The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  If you prick your skin with a needle, the pain signal will travel to the brain at ninety-eight feet per second, I learnt from my science teacher. Burning or aching travels at six and a half feet per second. Pain seemed so much less capricious than pleasure, and so much less terrifying than feeling nothing. By fifteen my body was a scarred map from which I could point out the fight or fall that caused each lasting Tick-Tack-Toe mark on my knees and elbows, the slash across my eyebrows and down my collarbone, the jumpy dotted lines on my knuckles. One scar on my bottom was from the time a boy threw me in a skip and metal cut through my jeans, the slice on my wrist was the time I fell on a shard of glass during a football scuffle and had to get stitches, another on my arm was from the time I was pushed off a skateboard. Although I pinch myself sometimes, and absently bite my lip, I’ve only really “self-harmed” once: a four-inch knife line inside my thigh. I sat on the edge of the bathtub to design it when I was twelve. It didn’t even really hurt. I regretted it. It was interesting more than thrilling. It was harder to stop dragging the knife across than it was to continue with the movement. There was no thrill of connection in cutting myself; someone else had to do it in order to make me feel calm.

  As David and I smoked Lily’s cigarettes on the wooden bench, my nerves dissipated with the darkness. A skinny man slid past us on roller skates with a boom box on his shoulder. He put the music box down, around a hundred meters from the bench and shouted – “Here we go! Here we go!” – pirouetting on his glittery skates. It looked like something out of an urban, hip-hop Fantasia cartoon. Soon there were naked kids being pushed around the boardwalk in shopping trolleys, drinking milkshakes from buckets the size of their bodies. There were DJ decks set up on the street and toy trucks jumping around the legs of the bench, being attacked by tiny dogs wearing witty T-shirts.

  “I’m sorry your friend died,” I said to David.

  “Me too,” he said, shrugging, tipping his absurd neon-yellow sunglasses over his eyes. “That’s fucked-up about your boyfriend stealing your car, though,” he added. I had an urge to touch him. He looked perturbed and pale and drunk in the sunlight.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked me, not smiling.

  “I’ll probably do some touristy stuff, then go home.”

  “England?”

  “London.”

  “Your ex-boyfriend English?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I wondered if my nationality would make David think of Lily, but it didn’t seem to.

  “Did you have an argument with him before he stole your car?” David said.

  “He ran off with a girl who works in some roadside diner. They exchanged numbers while I was in the toilet a couple of days ago. He gave me this guilty look when I came back. She served me pancakes without looking me in the eye, but she smiled secretively at him. You know the feeling?” I said, fingering the rim of my baseball cap and shivering. I’ve never even set foot in a roadside diner, just seen them in movies and read about them in books.

  “I need to go throw up,” David said suddenly, nearly to himself. “I haven’t slept for a while.”

  “Do you want me to get you anything?”

  “I usually wait till I know a girl before I vomit and pass out on her,” he said, standing up and trying to smile. He looked unsteady on his oversized feet.

  “You sure you’re alright? I could walk you somewhere?”

  “You’re very polite for a grave-robber,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” I said, wanting to help him.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Good to meet you.”

  “Sleep well,” I frowned. He staggered away down the crowded street with a slight limp that made him look like some sort of poseur gangster, then turned and bent over to vomit in an alley off the main road.

  5

  I carried Lily’s suitcase to a youth hostel away from the boardwalk. The room I was given had two beds with squeaky springs and the mosquito screens had flies trapped on it. Every time a car came past the road underneath, the walls would light up yellow. It felt as if I were sitting inside a dying light bulb. It turned out that when I took Lily’s shoulder bag I also stole her wallet, which had a further hundred dollars, some credit cards and her driving licence. The picture on the driving licence scowled at me. Presumably most people can conjure an image of their mother from childhood, but my memories are either from photographs or they’re physical. I can’t imagine what she used to look like, but remember fragments of her holding my hand too tight in a supermarket, the texture of her legs when I grabbed them, the extreme comfort of a silk blanket my dad’s older sister gave me when I was born, which Lily used to wrap me in. Sometimes, when I’m anxious, the soft area between my fingers lifts up and tingles in memory of that silk blanket that I used to drag between my baby fingers. Odd things made me think of her, but I didn’t think of her very often. For example there’s a particular brand of cheap hair dye that used to make my stomach turn, only I couldn’t possibly have remembered the smell of henna and peroxide from when I was under the age of three. Similarly I’m convinced that we were overrun by a plague of ladybirds around the time Lily left, but Dad doesn’t remember anything of the sort.

