By jogging from the railway station to the grim concrete underpass outside the arrivals terminal, I caught the last courtesy bus from bus stop K to the budget hotel with seconds to spare. Cheapskate that I am, I was glad to be spared the humiliation of being charged £20 by a cynical cab driver to be taken the long way round the one-way system to a destination less than a mile away. Which is what normally happens to me at Gatwick. I was tired after a long journey and the issue had assumed an importance in my mind that was perhaps disproportionate. So my euphoria at seeing hotel bus number H2 cantering between the concrete pillars towards me was probably also disproportionate.
The driver was genial; his bus like an empty cavern. I placed my suitcase in the luggage area and took a seat at the back. Now I was feeling ever so slightly smug. From now on, everything would be easy. Check in at the hotel, straight to bed and five hours dreamless in a cosily overheated superior double, shower, courtesy bus back to the terminal, ticketless check-in, some light airside shopping, a coffee and an almond croissant in the airport lounge, a six-hour flight deliciously engrossed in the final third of Max Hastings’s All Hell Let Loose, then step down from the plane into summer.
The driver spent a minute or two making entries on his worksheet. A bewildered young couple dressed for the beach asked the driver some questions, received detailed answers, with hand signals, and then set off down the underpass with renewed hope. He was about to close the doors when another passenger arrived precipitously, slung her holdall between them and clambered aboard. A woman, late-forties, Latina, in complete disarray. Her long coat was flapping open and falling off one shoulder. Her long black hair was falling into her eyes. She couldn’t find her purse. She found her purse. She opened it upside-down and her change fell out and went in all directions. She stooped to retrieve the coins, her hair fell down like a curtain so that she couldn’t see and her breasts nearly came tumbling out of her top. A tiny straw sandal fell out of her unzipped holdall. I sprang up and joined in the search for the coins, helped with the assemblage of the nominal payment, tacitly acknowledged the driver’s humorous ‘Gawd ’elp us’ expression, and returned to my seat.
She came and sat near me, smiling her gratitude and pulling her coat together and adjusting her scarf. The repositioning of her scarf required a big arm movement, like a one-armed front crawl. She didn’t seem intoxicated in any way, or insane, just very disorganised. A thin line of vivid red lipstick was smeared across her cheek. The door hissed shut, the bus pulled away from the curb and she subsided into something approaching equilibrium.
But not for long. The first stop, a minute later, was the foyer of my hotel. Hers also. She rose too soon from her seat and was thrown violently forward by the driver’s too sudden application of the brake. She lost a shoe, the coat fell apart, the raven hair cascaded down, and the scarf came off. Only a desperate lunge for a handrail stopped her from going down altogether. She gathered up her split-open holdall and with nothing but a sincere and scarlet smile of gratitude for the driver stepped down from the bus and reconstituted herself on the pavement.
The enormous, demoralising hotel lobby was deserted, except for an exhausted and demoralised Asian woman manning the desk. I gave my name and she looked me up on her screen. At that moment the woman on the bus made her appearance in the lobby, performing that one-armed front crawl to prevent the scarf from slipping off her shoulders.
‘For two?’ said the receptionist. I tried to imagine how it might go if I’d said, ‘Yes, two,’ and she’d agreed to share a bed with me after a brief negotiation in basic sign language. Her life would be a much more straightforward affair in the hours when she had nothing on, I imagined, thought it would be virtually impossible to keep the duvet from continually falling off the bed. ‘No, just me,’ I said.
The receptionist was almost asleep on her feet. She swiped my card and pushed a form across for me to sign. And in that half-minute it must have slipped from her memory that the two people standing before her were separate entities, because she said, ‘Would you like two keys?’ Either it had slipped her mind or she was livening up the graveyard shift with a spot of matchmaking. Too tired myself to argue or explain, I said, ‘Go on then, two, please.
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