Authors: Anna Stothard
“Probably why he doesn’t have teeth any more,” I said, smiling.
There was a Thai quiz show on the television. The contestants had to invent acronyms out of random words. David and I watched the show during a pause in our conversation.
“This is fun,” David said, and half-smiled at me. “You’re making my birthday nearly bearable.”
“What would you be doing if I wasn’t here?” I asked.
“I’d be watching this Thai game show and eating curry on my own,” he said.
“No you wouldn’t,” I laughed, wondering. “Do your friends know it’s your birthday? Are you seeing them later?”
“Na, I don’t shout about my birthday from the rooftops any more,” David shrugged.
“I’m glad you’re having fun,” I smiled.
“Fun: Fanatical Urban Nuns,” he replied, with a nod to the game show on the television flashing with static above us.
“Fanatical: Four Ambidextrous Nymphs Attacked The Igloo Causing... Atrocious Laughter,” I said, taking a while to think of each word.
“Nymph: Not Your Mouth Please Honey,” he said.
“Honey: Happiness... Offers No Escape Yet,” I said.
He laughed.
“True,” he said.
It was late by the time our conversation stalled a little and we both looked out of the window at the car park and the scraggly valets. I was worried about going back to the hostel that night. Richard or the man with the nose stud might still be waiting for me, or the hostel might have called the police if someone had come in to claim the suitcase. Or the suitcase might be gone, which I didn’t want to think about either. I certainly didn’t want to talk to the police, but I was most scared of Richard and the man who’d stolen my bag.
“Hey David,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t think I’m weird or anything, but I don’t suppose I could sleep on your sofa? Just for tonight. I don’t mean,” I said. “You know. I really mean the sofa, like not in a euphemistic coffee way, in an actual sofa way.”
And I really did mean it in an “actual sofa” sort of way, not in the confused way I’d let August light my cigarette on the fire escape outside the Dragon Bar. I didn’t want to have to go back to the Serena that night, but I didn’t want to ruin things by sleeping in David’s bed that night. I wanted to sleep on David’s sofa.
“Of course,” David said simply. “No worries.”
“It’s not that I’m scared of that jerk from before, it’s just that it’s late and they sometimes rent your bed to someone else if you’re not there by eleven,” I said. “But not if it’s any trouble or anything.”
“No worries,” he smiled. “I’m actually working tonight, though. There’s some stuff happening around and about, so I won’t be in the apartment.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Positive,” he said.
“Sure?”
“Sure,” he said.
“What sort of stuff is going on? Celebrities?”
“People are more interesting at night. You get to see what you’re not meant to see if you go out at night.”
“Are you an insomniac?” I asked.
“Recently,” he said. “A bit.”
David’s flat was within walking distance from the restaurant. He had an amazing collection of bad horror films, just like Dad did, but his walls were also covered with bookshelves. Obviously he was a lot older than me, but it didn’t necessarily show until I realized how much more information might be in his head than was in mine. English was my best subject at school, but I hadn’t really read much. I later discovered that the most beat-up and scribbled-on of David’s books were by Hemingway and Capote, but two entire walls of his small flat were covered in bookshelves. There was Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Mark Twain, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger and loads of beautiful books on photography that he kept in a mysterious order based on merit rather than alphabetized by title or artist. There were no personal photographs on his walls, none of his toothless father or dead mother or Lily, but there was a whole set of prints in which random people were seen from behind. There was an old lady with her back to the camera, a little girl running away from the camera, a skinny woman in a miniskirt putting her middle finger up to the camera and a photograph of a busy shopping street in which everyone’s face was in some way hidden by hats, other heads or pillars. The photographs were all framed, yet they were somehow desolate. There were no close-ups or faces.
The rest of David’s flat was excruciatingly tidy. There wasn’t even any food in the fridge, and his IKEA sofa bed folded neatly out in front of his flat-screen television.
“Here’s a glass of water,” he said, handing one to me and then looking a little confused about the situation. “Do you want anything else? I don’t have people over much.” He’d already piled sheets and pillows and a blanket on the sofa for me.
“That’s great, thank you,” I said. “It’s really nice of you.”
“I’ll be back early tomorrow morning. If you want to leave before that,” he said. “Just lock the door from the inside. There’s a bus stop on the corner. I know where you’re staying and everything, so... ” He paused. “And don’t steal anything,” he said. “Please. Okay?”
“Okay,” I smiled. “I’ll try my best not to steal anything.”
“Thanks,” he said, and smiled.
