‘Oh, yes, I’ll be there in a minute,’ stammered Finn in reply, before moving a bit away from them along the corridor. There he played with his mobile phone awhile, as if sending or receiving an important message. Whether this satisfied the man, Finn couldn’t tell. Although after a pause the two of them resumed their talking. She went into a whisper Finn could hardly catch,
‘Of course, it’s as much about making the staff feel better about themselves as anything else. Employee fall-off’s massive in this sector, and employers are looking for us to bring results. You have to remember,’ she confided, ‘that these are staff hearing anything up to two-dozen family sob-stories a day. They have the same stresses and frustrations as the rest of us. And anything that they can use to justify excessive sick leave, poor work-rate, bad attitude, or a dispute with their line-manager, they will.’
‘It’s difficult for supervisors.’
‘It is, and that’s what our companies report to us. What they want from us is a kind of psychological massaging.’ The woman spoke even quieter now, as if even between the pair of them this was top secret, ‘They want employees whose job might involve turning a young family out onto the street to have no higher stress levels than those arranging bank account transfers or third-party car repairs. I swear, they’ll want the moon on a stick next.’
‘Well, if anyone can do it, you can, Gail. Good luck.’
‘Cheers, Chris. I need it.’
‘Er, hello? We really are going in now.’
Finn knew this was for him again. He turned around with not a notion of how he would respond. The need to do so was taken out of his hands though, with the sight of Sylvie rushing out through the double doors.
Chapter 8 – This Far and No Further
‘Finn, here you are,’ said Sylvie. ‘What are you..?’ She looked around quickly at the talking business couple, who just as quickly looked away. She looked back to her friend, who said to her,
‘I can’t do it, Sylv.’
‘What d’you mean, you can’t do it?’
‘I can’t go in.’
Sylvie had questioned Finn with all the expected insistency. However, had he been himself he might have noticed that at hearing his answer she bore an odd air, as if wanting only to break into a smile.
He repeated, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t set foot in that hall.’
Finn looked past Sylvie’s shoulder to the pair of event organisers. They looked back in his and Sylvie’s direction, then away again, then to their watches. But anything they were about to say was interrupted by Jemima’s just-as-sudden arrival from the hall,
‘Sylvie, you didn’t come back… Finn! Here you are.’
Even as she said these words, Jemima seemed aware of something deeper going on. And this, and the running, and the sense of importance she had been placing on the seminar, all then had a collective effect on her. She moved to the wall to lean her back against it, before sliding down into a sitting foetal position, her knees up in front of her.
Finn was startled, though Sylvie was controlled,
‘It’s okay, sometimes she hyperventilates,’ said Sylvie, kneeling with her. ‘I can sort this.’
But just then Jasper came through the doors also,
‘Where did you all get to? Jem!’ He moved quickly to the woman by the wall.
‘It’s okay,’ Sylvie reassured him as he got there. ‘She’s just lost her breath.’
‘Is she all right?’ asked the male event organiser. He was asking his partner as much as the people rushing around in front of him.
‘It looks like some sort of panic attack,’ answered his colleague. She was not without compassion though, asking,
‘Can we help?’
‘It all right, we’ve got her,’ answered Jasper quickly, now kneeling and holding Jemima. He breathed slowly in time with her to calm her down.
‘So… there’s nothing you need us to..?’
‘No. She’s quite all right.’
The man whispered after a moment, ‘We have a room full of people waiting, we can’t…’
‘I can run to reception?’ offered the woman. ‘Fetch a doctor? The hotel has one on call.’
‘It’s okay, we’ve got it,’ said Jasper more insistently now. All his attention needed to be on Jemima.
‘Okay, well if you’re sure she’s..?’
‘Yes, yes.’
The man said, ‘Then we really should be getting in there. Are you coming?’ Quite reasonably, he looked to Finn and Sylvie, now standing out of Jasper’s way. Sylvie didn’t answer him though, instead asking Finn,
‘Have you courage for both of us?’
