Purgatory Hotel

by Anne-Marie Ormsby

  “So there is a book here that will tell me about my past lives?” she asked glancing around her at the shelves.

  “One book for every life. Each book will give you your previous name,” he answered, becoming agitated, as though she was bothering him.

  “So then—”

  “Look, missy! I am trying to read here… just let me read! Work it out for yourself – I had to!” he began screaming at her. Dakota shrank back into her chair and resolved not to say another word to him. She began to read her life as it began, and it was oddly like reading a well-written biography. It left out the obvious things and told stories that would be of interest and have sentimental meaning. As she read the words it was as though they immediately transformed themselves in her head to the memory itself, as though she were not even reading at all, but merely thinking about her past. They became her memories as she flitted across the words, and not a moment sooner. Soon she realised she was reading things she had already remembered when she sat with Danny.

  Urgency and curiosity took over and she turned directly to the last page in the book.

  It was blank, as were the preceding pages. In fact the only pages with writing on them were the ones she had already read.

  “Hey, what is this?” she muttered angrily to herself, half-tempted to disturb the man down the table again. But as she returned to the blank final page, she stopped, stunned as a sentence formed before her.

  To understand, you must return to the start; there is no end without the beginning.

  Dakota felt suddenly like a naughty child, caught cheating at an exam. Humbly, she returned to the page she had been reading and read on and on until at last she found something she did not recall. It seemed there were things previous to her parents’ death that she had forgotten.

  ELEVEN: Back to Life

  Lula Crow met Jackson Shade for the first time when she was eighteen and Dakota was eight. The story of their first encounter was one that Lula would relate to Dakota at regular intervals. Her desire to recall and share that particular event came more frequently as the years went by, and that desire usually came when Lula’s medication made her emotional. Dakota remembered everything her sister told her.

  Lula was visiting the graves of her dead siblings on a winter afternoon. The cemetery was sleeping under a blanket of dried leaves. Soft winds disturbed them occasionally and it reminded her of someone muttering fervently in their sleep.

  The cemetery lay beside the church they had attended every Sunday of their lives, St Brigid’s, and beyond the church and graves fields lay for miles. It was at the edge of the village and the next village lay miles beyond the woods, known as Pan’s Wood, which sat to the right of the cemetery. Little Mort was a beautiful country village buried amidst the farmland of south-west England, but in the fouler weather it seemed lost and abandoned.

  Lula visited the graves often, usually when she felt particularly plagued by the depression that haunted her life, bringing with it feelings that her medication wasn’t working and that it was all a waste of time.

  She had not had a full night of natural sleep since Dakota was born. For the first two years she would get up in the middle of the night, to shuffle across her bedroom and peer into her sister’s cot, sometimes encountering her mother doing the same thing. Her mother had no idea that Lula’s watch over her baby sister was so obsessive that it was keeping her awake most of the night. It was only after Dakota’s sixth birthday that Lula decided to get help. Her sleepless nights were soon put to an end when she was prescribed sleeping pills and anti-depressants. Hannah and Jack Crow felt terrible for not having noticed their daughter’s insomnia or depression, but Lula never felt anger towards her parents. She just made her mother promise to keep an eye on Dakota for her while she slept.

  So for the past year and a half, Lula had dutifully taken her tablets every night and slept through till dawn. But over the previous few weeks she had found her sleep growing lighter, even waking once or twice to check on her sister again, as though wakefulness in dark hours set an automatic mechanism off in her body.

  With the wakeful moments came tears and thoughts of loneliness, anger at her state of mind and wishes that she could forget the memories of the dead babies she had found, still as churches at night.

  Depression was moving sluggishly through her that day as she entered the graveyard. Clouds overhead promised rain and she hoped that it would come soon. She wanted it to pour down so she could walk on, soaked to the bone, and perhaps it would make her feel cleansed and refreshed.

  When she reached the four tiny graves she sat at their feet and let her eyes skim over the names engraved on them:

  Montana Ezekiel, born asleep.

  Beatty Amos, aged 3 months,

  Nevada Elijah, aged 2 weeks.

  Alabama Delilah, born asleep.

  Before Lula and Dakota’s parents had settled in the South of England, they had toured the United States of America, working their way from state to state using the money they had inherited from Jack’s parents. Photos of their travels adorned the hallways of their home, permanent reminders of the life they once lived, and as a homage to the land they had traversed, they named their children after places they had visited. However, their Catholic upbringing was also in their hearts and they gave all the children middle names from the Bible. All except Dakota. They gave her the middle name of Grace because, as her mother said, it was by the grace of God that they had been allowed to keep her.

  Beatty was the first boy and had been the first one that Lula had found dead. She was only five years old then. Montana had died two years earlier and she still remembered the sound of her mother’s grief in the dead of night when the midwife had delivered the silent child. The sound of her mother’s screams was what kept Lula awake whenever there was a new baby in the house. She would lie awake waiting to hear it again, that dreadful sound of pain and horror. However, the only sound she heard after her own terrible discovery was the sound of her own grief, her own terrified cries as she stared into face after tiny face searching for some sign of life.