“I only steal from funerals,” I said.
“Phew,” he said. “Good to know.” There was an awkward moment, and then we both looked away from each other.
The next morning I woke up early, before David came home. I showered in his spotless bathroom and snooped around the flat. His bedroom was very tidy. He had a huge wardrobe across one wall, sectioned off by a broken sliding door. It made me smile that he managed to look so chaotic, so mismatching, when everything around him was so well ordered. I checked the pockets of a couple of trousers in his wardrobe, but didn’t find much. There was a biro, a broken bit of camera, a cigarette butt wrapped in tissue and a telephone number written on a napkin. Face down in one of his drawers, among folded boxer shorts and balled-up socks, there were a couple of photographs. I was hoping to find the one of Lily that he stole from her bedside table at the wake, the one of her sitting cross-legged in her bikini and white T-shirt, but instead they were of David and friends. One was of David and a group of glamorous, bedraggled-looking friends all holding beers outside a bar and grinning. Another was the same group of people sitting in a beat-up gold car with David in the driving seat.
The car seats in the second photograph were made of tan leather, which matched the honey-gold glitter of the paintwork outside. It reminded me of old American movies. The car had a curved nose like the snout of a bear, and the “bling” paint job seemed exactly right for the stubble-cheeked and green-eyed man in the driving seat. It was haphazardly outlandish, but without self-consciousness, more like an oversized pet than a mechanical object.
There was also a lovely photograph, really beautiful, of David sitting on the hood of the dented old car with a camera held up to his face. In this photo you could see that the car was a Buick, and David looked forlorn, staring blankly at the camera. I put the three photographs back face down in the drawer. The walls of the flat were beige, the carpets were beige, and the curtains were covered in those geometric patterns you see on public-transport upholstery. Even his kitchen cupboards were nearly empty. He seemed to live off ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off and Oreos.
I flicked my eyes over the books, which did have personality. On the bottom shelf were the art photography and fashion books, those big coffee-table things that cost a fortune. Each book had one or two Post-it notes sticking out, which corresponded to where David’s photos were. The first photo that I saw of David’s was in a coffee-table book called
Suburban Circus
, which was full of strange-looking people doing domestic things. I was struck by a triple-jointed woman cleaning her bathroom in a tutu, and an albino teenager standing on a staircase wearing the most amazing green-silk ball gown, as if about to go the prom. David’s photo was on page thirty, and it involved a dwarf woman giving head to an enormous man in the middle of a well-manicured rose garden. The photograph was taken from a distance. For some reason, as I looked at the photograph I thought of being taken by Dad to Gulliver’s Village off the M40 in England when I was little, all of those tiny houses scattered around, when I thought the village would be super-human size. Dad and I ran around through the streets – him pretending to be King Kong and me pretending to be the woman in
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman
, seeking revenge on everyone who had crossed me. In David’s blowjob photograph there were car headlights hitting the sexual ensemble through what must have been a rose or bramble bush, because the light was all broken in places. It made the bodies molten, as if they were made of sweating plastic. It also looked so fake that the small woman could have been blowing up a massive doll and soon the man would shudder out of her mouth and up into the sky.
Other examples of David’s photography were more traditional. In one fashion magazine there was a perfume campaign earmarked, although it didn’t have his name on it. The photo was of a naked woman covered in sand, lounging on the beach with her back arched. In another magazine there was a fashion spread of models in bikinis on a Los Angeles rooftop, and in another a spread of men and women walking their dogs in city streets. One of the dog-walking photographs was the same photo of Lily that I found in the zipped plastic compartment of her suitcase. I pressed my finger to Lily’s pretty face and tried to imagine how she felt, teetering down that road with David looking at her. I put the magazine back on the dustless shelf and noticed a newspaper page folded up tight there between two magazines. It was flattened and faded, like an awkwardly pressed flower. The corners bristled when I opened them out, revealing a page of Death Notices from the
Los Angeles Times
two and a half weeks ago. It was half a page long, and looked like a group of personal ads or classifieds, but each little inky box was selling a memory rather than a raffle ticket or a kiss. There was Mavis Miller, who passed away peacefully in Pasadena, aged 92. And there was Linda Barretto Tengco, 42, of Porter Ranch, CA, who was survived by husband Vergel. I learnt that Walter, 81, was a beloved husband, father and grandfather, but he passed away November 13, 2009 at Los Angeles, California due to complications following surgery. And Dan Silverman wanted donations to be made to Cancer Research in lieu of flowers. There was a strange and succinct poetry to these memorial boxes, all of which seemed curiously impersonal. Only two of the Death Notices had pictures, and one of them was a photograph of Lily. It was a small picture, half the size of a credit card. Her hair was long and dark in the photo, her big eyes outlined thickly like a Manga cartoon character or a wide-eyed animal. The page smelt of chalk, the way old newspapers usually do.
