Hotel

1. 

At that time my girlfriend worked the evening shift at this bland four-star hotel in the city.
Once the day manager had left, I'd show up (carrying a six pack and snacks) and she'd slide a key across the counter.
(It was always a different room but because all the rooms were similar in layout and decoration....it was always the same room....pretty much) 
I'd go up in the elevator.
I'd wait for her to finish up her shift.
I'd watch free movies and drink beer.
And life was sweet.
And we lived this way for two years.
Staying on average, five nights a week at the four-star hotel.
Which was never full.
The neighbourhood around the hotel was also always empty and lacking in character.
We joke that it was a ghost town. 
At that time, my girlfriend was studying to become a vet.
So she lugged all her text books around with her. 
(Do you know how little money vets make? I was shocked to find out...you would think a vet would be like any other doctor but no, not so....I mean if you are tentatively thinking about becoming a vet....forget about the money side of things.....you truly have to be in that profession for the love of animals.)
Anyway, we practically lived in that hotel
But it wasn't all plain sailing. Not like you’d think.
The Filipino housemaid figured out what we were doing.
I don't know why it bothered her so much but it did.
(at one point she threatened to tell Ramon....the manager…..which was a joke considering she also slept in the unoccupied rooms whenever she had the chance.)
Anyway, why it bothered her, I do not know. Maybe we were encroaching on her territory.
Anyway, when all that fuss happened, we had to back off for a few weeks....lay low.
Then things returned to normal…..with my girlfriend sliding the key across the reception counter, me scooping it up, getting in the elevator, pretending I was a paying customer. 
One day I ran into this guy I knew from years ago, right there in the reception area.
Ahmed. 
Ahmed was staying at the hotel, passing through on his way to somewhere else.
Apart from the suit, he looked about the same.
(actually, that's not true. He looked great. Prosperous. Healthy. In control of everything around him. And generally exuding an aura of someone who was in control of much grander schemes) 
We shook hands and patted each other on the back. 
(Wow.....dude......long time....great to see you....etc. etc.)
Ahmed and I went to the same film school together ten.....(shit)......fifteen years ago!
Judging from the quality of his clothing and what he told me, he had indeed gone off to make a big old success of himself.
Whereas I'd become bogged down....stuck in this little town.
(student debt, nowhere jobs and even a stint on the dole while I let a few of my artistic aspirations run their course).
Back in film school (back when they still actually used film in film school, it was that long ago) Ahmed and I tried to make a pornographic movie.
(not together......not us in front of the camera. Us behind the camera)
What happened was, he approached me at the end of one of our typically pretentious class critiques (we used to tear our fellow student’s work apart in the guise of constructive criticism). 
It was a simple idea.
Ahmed wanted to use the college's equipment (cameras, sound equipment and editing suites) to make something with a more…..real world, commercial dimension. 
(besides which….everyone else was taking photos and making videos about their precious childhoods and their sexuality, trying to push the envelope with blown up images of their junk which we all had to endure as captive audience members during these end of term critiques….so why shouldn't we profit from all this nudity?)
Ahmed was an excellent salesman (I think he was just biding his time in this Mickey Mouse art course….sussing out the opportunities available in Australia). 
He wanted to know if I'd be the camera man. (there was a payment of $1100 waiting at the end of three days work)
He had two girls lined up.
Possibly a third.
He also had the use of a large house out by the beach. 
And so, on the designated weekend, off we all set, in a rented van full of borrowed college equipment.
There was no script. 
The story outline was explained to us as we headed towards the coast……the story went, three girls are hanging out at this beach house.
And they are bored and randy.
And they kept taking showers.
And they keep taking off their clothes. 
And then the neighbour (a male medical student Ahmed dug up from somewhere) comes over and screws them all (in various different positions and configurations).
I didn’t say anything but….I wanted to remind him that planning is key. 
Anyway, all this would happen while Ahmed and I would capture the whole thing on high-end video (digital wasn’t an option in those days).
And then we'd edit it all together (this erotic masterpiece) slapping on some music, credits, before handing it over to Ahmed's buddy in Melbourne who would be responsible for distribution.
At which time Ahmed would pay me eleven hundred dollars for a weekends work.
Simple as that. 
(keep in mind this was before the internet, before everyone with a daddy complex or a hyper libido decided they needed to market and sell their sexual lives online. You could actually make money off a porn in those days). 
