The relative quiet of the early registration period is over in a flash, and Saturday morning comes round far too fast – like it always does. We’re well into the first full day, with breakfast already a distant and fading memory, when Bede raises an eyebrow at me from his spot behind the registration desk. “You have jam on your lanyard.”
“I know. I’m saving it for later.” I surreptitiously give the Access All Areas pass hanging around my neck a wipe, and he almost falls off his chair laughing.
Naturally, this is the moment my dad chooses to appear round the corner, having just walked the length of the registration queue. He narrows his eyes briefly at Bede, who takes the hint and gets on with flicking through the rack of membership badges for “Sands, J”, while beside him Nadiya hands over one of the canvas membership bags we were stuffing with freebies till gone midnight. I try really hard not to notice the smudge of what looks like pizza sauce on the back of the bag as it crosses the table.
Dad surveys the queue. He’s rocking back and forth on his heels, the way he always does when he’s nervous. “How’s everything going so far?”
“Seems okay. We opened registration at 9.30 this morning, and we’re at about a hundred an hour.”
I can see him doing the maths in his head, so I add: “Faster than last time, yes.”
“Do you…?”
“No. I don’t have the figures from last time. I was there. Do you trust me or not?”
“You know I do.” He squeezes my shoulder. This is barely a step up from the kiss-on-the-top-of-the-head. In front of a queue full of people who have literally nothing better to do than stare at me. Awesome. “I’m just wondering whether the queue might move a little faster with someone else helping?”
“You mean me.”
“Not necessarily. But what are you doing at the moment?”
“I’m standing here. Talking to you, Dad.”
“Right. Yes.”
“Would you like me to get behind the reg desk for a bit?”
“If you think that’s the best thing to do…”
I’ve already lost him. He’s craning his neck, peering down the queue towards the main entrance. And he’s spotted someone, I can tell.
“Lexi, could you ask…”
“Sam? She’s already on it,” I say, clambering over the pile of tote bags – it’s a lot smaller than it was last time I looked. Sam is, as usual, on guest liaison duty. Her job is to prowl the lobby keeping an eye out for any of our convention guests – anyone who’s due to be on a stage over the weekend. When she spots one, she sweeps them off to a separate registration area to give them their pass and schedule. Her wig today is bright green and matches her outfit, so it’s fair to say that seeing her striding across the lobby towards them, some of our guests may well assume she’s cosplaying as broccoli. (Who knows? She might be. I didn’t dare ask when she stuck her head round the connecting door between our rooms.)
This satisfies my father – in as much as he ever can be satisfied with the way a convention is going on the first morning. He nods and wanders off, smiling at people in the queue and stopping here and there to chat. I notice he gives the guys dressed as space marines – already getting excited about the Interstellar Terror Q&A and apparently rating Hollywood aliens on a sliding scale of scariness while they wait – a wide berth though.
“Lex? We’re running low on bags.” Nadiya pokes me in the side. “Where are the rest?”
“Down in the cargo bay. We only brought half of them from the storage locker this morning. I can radio through and get some brought up – how many do we need?”
She looks up and down the queue, then up at the ceiling as she rolls through the numbers in her head. “Another two hundred? But quickly, yeah?”
I grab my walkie-talkie from the desk – and promptly drop it straight into Bede’s lap. He yelps.
“Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry…” I lean forward to grab it – and then stop. “I think you’d better pass that to me, don’t you?”
He hands it back over his shoulder without even looking up from the names he’s ticking off on the membership list.
“Lexi?” A voice I don’t know is saying my name.
“Hmmm?” I look up from the walkie-talkie, trying to match the voice to a face. On the other side of the table, just to the left of the rapidly-diminishing bag mountain, is a woman with a friendly smile and neat blonde hair. She’s wearing a beige trench coat, a white T-shirt and skinny jeans with ballet pumps. On the floor beside her is a huge leather shoulder bag, and in her hand is a phone.
Publicist! hisses a tiny voice in the back of my head. First rule of conventions: always be nice to the publicists. However tired, stressed or pissed off you – the convention staff – might be, the publicist has got it worse.
(Actually, that’s a lie. The first rule of conventions is: always make sure the hotel knows you’re coming. Because sometimes they don’t. True story. A story I’ve heard many, many times from my father, usually late at night and in the immediate run-up to another convention…)
“Hi!” I arrange my face into my best I’m-busy-but-delighted-to-help expression. I know it’s the right one. I’ve practised it in the mirror.