“Lily lived life to the fullest to the very last moment,” the death notice said underneath the smiling photograph. “She is survived by Richard, and many friends who will never forget her. A wake, but the way she would have liked it, will be held at the hotel.” I stared at the newspaper page for a moment longer, touching the photograph with my thumb, then folded it along David’s crease lines and slotted it back between the two fashion magazines on his shelf. I put everything back exactly where I found it and left David a Post-it on his pale-wood kitchen table, thanking him for letting me stay and saying I’d like to do it again some time.
The morning after I left David’s flat, I called the Serena from a payphone to ask if the man with the gold nose stud had approached them about Lily’s suitcase.
“We didn’t give it to him, of course,” said Vanessa. “Tony took the key from him and told him to fuck off or we’d call the police.”
“What did he do?”
“He argued for a bit and then left,” said Vanessa.
“What if he comes again?” I said.
“We’ll do the same. He just seemed a bit stupid as far as I could see. Nothing to worry about, sweetness. He just kept saying that the suitcase didn’t belong to you and I kept saying I didn’t know what he meant.”
“It belonged to my mother,” I said.
“You should call the police yourself if you’re worried,” she said. “Can’t say he seemed like a wholesome sort of man.”
“Have you seen him around today?” I asked.
“No, but I’ll keep an eye out,” she said.
“Thanks, Vanessa,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t call the police.
I didn’t go back to the Serena that morning, but changed buses at the corner of Hollywood and Gower, opposite a cut-price furniture shop and in front of a converted theatre that was now offering a course in “How to Succeed in Life”. At the bus stop everything was two-dimensional in the afternoon heat with the smoggy sunlight flattening the palm trees to the concrete buildings and the glassy yellow sky. Everything was stuck flat to everything else, like the cardboard cut-out background of a child’s puppet theatre.
“Too hot, huh?” said a woman in a hat and a man’s oversized T-shirt. She was carrying a plastic bag from the 99-cent store and a suitcase on wheels. I nodded and turned away from her to watch two girl guides or scouts or something on their knees shining the star of a TV actor that I hadn’t heard of. One of them was scrubbing the bronze crevices with a toothbrush; the other was buffing the marble. They didn’t talk to each other, but both frowned and sucked their tongues. The woman with the hat shuffled onto the bus ahead of me, and pigeons flung themselves sideways as the vehicle pulled out into the road. I sat down right at the back. At the next stop, a clique of small Mexican women sat in the seats surrounding mine. They were discussing something uproariously funny, which meant little bits of their sweat kept rolling through the air and landing on my bare shoulders or knees. A bald white man with a golf hat kept telling the gaggle of women that they had no manners, that they were offending his eardrums and that the next time he saw them he would blow a whistle loudly into their ears. They laughed and ignored him, all of the women smiling with kind eyes and pinched leathery skin.
I took a bus downtown to look for Julie’s Place, the bar August had mentioned where Lily met Richard. I got the address from the match-box packet in the zipped pocket of Lily’s suitcase. The bar was a dark-brick building with hedges outside and a flat roof on top. It had heavy doors that were closed in the early-afternoon sunlight, but had the words “Julie’s Place” written over the top. I smoked cigarettes outside on the kerb next to a lamp-post for ten minutes before deciding to walk around the side and under a brick arch to a large car park at the back, where I found two camp men chatting at the mouth of an open door. Los Angeles is backwards – people come in through the car parks, and the front doors are just for show, because no one but hobos and idiots ever walk around the town. Beyond this car park was a graffiti-covered brick wall and a retro Coca Cola advert that was sliding from its hinges. The two men were both dressed solidly in black. They had the high cheekbones and expressively earnest eyes of actors. Neither of them looked at me. They were talking about scripts. I stood just around the corner and listened for a moment. One was writing a thriller about cocaine-smuggling snake worshippers in Texas, the other a teen romance about foreign-exchange students who turn into werewolves.
“Excuse me,” I said after a moment, stepping forwards. They looked over at me with their nearly matching big eyes and perfect molasses tans. I felt nervous, but asked: “Is Julie around?”
