There were some cars parked on the kerb just to the right of the youth hostel, and I glanced at an old green car that looked nothing like David’s snazzy SUV. Fast-food packaging was strewn on its passenger chair, and pine-tree air fresheners hung on the dashboard in front of a man with a thick neck and sharply parted black hair. I stared at the driver for less than half a second before he glanced up from a magazine he was reading and stared me straight in the eye. He revealed a squat face, stuck on a neck as big as my waist, and a gold stud in his nose. I caught my breath – feeling that calm white heat that comes from a sudden rush of adrenalin. I slowly turned away from the green car – a Volvo, I think – and started walking in the opposite direction, past the entrance of the Serena Hostel and then towards the liquor store on the corner, but the green Volvo driver with the schoolboy haircut was already stepping out of the car in my direction.
The next few seconds moved quickly. I’d got around the corner by the time the man caught up with me. We were outside a blue apartment complex crawling with bougainvillea when he put his hand on my bare shoulder to stop me walking any further.
I stopped walking. Fighting always felt intimate to me. Lily had avoided making physical contact with me if she could help it, but after she left Dad and Grandma didn’t touch me much either. My friend Mary and I used to spend a lot of time scuffling with friends on the football fields instead.
“Richard just wants to see you, kid,” said the man with the nose stud. The skin of his hand felt colder than I expected, I guess because his car was air-conditioned and he’d been waiting in it for hours before he saw me. I could have broken into a run, but I wouldn’t have got very far in Lily’s stupid red stilettos, and he probably would have grabbed me. So I stayed put and tried not to bite my lip.
“Did you follow me back here from that bar the other night?” I said over my shoulder. The man’s cold hand ran down from its resting place on my shoulder to curl itself around my wrist, which he twisted slightly behind my back. It didn’t hurt, but my muscles strained, and we both stood quite still. I shivered.
“Where’s the suitcase, then?” he said.
“I dumped it in a skip downtown last week,” I said. “I don’t want Lily’s shit. Where’s Richard? I looked for him at the hotel yesterday and the hotel was all boarded up. He doesn’t answer his phone or anything.”
“I’ll take you to see him,” the man said, and turned me around so I was facing towards the hostel entrance and his car. He still had my wrist twisted behind my back.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, and nudged me forwards with his shoulder. I leant back to stop moving, but he twisted my wrist so sharply that I found myself doing what his body was telling me to do, and walked forwards in the direction of the hostel and the car.
Even though it was only early evening and still bright, nobody on the streets did anything. It was like everyone was in a different movie from me or something. A middle-aged woman with shopping bags walked past without stopping. She had very blue eyes, which looked directly at me, then escaped towards the street in front of her. When we got to the corner outside the liquor store I started to struggle, because people were always going in and out of that shop. I wriggled in the man’s arms, and he twisted my arm back further, but it didn’t hurt enough to stop my struggling.
“Get off me,” I said, fighting under his grip now, twisting so he had to force my other arm behind my back and hold me. I was beginning to panic. I could see the man’s green car parked twenty metres away on the kerb, and however much I squirmed he just kept squeezing harder. Nobody from inside the liquor store looked my way, and no one came out.
“Get the fuck off,” I said, and kicked backwards at him like a horse. I missed his knee, but caught his toes under Lily’s high-heel shoes and the man loosened his grip for just long enough for me to break away.
He only lost contact with my arm for maybe half a second, enough time for me to take three steps in the opposite direction from his car. Just as he grabbed me again, jarring my shoulder, David appeared around the opposite corner of the block two hundred meters in front of us.
“David!” I shouted. David had appeared, staring at the floor, but he looked up when I shouted his name. His lolloping gangster walk broke immediately into a lolloping run like a lazy giraffe. “David!” I shouted out again, and without warning the man with the nose stud wrenched my rucksack off my shoulder and dropped his grip on my arm. The sudden release of pressure made me stumble in Lily’s shoes. The thief only caught my eye for half a second, then immediately started to walk away down the street with my rucksack in his hand. Perhaps he was scared of David for some reason, or perhaps the reason was merely David’s looming size. I took a few steps after the thief, but I was so disorientated and unsteady on Lily’s heels that I tripped over a broken piece of pavement, and when I scrambled up to my feet again David was there next to me.
The streets kept flowing forwards. Across the road on the right was the empty ice-cream shop with a rare customer licking a chocolate ice-cream cone. The customer’s tongue seemed very long, lapping in and out like a gecko in the heat, and she raised her eyes to gawk at me. An elderly man was smoking a pipe at a bus stop. He stared at me through the bubble of his pipe smoke. Even a bag lady was ogling at me. She was wearing torn leggings and a felt hat, clutching a shopping trolley full of blankets, empty bottles and recyclable cans.
“What just happened?” David said, anxiously glancing around the street. I could smell myself, particularly my own underarm sweat and the slight scattering of blood at my knees. The man with the nose piercing was getting in his car, and I didn’t try to stop him or scream. The man even caught my eye as he closed the car door, but David was there now, and I didn’t know what to say. Words stuck in my mouth, and it was almost a relief to see there was a little bit of blood on my knees, articulating some pain for me.
