“No,” I said, narrowing my eyes, “I don’t think about dying very much.”
“Do you miss your Grandma and Grandpa?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “But I don’t believe in Heaven.”
“So where are your Grandma and Grandpa now?” he said.
“They’re in a box under Dad’s bed,” I said, “Cos they were cremated.”
“Do you miss your mother?”
“No,” I said.
“You never wish you had a mother?”
“No,” I said crossing my arms.
“Does it make you feel bad that she left you?”
I shrugged, nonplussed.
“Does it make you feel unlovable?”
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Does it scare you when people leave?”
“What’s that got to do with liking to sleep?” I said, and promptly lost interest in the whole conversation. He was a weedy man with thick glasses. I imagined the doctor as a child while he tried to tell me that it’s important to keep a hold on reality, however banal it seems.
“Reality is very important,” he said. I imagined the doctor being bullied at school, being put into rubbish bins and spat on. He told me that I was obviously very creative and that I had a high IQ, but mustn’t let myself slip away from the tangible world and the people around me. I imagined the doctor falling asleep in bed with his boyfriend or wife, snoring just slightly.
The doctor made me stay overnight in that hospital, with electrodes attached to my wrists. The hospital room was the colour of pale eggshells, and there was a white porcelain lamp with a pink floral shade next to the bed along with a plastic mug of water and a box of tissues. There was a window that looked out onto another part of the hospital. I could see a middle-aged man asleep in bed and a nurse tucking the covers in around him. In another window there was a nurses’ station with a skinny lady filing her nails while watching a tiny television. In my bedroom there was a video recorder attached to the ceiling, which could see every bit of the room apart from a little triangle of space directly behind it.
Dad was livid with me when the Doctor told him that I hadn’t slept for a minute all night. I’d spent the entire evening drawing pictures of dolphins on the wall behind the camera, out of view, or making rude faces at the camera.
“Do you know how much that night cost me?” Dad shouted at me when we got on the train the next morning. I shook my head. “Now they want you to come in for weekly therapy sessions. They think you’re crazy, but I won’t have it. We’d all like to spend our lives falling asleep and swimming with dolphins, but we have to work. You’re just an attention-seeking little girl who doesn’t know how to behave. That’s all. Do you know that? You only think about yourself. You’re just like your fucking mother,” he said. “And you’re going to snap the fuck out of it,” he said as the train moved off.
I didn’t say anything in retaliation, and I stared out of the window at suburban rooftops, torn in places by crumbling walls and graffiti – “bite”, “slum”, “ideal”, said the walls in kaleidoscopic bubble-writing. The sky slipped by above the chimneys and our train fed itself into the city. “Abluvion”, I thought, imagining Grandpa’s dictionary again. As the train slipped underground and became the Tube I begrudgingly decided to stop sleeping all the time, mostly because going to see the boring doctor once a week was a grim prospect. Although legitimately tired, I stayed awake through the entire train journey and watched a B-horror flick called Curse of the Puppet Master with Dad until midnight that evening, long after Daphne had popped Valiums and passed out on Dad’s lap. For the next few years I sometimes woke up in places other than I fell asleep, or dreamed things that I thought were true when they weren’t, but I never spoke about these sleep demons to him again.
