Free Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean Page A

forbidding, expensive brands in dark green, brown leather and navy. Annemieke hoarded a mass of clothes, bobbled and baubled, which refused folding and rioted in the wardrobes. From the shelves a sleeve here or there stretched down towards the clothes hanger, dripping with crocheted cherries, too many zips and cuff buttons shaped like anchors or hearts.
    He had thought at first that her wearing eye make-up in bed was charming, acquired from some magazine advice column typical in the 1960s—or it might be some slatternly laziness, and this thought appealed to him perhaps more. One evening, in the early days, before the children, he spotted that the colour of the eye shadow had changed from green to a pearlized white shimmer, which matched her nightdress. He had felt cornered. Yet when she ceased to wear it in bed, he was dejected. Accidentally, he found the tubes of cosmetics in her drawer; she kept them still and he became jealous. By then he'd become merely a tenant of her bed-tent, profiteer of her capable circulatory system in wintertime.
    Looking into the room, he saw her turn a little, kicking at the sheets. Her feet suffered too, along with her eyes. She stuffed them into too tight too high heels, put plasters over blisters and sloughed away red patches to leave raw patches. Finding the dry skin razor in their
bathroom, the foot carpaccio in the bidet, had turned his stomach. She could not abide sheets over her feet, so those red paddles of pain turned in the night-time air.
    He extinguished his cigarette and went back into the room. He put on the lamp by his side of the bed and picked up his book. He had known the light would wake her. She was roused and frowned at him, lifting her head.
    'It smells of smoke in here.'
    'Sorry.'
    'Can't you sleep?'
    'No. Insomnia.'
    'Why don't you take something?'
    She turned and nestled her head once more into the pillow and he saw her shoulders slacken. Before she was quite asleep again, he put his lips between her shoulder blades and kissed her there.
    The phone rang. It was George.

16
    I T WAS THE MANAGER'S first serious hotel. Steve Burns was thirty-five, he was single; he was committed to his new job. The resort was one of a chain of luxury re-sorts that were marketing themselves as 'taste and refinement in unexpected locations.' 'Taste and refinement' meant dark teakwood and uniformly white furnishings. The 'unexpected locations' were a result of
the prime real estate in any popular resort area having been long since snapped up.
    The manager's job description was rather alternative, rather New Age. In bold letters he was instructed to 'deliver an experience that enables our customers to re-connect with his or her inner self in luxurious surroundings.' He was, however, from Manchester. Steve Burns. Down to earth. He'd laughed about the job title: 'Total Experience Manager.' He'd shown it to his friends down at the local that lunchtime after it came in the post, red-cheeked no longer from pride, but from the several beers and the stuffy public bar on the solitary hot day of the year. His friends quizzed him. He'd been a hotel manager, but now he was to be a guru, it was a promotion, surely. Like going from baker to bishop.
    'Look,' he said, 'you park seventy-odd middle class fat-arses round a swimming pool in the blazing heat, you get them up to pour booze down their necks, and then you drag them off to sweat it out on the massage table and they'll find their selves all right. I don't doubt they'll find that their true self, their inner child, is just what it was before they left home; a right greedy bast'd.'
    'Half your chance,' his friends had moaned and gone on to ask him about discount rates. Time to leave.
    Now he was sat, in khaki trousers and a white shirt, a silver chain round his neck, hairy ankles peeping out of brown leather boat shoes, on the corner of the big dark wood desk he'd been given. A dark wood fan, brass details, a colonial era reproduction, turned above