  Lula was beginning to wonder what she would do if she ever found Dakota dead. Wiping away the tears, she looked up at the cheerless sky and blinked the blur from her eyes. Dropping her gaze back down, she focused beyond the four white, angelic headstones. Some of the much older graves were in that section of the cemetery, and about two rows away began the deluge of elaborate and oversized grey headstones and tombs. In her direct line of vision was a sarcophagus bearing the name Finchley on its side. On top of the tomb lay a man on his back, reading a book held up above his face.

  Lula blinked her eyes a few more times, thinking she was seeing a ghost, but as he shifted slightly she realised he was real. Unsure whether to reprimand him for disrespecting someone’s grave – both Lula and Dakota had been brought up to think it was rude to step all over someone even though they were dead – or whether to feel sorry for him, she stood up and walked towards him.

  Sensing movement, he turned his face to her and she stopped moving, a single gravestone between them.

  As she was to tell Dakota many times, she had never seen a man more beautiful. He made no move to get up from where he lay on the cold concrete tomb. Instead his crystal blue eyes flashed at her from beneath his heavy brow, his face sharp and gaunt yet somehow soft, fractured by strands of his long black hair that had fallen across his face. Lula thought he might be a fallen angel. His black trench coat could have concealed wings that rose out from a strong but lithe torso that revealed itself from beneath a thin t-shirt.

  “Do you like Baudelaire?” he asked, motioning to the book in his hand.

  “Yeah,” she lied successfully. She liked poetry and had heard of the French poet but had never actually read any of his work. The man continued to look at her as silence hovered between them, leaves blowing across the floor.

  “You know this person, then?” she asked, pointing at the tomb he was lying on.

  “No.” He lai
d the book across his chest and stared up at the scudding clouds. “I don’t know anyone here; I just like how quiet they are.”

  Lula found she was hanging on his every syllable, as though she had never heard a person speak before. His voice was deep and flowing. It blew away across the quiet graves as though he were preaching to the cold stones and grass.

  “Who are you visiting?” he asked her. She looked down and away from him, suddenly not wanting to share the deaths of her family with this stranger. Just as the words began to rise in her throat, and the urge to share everything with him began to surge, he spoke again. “Don’t worry, forget I asked. You can tell me next time.” And with that he picked up his book and began to read again.

  “Next time?”

  “Next time I see you here. I come here all the time; I’ll see you again,” he explained, not looking at her.

  She found she had no words left in her apart from rash declarations of love and sudden profound words of passion. So she turned away and walked home, looking back three or four times at the man on the grave.

  She was in love and she didn’t even know his name.

  When she got home she wrote five pages in her diary about the two-minute encounter in the graveyard. That night she went to bed early just so she could lie in the dark and think about the raven-haired man with eyes the colour of Caribbean waters. Once she had finished writing it all down, she repeated it out loud to Dakota, who wasn’t entirely sure of what her sister was telling her, but she was just excited to be the centre of her sister’s attention for the time it took for the story to unfold.

  The next day Lula went to work at the local bookshop and scoured the shelves for a book of Baudelaire’s poems. The one she bought that day was the one that Dakota would read when she was eleven, its spine cracked and corners of pages turned down to mark Lula’s favourite poems.

  Lula read them over and over again, lost in the beauty of the words, imagining the mysterious man reading them to her. After holding out for two days, Lula returned to the graveyard after work. October had set in and the day was almost gone by five-thirty. Leaves scuttled across the slumbering residents as she walked up the path beyond the cemetery gates. Spits of rain were in the air, threatening the earth with a downpour.

  He was sitting on a bench to the left of Finchley’s tomb, book in hand. Lula’s eyes dropped momentarily as she passed by the graves of her brother and sisters.

  He did not look up until she sat down beside him, and at the moment, that very second when he turned his blue eyes to her, the Heavens opened and heavy cold rain trickled down her face. He did not speak; he did not smile. He closed his book and took her hand in his own. his long fingers slipping between hers, and he stood to lead her deeper into the cemetery.

  Lula did as she was silently instructed and walked quietly beside him down the long avenue of trees, rain spattering their faces like tears, fresh and reviving. Then he led her off the path to a large tomb with an unlocked door that sat buried at the back of the rows of graves. Inside, large sarcophagi lay still and cold and the air smelt of stagnant flower water and dust. The final resting place of the Boncoeur family was quiet as Lula and her companion sat down on the huge tombs. Rain clawed at the tiny stained glass window that peered down from the back of the tomb, its leaden angel staring at them. Lula wanted to speak, but was afraid of sounding stupid, so she just sat and listened to the rain. A gust of wind blew the tomb door open allowing a slither of autumn light to crawl in before a gale slammed the door shut, plunging the dead room into darkness.

  “My name is Jackson Shade,” he whispered to her.

  “I’m Lula Crow,” she replied, and he leant over and kissed her passionately.

  Lula never went into the details of what happened next, but Dakota had a feeling that Jackson and Lula had consummated their relationship right there in the tomb on a rainy October evening.