In theory. 
The problem was....our little production was a disaster from the onset.
The 'actors' were beyond wooden (we'd turn on the camera and...imagine four naked people….four barely animated cadavers wandering around like they’d been lobotomised. And it was even worse when they tried to act alluringly....God, it was terrible.)
And the house was damp and cold (it was the middle of winter. so it had more of a low budget horror movie vibe).
Despite the bar heaters and the encouragement, the medical student could not achieve or maintain an erection.
That first evening, I just filmed a lot of sad attempts at sex.
Goose-bumped bodies slapping pointlessly against each other. 
And in between takes, we waited. 
And waited. 
And waited, while Ahmed tried to keep the whole show going. This meant keeping the girls interested and talking the flaccid medical student into loosening up and generally trying to get everyone to fuck each other with something that resembled feeling.
Warmth.
Interest.
Less of that shivering robot acting style which was so prominent every time Ahmed whispered, “Action”. 
But things kept going wrong. The three girls spend most of their time sitting around, complaining and smoking out on the balcony.
(or defiantly forgetting to smoke out on the balcony). 
So the shooting schedule went right out the window.
And what we did manage to get down on video was completely unusable. 
Then on Saturday, around lunch time (just as we were starting to make some progress with the flaccid penis situation) a car pulled into the driveway.
Three guys got out.
Three surfers. 
They came in through the front door like they owned the place (and most like this was because one of them did actually own the place). 
Unfortunately, their unexpected arrival did not result in a film-able orgy (as one might expect according to the shoddy narrative conventions of pornographic films) 
No, it resulted in a heated argument. 
And it boiled down to this: Ahmed had not asked these people if he could shoot a porn movie in their house.
He had just gone ahead and done it.
"I said you could stay here for a day or two.....I didn't say you could shoot a fucking porn movie in my parent's house man” shouted the guy who seemed most incensed. (his mates were torn. Friendship vs. the opportunity to watch an adult film production. A tough decision, no doubt)  
Ahmed was a smooth talker but sat first, he could not quell the ensuing argument.  
And it was a complicated argument (Ahmed has a murky history with these guys) which threatened to tip over into a physical fight. (at one point there were several people arguing, shouting and screaming at the same time).
The girls were all upset. They’d had enough. So had I.  
The medical student had, for some bizarre reason, achieved a full erection (it was, he later told me, all that pent up tension, like nervously laughing in an inappropriate moment)  
Anyway, I realised that things were not getting properly resolved...that these three young guys were either threatened, excited or truly angry (or most likely a combination of all three) and their only possible way of working out this tangle of emotions was to working themselves up into a frenzy.
In other words, they wanted to fight us.
And I didn't want to fight anyone.
I was just the cameraman.
(when I tried to edge out the front door, one of them goes, you ain't going nowhere 'cameraman', dramatically emphasising the word like he was belittling me somehow). 
Anyway, two of the girls collected their things and marched out, telling Ahmed they still expected some form of payment for their time.
The thing that really worried me was that these three guys began to commandeer the college video equipment (equipment that was signed out in my name).
The medical student and the other girl went outside to waited. 
Ahmed and I were forced to clean up the house while these three guys verbally and some cases physically shoved us around (it was very humiliating) 
(I gotta say, in the end it was 100 percent Ahmed's smooth, velvet-in-your-ear talk that kept us from taking a beating. By the time we were fluffing the last cushion, packing the vacuum cleaner away, all the animosity seemed to have dissipated. These guys seemed almost congenial, once their house was back in order.)
Finally, we got all the equipment back in the van and drove off.
We drove to a chicken shop and ate some junk food in the car park.
A minor setback, I remember Ahmed saying as he licked his grease coated fingers and looked out across the hot carpark (obviously seeing beyond the weeds, empty spaces and sun-beaten cars of Perth).
That was the end of my short porn making career. 
And at that moment, I had no doubt Ahmed was either going to end up in jail or making a shitload of money.
Running into him years later, his appearance indicated the latter. 
Anyway, we talked briefly in the lobby/reception area.
And I had a drink with him later on in the pub on the corner. 
And everything had changed for the better in his life yet he was exactly the same.
A salesman. 
Super confident.
Always brainstorming up some new money making scheme. 
If you are ever in Dubai, he said handing me a crisp business card, drop in and see me man. Yeah? I will take care of you. 
