In recognition of National Storytelling Week, I’ve decided to dig some choice nuggets out of the archive for your readery enjoyitude.
First up’s a nasty little piece of work from the mid-90s, written while I was holidaying in the Canaries. Yeah, the hotel was quite a bit like the one I describe here, and I spent a great deal of time on our balcony that week.
I was better behaved than the protagonist of this tale, though.
FROM A HOTEL BEDROOM
We were very lucky with Room 423. Our primary concerns had been for privacy and space, and in that we were more than adequately served. It was one of the largest rooms in the apartment complex on the island, a light, airy space paved in cool, marble tiling. We were close to the hotel amenities, directly facing the lifts to the lobby. If we’d wished, we could have spent the entire holiday without needing to meet another resident.
423 was set off to the left hand side of the complex, and the balcony looked over the bar and pool area, two floors below. It was tucked off-centre, enough that anyone on the balcony simply wasn’t noticed from below. For me, the most important part of the room was that balcony. I do not consider myself a voyeur, but once I realised that I could view the activities in the social hub of the hotel while remaining unobserved, I’m afraid to say that my curiosity quickly overtook any sense of propriety. Soon, I found I was spending all my time there, sat at the cheap white plastic table set provided by the hotel, watching life unfold below me. I bought a notebook and a supply of pens from the hotel supermarket, and began to fill it with my observations.
The entertainment evenings were the most fertile for material. If I moved the table to the far left of the balcony, under the bedroom window, I could easily see the cabaret and a large portion of the audience at the pool bar.
The acts were little more than karaoke, a shiny-faced girl or over-made-up boy fresh from the club circuit in Leeds or Middlesborough belting out standards through the hotel’s underpowered PA systems. They worked so hard, putting so much effort into every crappy Motown cover, piling teeth, eyes and tits into every overwrought moment. They were faced with stony-faced indifference from their audience, blank-faced proles swilling grimly on unfamiliar lagers and cocktails, or wild enthusiasm from a group of pissed pensioners who spent the whole evening hollering for Elvis.
I tried imagining the things going on in their heads. “I got to the second round of X-Factor, and this is the best I could get. And I had to fuck the tour director.” Not that I had to imagine too hard. I could see their faces when they turned away to slot another tune into the playback machine, and let the mask slip for a moment. The rage, the disappointment. The awful realisation that this was it, this was as good as it was going to get. That the nice things Louis Walsh had said about their performance would be the highlight of their professional life.
There was one girl. Julie, a Borough girl. Glossy, Pantene-perfect hair, sparky feline eyes. Her voice was a rich, honeyed instrument, with little of the nasal quality that many of her counterparts effected. She was bold, experimental. She tried out a few R&B covers that went down like a handful of cold sick with the punters. I could see the life being drained from her day by day. She was having trouble with a pair of 12 year old twins from Manchester, undersupervised brats who delighted in yelling at her to get her tits out while she was singing. They were indulged by their parents and the guests in general. They were destroying Julie in increments.
One night, she beckoned them over at the end of the show, and moved them to a quiet corner directly underneath my balcony. There, she introduced them to her boyfriend, Carlos. Carlos stayed in the shadows, and I couldn’t get a decent view of him. But I heard him perfectly clearly, and the Mancunian brats were certainly listening when he told them that any further interruptions to the show would be met with their discovery the following morning face down in the hotel pool.
I wish I could have seen the look in Julie’s eyes then. Her performances took on a fresh relish from that point on. She did her own thing, and became much more entertaining for it. She started every evening with a bouncing cover of “Fish Gotta Swim”, and directed it at the boys. They were not seen at the bar after that.
I soon realised that holidays bring out the worst, cruellest aspects of children. I lost count of the times they were thrown into the pool, often by their parents. For every one that paddled back squealing “Daddy, again!” I saw another struggling back to the edge looking hurt and confused. They were learning lessons about the harsh nature of trust.
They were yet more brutal to each other. Holding each other upside down in a metre and a half of water. Richocheting footballs off each other’s heads. Attempting to choke the lives from a despised sibling. All the while, their doting parents sat by the hotel pool, befuddling themselves with cheap sangria and offering the occasional “Wayne, put your sister down” in the general direction of the killing floor.
I have watched in horrified fascination as one five-year-old held his younger sister under the surface of the kiddie pool, an act of revenge for the heinous crime of making him drop his lolly. Mummy was there, but too engrossed in the latest copy of Take A Break, wired into her iPod, to notice. I still wonder what would have happened if, in a rare pang of public-spiritedness, I hadn’t dropped an empty beer bottle on her to wake her up. Frankly, it was the unfair odds I couldn’t stand.
As the week oozed by, and my notebook filled, I found it harder to leave the balcony at all. My infrequent trips to the hotel bar, in hat and shades, normally lasted no more than half a bottle of San Miguel before I had to stagger back to the room, nauseated, agoraphobic. Everything was too close, too loud. Without the distance and the boundaries of my balcony, it was too much to bear.
Friday, fryday, hot as hell, was new intake day and the pool area was solid with reddening flesh. Sweet Julie was there, basking at perfect ease, glossily brown. On the sunbeds next to her, two new arrivals, giggling girls, cast a jealous look at her flawless beauty before casting off their bikini tops and thrusting their breasts bravely at the merciless sun. They would be tomato red and in agony by the end of the day.
Everywhere, it was the same story. People were paying good money to come and roast themselves under an unfamiliar sky. Safe on my balcony, I found it hard to see the point.
There was a soft sound from behind me. The shush of bare feet on a marble floor. My wife, newly awake from her midafternoon siesta. She despised the sun as much as I. We were not here for that. She moved in behind me, and slid her soft arms around my chest.
“I am starting to feel neglected,” she said in a mocking, accusatory tone. “I can’t believe you’re still out here.” She laid her cheek against my back, and I felt her gentle smile.
“Why don’t you put the gun down and come inside for a while?”
I grinned from behind the telescopic sight. The rifle was an old M-16, the stock silky from decades of use. It had a tendency to jam, and even at full tilt I’d be lucky to get two rounds a second out of it. But I was fond of it, and it was always fun smuggling it through customs. Besides, the slow rate of fire simply meant that I’d have to carefully pick my targets. I thought of sweet Julie, and stifled another smile.
I clicked the safety back on, and turned to face my beautiful wife. I stood, and took her outstretched hand, taking one last look out over the balcony as she led me back into the cool dimness of the room.
“You’re right,” I said. “There’ll be plenty of time for that before we leave.”
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EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 
