Authors: Anna Stothard
Lily and Dad had their first date at the London Zoo Aquarium. They’d met two weeks before during a table-tennis tournament at the local community centre. It was Grandpa who gave Dad the money to take Lily out, not knowing how much trouble their relationship would cause. I heard Grandpa and Grandma arguing about this once, which makes me think maybe she got pregnant on that first date, perhaps even at the Aquarium. Certainly she got pregnant somewhere during the first few weeks of knowing Dad. I like to think it was the Aquarium rather than some cupboard in the community centre or a bed in whatever foster-home council flat Lily was staying at.
“What was your first date with Lily like, though?” I asked Dad, following him from the TV room to the kitchen one morning when I was ten or eleven. “Was it fun?” I called her Lily, not ever Mum. Actually I didn’t speak about her much at all, because Dad didn’t like it, and those conversations always ended with him being bad-tempered. That Saturday morning Dad put the kettle to boil and slid pop-tarts out of their silver packaging into the toaster. I was still in my pyjamas, which were bright-red and covered with Arsenal football logos. I stared up at Dad from the opposite side of the kitchen counter.
“We looked at the sharks, I guess,” he mumbled. “It was all right. Quite fun.” He pushed down the toaster racks.
“Why did you look at the sharks?” I said.
“Cos I like sharks.”
“Did she like sharks?” I said. This was before Dad and I had painted the walls of the flat weird colours, so everything was dirty-white or brown back then.
“Aren’t you late for school or something?” he replied.
“It’s Saturday,” I reminded him. “When you went on that date, with Lily, did you look at the jellyfish?”
I’d just watched a National Geographic documentary about jellyfish at school. I’d been fascinated by their jellied tendrils and throbbing bodies. I liked the names, too: “moon jellies”, swarming together in astonishing numbers. “Gelatinous plankton”, “sea nettles”. I’d written a story about them in English class. A jellyfish fell in love with a wave in the middle of the ocean. The jellyfish chased the wave all the way to a beach, where the wave broke into a million pieces. The love-sick jellyfish was so distraught that she, too, climbed up onto the sand and died there.
“I only remember the sharks,” Dad said about the Aquarium date, intently watching his pop-tarts.
“Did you know jellyfish aren’t really fish? They don’t have brains and they don’t breathe.”
“Oh?” he said.
“And they’re made of 90% water,” I said.
“Huh,” he said.
“They look sort of like aliens, right?” I said.
“I don’t know what aliens look like,” he said.
“That’s true,” I said. “Do you think Lily liked the jellyfish? Did she see them? Or did she like the sharks?”
“I don’t know what she fucking liked,” Dad snapped, and then his pop-tart popped, which made us both jump. I took a step away from the counter and looked away from Dad, out the living-room window, where there was a blue helium balloon floating up in the sky. There had been a jellyfish called Man-of-War in the documentary, which floated like a bubble above the water, but had fifty meters of bulbous blue tentacles underneath the surface. The beaded tendrils throb with the water currents, twisting up and down in blue curls. There’s another type called Nomura jellyfish, which can weigh up to 450 pounds and looks like some big chunk of melting coffee ice cream.
“Seahorses mate for life when they’re in the wild, but in tanks they’re promiscuous,” I said, hoping to continue talking to Dad, although he was already preparing to take the pop-tarts into his bedroom.
“Where’d you learn that word?” he said.
“Promiscuous?” I said.
“That’s not a nice word,” he said.
“It means to love a lot of people,” I said. “Is that bad?”
Dad laughed, then grinned at me, splitting the pop-tart in two parts and blowing on the molten jam inside. He chuckled.
“That’s a good one,” he said.
“What’s a good one?”
“Nothing, nothing. You’re a hoot.”
“Why am I a hoot?” I said, frowning. “What’s a hoot?”
But he didn’t answer, and walked resolutely back into his bedroom with his plate of cooling pop-tarts. The door clicked closed, and I turned on the television. It was never really clear how Lily and Dad ended up with me. I do wonder why nobody let Lily have an abortion. Perhaps Lily and Dad left it too long before telling Grandma and Grandpa, or perhaps it was to do with Grandma’s Catholic childhood, even though she hadn’t believed in God or been to Church for years. Sometimes, when I feel low, even now, I think about how easy it would have been for me to not have existed at all, and everything seems better.
