Five Years in Hell: A Memoir

By Nisaba Merrieweather

What happens when you put a normal person into an abnormal situation? Do they break, or do they harden up? This memoir exposes the underbelly of a part of the hospitality industry in Australia, covering the five years the author spent as the unpaid night manager of a hotel, dealing with all kinds of dramas down to actual violence. Along the way are many moments of dark comedy. Enter, if you dare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: May 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9781779417978

Nisaba Merrieweather

Nisaba Merrieweather was born in 1960 and is not yet dead. She started writing at eight but quietly got rid of everything written last century. She writes philosophy, fiction, and mysticism, and has won a large number of online poetry competitions. She has been an active member of the Outback Writers' Centre since 2021.

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Five Years in Hell

Copyright © 2024 by Nisaba Merrieweather

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Some names, including the hotel’s name, have been changed to protect the guilty. Others haven’t.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-1-77941-796-1 (Hardcover)

978-1-77941-795-4 (Paperback)

978-1-77941-797-8 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

For the beautiful Rosie, who at once landed me in it and kept me sane.

For the folks at Erina Archery Club, who helped her to do the latter.

A shout-out to Dripp Café, Dubbo, for providing a congenial alternative to my usual writing environment.

Lastly, to Anabel and David, two of the kindest and most generous people I have ever encountered, without whom my escape from my Five Years in Hell would have been a lot more difficult and unpleasant.

I was murdered once. It only hurt later, long after I had been reanimated. Pain is weird that way. (Padma)

PRELUDE

This document covers an interesting, bizarre, painful and sometimes very funny period of my life a couple of years before and at the beginning of the Plague – that is, starting before Covid-19, our modern-day plague, and leading well into it. At the time, I was the night manager of a three-star hotel.

Our contemporaries seem to think that the mediaeval word Plague refers only to the Bubonic Plague – a condition caused by a lovely little organism called Yersinia pestis, which, incidentally, is alive and flourishing in Australia as I write – but in fact, the mediaevals recognised several clear and distinct plagues. One was the Bubonic, a plague of swollen and darkened lymph nodes commonly referred to as the Black Death, and another was the Pneumonic, which was characterised by sneezing, coughing, mucous, fever, joint pain and often death; it was probably a virulent strain of what we now call influenza. There were several others. The word really denotes anything that, up until the 1980s or 1990s, would have been called an epidemic and since then would have been called a pandemic: a contagion of any kind that spreads wildly and affects many. Today, antibiotics control Bubonic lague in humans nicely, but the feral rat and mouse population in Australia still suffer widely from this pernicious disease, and it is possible for humans to catch it.

Some years before the current plague, I lived in rented accommodation. The place was fine – smallish and shabby but waterproof and private, and that was all I asked. My landlords liked me and had given me to understand that I’d be allowed to live there long-term as they had no intention of selling any of their properties. Sadly, the wife sickened and died (not of any kind of plague) and the widower lost heart. Firstly, maintenance stopped happening, then a For Sale sign appeared in my yard.

What’s worse, the estate agents kept bringing potential buyers through while I was home. I didn’t want it to sell, since most of them were talking about renovating. Renovating meant an almost-certain eviction while the work went on, and the building needed serious work. So any time the agents were busy talking to one member of the cruising would-be buyer-couples, I’d silently show the other the termite damage in one of the major structural walls and be very polite to them.

The building went to auction, with myself and all my neighbours still in residence. The auction was in our backyard, which abutted the lake. I decided to attend, since I was in the habit of sitting out there with a cuppa and a dulcimer anyway. I was somewhat satisfied to see that none of the people who had been shown the termite damage came to the auction. Conversely, I was put out that the auctioneer, without so much as a question, commandeered my table for himself.

My landlord had said he wouldn’t sell for less than three million, so I was hopeful I’d be able to live there indefinitely. The auctioneer started the bidding at $750,000. Not a single bid happened. The property was passed in, and one of the registered buyers went into private discussion with the agent. We heard later that the landlord had settled for $720,000, considerably less than his stated minimum of three million. Then came the eviction notice. I was no longer under a formal lease, so they needed to give me only minimal notice. I had limited funds, which created a problem.

There was a large hotel down the road with bars, function areas, restaurants and a large accommodation wing. A friend of mine had just taken over keeping the books for the owner, a part of the then management triumvirate. I was in the habit of dropping by occasionally to catch up, and she was in the habit of downloading about her difficult partner. After I was served my eviction notice, I wandered down the road with a heavy heart intending to moan to her. Instead, as usual, I sat patiently while she moaned about her partner. I was polite and made all the right noises until I told her to shut up and listen – it was my turn now, and she owed me, as I was such a good listener. I talked her through the whole thing, and when she asked me where I’d looked for accommodation, I said I’d only just heard. Then she got busy with work, so I wandered away.