24
On the whole I slept unexpectedly deeply in David’s bed, falling into a well of nervous unconsciousness while he was sleeping next to me, but also while he padded around the flat reading magazines and fixing his cameras. He told me that I whimpered in my sleep, which embarrassed me, but I wouldn’t tell him about the dreams of fainting and falling, or of the bleeding sunsets and the mouthful of goo being disgorged from the lips of a newborn baby. I also wouldn’t tell him about a new recurring dream, a horrible Enkidu-Gilgamesh-and-Lily-inspired nightmare that started in the idyllic few weeks after David and I started sharing the same bed. The dreamscape was a desert village of concrete houses with barren cactus gardens. I’d be playing with the desert geckos and chameleons a little way from the town, letting their little webbed toes crawl all over my body and face while I lie on the floor. Then with a rush and an intake of breath, a sudden panic comes over me as I remembered: we are meant to be moving house that day! I immediately start to run towards my house, bare feet panting over hot sand and brambles, geckos tumbling backwards off my skin, but when I get to our kitchen it’s empty. I run out front just in time to catch sight of David and Lily driving away in David’s new black SUV. Sometimes they kiss before driving away, but they never look back. The worst part of the dream was how as time passed and nobody came back for me, my flesh began to crawl with metallic-coloured scales. They came painfully out of my skin like teeth from raw gums. My spine grew lengthways, and I screamed when it broke out of my lower back, becoming a tail. My tongue grew while my legs shrunk, and when a new family came to live in the desert bungalow, nobody took any notice of the gecko in the garden.
I’d wake with a sudden gulp of air, pleased to see David. Sometimes he’d stroke my hair and I’d pull away from him, not wanting to be patronized. Sometimes we’d make love after my nightmares, and I’d feel even more like a strange animal. Occasionally he even held me in place on the bed or the floor. If he held me too tightly I’d buck against him, my hips squirming on impulse and the palms of my hands pressing neatly into the groves of his shoulders. He’d pin me down hard, like we were fighting or play-wrestling. I’d push him away when he came close, and he’d drag me back in, then he’d push away and I’d pull in, yet we hardly moved at all. I loved him. My skin would itch for him to hurt me, but I didn’t ask him to. I knew I was with him, kissing him, touching him, but sometimes I wanted more proof of our connection and my physical existence. I was more existent when he touched me. I wanted pain, though. I wanted the proof, the pain, the sure rush of being connected to another human being. All I could do was buck under him and fight, though, and could never quite articulate my interest in feeling pain.
The closest I ever got, somewhat comically, was once asking him:
“Have you ever killed a chicken?”
I wasn’t bringing up the subject of pain, only I’d seen a documentary about the sex lives of animals. When a female otter is in heat, for example, the male glides towards her under the stream water, and they copulate while swimming slowly forwards together in the river.
“Can’t say I have,” said David, lighting a cigarette and lounging. He tipped ash into a silver tray.
“You press their backs so they think they’re going to have sex,” I said, “And then you snap their necks.”
“I’d never hurt you,” he said.
I laughed at his earnestness, and kissed his shoulder.
25
Two of Lily’s ex-patients lived in a run-down Spanish villa in Laurel Canyon. The address was on the “contact sheet” that I’d found in the plastic zipped compartment of the red suitcase. Even from the road you could see paint peeling from the chalky stucco in the midday sun. It was cool up in the mountains, though, different from the polluted heat of Thai Town and Little Armenia. Gobs of sunlight ran around on the road as trees shivered above me. There was a massive Toyota people carrier in the driveway, and the sound of a dog yapping behind a garden door that seemed to be the only entrance to the house. It had been over two weeks since my rucksack got stolen, and I was beginning to stop looking over my shoulder for Richard or his friend. That morning I’d telephoned all of the people on Lily’s list of work cont
acts. Only one of the contacts from this list had offered any useful information about Lily. The first number I called was a wrong number: either it had been typed wrong or it was no longer in service. The second number took me through to a young-sounding Canadian man whose grandmother, one of Lily’s patients, was at a hospice now. The Canadian didn’t remember much about Lily, and seemed eager to get off the phone, back to whatever daytime television show was booming in the background of our conversation.
“She was only here a couple of weeks,” the Canadian man had said. “Don’t think it worked out or something, but I can’t remember.”
The second-to-last phone number belonged to Teddy Fink, presumably the same Teddy from the photo of him and Lily outside the place labelled “Malibu Mansions” in biro on the back, and from the greetings cards Lily had saved.
“I’m afraid Mr Fink died four years ago, and I have nothing to say about Mrs Harris,” said the woman who picked up the phone, “I’d rather you didn’t call here again, thank you.” And the woman put down the phone, so that wasn’t very successful at all. She sounded irritated and busy. Then the last number on the list was answered by Ms Bianca Forbes, who was immediately excited to hear that my mother was her former nurse and that I was looking for information about her.
