The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  “Are you still there?” the woman from the hospital said over the phone after I held my breath for a moment.

  “I’m here,” I said, exhaling. Downstairs, underneath the flat, Daphne and Dad were cleaning in the café kitchen. I knew every sound so well that I could almost see Daphne and Dad winding rhythmically around each other amongst wet metal and plastic.

  “Well, I’m sorry to give you bad news,” said the woman.

  “I didn’t know her,” I said, picking at the skin around my nails and sucking little pockets of blood as they rose up. “Is there a funeral though?”

  “She ran a hotel with her husband in Los Angeles. The funeral will be in Venice Beach, followed by a wake at the hotel nearby. I’m afraid it’s set up for Friday afternoon. I am really sorry: I left a message earlier in the week.”

  “Nobody passed it on,” I said. “Do you think she’d want me to come? Did her friends know she had a daughter?”

  “I just work at the hospital where she died. I never met your mother,” the woman said.

  “Did she have other kids?”

  “No other children are mentioned on her documents,” said the voice.

  If Dad had sat me down and told me that Lily was dead, perhaps I would have shrugged and gone back to watching TV or reading my book: it’s not like I knew her. But he hadn’t told me, so instead of shrugging I packed my savings from the café and stole Daphne’s credit card from her handbag, which was sitting on the sofa in front of the television. I knew the number, because Daphne had a terrible memory and had it written on an index card in the cutlery drawer along with Dad’s mobile number. It took me ten minutes to book a ticket online, for early the next morning, and twenty-or-so hours later I was in my mother’s bedroom at the top of a vast pink hotel in Venice beach, lifting a wedding dress up against my body. I glanced briefly at her unconscious husband and took off my own damp T-shirt to slip the dress over my head.

  If the red-haired man had woken up at that second, he would have seen torn tracksuit bottoms sticking out from a milky froth of his dead wife’s silk-and-lace wedding dress. For a moment I was caught inside the cloud of perfumed silk. The music was getting quieter in the layers of hotel underneath the bedroom, the party finally winding down. It must have been five or six in the morning by that point. I could have taken off the silly dress and snuck out. Nobody would even have known that I’d been there, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the creature in the mirror. I didn’t look anything like Lily. Nobody would recognize the connection. Who knows if her husband or anyone else even knew she had a daughter. I could have snuck out in the same invisible way I came. I could have gone home and worked at the café to help pay off the credit-card debt. I could have walked away from Lily’s prostrate husband and snuck out of the party, but instead I picked up one of Lily’s red stilettos. I wanted to take them, even though they wouldn’t suit me and I’d probably never be able to walk in them. Then I figured maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take a couple of dresses, a few pairs of shoes. Lily might even have wanted me to have some of her stuff.

  I padded over to the wardrobe to look for a bag or suitcase or something, because all I had with me was my doodled-on school rucksack. Glancing at the red-haired man I got down on my knees to reach under the bed, which is where Dad and Daphne keep their suitcases at home. Sure enough, amongst old tissues, broken sunglasses and crumpled receipts I tugged out a beat-up red suitcase. It was about three feet by two and made out of material the colour of ancient red Play-Doh. It sort of smelt like Play-Doh too, chalky and dry, yet somehow comforting. Inside there were papers, postcards, and photographs in some of the little pockets. “ To My Darling Lily,” I read from the first line of one of the typewritten notes, but then the red-haired man started to stir. He groaned on the bed, and a little bit of white saliva bubbled at the corner of his lips.

  I began to put clothes quickly in the suitcase, on top of the letters, looking back to the red-haired man every two seconds to check he was still unconscious. I took a leather biker jacket, a pair of stonewash jeans, a silk fuchsia dress, a fitted black dress, a white cotton dress with black buttons down the front, four tops, some sunglasses, a little pair of silver teardrop earrings, some underwear, red lipstick, a suede tan handbag, two packs of cigarettes and a green plastic lighter. I picked up the shiny paperback novel from next to her bed and looked down on Lily’s husband. The pointed tip of one snakeskin shoe was dangling off the side of the bed, and his chest hair was all matted around the gold chain at his neck. He might have been handsome once, but he was gaunt and pulpy now. He groaned again, rasping like his mouth was full of sand, but he didn’t stir, and I went back to closing the suitcase over skirts, dresses, black boots, muddy red stilettos, and the pair of grey ballet pumps. There was a pile of twenty-dollar notes in Lily’s underwear drawer, which I guiltily stuffed in a pocket of my rucksack too.

