The Pink Hotel (3 page)

“Good morning,” said a voice. I can’t have been asleep for very long, because the light on the beach was still frosty when the flash of a camera woke me. I jumped, and my eyes focused on the Giant, who had fumbled to steal the laughing photograph from Lily’s room earlier. He was standing above me now, silhouetted against the backdrop of the near-deserted beach and pointing a camera at me.

My fingers gripped Lily’s suitcase. The Giant’s irises looked very green in the rising daylight, and his lopsided mouth made one of his eyes seem smaller than the other. His lips were pursed, perhaps angrily. I didn’t move.

“My name’s David Reed,” he said. Then he took another photograph. “I saw you leave the hotel with the suitcase,” he added. “Thief,” he slurred, drunk. “I wasn’t going to do anything about it. Not my business. But then I’m walking over the beach minding my own business and – bang – there you are, looking photogenic. Right?”

“You should have kept minding your own business,” I said, getting up off the bench with my hand wrapped around the suitcase handle. He took another snap of me.

These photographs reminded me of how a man once tossed off in front of me on the night bus in London, his face creasing as his hand worked faster, puckering his lips with concentration. I had thought the act mesmerizing, grotesque and humiliating all at once, as if he were trying to touch me without moving. There was a similar intensity in the way the Giant was looking at me, as if he was trying to memorize me for later. It’s funny the way that men can possess women just by looking. They can take the woman home and merge her with other women in their head, change the length of her legs and the willingness of her mouth until there’s a whole new version of the original girl dancing seductively in the head of a stranger. Like I say, my talents never lay in standing out from the crowd. I’m very sensitive to people looking at me, feeling it on my skin like physical contact even from a long way off. Luckily people very rarely looked at me in the way the Giant Man was looking at me on that early morning beach, or how the man had looked at me on the bus.

“No, no, no sit down,” said David. “I’m harmless. No worries.”

He was clearly quite drunk, although maybe not as drunk as the red-haired man had been. The Giant stopped talking for a moment and took another picture. Then another.

“Did you take that from her room?” he said, nodding at the red suitcase.

“What are you talking about?” I replied. “This is my suitcase. I’m on holiday.”

We could hear the sea licking up at the sand two hundred meters from the bench, and smell salty air. He also smelt of beer, nicotine and alcohol sweats. There were faded old scars on his face – one on his eyebrow, one under his right eye, and a thin scar down his nose. He had a spider web of wrinkles around his eyes, but they didn’t make him look old, somehow. He looked boyish.

“I’m curious about what kind of person steals from a wake, though,” he said, and shrugged his big shoulders.

“It didn’t look like a wake,” I mumbled, “It looked like some sort of rave.”

“You didn’t know her?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.

“I just thought it was a party,” I lied.

“It was random opportunism?” he said.

“My boyfriend ran off with our rental car this morning. It had all my money, my clothes. Everything,” I said. “You going to call the police on me or anything?”

He paused.

“No,” he said, thoughtfully.

David pursed his lips and sat down on the bench next to me. The blond hairs on the back of my neck stood nervously to attention. Behind us the boardwalk was beginning to fill up with joggers and street vendors. I reached into Lily’s suitcase and extracted a half-empty pack of cigarettes along with her green plastic lighter.

“Those hers or yours?” he said, nodding at the cigarettes.

“Hers,” I said, then put one in my mouth and offered him the pack.

“That’s audacious, stealing her cigarettes and then offering me one. I might be her husband, or her brother.”

“Are you?” I said, glancing across at him.

“No,” he replied, and lifted the whole pack to his mouth, removing one of the cigarettes with his lips. He looked at Lily’s lighter for a moment, then flicked the tarnished silver roll to light mine before he lit his own. My heart jumped when he took a direct look at me under my red baseball cap, but he didn’t seem to notice any similarity between my face and hers. I have a small, symmetrical face with big brown eyes. It’s Dad’s mouth, Dad’s slightly pointed nose, Dad’s pale skin and high forehead. I figured that on some unconscious level David noticed me because of an element of Lily in my eyes. He must have done, but he gave no indication of recognizing Lily in me. I looked nothing like my mother. We sat in silence for a moment.