Finn answered, ‘This isn’t courage, it’s fear.’
‘Then have you enough of that?’
The man gave Finn a disapproving look at this, as if asking, ‘What are you crazy kids up to?’ Before saying with renewed finality,
‘Well, we’ll be starting in a minute. We really do have to…’
‘Then sod off and give us some space.’ This was Jasper, tired of the distractions as he calmed his passing-out friend. To which the organisers responded by taking their leave and entering the hall. With an angry push, the doors behind them closed.
‘What do we do?’ asked Sylvie, looking at the doors.
‘I think we’ve just done it,’ answered Finn. He looked to her, then to Jemima sat against the wall, now breathing quietly.
‘Should we get a doctor?’ Sylvie asked Jasper. All were amazed with the sudden revelation of his caring side.
‘I don’t think she needs one,’ he considered. ‘She’s calming down now.’
‘I’ll get one anyway,’ answered Sylvie. She was glad of anything that stopped her thinking of what they’d just done.
Finn went with her, the pair jogging to reception.
‘She’ll be fine, she’s done it before,’ she said as they neared the front desk. ‘Hello, my friend’s having trouble breathing.’
‘What room’s she in?’ asked the attendant. Her job clearly left her unruffled in an emergency.
‘She isn’t in a room, she’s downstairs, outside the conference room.’
Without another detail needing to be asked, the attendant had already picked up a phone and pressed a single button to reach someone,
‘Hello, yes, this is the Grand. We’ve a patient with breathing difficulties. They’re on the ground floor, come to reception.
‘They’ll be here in two minutes.’
Yet it was less than one before a medic from whatever facility the hotel had a hotline to had arrived, young, flushed and eager to help.
Within that time though, with Jasper’s arm around her, the patient had met her party in reception. With her consort, she was now on her way outside for some air. The leaving pair was almost at the revolving doors when the doctor came through them, missing them entirely.
The receptionist was distracted with a phone call, and for a moment not at her station. The doctor looked around, saw only Finn and Sylvie by the desk, and so asked,
‘I’m a doctor. Do you know of a guest with breathing difficulties?’
They were alone in the large reception room. Life was going on in the street outside, but inside the hotel there was no one else to see them. With Jemima evidently fine, some demonic spirit grabbed Finn, and had him say,
‘The patient’s name is Chris. He’s on stage in the main hall. It’s his heart. Palpitations. He insisted he go on.’
‘Oh my, I’d better get in there,’ the doctor answered, turning to run.
‘It’s just along the corridor, on your left.’
No sooner had Finn somehow straight-facedly got this out, the woman with him somehow not laughed, and the confused doctor gone to find his patient, than the Evil Twins and a much-recovered Jemima, herself on the verge of hysterical giggles, looked to each other, then to the door; before looking to Jasper… and bolting for it.
PART TWO – THE HOPE OF ROMANCE
Chapter 9 – To do it Today
is Never too Late, or The First Time I Felt Alive, or Adult Truant, or Our Day Out
Mindful of Jemima’s frail state, their desperate dash took them only through the revolving doors and around the corner of the large building. There they stood, their backs pressed against the wall like outlaws in a gunfight. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that Jasper had come with them after barely a second’s pause.
‘Hold up,’ he’d called, once they were around the corner. Before adding, once they’d come to a stop, ‘That was stupid, when Jem’s just been ill.’
‘I’m fine now, Jasper,’ she countered. ‘They could see that.’
‘It’s not for you to decide that you’re fine. That doctor was for you.’
‘You didn’t think I needed one.’
‘How do you feel?’ Sylvie asked her.
‘I feel alive.’
‘No,’ said Jasper, ‘you’re feeling light-headed. Keep breathing slowly.’
The argument petered out into heavy-breathed silence, underscored by muffled traffic hum. Jemima though, like Sylvie and Finn, seemed only giddy with excitement, which seemed to have put the colour back in her cheeks.