  As I closed the suitcase clasp, the red-haired man made another noise, and this time the rasp turned into a cough that seemed to lift him out of unconsciousness and up onto his elbows, although his eyes remained closed. He coughed again, straining the buttons on his shirt and making the veins of his neck swell. As I stepped towards the bedroom door with Lily’s suitcase in my hand, the red-haired man opened his eyes and stared at me.

  “What the fuck,” he said, quite slowly.

  I didn’t put down the suitcase when he spoke, but pulled the bedroom door closed with my free hand just as the red-haired man made an uncoordinated lunge towards me off the bed. The bedroom door slammed shut, and I didn’t open it to check if he was all right, just legged it out of the apartment.

  3

  I’m usually very good at being invisible. Back home in London my friend Laurence taught me that the way to be a great petty thief is to switch off your personality while still being acutely aware of the world around you. He liked to shoplift, and I came with him sometimes, although before Lily’s wake I hadn’t actually stolen anything for years. Laurence used to preach that most of the million ghosts walking mindlessly from A to B in every city in the world are inconspicuous because they aren’t noticing themselves, but an arrogant person or an anxious person is noticeable because they’re so aware of their existence. Similarly, fine-pointed stilettos and push-up bras draw a woman’s attention to herself, and so she exists visibly to the world. Laurence used to say that I had “kleptomaniac chic” down to a T, which apparently meant dressing as if unsure about my own existence. Even as a kid I was incognito. According to Dad I neither smiled nor talked until I was five, which caused everyone to think that I was either deaf and dumb or autistic or both. He said I was a “personified shrug”, a kid on whose face fear, anger, amusement and love all looked the same – just a tilt of the head and a blank stare from inhumanly wide eyes.

  I tried to be invisible as I rushed out of the private flat at the top of the Pink Hotel, but it’s hard to pull off when you’re scared. I dragged Lily’s suitcase through the waning party, and at first I thought the red-haired man would clamber up from the floor and follow me. I kept looking back, but he wasn’t there. Other people seemed to be looking at me though. There was a woman in a leather minidress, and a man with a gold stud in his nose who looked thuggish except for neatly parted black hair. I only noticed this man very fleetingly at the hotel that first night, but the mixture of schoolboy hairstyle and a thug face made me remember him later. The techno and electro music had stopped by now, so maybe someone had heard noises from upstairs. There were people asleep in different rooms, or still dancing to themselves in the hallway. Someone was vomiting in a toilet and I swear she looked up and smiled crookedly at me as I passed. Someone else was crying. I hurried downstairs and out of the hotel onto the boardwalk, where the light was just beginning to turn blue behind street lamps and palm trees. The suitcase wasn’t heavy, just clumsy to carry. It kept banging against my leg, and I looked behind to check nobody was following me.

  There were people smoking on the steps and two people kissing against
the pink stucco walls, but nobody followed me. On one block of the road, homeless men slept in bundles of rags and corrugated cardboard. One of them looked at me with heavyset narcotic eyes, but the rest were curled up with their dusty eyelids closed. I gripped the suitcase tighter and kept walking until I couldn’t see the homeless men or the pink walls of the hotel any more. Then I sat down on a bench in front of the blacked-out beach to open Lily’s suitcase for a jumper or jacket to wear as the sun came up. From the chaos of my thievery I chose the leather motorcycle jacket that Lily had been wearing in the photo of her posing with her bike. I thought about phoning Dad to tell him I was OK, but decided to calm down before that battle. I zipped the leather jacket up to my neck.

