Hungry Ghost Part 3

Written by Holly Wilcox Routledge

T.W: Allusion to an animal injury and imagery of an animal injuring itself. Mentions of muscle and tissue.
You shouldn’t think I have this attitude because I hated working in hotels, or working with people. If I hated working with people (which, quite frankly, was just a way those who had a hatred of people outright attempted to disguise their true feelings) I would have chosen a field to go into that would keep me away from them as much as possible, and let me live a solitary existence. It’s an easy mistake to make. You’d be surprised how many people manage to convince themselves that their own reaction or discomfort with humans can be put aside to pursue something for the sake of money. I’d seen it in hotels, I’d seen it in cafes, I’d seen it in schools and hospitals and churches and homes; beyond all existence on the waking human world, I’d heard it, felt it in every dream, a visceral, bone-deep emotion that pulsated deep within, a wound that festered but was never given care, until it grew, open and rotten in the dark of night, letting me see what the sleeper wished they never could know. Or maybe, they did know; they just knew that they had to sit alongside it instead of revealing it. 

I went to hotel school after I graduated high school, a local one just forty-five minutes away from my parents home, which I could easily reach by bus and train. , It was the perfect location.  I didn’t need to worry about getting up too early and making a mad scramble to get a train that only came every so often, or run like hell once class was over to try and get on the last train of the day. I could, if I felt so inclined, go out to the pub near the school and enjoy drinks late into the night with my classmates and still be able to catch a train back home. If I brought my bicycle with me, I could bike—albeit, in a very wobbly line—to the bus station near my house. Some nights, I forwent public transport entirely and biked the full forty-five minutes back home. Sober, of course. I never bicycled whilst under the influence. I was sensible like that. 

The hotel school was relatively straightforward. We studied the basics of hospitality and hospitality management in a classroom environment for the first six months, before we started the hands-on part of the course. This involved working for a local hotel for twelve months, each of us being interspersed in one of four different departments before moving into the next after three months. It was supposed to give us a greater idea of the day-to-day goings-on  behind the scenes of a hotel as well as encouraging us to explore different options in the hospitality field. 

Maybe it was a nice way of tactfully telling those who wouldn’t make it to the back office that they and their talents deserved to be elsewhere; ‘Look, you don’t have the computer skills to go back of house, so you can kiss that dream away. But you’re much better working with people, so you should go into the restaurant side of the hotel, and you should get much more out of it there! What do you say we sign you up for all those restaurant courses once the year is up?’ 

There was an overall sense of illusion that most of our teachers wore when we reported to them during our time at the hotel, the kind of endless energy that came into trying to convince a bunch of teenagers that it would be oh so cool to become a restaurant manager instead of the high paying job they’d set their sights on. A kind of tight grin that they wore when we told them of our displeasure with the managers, supervisors and higher-ups in the hotel, who seemed far

more interested in making us squeeze money out of visiting guests than encouraging us to grow into the next generation of hoteliers. 

I was in my final year at the school, just two weeks shy of finishing off my studies, when it emerged that the teacher who ran the practical course was the adopted brother-in-law of the hotel owner. We were all paid for working in the hotel, of course, and had been constantly reassured that our work experience there would be well-paid for, since the hotel wasn’t going to risk officials getting involved and sniffing around; but, it seemed the teacher had been taking a nice little slice of our earnings in exchange for sending us to that hotel and that hotel only, starving any of the other hotels in the area of gaining any new workers, or possibly training reliable staff for themselves. 

People went ballistic, of course. People felt they’d lost out on opportunities elsewhere, with different styles of hotel management, with different experiences. The teacher resigned out of shame. But by that point, I was too tired to care whether or not I could have had a different experience at another hotel. I had wanted to snap and bite at anyone who came near, tell them to scram and leave me alone, so I didn’t raise too much of a fuss. I was already planning on leaving that town as fast as I possibly could and didn’t want anything that could possibly hold me back or draw the process out. I graduated, collected my diploma, and started to make my plans on which city I should move to to put my degree to use and start getting as much cash as I possibly could. 

