The Wake-Up Call

by Beth O'Leary

If Lucas is doing something, I have to be doing it too, but better. This has generally been very good for my career over the last year, but it does mean that right now I am grappling with a fir-tree branch which measures at least twice my height and four times my width. ‘Do you need help?’ Lucas asks. ‘Absolutely not. Do you?’

These days, things don’t go well if we’re at the front desk together for too long. Mrs SB says it ‘doesn’t seem to create quite the right atmosphere’. Arjun, the head chef, says ‘when Izzy and Lucas are on shift at the same time the hotel is about as welcoming as my grandmother’s house’, and I’ve met Arjun’s grandmother, so I can say with confidence that this was a very rude remark.

‘You didn’t forget to tell Poor Mandy.’ Mandy is the other permanent member of the front-of-house team. She is not actually poor in the financial sense – she has just become known as ‘Poor Mandy’ here at Forest Manor Hotel and Spa because she’s always stuck between me and Lucas when we’re arguing about something. Poor Mandy doesn’t care about the way the stationery drawer is arranged. She just wants some peace and quiet.

Izzy knows I do not enjoy emotional conversations. The only consolation is that I have already signed Izzy up to help Barty fill in a forty-four-page insurance document which he has definitely downloaded in the wrong format. It will be pure torture for her.

I am talking through a new lunch menu with Arjun, who now has a very limited number of people with whom to discuss these things (Ollie suggested we should serve Doritos with Arjun’s forty-eight-hour chilli and has been banned from having opinions).

Poor Mandy heads over to take his umbrella, unexpectedly dousing her own shoes as she pulls it closed. She looks down at her feet, crestfallen, before returning to the desk with the air of a woman who fully expects the universe to give her wet shoes.

Pedro and I met at the gym – I heard his accent across the weights zone, and it was like breathing in and suddenly smelling home.

As one, we look at the builders, who are currently debating something at the top of a scaffolding tower by the staircase. They are incredibly intrusive. I have asked them to be quiet on multiple occasions, but the only effect has been that they have stopped greeting me when I arrive in the mornings.

I type out a few emails to possible ring owners just as the rest of the builders traipse in, trailing wet mud across the lobby floor behind Louis. I reach for the phone to call housekeeping, but Dinah appears, as if conjured by inconsiderateness, and scowls after them, mop already in hand. I like Dinah. She never goes the extra mile – she goes just far enough, and I have a lot of respect for that.

‘Guys, guys, guys,’ Ollie says, power walking over from the kitchen. Ollie has been told repeatedly not to run through the hotel, so now he does an odd fast walk that involves a lot of arm movement.

Izzy is staring at me like I’ve just announced that in future I’d rather we deliver all internal communications by carrier pigeon.

She bristles. ‘I’m doing plenty, thanks. And you’re welcome. Just . . . Go gently when you get back to her on the figures, OK? Some of us are humans, not robots.’ She walks away through the rose bushes, towards the hotel. The word robot stings like a slap. I’m human too, I want to say. When you’re unkind to me, it hurts.

If I say yes, she’s pretty, then they will not be satisfied until Izzy is flying over to Brazil for a large family wedding. So the obvious thing to do is to say no, she’s not pretty.

After hitting send, I belatedly wonder if that might have been one too many exclamation marks. I’ve always been partial to an exclamation mark. Full stops just seem so . . . grown-up.

All’s fair in love, war and petty workplace feuding, right?

We are all misled and misdirected from time to time. Perhaps there really is no shame in that, as long as we wake up to it before it’s too late to change.

He is eating a sandwich angrily, which I didn’t know was possible, but he’s really managing with aplomb.

I’m about to respond with something sharp – all the muscle feels so dismissive. But I swallow it back. What she said about me raising my voice struck me hard, because that’s how discussions happen at my uncle’s house. Everyone is always snapping and shouting. I hadn’t realised quite how much of that I had absorbed.

Ms Ashley yells an insult so colourful that Mr and Mrs Hedgers immediately scoop up the children and flee the scene before Ruby asks anyone to repeat it.

He is a small, scrawny white man with no hair and too many tattoos, and he is that very rare thing: a person I liked straight away.

(Why is it that when men sweat, it’s sexy, but when I sweat, I look like I’ve been crossbred with a tomato?)

‘We’re having it upstairs,’ I say, nodding to Irwin, the builder who gave me permission to use the newly reconstructed staircase. Skip the fourth and eighth step was his first instruction. His second was, And if you fall through the ceiling while flirting upstairs, make sure you’re too dead to sue me.

‘Well, it’s real people, not just numbers. Those poor kids. This is all so unsettling for them anyway. And we’ve made the hotel so homely for them!’ Izzy tears up slightly. ‘I chose Ruby’s favourite star to go on the top of the tree!’ How did I ever, ever hate this woman?

