The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  “You’re living with David,” Sam said.

  I nodded.

  “You’re a brave girl,” Sam said.

  “He doesn’t drink any more, he’s different,” I said.

  “I understand,” he said, not looking at me. We both stared forwards at a row of cars, a burrito stand and the back entrance to a large, flat-roofed, beige Starbucks. Both Sam’s window and mine were rolled down in his little car, and we were smoking anxiously out of them, our elbows dipping from the car, both of us sipping ice black coffee that felt amazing in the heat. The air was heavy and the car smelt horrible because we’d started using a Coca Cola can to throw our cigarettes into since yet another forest fire was raging through the hills above us.

  Every time we blinked that strange summer, fires hit the headlines. More often than not the dry air was thick with soot. The heatwave had finally ignited, and LA had a halo of fire over it. One of the fires even came close to consuming the Zoo, and they had to relocate all the animals before the fog and soot in the city turned into the smell of an exotic barbeque. One of the fires started when I was watching television at Sam’s house. His living room looked out on a layer of rooftops, and then out towards Griffith Park Observatory. Sam’s flat was a bric-a-brac of collectable figurines trapped in packaging. Each little Vampire Slayer, Darth Vader, Spider Man and Princess Leia was poised in earnest combat with the stale air still in their box, their panic-stricken painted eyes threatening mutiny. Apparently the toys were worth a fortune, though. He once told me that he had a comic-book collection worth more than his penthouse. When the fire started I was playing with the wax from some rose-scented candles. Sam was working in the other room. With red eyes and slow reactions, I dripped the wax onto my knee and made a dotted line up the inside of my thigh. Each blob of pale wax burnt my shaved thighs and left continent-shaped raw skin as I peeled off the wax puddles. Wax doesn’t turn me on. I like that immediate surface-level sting of it, but mostly it makes me feel nostalgic for crayons. In autumn I used to spend hours tracing around leaves from London trees, copying their veins like a cartographer. But hot wax did have a certain appeal, in relation to pain. Unlike cutting, wax burns didn’t leave a scar or any telltale droplets of blood in between the bathroom tiles. Wax was a clean, frivolous pain. While I dripped wax on my thighs I noticed the grazes on my knees had healed. I wondered where Richard was now, and if he’d forgotten about looking for me and looking for the suitcase. Vanessa said nobody had come to the Serena since the day the man stole my bag, so perhaps Richard had forgotten about me.

  I can’t remember what was on television at Sam’s place the night the crazy fire started, but the programme was interrupted to show footage of Griffith Park starting to burn. Then I looked up through the big window behind the television and saw the actual fire spitting up in the middle distance.

  28

  “The sky is blood-red outside my window tonight, and I’m thinking of you,” I read, closing my eyes to feel the sun on my body while imagining the anonymous author of the letters. I’d read the letters so many times, now, that the words were becoming familiar.

  “The first time we met you were holding a small red umbrella,” the man wrote. “Remember? And now the colour red makes me think of you.” I tried to concentrate on the words. “Later, I came to know your little red dresses,” the letter continued, “and the army of incendiary lipsticks on your dresser. That first sight of you made me think, immediately, of red-light districts, of the bullfighter’s tempting rag, of revving engines, of battle decks stained red from the start, so that the sight of blood would cause no alarm. These images flashed in front of me as you turned and smiled at me. Right now the sky outside my window is the colour of that nail polish you have called ‘The Battle of Magenta’. It’s making me think of you, but also somehow, of childhood.

  “I made paint once when I was boy,’ the typed words continued. “Carmine is a particularly deep red colour, different from Magenta, produced by boiling dried insects in water, then treating the resultant acid with alum, cream of tartar, stannous chloride or potassium hydrogen oxalate. Sometimes egg white, fish glue or gelatin were added, but since I had no fish glue or gelatin, I stole eggs from the fridge. What fascinated me most, apart from a natural boyish interest in boiling bugs, was that the quality of the carmine was affected by the temperature and the degree of illumination present during its preparation, sunlight being essential for a perfect hue. The colour red, then, in my eyes, was made from dead insects and sunlight. Perhaps I would have forgotten about sunshine and dead insects, if it wasn’t for that moment outside the café when I saw you, beautiful, swinging your red umbrella. And perhaps if I’d been unlucky enough never to have known that carmine was made from death and sunshine, I never would have fallen in love with you. With love, for ever, for always.”