I looked for housing fitfully over the next several days, then wandered back to have another chat. She offered me a free orange juice and started talking about her staffing difficulties. She had just lost her night manager, someone who lived on the premises and dealt with anything that happened after the bar staff signed off and left. They needed someone, she said, to check in any guests who arrived extremely late, to supply fresh towels or teabags to rooms that might have run out, to patrol the corridors once or twice a night and make sure the fire escapes had not been wedged open, to answer the phones, which were redirected to the phone in the night manager’s flat. And yes, phone calls were easy, mostly it was a matter of asking them to call back after nine in the morning when the office staff arrived.

I was amazed that no one would want a cruisy job like that: no supervision, kicking back at home with the TV most of the time, minimal amounts of work in exchange for accommodation and electricity. Surely I can’t be the only person that doesn’t go out much of an evening? And in any case, on Fridays and Saturdays the bar was always open late so the night manager could go out as long as they were back an hour or so after midnight. It sounded like quite a reasonable job to me – you‘d even get to sleep on-duty as long as you woke up amiable and ready to function, so you could do whatever you usually did during the day to earn cash-money.

Where have you advertised this job so far? I asked.

I was already formulating suggestions in my mind about where she might advertise it that might attract loyal people without much of a night-life. Instead, she gave me a look of incredulity.

I’m offering the job to you, she said, laughing.

And with that, my illustrious career as a hotel night manager began.

* * *

Part One

Ruby showed me the flat. I’d always had a poor sense of direction in enclosed buildings where the earth’s magnetic fields were messed-up by electrical wiring and – worse – WiFi, and after I’d had a stroke some years previously, it was even harder for me to memorise new maps in my mind. She walked me downstairs – there were two descending flights of stairs and I would later find only one of them led to my level; the other, confusingly, led to another level. After the dark, dank descent, she led me along a dingy corridor. She waved to our right to indicate where the swimming pool was and walked to the end of the corridor.

Her master-key opened the lock. A tiny kitchen to the left, with cupboard space but no bench space. It would be hard-to-impossible to make my own bread or pasta from scratch. A reasonably spacious living room with a picture window looking out towards the gated community next door with just a flash of the lake in the corner of the view. I looked at the living room: my lounge furniture and my writing desk would all fit. Then there was a door into a bedroom with built-ins; it was large enough to be comfortable, small enough not to be functional as a multipurpose space, and an en-suite bathroom.

What nobody told me until it was too late was that my bedroom was directly below a guest room. And not just any guest room but one where we had a dropkick permanent resident called Rusty. Rusty was a little too fond of his beer and later inveigled his way into a maintenance job, working for his rent so that he would have master-keys and an alarm code and could help himself to beer at any hour of the morning or night. And every morning at sunrise for all the years I was there, he would wake me up by urinating loudly and copiously, directly over my head. The noise reverberated right into my sleeping ears. Rusty pissing on me. I had to wake up to that every single day for the rest of my life there. It was the first hint of the hell-to-come.

I didn’t know that when I accepted the job. I was told I would be working nights, with the night-mobile on me at all times. Aside from answering the phone with a smile and dealing appropriately with all calls, plus doing a security based prowl along the corridors sometimes (I settled into doing this when the bar closed and a couple of hours later when I wanted to go to bed), I would be able to live my own life as long as I was in the premises from Close until the office staff arrived at nine. I could watch TV, I could sleep on the job, just as long as I woke to the phone. And I’d have my days free. I was already working part-time in a couple of places so there was no reason why I couldn’t go on doing what I already did for cash.

The deal sounded okay to me, innocent that I was at the time. I told Ruby I’d need a couple of weeks to pack my life in boxes and find removalists. But she needed a night manager right then. So she booked me into one of the guest rooms across the corridor from my flat on the basis that I could sleep there and then go home to pack my house up during the day.

She handed me over to someone I’ll call Helen, the event manager, to be trained. The training was ludicrous and took less than ten minutes. She whisked me along identical, anonymous corridors that I never had any hope of remembering and showed me locked doors that looked identical to every other door, saying things like This is Housekeeping’s room. You can find extra toilet rolls and teabags there, and This is the laundry. You can wash your own stuff there after-hours, and if people need extra towels, you’ll find them there. Not a word about how to actually operate the big industrial machines. Then she took me to reception and said: For after-hours check-ins, there will be a tray of paperwork with keys clipped to it. I won’t show you the forms. They are self-explanatory.