  At first it seemed unlikely that I’d be able to doze on a bench in front of a picture-postcard cliché of a beach, but soon the sun started to come up, and my adrenaline stopped pumping quite so hard. I lay down with the suitcase under my head on the bench. The light was beautiful, sort of frosty. I hadn’t seen the sea since a caravan holiday in Cornwall six years ago. I don’t love the sea in any cosmic sense, but I do like it. The Pacific looked like a different animal from the Atlantic. If the Atlantic was a foaming, snapping Rottweiler, the Pacific was a sleepy gecko in the sunlight. I had a recurring dream throughout that strange summer, which always began as a conscious thought while I was trying to lull myself to sleep and ended in dull panic. I’d begin with a deserted beach, all warm and wonderful. I would be naked in my dream, and for some reason pregnant, the thick water touching my white thighs and then my belly as I stepped further into the sea. The sky would always be full of blue seagulls in my dream, and I would find myself unable to ignore a red coin of colour that appeared on the horizon and grew. It looked like a sunset that had started in the sea before it hit the sky, and I wouldn’t be able to stop looking and couldn’t stop this feeling of panic, like someone was dying out there. I’d go and sit on the itchy beach and stare at this beginning of an upside-down sunset until I was actually giving birth, at which point I’d try to stop my thoughts. I’d wake myself up slightly, trying to go back to the feeling of damp sand between my toes, to imagine being blind, being asleep, but the thought-baby and thought-me wouldn’t stop panting, painfully, giving birth on the beach. Then there would be an incredibly calm moment, like the exhalation of air after you come or lose your temper. I’d be in the water again and cleaning off all the blood from the baby. I’d put my fingers in the baby’s mouth to scoop out the red coin of goo, and its mouth would be an echo of the blood on the horizon.

  4

  “Good morning,” said a voice. I can’t have been asleep for very long, because the light on the beach was still frosty when the flash of a camera woke me. I jumped, and my eyes focused on the Giant, who had fumbled to steal the laughing photograph from Lily’s room earlier. He was standing above me now, silhouetted against the backdrop of the near-deserted beach and pointing a camera at me.

  My fingers gripped Lily’s suitcase. The Giant’s irises looked very green in the rising daylight, and his lopsided mouth made one of his eyes seem smaller than the other. His lips were pursed, perhaps angrily. I didn’t move.

  “My name’s David Reed,” he said. Then he took another photograph. “I saw you leave the hotel with the suitcase,” he added. “Thief,” he slurred, drunk. “I wasn’t going to do anything about it. Not my business. But then I’m walking over the beach minding my own business and – bang – there you are, looking photogenic. Right?”

  “You should have kept minding your own business,” I said, getting up off the bench with my hand wrapped around the suitcase handle. He took another snap of me.

  These photographs reminded me of how a man once tossed off in front of me on the night bus in London, his face creasing as his hand worked faster, puckering his lips with concentration. I had thought the act mesmerizing, grotesque and humiliating all at once, as if he were trying to touch me without moving. There was a similar intensity in the way the Giant was looking at me, as if he was trying to memorize me for later. It’s funny the way that men can possess women just by looking. They can take the woman home and merge her with other women in their head, change the length of her legs and the willingness of her mouth until there’s a whole new version of the original girl dancing seductively in the head of a stranger. Like I say, my talents never lay in standing out from the crowd. I’m very sensitive to people looking at me, feeling it on my skin like physical contact even from a long way off. Luckily people very rarely looked at me in the way the Giant Man was looking at me on that early morning beach, or how the man had looked at me on the bus.

  “No, no, no sit down,” said David. “I’m harmless. No worries.”

  He was clearly quite drunk, although maybe not as drunk as the red-haired man had been. The Giant stopped talking for a moment and took another picture. Then another.

  “Did you take that from her room?” he said, nodding at the red suitcase.

  “What are you talking about?” I replied. “This is my suitcase. I’m on holiday.”

  We could hear the sea licking up at the sand two hundred meters from the bench, and smell salty air. He also smelt of beer, nicotine and alcohol sweats. There were faded old scars on his face – one on his eyebrow, one under his right eye, and a thin scar down his nose. He had a spider web of wrinkles around his eyes, but they didn’t make him look old, somehow. He looked boyish.

