The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  “Hello?” I said, mostly to myself. Then, as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that there was the silhouetted outline of a man on the other side of the window, apparently staring straight back at me.

  41

  I thought for a second that the man in the window might be David, and I stepped backwards, nearly losing my footing on a rock behind me. Then, as my pupils dilated, I realized that it was the man with the schoolboy haircut who stole my bag. He smiled at me from behind the glass, and instead of running I glanced absently around at smoke rising from the chimneys of far-away bungalows.

  “Hola,” the man said through the glass. “How’d you get here?”

  He disappeared from the window. I considered walking away, perhaps to the 99-cent-taco place, or another bungalow, but I stayed put.

  “Guess who’s at the door!” the thief shouted back into the darkened bungalow. There was a pause as doors opened and things shuffled inside, then the front door unbolted and opened a crack. I stood three metres from the door with my kitten heels embedded in sand. The person who opened the door had holes in his grey sports socks, and tattered linen trousers that dragged slightly in the dust. They were too big for him, and his white vest was yellow at the neckline. His gold chain was matted in his chest hair. A little smile appeared and then disappeared at the corner of his chapped lips, and he put small-framed sunglasses down over his green eyes. His red hair was longer than it had been at the wake, and he had a beard now. He took his time looking me up and down, with interest, and then he smiled at me.

  “Well then, hi at last,” he mumbled. I blinked. He stared at me through his sunglasses for another second, and then turned abruptly inside the bungalow and left the door open for me to follow him. “You better come in then, it’s a million degrees out there,” he said in his nasal New York accent while he walked away across the room, sticking his chest out and clenching his fist like he’d done at the wake.

  I wavered on the doorstep for a moment, but saw through the door that Lily’s red suitcase was lying open in the middle of the living-room floor. The “charming” man must have been Richard after all, not David. Lily’s dresses, boots, Christmas cards, letters and all the rest were lying there on a dirty white shag carpet in front of a fireplace. From the doorway the bungalow smelt slightly of paint, a bit like how Laurence’s fingers used to smell after he’d been out tagging London with spray paint. The front door led into a tiny kitchenette, but you could see over the counter into a messy living room. There was a taxidermy crow on the mantelpiece, and a taxidermy eagle on the coffee table. The crow’s beak was tilted upwards in a haughty smile, and a string of rosary or carnival beads glinted around its neck. There were beer bottles, some with candles shoved down their necks, some broken and used as ashtrays. A huge road map hung on one wall, just like the various doodled-on roadmaps in Lily’s suitcase of memories.

  It was the road map rather than the suitcase that made me follow Richard into the bungalow in the end. The map on the bungalow wall was of California, and as I got closer to it I saw that the coastline formed the basis of a naked woman’s spine, and her knees were crouched up near the border to Nevada, at Death Valley National Park. One of her nipples seemed to be made out of Lake Tahoe. The woman’s head was drawn up near Oregon at a place called Eureka, which was sort of funny. Jazz played quietly from some old speakers in the corner of the room, and the man with the pierced nose seemed to have disappeared into one of the doors off the living room. Along with the bits and pieces I recognized from the suitcase, there were other girlish things around the bungalow that suggested a woman’s presence, or the remnants of a woman’s presence – a bracelet on the counter, some moisturizer cream and a lipstick on the floor next to the sofa. On the coffee table, amongst Lily’s photos, was the one of Lily standing with her bike under the sign saying Eagle Motorcycles. You couldn’t see much except for powder-blue walls, a door and the dusty-looking sign, but of course I now realized that she was standing against a backdrop of desert. Her face looked sultry, but sort of eager, like she was impatient to go for a ride. Also open on the coffee table were the bunch of maps with their labyrinthine erotic doodles, the Christmas cards from Teddy, the legal documents and the love letters.

