The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  After Grandma and Grandpa were both dead, I slept an awful lot. I’d wake up in cold sweats imagining that I’d lost my mind. My brain would be empty, bombed out, wordless. My most extreme panics are the wordless ones. It isn’t quite terror, then, but a glimpse into that amorphous baby time before language, when terror couldn’t be tamed by words. So my panics are also hallucinations of death, because Grandpa didn’t have language in the weeks before he died, and neither did Grandma. With Grandma it was horribly gradual. She got her pronouns muddled, and then she lost her nouns, until she spoke a sort of jabberwocky language.

  “I’d really rather fall off now. I’m just dafting today,” she’d say. “When I was then I knew everything and now I know nothing.” But soon it disintegrated into “horrorgroves” and “nickelush”, “logeytongues” and the “dollish dead”. She’d speak this nonsense incessantly though, which I assume is because a silence without words to bind your thoughts was even more terrible.

  12

  The summer I was in Los Angeles was one of the hottest on record for California. “Drought Forecasted for Los Angeles Summer,” announced news broadcasts on the little televisions at the front of the public buses as I travelled from August’s flat back to the youth hostel. “Heatwave Threatens California Power Grid!” “Fire warnings!” The Serena Hostel’s air-conditioning machines groaned and dripped into foamy puddles on the wooden floors, while pigeons huddled for shade on the window ledge next to my bunk bed. There were swarms of seagulls on Sunset Boulevard, pecking at the steam from loosened dustbin bags. Perhaps the heat upset them, and they got lost on stray currents of boiled air, landing in a panic on hot concrete instead of sand.

  The café near David’s office was a self-conscious space with multi-coloured tables and bad art on the walls. Mostly people put earphones in their ears and worked while drinking their soy lattes and black coffees. I saw the same faces, the same Apple Macs and Graduate Law textbooks each day, so it didn’t seem particularly strange for me to arrive in the morning and stay until closing. People wearing suits held meetings there, too, and I eavesdropped on scared-looking producers stuttering with coffee-induced confidence about their ideas for quiz shows or sitcoms. Los Angeles must be the only city in the world where you sit in a café and hear one guy say, “No, no, you don’t understand – the radioactive monkeys have escaped” – and then hear another person analyze their own lives in movie-writing language. “Consciously I’m in love with my wife,” one man said to his friend, “but unconsciously I’d rather do my secretary. It feels like this is a real first-act turning point for our marriage, though, you know?” The men nodded solemnly at each other.

  A friend of mine at school used to complain about how irritating it was that a woman couldn’t sit alone at a café without men thinking that she wanted company, but nobody came to talk to me, and I didn’t catch anyone’s eye. I happily read Lily’s racy paperback, studying how Shamhat the whore begged Enkidu the animal to fight a demigod called Gilgamesh in her hometown of Uruk. I pawed avidly over these warlords and their love lives until finally, nearly three days of café-living later, David swung into the café again and ordered a double shot of espresso.

  I lifted my chin to watch him pay for his coffee. While waiting for his espresso he glanced around the room and half-smiled at two paparazzi boys on a far table, who waved back at him. A blonde girl glanced up at David and then went back to reading a book called Building a Character by Stanislavski. David noticed the blonde, then took the coffee off the counter and poured a vast amount of sugar into it at the sideboard. He looked in my direction as he did this, but didn’t see me: he looked straight past me into the wall. Instead of going over to him or saying his name to get his attention, my elbow carefully knocked my tea mug to the floor. It smashed into three little pieces, and tea splashed all over the place causing everyone in the café to turn and look at me. I pretended not to know that David was there while I apologized and helped the waitress pick up wet ceramic from my feet. Only when she was mopping up the tea did I glance around the room and see that David was finally frowning in my direction. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember me at all. My heart started to beat too fast. At first he certainly couldn’t seem to place me, but I raised my eyebrows in feigned surprise at the sight of him. I smiled hesitantly and waved at him.

  “No way,” David smiled in disbelief, and then paused for a long time, as if making sure. “It’s the grave-robber, right? You’re the girl from the beach?”