“How do you know her, then?” I asked him.

“I used to be a fashion photographer,” he said. “She – Lily – the dead woman – she used to be a model. We did a shoot together, years ago in LA.”

“A model?” I said.

“Yeah, you got a model’s clothes,” he said.

“Did you love her?” I asked, thinking of that haunted way he picked up Lily’s photograph in the bedroom. The words sounded childish even as they came out of my mouth, but he looked earnestly at me.

“She was one of a whole bunch of models,” he said. “I took one awesome photo of her, though. She’s walking some dogs. She looks beautiful in that photograph. Then I didn’t see her again till years and years later.”

“Are you still a fashion photographer?”

“Na,” he said. “I do paparazzi work now. How old are you?”

“Twenty two,” I said, and David yawned. His whole body arched with the yawn, his mouth stretching as if he were about to turn himself inside out.

My body has always felt divorced from my mind, but David’s body seemed to belong to him. His smile was connected to his shoulders and his hands connected to his eyes. I wondered where his scars were from. He had an energy that made me think of fighting, and then of the football pitch in Swiss Cottage where I always hung out. The asphalt was surrounded by graffiti-smeared brick walls, and we’d hop over a large yellow skip to get foot holes in the bricks and then jump or tumble onto spiky grass. Most of the girls had flirtations with the boys. Some had sex, moved in and out of allegiances, dated and grimaced and sucked and grinned and fell in love, but I never once gave a blowjob behind the bike shed. I was friendly with a girl named Mary, and we would sit facing the walls as if we were having conversations with the graffiti and drag our thumbs down the bricks, seeing who could do it for the longest. It was always me, with a connect-the-dots of broken skin like a kiss that buzzed right down the inside of my knees.

It’s difficult to explain the adrenalin I got from someone’s trainer mashed into my shoulder or grazing my knee and smelling blood on shorn grass. I liked the relief of cold air forced sharply into my lungs and the respite of traceable pain on my skin rather than the fleeting and invisible map of pleasure that seems to happen with love or affection. Girls are meant to be subtler in their choice of violence, but it took me a long time to discover sex and charm. Instead I scraped my knees, spat on boys till they fought me in the football field, acquired black eyes and bitten lips and played chicken in the bramble bushes – running barefoot at friends in the middle of the night until our ankles were jagged with blood.

If you prick your skin with a needle, the pain signal will travel to the brain at ninety-eight feet per second, I learnt from my science teacher. Burning or aching travels at six and a half feet per second. Pain seemed so much less capricious than pleasure, and so much less terrifying than feeling nothing. By fifteen my body was a scarred map from which I could point out the fight or fall that caused each lasting Tick-Tack-Toe mark on my knees and elbows, the slash across my eyebrows and down my collarbone, the jumpy dotted lines on my knuckles. One scar on my bottom was from the time a boy threw me in a skip and metal cut through my jeans, the slice on my wrist was the time I fell on a shard of glass during a football scuffle and had to get stitches, another on my arm was from the time I was pushed off a skateboard. Although I pinch myself sometimes, and absently bite my lip, I’ve only really “self-harmed” once: a four-inch knife line inside my thigh. I sat on the edge of the bathtub to design it when I was twelve. It didn’t even really hurt. I regretted it. It was interesting more than thrilling. It was harder to stop dragging the knife across than it was to continue with the movement. There was no thrill of connection in cutting myself; someone else had to do it in order to make me feel calm.

