‘You look bloody awful,’ she said when he walked through the staff entrance just after eight o’clock. ‘Have you had any sleep at all?’
Cheryl gave her son a perfunctory hug but work was on her mind and she quickly returned to the restaurant. Kite was past the age at which he consciously longed for his mother’s embrace, yet would have welcomed even the slightest display of tenderness or excitement at his arrival. Instead she said: ‘As soon as you’ve got changed you can turn down the beds in Adam, Bay and Churchill, then take over from Paolo in the bar.’ There was no opportunity to tell her what had happened on the train, no questions about his journey or an offer of something to eat. It was left to the other members of staff to greet him more warmly. The chef, John, and his number two, Kenny, looked up from their work and grinned, Kenny saying: ‘There he is, the man from Atlantis. Welcome home, Lockie,’ as Moira, a roly-poly waitress who had worked at the hotel since the mid-seventies, came into the kitchen and nearly dropped a tray of dirty plates in surprise.
‘Lockie! We didnae know you was coming tonight. How’s my favourite boy?’
Kite briefly disappeared into Moira’s vast bosom and felt the scrape of facial hair against his cheek as she kissed him. There was little time to loiter and chat. John called out ‘Service!’ and Moira was soon ferrying two bowls of seafood stew back to the restaurant. Kite withdrew to the staff area, found a clean white shirt and a pair of black trousers, shaved with a Bic razor and applied some deodorant to his armpits. The remains of staff dinner were congealing at room temperature on a Formica table: a foil tray of lasagne, a few dehydrated kernels of sweetcorn and a Tupperware box of salad, comprised mostly of red onions and damp chunks of iceberg lettuce. Kite was famished and wolfed the remains of the lasagne, washed down with a hair-of-the-dog can of Heineken discovered at the back of the fridge. By eight-thirty he was on the back stairs, heading up towards Adam, the smallest of the hotel’s twelve rooms, located directly above the vast walk-in fridge used by the chefs to store fresh fish, cuts of meat, dairy products and puddings.
Turning down the beds during dinner had been Kite’s first job at the hotel as a child. When his father was still alive, he had dutifully gone from room to room, straightening out bedspreads and plumping up pillows, tipping out ashtrays and wiping them clean with a tissue. For each bed he was paid a flat fee of twenty pence, which he normally spent on sweets in Portpatrick. When Kite was thirteen, his mother had told him: ‘Always watch out for the way people talk to waiters in restaurants. If they’re rude or surly, don’t have anything to do with them.’ This observation had resonated with him and, as he grew older, Kite realised that he could learn a lot about people simply by studying how they behaved. Each bedroom on his nightly errands, for example, told Kite a different story about its occupants: sheets crumpled and discoloured by sex; letters and business papers left out on desks for prying eyes; money and jewellery scattered on the tops of dressing tables and spilling out of suitcases. An individual’s interests could be gauged by the books they were reading, their standard of living by the quality of their clothes and the value of their belongings. American guests were the easiest to spot: they came in droves during the summer months, armed with golfing magazines and books about their Scottish ancestors, and always tipped fabulous amounts of money if Kite found them in their room during his nightly rounds. In time, however, without ever hearing them open their mouths, the young Kite reckoned he could tell if a guest at Killantringan was French or British, American or Italian, married or single, happy or depressed. Even now, as an experienced old hand armed with a duster and a hangover, he secretly looked forward to snooping in the various rooms to which his mother had sent him. He cleaned Adam in under five minutes, concluding that its occupant was a single, possibly lonely woman from Dusseldorf with interests in fishing and Communist Eastern Europe: there was a spinning rod propped up against the wall and her West German passport bore stamps from Poland, Yugoslavia and Romania. She was reading a romance novel (in English) and was midway through a bottle of medium sweet sherry which she had left on the windowsill to chill.
Having locked up, Kite walked the short distance to Churchill. The room was so named because it was alleged that the British prime minister had stayed at Killantringan during the Second World War, meeting General Eisenhower for secret talks about the D-Day landings. When Kite knocked on the door, he heard a deep, full-throated American calling out ‘just a moment please’ and was preparing to say: ‘I’ll come back later’ when a huge bear of a man, Churchillian in girth and stature, opened the door. The man was at least fifty and held a tumbler of whisky in his left hand. He looked surprised to see Kite standing in front of him and was momentarily lost for words.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Kite. ‘I just wondered if you needed your bed turning down?’
‘Ah!’ the American replied instantly. ‘You must be young Lachlan.’ With his steady blue eyes and the flicker of a smile, he appeared to be sizing him up. There was a list of residents on a clipboard downstairs with the names of the guests staying at Killantringan. Kite hadn’t had time to check it and consequently