  “There weren’t any ladybirds,” Dad claims, but it would be just like him not to remember those leggy red shells gradually multiplying so they drowned in my bathwater and got stuck in the creases of my baby clothes. Ladybirds are meant to be lucky, which is strange considering the rhyme about flying away home your house is on fire and your children are gone. The ladybirds would fly at any available light source and then jump away from the heat, panicked, a little embarrassed, like a child touching an electric fence. A second later they would tuck their petticoat wings back under their shells and lift up for the light bulb again. I’m sure they formed mass graves in the bedside and kitchen light fixtures, all around the time Lily left.

  I took off Lily’s leather jacket and folded it over my arm, then placed it on the bed. I folded the three stolen dresses, smoothing away the creases and piling them up on the bed. They smelt of floral perfume. Then I took out the shoes – the red stilettos, black knee-highs, little grey ballet pumps – and put them to the side of the suitcase, under the metal legs of the little single bed. There were shadows of dirt on the inside of each shoe, like dislocated shadows. In a plastic cover under an elastic strap in the roof of the suitcase were typed papers full of legal jargon about the Pink Hotel – proxy, aforementioned, hereafter. Also under the strap were a “Certificate of Completion” and an “Evaluation Report” from a nurse’s training college in a place called Glendale. It said she was “dedicated and enthusiastic”. Tucked away near the report card was a photograph of Lily wearing pink scrubs, with her arm around a debonair-looking old man. It said, “Teddy and Lily, Malibu Mansions” on the back. Then there was a pile of road maps, mostly of American states – Nevada, Alabama, California – but also of European cities – Florence, Berlin, London. The road maps had routes marked on them, the ink making funny patterns on the lattice of roads. Perhaps she travelled and never tried to find me. I tried to imagine Lily in London, sitting on an underground platform or walking through the polluted circus of Finchley Road trying not to catch anyone’s eye or step on the cracks. I wondered if she’d ever watched me from afar and not made contact: perhaps she’d seen me playing football, or at school, or waiting tables at the café.

  I hoped to find a picture of Dad or of me among the rubble of memories tucked away in the suitcase, but the pictures were mostly of Lily herself. There were pictures of Lily and her husband swimming in a rooftop pool, Lily drinking red wine somewhere in the countryside, Lily wearing a diamante cocktail dress and fur cape. I looked at a Polaroid of Lily standing with a motorcycle outside a blue concrete building under a sign saying “Eagle Motorcycles”. This was the same bike that she was standing with in the photograph on her table at the Pink Hotel, which I supposed was her bike, perhaps the one she died on. The bike in the photo was slim and shiny, with a curve
d black-leather seat and silver handlebars.

  In a side pocket of the suitcase were Christmas and Birthday cards all bundled together along with postcards and letters. Some of the cards were from the man called Teddy from the debonair “Malibu Mansions” photo. The most arresting letters were the ones typed on thin paper and signed off “with love, for ever, for always” rather than with a name. The typewriter had bruised the paper with long lines of indentations. I imagined Lily running her own fingers over the words like they were Braille. “The sky is blood-red outside my window tonight and I’m thinking of you,” one of them began. “The first time we met you were holding a small red umbrella. Remember? And now the colour red makes me think of you.” There were no dates or names on the pretty letters. “Later, I came to know your little red dresses,” the letters continued, “and the army of incendiary lipsticks on your dresser”. The letters made me feel like an eavesdropping child flummoxed by adult vocabulary and emotional dynamics. I folded the letters along their original creases and placed them back into the case. I figured they were from the red-haired man, and felt guilty. Perhaps he’d report the theft to the police, telling them to look for a girl with a baseball cap and red suitcase. Of course, the pretty love letters could have been from David. In any case I would have liked to have found the magazine photo David mentioned, from when Lily was a model and he met her for the first time.