Sure, I said. 
I think I still have that business card somewhere. 

2. 

At that time my girlfriend worked the evening shift at this bland four-star hotel in the city.
God....we barely ever went back to our own house.
Our house was overgrown, crumbling and sinking in on itself.
An old place which, a long time ago, we had admired for its so-called 'character'.
I'd come to the realisation that 'Character' was over-rated.
Anyway, it was an old two-bedroom structure on a street lined with similar slumped brick houses, all of which were hidden behind shaggy front gardens and had postwar asbestos extensions stuck on the back or side. 
In other words, a place which seemed depressing and substandard compared to the clean, modern hotel environment.
I'd come back to our house, let myself in with dreary regret, usually in the middle of the day to pick something up.
I always felt like I was breaking into someone else's shitty house (looking through their shitty things, thinking thank god all this detritus isn't mine. You know what other people's stuff can be like? The kids toys kept in plastic tubs, the old files, the clothing, the chair with the broken leg. From an outside perspective, all of it is landfill. Junk).
Anyway, it was during that time, during that winter, that I realised we had a serious mice infestation.
I catch them in the corner of my eye, zipping across the wooden floorboards in the still air of the house, darting beneath the fridge and behind the furniture.  
It felt like the place with seething with them.
At first, I just ignored it (not my problem. I live in a hotel).
Then I threw all the food in the cupboards away (everything except canned food).
I'd get what I needed from the house, lock the front door and I'd drive off.
I’d return to my real life, hanging around the hotel. 
My girlfriend would slide a new key crossed the reception counter.
I'd get in the elevator, hit the appropriate button (mice situation forgotten).
I could completely understand why people took shortcuts in life.
Why they wanted more than they had, without all the hard work. 
If life was a game of snakes and ladders, and you kept landing on those damn empty squares or those squares where a forked tongued snake took you down a few levels....you'd get tired of that shit. Eventually, you'd start angling things, maybe even cheating, so that just for once, you would land on a square with a really big ladder.
A ladder that would take you all the way to the top.
Much like a mirror lined elevator compartment moving smoothly up towards a private room with a fully stocked bar fridge, crisp white linen sheets and taps that didn't honk or run out of hot water when you turned them on. 
But then.....
Then came the time when I was forced to deal with the mice situation.
(my girlfriend returned to the house one evening and had a complete meltdown when she saw the floor was seething with all these creatures....why is it that women instinctually scared of mice? Of all the creatures on the planet, mice are supposedly the meekest. The cartoon stereotype is of a woman, gathering up her skirt, standing on a table shrinking in terror as a little mouse scurries across the linoleum floor beneath her. It is true. Women (and elephants) actually react like this when they see mice. Is this because of the rodent's climbing abilities? Their instinct to hide and burrow? The threat of penetration?)
Anyway….
(.....the only thing that concerns me is the violence of dispatch. Bringing your boot down on one of these poor little guys. Because it won't be like an insect. You would be committing to a serious and messy autopsy with guts and organ mush everywhere).
Anyway, my girlfriend told me that I needed to deal with the mouse situation. 
Immediately. 
Or no more free hotel rooms. 
So, I call a guy on a phone number I got from a billboard.
I'll see you at 3 pm, he said. 
He arrived in a truck with a clipboard.
Swaggered up the driveway.
He poked around with his touch, examining droppings like the great hunter he imagined himself to be, nodded his head, confirming that the situation was indeed grim. 
So grim he would need to take 300 dollars off me.
I took his card, thanked him for the quote, told him I'd talk it over with my wife.
(girlfriend didn't quite have the same connotations of negotiation and appeasement)
.....and I decided I was gonna kill all those mice myself.
Save three hundred dollars.
Avoid landing on the square with a little snake waiting to take me back down. 
So, I bought a humane trap from Bunnings. Two of them actually.
I smeared peanut butter on the inside of the trap.
Turned off the lights.
Sat back in the dark and waited.
Three minutes later.....snap, snap went the traps. Almost in unison. 
Once retrieved, I could feel the mice scurrying around inside the plastic tubes, trying to find the exits. 
The problem was I hadn't thought about what to do with the mice after I caught them.
In the end, I cleared all remaining items out of the freezer and I put both mice in a plastic bag and placed the bag the freezer.
Basically, they just went to sleep and froze to death.
Then I repeated the process.
