter 2
The house lights dim. The stage snaps to black and the air crackles with anticipation. In the dim red light of the fire escape, a latecomer takes their seat. Someone coughs. Then a giggle. Seconds pass– I count them in elephants like people count the spaces between thunder and lightning.
At a dozen elephants, I lift my hand to nibble at the lime green nail polish Eva painted on a few days ago in our lunch break. When I suggested the strapline on the packaging should be changed from ‘lushly luminous’ to ‘giddily gaudy’, she called me Judge Judy. And then she tutted when I pointed out the colour clashed with my hair.
Four more elephants pass. A spotlight comes on, revealing Vince Marino– an actor with a billion-watt smile, and a New York state of mind.
‘Good evening, sheeple. Let us collectively take a moment.’ He bows his head like a pastor in prayer, before snapping it up and piercing the front row with his gaze. ‘But which moment? Think of how many we record, hashtag and pimp up with the perfect emoji or backing track before uploading them to our platforms. I invite you to reflect on your recent social media posts and all those moments you captured and overshared. A shameful nugget of crudity, a clip of silliness or a minute of downright madness, posted to your followers with a winking face and an ironic comment. A false impression of yourself, or maybe the real thing?’
Moving like a stag, he switches his attention to the people in the second row, raising Hollywood-quality eyebrows flecked with the same shades of salt and pepper as his hair. ‘Tonight, we will explore what happens when a social media post goes viral. Could it beyourpost, sir …?’ His words dance in the air as he flashes a smile at some unfortunate man and then proceeds to grin at his partner. ‘Or maybe your wife had trigger-happy fingers? For one audience member this show will be especially memorable. And the rest of you will love it to bits as you’ll get to do what you do best– judge people by their social media. I’ll start the ball rolling in a few minutes by picking a tweet from one of your accounts. We will follow its fictional journey through the Twitterverse, while I profile a selection of family, friends and colleagues drawn into the drama against their better judgement– all carefully curated from my overactive imagination.’ He stresses the end of the sentence, accompanying the speech with sweeping hand gestures and the odd malevolent grin.
The woman next to me leans in and whispers something I barely catch: ‘I’m bricking it aren’t you? I’ve got ten thousand followers and he always picks on people with mahoosive accounts.’
