Authors: Anna Stothard
The streets of Venice Beach were quieter than they’d been the day before, yet still strange. Elderly ladies in vast sunglasses were knitting on the bench where David and I had smoked Lily’s cigarettes. There were rollerbladers everywhere, zipping around pumped-up body builders and tourists wearing bum bags over big pastel T-shirts. I stopped to watch an old lady reading tarot cards and a woman in a tie-die dress making jewelry boxes out of shells. Eventually I arrived at the Pink Hotel, suitcase in hand. Everything looked different in the light. It was more ragged, with canned laughter from a sitcom jangling in the foyer and a couple of surfers drinking soda on broken sofas. There were still beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays scattered around, and the air was stale like nothing had really been cleaned properly yet. A concierge girl looked up at me over a pair of tortoise-shell Ray-Bans balanced on her freckled nose. Her skin looked a bit green.
“We’ve all got hangovers from hell, babe, sorry,” the girl drawled. “I’m sure not going to be the one to disturb Mr Harris today. No way.”
“He’ll want to see me,” I said. “I think he’s probably looking for me, even.”
“He’s not looking for anyone, believe me,” she said. “We had a big party last night, and now the cleaners have gone on strike and... you know? It’s just not a good day.”
“He was looking for me last night,” I said.
“He doesn’t want to see
anyone
,” she said. “He’s asleep.”
I paused, thinking the girl was turning greener in front of me.
“But you’ve spoken to him today?” I said. The girl shrugged her bony shoulders.
“The TVs on up there and he’s been clomping around. But he’s asleep now, so call back later if you really need to speak to him.”
Part of me considered leaving the suitcase there with the concierge girl, but I didn’t want to abandon it before I’d spoken with Richard. I wanted to know why Lily became a nurse, for example, and when she was a model. I wanted to know if she mentioned me, and whether Richard had written her those love letters.
“Can I leave a note?” I said.
“Sure,” she said, giving me a piece of paper and a pen, but when it came to writing something down I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Just tell him someone dropped by to give the suitcase back?” I said. “Tell him I’ll come by again in a few days.”
“Sure thing,” said the girl, looking at the suitcase in my hand. “I’ll tell him you’ll come back later. What’s your name?”
“He doesn’t know me,” I said. “Just say the girl who took the suitcase.”
“Sure,” said the girl, frowning for a second, then going back to her computer screen.
I smoked a couple of Lily’s cigarettes in the car park outside a 7-11 near the Pink Hotel. Maybe Richard was so drugged that he wouldn’t remember me stealing the suitcase at all. My thumbnail fondled the zip of the clasp of Lily’s suitcase, which seemed hot under the West Coast sunshine. I particularly wanted to touch the silk fuchsia sundress for some reason. My skin lifted at the idea like it used to lift when thinking about my silk blanket when I was a baby.
After a while I went into the 7-11 convenience store and bought a phone card from the teenage shop assistant. The buttons on the parking-lot payphone were all sticky, and it rang for ages before Daphne’s irritated voice arrived at the receiver. I could imagine her oval face in the darkness, tumid with sleep and floral-smelling moisturizing lotion. Her cheek might have been momentarily scarred with the imprint of creases from the frilled edges of her special silk pillow that didn’t make her hair frizz during the night. She always looked older in the morning, her skin a landslide that righted itself slowly throughout the day.
“Hello?” she gulped, and then coughed. “Who is this?”
“Me,” I said quietly.
“Stupid girl,” Daphne immediately snapped over the crackled phone line, “get the hell home, alright?” I imagined Dad, his hairy belly under the stolen bedspread, his hands reaching over to grab the phone from Daphne’s fingers.
“You think I don’t check our bank balance? I want you on the next plane home,” said Dad sternly, and I could imagine him crossly putting on his glasses in the dark. “Right now. You hear? Get the next plane home or we’ll be calling the police,” he said.
