Overall, though, the hotel walked the talk. Understated, classy, quiet, and all of the above extended to the staff who ran the place. Tilly squinted at her phone and nodded. The training had instructed her that the computer-driven doorbell, which linked to the app on her phone, would tell her if the occupants were inside. A little emoticon told her that they were. Pressing the bell, she slotted her phone back into her pocket, smoothed her tabard and waited. Half a minute later, a tall, revoltingly tanned, most likely Australian woman with long, dry, overly processed scraped-back blonde hair, wine glass in hand, plus irritated look on her face opened the door. Friendly, she was not.
Tilly tutted to herself as she registered the woman's attitude before she had even opened her mouth. Mostly, however, Tilly didn't really care about attitudes, unhealthy tans, or irritated looks on overly filtered faces. Like, she really didn't care because she was purely there to do a job with sparkly five-star hotel bells on. Always and forever, she stuck to the brief, performed her job on rotation, did her thing. She knew how to hospital-corner a bedsheet to within an inch of its life, she could fold a stack of towels into a perfect tower in seconds and perform a turn-down service with her eyes shut, which is why her mostly Fijian acquaintancesadoredher. Our Tils knew how to graft and executed it like no other. The look on the Australian woman's face really meant nothing to Tilly in the slightest. Whatever, my friend, whatever. In four years of cleaning up after holidaymakers, she'd seen it all.
Smiling and pretending that English was not her first language, a trick not learnt in the hotel training portal but from her colleagues, Tilly followed procedure. As few words as possible, a smile in place, head turned slightly to the side,retreating a little, compliant. Putting her accent into gear, Tilly blinked. 'Housekeeping.' Pronouncing the word with an inflexion at the end, turning it into a question, she smiled.
'Housekeeping?' the woman repeated with a frown as if Tilly had just suggested flying to the moon. 'Okay. What? You mean you want to do it now? Can you come back later, or will that mean that we don't get a proper clean? As I said when I checked in, the beds must be changed daily. I don't pay these sorts of prices to sleep in dirty sheets. Get me? Also, when you come back, leave double the number of towels, and we want two chocolates each for the nighttime thing.' The woman held her hand up in a stop sign. 'Before you say anything, Idon'tcare about the environment. Anyway, it’s not really convenient for you to come in right now. We’re just about to have a morning drink.'
Internally, Tilly rolled her eyes and wanted to deck the woman. In her head, quickly assessing her schedule and that of her teammates for the day, she quickly worked out what time she would be able to return. Adding a lilt to her voice, she turned her head and lifted her shoulders a little bit. 'Will I come back mid-afternoon?'
The woman swore. 'Really? For God's sake! Mid-afternoon! We'll betryingto relax. No, we don't want it done this afternoon. We might have a nap after our 3 o'clock cocktails.' The woman tutted, rolled her eyes and opened the door fully. 'Come in then if you have to do it now.Soinconvenient. We'll be on the balcony.'
Tilly walked in and felt a blast of ice-cold air-conditioning from above despite all four terrace doors being fully open to the tropical heat. Pushing in a mop, she slipped her AirPods in as the woman poured two drinks from the minibar and stepped out onto the terrace. Tilly chuckled to herself as she pushed the pods further into her ears. The insertion of AirPods was another trick passed on to her on one of her first shifts servicing a stateroomon a fancy cruise. It was a small, ingenious titbit, really, but it fended off questions. Tilly was sure it may have curbed some of the stranger requests she often got, but there you go. They'd paid the money, she did the deed. Who was she to judge?
Not in the mood for music, she got on with the job in hand and made her way to the bathroom off bedroom one. Sliding back the door, her eyes went wide as she took in the damage around the gigantic egg-shaped bath and double walk-in shower. She'd seen some messy rooms in her time, but this was next level. The place looked as if a small but very effective bomb had gone off. She shouldn't have been surprised; there had already been a warning on the housekeeping WhatsApp group earlier in the week.5272 a handful, sorry. Tilly could see why. Toiletries were scattered across every inch of the marble bench, a layer of talcum powder covered the floor, and an unravelled toilet roll lurked by the door. Soaking wet towels were draped absolutely everywhere, an old cup of tea sat by the sink and what looked like coffee had pooled around the plughole. Piles of used tissues lay in a heap on the side, bikinis and dirty underwear were strewn on the floor, and toothpaste splatters went up and down the mirror. Pleasant or polite it was not.
Whipping her phone out of her tabard pocket, Tilly tapped onto the housekeeping WhatsApp group.
Just arrived in 5272, and the bathroom alone will take me ages. It's a mess in here. Is anyone okay to cover my next room? Otherwise, this is going to put everyone's day back.
A reply pinged back almost straight away.
Yes, of course, it took me a long time on the turndown last night too.
Tilly didn't really know where to start. No stranger to a messy room in her time following Lennixx around the world, this one was next level. Following the training routine, she put on a pair of latex gloves, removed the tissues from the vanity top,moved the dirty underwear and collected the towels. Spraying the bath with cleaner after removing the cups from the side, she methodically went through her routine. Just as she was mopping her way out of the bathroom, voices floated through from the balcony.
'What about that musician, then? Can you even fathom it?'
'I know. That was a bit of a turn up, wasn't it? Can you believe he actually came to our room? He knows how to perform, and I'm not talking about playing the piano.'
'Tell me about it. He must be fifteen, no twenty years younger than us, don't you think?' the other woman cackled.