“My bag just got stolen,” I said shakily to David.
“By who?” David said.
“He’s gone. It doesn’t matter. There was nothing in my bag really.” And in a second the man really was gone, driving off down the street in his dirty green car.
“Did he hurt you?” David said.
“No,” I said. “It’s fine, there wasn’t even anything worth having in the bag.”
“Shall we call the police? What did he take?” David said.
“Nothing valuable,” I said. There was maybe twenty dollars in the bag. The letters, photos and clothes were all in the locker at the hostel, but the key to the locker was in the bag, which I suppose was what the man wanted. I guess he’d been watching, and knew I kept the suitcase in there. I guessed the man would go through the bag and watch me from somewhere, waiting to see whether I went into the hostel or went away with David. I didn’t want anyone to have the suitcase. I wanted it myself. Richard had known Lily for years, he didn’t need the evidence of her existence in the way that I needed it. I wriggled my toes in Lily’s shoes.
“Can I borrow your phone for a second?” I said to David, and when he presented it, I turned away from him to get the number of the Serena from directory enquiries. The hostel was two seconds away, but I didn’t want to risk the man being there, standing in the foyer.
“He’s an ugly guy with a thick neck and a nose stud,” I said over the phone to Vanessa. “He’ll come in with my locker key, but please don’t give him the suitcase, okay? Tell him there is no suitcase in that locker and you don’t know what he means. It means a lot to me. It belongs to my mother. Will you tell Tony and whoever else is working?”
“Have you called the police?” Vanessa said.
“I don’t want to call the police right now, but please don’t give him anything from the locker, okay? Please?”
“I’ll make sure no one takes your suitcase,” she said soothingly, as if this was a daily occurrence. “If the little shit comes, I’ll get Tony to have a chat with him.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. “It means so much to me.�
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“No problem,” said Vanessa.
I thought about what was in the rucksack. The Enkidu book was in there, still unfinished, along with half a sandwich I’d eaten for breakfast and a pack of cigarettes I’d bought that morning. The only important thing apart from the locker key was my wallet, which Dad had bought me for my sixteenth birthday. Dad had been so sweet, giving me that present. He usually gave me things to do with football. Every Christmas, a new football shirt. Every birthday, a brand new football. Not that I’m complaining, I liked footballs and used to wear a lot of football shirts, but the wallet had been a remarkable change from the norm. It was a man’s wallet, made of real leather with a green silk lining. Green is my favourite colour. It also had the passport photo of Lily, Dad and I, from when Lily was a kid, which obviously I put in there, not Dad.
David put his huge hands on my little shoulders and smiled down at me. I had to tilt my head in order to look at him.
“My wallet was in there,” I said, very aware of how close my lips were to his neck, and very aware of his smell. I paused and realized that my hands were shaking. He took his hands off my shoulders and I felt embarrassingly warm, weirdly and unexpectedly girlish. He took his sunglasses up off his eyes. He still looked unwell, with puffy eyes, but he smiled at me. He was wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I have never wanted to touch anything so much as I wanted to reach up and touch him just then.
“Your hands are shaking,” he said to me.
“They’ll stop in a minute. Happy birthday,” I smiled.
“I’m so sorry I was late,” he said. “This wouldn’t have happened if I’d been on time.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, feeling bashful.
Bashful wasn’t something I did. Before LA, like I said, Laurence was the only boy I’d ever slept with, but I’d also never kissed anyone except for him. Kissing always made me feel squeamish. I would be as likely to let someone’s tongue inside me as any other body part. Laurence was skinny and tall, with pale hair and pale eyes. He smoked a lot of dope and had a messiah complex, always coming out with platitudes such as “people who fight fire with fire usually end up burnt” or “we come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see them”. We’d been friends since we were ten, when I tricked him into jumping off a wall. He broke his leg, and I was forced to go visit him every day for a fortnight. There was never anything romantic between him and me. Part of my punishment for tricking him into jumping off the wall was that every time Dad made me visit him, Laurence persuaded me to show him my knickers or my nipples until I’d earned his forgiveness. He never touched, just looked. At the time I didn’t have a clue why he wanted to see my underwear so often. Years later we did have sex a couple of times when we were bored or high, but I found it about as interesting as showing him my nipples when I was ten.
Unlike Laurence’s precocious serenity, David seemed strangely unsure of his surroundings half the time. He was turning thirty-two, but in a way seemed younger than me, like he wasn’t sure how to behave. We spent his birthday sharing a coconut curry in an over-lit Thai restaurant near his flat. Thai pop music whispered from televisions in the corners of the room, where distraught Thai pin-up boys tore off their T-shirts and sung about love.
After I cleaned my bloody knees up in a toilet cubicle, David and I sat at a window table looking out through bamboo blinds and a dusty window onto a big empty car park. Bored valets in ragged clothes read porn magazines on the kerb. David and I talked about how he started taking photographs on Coney Island and how he moved to Los Angeles when he was twenty.
“Did you meet Lily in New York?” I said.