  All of the lights were off inside the bungalow, but one of the walls had a sliding door, which was open and led onto a patio made of packed sand and half-moon car tires. There were two metal chairs on either side of a table made out of a worm-scarred wooden door, which was covered in engine parts like springs and cogs and different-sized screws. A big metal awning threw shade over the patio. Richard was already sitting in one of the chairs, and he didn’t turn around or tell me to have a seat.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Richard said, not looking at me. “Nor is Jorge. I wanted Lily’s stuff back, that’s all. It’s not so unreasonable,” he said.

  “You got your friend to mug me,” I pointed out.

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” said Richard. “I would never have anyone hurt Lily’s daughter,” he said. “He just went to retrieve my property.”

  “Why did you wait so long before you tried again, once you knew where the suitcase was?”

  “Jorge clearly wasn’t very efficient. I had some shit to sort out, but when I went to the hostel all I had to do was ask and the nice lady gave the suitcase over. Easy.”

  “I tried to give the suitcase back, you know,” I said lamely, staring at the back of his head and then around the dusty landscape.

  “You didn’t try hard enough,” he said.

  Richard rolled a little metal screw around between his thumb and forefingers, then picked up a tiny nail file. He held the nail file to the end of the screw and stared at it as if about to start filing it down, but didn’t do anything. In profile he looked both rough and effeminate, like some sort of violent and graceful desert creature. At the wake he’d reminded me of a snake, but his face looked less vicious and startling now. In front of the bungalow were miles of desert and the occasional burnt-out or abandoned building, their scorched wooden beams raised in surrender. One was a house with a sloping roof and a rusted RV outside it, another was just a skeleton of a building rotting in the sunlight.

  “Were you reading Lily’s Enkidu book?” Richard said.

  “I didn’t get to finish it,” I said.

  “Nor did she,” he said. “Why are you here? I didn’t think I was actually going to get the pleasure of meeting you.”

  “I came to see where she died,” I said. Richard unclenched his freckled hands and moved his body around slightly to face me.

  “My name’s Richard Harris,” he said, but I didn’t take his freckled hand, or sit down in the chair next to his. However well spoken and “charming” he seemed now, when I looked at him I couldn’t shake the image of him lying unconscious on Lily’s unmade bed with cocaine in his nostril hairs and drool around his mouth.

  “Is there some way to get away from here apart from the bus?” I asked Richard.

  “You won’t shake my hand?” he said.

  I didn’t move or touch him. Touching Richard, even his hand, seemed repulsive. I missed David.

  “Will a cab come out here?” I asked.

  “Doubt it. Jorge can give you a lift somewhere, though. He lives near here and has a car.”

  “A green Volvo,” I said. “I know.”

  “Dirty thing,” said Richard. I didn’t say anything.

  “Jorge is a great friend,” Richard continued. “He’s a good guy. He makes the taxidermy birds.” I lit a cigarette. “He wasn’t going to hurt you. He just wanted to find out where the suitcase was and bring it back to me.”

  “Did you know she had a kid?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “She talked about me?”

  “She asked your Dad if she could have you come to LA once, you know,” said Richard. “She wanted to take you to Universal Studios or something ridiculous. I listened to the conversation they had. Your Dad said that
if Lily came to London she was welcome to take you to the cinema and pick you up from school and see how it went, but there was no way he’d let Lily hurt you again. So it was a no for Universal Studios.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “Indeed. I agreed, to be honest. He told Lily he felt sorry for her cos she was missing you growing up, and one week in Los Angeles wouldn’t solve that.”

  “Sounds like Dad,” I frowned, and Richard looked at me. I remembered how August had glanced furtively at me in his flat that first night, like he couldn’t place me and didn’t know whether to be familiar or distant with me. Richard was doing the same thing, stealing sideways looks and pretending not to.

  “Is that the only time she tried to contact me?” I asked.

  “She wouldn’t have been a good mother,” he said.

  “She wasn’t a good mother,” I said.

  We sat in silence for a couple of minutes. I put down the sunflower I’d bought to put on the road. It had lost a lot of petals, and the ones that were left seemed to be turning brown at the edges already.