  29

  The next day David was out, while Sam and I weren’t filming, so I sat around the swimming pool with the Armenian women again. They all wore faded swimming costumes, great big sunglasses, and sat with their feet in the chlorinated water until lunchtime most days, shelling peas or peeling potatoes into metal mixing bowls. I was wearing a navy-blue bikini that the Armenian ladies leant me, with a white T-shirt on top. Over the last weeks I’d started to sit with the Armenian women nearly every day, either reading Lily’s notes or one of David’s books.

  “I’ve lost my tea strainer,” one of the Armenian women yelped from inside a first-floor flat at the corner of the swimming pool courtyard. “Has anyone seen it?”

  “Look under the bed, that’s what my mother always used to say. According to my mother, everything that got lost could always be found under the bed,” said another woman. “If I lost my religious faith or my virginity, it probably would have been under the bed with the TV remote and my father’s dentures, as far as she was concerned.”

  “It’s a tea strainer, why would it be under the bed?” said the first woman, humourless.

  “Ah you were lucky,” said Dalita to the woman whose religious faith was under the bed. “Just one thing to remember! My mother, yes? She had a continual monologue, a waterfall, yes? Of advice. Whatever we were doing, she had advice.” Dalita put on a high-pitched know-it-all voice that was meant to be a parody of her mother: “See that flower, yes? That’s an Arataraticum. Lovely flowers. If you ever keep them indoors, remember not to over-water them. They’re delicate, yes? They’re delicate and they need a lot of sunlight.” Dalita continued, getting into the role and making her friends laugh. “Talking of which, aren’t you hot in that T-shirt, little one? Take it off or you’ll get heatstroke. If you ever do get heatstroke, put ice cubes under your tongue and on your wrists. Don’t believe anyone who tells you to take a cold bath, you’ll catch your death, yes? Talking of which, never bite ice cubes, you’ll break your teeth. It’s important to look after your teeth if you want a good husband...” Dalita took a breath. “She could go on for ever, a regular panic of strange advice.”

  “High heels ruin the shape of your feet,” remembered another woman. “Which is gobbledygook. I wore heels all my life just to spite her, and my feet are just fine.”

  “People don’t get what they deserve,” said another, “they have to fight for it.”

  “Do everything once,” said another woman, “was advice written by a dead man.”

  “Be careful what you wish for, it might come true,” said another of the women.

  “What about your mother?” said Dalita to me.

  “She told me never to start smoking,” I lied, somewhat randomly, lighting up a cigarette and offering them to Dalita. Dalita cackled, and took a cigarette from me.

  When I went upstairs, David was already back. He was in a playful mood. He had his camera out, and the minute I walked through the door, all sweaty from sitting by the pool, smelling of chlorine and sunlight, he snapped a photo of me. He smiled. It reminded me of the morning after Lily’s wake, when he wouldn’t stop taking photos in the dusty early light. I wondered if i
t reminded him of that too.

  “Don’t,” I said to him.

  “Smile, beautiful,” he said.

  “No,” I said, and turned around so my back was to him. We were both quiet and still for a moment, neither moving. I loved him, God. I did. Nothing mattered, not even Lily. Not Richard, not the Pink Hotel. Nothing. I knew the glass eye of his camera was on my back. I felt like a deer caught in range. My spine tingled underneath the sweaty T-shirt. My toes wriggled. Then I broke, and peeked over my shoulder at him. He immediately took a photo. Flash. I was dead.

  “Whatever happened to the photos from the beach?” I said after I turned away from him again and stood with my back to him, silhouetted by the window.

  “What photos?”

  “After the wake,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Probably at the office,” he said. His expression clouded for a second, then brightened again. “I’ll have a look. Take off your T-shirt, lovely thief girl.”

  “No,” I laughed. “Hey, David, why don’t you have any personal photos around the flat? Like the photo in your sock drawer of you and your friends in that car?”