“Who?” he said, then realized. “No, I met her in Los Angeles,” he said, looking a bit distracted and perturbed at the mention of her. “I moved to Los Angeles and did fashion work, lived the high-life for a while before I got into paparazzi stuff. I worked on movie sets, in art departments, too, cos I like taking behind-the-scenes photographs. Paparazzi work is a kind of back-stage photography, only on a grander scale, and guerrilla-style.” He smiled, and told me he enjoyed it more than fashion photography, although it was less glamorous.
“I’d love to be a screenwriter,” I said. “I want to write horror or sci-fi movies, the B-rate stuff that goes straight to video.”
“Like The Astounding She Monster?” he said.
“You’ve seen that?” I said, amazed. It was this 1950s gangster flick about a gorgeous alien whose touch was deadly, which I’d seen with Dad. “Have you seen The Butchers?” I said. “I used to watch these movies all the time as a kid. They’re amazing. How come you watched them?” I whispered at him, laughing.
“My Dad liked them,” he said.
“Mine too,” I smiled.
“You get on with your Dad?” he asked.
“Sort of. We fell out when I was seventeen because I got expelled from school, and he never really got over it. He doesn’t really care that much, but that’s all right in the grand scheme of things, you know. I’m fine without him. You get on with your Dad?”
“He’s still in New York. Lives in a nursing home on Coney Island, right near the tenement building he was born in. He’s a hit with the ladies there, he still takes women on dates to get cotton candy and sugar popcorn like he did when he still had teeth.”
“Probably why he doesn’t have teeth any more,” I said, smiling.
There was a Thai quiz show on the television. The contestants had to invent acronyms out of random words. David and I watched the show during a pause in our conversation.
“This is fun,” David said, and half-smiled at me. “You’re making my birthday nearly bearable.”
“What would you be doing if I wasn’t here?” I asked.
“I’d be watching this Thai game show and eating curry on my own,” he said.
“No you wouldn’t,” I laughed, wondering. “Do your friends know it’s your birthday? Are you seeing them later?”
“Na, I don’t shout about my birthday from the rooftops any more,” David shrugged.
“I’m glad you’re having fun,” I smiled.
“Fun: Fanatical Urban Nuns,” he replied, with a nod to the game show on the television flashing with static above us.
“Fanatical: Four Ambidextrous Nymphs Attacked The Igloo Causing... Atrocious Laughter,” I said, taking a while to think of each word.
“Nymph: Not Your Mouth Please Honey,” he said.
“Honey: Happiness... Offers No Escape Yet,” I said.
He laughed.
“True,” he said.
It was late by the time our conversation stalled a little and we both looked out of the window at the car park and the scraggly valets. I was worried about going back to the hostel that night. Richard or the man with the nose stud might still be waiting for me, or the hostel might have called the police if someone had come in to claim the suitcase. Or the suitcase might be gone, which I didn’t want to think about either. I certainly didn’t want to talk to the police, but I was most scared of Richard and the man who’d stolen my bag.
“Hey David,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t think I’m weird or anything, but I don’t suppose I could sleep on your sofa? Just for tonight. I don’t mean,” I said. “You know. I really mean the sofa, like not in a euphemistic coffee way, in an actual sofa way.”
And I really did mean it in an “actual sofa” sort of way, not in the confused way I’d let August light my cigarette on the fire escape outside the Dragon Bar. I didn’t want to have to go back to the Serena that night, but I didn’t want to ruin things by sleeping in David’s bed that night. I wanted to sleep on David’s sofa.
“Of course,” David said simply. “No worries.”
“It’s not that I’m scared of that jerk from before, it’s just that it’s late and they sometimes rent your bed to someone else if you’re not there by eleven,” I said. “But not if it’s any trouble or anything.”
“No worries,” he smiled
. “I’m actually working tonight, though. There’s some stuff happening around and about, so I won’t be in the apartment.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Positive,” he said.
“Sure?”
“Sure,” he said.
“What sort of stuff is going on? Celebrities?”
“People are more interesting at night. You get to see what you’re not meant to see if you go out at night.”
“Are you an insomniac?” I asked.
“Recently,” he said. “A bit.”
David’s flat was within walking distance from the restaurant. He had an amazing collection of bad horror films, just like Dad did, but his walls were also covered with bookshelves. Obviously he was a lot older than me, but it didn’t necessarily show until I realized how much more information might be in his head than was in mine. English was my best subject at school, but I hadn’t really read much. I later discovered that the most beat-up and scribbled-on of David’s books were by Hemingway and Capote, but two entire walls of his small flat were covered in bookshelves. There was Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Mark Twain, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger and loads of beautiful books on photography that he kept in a mysterious order based on merit rather than alphabetized by title or artist. There were no personal photographs on his walls, none of his toothless father or dead mother or Lily, but there was a whole set of prints in which random people were seen from behind. There was an old lady with her back to the camera, a little girl running away from the camera, a skinny woman in a miniskirt putting her middle finger up to the camera and a photograph of a busy shopping street in which everyone’s face was in some way hidden by hats, other heads or pillars. The photographs were all framed, yet they were somehow desolate. There were no close-ups or faces.
The Pink Hotel Page 10