“Inside,” said one of the actors. I stepped through out of the sunlight into a hallway with black-painted walls. “So anyway, like, it’s meant to be like better than taking Ex, being bitten by a snake,” I heard behind me. The hallway curved into a sweat-smelling bar. The lights were all off, and some of the chairs had been unpacked already, but most were still upside down on shiny wooden tables scattered around the room. There was a pinball machine in the corner, and an American football game playing on the flat-screen television above the bar. The walls were made of peeling veneer, and there wasn’t any air-conditioning, just two black-painted fans stirring the sweaty air.
“Hello?” I said. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. “Hello?” I said again, then went over to one of the pinball machines and slipped a quarter in. A sports commentator on the TV was talking about the history of American football, and I pulled back the pinball spring. Just as I was about to start playing, thinking of the Trocadero Arcade in Leicester Square where I used to hang out playing videogames sometimes when I was little, a voice said:
“We’re closed.”
I jumped and turned around, losing the silver ball down the pipes of the machine. Behind the shiny chrome bar was the same skeletal woman with cropped black curly hair that I’d noticed dancing with her eyes closed at Lily’s wake. She was wiping down the bar with fingers covered in costume jewelry plastic rings. She was a tiny woman with bones that were visible under thin, pale skin. She seemed held together by hair and clothes rather than skin and bone, as if her fingers might crumble to dust if you removed all the plastic rings. She must have been in her forties, but looked older. She didn’t smile at me.
“Are you Julie?” I said.
“Did the boys let you in?” she said sharply, ignoring my question. “Can I see your ID? You look about ten, no offence.”
“I’m looking for Richard Harris?” I said.
“He hasn’t lived here for years. I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave. I can’t have underage people in my bar. I haven’t seen that man in years.”
“Were you at Lily’s wake?” I said.
Julie paused. She stopped cleaning the bar and looked at me. She had cavernous eye sockets with the skin stretched and swollen like blisters underneath. Even in the dark you could see the red veins under the skin of her eyelids. Her eyebrows were painted on above her eyes in pale-brown pen, and they gave her an expression of perpetual surprise even when the rest of her features seemed sunken in sadness. Everything about her was tense, from the corners of her mouth to the sinews in her skinny neck.
“Did you know Lily?” she said quietly.
I considered the question for a moment. I didn’t feel like confiding in this anxious woman about anything, but there was something shifty about the way her eyes flickered at the mention of Richard and how she’d lied about not having seen him in years. I didn’t like her, but decided to tell her anyway. I still felt high from my evening with David the previous night, like nothing could touch me.
“I’m Lily’s daughter,” I said.
“Lily’s
daughter
?” Julie said, incredulous, and smiled for the first time since I’d seen her. She had sharp little teeth, and flashing them didn’t suit her.
“Technically,” I pointed out. “I mean, biologically. She didn’t bring me up or anything.”
“Lily’s
daughter
?” Julie said again, with the same intonation. “Are you serious? I’ve known Lily since she was twenty-one. I think she would have mentioned a daughter.”
“She doesn’t seem to have been particularly vocal about my existence.”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t believe you’re her daughter,” Julie said. She took a long look at me, then disappeared into the back and didn’t reappear again for ten minutes. At first I thought that was Julie’s last word on the matter and she expected me to leave while she was gone, but then I imagined she might come back with something of Lily’s – another photograph, perhaps. For a second I even thought she’d come back with Richard trailing behind her.
Instead Julie came back into the bar with an infinitely more relaxed expression on her sharp face. She didn’t offer any explanation for her odd behavior. The tight curve of her lips had melted into a mercurial smile, and her bony shoulders had dropped an inch. I guessed she took a pill or smoked something, but later it turned out that she was quite a serious heroin addict. She never gave any explanation for her moods, which moved in waves from relaxed pleasure to nervous horror every few hours, and then back again once she’d disappeared into the backroom and remerged.
“You’re not kidding me about Lily, right?” Julie said, looking at me with consumed eyes. “Tell me now if you’re fucking with me, okay?” she said.
“I’m not fucking with you,” I said. “Could you tell me about her? I didn’t know her, and I’d love to hear about her, if you didn’t mind.”
“You don’t look like her, you know?” Julie said.
“Yeah, I know,” I shrugged. “You can ask Richard, though. Richard knows she had a daughter. I’m definitely her kid.”
“No, no, you don’t have her profile at all. You don’t have her nose: she had a better nose. You don’t have her hair. Of course she had black hair when we knew her, but she
was
a natural blonde at some point I suppose.”
