Authors: Anna Stothard
The red-haired man lay unconscious on the bed. He stirred briefly when I put a blanket over his body, but he didn’t open his eyes or speak. There were granules of white powder tangled in his nose hair, and his skin was tacky like fresh paint. He had clearly dressed with precision earlier in the day. His snakeskin shoes were both tied in a careful bow, and his socks were the same colour as his suede belt. But now there was vomit on the trousers and his skin smelt of beer.
I quietly picked up a sequined dress from the floor of Lily’s bedroom. I held it against my body, but it looked silly. I was nearly eighteen years old, and hadn’t grown into dresses yet. They didn’t suit me. I dropped the dress to the floor and put a man’s bowler hat on my head. There was a messy jungle of silk, leather, cashmere and cotton on the floor along with a few man’s shirts crumpled in puddles, a few ties and loafers and big trainers amongst the overpowering femininity. The wardrobe rail had fallen down while the men fought, so the room looked even more chaotic than before. Some patent red stilettos caught my eye, and a pair of grey ballet pumps. I picked up the mink scarf from the floor and wrapped it around my neck. It felt heavy and dead. At home in London I had a white melamine chest of drawers full of tracksuits, oversized jumpers and screwed up T-shirts acquired from school lost-property boxes or locker rooms over the years. The drawers were decorated with the faded remains of red Arsenal football stickers, and on top were three football trophies and one swimming trophy. I’d been proud of these trophies at some point, but eventually they merged into the dark magenta of my bedroom walls.
Nothing in my flat at home was soft to touch. Dad liked to make use of “found” things, so all the bedspreads in the house were made of that faux-quilted polyester, stolen from bed-and-breakfasts over the years. Not that we went on holiday very much, but when we did we never went back to the same place twice. My bedspread was patterned with a faded bouquet in watery pastel colours, while Daphne and Dad had a mud-coloured bramble pattern. We still had two nice bath towels from the Hilton in Brighton, where Daphne and Dad spent their honeymoon, and five thin green towels from the gym where Daphne used to work as a receptionist. We didn’t have too many problems with money, but still nothing made Dad happier than free stuff. One day Dad came home with a small city of discarded paint cans from outside the DIY store at the end of our road. They were colours that had been mixed wrong. Dad insisted that we spend my half-term holiday painting a rainbow of rejected colours onto the faded white walls. The “Canary Yellow” of our bathroom walls looked green in sunlight, the “Rum Caramel” of our kitchen cabinets was a watery-coloured varnish, the “Palace Velvet” of my bedroom walls was more swampy than palatial, and the “Ruby Fountain” of our living room was the colour of scabbed knees. He also insisted that we revarnish the living-room floor, even though the stolen varnish was granular with fat clumps of sand made to stop people slipping on factory floors.
I glanced at the red-haired man snoring now on his bed. A photo of his wedding day sat on the bedside table next to a glossy paperback novel. It was difficult to tell how old Lily was in the wedding picture, but she was wearing a simple white dress with a veil covering big brown eyes. The red-haired man looked much more handsome in the photograph than he did lying on the bed. In the wedding photo he stood behind his new wife with a look of amused, baffled devotion, like he couldn’t believe his luck. I noticed the actual wedding dress was in a dry-cleaner’s zipped plastic bag curled on the wardrobe floor, where it had slid off the rail during the fight between the Giant and the Red-Head.
I owned just one photograph of Lily before she left us, which I found in Dad’s desk drawer next to some spilt ink, old electricity bills and an ecosystem of dust. She left when she was seventeen, three years after I was born. In the picture she and Dad are sitting in a photo booth with me – three years old – in their laps. Dad has acne and Lily has pink hair. She was always dyeing it different colours. Dad is looking at Lily, who is already looking away from both of us up into the middle distance. I’m the only one who is looking at the camera. She must have left a few months after the photograph was taken. She looks as if she’s already fading from the tube-station photograph booth, like she’s turning into a fairy child or a poltergeist as the camera flashes. I couldn’t imagine her in the café, or helping me with my homework. She was always just an undefined thought in my head, or a shape that seemed sometimes about to appear in my peripheral vision and never did. Nobody heard a word from her after she left. We didn’t even know she moved to America. The first time she ever felt remotely real to me was when I found out that she was dead, because at least that was physical. It wasn’t the half-remembered smell of her or a story about how she stole money from Grandma’s purse, or how she and Dad went on their first date to an aquarium. It was fact. She died. She was thirty-two. The accident happened on a road called Laguna Highway, somewhere outside Los Angeles, in the desert. She was riding a motorcycle too fast and not wearing a helmet. She never regained consciousness, and died in the ambulance twenty minutes later, the hospital administrator told me over the telephone while I stood motionless in our “Ruby Fountain”-coloured living room off the Finchley Road in London. The hospital administrator thought I ought to know that my mother was dead, since I was her only blood relative, but the hospital only knew I existed because of some information on an old healthcare document.
