Night Two

She slept from eight to one, which was good for her, and woke with the curtains shut and the flat doing the thing it did at midday, which was to look like a place somebody had left in a hurry a long time ago and meant to come back to.

The flat was one bedroom over a dry cleaner's. She had taken it because it was on the second floor and the second floor was high enough that nobody could see in and low enough that she did not have to think about the lift. There was a sofa, a table by the window she used to eat at, and a wall of shelves she had filled in the order she had unpacked the boxes, which meant that the things she actually used were on the bottom shelf and the things she had kept for reasons were on the top, and the top shelf had become a kind of record of decisions she had made too quickly.

Halvorsen had said, on the last night of training, standing in the car park at seven in the morning with her keys already out: "You'll want a hobby."

"I have a job."

"That's what I said." She had got into her car then and driven off, and Ruth had not seen her since, and had not really thought about her until the third or fourth week, when she had realised that the training had been thin and that she had been left holding a job she had learned about eighty per cent of.

She made coffee and drank it standing up. She checked her phone, which had nothing on it. She sat on the arm of the sofa and looked at the wall for a while and then she went and had a shower, and by two o'clock she was dressed and had decided that she had misread the date.

The reasons were good reasons. She had been on her feet for eight hours. The logbook was a bound book with no printed dates, so the date on any given page was whatever the last person to write on it had decided the date was, which meant that a date was the least reliable thing in it. She had been tired, and there had been a moment around four where she had looked at the shop categories for nine minutes and had thought about nothing at all, which she recognised as the point in a shift where her eyes stopped being entirely hers.

So she had written the date wrong on a page further back than she thought, and had then read her own mistake back to herself and been briefly frightened by it. That was the whole of it. It was a mistake made of tiredness and a bound book, and there was no third thing.

She was, on the whole, pleased with this explanation. She held it for about six hours.

She went in early.

That was not procedure. Auditors arrived at ten to eleven. But she had the explanation and she wanted it confirmed in daylight, in a full lobby, with the carvery doing dinner and the shuttle running and none of the quiet that had made the night feel like it had been about her.

The lobby at six in the evening was a different building. The tea-coloured lights were off and the others were on and the floor had a sheen to it that only existed when there were enough people walking on it. There was a hen party checking in, six women in matching sashes, one of them holding a bottle by the neck with the air of someone who had been told twice. There was a man in a suit arguing quietly with the carvery's temporary signage. There was a child lying flat on the floor in front of the lift with her arms out, entirely unbothered, being walked around by everybody.

Ruth went behind the counter, which was allowed, and said hello to Sana on dayside, who was doing three things and acknowledged her with her eyebrows.

The logbook was on its shelf.

She took it to the far end of the counter and opened it at the back, which was where the entries ended. Her own from this morning, the 9th. She turned one page.

The 12th.

*Night of the 12th. Handover light. Guest in 306 requests a late checkout. Grant it. Nothing outstanding. R.A.*

In daylight it looked exactly the same, which was somehow worse. It had been easy to think of it, at four in the morning, as something the building had done. In the six o'clock light with a hen party shouting at the lift it looked like an entry. It looked like something a person had sat and written, in a book that was kept under a counter, using a pen that was in the pot.

Her handwriting. There was no argument about the handwriting. She looked at the T in "nothing" and put the tip of her own finger on it, which was a strange thing to do, and she stopped doing it.

"Ruth."

Boyle was in the doorway of the back office with a folder under his arm and his jacket over it, which was how he carried things, as though the folder needed a coat.

"Boyle."

"You're early." He said it pleasantly. He was always pleasant. He was a man whose entire professional method was pleasantness deployed in the right order. "How's the night?"

"Fine."

"Good, good." He looked at the logbook in front of her and did not ask. That was a thing he did, and she had noticed it in her first month and had filed it under the general category of things about dayside, and had never had a reason to take it out again until now. He looked at the book and did not ask, and then he looked at the counter and did not ask, and then he said, "We've had a note."