That was what it was all about, at least. Around a month after the scandal broke, they held the career fair in the canteen of the school. Usually, it featured table after table of hotels looking for others to join their ranks, with maybe a few other administrative businesses there to tempt any stragglers who weren’t feeling so optimistic about a hotel career into switching careers—and four months earlier in the year. As it was, due to what had happened, the overall attitude towards the industry had changed and the administrative staff decided that it was probably a good idea to give more opportunities to the students. That year, they had stalls for business management and administrative work alongside the usual hotel stalls, which boasted all the staff benefits and perks of choosing them above anyone else. 

I’d patrolled the canteen, eyeing up the offerings, weighing it all out in my mind. I’d joined hotel school for the express purpose of getting out of town, with money only coming in close second in importance. But after what had been revealed, maybe it was time for a change of scenery. Maybe go into another industry that would get me out of here. It could be anywhere else in the country, operating out of a shack and involved doing nothing more than watching paint dry, but so long as it was anywhere else, it would do. The weeks leading up to the fair had been nothing but disaster after disaster whilst I worked non-stop, and the more I had to think about the future, the more my mind seemed to turn in on itself, chasing the same thoughts over and over again, until every second thought was that I had to leave. Like an animal that had gotten a leg caught in a trap, with the only option left for freedom gnawing the limb off, I contemplated how I was going to leave.

At that moment, looking at the options, I was struck by an agonising wave of the realisation that  my dream was just out of reach unless I managed to make the right choice. I had thought I had done that a year ago when I chose hotels, but the revelation of the scandal only made the jaws of the trap sink deeper into the tissue and muscles. If it had snapped clean through bone, I would have a way to leave, albeit, in shock and pain. I’d have to start all over again, but I would be able to leave. But what would prompt the jaws to snap shut? Or would I have to chew and chew, around flesh, spitting out blood and tissue, to find my freedom? 

The thought of going into business administration or any other admin role made me want to scream. So many of them were in towns adjacent to my own and the possibility of being sent back because I knew the area better was high. I knew nothing about management or administration skills outside of a hotel environment, either. If I couldn’t find something here, I had no other choice than to go  to a hotel within the town, or potentially nearby. 

As I thought about it more, under the woollen sleeves of my jumper, the scars that ran up my upper arms seemed to throb with each step. The plasters I’d hastily put on just two days prior were catching on the fabric every now and again and the constant tugs were only adding to the overwhelming thoughts that were chasing after each other. 

I tried to focus on what I was seeing in front of me,on anything other than the small flashes of pain that fizzed with every step I took—anything other than the memories of the night before last, running through the stone path in the dark, running into the depths of the night. 

“If anything”, a dark voice said snidely, “That should motivate you all the more to find a way out of here.”

Where to next? Where to next? What would get me out of here? Which one of you in this room was going to help me escape? 

I scoured over the pamphlets for a computer software company that seemed to be stressing they would teach us any particular skills regarding development, giving a small nod to the nervous looking representative standing behind the table, before moving to the next one. It was covered in brochures for hotelier training and pamphlets for wine tasting and other luxury skills. I looked up to see who the owner of the stall was and was surprised to see a foreign man in a fancy suit with a pin in the shape of two golden keys on his lapel. 

Funny. We didn’t often get foreigners here. I barely knew anyone who talked about wanting to go overseas. If he was surprised by my staring, he didn’t show it. 

Instead he had beamed and offered a polite greeting and an enquiry about what it is I was looking for. He spoke with only a small trace of an accent and when he spoke, he pulled up different pamphlets and went through all the benefits on them. I could barely pay attention to the benefits as I thought about the situation I was in over and over and over. Did I go to another post-graduate course? Did I go to a university and study something there? And where was I

going to get the money for that? Where was I going to find the money to afford a place, what job would I have to work to get that? I already had a certain amount saved up, but would that be enough? How much longer would I have to work here before I could finally get out? 