  “I’m curious about what kind of person steals from a wake, though,” he said, and shrugged his big shoulders.

  “It didn’t look like a wake,” I mumbled, “It looked like some sort of rave.”

  “You didn’t know her?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.

  “I just thought it was a party,” I lied.

  “It was random opportunism?” he said.

  “My boyfriend ran off with our rental car this morning. It had all my money, my clothes. Everything,” I said. “You going to call the police on me or anything?”

  He paused.

  “No,” he said, thoughtfully.

  David pursed his lips and sat down on the bench next to me. The blond hairs on the back of my neck stood nervously to attention. Behind us the boardwalk was beginning to fill up with joggers and street vendors. I reached into Lily’s suitcase and extracted a half-empty pack of cigarettes along with her green plastic lighter.

  “Those hers or yours?” he said, nodding at the cigarettes.

  “Hers,” I said, then put one in my mouth and offered him the pack.

  “That’s audacious, stealing her cigarettes and then offering me one. I might be her husband, or her brother.”

  “Are you?” I said, glancing across at him.

  “No,” he replied, and lifted the whole pack to his mouth, removing one of the cigarettes with his lips. He looked at Lily’s lighter for a moment, then flicked the tarnished silver roll to light mine before he lit his own. My heart jumped when he took a direct look at me under my red baseball cap, but he didn’t seem to notice any similarity between my face and hers. I have a small, symmetrical face with big brown eyes. It’s Dad’s mouth, Dad’s slightly pointed nose, Dad’s pale skin and high forehead. I figured that on some unconscious level David noticed me because of an element of Lily in my eyes. He must have done, but he gave no indication of recognizing Lily in me. I looked nothing like my mother. We sat in silence for a moment.

  “How do you know her, then?” I asked him.

  “I used to be a fashion photographer,” he said. “She – Lily – the dead woman – she used to be a model. We did a shoot together, years ago in LA.”

  “A model?” I said.

  “Yeah, you got a model’s clothes,” he said.

  “Did you love her?” I asked, thinking of that haunted way he picked up Lily’s photograph in the bedroom. The words sounded childish even as they came out of my mouth, but he looked earnestly at me.

  “She was one of a whole bunch of models,” he said. “I took one awesome photo of her, though. S
he’s walking some dogs. She looks beautiful in that photograph. Then I didn’t see her again till years and years later.”

  “Are you still a fashion photographer?”

  “Na,” he said. “I do paparazzi work now. How old are you?”

  “Twenty two,” I said, and David yawned. His whole body arched with the yawn, his mouth stretching as if he were about to turn himself inside out.

  My body has always felt divorced from my mind, but David’s body seemed to belong to him. His smile was connected to his shoulders and his hands connected to his eyes. I wondered where his scars were from. He had an energy that made me think of fighting, and then of the football pitch in Swiss Cottage where I always hung out. The asphalt was surrounded by graffiti-smeared brick walls, and we’d hop over a large yellow skip to get foot holes in the bricks and then jump or tumble onto spiky grass. Most of the girls had flirtations with the boys. Some had sex, moved in and out of allegiances, dated and grimaced and sucked and grinned and fell in love, but I never once gave a blowjob behind the bike shed. I was friendly with a girl named Mary, and we would sit facing the walls as if we were having conversations with the graffiti and drag our thumbs down the bricks, seeing who could do it for the longest. It was always me, with a connect-the-dots of broken skin like a kiss that buzzed right down the inside of my knees.

  It’s difficult to explain the adrenalin I got from someone’s trainer mashed into my shoulder or grazing my knee and smelling blood on shorn grass. I liked the relief of cold air forced sharply into my lungs and the respite of traceable pain on my skin rather than the fleeting and invisible map of pleasure that seems to happen with love or affection. Girls are meant to be subtler in their choice of violence, but it took me a long time to discover sex and charm. Instead I scraped my knees, spat on boys till they fought me in the football field, acquired black eyes and bitten lips and played chicken in the bramble bushes – running barefoot at friends in the middle of the night until our ankles were jagged with blood.