As David and I smoked Lily’s cigarettes on the wooden bench, my nerves dissipated with the darkness. A skinny man slid past us on roller skates with a boom box on his shoulder. He put the music box down, around a hundred meters from the bench and shouted – “Here we go! Here we go!” – pirouetting on his glittery skates. It looked like something out of an urban, hip-hop Fantasia cartoon. Soon there were naked kids being pushed around the boardwalk in shopping trolleys, drinking milkshakes from buckets the size of their bodies. There were DJ decks set up on the street and toy trucks jumping around the legs of the bench, being attacked by tiny dogs wearing witty T-shirts.

“I’m sorry your friend died,” I said to David.

“Me too,” he said, shrugging, tipping his absurd neon-yellow sunglasses over his eyes. “That’s fucked-up about your boyfriend stealing your car, though,” he added. I had an urge to touch him. He looked perturbed and pale and drunk in the sunlight.

“What are you going to do?” he asked me, not smiling.

“I’ll probably do some touristy stuff, then go home.”

“England?”

“London.”

“Your ex-boyfriend English?”

“Yeah,” I said. I wondered if my nationality would make David think of Lily, but it didn’t seem to.

“Did you have an argument with him before he stole your car?” David said.

“He ran off with a girl who works in some roadside diner. They exchanged numbers while I was in the toilet a couple of days ago. He gave me this guilty look when I came back. She served me pancakes without looking me in the eye, but she smiled secretively at him. You know the feeling?” I said, fingering the rim of my baseball cap and shivering. I’ve never even set foot in a roadside diner, just seen them in movies and read about them in books.

“I need to go throw up,” David said suddenly, nearly to himself. “I haven’t slept for a while.”

“Do you want me to get you anything?”

“I usually wait till I know a girl before I vomit and pass out on her,” he said, standing up and trying to smile. He looked unsteady on his oversized feet.

“You sure you’re alright? I could walk you somewhere?”

“You’re very polite for a grave-robber,” he said.

“Are you sure?” I said, wanting to help him.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Good to meet you.”

“Sleep well,” I frowned. He staggered away down the crowded street with a slight limp that made him look like some sort of poseur gangster, then turned and bent over to vomit in an alley off the main road.

I carried Lily’s suitcase to a youth hostel away from the boardwalk. The room I was given had two beds with squeaky springs and the mosquito screens had flies trapped on it. Every time a car came past the road underneath, the walls would light up yellow. It felt as if I were sitting inside a dying light bulb. It turned out that when I took Lily’s shoulder bag I also stole her wallet, which had a further hundred dollars, some credit cards and her driving licence. The picture on the driving licence scowled at me. Presumably most people can conjure an image of their mother from childhood, but my memories are either from photographs or they’re physical. I can’t imagine what she used to look like, but remember fragments of her holding my hand too tight in a supermarket, the texture of her legs when I grabbed them, the extreme comfort of a silk blanket my dad’s older sister gave me when I was born, which Lily used to wrap me in. Sometimes, when I’m anxious, the soft area between my fingers lifts up and tingles in memory of that silk blanket that I used to drag between my baby fingers. Odd things made me think of her, but I didn’t think of her very often. For example there’s a particular brand of cheap hair dye that used to make my stomach turn, only I couldn’t possibly have remembered the smell of henna and peroxide from when I was under the age of three. Similarly I’m convinced that we were overrun by a plague of ladybirds around the time Lily left, but Dad doesn’t remember anything of the sort.

“There weren’t any ladybirds,” Dad claims, but it would be just like him not to remember those leggy red shells gradually multiplying so they drowned in my bathwater and got stuck in the creases of my baby clothes. Ladybirds are meant to be lucky, which is strange considering the rhyme about flying away home your house is on fire and your children are gone. The ladybirds would fly at any available light source and then jump away from the heat, panicked, a little embarrassed, like a child touching an electric fence. A second later they would tuck their petticoat wings back under their shells and lift up for the light bulb again. I’m sure they formed mass graves in the bedside and kitchen light fixtures, all around the time Lily left.