After my lunch with David I went back to the hostel and asked Vanessa, the manager, to get my suitcase out of the locker. I knew the next thing to do was phone Dad and tell him I wasn’t coming home just yet, but the thought made me feel lonely. Anyway, it was too late to do it that evening. It would be early morning in the café. I’d do it first thing the next day. So I procrastinated, sitting on the floor of the dormitory room and flipping through Lily’s letters and photographs again. There was a zipped plastic side pocket I hadn’t noticed before, like where you’d keep cosmetics or something if you were actually going on holiday. In the zipped compartment was a graph entitled “contact sheet” listing names and phone numbers, one of which was Teddy Fink, the same name as on the Christmas cards I’d already flicked through and the photograph of Lily wearing scrubs. There were also a couple of matchboxes from Julie’s Place in the side pocket of the suitcase, which I assumed was the place August had mentioned where Lily used to work, and where she met Richard. There were a couple of shiny magazine pages folded up in the corner of the zipped compartment. One of these folded magazine pages was an advert for toothpaste, just like August had said. It was all creased and mangled. The maps and letters and legal documents were all kept carefully, but these magazine pages were just folded haphazardly and shoved in the side pocket. The colour had worn away from the creases, and the pages were stuck together slightly in parts. The second page was an ad for a lingerie shop where Lily was one of a crowd of girls standing around in white-lace bras and silky knickers. Both of those photos were sort of ridiculous, but it was the third photo that caught my eye. Lily must have been in her early twenties, and the caption said “Photography David Reed” at the bottom. It was the photo David had mentioned on the beach the morning after Lily’s wake. In this photo she looked like she knew everything there was to know about the world, and as if it was under her thumb. She was walking nearly naked down a vacant suburban street wearing knickers and a little waistcoat, holding two leather dog leashes that were attached to two savage pit-bull terriers. The scarlet of the leashes matched Lily’s flamboyant cherry lips as she laughed. “I came to know your little red dresses and the army of lipsticks on your dresser,” I remembered reading from the anonymous letters. The photograph of Lily was a beautiful composition. You could almost tell that David loved her just from the way he made her look in the photograph. It made me want to experience things she’d known. She looked more alive in that photograph than I felt, actually alive, sitting on the floor of the creaking West Hollywood hostel.
The next morning I sat perched on the edge of a crumbling wall next to a public telephone outside a Thai hot-dog stand on Hollywood Boulevard. There was a huge plywood sign in the shape of a hot dog above the bamboo door, but the pink sausage had a smiling face with slanting eyes. There was a homeless man who shuffled back and forth down this stretch of Hollywood Boulevard every day, endlessly. He passed by in a noxious cloud of odor while I put my phone card in and dialled London.
“Yup?” came the reply on the other end of the telephone. I could hear the television on in the background, BBC News at Ten. I’d been in LA over a week by this point, and my plane home was supposed to have left three days ago. I could see it all: the gaudy walls around him, the little vein that rises in his forehead when he’s tired or angry, the ink marks on his fingers from doing the café accounts.
“Dad?” I said.
“Where are you?” he said, slowly, after a pause.
“Still in Los Angeles,” I said.
“Are you all right? You weren’t on the flight.”
“I’m fine,” I said. I tore some skin off my nails.
“I spoke to Lily’s husband, you know,” Dad said.
“Richard?” I said, and frowned. “Why?”
“He called the flat and said he was looking for you,” Dad said. “And he was pretty fucking irritated when I didn’t know where you were staying. I knew nothing good would come of you going to the funeral,” he said.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Everything’s good.”
“Not according to Lily’s husband. He says you stole a suitcase from his bedroom during Lily’s wake. He said you’ve been hanging out with Lily’s first husband, dragging this suitcase all over Los Angeles.”
“How did he know I’d met her first husband?”
“I don’t know how he knew, but he wasn’t happy.”
“When did he call?”
“Two days ago, on Thursday,” Dad said. “I told him you were meant to be on a plane Wednesday evening, but you hadn’t turned up.”