Out in the pavement, beneath the bright grey sky, the remnants of the mid-day rush-hour occupied their senses. Travellers on foot that early afternoon were brushing past them. Sylvie gasped for breath – more through shock than through their short burst of action – and said simply,
‘I can’t believe we did that.’
‘Me neither,’ echoed Finn. For the duration of their run he had been unable to stop smiling, but now he wore a look of careworn exhaustion.
‘Wow, that was so exciting,’ concurred Jemima. ‘I haven’t felt like that since school.’
‘It’s left us in a mess though, hasn’t it,’ said Jasper, which riled Sylvie.
‘Just go back in then,’ she told him. ‘Make your apologies, sit at the back.’
‘What, after that farrago? I’ll never show my face in that room again. You dragged me out of there.’
‘Did we hell!’
Jemima though just laughed, ‘That really was brilliant, Finn. The funniest thing ever.’
‘Yeah,’ retorted their more sensible colleague. ‘It’ll be hilarious when we catch up with Mitch and he tells us all about it.’
‘Oh God, he was still in the conference hall,’ realised Jemima, before laughing again.
To which Sylvie declared, ‘That confirms it. We can never go back! We’re outcasts forever! But you.’ She looked to Finn, holding his face in her hands. ‘Oh, look at you. You’re in an awful state, aren’t you.’
For something, even after this short time, was telling on Finn. Perhaps nothing more than the knowledge that, had his trick with the doctor been played on him, he’d have felt so embarrassed, and would have shuddered at the memory ever afterwards…
‘So what do we do the rest of today?’ asked Jemima, calming down, as they all were.
‘Well, we can’t go back in there while the conference is on,’ repeated Jasper. ‘Not after that stunt you pulled with the doctor.’
‘You stood there and watched us do it,’ reasoned Jemima.
Though it was Sylvie who gave the more defining answer,
‘God, how repressed are you, Jasper? You saw us having fun, and some part of you couldn’t bear not being involved. You’re just as silly and immature as the rest of us; you just can’t bring yourself to admit it.’
‘Well, thank you, Doctor Freud,’ countered Jasper, as much in dark jest as in avoiding giving a proper response. ‘Remind me to cancel those therapy sessions I had booked, now I’ve got you to analyse me.’
Frustrations and flaring panic aired, they again lapsed into silence.
‘Can we go for a walk?’ asked Finn then.
‘They’re not going to come out and get us,’ Sylvie attempted to joke.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ quipped Jasper. He was keen to get going somewhere, anywhere, himself.
‘I just don’t like standing around here,’ explained a sallow Finn. ‘Can’t we go somewhere else?’
‘He’s right,’ said Jemima. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
To which all their feet concurred.
‘It can’t do any harm anyway,’ muttered Jasper en route. ‘The damage is done.’
‘Give over, Jasper,’ snapped Sylvie. ‘Don’t you think Finn feels bad enough about it all as it is?’
‘No one asked you to come,’ concurred Jemima, though her sweet voice could no more issue insult than blasphemy. ‘Where are we going anyway?’
‘I just need to clear my head,’ explained Finn.
And clear their heads they did do, for nearly three quarters of an hour, getting themselves good and lost in a city none of them claimed to know well. Although they never quite lost the centre, never found themselves in among the factory estates and ring-roads and nightmare tower blocks that ring Britain’s, perhaps the world’s, metropoli.
And then, just when they needed it, they saw the perfect Victorian hostelry emerge before them, its edifice towering over a public square like a galleon on a flat sea. Sylvie remembered then that for one of them this wasn’t quite unknown territory,
‘Of course, you knew this was here, Finn. You’re a local! This is your homeland.’
‘Try hinterland.’
Chapter 10 – Pub Life in Albion
For Finn, the transition from youth to adulthood could have been summed up in the single word: pub. For there seemed no trip, no visit, no event or day out since the age of seventeen that had not involved one.
