Confessions from a Package Tour. Rosie Dixon

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СКАЧАТЬ shout can be heard from the top of the stairs. ‘Hurry up, Myrtle! I can’t keep my finger in much longer. It’s going numb!’ Penny leads a stampede for the stairs and I make my escape. Perhaps, on the whole, it is a very good job that we are going to spend the night in a different hotel.

      Tired as I am, I cannot help feeling excited as I walk through the streets. At last I have set foot on foreign concrete. All around me are men and women who speak a different language, eat different foods, sleep in different beds. It is all so new and stimulating. Even the smells are different. Strange to think that only a few days before I had been leading a humdrum existence in Chingford – or West Woodford as Mum prefers to call it. What would the family do if they could see me now, striding through what I suppose must be the docks? Certainly, there are a lot of masts and smokestacks poking above the low roofs. How nice it would be if I could find a quaint little waterfront hotel in which to spend the night. Dusk is falling fast and the red lights are coming on all around me. It is very picturesque.

      ‘Hey, you jig, jig, focky, focky?’ I suppose that the language the man is speaking must be Flemish. I have never heard anything like it before. He is probably asking if I have a light.

      ‘I no smoky,’ I say, holding an imaginary cigarette to my lips and shaking my head from side to side.

      The man looks disappointed and shoves his hands deeper into the pockets of his seamen’s jacket. ‘No luck?’ he says – at least, I think it must be ‘no luck’. The way he pronounces his words it sounds more like ‘no suck’, though that wouldn’t make sense, would it?

      I shake my head again; he says something else I can’t understand and wanders unsteadily up the street. I do hope that he is all right. I watch him go up to another woman who listens to what he has to say and then steers him towards a doorway. She is no doubt going to give him succour. Oh dear, I feel like one of those people in the Bible who passed by on the other side. If only all the Belgians were able to speak English as well as the man at the Hotel Twerp – I mean, Antwerp.

      My suitcase is beginning to get heavy so I look round eagerly for signs of a hotel. There are lots of bars and one or two clubs but no – wait a minute! There we are: Hotel de Plaisir. Luckily my French is good enough to tell me what it means: Hotel of Pleasure. Sounds jolly enough, doesn’t it? It is a bit shabby, set into the wall of the narrow street, but I suppose you could say that its condition adds to its charm. Certainly, the large red light above the door bathes the front of the building in a warm, welcoming glow.

      I go through the door and am faced by a counter, behind which stands a small fat man wearing a beret and a hooped T-shirt. His moustache might have been applied with an eyebrow pencil and he looks at me suspiciously.

      ‘Good evening,’ I say cheerfully. ‘Do you speak English?’

      ‘Little,’ says the man unenthusiastically. I notice that he smells of garlic – in fact, everything seems to smell of garlic.

      ‘I’d like a room for two people,’ I say.

      The man’s face splits into the imitation of a smile. ‘Good thinking,’ he says. ‘What you try to say? You want to work ’ere?’

      ‘I want to spend the night here with my friend – my girl-friend.’ I add that hurriedly because I don’t want the man to get the wrong idea.

      ‘You both working, are you?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘My friend is at the Hotel Twit – I mean Twerp – I mean Antwerp, at the moment.’

      ‘Business good?’ says the man, starting to light an evil-smelling cigarette.

      ‘We’ve put up sixty tonight,’ I say, not without a touch of pride.

      The man stubs his match against the end of his cigarette. ‘Sixty?! And now you want to come ’ere? On Sunday night? With the Russian one ’undredth and forty-second fleet paying a goodwill visit?’

      ‘It all helps to add a little colour, doesn’t it?’ I say gaily. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to squeeze us in?’

      ‘With your work rate, I would be imbecile not to,’ says the man, revealing a new sense of urgency and purpose. ‘Come, I show you to room.’

      ‘What time is dinner?’ I ask as, what I assume to be the manager, leads the way upstairs. ‘I could eat a horse.’

      ‘You could eat a whore’s what?’ says the manager, stopping on the bend of the stairs and looking at me suspiciously. ‘We no want any cabaret acts ’ere. Our customers are simple seafaring men who in most cases crave only the satisfaction of the most basic of appetites.’

      ‘Just like me,’ I say. ‘I don’t want anything fancy. Just something good, solid, substantial and filling.’

      ‘Y-e-es.’ The manager scratches the front of his trousers in a way that I find rather uncouth and continues to lead the way upstairs. To tell the truth, I have not really warmed to the man. A gentleman would have carried my suitcase. So much for all the stuff about Continentals falling over each other to kiss your hand. I thought it sounded too good to be true.

      ‘ ’Ere you are. This do you very well – like everything else, yes? ’O, ’O, ’O! English joke, no?’

      ‘No,’ I say, firmly, looking round the small, stuffy bedroom without attempting to disguise my lack of enthusiasm. ‘There’s hardly room to swing a cat in here.’

      ‘You no need to swing cat,’ says the man. ‘Flagellation is too sophisticated for my clientele. They like simple stuff.’ He looks round the door and closes it quickly. ‘Just like me! Welcome to Hotel de Plaisir.’ So saying, he unzips the front of his trousers and produces what at first glance I take to be a plug of chewing tobacco. I am about to tell him that I am not a chewer when I see what the thing really is. Despite my understandable lack of experience, I am able to recognise a cupid’s quiver – especially when it is quivering as much as this one.

      ‘How dare you!’ I say. ‘Put that away at once. I’ve got an empty matchbox somewhere if you don’t mind it bashing against the sides.’

      ‘Just a quick one!’ sings out the loathsome low-lander. ‘So I can recommend you to my customers.’

      ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ I say sternly. ‘This kind of shenanigans puts a totally different complexion on our relationship. I suggest that you accept my offer concerning the matchbox before it is too late. I have a pair of tweezers in my make-up bag.’ Of course, this kind of talk is all terribly forward and quite unlike the real me but I find that it is the only thing that a certain type of man understands.

      ‘Shenanigans?’ says the man slowly. ‘What is they?’

      ‘English lessons are extra,’ I say bravely. ‘Now, unless you pull yourself together, I’m going to check out of this hotel immediately. I don’t mind a little joke’ – I lean on the word little – ’but enough should be as good as a feast to a blind horse.’

      ‘Blind whores?’ says the manager looking puzzled. ‘You talk about the rest of the girls? They old; sure; toothless, maybe, but not blind.’

      At this confusing moment, the door opens and a woman comes in. At first, I think she is wearing fancy dress. She can’t be a day under fifty and yet she is sporting a thigh-length mini skirt with a slit running up to her vaccination mark СКАЧАТЬ