“I didn’t steal from Lily’s husband, I borrowed some things that used to belong to my mother,” I said. “And then I tried to give the stuff back, but he wouldn’t see me.”
“Well, he didn’t sound happy. He wants you to call him. Do you have a pen? He gave me the number.”
“His wife just died. Of course he’s not happy.”
“Do you have a fucking pen?” Dad said.
“Wait a second then,” I said, and rooted around in my rucksack for a pen and something to write on. I scrawled down the number, although I was starting to lose any intention of giving the suitcase back. I didn’t like the sound of Richard, and I liked the suitcase now. I liked the clothes. I liked reading the letters.
“What was in the suitcase you took?” Dad asked after he’d read me the number.
“She ought to have been paying you alimony or whatever you call it,” I said to him, slipping Richard’s phone number into the pocket of Lily’s jeans and thinking of some way to get Dad on side. “They had this huge hotel on Venice Beach, and she had tons of clothes and jewelry and stuff. She was rich, Dad. Loaded.”
“You stole jewelry?” Dad asked hesitantly. “I can’t believe even you would be stupid enough to steal jewelry from a wake. Tell me that’s not what happened.”
“Just shoes and stuff, not really jewelry,” I said.
“He was livid.”
“They were nice shoes?” I said, kidding. He didn’t laugh, and nor did I.
“How about you just come home?” Dad said slowly, weighing up the situation. “Forget it all and get on a plane. Don’t call him even, he didn’t sound like a nice guy. Don’t meet him. Just leave the suitcase wherever you’re staying, or throw it away.”
“You mean not give the suitcase back?”
“The man sounded angry, and he didn’t sound nice. You stole a dead woman’s clothes from her wake and expect her husband to be understanding? I’m not saying that’s okay, just that you didn’t know what you were doing. I think you should just cut your losses and come home. We don’t know what sort of a person she was.”
I imagined the fuzzy bits on Dad’s jumper, the fluff that always happened if you washed anything in our broken washing machine. Daphne could spend hours watching TV and tugging off the fluff from Dad’s jumpers, like a monkey couple pulling ticks off each other. The television flicked off in the background, and Dad sighed into the telephone. The room would have gone dark except for a side lamp on the dining table behind.
“I need to give the stuff back,” I said. “Don’t I? He’ll understand once I explain.”
“She wasn’t your mother,” he said. “A few hours of labour and a chromosome doesn’t qualify her as that. She was a manipulative, dangerous little girl who showed every sign of growing up into a manipulative and dangerous woman who we were lucky not to have in our lives. I don’t know much about Richard, but I know I don’t want my daughter to have anything to do with him.” Dad enunciated his words with such precision that I could almost hear spit land on the phone mouthpiece.
“Why? What do you know about him? Did she ever make contact with us, and you never told me or something?”
“Never even a postcard,” said Dad.
“You would have told me, right? If she’d wanted to get hold of me?”
“She wasn’t chomping at the bit, she was a selfish cow.”
“I don’t exactly trust your telephone messages,” I said.
“I genuinely didn’t think you’d care that she was dead,” he said.
“Well I did care,” I said.
We paused for a moment.
“I just know the man on the phone – Richard or whatever – sounded angry,” Dad said. “You know I gave up a lot for you. I’m the one who looked after you.”
“I’m really sorry about what she did to you,” I said.
“To us,” Dad said.
“Okay.”
“I want you home,” Dad replied. “I don’t want you to get in any more trouble than you’re already in. I need you to come home now.”
“Bye, Dad,” I said.
I stood next to the phone feeling deflated. Traffic fled past behind me, scattering fumes and dirty pigeons into the air. I have a little scar on the bottom right of my lip, created because when I’m nervous or concentrating I fold my bottom lip up into my mouth and bite down – just slightly. Maybe the canine tooth on the right side of my mouth is sharper than the left, because it’s only ever the right hand side of my lips that break. I’ve been breaking the same space for so long that the skin opens easily now, shrugging up a little blood to the surface.