  I didn’t dream about anything in the hours after Lily’s wake. It was the black-hole sort of sleep where you don’t wake up refreshed. I fell asleep in my clothes on the bed and eight jet-lagged and dreamless daylight hours later I opened my eyes to find my body thick with sweat from sun pouring in through the hostel window. I took a deep breath and listened to funny sounds in the corridor outside. In the next-door room, two Australians were arguing about the merits of bamboo over fiberglass in the surfboard-manufacturing process. Outside the window a little girl was singing a pop song, a siren was screaming, and there was an infomercial for laser-eye surgery going on somewhere else. Lily’s clothes were strewn accusingly over the floor. I dragged one of her halter neck tops over my head. I’d been wearing the same T-shirt for ages, and it stank of skin and sleep. I put my own tracksuit bottoms on, my own scuffed trainers, and stuffed my Adidas zip-up hoodie in my rucksack.

  6

  The streets of Venice Beach were quieter than they’d been the day before, yet still strange. Elderly ladies in vast sunglasses were knitting on the bench where David and I had smoked Lily’s cigarettes. There were rollerbladers everywhere, zipping around pumped-up body builders and tourists wearing bum bags over big pastel T-shirts. I stopped to watch an old lady reading tarot cards and a woman in a tie-die dress making jewelry boxes out of shells. Eventually I arrived at the Pink Hotel, suitcase in hand. Everything looked different in the light. It was more ragged, with canned laughter from a sitcom jangling in the foyer and a couple of surfers drinking soda on broken sofas. There were still beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays scattered around, and the air was stale like nothing had really been cleaned properly yet. A concierge girl looked up at me over a pair of tortoise-shell Ray-Bans balanced on her freckled nose. Her skin looked a bit green.

  “We’ve all got hangovers from hell, babe, sorry,” the girl drawled. “I’m sure not going to be the one to disturb Mr Harris today. No way.”

  “He’ll want to see me,” I said. “I think he’s probably looking for me, even.”

  “He’s not looking for anyone, believe me,” she said. “We had a big party last night, and now the cleaners have gone on strike and... you know? It’s just not a good day.”

  “He was looking for me last night,” I said.

  “He doesn’t want to see anyone,” she said. “He’s asleep.”

  I paused, thinking the girl was turning greener in front of me.

  “But you’ve spoken to him today?” I said. The girl shrugged her bony shoulders.

  “The TVs on up there and he’s been clomping around. But he’s asleep now, so call back later if you really need to speak to him.”

  Part of me considered leaving the suitcase there with the concierge girl, but I didn’t want to abandon it before I’d spoken with Richard. I wanted to know why Lily became a nurse, for example, and when she was a model. I wanted to know if she mentioned me, and whether Richard had written her those love letters.

  “Can I leave a note?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, giving me a piece of paper and a pen, but when it came to writing something down I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Just tell him someone dropped by to give the suitcase back?” I said. “Tell him I’ll come by again in a few days.”

  “Sure thing,” said the girl, looking at the suitcase in my hand. “I’ll tell him you’ll come back later. What’s your name?”

  “He doesn’t know me,” I said. “Just say the girl who took the suitcase.”

  “Sure,” said the girl, frowning for a second, then going back to her computer screen.

  I smoked a couple of Lily’s cigarettes in the car park outside a 7-11 near the Pink Hotel. Maybe Richard was so drugged that he wouldn’t remember me stealing the suitcase at all. My thumbnail fondled the zip of the clasp of Lily’s suitcase, which seemed hot under the West Coast sunshine. I particularly wanted to touch the silk fuchsia sundress for some reason. My skin lifted at the idea like it used to lift when thinking about my silk blanket when I was a baby.

  After a while I went into the 7-11 convenience store and bought a phone card from the teenage shop assistant. The buttons on the parking-lot payphone were all sticky, and it rang for ages before Daphne’s irritated voice arrived at the receiver. I could imagine her oval face in the darkness, tumid with sleep and floral-smelling moisturizing lotion. Her cheek might have been momentarily scarred with the imprint of creases from the frilled edges of her special silk pillow that didn’t make her hair frizz during the night. She always looked older in the morning, her skin a landslide that righted itself slowly throughout the day.

  “Hello?” she gulped, and then coughed. “Who is this?”

  “Me,” I said quietly.

  “Stupid girl,” Daphne immediately snapped over the crackled phone line, “get the hell home, alright?” I imagined Dad, his hairy belly under the stolen bedspread, his hands reaching over to grab the phone from Daphne’s fingers.

