BAD CARPETS AND LOLLYPOP STICKS
Loughborough, like a bedraggled and mangy fox, looms up along its arterial roads and then almost disappears out where the university campus starts; end of the world. Alarms are ringing on the high street but there’s nobody around; perhaps they are ringing because they crave attention? Somebody. Anybody?
On the other side of town our destination rises. The smoke sickened Quality Hotel nestles in its own swamp of cohorts: truckers and their beer-bellied assistants, terrorist suspects, artificially inseminated housewives longing for the pool to open up so they can drown their sorrows (except the pool automatically locks at 8pm and no-one can get in – perhaps for that very reason: to keep the suicide numbers down). In fact, they should consider renaming it The Suicide Hotel – tag line: Everything comes with a price –
Then out to brave the long walk to the bedroom: the desolate corridors, the paper thin carpet held together with black gaffer tape and hope, littered with lollipop sticks and Bernard Manning humour behind an arched hand (nudge nudge). You know it’s going to be bad when the room numbers start at 101 and it’s the first room to greet you in the opening passageway. Silence behind the peeling door.
My room is the kind of place you’ve seen in photos where the ‘suicidee’ is spread out on crumpled sheets, the walls cramping in, the bottle of pills to hand, the TV still on and the steady drip of the drains outside the window adding some symbolic detail, whilst unbeknownst to you the viewer the lamp shades are thick with dirt and the bathroom has unidentifiable matter growing on the walls and in the grouting spelling out the name of the recently departed – the tonal beige of the décor (apart from the bauxite carpet and faux parisienne curtains) is enough to drive even the sanest person wild with depression – you can’t even get a signal for a mobile phone adding ever more credence to the impression that this is all a proto-communist nightmare – the heaving breath of relief of the newly departed in the morning must be like a scirocco coming in off the forecourt to the puzzlement of those just entering, staring back over their shoulders like blinded rabbits unaware of the sentence to come, yet wondering what if this is it? The pool table greets them just inside the foyer, as it did me, surrounded by shaven-headed men in t-shirts two sizes too tight, beer bellies peeking out iridescent, crepuscular from beneath them, and lank-haired young gofers intent on the older men’s every words and snatch at the pool balls. The air around them reeks of guff, kebab and lager and some reverse pretension at total ignorance, total stupidity. They remain as noisy as they possibly can; a caterwaul to greet newcomers, buffoons to the bitter end surrounded by mock mahogany and recently upholstered 1970’s furniture – if it wasn’t for the Quiz Night machine and the Link cash dispenser stood like droids in the middle of the room, then the scene would be almost timeless, the 3 day week and the Common Market on the lips of everyone here – though I suspect there’s a few with rellies in Iraq which would give time a jolt to untrained ears.
Jackie the receptionist seems at a loss – taken by surprised (suspicious?) when new guests arrive (maybe its one huge ‘happy’ family in here? A cult of 21st century lounge lizards and barflies?) – I am booked in under Ms. Belerine which is mildly entertaining, but what is more amusing is the look of shock in the young woman’s eyes when she tries desperately to use her booking computer, she goes to pieces and flaps and faffs with sheaves of registration paper and plastic key cards – it’s a mesmerising ballet of inefficiency - the stumbling dumb checkout girl brought up into the world of the ‘glamorous’ hotelier by her fuck and chuck boss thanks to her flashy tits, stuck here for eternity, wanting and waiting for Mr Right to walk in and claim his reservation on her heart –
The soap is petrified in the bathroom, crumbles to the touch – a long hair (not mine) trails across a tile on the wall of the bathroom like a clue or signpost to some disposable tryst, a fracture in the equilibrium of a taxi driver or corporate middle-manager’s twelve year marriage – the ennui of the rain, don’t forget – the prison quadrangle, the aphid-addled rose-bed, the footie frown and the silent chant of the forgotten locked in their hotel rooms having never tasted quality – welcome to Loughborough, welcome to beyond the back of beyond . . . listen and you’ll hear the screams . . . .
Loughborough 10/7/07