  Lula would meet up with her enigmatic boyfriend three times a week at the same tomb. Each time she’d put a finger over her lips and say ‘Shhhhhh’ to Dakota with an excited giggle. She kept Jackson a secret from her parents because of the age gap. She knew they would disapprove of their eighteen-year-old daughter dating a twenty-three-year-old man. Even though Lula talked to Dakota about him, she continued to keep his existence from their parents. Lula said she liked the secrecy and so did he. Every time her parents asked about a possible boyfriend, she kept her cards close to her chest and never told them anything. Even though she was old enough to do as she liked, she still lived with her parents and this alone meant pretending to abide by their rules. Her clandestine meetings with Jackson were the most exciting thing in her life, and she felt her parents might ruin it if they knew about him.

  “And anyway,” Lula said one day, brushing her hair in the mirror, “we don’t want to be boring and be like everyone else. It’s more fun that no one knows about us.”

  “But I know about you!” Dakota laughed.

  “Yeah, but you’re good at keeping secrets, aren’t you, D? You will keep my secret for me, won’t you?” Lula laughed, and Dakota promised again to keep her sister’s big secret.

  Dakota did not meet Jackson until she was ten. Lula never brought him home before that, and the only reason he came by that night was because Mum and Dad were having a rare night out and Lula was babysitting.

  Jackson strode into the lounge where Dakota was watching TV. When she looked up at him, he seemed to freeze to the spot. They stared at each other for what felt like the longest time, both unsure of what to do or say. She felt peculiar as she looked at his long black hair and his black clothes. She had a feeling that they had met before, but she had no idea where.

  The moment was broken as Lula entered the room. Grabbing the TV remote, she turned up the volume and said, “Stay down here, OK sweetie?” Then Lula turned and took Jackson upstairs to the room that she and Dakota shared.

  Dakota sat still and listened. After a few moments, she heard her sister moaning as the bed creaked rhythmically. Dakota knew all about sex already. She had learnt all about it from reading her sister’s copies of Marie-Claire and Cosmopolitan. She would read all the juicy details while Lula was out. There was also a book that had come free with one of the magazines and it had fictional stories about sexual encounters. Dakota found them fascinating and had even learnt to masturbate from reading through the seedy stories, and the various articles about improving ‘self-love’ techniques. She practised secretly under her duvet while Lula was out getting drunk or having sex in graveyards.

  After a half hour of moaning and creaking, Lula and Jackson reappeared looking flushed and dishevelled.

  Jackson was putting his black trench coat back on as he stared at Dakota. She looked back at him silently. He looked like he was about to say something but Lula began to usher him out of the house and the moment was gone.

  Dakota often quizzed Lula about her relationship with Jackson. The sisters sometimes went out for walks after dinner into the local woods where they could talk away from the ever-listening ears of their parents. Usually they waited until they went to bed and Mum and Dad were downstairs. Dakota would ask questions: was she in love? How did she know? How did it feel? Was she going to get married?

  “I don’t know if we’ll get married, but we want to live together,” Lula whispered to her little sister in the dark bedroom.

  “Don’t move out! You can’t leave me!” Dakota replied, tears welling in her eyes. Lula was her only friend. She had no friends at school, and she didn’t fit in with anyone she had ever met. Her play-times were spent alone reading book after book, looking within the stories for some kind of life she could live when she grew up. Without Lula to gossip to at night, Dakota felt she had nothing. Her mum and dad were great, but they were adults and she wanted to hear about her sister’s life – the parties, the sex, the drugs.

  “I’m not leaving yet! I can’t afford it. I have to get a better job and save up, and Jackson still lives with his mother and has to pay rent t
o her, so he finds it hard to save money. Maybe when I am twenty or twenty-one I will be able to move out. You have me for another couple of years.”

  “I wonder if I will still live with Mum and Dad when I am nineteen,” pondered Dakota aloud.

  “No! You’ll be a model in Paris or New York.” The two girls giggled in the dark room as the lights of passing cars briefly haunted the ceiling.

  “I’ll have five kids with Jackson and you’ll marry someone rich!” Lula laughed.

  “You want to have kids?”

  “Yeah, it feels like you’re my child though,” replied Lula thoughtfully.” I always tell Jackson that you are my baby. He says he’d be happy for you to live with us one day.”

  “Really? He said that? That would be so cool!”

  “Do you like Jackson then?”

  “I only met him once and we didn’t even talk!”

  “But he is soooooooo gorgeous, don’t you think?” Lula giggled dreamily.

  Dakota closed her eyes and she saw him, the way he was in the lounge that evening, tall and dark with a swarm of unnamed thoughts brooding behind his crystalline eyes.

  “He’s OK,” she said before saying goodnight. Something about Jackson made her stomach burn, something about his sharp eyes drew her in, and she felt the tiniest twinge of fear. He never came to the house again.

  Some time later, on a late summer night, her parents died. As her sister dissolved into hysterical sobs of grief, Dakota’s first thought was to call Jackson, which she did by retrieving his number from Lula’s phonebook that sat beside the dropped telephone receiver. The first words she ever said to Jackson Shade were: “My parents are dead. We need you… to take us to the hospital.”

  And he replied a simple “OK” before doing exactly what Dakota had asked of him.