Senseless Violence

An imperfect joint in nearby tracks causes a slowly passing tram to pump a metal heartbeat through the hotel room. Now a voice, amplified by the late hour, and Guinness, calls something unintelligible to an unseen audience. Music strikes up in response. It rises from a basement deep in the roots of repurposed homes of Georgian stone to pick up the tram’s ectopic beats and thud out the message that I’ve picked the wrong street for sleep.

A female voice shrieks and wheels like a gull over the waves of a drinker’s enthusiastic tenor. The beat of the club closes over them before the spiking call of a real gull reminds me that the sea is still close by. I’d trade the club’s muffled humps of sound f or the suck and crash of the black water. The thought of it helps me drift. Eventually sleep beats out the gull’s shrieks and the stout, closing-time voices of Harcourt Street, even though the club’s base still swells over the dark hotel. Each to their own and no harm done. I did, after all, book a room in the heart of a city.

I am woken by a noise that may have been the aftershock of a dream, gone before it could be identified. The glass of soft hotel water by my bed has risen to the temperature of the stuffy room and does not comfort or satisfy. In the elastic, dream-littered time that I have spent asleep the club has closed and its patrons dispersed. In the silence I resist the temptation to check my phone. Knowing the time would invite calculations that would put pressure on my mind to find its way back to sleep. One of the most natural acts of a human being should not become a race against an app. Primed by recent but already distant dreams the darkness makes a hunter out of me and every tiny sound bears its threat-laced nighttime meaning. Insomnia stalks the room. It will be a long time before the first watery sighs of daylight arrive to fasten the room’s inexplicable creakings back to visible things. I breathe deeply and in my mind substitute the irritating jazz of the building’s moaning pipes and plastic clicks for the imagined, metronomic susurration of the tide on a shale beach. Insomnia taunts me for finding the incalculable danger of a nocturnal sea more comforting than the trivial sounds that haunt any twenty first century room. I ignore the mocking comparison, but still only go ankle deep into my mindful breakers. Deep enough to feel sufficient peace to begin to drift again. 

Then there's a knock on the door. A double tap, sharp and clear. An adrenaline-fueled wooden heartbeat. There is no time more silent that the seconds after an unexpected sound in the middle of the night. The double beat comes again, softer, a knuckle swapped for a palm, but louder.

“Let us in.”

It's a booze-flattened voice and it sounds like it is already in the room. The speaker must be up against the door. They have the wrong room. They will realise and leave. There's scratching now. Metal on wood. A Key? No. The door is locked and unlocked by a card. A knife then? Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t panic. I could plausibly still be asleep. Ignore the voice, it will go away.

“Let us in.”

I pull the quilt higher like a child. The door is locked. Doing absolutely nothing is an option.

“Open the feckin door.”

I have no intention of opening the door, but I can be brave behind it.

“You’ve got the wrong room.” My voice is thinner than I’d hoped, smaller than it sounds in the daylight. I'm as anxious about disturbing others as I am about being disturbed myself.

“Who’s that in there?” This astonished voice holds no such anxiety. It is entirely convinced it holds the moral high ground here.

“Who’re you! This is my room.” I impress myself by standing my ground, despite still lying in the oversoft bed. I pat across the surface of the nightstand, feeling for my glasses. I'm vulnerable without them, regardless of whether or not I am opening the door.

“Mary? Have you got another fella in there?”

“Mary? Who the hell’s Mary? You’ve got the wrong room.” Where the hell were my glasses?

“Open this feckin door!”

I feel compelled to at least get out of bed. The worn hotel carpet is rough on my bare bed-softened feet. I grope for the phone by the bed and dial reception. No answer. I am first annoyed, and then ashamed for hanging my hopes on the intervention of an authority figure who is in truth likely to have been a Polish teenager on minimum wage.

“I’ll kick the feckin door in if you don’t open it right now. Mary? Mary, you better open this door.”   

“There is nobody called Mary in here and I’m not opening the door. Now go away.”

