Did Someone Order Room Service? by Charlotte Phillips

I never missed one of their shows back in the Eighties and I’m not going to start now.’ Did you hear me? Backstage Passes! I’m with the band, darling. Their comeback tour and I’ve got backstage passes. This isn’t some flash-in-the-pan manufactured cutesy boy band, you know. ‘Don’t be so dramatic, darling.’ Behind her mother’s attempt at soothing she could hear an airport tannoy announcing some flight or other. Her mother set up a business? In which universe would that be? ‘And instead you’ve blown the lot on travel plans and concert tickets.’ ‘I lent you my savings because you wanted to set up a business,’ she said, and it sounded so laughable spoken out loud that she could scarcely believe she’d been so stupid. She’d just have to dodge into a linen cupboard or something if push came to shove. Unfortunately this wasn’t looking like a quick call since she apparently had to spell out the fact that what her so-called parent had done was unforgivable. It had taken sixteen tries before her mother picked up the phone and she wasn’t about to hit disconnect after all that effort just because of a little thing like personal phone use during work time.

Guest Services Agent was only a few steps above minion here at the Lavington Hotel. Which actually amounted to quite a lot of people. She reached the top of the stairs and turned to walk at speed down the hotel’s top floor corridor, heels sinking into the sumptuous ankle deep runner, phone clamped to her ear and eyes everywhere for the slightest sniff of another member of staff. Layla Jones wondered, not for the first time, if there could be such a thing as an entire-adult-life crisis instead of just a midlife one.

Did Someone Order Room Service? by Charlotte Phillips