“I’m Lucy, from Eagle’s Head?”
Eagle’s Head. Books. Something about books. That’s literally all I’ve got right now.
“How can I help?”
“I was wondering…we have a new author, and would it be possible…?”
“You need another pass?” I have a list somewhere. I know I do…
“Lexi! Bags!” Nadiya hisses at me. I glance over at the bag pile. We’re down to maybe fifty. If we run out of bags, the queue grinds to a halt and everyone starts getting grumpy. Plus I get my dad breathing down my neck again. Bags. We need bags. I need to get bags. I have never needed bags as badly as I do at this moment.
“Lucy. Umm. Lovely to meet you. Yes. Pass. I don’t have any extra passes here at the moment, but if you want to double back and head to guest registration on the other side of the main lobby, one of the team will get you sorted out. Just ask for Sam, and tell her I’ve sent you over. She’s basically dressed like giant asparagus. You can’t miss her.”
“Great. Thank you.” Lucy the publicist picks up her bag and heads back down the line.
Eagle’s Head. Why does that ring a bell?
“BAGS, LEXI!”
“Shit. Yes. Sorry.” I press a button on the walkie-talkie. “Mike? Can we get a couple of hundred swag bags up to registration, please? Yep. Now. Like, actually now? Thanks.”
The call comes over the walkie-talkie during the late-lunchtime lull. At first, I try to ignore it. It’s only half past one, and I’m already officially shattered…but one does not simply ignore the call of the walkie. It’s my dad – and while I don’t catch all of what he says, it doesn’t matter. I definitely get the word “pineapple”.
“Pineapple” is the code word.
“Pineapple” is never good.
Bede hands what feels like the thousandth bag over the desk and looks at me with horror. “Did he just say…?”
“Yes. Yes, he did. Pineapple. Pineapples everywhere.” I jab the talk button. “Pineapple. Understood. On my way to the ops room now.” I stuff the walkie into the back pocket of my jeans. “Can you tell Sam if you see her?” I ask.
Bede nods. “Where is she anyway? She’s meant to be taking over from me on reg.”
“I haven’t seen her since this morning.” I crawl out under the desk. It’s the quickest way. Not the most elegant, but who needs dignity?
“Can you call her or something? I’m starting to lose all the feeling in my legs. Plus I’m starving…” he shouts after me.
I half-walk, half-jog down the main corridor, dodging between groups coming out of one of the programming halls. Marie – one of Dad’s senior staff – is standing by the double doors, directing the queue waiting to go in for the next panel. She opens her mouth to say something…but closes it again when I mouth the word “pineapple” at her.
She shudders, and I hear her say, “Good luck.”
The ops room door is ajar.
I take a deep breath.
My father, the hotel manager and Sam are gloomily huddled around a petite, pixie-like woman, and a slightly frazzled-looking guy who is only a couple of years older than me – which would probably make him her assistant. I recognize her immediately. She’s one of our guests of honour – which would explain why Sam’s here, and not switching with Bede. The guest is an actress; I remember seeing her check in to the hotel last night. I remember, because she had one of those incredibly tiny dogs with…
Automatically, I check the room for a dog.
I see no dog.
There is no dog.
There is no dog, and the guest of honour is crying.
Oh no.
Pineapples everywhere.
The dog, it turns out, is called Bangle. Bangle has – not to put too fine a point on it – done a runner from his hotel room and is now at large somewhere in the hotel.
Probably.
The first thought that lands in my head as Dad explains the whole sorry saga is: the dog has its own hotel room?
The second is: Bangle? Really?
Not that I’m judging or anything.
But…Bangle?
Either way, Bangle is a very small dog in a very big hotel full of people who aren’t exactly looking out for a dog the size of the average pencil case. What if he gets out of the building? What if somebody treads on him?
Sam takes the hotel room and the upstairs corridors. The assistant takes the stairwells and lifts. Dad takes the lobby and the convention floor, giving me a stern look that says he’ll be co-opting more of my staff to help with that…which leaves me with the service areas. Looks like instead of ducking into the Feminist Harry Potter panel, I’ll be spending the afternoon crawling around the housekeeping storage areas, shaking a packet of dog chews. Excellent. I’d so much rather be doing this.
