Sweet Caroline is on the radio, which isn’t my favourite song but yeah, I can belt it and so I do, turning the corners of the blackening roads. I used to love seeing the look on colleagues’ faces when they dragged me up for karaoke at work dos, thinking it’s only the fit birds that can sing. Oban. I’ve done it for years.
The coast lifts its leg in the distance and I nosy out for a parking spot. I keep asking Owen to look at the gearbox as you really have to jam it in reverse, but he says I should pay someone to do that and not waste his time. You’ll have to let me have the money for it then, I’ll say, and he’ll say it’s your own fault if you can’t park your car, get better.
Get better, I’m mumbling as I lug my suitcase out of the boot and drag it behind me on the gravel like a dog worming. An inflatable Father Christmas shimmies above the rooms available sign and snow is starting to pill from the sky.
Have you got your cd, the receptionist says. I can see where she’s recently plucked her eyebrows, the skin across her forehead striped red from her temples up to her sockets and right across the bridge of her nose.
You can set up at six-thirty, she says. Dean will be there to help. Your room’s 22, swipe the card. We’ve put a sandwich in there for you.
I had a Big Mac and McFlurry on the way up. I’d driven past the Loch Fyne restaurant and thought about oysters and buttered bread and what caviar might taste like. The taste of the burger I took with me all the way to the coast, driving through towns with their peat-fired pubs and bakery windows piled up with rolls glowing like the Christmas lights strung over the cobbles. I’d had a can of Coke around Tarbet and a butty from a caravan too, but I’m still hungry.
My hotel room looks much the same as all the other rooms I’ve stayed in along the west coast. I’ve been singing at weddings, birthdays, funerals, hogmanays and retirement functions for nine years now, at first only on special occasions and now every holiday season. I stopped calling them gigs when Owen said, well where are the crowds and the cd contracts? You’re not famous to me.
The mattress gives with a little wheeze as I sit down. I unbutton my jeans. I have a velvet dress to wear that I always shake out for this time of year. It doesn’t matter that it will have been seen before; the same guests stay at the hotel each season. I would like to say there were faces I remember but really I only remember the tips. Don’t forget them, Owen said before I left that morning.
