The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  “Did you love her?” I asked.

  August nodded.

  “Sure,” he said. “Of course I did. I married her.”

  August let me stay at his flat above the bar that night, because it was late and the West Hollywood hostel was a while away. He looked nervous when I asked to stay, but he couldn’t really say no at that point. He relaxed once we were at his place, though, him sitting on the mattress, me on the sofa. It was just one room with a beat-up-looking sofa, a mattress, and a tiny kitchen table. He gave me pyjamas trousers to wear with a T-shirt. He still tried not to look at me, although his eyes kept flickering over to tiptoe across my skin and then jump away again. It felt strange, almost powerful, that I was making him nervous, even if it was only by association.

  “Are you sure I don’t look like her?” I said to August. I glanced up at him and tried not to bite my nails or tear up loose skin on my fingers and draw blood.

  “Not really,” he said. “I don’t know, you seem like more of a... tomboy than she was. Right? You walk different. You seem quieter than her, too.”

  I shrugged.

  “Why did you divorce, then?” I asked. “If you loved her?”

  “Life isn’t that simple. We grew apart, I guess,” he said.

  “You said she left you,” I said.

  “We grew apart, then she left me,” he grinned. He had a nice smile. “For most of the time we were married she had this awesome enthusiasm, you know? She would suck you into her moods, her whirlwinds, but at some point she started spinning too fast. She worked at a bar downtown called Julie’s Place and started having an affair. I’d met the guy a few times at parties and stuff. He was some slime ball who lived above Julie’s bar, the sort of guy who’d sell his grandma for cigarettes.”

  “What was his name?” I said.

  “Richard, I think?”

  “She married him,” I frowned. “Richard Harris?”

  “That’s him.”

  “But – you know – he can’t have been that bad. I mean, as an influence. Lily did nurse’s training a year after they got married, you know? I found her report card from a nurses training college, and it said she was ‘dedicated and enthusiastic’.”

  “Well, she was enthusiastic,” August said. “But never for the right things, at least when I knew her. But you’re right, it’s not like I saw Richard’s good side. He just wanted me out of the picture.”

  “Did you put up a fight?”

  “Not much. Like I say, we weren’t on cloud nine any more by that point.”

  “Do you know when she was a model?” I said.

  “She was in a few things while we were together, toothpaste and stuff, but she was always missing auditions and forgetting to turn up to shoots. She wasn’t the most reliable girl, your mother, but you know that.”

  “She must have got better, to be a nurse,” I said hopefully.

  “Maybe she changed, who knows,” said August.

  We were quiet for a moment. The late-night air went silent. If you listened you could hear cars buzzing like insects down the road underneath his apartment and the click of a woman’s high heels on the damp streets. I turned my head to look out of the window and caught that 6:00 a.m. city moment where the workaholics and alcoholics, early birds and insomniacs fleetingly collide. There were spotty teenagers walking back from the night shift at some garage, dragging their oversized limbs and not talking to each other. One of them almost bumped into a smart businessman getting into his Mercedes, and the businessman swore, already hating the day.

  “She wanted an abortion. My Grandpa talked her out of it,” I said to August. He sat down on the sofa next to me and I turned my face towards him slightly. The beige linen sofa was uncomfortable, and it had a rip in the back, like he got it off the corner of a road and never fixed it up.

  “Well, sounds like she was just a baby herself; you can’t blame her for that,” he said.

  “Dad says Lily wasn’t the nurturing type – that’s why she left me, I suppose. My Grandma, my Dad’s mother, she gave Lily two goldfish to look after when Lily first let slip she was pregnant. Lily named one of them Satan, one Guinevere, and they were both dead within a week.”

  August laughed.

  “She vomited the only time they tried to make her breastfeed,” I continued. “She didn’t touch me if she could help it. She even left me in the supermarket once.”

  “On purpose?”