  “Is that for her?” he said.

  I nodded, but my nod turned into a shrug. I thought about poor Dad, not knowing what to do with me all those years, and I looked around at the landscape of sandy hills and burnt buildings beyond Richard’s little bungalow.

  “What is this place?” I said.

  “A little business venture that fell through a few years back,” he said with a shrug, letting his eyes meet mine and stay there for a beat. “We were meant to sell it, but for one reason or another it became our secret little holiday home.”

  “Someone told me the two of you divorced?” I said.

  “Did Julie tell you that? You’ve certainly done the rounds, haven’t you? Yes, Lily and I were divorced when she died. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we were out here the weekend she died,” he said. “Sorting our shit out.”

  “Did you have an argument that night?” I said carefully. “I mean, why was she driving so fast, late at night?”

  “Oh, she always drove fast,” he said. “She went out to clear her head.” He paused, thinking about it. “Can I give you some advice?”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s a bit sentimental, this advice. I’ve been getting quite sentimental in my old age, or since she died. Since she died I feel like I’ve aged.”

  “Okay,” I shrugged.

  “There are a finite number of people who will ever see you,” he said carefully. “Really see you. Lot of people loved your mother over the years, which you’ve probably worked out from your little paper-trail treasure hunt. But I saw her. We had a lot of the same flaws, which made it hard sometimes. Eventually we were making each other insane, but I’ll always love her.” He paused, like he was a little embarrassed by his lyricism. I couldn’t decide if it sounded phony.

  “Stay for a drink?” Richard said after a while. “I only have whiskey.”

  “Whiskey then, okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He slid back through the doors into the bungalow. I turned my chair around to face inside the bungalow and watched him make the drinks. There was a photograph on the kitchen wall that I hadn’t noticed before, of a miraculous red sunset that looked like grenadine spreading through a glass of lemonade. Richard broke ice out of ice trays from the freezer, smashing solid water on the granite countertop. One of the ice cubes spun onto the floor and almost immediately began to melt there. I remembered the anonymous letter writer’s typed words. “I feel sometimes as if I’m fictionalizing you, as if you’re a figment of my imagination,” he’d written to Lily.

  “Did you write those love letters about red sunsets and umbrellas?” I said as Richard walked back to the patio with two glasses of whiskey on ice.

  “Sure,” he said. “I didn’t know she’d kept them. They’re quite embarrassing,” he said.

  “I liked them,” I said. The whiskey tasted strong and cold on my tongue, so I took two gulps in a row, trying not to wince as it burnt my throat. The coldness contrasted the desert heat and made my teeth ache slightly. I thought to myself: “Carmine is a particularly deep red colour, different from Magenta, produced by boiling dried insects in water. The colour red is made from dead insects and sunlight.” I lit another cigarette, and the whiskey calmed me down a bit. I thought of the word “entanglement” and how the letters described that Lily liked words. Richard had tangled lines on his face, around his eyes and downward-sloping mouth. His irises looked heavy like nuggets of metal. I wondered whether he was planning on going back to the hotel after he’d sorted his life out, and whether he regretted being the one who truly “saw” my mother.

  “I like your maps, too,” I said to Richard.

  “Thanks,” he said. “They were Lily’s idea. We used to take road trips occasionally, on the bikes – we’d decide where the elbow of California was, for example, and go there. Or the eyebrows of Nevada. We wanted to have a picnic on the nose of every big city in the world.” He smiled.

  “What body part is this bungalow?” I said, looking over through the sliding doors to the map on his wall.

  “Dunno,” he said. “The toes?”

  “What about the Pink Hotel?”

  “Los Angeles is sort of the belly button of California, don’t you think?”

  “Guess so.” I smiled slightly.

  We paused, and he looked solidly at me for a moment.

