Welcome to the hotel. Please read this letter, you will get an idea of what a room attendant’s job involves. Do not tell the housekeeping manager about this letter, please just replace it in the draw when you have read it.
We tidy up the bed, make the pillows nice and tidy. Make sure there’s no dust around. Replace new linen every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s messy or if it’s clean, this is part of the job. Toilets and bathrooms - mirror - have to be nice and clean; no dust around. We put things where they belong. Tidy up everything, valance, pillows. Vacuuming has to be done every day.
We do the function and meeting rooms on certain shifts. The head concierge says the meeting rooms are named after political Radicals. He has to know for when guests ask.
Where the hotel is now, it used to be a field. The names are of leaders who organised a meeting on the field in the eighteenth century. Nineteenth maybe. A meeting for political reform. Cotton mill workers dressed in their Sunday best, men and women and their children.
Singing the popular songs of the day. They would call them folk songs now. Musical bands blaring. But men on horseback waded into the meeting, trampling bodies, swinging their sabres. People were killed. There is a Bamford room, a meeting room, on the first floor of the hotel. After a meeting it has to be vacuumed, table cleared and wiped clean. The concierge says it is named after the weaver Samuel Bamford, who was there at the gathering, at the massacre, in the field. Bamford described the event in a book he wrote years later.
Ten minutes after the violence, he wrote, the empty field was covered with debris.He saw a black banner sprawled on the ground, with the word ‘Love’, a heart, and two clasped hands on it all painted in white. A man’s cap, with a sprig of laurel, half hidden by muddy sods. Women’s bonnets all around, one made with floral crimped material. A shoe without a sole stuck deep in a rut. A trumpet. A drum. A flute. Branches of laurel.
So they built the Free Trade Hall, thirty-odd years later. In memory of the dead in the field. That’s this building. Now it’s a hotel.
In occupied rooms we do the job. But we never touch the guests stuff, where they put it, where they set it. We knock and make sure if a guest is in the room. Sometimes the guest is in and says, ‘Oh, you can do it’: then we clean the room with them there.
It’s only possible to have a social life some weekends. Some people have a second job too so on the week days it’s difficult to go out. Like cleaning in an office, getting home every night, ten, ten-thirty, sometimes nine, it depends how busy things are.
The concierge also tells guests about The Free Trade Hall, the concerts they had here when it was a music venue. Some rooms in the hotel are named after musicians. The concierge says he went to a famous concert, when Bob Dylan went electric. In the sixties. Bob did a first half, all acoustic songs, just with his guitar.
Then Dylan came back on with an electric band for the second half. People booed, clapped slowly. They thought it wasn’t the music of the people, folk music. If it was electric it was a betrayal. Of folk traditions, that go back through time. It became a battle between the performers and the audience, but with words, with sounds. Dylan replied to the heckles by saying, ‘Play fucking loud’ to his band. He liked the volume, the thrill of the resonating chords in the echoing hall, the sound of modern life.
‘How does it feel?’ he sang, ‘You're invisible now…’ The concierge tells this to people who book into the Dylan suite. It’s the most expensive one on the top floor.
The concierge says he stayed behind after everyone else left the concert. When the room lights went on, he just stared at the empty stage, and the floor where the audience had been.
He looked at the torn ticket-stubs, the ripped up programmes. The cigarette packets, green and white Woodbines, blue and white Players Navy Cut. With the glittering entrails of foil lining. Smashed glass all around, glinting in the house lights. Everywhere little white cigarette stub specks. A pale blue and white, woollen, unremembered or abandoned scarf. Making the shape of a double u. A pair of black plastic dark glasses. Broken.
Sometimes there is lost property left in rooms when people leave. It’s put in the office, and kept for three or four months. So if the guests ring it is sent to their address. So many things… like shirts, glasses, books. That sort of thing.
Sometimes parties are happening in the rooms, quite often. We get used to it. We sometimes try to get a chance to slow down, or sit for a while in a room. Today, on my last day in the job, this room was very untidy. The room you are in now. Lots of stuff everywhere. I lay back on the mattress. The sheets smelt of perfume. I turned the bedside radio up really loud. I felt the warmth of the room and the softness of the duvet, I smelt the left-over breakfast on the tray and the spilt vodka on the table. I ate a pastry from the tray. There was a smell of perfume on the sheets. I stroked the side of my neck. I was imagining the guests nakedness on the sheets the night before. I slipped my hand into my skirt. I felt the little hairs on my lower stomach. I pushed my face into the sheets to smell the expensive perfume. I moved my fingers down and rubbed myself up slowly as I lay on the mattress. After a while I decided to write this letter, which I have almost finished. I will leave it in the draw when I have written it. I will then leave the room, and leave the mess as I found it.
As I write, I can see wine stains on the bedside table. A wine glass is left on the rim of the bath. A bra strewn on the floor. Marks on the TV cabinet. Sheets coming away from the mattress. A room service breakfast tray is left on the bed, the food half eaten. Shampoo has been spilt on a shelf in the bathroom. It is slowly forming a pool around the small plastic bottle. Cigarette stubs on the table. On the carpet a towel, biscuit crumbs, plastic bags. The TV is left on, it’s screen reflecting the whiteness of the bed sheets in the morning sun.
Please put this letter back in the draw and leave it for the next guest to read. Thank you for your time.
As usual, Kirby manipulates various interwar records to fit a cavalcade of emotional states: blissful (B1, E8), tragic (D2, D5), frantic (E1, E6), and just plain horrifying (F3, G1, H1, K1). gjoe52
At the moment "I am Grimaldi" is my favourite track, although that could change. A stupendous album.
"I can't seem to stop this melancholy'
What it means to me can only be expressed by the phrase" Diddy Wah Diddy" Séamus Duggan
A work of considerable power and subtlety. Certainly a grower but I was hooked on first listen and it seems to improve on subsequent plays. Well done to everyone involved and good luck for the future, hopefully a long and successful future. simon1956smith
If you've been craving something dark and gritty yet stylish and dancefloor-ready, this hard-edged industrial synth opus might fit the bill. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 16, 2024
The enigmatic Frank Ene's solo record lives in a magical world where Serge Gainsbourg fronts Yellow Magic Orchestra. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 17, 2022