  I shrugged and put the tips of my fingers lightly on August’s brown skin, tracing the muscle of his shoulders, pressing my finger into the space like a button behind his earlobe. I paused for some sort of reaction, but he didn’t stop me. I kissed his ribs and tasted bone. August held my hips and hesitated for a second, then lifted my spine to place his body inside mine. He left his blue T-shirt on my torso and heat crackled bitingly at our cool skin. He did it with his eyes closed, as if the sight of me was peculiar, like I was a wet dream from his teenage days.

  10

  I hated sleeping in the same bed as anyone else, let alone in someone’s arms. Even the thought of sleeping while in physical contact with another human being used to make me so conscious of breathing that inhaling became as complex as keeping a drum rhythm. Even if comfortable, I’d itch to turn over into another position, my knuckles would ache to be cracked and I wouldn’t fall asleep until I’d excavated myself. I’m better with sleep now. That night, though, August fell immediately asleep a few moments after he came, while I lay awake and wished that I wasn’t sober. Sleeping in the same bed as someone seems more intimate than sex. Sleep has been a kind of demon in my life – seductive and spiteful. I used to talk in my sleep, throw things even. I’d wake up backwards on the bed with my pillows on the floor and my alarm clock in my sock drawer. In other centuries or other countries they might have called me possessed. I used to keep bottles of night-time cough syrup packed side by side in my bedside drawer, too, and took spoonfuls of codeine so that I’d fall asleep without having to invent stories that I had no control over, which, if I wasn’t careful, could sink into terrifying dreams that I had even less control over. I hated my imagination. I hated my lack of control over it. Then at the age of twelve I decided that the stories in my head were better than reality, and so I slept as much as possible for nearly a year and a half of my life without a drop of cherry-flavoured syrup.

  Lying next to pretty August in the small bed in Los Angeles, though, I didn’t sleep at all. I studied the shadows and tried not to move much or wake him up. I did a lot of thinking that night with my face against the wall and my back strategically making a barrier between our bodies. I wondered how much Richard wanted the suitcase back, and if David was still drunk. It sometimes seems that men and women are born to be a particular age. David was meant to be in his twenties. I’m meant to be fifteen, maybe. Children are allowed to be perplexed, but adults are judged on how well they mould to the world around them and how well they connect. If you’re no good at connecting then you’re a failure. There were some girls back in London with slick back ponytails and low-slung jeans who seemed only to be biding time until they were thirty-five. Their eyes were ahead of their sharp mouths as they sat on the railings, smoking dope and waiting for something that never happened. Often their skin was bracing itself for wrinkles while they blew smoke out with a flurry of guttural swearwords. These girls occasionally came to the football field to find boys, but they didn’t speak to me. There were chubby little boys with greased hair, pin eyes and oversized football shirts who ought to be nineteen and ever after would be faintly absurd. Occasionally a slump-shouldered woman would walk past the football field on her way back from the all-night supermarket, and it would be obvious that she was born seventy-two: her body only needed to catch up, and she might be considered beautiful.

  In the same way, August had the ephemeral expressions of an enthusiastic child still brimming on his face, and it made the laughter lines around his mouth stand out. He must have been unapproachably pretty at seventeen, but
his forehead had contours now and his nose was broken in the middle with a jagged bump. I wanted to draw a map of his body while he slept – like the maps in Lily’s suitcase of memories – especially the sheet wrapped around his right thigh, and how what must once have been a perfect washboard stomach now inched out, just a little, towards gravity. For a moment there was nothing else in the world but that yawning breeze in the white curtains and the gurgling dripping of a tap in the kitchen. There was nothing more than stretching naked next to a sleeping boy and running my fingers over a cool patch of material at the top of the bed, feeling the nerves down my spine awaken inch by inch. I rolled over onto my back and took in my surroundings, which for a moment did not make sense. Martini bars and cityscapes, dusty roads and blue miniskirts, everything came back to me simultaneously and with equal luridness.