Julie tried to touch my face across the bar, but I moved away, and she looked genuinely hurt by my reluctance to have her bony fingers on my skin.
“You’re not like her at all,” Julie said sharply. “She was sensual. She was full of love.” Then it was my turn to be hurt for a moment, and I flinched, looking away.
“Sorry. That was a mean thing to say,” Julie mumbled. “Fuck. I’m all weirded out now. She never mentioned you at all. You’re pretty in a different way.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry. I know I don’t look like her. I don’t want to look like her.”
It turned out that Julie hadn’t seen Richard since Lily’s wake, and she didn’t know where he’d disappeared to.
“Fucker owes me money, though,” said Julie.
“How come?”
“He always had some scheme on the go.”
“Like what?”
“They had creative minds, those two, but straight things got bent in their presence. Nothing was ever what they said it was going to be.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Property development became insurance fraud – that sort of thing.” She laughed gleefully, then continued: “After dabbling in property development they set up a motorcycle company. They got plenty of interest, cos his bikes are beautiful things, and she was one of those people who could charm a pig into a butcher’s shop if she tried. A year later he’d filed for bankruptcy, and they’d only finished three bikes... ”
“So he made the motorcycle Lily died on?”
“Sure, I guess. It just makes you want to cry, doesn’t it?” she said with dry eyes. She blinked a few times and looked exhausted. “I don’t know. She was reckless. It wasn’t his fault. His bikes were beautiful things.”
“Why did you lend them money recently?” I said.
“Supplies,” Julie said, then giggled a little manically. “Cos I’m stupid.”
“Supplies for what?”
“They organized some of the best parties in LA. Everyone wanted to be there,” she smiled. “Like the wake, but better. Good parties. Everyone loved them.”
“So drink and drugs and stuff?”
“That sort of thing,” she said.
“Did he love Lily?”
“Everyone loved Lily,” she said.
“And you really don’t know where he might have gone?” I said.
“His phone’s not working,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “He’s looking for me, and he left a number, but it doesn’t work. He made a big deal about me phoning him, and then his phone doesn’t even work.”
“He owes people money, that’s why his phone doesn’t work,” said Julie. “I’m sure he’ll find another way to get hold of you if he wants to. He usually gets what he wants.” I looked at Julie’s fingers, crawling over themselves at the bar. Her lips were dry, and the skin was peeling off around her sharp little nose. She poured vodka over some ice and sipped it slowly. Without us noticing the bar had filled up. There were lots of hipsters wearing trucker caps and geeky tortoise-shell glasses. I ended up staying there for a few more hours watching Julie get wrecked behind the bar. All the customers knew who she was and seemed to enjoy her unreliable company. Every hour or so she’d disappear and return refreshed, but by the end of the night she was cadaver-pale with blue lips and bloodshot eyes. She moved as if walking through sludge, and smiled at me occasionally across the overheated room. The lazy ceiling fans couldn’t keep the place cool, but people didn’t seem to mind sweating. Triangles of sweat expanded on the backs of T-shirts and between girls’ breasts. Eye make-up melted into inky tears and lipstick disappeared all together. Nobody else really spoke to me, but I eavesdropped on actors and music journalists and cameramen for a while. In the crowds I kept watch for Richard or the man with the nose stud, but they didn’t turn up at Julie’s place, and they didn’t turn up during my bus ride back to the Serena Hostel. I checked that the green Volvo wasn’t parked anywhere near the hostel before I got too near, and I glanced around the front door before stepping inside. I didn’t get back to the hostel till late, long after I figured Vanessa and Tony would be asleep.
The woman who often worked the night shift for the Serena was an Australian girl called Miranda, who drank a lot of Diet Coke. The cans would be lined up on the counter while she played on the computer all night.
“Hi, troublemaker,” she said briskly. “You okay?”
“Are Tony and Vanessa annoyed at me for making trouble?” I said. “Do you think they want me to leave?”
“They run a youth hostel in West Hollywood. They’re used to trouble. Someone left a note for you, though,” she said. “I don’t know if it has anything to do with anything from before.” She handed me a bit of paper, and I looked at it nervously. “It wasn’t the ugly Spanish guy,” she said. “It was some big guy with weird clothes?”
I smiled at Miranda and padded upstairs, where nearly all the beds were occupied with a Japanese package holiday, but Vanessa had made sure my bed was kept free. The tourists were all asleep or whispering with each other in the darkness. I climbed under the covers of my little single bed in the corner and opened David’s message under a nightlight.