  I didn’t really know what to say, so I pulled my knees up to my torso and then immediately put them back down again. I closed Lily’s book and put it away. My mouth was dry.

  “Guess so,” is all I could think of.

  “You look different. Remember me?” he said.

  I was wearing Lily’s stonewash skinny jeans, her grey ballet pumps and her black T-shirt. I wasn’t wearing my baseball cap.

  “You threw up on the road,” I said. “Of course I remember. It’s weird to see you again.”

  “Been to any productive funerals recently?” he said.

  “I tried to give the clothes back the next day, only Lily’s husband had a hangover and wouldn’t see me. I felt bad about it,” I said. “Did you know Richard?”

  “No,” he shrugged. “Not really. So what did you do with the clothes if you didn’t give them back?” David said.

  “Kept some. Sold most of them,” I said.

  “So lunch is on you,” he grinned. I glanced up, and when I didn’t reply he said: “What brings you to this part of town, though, anyway? I always thought coincidences hardly ever occur in Los Angeles, but recently I keep being proved wrong.”

  “I’m just hanging around in LA for a while,” I said. “You?”

  “Work. You should try it some time: it beats grave-robbery.”

  “Stop it,” I said. David and I remained silent, watching each other. Perhaps he was remembering the exhaustion of that morning, or how the taste of Lily’s cigarettes mixed with salty morning air.

  “You look different,” he said. “A little less feral.”

  “You look worse, if that’s possible,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he replied, sarcastic. He did look worse. There were swollen pockets under his eyes, and his skin was sallow with several broken veins on his cheeks, like tiny fireworks. It looked as if he’d lost a lot of weight quickly, all in the week since Lily’s wake.

  “You know, I felt sort of guilty after I left. Like, I harassed you and hit on you and then left kind of abruptly. I was crazy blind drunk, and to be honest it’d been a rough couple of weeks.”

  “You were chatting me up?” I said.

  “Don’t pat yourself on the back, I have awful taste in women.”

  “And a terrible sense of timing,” I said.

  “Says the girl who stole from a funeral,” he smiled, then paused. “Have you had lunch?” he asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Would you like to?”

  “I’m not buying,” I said.

  Lunch was a sort of picnic in his car, which had that new-car leather smell. He parked in the derelict parking lot of a bar called Platinum. It had tinted windows and a metal door with a small grate at eye level. It was either a strip club or a casino, but there was no music or noises coming from inside. There were one or two cars outside the little building, and lots of graffiti around the edges. David and I listened to basement remixed hip-hop from his iPod and shared his homemade sandwiches – each one had its crusts cut off and was wrapped in silver foil. There was something paradoxical about David from the start. He was disdainful, yet anxious. He was too old for basement hip-hop remixes. He had a brand-new SUV with DVD players built into the seats, satellite navigation and big leather seats, but the back seat was covered with turrets of girly gossip magazines. He lurked in the parking lots of z-grade strip joints to catch celebrities or politicians at compromising moments, but he cut the crusts off his own sandwiches and kept emergency Oreo cookies in his glove
compartment.

  “I’m not strobe-lighting,” he told me, when I picked up one of the gossip magazines he worked for and asked how he decided to join the paparazzi. “If there are thirty cameras waiting for Britney outside the Roosevelt, I’m not one of them,” he insisted. He had an ironic smile and mischievous eyes that goaded me to ask where he would be – up a tree in her back garden? Skulking in the gas station where she bought her cigarettes? Waiting in the parking lot of a bar with blacked-out windows in the middle of the day? Where? But I didn’t ask. The photo David took that afternoon in the parking lot was of a film star I didn’t recognize. The stout and balding middle-aged man came out of the heavy metal doors of the Platinum Club looking bedraggled, his shirt limp across his shoulders from sweat and his bald head glowing. I didn’t even feel very sorry for the man. He already had gallows in his eyes as he walked straight to his car, like some haunted storybook villain transplanted awkwardly into the Los Angeles sunlight. The villain didn’t even know he had his photograph taken. The LA Times ran an article about the famous actor’s crippling gambling addiction the next day. I wondered why David had asked me to share his sandwiches. Was he being nice, or had he recognized me as a relation of Lily? Did he really believe the coincidence of me turning up at the café?