“Oh! Well she came over every afternoon for years and years and years, we knew her well,” said the chirpy voice. “Of course we remember. I was so sorry to hear that she died. Poor thing. Why don’t you come up for iced tea this afternoon and we can tell you all about her? It’ll be fun.” So that’s how I ended up standing outside the garden door in Laurel Canyon with no one answering the door. I definitely had the address right, because I’d taken a taxi for the first time since being in Los Angeles. Lucy and Bianca Forbes lived right at the top of a road called Eden Drive, off Wonderland Avenue, which isn’t the sort of address you forget.
I knocked on the door one more time and then rang a doorbell that didn’t make any sound. The dog started to bark louder, though, and eventually I heard footsteps traipsing towards the door.
“Hello?” said a woman’s voice through the door. She opened it an inch, stretching two door chains like saliva on an oversized mouth. The woman I saw through the crack was small and wide-eyed and middle-aged with peaked eyebrows and black hair. A poodle yapped at her feet. “Miss Lily’s daughter, right? They mentioned, yes,” the woman said in halting English, and unlocked the door. She grabbed the poodle aggressively by its collar and dragged him off away from my ankles. The woman was wearing a black T-shirt and black leggings, with her hair tied neatly up in a shiny jet-black bob around her head, looking almost identical to the poodle. “They’re on the porch,” she said, and walked the dog away. Down some stone steps was a sloping walled garden that smelt of foliage and chlorine. At the lower end was the swimming pool, and at the top was a large Spanish-style porch with two identical old women sitting on colourful wooden chairs. They both waved at me, and I walked up towards them, trying not to trip over bits of crazy paving and tree roots.
“Hello, hello!” one of the women. “You made it!”
Let’s have a look at you, then!” said the other. They were clearly twins. Perhaps one of them was a little more hunched in her chair and the other a little more wrinkled at the neck, but essentially they’d aged at the same rate. They were pixielike, both wearing Oriental pointed slippers and cotton dresses with matching gold earrings hanging heavily off their ears. “Eldritch,” I thought, which means “unearthly and weird”, but the word always makes me think of elderly elves wearing lots of golden jewelry. The house seemed massive behind them. There were four white pillars holding up a second-floor balcony, which had elaborate wrought-iron railings that wound in the shape of flowers. Then the third floor was topped off by a sloping tiled roof the colour of rust that matched the colour of their slippers.
“You don’t look a thing like her, do you?” said one of the women, peering at me over a pair of tinted spectacles.
“Yes she does,” said the other woman. “Now, turn to the left a bit,” she demanded of me. “Now isn’t that Lily’s pout, just there, that curl at her lips?” And both women fell silent, studying my profile, the angles of my lips.
“We had no idea she had a daughter,” said one of them.
“I don’t think many people did,” I replied.
“Now why is that then?” said one of the twins.
“She was only fourteen when she had me,” I said.
“That’s terrible,” said one of the twins.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Well my name’s Bianca,” said the hunched twin, “and this is Laurie Lee.” They both grinned at me. I noticed that the Poodle-faced woman hadn’t gone far. She was sitting on a deckchair looking our way. “And Lily came to work for us years ago, when she was just starting as a nurse. We recommended her to all our friends,” Bianca continued.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said. “It means a lot.”
“It’s no problem at all; we were so upset to hear that Lily died. We read it in the papers.”
“Laurie Lee always reads the death notices. It makes her feel like she’s achieved something with her day,” said Bianca with a wink.
“Not dying is an achievement at this stage,” said Laurie Lee.
“Who would have thought we’d outlive one of our nurses?”
“Did you go to the funeral or the wake?” I asked.
“Oh no,” said Laurie Lee, “Bianca has such a trouble breathing nowadays, and I have this damned arthritis. We saw the death notice, that’s how we found out. We sent flowers. Brightly coloured flowers.”