‘You are making it harder for me to think you’re sensible. Sensible men don’t wink,’ I say, thinking gloomily of Louis, who winks at least once a day, and is definitely an idiot.

‘OK, if you want to be romantic about it, you’re showing her how it could be between the two of you if you were together. So many great love stories started in the bedroom. My brother’s wife was his one-night-stand rebound girl! And now they have a horrible number of children.’ This is actually quite helpful.

‘You rascal,’ Mrs SB says to Barty as he swoops in to kiss her across the desk. ‘You’d better have saved me a doughnut.’ Barty looks guilty. I’m pretty sure he ate at least four.

Arjun pops up in the window of the restaurant door. ‘Ollie!’ he barks. ‘Balls,’ says Ollie, trying a belated duck. ‘I can still see you!’ ‘He’s had me dicing on and off since Tuesday,’ Ollie says miserably, dragging his feet as he turns towards the kitchen. ‘If you do get a massive reward for that last ring, will you buy me an invisibility cloak?’ ‘You told me yesterday that you were loving the chance to help prepare the food,’ Mrs SB says. ‘Yes, but I’ve got blisters,’ Ollie says mournfully, as he walks into the kitchen with the air of a man tasked with saving the planet against his will.

I actively avoid starting conversations. Conversations find me more often than I would like as it is.

She rang for entertainment and distraction – she’s currently hiding in her parents’ spare bedroom with the disgraced Piddles, feeling (as she put it) ‘about the size of a frickin Borrower’ after a lunch with her overachieving cousins. She was delighted when I told her I was actually chasing a man down at an airport, rom-com style.

‘May I start by saying, do not try to push past me,’ Roger says. ‘I will catch you immediately and escort you to Bournemouth police station.’ If asking politely doesn’t work, pushing past the security guard is my Plan B, so this is a blow.

I try to eat another mouthful of my WHSmith sandwich. It makes me think of Izzy, and our trip to London together, when we had bought food at Waterloo before our train journey to Woking. How I’d realised what she meant to me that day – how obvious it had seemed. I find it very sad that I am triggered by WHSmith, especially as there is nowhere else to buy a good sandwich right now.

‘What? Why are you giving me your arch-nemesis face?’ ‘I thought . . . me and you . . . Are you my girlfriend?’ I blurt. My heart is pounding again, those old feelings never far away. ‘Yes! Aren’t I? After the unbelievably romantic airport I-love-you thing?’ She looks panicked. ‘Have I misunderstood?’ ‘Have I?’

‘That can wait!’ Mrs SB yells. ‘Lucas! Barty and I are racing to the airport to stop you. You can’t leave, Lucas, you mustn’t. If I could offer you a pay rise, I would, or some job security of longer than two weeks, frankly, but – please! It’s not over yet!’ ‘You’re racing to the airport?’ I repeat, checking the time on the dashboard. ‘My flight departed forty minutes ago.’ ‘What? Did it? Barty!’ ‘It’s the time difference!’ Barty protests in the background. ‘It’s very confusing!’

‘Forest Manor Hotel is a survivor,’ Mrs SB says. ‘She sheltered sixty children from the Blitz in her day. She’s weathered storms and pandemics and more expensive structural damage than this, let me tell you. We will be open in the new year.’

‘Oh, yes. He came in and told me you were romantically involved. He seemed to be under the impression that I’d fire you both,’ Mrs SB says. ‘He was most disappointed when Barty and I cheered loudly enough to bring the ceiling down all over again. I don’t know what that young man thinks he’s up to, but since this afternoon, he’s also contacted the local press with a story about our front desk going unmanned and sent the food safety inspector around.’

‘And what insults did you have for Arjun when you failed to seduce him?’ Lucas asks politely. ‘Is he a small, mousey nobody, too?’ Louis’ eyes flick to mine. I smile, as if to say, Yes, of course I told him everything. Yes, we are mutually deciding not to destroy you. No, I am not confident I can prevent him from breaking rank and beating you to a pulp if he so chooses.

Grigg is one of those people who would manage to make something look crumpled even if it were very recently ironed, while his wife is just the opposite: she exudes the sort of effortless glamour that makes her stained white T-shirt look vaguely iconic.

She eases the nearest phone from Mandy’s hand and tosses it to me. I catch it. Thankfully. That was a very confident throw, and while I’m quite pleased that Jem rates my catching skills, I would also prefer her to never do that again, particularly this close to a swimming pool.

We manage to smuggle her in under Izzy’s woolly hat and a pair of sunglasses I keep in my glove box. It’s her security team who draw attention. I glower at them when they refuse to look less conspicuous, and they glower right back. I have the vague sense that I may have found my people.