“We absolutely will,” Daphne said in the background. I couldn’t think what to say: my mind went blank and my tongue felt twice the size of my mouth. I looked down at my scuffed trainers on the tarmac, and my hands holding a cigarette like a talisman. There wasn’t anything to do except put down the phone on Dad. I often find it hard to say what I mean. It’s like the person who speaks isn’t the person who thinks sometimes. My gut reaction was defensive, but they had every right to be angry. The little café Dad owned was off Finchley Road, an asthmatic motorway that runs from Swiss Cottage tube station in London. It was part of a row of four shops – a shoe shop, a newsagents, a hair salon and us. We lived in the flat above the café, which faced a string of nice terraced houses with manicured front gardens on one side, and on the other South Hampstead Rail Station and a massive, sprawling, grey-brick estate. I used to go to school a stone’s throw away from the estate, but when I was twelve I moved to a grammar school further away. The walls of the café were pastel-blue, with flowers stencilled along the edge, but the continual fizz of frying had turned the paint grey at the top. Every day after school I’d sit cross-legged on the industrial freezer in the backroom and do my homework. Dad never made me waitress on weekdays, only Saturdays and Sundays, because Grandpa had made Dad work after school and he never got good grades. Dad dropped out when he was sixteen and didn’t want that to happen to me. After finishing my homework I’d either help Dad with the accounts or I’d get my bike and go play among the grey stone walkways and interlocking tenements behind the café. The estate was a little town in itself, and shook every time a train passed underneath. It was a long, thin grey structure that curved along one side of the train tracks for maybe half a mile. Each flat had a balcony with dried-up plants dripping off them, or washing lines draped across, or beer-sponsored sun umbrellas that looked like they’d been stolen from a pub garden. The area around this was a labyrinth of pathways, stairways, playgrounds and hidden corners with flowerbeds everywhere. I suppose an enthusiastic architect assumed they’d be kept full of geraniums and daisies, but they were always full of dried dirt and ivy. There was one old lady in the estate who would potter around planting the odd solitary flower. She wore a wide brimmed sun hat with tracksuit bottoms that were too small for her. The elastic caught at her calves, leaving her ankles bare. She’d plant a single purple chrysanthemum in a forest of nettles, but a week later the flower would be dead.
After putting down the phone on Dad, I sat down on the kerb with Lily’s suitcase in front of me. A few moments later through the Californian heat and the rising chatter of car doors slamming in the increasingly busy 7-11 parking lot, the phone started to ring back. It jangled anxiously, and a bony dog started to bark. A graceful man wearing lip-gloss and a sailor’s cap looked down at me, then looked at the phone. I thought for a second the sailor was going to answer it, but he just kept walking. It seemed to ring on for ages, but when it stopped I lit a cigarette with Lily’s green lighter and tried to feel calm in the sunshine. I opened the suitcase on the tarmac and ran the cool hem of the fuchsia sundress between my fingers. I smoked with one hand and pulled at the silk with the other. After a moment the sun heated the silk, and it wasn’t soothing any more. Everything felt sticky in the sunshine. There was a brown envelope at the bottom of the suitcase that I hadn’t opened the day before. I thought it was sealed, but actually it was just sticky and old, and opened easily. Inside were a wedding licence and two photographs. The first photo was a faded Polaroid, labelled “Lily Dakin marries August Walters, in Jackpot, Idaho”. In this photo Lily looked like she was playing dress-up in a stiff “party dress” that pinched her throat. She wore her hair tied in a schoolgirl ponytail on top of her head, with a pair of rock-and-wire homemade earrings and two strands of limp hair dangling over her face. The boy had a thin shirt, two sizes too big for him, but he was even prettier than Lily. He had sandy hair, liquid blue eyes and a damp pink mouth like a bow that could be unravelled with a joke or a curse. They both stood hesitantly on the edge of childhood. The photograph was fading, and had a sickly flash in the left-hand corner, where the colour had been sucked up. The groom looked as if he might still race toy cars when nobody was looking, and the bride looked like she might still collect furry stickers or play with dolls.
As for the second wedding photo, it was the same one I’d seen framed in Lily’s bedroom, of her and the red-haired man. I wondered how Lily lost that indistinct and careful smile from the first wedding photo for the calm allure of the second. There was nothing written on the back, but there was a photocopied marriage licence folded in the envelope. The licence said that Lily Dakin, 23, married Richard Harris, 30, in Burbank, California. In this second photograph her hair was scraped off her face, and you could see the crow’s feet around her eyes. I finished my cigarette on the kerbside, staring at these pictures, then walked into the 7-11 and asked the shop assistant whether he had a copy of the Yellow Pages I could borrow and a map of Los Angeles that I could buy.
There were twenty-two California listings for A. Walters. I sat with the sticky payphone up to my mouth and spoke to Abigail Walters in Napa, Abe Walters’s son in Eureka, Anna Walters’s boyfriend in Santa Maria, Ashley Walters in Orange County, Adam Walters’s mother in San Francisco and then a woman named Candy Britannia in Los Angeles, who informed me that she was subletting from a man named August. She didn’t know (or wouldn’t give me) August’s mobile number or new address, but she thought he worked in a Martini bar in LA – a place called Dragon Lounge or Dragon Bar or something to do with dragons, although she wasn’t sure where exactly it was.