And anyway, who gives a dog its own room?
“Dad…” I grab his arm as we step back out into the corridor. His face looks ashy-grey in the artificial light. We’ve never had to deal with this kind of problem before. Guests getting sick, guests oversleeping, guests missing their trains or (one time) completely forgetting that they were supposed to be here. We’ve had all those, and over the course of his whole glorious career, Dad’s had plenty more. But a Small Dog On The Loose? That’s a new one.
“Just do your best, Lexi.”
“It’s a dog. A tiny, tiny dog. There is a lot of hotel here – it could be anywhere!” I hiss at him. He smiles back through the open door at the tearful actress – who is now dabbing her eyes with the corner of a handkerchief and glancing around to check who’s watching. I’m tempted to tell her there are no cameras in the ops room, but I imagine that would go down like a lead balloon, so I don’t.
“Exactly. It could be anywhere. So start looking.”
“It’s probably at the bottom of her handbag and she just can’t see it.” This sounded funnier in my head. Out loud, it isn’t funny at all.
“This isn’t a wallet, Lexi. It’s her pet.” He looks at me. I open my mouth to say something back, but he’s right. Tiny dog. Big hotel. Lots of people. Anything could happen to Bangle – most of it very not-good. Dad knows what I’m thinking though, and he shakes his head. “We can talk about the animal rule tomorrow morning. Right now, we look for the dog.”
“Bangle,” I say, wondering why we even bother having rules. There’s the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, like he’s trying not to smirk. But he has his game-face on.
“Bangle,” he says firmly. “Now go.”
The service corridors of the hotel go on for ever. I thought the convention floor was big, but it’s nothing compared to the warren of passageways and storage areas down here. There’s a whole room just for storing sheets. It’s like I’m Alice and I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. You know, if the rabbit hole involved lots and lots of laundry. A slightly open door near the kitchens leads to a huge pantry full of sacks of flour…and two chefs dressed in checked black-and-white trousers and open white catering jackets, sitting on a pile of them, smoking. They’re almost as surprised to see me as I am to see them, judging by how fast they try to hide their cigarettes. I explain the dog problem before they recover enough to start shouting at me – I’m not technically supposed to be poking around down here. They look at each other. Then back at me.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen him, have you?” I ask. “He’s about this big…” I hold my hands up. He really is very small.
They variously frown, shrug and shake their heads. Right. Helpful.
I’m pondering the big steel doors into the hotel’s massive industrial kitchen – and thinking exactly how much I don’t want to go in there and tell them the convention that’s already making their lives quite hard enough, thank you, has managed to lose a dog – when my walkie-talkie chirps. Bangle has turned up, unharmed…in the wardrobe of his own bloody room, which the frazzled (and possibly useless) assistant had managed to shut him in without noticing. Sam opened the door, he bounced out, crisis over. Everything is fine.
Fine is a state of mind. I’m starving, knackered and standing in the middle of a gloomy hotel service corridor that doesn’t feel a billion miles away from something in a horror movie, flickering overhead fluorescent lights and all. I’m sweaty from running around looking for a missing pet that wasn’t actually missing, I’ve walked for what feels like miles and – what’s worse – I’ve absolutely no idea how everything’s going upstairs on the convention floor… And when I get back up there, I’m going to have to deal with a sulky team who’ve had to cover for me and Sam while we’ve been off on our magical mystery tour. Yes, they’re my friends…but friendship only goes so far.
As I trail back along the corridor towards the lift, I try to shrug off my black mood. I’m annoyed with Dad – for sending me down here, for letting a guest bring a dog when I could have told him something like this would happen…and also for suddenly presenting me with incontrovertible, un-ignorable proof that Bea is a serious thing, not just someone he likes going for a drink with after going to serious, business event-type conventions. (Who would have thought that conventions about conventions were even a thing – let alone romantic?)
Yep, that’s what I’m really annoyed about, isn’t it? The wedding thing.
It’s not that I don’t like Bea, exactly, it’s just that I’m not sure I’m ready for her to become a permanent fixture. I mean, I like the picture on the wall in my hotel room, but that doesn’t mean I want it in my actual room. It would feel alien. Wrong. But it’s not exactly something I can talk to Dad about, is it? Conventions? Yes (provided I can pin him down long enough). My feelings? No. No way.