August stared straight up at me as I walked into The Dragon, but then he looked immediately away. It had been four days since I left him sleeping, and I felt uncomfortable at the sight of him. He took his time serving drinks to a group of men in thin silk ties before he came up to where I was perched at the bar. It was a Sunday, and not too busy in the bar. There were the men in thin silk ties drinking Martinis, two women on their second bottle of white wine in a corner, a group of tourists with sunburnt noses, and a man with a gold stud in his nose drinking beer on his own at the window. The man sitting near the window had a thick neck with greasy black hair parted at the side like a schoolboy. I stared at this man for slightly longer than I should have done, trying to think why he looked familiar.
August poured out a round of five tequila shots with slices of lime and a little bowl of salt for the businessmen with thin ties. He watched the men down the liquid and suck salt off their wrists then he slid over to my side of the bar and put down a glass of Coca Cola in front of me. He tilted his pretty head to the side and didn’t say anything. His face was much thinner than David’s face. August was pretty, while David might not even have been good-looking, not traditionally at least, with his oversized limbs and eccentrically ugly clothes. At the sight of August I felt more anxious than I had done before arriving. I was wearing Lily’s tight black knee-length dress and a vivid smudge of her red lipstick over my mouth this time. Her earrings framed my pale oval face, and her sunglasses kept the hair out of my eyes.
A few years after this night I actually decided to try and find August again, but it turned out that The Dragon Bar had been bulldozed into a vacant lot surrounded by walls of graffiti, and nobody knew anything about him. I like to think that he got married and had his own kids, maybe moved to the suburbs. I like to think he got a Golden Retriever that looked a little bit like him, and that his second wife buries her perfectly painted toes in the sand sometimes just like I imagined Lily doing outside the grocery store in Jackpot when they were kids themselves.
“Sorry about leaving the other day,” I said to August.
“No problem,” he said calmly, and smiled stiffly at me.
“I’m sorry, though,” I said again.
“Not even digits on the pillow?” He smiled then, and raised his eyebrows slightly awkwardly, self-consciously amused by the situation as it had turned out. “It’s like something I might do. Or Lily might do.”
“Really?” I said. I twisted Lily’s teardrop earrings in my ears and fiddled with her sunglasses.
“Cut and run,” he said, and then laughed. “You even stole my T-shirt and sweatpants.”
“Sorry,” I said, taking the tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt out of my rucksack and passing them over the bar in a plastic bag. I noticed the nomad bartender, Rob, roll his eyes as August took the clothes and put them underneath his side of the bar.
“You remember we talked about Richard, Lily’s husband?” I said. August flinched.
“Be careful,” August said. “I don’t think Lily was hanging out with a nice crowd.”
“That’s what my Dad just told me. Richard called my Dad, looking for me,” I said.
“Richard turned up at the bar on Wednesday evening, the day after you came to find me. I guess he figured out that you might be trying to talk with people who knew Lily,” August said. “So he thought of me.”
“And you told him I’d been here, then?”
“I told him you’d come by. I didn’t know you’d stolen from him, did I? I thought he was concerned about you or something.”
“I took some things Lily would have wanted me to have,” I said.
“Not according to Richard. That man wants his stuff back. He left a phone number for me to give you if you came by again.”
“I already have his phone number,” I said.
I moved my glass of Coca Cola around in its own little puddle of condensation. Light from the ceiling caught in the glass at the bottom of the tumbler. The bar smelt of peanuts, popcorn and sugar. I felt a rush of focused dislike for Richard, and maybe a little bit of fear creeping on the surface of my thoughts.
“Do you know a guy called David Reed?” I asked August. I locked my hands together on the bar and squeezed my skin. “He’s a photographer who took Lily’s photo? I think they were having an affair.”
“His name doesn’t ring any bells.”
“But she kept modelling after you guys were divorced?”
“Can I give you some advice?” he said.
“All right,” I said.
“It’s none of my business, but Richard isn’t a man to fuck with. If she was having an affair, keep it to yourself. If you stole something from him, give it back. I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him ten years ago, and I don’t want to now.”
“What’s so scary about him?” I said. “I saw him at the wake, and he just seemed like a fuck-up. He looked more like a wedding singer than someone to be scared of. He passed out in front of me and snored. I put a blanket over him. There was nothing scary about him.”