  “Where’d you get your scars?” I said to David after a long silence between us. The car now smelt of crumbled Oreos mixed with new leather. His scars, like mine, weren’t immediately obvious, except in certain lights, when they flashed for a second.

  “Accident-prone,” he smiled. “You?”

  “Mostly fighting,” I said, crossing my arms and touching my face with the tips of my fingers.

  “Fighting?” he smiled.

  “Playing football. I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Not proper fighting. Where you from?”

  “Coney Island. You ever been?”

  “No. It’s a fairground near New York, right?”

  David laughed.

  “There are fairground rides on it, sure,” he said. “But people live there.” I blushed and felt stupid.

  “Were you a ‘carnie’ at the fair, then?” I pushed on, even putting on an American accent to say the word “carnie”, which I’d heard from some American sitcom. I didn’t really know what a carnie was, and my accent was awful.

  “You know, I kinda was,” he laughed. “My dad was a mechanic – he worked for The Astroland Amusement Park. Not quite a carnival, but near enough. My mother died when I was twelve, but she used to work there at a popcorn stand. My first girlfriend was a mermaid named Emma. She worked at the Coney Island Freak Show.”

  “A mermaid? How’d that work out?” I laughed. I was happy at that moment, hearing about mermaids and freak shows, I almost wanted to tell Dad. He wouldn’t even have been interested, though. He lived in a world where you got by. You didn’t live, but you kept going. Maybe that was why Lily left him. He’d have been expecting me home three days ago, and I hadn’t called yet to explain yet. He’d be very angry by now, but I knew he wouldn’t actually call the police.

  “It’s caused a lot of confusion, the problem of how mermaids make love,” David said, “but in my experience they unzip their Lycra fins and unknot their plastic glitter-coated shells from around their adolescent breasts and fumble around in the gritty backroom of a Coney Island Theatre.” I laughed, and he continued: “She dumped me for a realtor three times her age.”

  “You really do have bad taste in women,” I said.

  “Ah, there are plenty more fish in the sea,” he laughed.

  “You’ve used that joke before,” I said smiling, and he might have blushed. He looked straight out into the windscreen, and I remembered the desolate look in his eyes when I watched him sit in the car a few days ago.

  “Couple of summers after Emma dumped me,” he continued thoughtfully, “a friend of mine got a job at Disney. He was Donald Duck for two months, and he started dating Sleeping Beauty – who, somewhat ironically, was a methamphetamine addict. One weekend I went up to visit him and ended up sleeping with the girl who played the Little Mermaid at the underwater grotto. I don’t remember her name.”

  “Ariel,” I said.

  “Lucy to her friends,” he said.

  We paused.

  “You have little lines around your eyes,” he said to me.

  “Yeah, so do you,” I said and closed my eyes briefly, touching the thin skin around them.

  “But I’m old, I’m thirty-two next Wednesday,” he said, and then paused. “You said you’re, what, twenty-two? I think you’ve either had your heart broken one too many times, or nobody ever told you to moisturize.”

  “What a weird thing to say,” I frowned, looking away.

  “Just observing.”

  “My mum died when I was three,” I said.

  “Yeah? That’s hard.”

  “You can’t miss what you don’t know,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” replied David. “Course you can.”

  I shrugged.

  “Would you like to have a birthday drink with me next Tuesday?” he said.

  “Dunno,” I said, trying not to smile. “Maybe.”

  “I’ll pick you up from your hostel if you give me the address, say 6:00 p.m.?” he said.

  13

  Lily and Dad had their first date at the London Zoo Aquarium. They’d met two weeks before during a table-tennis tournament at the local community centre. It was Grandpa who gave Dad the money to take Lily out, not knowing how much trouble their relationship would cause. I heard Grandpa and Grandma arguing about this once, which makes me think maybe she got pregnant on that first date, perhaps even at the Aquarium. Certainly she got pregnant somewhere during the first few weeks of knowing Dad. I like to think it was the Aquarium rather than some cupboard in the community centre or a bed in whatever foster-home council flat Lily was staying at.

