Visit to Apartment 238

(a short story by Nicholas Penrake)

Photo: Westend61

At the top of the stairs… another one of those long corridors, doors either side, the same soft warm yellow lighting, the long tongue of the industrial carpet that leads to a juncture where you might expect to see two young twins appear on tricycles.

You didn’t want to come. For weeks you kept putting it off. The kitchen, the new menu, the sheer exhaustion sapping your ragged libido. The faint hope you might run into a girl like Alex and not even have to think about this...

Crazy to think that was two years ago. You remember seeing her drop by at the restaurant to hand in her CV. A paper one. In person. You’d just lost a few people coming out of Covid, so her timing was impeccable, as you might expect of a dancer.

You were too busy in the kitchen to go over and say hello. You’re Head Chef anyway. Head chefs don’t do that kind of thing. It’s embarrassing. For everyone.

She saw you gazing at her, though — middle of the kitchen with a pan in your hand, not even close to the stove. For a couple of seconds, you were her age again, and a fleeting thought ran through your head that you might be within a chance of...

Nah… you might be the head chef, but you’re too old now… not even Michelin star.

When she joined the waiting staff, if she ever came within your orbit, you couldn’t keep your eyes off her. Five minutes of watching her in motion, gliding from point to point, and you’d go back to your stove, stirring your sauce, with an ache in your chest. At odd moments you’d get clumsy with your knife. Too large a pinch of salt, too heavy a grind of the peppermill…

Of course, she had a boyfriend, didn’t she. Mercifully, he never popped in to see her. But then you heard from one of the waiters it was over. She took a few days off. To recover. Possibly planning to leave. It was almost a relief not to see her for a while.

She returned with an air of defiance and renewed independence. She asked for extra shifts. That meant she was in the kitchen more often. And this was better. Now you weren’t just glancing and gazing, you were chatting, joking and laughing. She liked your wit and playfulness, that much was clear at least.

And then one night she’d stayed for a lock-in, and you ended up in a taxi heading back to a spacious converted warehouse space she was house-sitting for a friend, she said.

As soon as you were inside she threw herself into it. As if music had started up and she was your lead. You could barely keep up. A memory came to you of a ten-year-old boy drifting into the middle of a large swimming pool, flailing about, calling for help...

This was a different kind of drowning: fingers clawing at the wreckage that was you as a young man. You knew how hopeless it was, the young man was all but drowned. But here’s the thing, the thing you’d never forget: you felt so deeply grateful to her, to life, for the privilege of wrestling if only for an hour with such a lithe, sculpted body, a force still brimming over with hopefulness and ambition.

Afterwards, she turned over onto her side. You turned the same way to nestle against her, your knees touching the backs of hers. Her scent wafted up your nose, sweeter than anything you’d created in the kitchen.

She took your hand, cupping it in hers like it was a precious pendant that would keep her safe through a stormy night. The peace you felt was so profound you could have happily never woken up.

You never got to discover what was going through her mind that night. Maybe not much at all. As a dancer, she was a performer. As a chef, you were a performer. It made sense that it should work.

But the years, man, the years, the yawning gap…

Daylight arrived, her warmth had departed from your side, and she was up, looking busy, and business-like. You ruffled your hair and tried to look presentable — suddenly alive to the prospect she was already reviewing the previous night as a ‘mistake’.

Simply observing her move about the room told you what you already knew — you might still be fast with a knife, but you’d never keep up with this dynamic young woman… too hot a flame, even for you.

And so now you’re here, two years on, walking along another anonymous corridor, glancing at the numbers on the doors as if you were on a mission. Maybe you are. The feelings of déjà vu nearly make your head spin.

You stop outside number 238. This is it. Your destination.

You knock on the dark wood. You grow aware of your heartbeat. The door opens with a squeak of hinges. You wait for someone to appear. No one appears. You should be used to this melodrama by now.

You step into a dark lobby. A short and muscular middle-aged man — Indonesian, Malaysian, too thin in the face to be Chinese — greets you with a solemn nod, as if you were here to attend an open-casket funeral.

He closes the door and, without saying a word to you, heads off down the corridor to your right.

You follow him because it would seem he already knows who you are, why you are here. You’re a booking. A sum of money in his ledger. Your name is irrelevant.

At the end of the short, dark corridor, he pauses by a door to your left. He stretches out his arm pointing at the gap in the door, the fractional view of the room’s interior.

You’re about to say something, when he nods sharply, cutting you off, as if words were not only superfluous but inappropriate.

Barely a beat, and the man walks off, back to where he came from.

You nudge open the door and step into a low-heat oven amid pools of red light.