  “It was days before I remembered someone had walked off with Lily’s suitcase,” Richard said. “I was looking for all this missing paperwork and suddenly – bang – I remembered some ghostly kid in our bedroom with a suitcase in her hand. The deeds to the Pink Hotel were in the suitcase, you know? It made my life a nightmare. It took me a month to come get the suitcase myself, because I declared bankruptcy and everything was a bit fraught. Turns out I owed too many people money, so even if I had inherited the hotel I would have had to sell it.”

  “You didn’t inherit it?” I queried.

  “You didn’t look at the deeds?” he said.

  “I saw some legal stuff, but I didn’t understand it.”

  “Lily inherited the hotel from a guy she nursed, called Teddy Fink. Did you get that far?”

  “No. I didn’t read them. I read the Christmas cards and saw the photo of Teddy Fink, and I know he died, but I didn’t know he left her anything when he died.”

  “It was always in her name. And because we were divorced when she died, the hotel doesn’t come to me. It comes to her next of kin. So that’s you.”

  He raised his eyebrows at my completely blank expression. The words hung around in the air for a while, and I fumbled to open a new cigarette packet from out of Lily’s suede bag. I put one in my mouth.

  “I thought you knew,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t someone have tried to contact me?” I said.

  “I think the lawyer left messages with your father,” Richard replied. “But as I discovered, you’re not an easy person to track down.”

  “Aaron Soto?” I said.

  “That’s it,” said Richard.

  “Are you angry?” I said to Richard as this information slowly sunk in.

  “There’s nothing I can do, I would have contested it maybe, if I’d had the fucking deeds when I needed them,” he shrugged. “But then it was too late, I had to declare bankruptcy, and after that it didn’t really matter. I only went back to get the suitcase for sentimental reasons. Anyway, I’ve started from scratch before. It’s probably better this way.” He paused, and turned to face me in a way that made his eyes look almost kind. “In the end I came for the suitcase because I wanted my memories back,” he said.

  I remembered Julie saying that Richard used to sell old cars, and it struck me that he seemed exactly like a used-car salesman. He was charming, like Miranda said, but furtive. He didn’t seem as scary as people kept saying he was, but I could see how he might turn. I wished David were there: he’d know exactly what to say. A gecko crawled near my feet, its skin
glinting. It was so very gecko-like and so perfect. It made me think of one of my favourite words, from when Grandpa was still alive. Grandpa taught me the word “quiddity”, which is like “essence”, only better. It’s a word that describes exactly what is so compelling about good words. A good word captures the quiddity of its meaning, the drippiness of dripping and the phosphorescence of a phosphorescent light. The geckoness of being a gecko. The trouble is, in the day-to-day reality of life, things are so much more complex. It’s hard to pinpoint the quiddity of people or relationships or conversations, because as soon as you do, it will shift slightly, and the quiddity will be different.

  “She wasn’t happy the night she died. We were sorting out our things, separating, not really talking much. Maybe it would have been better if we’d argued. She could have let out steam,” he shrugged.

  “What happened, exactly?” I said.

  “She drove off too fast, turned a corner and knocked into some drunk in a big car who happened to be out there that night. And that was that. It’s usually so empty around here. It wasn’t directly my fault, but maybe I should have known she’d drive recklessly if I let her go out. Maybe I did know she would.” He lit a cigarette. “The drunk phoned an ambulance for her, then drove off. They couldn’t trace the number. Big old American car drove right past the bungalow even, not that I knew what had happened until the ambulance turned up.”

  “What make of car?”

  “Buick, I think,” he said. “A big gold Buick.”

  I stopped smoking my cigarette and then forced myself to breath quietly. It was really quite dark now out on Richard’s patio, and the embers lit up our faces. You couldn’t see into the distance any more. There were stars, but I’ve never had any interest in stars: I don’t care that they’re pieces of the future or the past or whatever, I don’t care that they’re dying. They’re just pinpricks that make patterns if you stare for long enough. “They remind me of school outings to the observatory,” I’d said to David once when he tried to mumble something romantic about the sky, and he’d fallen about laughing on the floor. “City slicker,” he’d laughed at me.