‘Yes sir, I’m seven.’
‘Seven is it? Well, off you pop and tell your mum what I said. OK?’
‘OK.’
On her settee, Claudine Owen reclined with her legs crossed at the ankle, flipping through a copy of Vogue.
Max crept behind her and trotted to the reception desk keeping out of her line of view. ‘Excuse me, Miss,’ he hissed.
When the middle-aged woman in the dark swinging kilt saw Max’s face, she was beside him in seconds. Her knees folded so that their faces were level. ‘Is something wrong, dear?’
Max explained.
The lady’s eyes swept over Max’s mother with a bland look that disclosed not a hint of disapproval then she held out her hand to Max. ‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s sort this out.’
She left Max at the entrance to the bar, and soon emerged, bearing a silver tray of drinks, which included something orange with tiny bubbles.
Max skipped behind and watched her place the drinks on the low table beside Claudine.
Claudine did not raise her eyes. ‘Put it on my bill.’
‘Certainly, Madam.’ The lady winked at Max and handed him his drink.
Over that first week, Max’s mother breezed in and out of their room, relating stories of sexual indiscretions among the cast or sending him to buy moisturiser and magazines. At no time did she show him affection or even thank him.
During dragging days alone, the boy’s chief companions were the women who cleaned the room: rough spoken, foreign, and kind. He ignored the questions in their eyes and wondered what life would be like if Carol took him home to meet her ‘young’uns’ or Rita to Greenwich, where she lived with her bed-bound father. Once, in his loneliness, Max telephoned home and begged his father to collect him. But Sean said he must go to work and told him that there were also ‘other things’ to prevent his coming for his son. So, Max sought the nearest library and, like Matilda, began to educate himself.
In time, he felt at home in the big hotel and at the Library. In the latter, a kind lady would sometimes sit with him and help with his learning. She tutted at the stories he told of his mother’s escapades. On the day she mentioned that it was illegal to keep a child from school, Max stopped going in case Claudine got into trouble. But on his walk back to the hotel, he ruminated on the information he had received, and as he crossed the vast hotel foyer, he decided he would confront Claudine with the fact of his education rights.
He marched from the lift and had nearly reached their door when it opened, and his mother stepped out, laughing, in the arms of a man. The fellow had one hand on her shoulder, and in the other he carried an overnight bag. The very bag Max had struggled to load in and out of the car on their arrival.
‘Oh, hello Maxy darling,’ his mother cooed in a voice he did not recognise. She cupped his chin in her hand and held his eyes with hers. ‘After rehearsal this evening, Reg and I are going away for a week or two. You’ll be all right here, won’t you?’ She did not wait for an answer. ‘I’m sure you will; you’re a big boy now.’ She dropped a brief kiss onto his hair, said, ‘Order your meals from room service,’ and let the room key fall from her fingers. After diving to catch it, Max watched her stiletto heels stalking towards the lift and Reg, trotting behind firing back apologetic looks.
Alone in the room, Max sat in a tub chair with his legs sticking out, and stared at his surroundings. He was paralysed with terror at being left alone.
After ten minutes, his fear had transmuted to fury. He bounced forwards and dropped onto the plush carpet and seized the nearest thing to hand, a magazine. He fired it across the room, and it sailed a brief distance before fluttering to the floor. Sobbing, he followed the magazine with a bottle of water, which shattered the dressing-table mirror with a rewarding crash. Next, a jar of night cream smashed on the wall, and a dollop of white grease slid down the wallpaper and landed in a glutinous blob. Handfuls of pages from the Gideon’s Bible landed in the mess, and he jumped on them again and again, grunting with the effort, ensuring the cream was well imbedded in the carpet pile.
When he had run out of projectiles, his wild eyes fixed on his mother’s negligee on the bed. Last night she had slept in this pink frothy nonsense, had wandered around the room with no concern for propriety; her breasts and pubic hair revealed under its flimsy layers. With a long shard of broken mirror clenched in his fist, Max proceeded to ‘murder’ the night dress, raising his hand, and driving the point deep into the bedding again and again. A pillow burst open, sending a mass of suffocating feathers into his face, while blood from his lacerated palms sprayed onto the white linen sheets.
Thunderous banging tore him from his madness and he froze, his hand in mid-air, his breath heaving in the dusty, perfumed air. An excruciating pain in his hand filtered into his awareness, and screwing up his face, he opened his fingers to release the glass dagger.
A set of fingers with neat bare nails curled round the edge of the door, and the full-skirted lady from the reception desk peeped in. The memory of her kindness was too much for Max, and he gave a shrill wail. In seconds she had him pressed to her body, and