“What have you done with Mary?” The voice climbs to a shout. 

Jesus, there's no reasoning with this drunken idiot. I form a dozen insults and swallow them all. It doesn’t matter, a heavy fire door stands between us. I am safe.

The first bang is accompanied by the rattle of the metal lock and I immediately taste iron in my mouth. The maniac has actually kicked it. My heart has become an external organ, pounding wet on my sweaty chest. There is a staggering pause and then a second bang and the ominous strained wheeze of wood that is considering cracking.

I tear at the pile of clothes that I had left draped over the chair at the end of the bed and feel the well-worn denim of my jeans. Whatever is about to happen, I cannot face it without trousers. Hopping around as I pull them on I am acutely aware of the softness of my half naked body. Shoes or glasses? Do I have time for both? Can I find either? Am I capable of hitting someone? I did once, but I was fourteen and it was a single climactic panel in the comic strip of a dramatic teenage day. It had clean white borders and no real consequences. I had thrown a single instinctive punch when my anxiety levels had made it impossible not to. This is different. This feels Darwinian, and there is a very good chance that I will not be the fittest participant if it comes to blows.

The wait for the third kick is soundtracked by the tinnitus of blood being forced through my burning ears. It doesn’t come. Has he gone?

“OPEN THE FECKIN DOOR.”

A door does open. For a second I am convinced that the rattling lock and swooshing door is mine and adrenaline clenches my fists. But my door is still closed and there is a second voice in the hall now.

“People are trying to sleep, you little prick!”

Little prick? My guardian angel has arrived to save me from the need to act and with a single insult has shrunk the violent giant down to a little prick. Suddenly there are more gasped words, clipped single-beat profanities, crotchets to the minims of shuffling feet that scrape and scuff at the corridor carpet. There is more shouting now, a female voice punctuating orders with cricket bat slaps. My guardian has help. He doesn’t need me. I can stay behind my door. Anyway, the moment for any noble intervention has passed. I have no choice but to stay behind my door. I promise myself I am not a coward. I am a realist, I owe nobody anything, I am the wronged party here. So why do I step towards the door and take hold of the latch? The corridor is a canal of shouting now. Doors bang and squeal on floors above and below, the brave and the reckless among the stack of people I’d been sleeping in are converging on the fight like the crowd in my teenage playground.

A siren whoops three floors below. Someone has called the Guards, probably a furious Polish teenager feeling more poorly paid than ever. The siren’s song tempts me to go out and witness the death throes of whatever is going on on the other side of the door but my hand, which has been acting without the consent of my brain, stays frozen on the latch. In seconds heavy boots are among the bare feet and socks of the corridor. Professional imperatives overpower passionate protests and order is restored. A radio squelches and the matter is quashed. Doors close and muffled voiced debrief above and below me.

I can not let go of the latch. I have sweated my blood to bitter coffee grounds and my body is no more than cramping muscle around a skeleton of adrenaline. I have to see if the coast is clear. I could not climb back into my rented bed with even the slightest fear of hearing Let us in. The drunk is a cockroach who could have survived the fallout that has quietened the corridor. I know he must be gone, probably handcuffed in the back of a Guard’s car, but I have to check.

The door that resisted the cockroach’s boots has also blocked out the corridor’s clinical light. When I open it my bleary eyes fizz as they fight to adjust to the electric rush. I raise a hand to my face and remember that I never did find my glasses.

A sudden noise springs up behind me and triggers a spinning, blind-panic punch that is impossible for me not to throw.

I hear the noise again, the electric squelch of a Guard’s radio, as I am ducked into his car.

As I stretch out on the hard bed in the never-dark cell I think I can hear a tram passing. A moaning street sweeper shushes the dawn pavement and brings work back to the world as it erases the evidence of the night’s rough life. Baffled beyond shame, my only comfort is a lament I can hear from somewhere beyond my cell door, amplified by the early hour, the ghost of Guinness past, and sorrow; How could you, Mary?