  “What was your first date with Lily like, though?” I asked Dad, following him from the TV room to the kitchen one morning when I was ten or eleven. “Was it fun?” I called her Lily, not ever Mum. Actually I didn’t speak about her much at all, because Dad didn’t like it, and those conversations always ended with him being bad-tempered. That Saturday morning Dad put the kettle to boil and slid pop-tarts out of their silver packaging into the toaster. I was still in my pyjamas, which were bright-red and covered with Arsenal football logos. I stared up at Dad from the opposite side of the kitchen counter.

  “We looked at the sharks, I guess,” he mumbled. “It was all right. Quite fun.” He pushed down the toaster racks.

  “Why did you look at the sharks?” I said.

  “Cos I like sharks.”

  “Did she like sharks?” I said. This was before Dad and I had painted the walls of the flat weird colours, so everything was dirty-white or brown back then.

  “Aren’t you late for school or something?” he replied.

  “It’s Saturday,” I reminded him. “When you went on that date, with Lily, did you look at the jellyfish?”

  I’d just watched a National Geographic documentary about jellyfish at school. I’d been fascinated by their jellied tendrils and throbbing bodies. I liked the names, too: “moon jellies”, swarming together in astonishing numbers. “Gelatinous plankton”, “sea nettles”. I’d written a story about them in English class. A jellyfish fell in love with a wave in the middle of the ocean. The jellyfish chased the wave all the way to a beach, where the wave broke into a million pieces. The love-sick jellyfish was so distraught that she, too, climbed up onto the sand and died there.

  “I only remember the sharks,” Dad said about the Aquarium date, intently watching his pop-tarts.

  “Did you know jellyfish aren’t really fish? They don’t have brains and they don’t breathe.”

  “Oh?” he said.

  “And they’re made of 90% water,” I said.

  “Huh,” he said.

  “They look sort of like aliens, right?” I said.

  “I don’t know what aliens lo
ok like,” he said.

  “That’s true,” I said. “Do you think Lily liked the jellyfish? Did she see them? Or did she like the sharks?”

  “I don’t know what she fucking liked,” Dad snapped, and then his pop-tart popped, which made us both jump. I took a step away from the counter and looked away from Dad, out the living-room window, where there was a blue helium balloon floating up in the sky. There had been a jellyfish called Man-of-War in the documentary, which floated like a bubble above the water, but had fifty meters of bulbous blue tentacles underneath the surface. The beaded tendrils throb with the water currents, twisting up and down in blue curls. There’s another type called Nomura jellyfish, which can weigh up to 450 pounds and looks like some big chunk of melting coffee ice cream.

  “Seahorses mate for life when they’re in the wild, but in tanks they’re promiscuous,” I said, hoping to continue talking to Dad, although he was already preparing to take the pop-tarts into his bedroom.

  “Where’d you learn that word?” he said.

  “Promiscuous?” I said.

  “That’s not a nice word,” he said.

  “It means to love a lot of people,” I said. “Is that bad?”

  Dad laughed, then grinned at me, splitting the pop-tart in two parts and blowing on the molten jam inside. He chuckled.

  “That’s a good one,” he said.

  “What’s a good one?”

  “Nothing, nothing. You’re a hoot.”

  “Why am I a hoot?” I said, frowning. “What’s a hoot?”

  But he didn’t answer, and walked resolutely back into his bedroom with his plate of cooling pop-tarts. The door clicked closed, and I turned on the television. It was never really clear how Lily and Dad ended up with me. I do wonder why nobody let Lily have an abortion. Perhaps Lily and Dad left it too long before telling Grandma and Grandpa, or perhaps it was to do with Grandma’s Catholic childhood, even though she hadn’t believed in God or been to Church for years. Sometimes, when I feel low, even now, I think about how easy it would have been for me to not have existed at all, and everything seems better.