And that was all.

This training imploded quickly the first time someone booked online after-hours and a staff member wasn’t there to prepare the paperwork for me. I had no idea how to logon to the reception computer or find bookings. I found myself ringing Ruby after her bedtime and getting her to walk me through the whole thing, with an exhausted traveller in front of me waiting impatiently. Surely, that’s the sort of thing training should cover? After a few months, when I had learnt my job the slow, painful and embarrassing way in the absence of any training, I had a quiet word with Ruby and told her that if I ever left, I demanded that I be the person to train the next night manager, not Helen. That way, they’d have at least some slight chance of knowing their job.

For the first couple of weeks, sleeping in a guest room and going back to my previous home to pack, I was running on raw nerves. Every time I had to do anything, it was new to me. I woke Ruby a lot. I also got lost a lot – it took me ages to work out which of the two descending flights of stairs from the foyer took me back to my own level. And in the beginning, the building resisted me. Every time I tried to open a lock, including to my own room and later my own flat, the keys would refuse to open the doors and I’d have to struggle, occasionally even resorting to getting other staff members to open doors for me. Once the building even assaulted me. I was wearing a tee-shirt with big loose sleeves and hurrying down a staircase. The handrail of those stairs grabbed me by the sleeve, swung me around and slammed me hard against the concrete wall. Stars-in-the-eyes time. For a week, I was purple.

My very first story-worthy incident occurred just two days after I properly moved into the flat and started sleeping in my own bed. The night had passed without any major incidents. I had my second alarm set for 9:00 am, since I needed to be up, showered and dressed by 10:00 am to get that day started.

Instead, I got woken up at around 6:30 am, right after I’d done my morning checks and gone back to bed. There was an elderly woman’s voice on the phone: I’ve got no water in my shower. I took her phone number and promised to investigate, not yet sure enough of myself to know how to do that in this particular building. Thinking furiously, I wandered out into my living room. Then I saw the problem.

My big picture window had turned into a fast-running waterfall! At that stage I was still too new to know that the plant room, with all the hot water tanks, the lift machinery and the air conditioning machinery was up on the roof. The plant room had not been mentioned to me during my extensive training, and I hadn’t given it a thought. Not until the entire hotel turned into a waterfall.

The next little while I was prowling around the hotel, work phone in hand, answering a continuous stream of phone calls about the water while trying to find the mains to turn it off. Helen, fortunately, chose that day to arrive early, showed me where to turn the mains off and opened the bistro very early to offer each in-house guest a proper coffee as an apology. I was left to field phone calls from the guests, tell them that we knew about the problem and were onto fixing it, and inviting them to go to the bistro for a decent coffee as an apology.

Most of them weren’t happy with that and we ended up giving them refunds. Amazingly, we didn’t have a staff member on hand who knew how to work the coffee machine, which was wildly different to the coffee machine on which I used to earn my living years earlier. Meanwhile, Helen got onto the plumbing contractors that the hotel used.

By the time Ruby arrived, all the guests knew the deal and were lining up at reception with their credit cards so that Helen could process refund after refund. I gave Ruby my version of the morning’s fiasco – which was wildly different to Helen’s, who seemed to suggest that I had single-handedly caused the waterfall. It was then that Ruby mentioned the name of the actual owner of the business and his utter refusal to spend money on maintenance.

Apparently, hotels are legally required to have their plumbing thoroughly inspected annually. This costs money. Therefore, the owner hadn’t done it for over twenty years – the law be damned. The pipes had corroded right through over that time and had burst into a huge waterfall that morning because of his lack of maintenance. Instead of spending a few hundred dollars every year, his choice to save money meant that he had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in one spontaneous hit.

I was to discover that this was his modus operandi with all maintenance issues – his love of saving money cost him a fortune. I often saw him at a distance but we never properly met, yet he still became one of my least favourite people very quickly.

* * *

Karaoke-based memory:

Drunken guy, late fifties or early sixties. Stumbling-drunk. Karaoke night. Falling against the bar and trying to get served after-hours when the bar was closed and staff were trying to get rid of him. There were three bar staff, all girls this time, plus me and a security guy. He kept trying to grope the females and asking us if we were single and who was going to come to his room in the hotel for a little fun. And why couldn’t he buy a drink, dammit, he’d driven all this way and spent good money on a room, the least we could do was sell him a drink.