“He asked me to get in contact with him if I saw you again.”
“So tell him you saw me,” I shrugged, but something stopped me from mentioning the hostel I was staying at.
“I don’t want to tell Richard that I saw you. I told him you wouldn’t be coming back here, but I’d rather that wasn’t a lie, all right?” August furrowed his brow.
“Okay, if that’s what you want,” I said, and counted the erupting bubbles in my half-finished glass of Coca Cola. August smiled a regretful smile and looked away from me. The women drinking wine were giggling. The man with the nose stud looked up from his beer at me, then stared out of the window.
“Do you think I should call Richard?”
“I don’t want anything to do with any of it,” he said.
“But you already have something to do with it,” I said.
“I don’t want to see you here again,” said August. “Thanks for the photo you left. It means a lot to have that. But I don’t want to see you again.”
“Sure,” I said, feeling cheap and strange.
It wasn’t late when I left The Dragon Bar, maybe eleven o’clock, but I felt anxious as I stood at the bus stop. There was a middle-aged woman in a white beautician’s uniform and denim jacket playing Tetris on her mobile phone. She kept looking up at me, and at a group of boys wearing baggy trousers and basketball jumpers who seemed to be staring at me rather than at her. Palm trees swayed up against the flat blue sky, and my body hardened with being watched. I felt ready to run or kick or spit, but nothing happened, and I assumed it was just paranoia because everyone kept saying that Richard was such a nasty guy.
There was a noise around a corner on the other side of a locked-up dry-cleaner’s shop, then nothing except the beautician’s fingers on the phone keypad and the shuffle of oversized teenage trainers on the concrete. For a second I thought I saw the man from the bar with the nose stud and the schoolboy tidy hair, but when I blinked he was gone again. There was a shadow of a man standing in the darkness on a nearby corner, though, who got into a beat-up-looking old green car, and the green car followed behind the bus for a while after we drove off. I sat at the back and looked through the murky rear window into the traffic underneath, but I couldn’t see the driver’s features, and once we got off the freeway we seemed to lose the green car. For the last ten or fifteen minutes of the journey I was sure that the green car had been a figment of my imagination, and that nobody was actually following me. I calmed down, but the panic reminded me of walking home from the football pitch to the café sometimes late at night, when I’d imagine creatures in the shadows. I’ve always been prone to irrational panic. It heats up inside me, under my armpits, behind my eyeballs. I’m not scared of pain or even sadness, only panic. I don’t struggle with depression and don’t think about death a whole lot. Even when I feel unhappy, tiny things still seem shatteringly beautiful, like the exact range of colours in a brick wall, or someone smiling to themselves while they’re alone. But panic caused me trouble, along with the occasional inability to control the movements of my thoughts. The panics came on when I’d been alone for a long time in a crowded place like a department store or library. It also happened when I hadn’t touched or made contact with anyone in a while. It was to do with either a very strong sensation of being watched, or suddenly being convinced that I had actually ceased to exist, that all I did was observe, and that I wasn’t connected to anything or anyone.
Both panics began slowly with shallow breathing and an ache behind my eyeballs. My thoughts would then become exaggerated, full of exclamation marks and italics. There were two scenarios: either I hadn’t looked anyone in the eye or had a conversation for so long that a kaleidoscopic feeling came over me. I’d be terrified that I was no longer attached to the world around me, so I’d need to touch someone in order to reconnect.
Then the other panic was the opposite. I’ve always been sensitive to people looking at me. If someone stares at me while my back is to them I can feel their eyes touching me. It heats up, and the little blond hairs at the back of my neck quiver. In these panics it would often be like everyone was looking at me suddenly from every angle, even when there weren’t people looking at me at all. My mouth would fill with saliva and my skin would tingle too much. This sort of panic was more difficult to relieve, because the more you thought about it the worse it got, and really there wasn’t any relief except being alone. Often there would be words in my head, too. I’d tell myself everything was all right and there was no reason to be scared, but these thoughts would be exaggerated, italicized, just like the other sort of panic. Soon the words would be pushing me straight into a panic attack, which was wordless and thoughtless and felt like my heart was exploding.