“It wasn’t easy to locate your information, but I left a message on your machine four days ago,” she said. I frowned. Dad hated talking about my mother, his first girlfriend. He’d mentioned her a countable number of times in my life, and all the small snippets of information came from my grandmother or family friends: Lily was a coward, a slut, a terrible mother.
“Are you still there?” the woman from the hospital said over the phone after I held my breath for a moment.
“I’m here,” I said, exhaling. Downstairs, underneath the flat, Daphne and Dad were cleaning in the café kitchen. I knew every sound so well that I could almost see Daphne and Dad winding rhythmically around each other amongst wet metal and plastic.
“Well, I’m sorry to give you bad news,” said the woman.
“I didn’t know her,” I said, picking at the skin around my nails and sucking little pockets of blood as they rose up. “Is there a funeral though?”
“She ran a hotel with her husband in Los Angeles. The funeral will be in Venice Beach, followed by a wake at the hotel nearby. I’m afraid it’s set up for Friday afternoon. I am really sorry: I left a message earlier in the week.”
“Nobody passed it on,” I said. “Do you think she’d want me to come? Did her friends know she had a daughter?”
“I just work at the hospital where she died. I never met your mother,” the woman said.
“Did she have other kids?”
“No other children are mentioned on her documents,” said the voice.
If Dad had sat me down and told me that Lily was dead, perhaps I would have shrugged and gone back to watching TV or reading my book: it’s not like I knew her. But he hadn’t told me, so instead of shrugging I packed my savings from the café and stole Daphne’s credit card from her handbag, which was sitting on the sofa in front of the television. I knew the number, because Daphne had a terrible memory and had it written on an index card in the cutlery drawer along with Dad’s mobile number. It took me ten minutes to book a ticket online, for early the next morning, and twenty-or-so hours later I was in my mother’s bedroom at the top of a vast pink hotel in Venice beach, lifting a wedding dress up against my body. I glanced briefly at her unconscious husband and took off my own damp T-shirt to slip the dress over my head.
If the red-haired man had woken up at that second, he would have seen torn tracksuit bottoms sticking out from a milky froth of his dead wife’s silk-and-lace wedding dress. For a moment I was caught inside the cloud of perfumed silk. The music was getting quieter in the layers of hotel underneath the bedroom, the party finally winding down. It must have been five or six in the morning by that point. I could have taken off the silly dress and snuck out. Nobody would even have known that I’d been there, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the creature in the mirror. I didn’t look anything like Lily. Nobody would recognize the connection. Who knows if her husband or anyone else even knew she had a daughter. I could have snuck out in the same invisible way I came. I could have gone home and worked at the café to help pay off the credit-card debt. I could have walked away from Lily’s prostrate husband and snuck out of the party, but instead I picked up one of Lily’s red stilettos. I wanted to take them, even though they wouldn’t suit me and I’d probably never be able to walk in them. Then I figured maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take a couple of dresses, a few pairs of shoes. Lily might even have wanted me to have some of her stuff.
I padded over to the wardrobe to look for a bag or suitcase or something, because all I had with me was my doodled-on school rucksack. Glancing at the red-haired man I got down on my knees to reach under the bed, which is where Dad and Daphne keep their suitcases at home. Sure enough, amongst old tissues, broken sunglasses and crumpled receipts I tugged out a beat-up red suitcase. It was about three feet by two and made out of material the colour of ancient red Play-Doh. It sort of smelt like Play-Doh too, chalky and dry, yet somehow comforting. Inside there were papers, postcards, and photographs in some of the little pockets. “ To My Darling Lily,” I read from the first line of one of the typewritten notes, but then the red-haired man started to stir. He groaned on the bed, and a little bit of white saliva bubbled at the corner of his lips.
I began to put clothes quickly in the suitcase, on top of the letters, looking back to the red-haired man every two seconds to check he was still unconscious. I took a leather biker jacket, a pair of stonewash jeans, a silk fuchsia dress, a fitted black dress, a white cotton dress with black buttons down the front, four tops, some sunglasses, a little pair of silver teardrop earrings, some underwear, red lipstick, a suede tan handbag, two packs of cigarettes and a green plastic lighter. I picked up the shiny paperback novel from next to her bed and looked down on Lily’s husband. The pointed tip of one snakeskin shoe was dangling off the side of the bed, and his chest hair was all matted around the gold chain at his neck. He might have been handsome once, but he was gaunt and pulpy now. He groaned again, rasping like his mouth was full of sand, but he didn’t stir, and I went back to closing the suitcase over skirts, dresses, black boots, muddy red stilettos, and the pair of grey ballet pumps. There was a pile of twenty-dollar notes in Lily’s underwear drawer, which I guiltily stuffed in a pocket of my rucksack too.
As I closed the suitcase clasp, the red-haired man made another noise, and this time the rasp turned into a cough that seemed to lift him out of unconsciousness and up onto his elbows, although his eyes remained closed. He coughed again, straining the buttons on his shirt and making the veins of his neck swell. As I stepped towards the bedroom door with Lily’s suitcase in my hand, the red-haired man opened his eyes and stared at me.