Like when he first announced they were getting married – I didn’t even know how seriously to take him at the time. I guess I thought if he actually meant it, Bea would be there too, telling me with him. Plus, you know: date, schedule…all that.
“I really love her, you know.”
“I know.” (I didn’t. Not until then…)
“And I want to do things differently this time. I don’t want to make the same mistakes with Bea that I made with your mother, making her feel like I was neglecting her. I want to be better, be a better husband.”
Oh, like the conversation wasn’t already awkward enough.
But…a tiny little patch of fear uncurled, fernlike, somewhere in the middle of my spine.
“Does that mean you’re going to stop doing the conventions?”
I wasn’t really asking about the conventions. Of course I wasn’t. I was asking about…life. Our life, his life, what happened next. I didn’t actually believe he’d ever stop: I’m not sure he can. But maybe if he loved her better than Mum…better than me…if he wanted to be better…he’d consider it, at least in his casually dropped into conversation kind of way. It would be a warning bell. Or what if he said he wanted to bring Bea onto the team? Did that mean she was replacing me, somehow?
“No! Of course not. She may not care much for the fan conventions, but she’s in the business too. She knows how much this all means to me.”
It wasn’t the most reassuring answer, but it was good enough.
“Stop doing that,” he said, waving a fork at me.
“Doing what?” I swallowed a mouthful of coconut rice.
“That. With your face.”
“My face?”
“You’re making that face.”
“There’s no face. This is just what I look like.”
“You know what face I mean, Lexi – I’m looking right at you. I thought you liked Bea?”
“I do!” (In small doses. And at a healthy distance…)
“Then what is it?”
“Nothing.”
In the gloomy service corridor, I poke at the lift button again. It hasn’t lit up, but maybe that doesn’t mean anything. I bash it harder. Bea’s fine – I do like Bea, I suppose – but what if getting married again makes Dad different? He is different with her, but what if it makes him different with me too? He’ll still be Max Angelo – but will he still be my dad? But then what if he doesn’t change, and Bea can’t handle how crazy he can drive people when he’s planning an event, and things go wrong like they did with Mum? I don’t know how he’d cope with getting divorced again. I go cold just thinking about it.
We were doing fine as we were, him and me… Okay, so most of the time I’m the one who counts as the responsible adult at home, but other than that? I’ve been dealing with Dad’s eccentricities my whole life; it’s part of being my father’s daughter. I don’t understand why things need to change.
Me? If I got my life running the way I wanted it to, I’d just leave things alone – the same as anybody would, surely?
My dad isn’t just anybody though, is he?
He’s an Angelo. And I’m an Angelo and conventions are woven through both our lives. I love them – working at them, planning them, thinking about them – because they’re where I feel safest. They’re what make me feel like me. And right now I feel like that could all be about to unravel.
I poke the button again. It falls off the wall.
Umm.
Stairs. I think I’ll take the stairs.
Finding Sam on the other side of the stairwell door onto the convention floor – holding out a clipboard and very clearly waiting for me – makes me wish I’d considered that decision a little longer.
“You look happy,” she says.
“Appearances can be highly deceptive. What d’you want?”
“Not me. Big Boss Daddy. Can you go check the green room, he says?”
“Why? Isn’t it where we left it?”
“Funny.”
I sigh. “Seriously? I’ve been traipsing round the basement…”
“Bede’s on his break and nobody knows where he’s gone – and even if we did, he’d be sulking anyway – and I’ve had to draft one of the art team in for cover on registration because Nadiya’s stuck with some crisis in one of the panel rooms…”
“What crisis?”
“Would you just chill?” Sam rolls her eyes. “Something to do with a microphone. She’s got it.”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“I don’t look after the green room. I only do the mics and soundcheck since…” She tails off pointedly.
“Ah.” There was an incident last year involving an entire tray of full coffee cups, a table leg, and a very famous writer wearing a white shirt. “Fine.” I snatch the clipboard out of her hand.
“Love you too!” she yells after me.
I stick the middle finger of my right hand up at her behind my back as I walk off. Someone dressed as Judge Dredd makes a disapproving sound. “Sorry, Judge,” I mutter.
Green room it is.