Snap, snap.....retrieve the traps......empty the traps.....put the mice in the freezer.
And repeat the process.
And repeat. 
And repeat.
I was there all night killing mice. 
Until the freezer contained almost 30 frozen or dying mice.
Then I went back to the hotel, took a shower, put on a complimentary robe and watched some movie with a very convoluted plot and a glut of characters who seemed to be constantly popping up in unexpected parts of the story, which I’m sure the filmmaker would justify by saying life was like this, a fragmented series of episodes that fit together perfectly yet made little sense at the time. And while I watched this movie I ate chocolate covered coffee beans like a king. In fact I ate so many of these chocolate coffee beans that I started feeling ill. 
Did I dream about a team of mice explorers tragically freezing to death in the endless darkness, on the side of a glacier? As I slept between my cool hotel linen and felt the excess of chocolate covered coffee beans repeatedly twanged a note of anxiety through my tightened nervous system? 
You bet. 
And despite my efforts, the mouse problem didn't go away.
(I could well imagine the exterminator guy laughing his head off in his white truck, saying, told you so mate. That'll teach you to stick with the professionals next time, eh?)
Accepting that our house must have become completely overrun but still not willing to part with the cash, I tried another solution.
A friend of mine was going off to Japan (some sort of extended working holiday thing from which he'd eventually return telling everyone he'd become 'bicultural'. So annoying.)
Anyway, he had this rescue cat.
This terrible creature. 
So that's what I did....I borrowed the cat for a month, telling my friend I’d take care of it.
And it was great. 
I arrived one morning with the cat in the cat carrier box and let it out. Let it sniff around and define its new territory. 
Over the next couple of hours, I’d be sitting around, in the living rooms, watching television or talking on the phone.
And the cat's head would slap around, alert, detecting something beyond the capabilities of my senses. 
Something moving in the kitchen.
Or in the corridor.
And off he would go.
Stalking low on his haunches, each paw tentatively placed on the ground as if he were picking his way across stones in a shallow river bed, muscles taunt, ears locking in on tiny sounds, locating, eyes scanning, pupils dilating to take in as much light as possible.
It was like watching a hunting bow being slowly drawn back, the tension gathering behind the arrow, the bow being aimed precisely before....
Release. 
Bullseye!
The cat would come back with a twitching, broken mouse in this teeth.
A stone cold killer, this cat was.
I left him to it.
I left plenty of water and a limited amount of food (obviously he needed to stay hungry for the mice). 
Periodically I'd come back to the house, let myself in, check on body count, give the psycho cat a reassuring stroke on the head (if he would let me....as time moved on, if he was in a mood, those retractable claws would come out and....)
And as I say, this was great for a time but then I realised I had either created or contributed to an existing problem.
I had undomesticated the animal.
Yes.
And I believe all the condoned, encouraged murder had enabled the cat's sense of dominance and control in all other areas of its existence. To an unhealthy level.
I believe he now considered himself to be at the top of the food chain. 
The one and only king of the jungle. 
Turning up at the house began more and more to felling like that last scene in Apocalypse Now.
When Willard finally confronts Kurtz at the end of the river (confirming that Kurtz had indeed, gone to far) 
The cat shagged the neighbour's cats.
He beat up a little dog three houses down.
His homicidal tendencies widened to include native birds which in turn set off the old woman who lived behind us (a blow hard environmentalist who scowled me for my sloppy recycling habits and lack of a worm poo bin). 
The cat began arriving home late at night with fresh wounds on his face from maintaining what I believe to be his ever widening territory.
As I say, I would go in to pat or discipline him, and more often than not he would wearily eye up my dangling five-fingered appendage as just another thing he could make bleed. 
(a weird land bound squid drifting into striking range).
But I have to say, he was effective in regards to the mice situation. 
And when my friend came back from Japan, all ‘bicultural' and highly irritating with new experiences to overshare, new lifestyle practices and a new philosophical approach to life which made the rest of us seem like dark age savages, I turned up at his place with the psycho cat in the plastic cat transporter.
Growing and hissing out from behind the steel bars (I mentioned something about the ride over being a bit bumpy)
A day, maybe two, passed before I got the phone call.
What the hell happened to my cat? he asked.
Nothing dude, I said, what do you mean?
Did you fuck up my cat man?
I did not 'fuck up your cat' I laughed. 
Something is wrong with him.