“What the fuck,” he said, quite slowly.
I didn’t put down the suitcase when he spoke, but pulled the bedroom door closed with my free hand just as the red-haired man made an uncoordinated lunge towards me off the bed. The bedroom door slammed shut, and I didn’t open it to check if he was all right, just legged it out of the apartment.
I’m usually very good at being invisible. Back home in London my friend Laurence taught me that the way to be a great petty thief is to switch off your personality while still being acutely aware of the world around you. He liked to shoplift, and I came with him sometimes, although before Lily’s wake I hadn’t actually stolen anything for years. Laurence used to preach that most of the million ghosts walking mindlessly from A to B in every city in the world are inconspicuous because they aren’t noticing themselves, but an arrogant person or an anxious person is noticeable because they’re so aware of their existence. Similarly, fine-pointed stilettos and push-up bras draw a woman’s attention to herself, and so she exists visibly to the world. Laurence used to say that I had “kleptomaniac chic” down to a T, which apparently meant dressing as if unsure about my own existence. Even as a kid I was incognito. According to Dad I neither smiled nor talked until I was five, which caused everyone to think that I was either deaf and dumb or autistic or both. He said I was a “personified shrug”, a kid on whose face fear, anger, amusement and love all looked the same – just a tilt of the head and a blank stare from inhumanly wide eyes.
I tried to be invisible as I rushed out of the private flat at the top of the Pink Hotel, but it’s hard to pull off when you’re scared. I dragged Lily’s suitcase through the waning party, and at first I thought the red-haired man would clamber up from the floor and follow me. I kept looking back, but he wasn’t there. Other people seemed to be looking at me though. There was a woman in a leather minidress, and a man with a gold stud in his nose who looked thuggish except for neatly parted black hair. I only noticed this man very fleetingly at the hotel that first night, but the mixture of schoolboy hairstyle and a thug face made me remember him later. The techno and electro music had stopped by now, so maybe someone had heard noises from upstairs. There were people asleep in different rooms, or still dancing to themselves in the hallway. Someone was vomiting in a toilet and I swear she looked up and smiled crookedly at me as I passed. Someone else was crying. I hurried downstairs and out of the hotel onto the boardwalk, where the light was just beginning to turn blue behind street lamps and palm trees. The suitcase wasn’t heavy, just clumsy to carry. It kept banging against my leg, and I looked behind to check nobody was following me.
There were people smoking on the steps and two people kissing against the pink stucco walls, but nobody followed me. On one block of the road, homeless men slept in bundles of rags and corrugated cardboard. One of them looked at me with heavyset narcotic eyes, but the rest were curled up with their dusty eyelids closed. I gripped the suitcase tighter and kept walking until I couldn’t see the homeless men or the pink walls of the hotel any more. Then I sat down on a bench in front of the blacked-out beach to open Lily’s suitcase for a jumper or jacket to wear as the sun came up. From the chaos of my thievery I chose the leather motorcycle jacket that Lily had been wearing in the photo of her posing with her bike. I thought about phoning Dad to tell him I was OK, but decided to calm down before that battle. I zipped the leather jacket up to my neck.
At first it seemed unlikely that I’d be able to doze on a bench in front of a picture-postcard cliché of a beach, but soon the sun started to come up, and my adrenaline stopped pumping quite so hard. I lay down with the suitcase under my head on the bench. The light was beautiful, sort of frosty. I hadn’t seen the sea since a caravan holiday in Cornwall six years ago. I don’t love the sea in any cosmic sense, but I do like it. The Pacific looked like a different animal from the Atlantic. If the Atlantic was a foaming, snapping Rottweiler, the Pacific was a sleepy gecko in the sunlight. I had a recurring dream throughout that strange summer, which always began as a conscious thought while I was trying to lull myself to sleep and ended in dull panic. I’d begin with a deserted beach, all warm and wonderful. I would be naked in my dream, and for some reason pregnant, the thick water touching my white thighs and then my belly as I stepped further into the sea. The sky would always be full of blue seagulls in my dream, and I would find myself unable to ignore a red coin of colour that appeared on the horizon and grew. It looked like a sunset that had started in the sea before it hit the sky, and I wouldn’t be able to stop looking and couldn’t stop this feeling of panic, like someone was dying out there. I’d go and sit on the itchy beach and stare at this beginning of an upside-down sunset until I was actually giving birth, at which point I’d try to stop my thoughts. I’d wake myself up slightly, trying to go back to the feeling of damp sand between my toes, to imagine being blind, being asleep, but the thought-baby and thought-me wouldn’t stop panting, painfully, giving birth on the beach. Then there would be an incredibly calm moment, like the exhalation of air after you come or lose your temper. I’d be in the water again and cleaning off all the blood from the baby. I’d put my fingers in the baby’s mouth to scoop out the red coin of goo, and its mouth would be an echo of the blood on the horizon.