‘What’s your fantasy job?’ begins Flavia.
Answers include thriller writer, monkey-house worker, tightrope walker, midwife (from Charlotte who’s about to retrain, having been a paralegal for a long time). When it gets to me, I’m stumped.
‘Going to have to pass,’ I say.
‘Nah-ah.’ Flavia shakes her head. ‘Literallyeveryoneelse has come up with something. Is youractualjob your fantasy? Is that why you can’t think of anything else?’
I humour her. ‘I dolikemy job. But obviously it isn’t my fantasy job.’
‘Why obviously?’
‘I’m a lawyer and I work far too hard. That’s no-one’s fantasy, surely.’
‘Okay, so whatisyour fantasy?’ she asks, like a pre-school teacher being very, very patient with a four-year-old.
‘I think I might be too busy to have one.’ My mind is a genuine blank.
‘That is not good,’ Flavia scolds. She waits for a few seconds longer and then shakes her head. ‘Fine. We’ll move on.’
I feel like I’d better come up with a good answer and tell her later.
I do alotbetter on the next question: ‘Where would you like to travel next?’ Luckily I happen to have recently booked a holiday to Iceland, so that’s an easy answer. No-one else says anything particularly remarkable either.
‘These questions are too easy,’ Mike says. ‘I have a better one. How many people have you killed?’
We all produce polite chuckles at his weak joke. Obviously no-one has killed anyone.
Except… ‘Seventeen,’ says Alex, who has been very reserved all day so far. I walked a little with him earlier, and he was quiet even one on one. He’s around my age, I’d say, and, in the politest way possible, I’d have to describe him as – on initial meeting at least – just unremarkable in every way. One of those rare people you’d really struggle to describe physically, for example.
Along with everyone else, I politely chuckle at his mild quip, and I hope he doesn’t feel that we’re patronising him because he’s usually so quiet.
‘I was a sniper in the Serbian army,’ Alex elaborates.
He really, really does not look as though he’s joking.
‘What’s the kill you’re most proud of?’ Mike asks, and Flavia chokes a little next to me.
‘Can’t tell you or I’d have to kill you too,’ Alex says. ‘But let’s leave it atI was very good.’
He does sound deadly serious, and everyone falls silent, just staring at him.
Flavia breaks the silence by saying, ‘That sounds like a very hard job. It makes herding teenagers as a schoolteacher sound easy, ha-ha.’
Everyone else joins in with some awkwardha-hasand we move on to another question (what you’d choose for your last ever dinner, which does make some people side-eye Alex a bit, possibly wondering if he would be thecauseof their imminent death) and then Flavia asks what everyone’s first car was, an entirely comfortable question, and once we’ve all exclaimed politely over Mike’s story about being given a brown Rolls-Royce by his uncle on his seventeenth birthday, I murmur that it’s late, and others join in, and finally we’re off to bed.
Mike, Flavia and I obviously take the lift up to our floor and then walk along the corridor together, still talking about Mike’s Rolls-Royce.
‘I could wax lyrical about the interior for hours,’ Mike says. That’s definitely true: he’s already been going for at least fifteen minutes. It’s actually very endearing; I’m becoming very fond of him. ‘But I shouldn’t keep you two lovebirds.’
‘Ha-ha,’ says Flavia.
‘Not lovebirds,’ I say.
‘Yeah, right,’ Mike says, suddenly seeming a lot less endearing. ‘Anyway, goodnight. See you at breakfast.Sleepwell.’ He does a huge pantomime wink and Flavia and I both wince.
Flavia says, ‘Goodnight, Mike,’ and puts her key card into its slot in our door.
And a few seconds later, the two of us are on the other side of the closed door, inside our suite together.
