After playing with both flat-screen televisions, skin-flaying showers and a forage for appropriate clothes, each of us grabbed a handful of grapes from the living room and made our way to the bar area, passing a gym and a massage room playing Chinese restaurant music. The sound of a Yorkshire terrier being trampled met us at the carriage entrance and a waiter stepped out from behind the bar to hold open the door. A noisy trio sat on a sofa: both men wore beige trousers and deck shoes and slopped their beer with each bark of laughter. The lady wore a linen shirt that revealed a fleshy pink triangle at the neck, adorned with ugly beads that hung like freshly speared testicles. She threw back her head and the canine yelping began again. I checked my ear for blood.
“Oh Roger, you’re terrible!” she giggled.
“Well, if I want chicken tikka masala, I shall jolly well ask for it. Although we’ll have to get them the recipe from England first!”
Roger laughed at his own joke, spilling more puddles of Kingfisher, which were quickly mopped up by a waiter with a magician’s supply of napkins up his sleeves. The trio had just arrived from a week in Panjim in Goa, but lived next door to each other in Bagshot, Surrey.
“…and every month we meet in the middle for violent sex,” he finished, clapping his hands and jumping off his seat.
A sensible distance away sat the couple from the suite next to ours. Cyril was a retired cardiothoracic surgeon in his 80s, with a naughty face and eyes that laughed in place of his mouth. His wife, Marie, had an Audrey Hepburn elegance and wore her dark chocolate hair tucked girlishly behind her ears. They lived in Sydney, but gallivanted around the world, travelling up the Irrawaddy river, playing golf in China, or filming lemurs in Madagascar. Marie and Passepartout clinked their glasses together and sank into conversation, while Cyril chased a king prawn around a plate with a toothpick and winked at me.
“So you two nippers are our neighbours?”
“Yes. Now let me double check,” I replied, not wanting to commit a faux pas, “you’re from Australia…”
Cyril nodded.
“…and Marie’s from New Zealand…”
“…and every month we meet in the middle for violent sex,” he finished, clapping his hands and jumping off his seat.
“Oh, Cyril, don’t be so silly,” Marie murmured over her wine. He mock-flinched and his eyes disappeared into crevices.
“I once did a big trip like you. I bought myself a motorbike. Didn’t know how to ride it, but where’s the fun in that?”
“What did you do?”
“I just got on it. Like anything, you try it first and then learn how to do it later. I went to the shop, got on it and came home. Only I didn’t know how to stop it, so as I neared my house I just turned it on its side and stepped off it.” He wrenched both fists across to his right, closed his eyes and went rigid.