I tossed and turned in the Venice Beach youth hostel that night, and the next day found an Internet café on the beach to look up the addresses of all the “dragon” establishments in Los Angeles that might serve Martinis. There was The Dragon, a Red Dragon, a Dragon Bar, and a Twin Dragon Drinks. I knew that the August I found wouldn’t be a boy my own age, but there was something about his Polaroid wedding photograph that made me want to find him anyway – perhaps it was because from the looks of things August must have been the person Lily called home in the years after she left me. While in the Venice Beach internet café I also typed the name “David Reed” and “photographer” into Google and got a bunch of results: a graphic designer from Texas, a professor of Computer Science in New Jersey, a Facebook page for a “freshman” in Northcentral University. Then there was a paparazzi website called “The List”, which had the Giant’s name connected to photographs of skeletal “It” girls stepping out of limousines, and small tanned men wearing sunglasses inside expensive restaurants. I figured that was the Giant, and pressed a “Contact us” button hidden at the bottom of the homepage, revealing the mailing address for their office in downtown Los Angeles. My return flight to London wasn’t for three days, and if Lily’s second husband wouldn’t even come down and see me because he was too hung over, I figured it couldn’t hurt to keep the suitcase for a few days and learn something about my mother.
It takes three hours to get anywhere on Los Angeles public transport. The same cooking channel was on the televisions at the front of every bus – men dressed as Zorro for some reason making omelettes on the beach. Out of the windows the city all looked derelict and vast with crouched buildings on either side of thick tarmac highways. At the Internet café I’d Google-mapped the places I wanted to go and marked them all out on my 7-11 tourist map, but still found it nearly impossible to understand where I was. I even looked again at the pretty road maps in Lily’s suitcase, but of course they weren’t helpful at all. Each one was drawn over with lines that on second glance were not exactly routes, but patterns, pictures, shapes. The outline of an angular woman with vast breasts was created by tracing the lines of Wyoming and Colorado, then two closed eyes were drawn onto an aerial photograph of roads in South Africa. There was a map of Tuscany in Italy, where the city of Florence seemed to be the hole between a woman’s legs; a version of New York where Central Park was clearly pubic hair, and a tourist map of Berlin where the Brandenburg Gate was a woman’s gnashing teeth in the middle of a cubist face. A badly photocopied map of Los Angeles had a woman’s silhouette drawn in black pen using the Western edges of different districts as the outline, and there was something very beautiful, very strange, about the detail.
On various complex bus routes I made my way from Venice Beach to Downtown LA, which equated to traveling from the elbow of the woman drawn on Lily’s photocopied and doodled-on map to maybe the belly button.
I decided to go to David’s office first, planning to move on to one of the possible dragon Martini bars in the evening. There’s a flower called “bird of paradise” all over Los Angeles: it has orange leaves shaped like knives, although from a certain angle the flowers also look like gaggles of slim-necked tropical birds. There were clumps of these savage plants outside the office block in which the Giant, David Reed, apparently worked. It was a grainy building made of concrete and glass, the foundations surrounded by an array of wilting foliage. There were ferns, cacti, birds of paradise and strange, waxy bougainvillea that seemed to be sweating in the sunlight. On my second day alone in Los Angeles I sat sweating, too, on some dusty stairs opposite the office building, ready to disappear if I actually saw him coming in or out of the revolving doors. But it was Sunday, so I supposed he wouldn’t come into the office at all. The stairs opposite the office building led up to a kind of raised mini-mall with a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Radio Shack. I’d peaked into the lobby and saw through the windows that there were lawyers and talent agencies and graphic designers listed on a board above the reception desk, along with “The List Photographic Agency”. There was a receptionist working behind the desk, but she was reading a gossip magazine and hardly anyone came in or out of the doors that afternoon. I sat there for a few hours, hoping to see David’s slouchy oversized body. Then when the sun started to go down I admitted defeat for the day and opened up my tourist map again to try and work out how to get to China Town, where one of the potential dragon Martini bars was.
I should have found somewhere to sleep and then gone to the bar, but it didn’t occur to me. I’d never been alone in a strange city before, let alone a strange country. I’d been on camping holidays with friends once or twice, and the occasional weekend away with Daphne and Dad, but I’d never checked into a hotel alone or found my way around a new city by myself. The first dragon bar I found that evening was a Chinese dive where a bouncer with yellow teeth threatened to have me chucked out even though I was only showing the cook a photograph of my mother on her wedding day. I must have seemed nervous and strange standing there with my school rucksack in one hand and Lily’s red suitcase in the other, baseball cap covering my boyish blonde hair. The Chinese bouncer didn’t believe that I was old enough to drink. Instead of finding August that night, I slept in the first youth hostel I found, which was luckily only a few roads away from the Dragon Bar. It was a China Town youth hostel that smelt of burnt rice and incense. The bedroom was meant to be communal, with two sets of bunk beds, but I was the only one in the room. I slept with the suitcase in bed with me, between my body and the wall, my sweaty fist on the handle. Every few minutes a new noise woke me up. First there were toilets flushing and doors slamming, then the scream of two cats having sex on the rooftop, then junkies or insomniacs babbling on the street under the window. I wondered what David was doing while I was sleepless in China Town. He was probably fast asleep and dreaming. I imagined him on his back, snoring slightly, splayed out on a big bed like a starfish. Then I imagined that he couldn’t sleep either and had his eyes open.