I don't know what to tell you man, I said. We just....um......hung out, you know? He was acting a little strange there towards the end (his final body count was around 170 mice. The birds and all the other infringements against creatures human and otherwise not included)
He kills everything he can get his paws on man, continued my friend. He went for my neighbour's kid this morning.
Prozac? I suggested.  
I heard the cat ran away a few weeks later.
And that was pretty much the end of that.


3. 

At that time my girlfriend worked the evening shift at this bland four-star hotel in the city.
After finishing her shift my girlfriend would kick off her shoes and climb onto the bed with me. (she usually had a bottle of white wine from the corner bottle-o and more of those damn ubiquitous chocolate covered coffee beans. I swear I was in danger of becoming one of those fucking civet cats. You know the kind that shits out those super expensive coffee beans?)
She would tell me about some of the guests. (the interesting ones)
Most of the guests were low to mid level business people just passing through, in town for one night maybe two.
For a convention.
A meeting.
A pitch.
With their little wheelie suitcases and laptops.
These people mainly passed through without incident. (….at most, a little befuddled blushing when it came time to settle up the following morning and that adult movie, purchased after a few beverages the night before, was staring up them from the itemised bill.)
Of course, it was the less savoury clients that took up most of her time.
The call girls, the speed freaks, the middle-aged party boys and beer fuelled sports fans. The runaways.  
Those were the people she ended up talking about. 
Their arguments.
Naked people getting locked out of their the rooms.
Drunks pissing in the elevator.
There was one woman who checked in with a child.
Nothing strange about that....
Except......
An hour later, seven people, apparently from the same family, showed up in the form of a human tornado that came whirling in off the street, spewing hot aggression and expletives, demanding to know where this woman and the baby were.
Insisting.
The husband or the de facto partner....whatever he was…..he was teetering on the edge. 
He stormed off, got in the elevator and went upstairs.
He started wandering around the corridors, knocking on random doors, shouting the name of his wife. 
My girlfriend had to call the cops, there were no two-ways about it.
Then she called me in room 32.
I was happy enough, right in the middle of an Oliver Stone movie on cable.
You need to come downstairs now, she said
What? Why?
I can't tell you why right now, she hissed into the phone, I just need you to come downstairs. Right. Now. Do. You. Understand? (when she started breaking everything up into one-word sentences, it was time to comply. In the background, I could hear some shouting. It sounded like people trying to escape an fire. What was that about?)
The elevator door opened on the lobby and right away I saw these six people of varying ages (ugly people really, and made all more ugly by their raw, incensed faces and their jerky, violent body language.)
Marvellous. 
Excellent. 
I arrived just as the aunt was smashing her fat hand down flat on the reception counter, demanding once again that the hotel give up this woman and the child. 
(actually, they didn't seem to care what happened to the woman just so long as they got the child back).
I sat down in one of the high-back chairs near the window, pretending to look at my cellphone, just a guest, you know, hanging out.
And my presence did calm the situation down momentarily.
The problem was this posse keep butting up against the hard fact that my girlfriend wasn't about to give out the room number of paying guest. No way. This was rule number one in the hotel industry. What were they thinking? 
Anyway, this is what set them off again.
Jesus....those women, with their emotion engorged war faces, they certainly could scream and holler.
The details about some kind for family fracture kept coming to light.
Accusations.
The child as some kind of leverage device.
Who could tell?
Life is made up of facts which can be twisted to serve either side of the same story. 
Then the elevator door popped open again and the husband (we had established by that point he was the husband) reappeared. 
I gotta say....when my girlfriend needs to be tough, uncompromising, it is a thing to see. 
She didn't look phased by any of this. 
We tend to think of ourselves as people of little or no consequence, yet I find I'm constantly impressed by this woman's inner strength.
Really, I am.
Anyway, riled by the women’s competing voices, the husband was starting to pace around like a caged bear, looking for something to smash. 
I kept on thinking, oh shit, am I going to have to physically deal with this guy? (the problem was I was pretty sure this guy was going to kick my ass if it came down to it. You are already on a losing prospect when you fight someone who is propelled and galvanised by a sense injustice. The way this man obviously was).
My lucky day.
Anyway, these people were once again working themselves up into combat mode. 
I'm sorry, said my girlfriend, I can't give out that kind of information and if you persist on walking around the building without permission, as you have been doing, you are trespassing. You are breaking the..... 