  I turned onto my side and closed my eyes on the darkness. I lay there for hours trying to regulate my breathing. I thought about David again, then about August. I swallowed, and the body next to me stirred. It was a peculiar feeling, almost like I could still feel his touch on my skin, like I was indented. I told myself to calm down, be normal, fall asleep, but it felt as if ants were crawling between my muscles, my sweating skin kinetic with them. The air in the room didn’t have enough oxygen in it. I was breathing August’s carbon-dioxide, and my breathing sounded so loud I was surprised it didn’t wake him up. It wasn’t dark enough in his flat, either, and I could hear the day beginning outside. I couldn’t stand the proximity, the weight of his presence on the bed, his breathing near my ear, the feeling that he was full of dreams. He seemed to be smiling in the darkness. Eventually I pushed August’s bed covers slowly off my legs, peeling my anxious limbs from the mattress inch by inch, heavily, escaping. I stuffed Lily’s purple dress into my rucksack and zipped Lily’s knee-high boots on underneath August’s tracksuit bottoms. I took the Polaroid wedding photograph from the Enkidu book, placing it carefully on the pillow next to August’s sleeping body.

  Outside his block of flats I lit a cigarette and felt giddy with relief. Emptiness and air hit my skin. Skyscrapers flanked the busy road. Sucking happily on my cigarette I started to walk in the direction of a bus stop at the top corner of the street, Lily’s boots clicking on the pavement as I hugged her leather jacket over the T-shirt August had leant me to sleep in. The morning air was cold in the shadows of the Los Angeles skyscrapers and hot inside the pockets of light that snuck through between and above the buildings. My plane back to London was meant to leave that afternoon.

  11

  When I was eleven, all gangly-boned and scrawny with large gaps in my mouth that hadn’t yet been filled with second teeth, Grandpa (Dad’s father) bought me a box of magic tricks and a dictionary. Who knows what made him buy that particular pair of presents, but I’ll always like him for it. In the magic box there were red plastic thimbles, coloured marbles, little sponge bunny rabbits and playing cards with prank corners. At home the only full-scale mirror was in the tan-tiled bathroom on the back of the door. I would spend hours and hours sitting on the edge of the bathtub practising sleights of hand in the mirror, but if anyone except my own reflection watched me perform, I’d mess up. Similarly with the dictionary, I almost never used my favourite words out loud. I hoarded them and used them to communicate only with myself. “Beguiling,” I’d say before I fell asleep, thinking of cunning bumblebees. “Ecclesiastical,” I’d mumble in the bath. “Exacerbate. Nebulous. Redemption.”

  Grandma and Grandpa owned the café and the flat then. They slept in the main room, Dad slept in what became my room, and I slept on a collapsible bed in the living room. Grandpa died of prostate cancer during my Christmas school holidays when I was eleven, a month after he gave me the box of magic tricks and the dictionary. Grandpa had one lazy eye, which was a putrid yellow like the yolk of an old egg. The iris bled out into the white area, which was grey with age. It was difficult to know where he was looking, and I used to think that he did it on purpose. “Just keep practising, kiddo,” he’d say when he saw me, cross-eyed and dizzy, trying to look at two things simultaneously. I still don’t understand whether he was blind in one eye, or whether his eyes could focus on separate objects at the same time.

  Dad and I were with Grandpa in the hospice room when he died, but Grandma was in the cafeteria buying coffee. It was a white room with beige furniture, a framed seascape on the wall above the bed, and an itchy blue armchair near the little window where I was curled when Grandpa stopped breathing. It was like the hospice was trying to make death as banal as possible. I was reading a yachting magazine that I’d picked up downstairs, Yachting Digest or something, and was flicking through dull photographs of boats when I felt the air in the room congeal slightly. I knew that he was dead before I looked up, and my most coherent memory is of the shiny magazine page resting on my knee. The light from the frosted windows was hitting the curl of the page in such a way that the photo was almost obscured by a pillar of white glaze, but underneath there was a small white boat, photographed from above, ploughing through water. My throat tightened with the atmosphere, and I glanced up. “Desiderium,” I thought to myself, “a yearning for something that you once had, but is now lost.” It was a lovely word, like “desire” and “delirious” and “dearest” all smudged into one.

