The Turnover by Jess Moody

Third in the third Lunate 500 competition

‘I would like to be a better voyeur: I practice, I make up characters, I ask students and strangers open-ended and provocative questions. But I bow to the virtuosity of the narrator of The Turnover who inhabits the twisted sheets of other people’s lives. In an unnamed hotel, they check out and she checks them out, Housekeeping moving surreptiously through the rooms she cleans. The passkey is key: the narrator’s a secret-taker who cultivates a vicarious life, the departing guests’s stories re-lived. But then A Girl is hired on, clearly a nemesis, but just maybe a collaborator, or even a protégé. Reading this fab flash, I’m reminded of the great Joy Williams’s novel, Breaking and Entering, and how our loneliness can be dense as a star.’
Alan Michael Parker (judge)

***

I needed no help. My insistence, my scorn of two decades.

Monsieur had listened. Happy to keep the wages low. We were only three dozen rooms, rarely full. I worked fast. Bullish down the corridors; my cart well-oiled to keep me in my place, beneath their notice. Some days I could turn over two floors before noon, their former residents still lounging downstairs, awaiting departure.

The trick was being certain of one’s own space. Folding yourself around the walls, the pivot of the door, the wave of bed linen, the guts of bathroom pipes. Know your shape, the taut sinewy certainty of you – and true efficiency follows.

It helped carved out time for the other thing.

Then Madame arrived. Her powdered nose crinkling at my muscle, my downy lip, these coarse fingers she would balk at having slide under her sheets.

She hired A Girl. To assist. In my ‘twilight years’.

So. The division. I sent her – flapping, gangly thing – to the west wing, I took the east. Always, I kept doors between us.

The loss was hard. Oh, the beds I missed before she stripped, beat, stretched afresh. The Latvian couple, their fifty years of marriage, such calm quilted dimples. The ‘sisters’ duPont, mattress gasping for air amidst ecstasy. The salesman from Ghent, weeping his failures at midnight, spilt Schnapps souring on the pillow. The English widow, her child’s curls stuck in crusting dreamless sleep.

Still, I had rooms enough. More time to stretch, make a star of myself, nose deep in scent memories.

The Christmas season burst upon us. Corridors full with page-boys, children running, ladies dithering, damp footprints betraying iaisons. Though we hovered, bobbed, glared, the rooms were never vacated on time. Our routine, my space, started to crumble. The Girl would flitter back and forth for this, that, for advice, to tell of the moustachioed man who kept looking at her by the pot-plant. I did not need this noise, this fussing at my edges.

Room 5, Christmas Eve morning. Curtains in denial of the hour. The perfume was its own season, layered warm and alluring. Whoever she was, she must have sighed her hopes until dawn.

I eased the door shut. Put my cloths and duster aside. Slipped off my shoes; the relief of toe sprawl.

A gift to myself.

I am a small woman. The beds were generous, and I could hide completely. My hair tickled my hot cheeks as I palmed the place of another’s unconsciousness. Yes. There she was. My stillness.

The floorboards creaked my mistake. Flitting, flitting! I should have locked the door. I held my breath.

When the blankets were pulled back, the long quizzical face of the Girl looked down at me. I lay prone, my right eye glaring up, red and defiant.

It took one whole minute before she decided.

In the covered dark she murmured, “What do we do now?”

I tsked her youth.

“Know their space,” I said. “Know their space.”