Eventually we managed to cajole him into almost agreeing to go to his room. He stumbled out of the bar and the security guy and I followed as it was a fair walk and we frankly didn’t believe he would get there. We put him in a lift with instructions on what level to get out at and what direction to turn. The lift kept bringing him back. Eventually I asked the security guy to escort him up as I needed to do my end-of-night security sweep through the building and I always started up on the level that guy was going to. They disappeared into the lift together, and I gave them some time. Then I hit the switch.

When the lift came back, they were both still in it, the guy arguing vociferously and the security guy being quietly menacing but very, very polite (as they’re taught). My body was already committed to getting into the lift and it would have been weird to back away, so I went in and hit the floor button again. All three of us walked to the door of his room. The guy didn’t know what room number he was in and was checking each one, so I kept saying No, that isn’t your door. When we got to his door, I said Here we are.

Then he turned on me aggressively.

How do you know what room I’m in?

There was no answer to someone who had spent all night telling you and every other female staff member his room number. The security guy and I kept our voices down as he blustered loudly at us for nearly an hour. One by one, the rooms around us turned their TVs on with the volume high, presumably to indicate that they’d been woken up by him and wanted to cover the noise of his offensiveness.

And he kept on asking me whether I was married. I asked him why he wasn’t asking the security guy if he was married if he felt that it was such an appropriate question. He demanded to know my name, after having been given it many times. He also blustered about us having made a big mistake to take him on and hassle him (we were the quiet ones, there only to make sure he could find his bed!) as he was with ASIO, the closest thing to a spy or secret service organisation that Australia has.

Now, I really know a guy who used to be with ASIO, and I know for sure that if you work for them, you absolutely never, ever mention it no matter how drunk you get, so he immediately proved himself a liar. He kept shouting, people in the rooms nearby kept their TVs on (this was after 2.00am), the guard and I kept being firm, responsible, polite and quiet. Somewhere along the line, he pissed himself – it shows up clearly on badly faded jeans, as they slowly turn dark-blue. Our politeness never changed - even drunks deserve at least the illusion of dignity.

Security regulations in Australia dictate that manhandling people is not allowed. So we had only dignity and insistence on our side. I also had a bunch of master keys in my hand, but I deemed it important that he open the door himself with his own key: flashing a master around would only make him carry on about how I intruded or invaded his space.

Eventually he went in and I wandered down the corridor (with Mr Security watching over me) to check the fire escapes. I deemed the floor secure and we walked past his room again towards the lifts. Our guest was still stumbling around and shouting incoherently behind his closed door. The guard went and signed off for the night later than his rostered time, and I did the rest of my run. I then sought out Ruby, whom I knew was still around. I told her what had transpired – she was one of the women he’d tried to pick up earlier – and asked if I had her permission to take extreme measures later if he didn’t calm down. I was thinking that if no one else can sleep, I’d call the cops and have him turfed out. She said if he didn’t settle that indeed would be the best course of action.

He gave me no further trouble. He must have collapsed in a urine-stained heap on the floor. What an irresistible example of Australian masculinity. I cannot imagine why none of us female staff members wanted to fall into his arms at first sight.

* * *

Both the problem and the anti-problem with the hotel was that it was jointly my workplace and my home. At and after closing time (different on different days of the week), it was my workplace: at night a workplace, by day a home. It felt like my kingdom, especially after the night staff had signed off and gone home: I was alone, I was in command. The downside was that I lost any anonymity, and I love my anonymity.

I became very good at waking up quickly and as a functional person with a professional smile. I took to sleeping in black leggings and old tee-shirts (something I still do to this day – it really is more comfortable than pyjamas), so I could throw on a collared uniform shirt over it, even leaving it unbuttoned, stick my feet in scuffs, and be out of my flat and on my way in less than 30 seconds looking as if I was dressed.

The hotel was on a spit of land sandwiched between two lakes, so let’s call it the Lakeside Hotel, Lakey for short. My previous home had been on that same spit of land, but on the other side of the road about three hundred metres west of the hotel. I had been, and continued to be, a regular singer at the Lakey’s karaoke nights.

Nothing changed after I started living and working there. During the karaoke gig, I’d just be a customer and singer (but a dry customer: I wasn’t much of a drinker and have never had a drop when I had to work later). Sometimes this would make things difficult if people were refusing to leave after Close: like every other staff member on the floor, I would go from person to person, asking them to leave.

Who are you to ask me to leave, you’re just a customer like me, I’d hear.

I work here, I’d say matter-of-factly.

No you don’t, they’d then say. You’ve never sold me a drink!

Of course not, I’d say, I’m not bar staff. I’m the night manager.

I became very good at making a polite tone of voice sound slightly threatening.

Normally during the difficult period when bar staff were trying to get rid of people, I’d be