  Grandpa’s lazy eye was looking right at me, although his “real” eye was pointing in Dad’s direction. There was a puddle of gunk in the corner of both his eyes and a line of fluffy saliva on his frowning lips. Why hadn’t Dad wiped it off? The strange thing was, it didn’t feel like a very big moment. It didn’t feel like his “soul” left his body at that particular moment. He used to be a handsome man, he used to be charming, and he used to tell really dumb jokes all the time, mostly about politicians I hadn’t heard of. He used to wear colourful bowties and he used to give me pound coins when Grandma or Dad weren’t looking, but in my self-obsessed and childish opinion at the time, if he wasn’t doing any of these things then he wasn’t my Grandpa. Lying grey-skinned and vacant on the thin hospital sheets he didn’t look like anyone I knew. He looked like a painting or a sculpture before he died, and he looked like a painting or a sculpture after he died. When I glanced up from my yachting magazine, all I did was blink.

  “Dad?” I said eventually, when my father didn’t take his eyes off my Grandpa. “Dad?” I repeated.

  “I think he’s dead,” he said slowly, measuring the situation.

  “Shall I call a nurse?” I said calmly.

  “No,” Dad said.

  “He’s looking at me,” I said.

  “No,” Dad said again. My right leg, curled underneath my body, was welling up with pins and needles, but I didn’t move a muscle.

  “Dad?” I said again.

  “No,” he repeated.

  After that, Grandma had a number of strokes. She’d always been peculiar, though. For example nobody ever saw her eat. Ever. She was the talent behind the café, and a wonderful cook. She was the reason she and Grandpa started it in the first place, and the menu Dad cooked is still from Grandma’s recipes. She made fish pies and lamb stews and even fiddly, suburban middle-class dishes like cheese soufflé, but she never set a place for herself at the dinner table. Nothing made her happier than seeing Dad or Grandpa eat her cheesy mash potatoes or minced-chicken lasagna, but only water and instant coffee touched her lips in public. One time, when I was eight or nine, I came to get a drink in the middle of the night and saw her stuffing Ritz crackers in her mouth, the crumbs tumbling into the sink. I held my breath and stood still in the shadows while she tore open the wax paper and crushed the salty yellow biscuits into her mouth. She was wearing a cotton nightdress with teddy bears on it, and her hair was loose around her face. The crumbs stuck to her chin, and I could see the lumps struggling down her long, thin neck, like a mouse swallowed whole by a snake. The next morning the rubbish had been taken out before I woke up, and there wasn’t a crumb to be seen.

  She adored Dad. She was quiet about
it, as she was about everything, but he was her whole world. Although before she had the strokes she fed me and corrected my homework and drove me to football tournaments and was almost always kind to me, she did all that for him. She didn’t really approve of me, because of how I came into existence. Years later I questioned Dad about her eating habits, and he didn’t believe me, never having noticed that she didn’t eat. Dad didn’t notice the way Grandma watched us all devouring the food she made or the pleasure she took in every fat chip and slab of crumbly quiche she made in the café kitchen. Perhaps it was to do with food rationing during the war, or some confused remnant of her Irish Catholic upbringing. The way she buttered bread for chip buttes was like a man putting suntan lotion on his new bride, or a priest at the rosary. It’s funny what Dad never noticed. He didn’t even notice that she occasionally spoke to herself in a nervous, heated whisper, especially while she was cooking.

  A few months after Grandpa died, Grandma had the first stroke. I was practising my magic tricks in the bathroom when she collapsed onto the shop floor. As she screamed a gurgling, broken scream, Dad and I rushed out into the hallway and down the stairs. I was eleven and barefoot as I stumbled helter-skelter down the cramped staircase. She was sitting on the floor, half her face and body sort of melting, muscles sunken. I grabbed the phone and called an ambulance while Dad struggled to stop her thrashing out at him. She never really recovered, especially because the nurses kept making her eat. She had other strokes and died in a hospice six months later. Again I worried when “souls” left bodies, and whether they could leave before a person really died. Our neighbours, and people at the hospital, kept saying that Grandma “wasn’t herself”, but I wanted to know what that meant. She was strange before the first stroke. Was that strangeness part of her “self” or a deviation? When did she stop being herself? If she didn’t know she was different, was she unhappy? What happened to her “self”? How did she lose it?