  “You think I don’t check our bank balance? I want you on the next plane home,” said Dad sternly, and I could imagine him crossly putting on his glasses in the dark. “Right now. You hear? Get the next plane home or we’ll be calling the police,” he said.

  “We absolutely will,” Daphne said in the background. I couldn’t think what to say: my mind went blank and my tongue felt twice the size of my mouth. I looked down at my scuffed trainers on the tarmac, and my hands holding a cigarette like a talisman. There wasn’t anything to do except put down the phone on Dad. I often find it hard to say what I mean. It’s like the person who speaks isn’t the person who thinks sometimes. My gut reaction was defensive, but they had every right to be angry. The little café Dad owned was off Finchley Road, an asthmatic motorway that runs from Swiss Cottage tube station in London. It was part of a row of four shops – a shoe shop, a newsagents, a hair salon and us. We lived in the flat above the café, which faced a string of nice terraced houses with manicured front gardens on one side, and on the other South Hampstead Rail Station and a massive, sprawling, grey-brick estate. I used to go to school a stone’s throw away from the estate, but when I was twelve I moved to a grammar school further away. The walls of the café were pastel-blue, with flowers stencilled along the edge, but the continual fizz of frying had turned the paint grey at the top. Every day after school I’d sit cross-legged on the industrial freezer in the backroom and do my homework. Dad never made me waitress on weekdays, only Saturdays and Sundays, because Grandpa had made Dad work after school and he never got good grades. Dad dropped out when he was sixteen and didn’t want that to happen to me. After fin
ishing my homework I’d either help Dad with the accounts or I’d get my bike and go play among the grey stone walkways and interlocking tenements behind the café. The estate was a little town in itself, and shook every time a train passed underneath. It was a long, thin grey structure that curved along one side of the train tracks for maybe half a mile. Each flat had a balcony with dried-up plants dripping off them, or washing lines draped across, or beer-sponsored sun umbrellas that looked like they’d been stolen from a pub garden. The area around this was a labyrinth of pathways, stairways, playgrounds and hidden corners with flowerbeds everywhere. I suppose an enthusiastic architect assumed they’d be kept full of geraniums and daisies, but they were always full of dried dirt and ivy. There was one old lady in the estate who would potter around planting the odd solitary flower. She wore a wide brimmed sun hat with tracksuit bottoms that were too small for her. The elastic caught at her calves, leaving her ankles bare. She’d plant a single purple chrysanthemum in a forest of nettles, but a week later the flower would be dead.

  After putting down the phone on Dad, I sat down on the kerb with Lily’s suitcase in front of me. A few moments later through the Californian heat and the rising chatter of car doors slamming in the increasingly busy 7-11 parking lot, the phone started to ring back. It jangled anxiously, and a bony dog started to bark. A graceful man wearing lip-gloss and a sailor’s cap looked down at me, then looked at the phone. I thought for a second the sailor was going to answer it, but he just kept walking. It seemed to ring on for ages, but when it stopped I lit a cigarette with Lily’s green lighter and tried to feel calm in the sunshine. I opened the suitcase on the tarmac and ran the cool hem of the fuchsia sundress between my fingers. I smoked with one hand and pulled at the silk with the other. After a moment the sun heated the silk, and it wasn’t soothing any more. Everything felt sticky in the sunshine. There was a brown envelope at the bottom of the suitcase that I hadn’t opened the day before. I thought it was sealed, but actually it was just sticky and old, and opened easily. Inside were a wedding licence and two photographs. The first photo was a faded Polaroid, labelled “Lily Dakin marries August Walters, in Jackpot, Idaho”. In this photo Lily looked like she was playing dress-up in a stiff “party dress” that pinched her throat. She wore her hair tied in a schoolgirl ponytail on top of her head, with a pair of rock-and-wire homemade earrings and two strands of limp hair dangling over her face. The boy had a thin shirt, two sizes too big for him, but he was even prettier than Lily. He had sandy hair, liquid blue eyes and a damp pink mouth like a bow that could be unravelled with a joke or a curse. They both stood hesitantly on the edge of childhood. The photograph was fading, and had a sickly flash in the left-hand corner, where the colour had been sucked up. The groom looked as if he might still race toy cars when nobody was looking, and the bride looked like she might still collect furry stickers or play with dolls.