I left the China Town hostel as soon as it was light on Monday morning, and found another one in West Hollywood called the Serena Hostel, which was advertised on the back of the laminated tourist map from the 7-11 on Venice Beach. The Serena was next to a liquor store and opposite a depressing-looking icecream parlor that must have been a cover for something illegal, because nobody ever went in or out of it. It was a nice-enough place, though, with big rooms and messy communal areas full of candles stuffed in beer bottles, and notice boards offering bus tours of celebrity homes. Dust floated everywhere, and the plumbing creaked, but it wasn’t expensive. The Serena was run by a gruff woman named Vanessa who wore long black dresses that made her look obese. She had three matted dreadlocks in her ashy hair and wore black lace-up boots even in ninety-degree heat. The co-manager, Tony, was an ex-bodybuilder who had a flattened nose and one finger missing off his left hand. They rented me a locker behind the reception desk where I could keep the suitcase safe and not have to drag it around the city with me all week. The lockers were big and wooden, a bit like the ones in left-luggage offices at some train stations, except these ones had padlocks. You had to give Vanessa or Tony the key and ask one of them to open the locker every time you wanted to get something. Before I gave them Lily’s suitcase to look after, I got dressed up slightly and took Lily’s driving licence from the purse in her suede bag. I still wore my grubby baseball cap, but it looked sort of trendy with Lily’s sunglasses and her slightly fitted black T-shirt in place of my hooded zip-up cardigan. I even wore a pair of her earrings: little silver-and-blue teardrops.
I crouched on the steps opposite David’s office again in my baseball cap and Lily’s sunglasses, not knowing what I’d say if he saw me. It would have been easier to speak with August than with David, since I had the wedding photograph to give to August. For David all I had to offer was a pile of letters that might not be from him at all. As I sat in the sunlight watching the revolving doors of David’s office, I could tell who were paparazzi, because they came out with their eyes darting, a camera swinging like a poacher’s gun across their shoulders. Many of them were bearded or thickly unshaven, and they’d slide sunglasses onto their noses as they walked away quickly, anxiously, like they were missing something; dirty-knuckled thumbs tapping away on mobile phones as they made for their cars or the coffee shop on the corner of the road. I ate a doughnut from the doughnut shop and felt sick, then flicked through the paperback novel that I’d taken from next to Lily’s bed at the Pink Hotel. It was called
Enkidu
, and had a drawing of an animal-like man on the cover underneath the embossed title. She’d only got three-quarters of the way through, by the looks of the partially dog-eared pages. According to the back cover, the book was based on some old epic poem about a black-eyed man-beast named Enkidu who grew up among animals, but flicking through the pages suggested it was top-shelf stuff. Sitting on the steps opposite David’s office, I read how Enkidu lollopped on all fours and suckled from the breasts of pigs until one day a hunter discovered him and sent a prostitute named Shamhat into the wilderness. There was a creepy sex scene in which Enkidu tried to suck milk out of Shamhat’s breasts and then bit her nipples till she bled. I kept glancing up from the pages to scan the faces and bodies of people traipsing in and out of the office, but I didn’t see anyone resembling David that day, and by the time I climbed on a bus to Boyle Heights with my annotated tourist map in my hands, my skin and clothes smelt of sweat and sunlight and doughnuts from the strip mall shops.
At a bar called Twin Dragon Drinks, a disco ball hung on the ceiling of a room with sticky floors and fake-wood panelled walls that you could hardly see behind the crowds of people palpitating to the music. I didn’t look a thing like Lily’s photo in her driving licence, but the bouncer ushered me in with a cursory glance. I shouted above the hip-hop music to ask all the barmen, doormen and waitresses whether they knew August. I showed them the photograph of Lily and August frowning solemnly on their wedding day, but everyone replied with shrugs and frowns.
“Na, never met anyone named August...”
“Like, what, the season? No...”
“He looks cute. Don’t know him...”
It was crowded in the bar, and people kept bumping into me, stepping on my toes and elbowing me as if I was invisible in the darkness. The drinkers and dancers seemed gigantically tall – white plastic platform shoes, hair extensions, muscular arms, tan girls and molasses-skinned men, baseball caps with the labels still on. Eventually I re-emerged into the warm Los Angeles evening and calmed down in the emptiness beyond the gaggle of smokers shifting from foot to foot in floodlights from the bar.