'Haven't had one like that for a while! He made me feel young again. If only…'
'I know, right? Lennixx, eh? Said he was straight off to a cruise to the outer islands. We should have gone with him for more fun and games.'
Tilly felt her heart sink to her boots. There was only one musician in the resort as far as she knew, and not many people going by the name of Lennixx. It didn't take a degree in communication to work out who had been the third guest in the room. Well, that was the end of that then.
3
It was many hours later, and Tilly was far from the opulence of the water-facing guest rooms she'd been servicing all day long. Behind the double doors to the left of the swimming pool, facing inland where the mosquitoes lurked in the staff quarters, she held her key card over the pad, pushed the door open with her hip, and let it fall shut behind her. Pulling her cleaner's tabard off over her head and dropping that and the rest of her brown uniform into a plastic washing bin by the door, she pulled the regulation oversized hibiscus clip from the back of her head and scooped her hair up with a scrunchie. Feeling good she was not.
Forty-eight hours or less were all she needed to implement her exit plan. She could andwouldbe gone in two days. Some might consider her stupid in her cleaning tabard and regulation tropical smile, but she was far from it and at all times ready to do what she had to do. Not only was shenotstupid, but she came complete with a backup plan for if and when things went wrong. A lesson learnt after a coercive, controlling ex-husband was always to have a strategy to get out. She had one now. Ever since the terror of the marriage and all that had come with it, she’d kept an exit plan in her back pocket ready to be put swiftlyinto play at any time. That time had come. It wouldn't take her long to be back on the other side of the world. Hello, my lovely English land. How are you? I’m on my way home.
Sitting down on the edge of the small, low-to-the-ground double bed, she stared at the wall for a long time as the ceiling fan turned slowly above her head, doing nothing much to push the not-quite-chilled-enough air around. Outside, cicadas had started up, somewhere down the corridor a door slammed, a tinny radio was on, and she could hear the staff buggy scooting down the service aisle picking up workers for the evening service.
Funny, really, she wasn't crying, shaking, upset or sad. At least, not yet. She'd thought, on the entire walk back from the executive suites, that she might start to blub once out of view. Or that she'd get to the door of her room, the whole thing would land properly, and she'd sit on the floor and howl. But rather, she felt nothing of the sort, just numb, really. Numb and ready to go home. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but in a way, there was relief in there somewhere, too. Or was she just kidding herself? Sugarcoating what had been done.
Booking a flight as soon as humanly possible was the most important thing and part of the exit plan front and centre. Tapping on Google Flights, she scrolled past the cheaper options without even looking. Getting out as swiftly as possible if and when it was needed had always been at the top of the list. This, my friends, was not a time for dicking around. Tilly Bloomwood needed to be boarding a jet that would get her home as soon as. None of the twelve-hour layover in New Zealand nonsense or going the long way around for the sake of a few quid. This was not the time to fanny about quibbling over pennies. Tilly Bloomwood had a mission to perform as soon as she could, and she was about to pull it off with military precision. She'd bebooked to leave, packed and ready to hotfoot it out of there as soon as she could.
In less than an hour, she'd found a flight out of Nadi, booked herself a window seat all the way to Heathrow, added extra baggage allowance just in case and zoomed to the checkout page. In a few minutes, it was sorted: card details in, three-factor authentication done, confirmation pinged through, tickets in her inbox.
Looking at the confirmation email for a long moment, Tilly shook her head. She'd always told herself that if anything went wrong, she was a couple of flights away from going home. Now that moment had come, and she would soon be on her way. A flight through Singapore was booked, confirmed and ready and waiting.
Walking the three steps to the tiny kitchenette corner of the room and filling the kettle, she made herself a cup of tea next to the two-plate ring and the mini microwave and sat down on the tiny compact sofa that was less sofa, more bench-with-cushions. Looking around, she realised that in a way she'd miss the little room with its small double bed, the cover faded from the sun where the curtain didn't quite meet in the middle. None of the bells and whistles of the rooms she cleaned, but clean, tidy and strangely full of the dreams she'd thought might come true.
Tapping on her photos, as she sipped her tea, she scrolled through the previous four years of her life. The pictures portrayed a life that wasn’t really true: with a life jacket over swimmers on a kayak in Barbados, in a tiny bikini, holding up a coconut in the Maldives. Standing on a beach at sunset in Tahiti, smiling from ear to ear. Lennixx on stage in a venue in Hong Kong. Lennixx on a cruise ship deck with sunglasses on. Lennixx with his arm draped around her in a restaurant in Bali. The two of them on a beach the morning after his birthday. Lennixx in a laundry doorway in just a towel.
Scrolling through, she waited for the tears, but nothing came. All of it felt very, very strange. Like looking at photographs of someone she'd known a long time before and didn't really keep in touch with anymore. As if the person in the photos was no longer on the scene. Sipping her tea and checking her emails, she wondered what Lennixx was doing on the cruise and mentally went through a list of things she had to do. It wasn't going to take her long to pack her bag, and her casual employment contract meant that she could leave pretty much whenever she wanted. She hated to let her colleagues down but knew that a queue of people would be lining up to jump in her place as soon as they could. Family emergency would do it. Nobody questioned a family emergency. She'd be on a plane in two days and back home before Lennixx had even completed the cruise. The fact that he had little to no internet connection on the small cruise around the island was only going to work in her favour.