A memory came to him then: of on one bright Saturday morning years ago meeting with an old schoolfriend in the city centre. Just before he left his home town, this must have been. Finn had envisaged them engaging in a nostalgic trawl around the places of their youth: record shops, markets, chip shops, local landmarks. And other places of boyhood interest, like mysterious alleyways, stairways that led nowhere, and dodgy shop signs that made them laugh like drains – for they were not of an age yet for high culture.
What a shock then for that friend to lead them both, in their first moments of meeting, instead to the nearest bar – just as either would do on any other occasion when they now met. It had only been the fact of it being their first weekend morning meeting since their school days that had triggered the bizarre expectation in Finn that time – on Saturday mornings at least – could have stood still.
In fact, so persuasive was the influence of the public house now on Finn’s social activities, that at his more sarcastic moments he had declared to friends that the sum total of his life’s sightseeing were the views of Britain’s cities through various barroom windows. (For he did have a couple of friends beyond Sylvie, fellow jaded hacks who could think beyond the office.) Yet for all his moaning, he conceded that the public house offered a perfect default. For where else were men supposed to go off-duty? What was the world to do with them?
The pub was like your living room out of doors. They were how Continental café culture might have developed had it been nippy enough on the boulevards of Paris or in the public squares of Rome for them to want to pull the door-to and put the two-bar fire on. Finn conceded the many hundreds of happy hours he and his compatriots had spent in these warm places. He was only thankful that he had never acquired the taste for drinking on his own – for he feared the removal of that last social barrier might have seen him in there morning, noon and night.
It also meant a bar was obviously where he and the others would end up going in such a situation as this one. The taproom they’d found was brass-ornamented, picture-hung and high-ceilinged. Its tall windows were full of sky from the square outside. It was half-empty after the lunchtime rush, and its tables were still being cleared of the remnants of the mealtime trade.
Once they were sat down with their drinks, each of the party in their own way conceded the truth of Jasper’s statement: that what was done was done, and so for the time being the lot of them really had nowhere else
better to be. It was also Jasper who’d bought the round. Although not even he could understand why he’d declared it ‘The least I could do’. From their table they had views of the town, the enormous windows giving the impression of inside and outside being the same space. Each was cast in that same diffused sunlight.
‘But what was it all about?’ asked Jasper, calmer now but still having little idea. ‘I just saw you all leaving the conference hall, and thought that something was going on outside.’
‘You couldn’t go in, could you, love?’ Again Sylvie took hold of some tactile part of Finn, this time his hands. ‘Your feet were rooted to the spot.’
‘That was it?’ asked Jasper. ‘No big emergency?’
‘How big an emergency would you have liked, Jasper?’ she exclaimed. ‘Finn dropping dead outside the conference room?’
‘And I was ill right after in the corridor,’ reminded Jemima.
‘Of course you were, love,’ counselled Sylvie. She took her hands from Finn’s to translate them to Jemima’s. ‘And it’s only that you amazed us all with your recovery that we’ve already forgotten about it.’
‘You hyperventilated, it looked like?’ Jasper, their inquisitor, summarised.
‘Yes,’ answered Jemima a little sheepishly.
‘And what caused it for you?’
‘Overexcitement, I think. At everything that was going on, people rushing around.’
‘But why did you leave in the first place?’ Jasper asked her.
‘Because Sylvie didn’t come back.’
‘And so why did you leave?’ Sylvie asked Jasper.
‘Because Jemima didn’t come back.’
‘Well, what a pretty pickle.’
Chapter 11 – A Friendly Visitor
‘Well, what a pretty pickle.’
This was said by a fifth voice, and one the other four didn’t know. It came from the table behind them.
Due to their positions, each table gave the impression of isolation, while leaving members of neighbouring parties sitting back-to-back with only the width of a sofa back-panel between them. Perhaps in the evening or during a busy lunchtime this was sufficient to leave one table’s conversation quite secret from the other. But on a quiet almost-empty mid-afternoon…