Don't Have Nightmares

When you live in a bed and breakfast house the last thing you can expect to get on a morning is a proper BREAKFAST. I wait for the clatter of plates that means dad is clearing up, and then get myself down to the kitchen to see if there are any leftovers. All I got this morning I got half a piece of toast that one of our GUESTS has left on the side of their plate.

Anyhow, I was standing in the kitchen washing this piece of toast down with the dregs of a carton of Tesco value orange juice when my dad came in. Are you deliberately trying to drive our GUESTS away? he demands, do you want us to end up out on the street? I didn't know which of these questions to answer first. My first thought, obviously, was that he'd found my blog. This blog.

These people, he went on, gesturing to the door that leads to what my mum and dad optimistically call the 'guests dining room', are LOADED, they don't need to stay here, they could afford to stay anywhere in St Ives, they could probably BUY the Porthminster Hotel and still have change for a crab sandwich at the Tate, but you, you, you're just as RUDE to them as you are to everybody else. Anybody'd think you RESENTED people staying here.

So he could have found my blog, but by now I'm thinking this wasn't about the blog, but something else I've done. I'm standing there looking at him, and the little flecks of spit in the corners of his mouth that he gets when he's mad, trying to think how I've been rude to any of the guests. As I'd only just got up and hadn't even seen any guests this morning, it couldn't have been something I'd just done. All I can think of, standing there, thinking on my feet and licking my Tesco value orange moustache from my top lip, was that a few days ago dad made me take some suitcases out for some old couple who'd stayed in my room, and I'd deliberately put one of them down on a coil of dogshit that just happened to be outside the front door. I'd even half liked some guests we'd had in the last week or two (baby Wanda and family).

We work like (regretable offensive racist term, which I REFUSE to repeat - deep inside my dad, I'm sorry to say, is a pretty unreconstructed working class lad from Leeds, who sometimes regresses into an extra from Life on Mars) day and night to keep this place running (day AND night? What exactly do they do when our GUESTS are asleep them, I can't imagine my dad sitting up all night on the off chance somebody rings down for room service) we hardly earn enough to get by, and then when we get somebody staying here who's got some real money, who's actually prepared to put some of behind the place, you treat them like, like ...

He ran out of words here or I stopped listening, one or the other, I can't be sure. That happens sometimes, it's like someone flicks a switch and it diverts my brain as decisively as the points on a train track. It was the idea of someone putting money behind the place that did it. Was this bloke some sort of Brinks Mat type armed robber, offering to give my dad a cut if he could stash his cash behind our house? That wouldn't be much good, because as I've said before, the back of our house is overlooked by the back of the houses on the next street. I had no idea where dad was going, but me, I off on The Usual Suspects. Standing there facing the line up with a steely gaze. Narrowing my eyes as I scrutinised each one of them. They all have faces straight off of a Crimewatch reconstruction, but have any of them got a manky hand?