  “Have you been snooping?” he smiled.

  “What happened to all those people? Like Sam and stuff? How come you don’t want to see them at all any more?”

  “I don’t remember those moments except from the photos. I don’t much remember the people, they didn’t mean anything. I dumped that ugly car. It reminded me of being drunk.”

  “And you dumped the friends, too?”

  David was silent for a moment.

  “If you take off your T-shirt then I’ll put photos of you all over my walls,” he said eventually. “To make up for my lack of personal history.”

  “Please don’t,” I laughed.

  “Come on,” he goaded. “Please get naked.”

  “No,” I laughed. “You take off your top.”

  So, of course, he took off his top without a moment of hesitation. He took off his T-shirts and then his trousers and then his boxers, until he was standing there starkers in the living room, just wearing mismatching socks. I laughed and glanced out of the window, because the living room looked out on the corridor. Anyone could have walked past and seen his tan line, his hairy legs. He had amazing calves: big, hairy, sinewy.

  “Now your turn,” he said. His gaze relaxed and unnerved me at the same time. His eyes were always mischievous, like he was thinking of a joke and I was the punch line.

  “Not going to happen,” I said, shaking my head. He took a step towards me and I took a step towards the door.

  “Please?” he said. “How about just one flip-flop?”

  So we laughed and he took some photos – of me laughing, of my head lost inside my T-shirt, of me taking off one flip-flop, then the other, and soon I was only wearing bikini bottoms, laughing for David in the living room. He kissed a freckle on my shoulder, and kissed my spine.

  30

  Sometimes I’d go to Julie’s Place when David was out. It was like I was tempting fate now that Richard hadn’t bothered with me for a while. I’d go back to the hostel and dress up in Lily’s clothes first – the fuchsia sundress and teardrop earrings, or the tight black dress and the red stilettos – then I’d change back into David’s dresses and wipe off Lily’s lipstick before I went home. Vanessa and Tony thought it was hysterical. They smiled when I went into the backroom dressed in jeans and came out in high heels and dresses. I don’t know what they thought I was doing, but they didn’t seem to mind.

  I was fascinated by the way Julie was beginning to look at me. It was so different from her derisive shrugs the first time I came to the bar. Now she looked at me in this strange, searching way, like a fleeting version of the way that David looked at me. She looked at me like she could see me, while before she’d looked at me like she was waiting for me not to be there. Now she would cock her head to the side and smile knowingly at me like she was my best friend. And she didn’t tell me I was too young to drink. Perhaps it was because I wore Lily’s clothes with more confidence. At Julie’s Place I found myself asking people questions all the time. How long would you wait in a restaurant for a date? Have you ever been arrested? Would you rather have a bath or a shower? What superhero would you be? If you had to lose one of your senses, what would it be? If you had to lose a limb which would it be? Do you have any piercings? There are mountains of people in my memory of those semi-drunken evenings, plus an insatiable desire to know what made each one of them happy or sad. The bravado of those conversations scared me, though, because no one told the truth. I don’t think it was their fault, though. I think the truth is actually very difficult to know about. It’s as hard to tell the truth as it is to see it in other people. These people presented bite-sized chunks of their identity, and wittily irritating one-liners that meant nothing to anyone.

  “Piercings? You can look for them later... ”

  “I’ll be batman if you’re cat woman...”

  “I’d wait for ever for you, baby... ”

  It felt like I’d spent each evening trying desperately to conjure cardboard cutouts into 3D form.

  Julie either spoke slowly, like a mouth on the moon, or a mile a minute, without punctuation, as if I were a tape recorder coming to the end of my capacity. Mostly she filled me up with a tizzy of words. “You know when I knew I was a heroin addict?” she said to me one evening, her jagged elbows on the bar and her wrists gesticulating wildly, “cos, believe me, at first it was recreational. But then it was New Year’s Eve and I was wearing a red Yves Saint Laurent dress on the F train into Manhattan, and there was a hobo next to me who’d just had a hit – but he’s nodding in and out, do you know what nodding is? He was happy. He was blitzed. And I knew I had to get help, because I wanted to be him. I didn’t want to wear silk blend and go look at paintings in an Upper East Side apartment, I wanted nobody to watch me shoot up in a corner some place, I could pass out easy enough when I wanted... ”

  “Did you lend Richard and Lily money particularly to buy drugs for the parties?” I interrupted. “Were they drug dealers or something? Maybe that’s why he just, you know, disappeared?”