I took off Lily’s leather jacket and folded it over my arm, then placed it on the bed. I folded the three stolen dresses, smoothing away the creases and piling them up on the bed. They smelt of floral perfume. Then I took out the shoes – the red stilettos, black knee-highs, little grey ballet pumps – and put them to the side of the suitcase, under the metal legs of the little single bed. There were shadows of dirt on the inside of each shoe, like dislocated shadows. In a plastic cover under an elastic strap in the roof of the suitcase were typed papers full of legal jargon about the Pink Hotel – proxy, aforementioned, hereafter. Also under the strap were a “Certificate of Completion” and an “Evaluation Report” from a nurse’s training college in a place called Glendale. It said she was “dedicated and enthusiastic”. Tucked away near the report card was a photograph of Lily wearing pink scrubs, with her arm around a debonair-looking old man. It said, “Teddy and Lily, Malibu Mansions” on the back. Then there was a pile of road maps, mostly of American states – Nevada, Alabama, California – but also of European cities – Florence, Berlin, London. The road maps had routes marked on them, the ink making funny patterns on the lattice of roads. Perhaps she travelled and never tried to find me. I tried to imagine Lily in London, sitting on an underground platform or walking through the polluted circus of Finchley Road trying not to catch anyone’s eye or step on the cracks. I wondered if she’d ever watched me from afar and not made contact: perhaps she’d seen me playing football, or at school, or waiting tables at the café.

I hoped to find a picture of Dad or of me among the rubble of memories tucked away in the suitcase, but the pictures were mostly of Lily herself. There were pictures of Lily and her husband swimming in a rooftop pool, Lily drinking red wine somewhere in the countryside, Lily wearing a diamante cocktail dress and fur cape. I looked at a Polaroid of Lily standing with a motorcycle outside a blue concrete building under a sign saying “Eagle Motorcycles”. This was the same bike that she was standing with in the photograph on her table at the Pink Hotel, which I supposed was her bike, perhaps the one she died on. The bike in the photo was slim and shiny, with a curved black-leather seat and silver handlebars.

In a side pocket of the suitcase were Christmas and Birthday cards all bundled together along with postcards and letters. Some of the cards were from the man called Teddy from the debonair “Malibu Mansions” photo. The most arresting letters were the ones typed on thin paper and signed off “with love, for ever, for always” rather than with a name. The typewriter had bruised the paper with long lines of indentations. I imagined Lily running her own fingers over the words like they were Braille. “The sky is blood-red outside my window tonight and I’m thinking of you,” one of them began. “The first time we met you were holding a small red umbrella. Remember? And now the colour red makes me think of you.” There were no dates or names on the pretty letters. “Later, I came to know your little red dresses,” the letters continued, “and the army of incendiary lipsticks on your dresser”. The letters made me feel like an eavesdropping child flummoxed by adult vocabulary and emotional dynamics. I folded the letters along their original creases and placed them back into the case. I figured they were from the red-haired man, and felt guilty. Perhaps he’d report the theft to the police, telling them to look for a girl with a baseball cap and red suitcase. Of course, the pretty love letters could have been from David. In any case I would have liked to have found the magazine photo David mentioned, from when Lily was a model and he met her for the first time.

I didn’t dream about anything in the hours after Lily’s wake. It was the black-hole sort of sleep where you don’t wake up refreshed. I fell asleep in my clothes on the bed and eight jet-lagged and dreamless daylight hours later I opened my eyes to find my body thick with sweat from sun pouring in through the hostel window. I took a deep breath and listened to funny sounds in the corridor outside. In the next-door room, two Australians were arguing about the merits of bamboo over fiberglass in the surfboard-manufacturing process. Outside the window a little girl was singing a pop song, a siren was screaming, and there was an infomercial for laser-eye surgery going on somewhere else. Lily’s clothes were strewn accusingly over the floor. I dragged one of her halter neck tops over my head. I’d been wearing the same T-shirt for ages, and it stank of skin and sleep. I put my own tracksuit bottoms on, my own scuffed trainers, and stuffed my Adidas zip-up hoodie in my rucksack.