“How long did she work here?” I asked, looking around at the muddled opulence of the place. The poodle woman was definitely watching us, and the poodle dog was chasing bits of blossom as they fell and floated on the still air from the trees above.
“Maybe three years?” Bianca said. “Although she worked for others as well as us of course. She was great fun. She was, what? Laurie Lee? What was she?”
“Vivacious,” answered Laurie Lee.
“She had a marvelous sense of the absurd,” said Bianca. “That’s one thing. For example, when we were a bit more mobile we used to go on a lot of church tours, you know, stained-glass windows and altarpieces and stuff. One time Lily came along on a particularly boring tour, and there was this sign – what did it say?”
“It said – ‘For the Sick and Tired of the Episcopal Church’,” said Laurie Lee. “It was for some free healthcare assessment. But Lily was bored, so she stole the sign and we all got helpless giggles in the car back home, because she was the one ‘Sick and Tired of the Episcopal Church’!”
I smiled politely, and the twins grinned with nostalgia.
“She was fun,” said Bianca. “That’s the thing.”
“How come she left?” I said.
“Well, it was a bit awful, in the end,” said Bianca. “Oly down there, the one who let you in, she’s our housekeeper. Been with us for years. She was always saying Lily stole things – objects and cash and what not, but we figured Oly was just jealous.”
“Turned out Lily really was stealing, though,” said Bianca. “Not a lot, mind you, so don’t worry, and we didn’t really mind. We have enough money, God knows, we didn’t even notice that she pinched some now and then, but I suppose it was the principle, and we had to let her go.”
“It shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but we’d written letters of recommendation, and it was a little embarrassing when those people realized things were going missing.”
“I phoned some other people she worked for earlier today,” I said. “They wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Who’d you call?”
“A couple of people. One was Teddy Fink?” I said. “But he’s dead. I spoke to a woman who sounded really irritated that I’d called.”
“Daughter, maybe,” said Bianca. “Lily worked for Mr Fink while she was working for us. Did Tuesdays and Fridays with him, the
rest with us even after she got married. We’d hear stories about him, that Mr Fink. He liked her a lot.”
“He adored her... the daughter didn’t.” Laurie Lee giggled.
“A lot of the people she nursed loved Lily, just as much as we did, but obviously you can’t keep help if they’re dishonest. You just can’t,” said Bianca, turning her palms outwards.
“Do you think she wants to know this about her mother?” said Laurie Lee to Bianca, then turned back to me. “I mean we still cared about her in a funny sort of way, we really did. Even after we found out. You know? We were heartbroken to see her go, and she still came around for lunch every so often. She was troubled, that’s all.”
“Do you remember when she set the Christmas pudding on fire and her hair got caught in the blaze?” said Laurie Lee to her sister.
“Woosh! Up it went,” said Bianca with a smile.
“She bought five different-coloured wigs from a dress-up shop. One day she’d have a neon-blue bob—”
“The next day she was a blond bombshell.”
“And we missed her when she was gone.”
“It wasn’t the same after.”
I think the twins continued to reminisce, but I lost track of the conversation. My mind went to Richard, and to thievery, and then to David’s part in all this.
26
I shared a sundae with David a few nights later. It was raining, like the night I met August properly, but the rain seemed hotter this time, and more dramatic. Los Angeles isn’t built for the rain, and everyone panics. The air gets saturated with ambulance sirens as oil rises up through the suddenly soaked tarmac highways, causing crashes. There was a flat-screen television in the corner of the diner where David and I sat, which broadcast the news. A smiley blonde presenter explained about blocked traffic and fatalities. A car fell off the edge of a road towards Malibu, killing a socialite on her way back from a charity gala. In Englewood earlier in the evening, a bus full of children had crashed on the way back from a field trip to the science museum. One died, twenty-two others were injured. There’d also been a gang bust-up outside a club that night, killing five gang members and two innocent bystanders.
The Pink Hotel Page 14