Please Enjoy

Chapter Three

By morning, the balcony had vanished into daylight and the tea cup left stained on the side table. The blackout blinds had done their job plunging the suite into artificial darkness until Vivian stirred. It was late, she ignored the mirror during her morning urine and decided she would wear slippers to breakfast.

There was no one in the lift to press the button anymore. Not like 2007. Back then, in one of the old state-run hotels in Shanghai, a person had hovered silently in the corner, dedicated solely to pressing the number she spoke out. They would have a tiny stool, right there in the corner!

These days, it was all swipe-card autonomy. Efficiency without charm or poop jokes!

Viv straightened her spine as the doors opened and she was swiftly seated for breakfast. An army of bodies performing the silent coordination of practised servitude. The commis waiter took her eggs from the kitchen on an oversized black tray, then, handed them reverently to a young woman who took the hot plate in a starched cloth, then placed the plate in front of Viv and bowed slightly. “Please enjoy,” she said.

She tried to get a cup of tea. English tea, that is. Which, in China, was still a diplomatic negotiation.

First, she found the tea bags in a wicker basket hidden among the passionfruit and lychee. No English Breakfast, just floral infusions and questionable oolongs.

So she asked for black tea. A man in a suit , brought her a single teabag on a plate. No water. Then came a crystal tumbler of hot water placed on a serviette. Then a porcelain cup and saucer. Then a glass of milk. Followed by a milk jug on another white plate. Three vessels two plates and no actual tea. Eventually, the staff understood. They returned with a proper cup: teabag steeping, milk on the side. Vivian signed with earnest. A small cross cultural victory.

When she stood to leave, a woman appeared just to bid her goodbye. Another man summoned the lift. She did nothing but exist.

If it had been dinner, she’d have had to smile awkwardly and wait for the staff to break eye contact before the lift door closed. But this was breakfast. The performance ended quicker.

Back in the room, she kicked off her slippers and stepped into the shower. Viv hadn’t seen a plug hole in the last three hotels. The shower tray was a moat, with silent slits in the floor where her secrets vanished. A glass partition moved on a rail and separated the two sinks from the rest of the bathroom. With a flick of a switch, the glass would frost instantly, hiding the view from the bedroom. The bathtub was not in the bathroom but perched by the floor-to-ceiling window, as if bathing were performance art, she counted ten lamps and thirteen spotlights in the suite.

The solitude of the room allowed her to behave like the animal she was. She let her belly expand and her shoulders round until the ding dong of housekeeping forced her to slip on a robe and straighten her spine. She politely refused today’s service even though she secretly loved that someone had come just to tuck in the corners of her duvet.

After the shower, she brewed up again. This time with the teabags she’d brought from home, not silk pouches, but a rectangle cardboard box with a red stamp. Yorkshire, emblazoned like a flag. She sighed, settling into the afternoon sun.

She rested her feet against the tempered glass of the balcony and leaned back on two legs of the chair. She thumbed through her contacts to ‘C’. Clare, Marie. Her thumb paused over the name. Then she pressed the screen off and placed the phone face down on the side table.

She didn’t want a present-day conversation; she wanted to recount Liverpool, 2007, thick in the bliss of patchy memory. When no one looked at phones unless they rang. Just a battered Nokia with predictive text that never got her name right. When it rang, it lit up in green: Clare Marie calling.