You feel you’ve been here before, many times, too many times. You have the same kind of Ikea furniture, the same wooden floor, the red light on the Ikea nightstand, the trail of fairy lights along the window sill… the absence of clutter. Like a private hospital room. For sick people. A bed without blankets or duvet, just a sheet. For fucking on.

What is less familiar is the figure seated on the other side of the bed with her back towards you. Usually, the person you’ve booked is already on her feet, the ridiculous heels adding a sort of theatrical authority to the battle-dress lingerie, a smile at work to oil her request if she might check your flight ticket.

This woman, though — she doesn’t even seem to register your presence. Her shoulder-length black hair hangs in tired curls over her crumpled slip. Her stillness begins to fill you with dread.

Hello, you say, as if to hear the echo of your voice in a well.

She turns her head slowly to look at you. You see her face, and immediately you know something isn’t right. This isn’t the person you saw in the photos on the website. She looks Chinese, not Romanian. The age lines on her neck, her cheeks, around her sad eyes send you into panic. Clearly, there’s been some kind of mistake.

You want? she says.

She twists her head further round, chin tilted up, as if for you to appraise her profile, her former beauty.

A clammy thought grips you tight: You’re here now, she’s still a little younger than you…you must do this, make the best of an awkward situation — you might even get a kick out of it.

Ees OK, you stay, she says. There’s an edge to her voice, as if speaking to a recalcitrant child. She pats the bed, meaning for you to sit.

The ingrained bitterness to her expression intimates, for a price, she might be prepared to deliver the bare bones of a fantasy you used to enjoy.

Time seems to freeze as if you were balancing on a tightrope, high up in the clouds, unable to move forward or backward…

To succumb to gravity now would mean taking out your wallet and fishing out some notes fresh from an ATM.

It’s a close thing — but just in time, you discover your resolve.

You’re a chef, you expect fresh ingredients — and this is not what you ordered.

You reverse into the corridor and hurry to the front door hoping you won’t bump into the pimp and his thick moustache.

Young female voices burble languidly in a room off the corridor, flagged off by a purple drape. It occurs to you, maybe this is where you should be: behind this curtain.

A door opens and a pretty young Thai or Malaysian woman slips through the purple drape into the corridor, lowering her eyes as she sees you loitering there like a spy.

You’re about to accost her with words to the effect you think there’s been a mistake, when the man who let you in reappears and scuttles over to you like a beetle. He gets right up in your face and, raising his chin, locks venomous dark eyes into yours.

He doesn’t ask you anything, just stares into your eyes.

Sorry, but I think you took me to the wrong room? you begin, adopting the American inflexion in a bid to sound like a reasonable businessman.

A fist slams into your stomach.

Wow, didn’t see that coming.

You haven’t yet caught your breath when a hand grabs you by the collar, lifts you up and bundles you towards the door and throws you out into the public corridor like a bag of rubbish.

The door slams behind you.

A door at the end of the corridor opens and a man steps out. He sees you doubled over and quickly walks the other way.

You wonder at the unfathomable hatred you read in the beetle’s eyes just before he punched you. Like he knows you and bears an infinite, speechless contempt for you.

You stand there a moment, fuming with anger and indignation, your watering eyes boring into the door of the apartment you were ejected from. You imagine yourself barging your way in there and demanding an explanation, an apology. It’s blood you want now, not sex.

Walk on, a voice tells you. Forget it.

And just like that, you fall back into your resilient self, like a gun slipping into its holster. Some things, at least, come quicker as you get older.

Now striding away, it occurs to you, over the last ten years, you’ve become more skilled at cutting off from bad experiences, bad relationships, bad jobs… almost cold-blooded about it. As if explanations were an irrelevance now, mere friction you have no time for anymore.

The stairs accelerate your falling steps, hastening you to the main lobby below.

You see four young people milling around the entrance. Their happy faces, happy voices belong to a different world from the one you just came from. Tenants or visitors who have no inkling of what goes on, hour by hour, in apartment 238. They don’t even glance at you as you sweep past them on your way to the exit. Which just goes to show, you’re not really here, this is all a kind of dream.

The cold, damp air against your heated cheeks quickly returns you to a calmer state. The rhythmic whoosh of rubber rolling through puddles begins to erase the emotions you experienced just minutes ago.

You take out your phone. The one thing that might help you reorientate yourself. The very thing that got you into this mess.

As you tap on Maps, you see there’s a little 1 on the WhatsApp icon. You tap on that. It’s a message from Jess.

Dad, where are you?

You’re not sure how to answer that.

You pull up Maps again. Where are we? …Fancy that, the blue dot’s refusing to show itself.