"About?"

"The corridor lighting." He adjusted his jacket on the folder. "It's the second one this month. Both mentioning the impression of length. Dayside's looking at it."

"Right."

"Not urgent." He was already moving. "You're early."

"I wanted to check something."

"Yes," Boyle said, to the space between them, and went.

She went back at ten to eleven. The 306 was the thread she had decided to hold, because the entry had named a room and a room was a thing she could watch without having to believe anything.

306 was occupied. It had been occupied since the 7th, by a man travelling alone on a rate that suggested his company had negotiated it years ago and never revisited. He had one folio and no extras and had not called the desk once.

At half past midnight she posted his rate for the night. It was the same rate as the previous nights. There was nothing to indicate that he was going to ask for anything at all.

Priya arrived at eleven with her coat still on and a paper bag she put on the counter and did not explain until quarter past twelve, when she pushed it across.

"It's a sandwich. The kitchen does them for the hen party and there's always four left."

"They don't give you the four left."

"They give me the four left," Priya said, "because I asked four years ago and then kept asking."

The sandwich was chicken and it was very good, and Ruth ate it standing up, reading the shop's till export, and it occurred to her that this was the only thing she had eaten since the coffee.

The night was busy in the way that Tuesdays sometimes were, which is to say not busy at all, but with two things in the wrong place. A walk-in at half past one, cash, no reservation, a man who paid for one night and then stood at the counter for a while as if he had more to say and decided against it. A folio in 121 that had a restaurant charge posted twice in the same minute, which was a double-tap on the terminal and which she reversed, and which was the sort of thing that happened twice a month and meant nothing.

She did the walk round at four. She checked the doors. She checked the fire panel, which was green.

Then she stood in the corridor by the pool for a moment with her hand on the door handle, which was locked, and which smelled of chlorine through the door, and thought about the fact that she had spent her whole shift watching a room number for a man who had done nothing.

At ten past four she went back to the desk and sat down, and there were two hours of the shift left, and there was nothing to do in them, and the logbook was on the shelf under the counter.

She looked at it for a while.

This was the part she would think about afterwards, in the way that you think about the exact point at which a road forked, when the version of the night before you was still simple and the version after was not, and you can see both of them lying there next to each other on the map.

She was not going to write anything. She had a good explanation and the explanation had survived daylight and there was nothing to test. That was what she was thinking while she took the book off the shelf and opened it at the back and found the page after her own, which was blank, because the 10th was tonight and nobody had written the 10th yet.

She wrote the date at the top.

She sat with the pen on the paper for a long moment. Priya was in the loading bay. The lobby was empty. The corridor lights had gone to their night setting an hour ago and the whole building had the specific quality it had then, which was not quiet exactly, because a building this size is never quiet, but was as close to it as the place ever came.

She wrote:

*Night of the 10th. Handover light. Guest in 209 checks out early. Nothing outstanding. R.A.*

She looked at it for a moment, and then she put the book back on the shelf under the counter, and went to check the fire panel again, which was green, and which she had checked forty minutes ago.

It was a test. That was what she told herself. It was a test of a document, and documents did nothing, and in the morning she would look at the page and the guest in 209 would still be in 209, complaining, and wanting his third voucher, and that would be the end of it, and she would have a sensible explanation for the 12th as well: she had written a page, and nothing had happened, and she was a woman who worked nights and had briefly been frightened by a bound book.

It was a test. She was almost entirely sure it was a test.

The thing she did not let herself finish thinking, in the two hours that were left, standing at the counter with the lobby spread out in front of her, was what she actually wanted the answer to be. Because if it was a test, she had lost nothing, and if it was not a test, then the entry would balance, and the guest in 209 would check out early, and Ruth would be a person who had made a man leave a hotel by writing a line in a book.

She counted the float at seven. It came to four hundred and eighty.

The shuttle driver came in for the keys at seven and said good morning the way he always did.