Give me a fuck'n room then, exploded the husband, slamming his wallet down on the reception counter.
I'm sorry but I can do that either, said my amazing girlfriend.
One of the women, another aunt, kicked over a wire display containing tour and travel brochures. 
Margaret River.
Wave Rock.
The Swan Valley.
I stood up.
And in reaction to this, the husband turned, eager for the physical conflict he'd been hunting for, available now that a male had entered into the mix.
What the fuck do you want? He shouted. 
I started talking in a cockney accent.
I don't know why I did this, it just happened. 
And this had happened in the past, when I'd found myself in stressful situations similar to this one.
It was totally unconscious. 
Maybe I was attempting to associate myself with the toughness of a British gangster (I wanted to sound like a guy you'd think twice about messing with). 
Like I say, it was uncontrollable reaction.
And I was actually pretty good at it (the accent, not the fighting part). I sounded authentic. My voice got gravelly and quiet. 
The counter-balance to all the shouting.
The quiet voice of menace and intent.  
Anyway, I was prattling on, phrases such as 'you know what I mean?' and 'give it a rest geezer' entering into my spiel as I tried to calm this lunatic down (....I was shitting myself a little bit because he had justice on his side and what did I have? A fake British accent).
He was momentarily thrown (I could see that in his eyes) because he couldn't tell if he was entering into a fight with Jason Statham or with someone doing a reasonable impersonation of David Statham.
I could see him doing the mental calculations, weighing and sizing me up.  
Easy tiger, I growled. 
Mind your own business ya pommy bastard, he barked back, taking a step forward, his hands tightening into fists. 
Wow (Fake Jason Statham wasn't too effective this time around, was he?) 
Here we go, I thought.  
Meanwhile, over my opponent's shoulder, I could see my girlfriend fending off the women who were trying to breach the reception desk, trying to get their hands on the hotel registry (An actual book, not an Excel spreadsheet). 
Screeching and screaming blue bloody murder. 
And into this mini catastrophe walked the Filipino housemaid.
And credit to her, she assessed the situation and then got right into it with the women, backing up my girlfriend.
(i was kind of hoping she would come over and give me a hand. She came from Manila so you just knew she was ghetto tough. Tougher than me at any rate).  
Anyway, I was slowly shaking my head, trying to look unfazed and deadpan sinister, talking in a thin threatening whisper, saying 'you don't wanna go there mate' when (thankfully) the cops walked in.
A beefy one and his skinny mate.
Tool belts loaded with the appropriate implements of determent. 
These two cops straightened out the situation immediately.
It was great.
I got to dust my shoulders off, shoot my cuffs and put Jason Statham away for another day. 
Then one of the cops went upstairs to talk to the woman.
To get her side.  
At that point, I slipped away and went back upstairs to my room. 
I resumed watching that Oliver Stone movie (what the fuck happened Oliver Stone?).
Two hours later, my girlfriend turned up, kicked her shoes off and flopped on the bed, groaning and plonking her end-of-shift bottle of white wine on the nightstand.
Jesus Christ, she muttered
How did that go? I asked. 
The cops were feeling lenient, she replied. They didn't charge the guy with trespassing. They just moved everyone along. 
I nodded.
We watched some trash TV while we talked and drank.
Through the window, a smattering of lights began to appear, making out isolated pockets of life in the empty grid of streets and houses. 
She took a bath and we drank and ate complimentary chocolate coloured coffee beans.
We fell asleep a short time later.
I dreamt of a doomed expedition of mice, huddled together on the side of frozen glacier.
Of being a cat that hunted and ate mice but shat out golden coffee beans.
Of being in a dark house with naked people walking around, room to room.
Of living in a hotel. 
The alarm woke us up the following morning at the usual time (this was the one drawback of living in the hotel. We had to be up and out before the morning shift began.) 
I showered and slipped out before the day manager turned up.
It was very bright and cold outside.
The woman with the baby, the woman who had caused so much commotion, sat in reception, waiting with her suitcase until a taxi pulled up at the kerb.
At which point she came out of the building quickly, got herself and her baby inside the taxi and took off. 
My girlfriend stopped working at the hotel shortly after graduation. 
Then it was my turn to study and up-skill.
We moved on.
We got married.
We live in Melbourne now.
I stayed in that hotel a few times when I was passing back through town.
It wasn't the same of course. 
Nothing ever is.