And all the while, the scars itched and throbbed. 

The man was saying that my hotel background seemed pretty solid and the work experience I must have accrued here at the school would make it easy for me to get into any other major hotel. Though, given what he’d heard about what happened, maybe I wasn’t feeling up for a career in hotels; but, if I did, hospitality offered the chance to go around the world and work in any place that would accept me. This included places where I didn’t have to worry about visas. It was, after all, how he had been able to work and travel.It had given him the opportunity to explore the world, even though he had had to learn two other languages to be able to do it. 

‘Are you good at languages?’ He had asked. 

‘I’m okay with them.’ I didn’t really know it at the time, but I would turn out to be quite adept at languages. Then again, you probably become adept when they’re your key to getting the hell out of somewhere. 

He nodded and ran his hand through his hair, which was pulled into a small blonde ponytail, the end perfectly curved, so whenever he turned his head, the overhead light in the gym made it gleam like freshly washed wheat. ‘You should continue on with hospitality, I think. Learning a language is a great way to stimulate your mind, and you learn even better when you’re on the job and having to think on your feet.’ 

‘Uh-huh.’ It sounded an awful lot like the kind of stuff the language department at my old school had tried to shove down our throats every year to encourage more people to pick up an extra language, but I was feeling generous. ‘How many languages do you know?’ 

‘Oh, about three, fluently.’ He grinned and his eyes squeezed so tightly that crows feet spread out from their edges, even though he couldn’t have been older than his mid-twenties. ‘But I pick up more here and there. I think it’s something that happens when you get involved in other cultures in hotels, you start picking bits up here and there to make sure that you can communicate with everyone.’ 

‘I see.’ I looked down at some of the pamphlets that covered the table, showing smiling hotel workers in fancy blazers pointing out things on computer screens to smiling customers. They were written in English, Mandarin and Japanese. I picked up one of the English language brochures. ‘Whereabouts are you from? I can hear you have an accent.’ 

‘Oh, I’m from Australia.’ He said, ‘But I’ve been in Japan for the last three years.’ ‘Where in Australia?’

‘I’m from a place called Brisbane, it’s on the East coast of the country. I came from a farm in rural Queensland, where my parents bred sheep.’ 

That caught my attention. I looked up at him. ‘A farm?’ 

‘Yep.’ He grinned. ‘Kind of like the ones you guys have out here.’ 

‘Did you leave Australia three years ago?’ 

‘No, I was in England before that, and I spent some time in Canada as well before I decided to come here. I’ve always liked Japan and Japanese culture though, so I knew I always wanted to live here. It took me about a year and a half to learn the basics of Japanese and get my writing up to speed, but wanting to be here gave me encouragement.’ 

My heart was beginning to race. England. Canada. Australia. They were so far away from here I couldn’t even imagine how long the journey would take. My hands were beginning to tremble. The scar began to throb. ‘What was it about Japan that made you want to come here?” 

How could you want to be here? How could you possibly want to live in this town? How could this world here be anything close to how wonderful the rest of the world could be? 

‘Well, I always wanted to climb Mount Fuji,’ he said, ‘And I’ve always loved Japanese food, but if I’m being honest, I think I just wanted something different, a different type of living, in a totally different country, if that makes any sense. I always just wanted to live anywhere other than home.’ 

It didn’t really matter why he wanted to come to Japan. I didn’t really give a shit about what he loved about it so much. He could have told me he loved Gundam, or Japanese literature, or geisha, or skiing. All I could focus on was that he wanted the same thing I wanted, and here he was; in the position I always wanted to be in. 

I could feel the jaws of the trap beginning to winch close. I didn’t need to chew any further. I could hear the machinations of it all beginning to slip into place. I had spent so much time in hotel school, through the industry, it would be a waste to go elsewhere, start over again from scratch when I could plow ahead with what I knew and take a risk to go abroad. 

‘Tell me how you did it.’ I said. ‘Tell me how I can do the same.’