  “Richard?” she said. “Richard?”

  “Lily’s husband,” I reminded.

  “I know who Richard is!” she said. She was high as a kite that night. The pupils of her eyes were dilated, bursting, and she was pouring vodka down her throat at an alarming speed. “They had amazing parties,” she said. “I hope he’s okay.”

  “Has anyone heard from him?”

  “Nobody’s heard from him since the wake.”

  “Did a guy called David Reed ever come to the bar? Maybe he met Lily here sometimes?” I asked.

  “I never forget a name,” she paused, then continued: “But there were lots of guys. Richard knew that. She was beautiful.”

  “Affairs?”

  “Sure. Of course. My God.”

  “With who?”

  “She and I weren’t tight like that, not after she divorced that pretty boy and started to understand the world. She followed me around like a dog when she first started working here, thought I was awesome, but she learnt fast. Anyway she wouldn’t have told me about her indiscretions, didn’t tell me about the men she fucked, cos Richard was my friend more than she was.”

  “Are you sure she had affairs?”

  Julie nodded and made herself another drink.

  “She modelled, right? Did she date her photographers?” I asked, smiling at Julie.

  “Richard didn’t like her modelling. He liked her being a nurse, you know? Fair enough. Her ego didn’t need fanning. And she had a good time as a nurse, it worked out well for them. God, Richard loved her.”

  “Lots of people seemed to,” I said.

  “And then they got the hotel, so she stopped nursing too,” Julie said. “I think then they were happy for a while.”

  “When did they buy the hotel, exactly?”

  “Oh,” she said and, just the
n, Julie’s elbow slipped off the bar. She nearly hit her chin on the metallic surface before righting herself with a giggle. The upward tilt of her thin lips didn’t suit her: it sort of stretched her face in all the wrong places. She was so thin, like a wig on a clothes pin. I never knew quite what was true in Julie’s ramblings. Sometimes she drank Coca Cola at the bar and looked haughtily at the youngsters around her drinking harder things and coming out of the bathroom with glittery smiles. Occasionally she’d get roaring drunk or high and whisper at me with pale lips that chewed the air and spat it out as mangled words. She’d talk of the buttercups in her garden at home, the time she wiped her arse with poison oak during a camping trip and nearly died, her compulsive fear of cockroaches, which reminded her of her father. One night Julie got paralytic, and I ended up taking her home in a taxi while one of the blue-eyed barmen locked up. Julie lived close to the bar, in the smoggy hills above Griffith Park. Her place looked small on the outside, with paint peeling off the stucco and big clumsy umbrellas of trees lolloping across the windows. We finally found her keys from the tissue-laden depths of her snakeskin purse and stumbled into the hallway. The ground floor was the top floor, with a worn red carpet and a framed promotional poster of The Nutcracker at the New York State Theatre twenty years ago. Then there was a narrow staircase that opened out onto a living room with hard-wood floors and yellow lace curtains covering a breathtaking view of winking late-night Los Angeles. It smelt like soup, just like Julie did, and there was no living-room furniture apart from a grey Pilates exercise ball, a blue foam mat and a black-leather bench press. There was drug paraphernalia – a syringe, a lighter – on the marble kitchen counter, next to some carrot sticks. There were lots of framed photographs all over the walls, of Julie at different stages of her life. There was Julie grinning behind the bar, Julie on a row boat with a man, Julie blowing out birthday candles at a small kitchen table. One picture caught my attention, of Julie and Richard and a bunch of people I didn’t recognize all posing outside Julie’s bar with their motorcycles. Richard’s motorcycle was slim and elegant, with a visible engine and leather seats just like the one in Lily’s photo. The other bikes were bigger, like most of the bikes in the mechanics shops I’d trawled through a while back.