Authors: Anna Stothard
The next morning I called Richard’s mobile number from the public phone near the Serena Hostel. My hands were shaking, and my plan was to say I’d thrown the entire suitcase in a downtown skip and didn’t want anything to do with it or Lily any more. I’d say sorry for stealing from him and sorry for throwing Lily’s clothes away, but if he asked to meet me I’d insist I was about to get on a plane and go home to London. My skin tingled as I dialled the number off the scraggy bit of paper in my pocket, but all I got was a dialing tone like his phone was turned off. I stood around in the heat for a few more minutes and then dialled the number one more time – carefully, checking each digit – and again I got a dialing tone like the phone wasn’t switched on.
After that moment of bathos, I didn’t feel like going back to the youth hostel, so I walked down Hollywood Boulevard and pottered aimlessly around the Waxwork Museum by myself, wondering why a waxwork panorama of the Crucifixion was included in an exhibition devoted to a cocktail party of Hollywood stars. The faces seemed to be dripping and melting in front of me. There was Charlie Chaplin with thin cotton trousers, Marilyn Monroe with matted tufts of beige hair and American pop stars I didn’t recognize wearing moth-eaten miniskirts. In the near-empty waxwork-museum gift shop I palmed a miniature Marilyn Monroe from a shelf into my rucksack and realized it was the first time I’d shoplifted anything since I was thirteen. The miniature Marilyn was also a scented candle, and it had a limp wick sticking out from the crown of her melting head. Her face was squashed and distorted. I dropped her into the pocket of my rucksack without blinking, and then continued around the shop. I smiled at the cashier as she looked up from her mobile phone to smile dumbly at me with blue eyes. There were books about famous people and Los Angeles history around the room, well-thumbed and unsold, then posters of tourist attractions pinned to the walls. I bought a postcard of the Hollywood sign for fifty cents.
I’d never stolen anything serious before the evening of Lily’s wake. In the past I’d only ever stolen stupid stuff, like gum and magazines, although I did use to keep watch sometimes for Laurence when he stole CDs. The first thing I ever stole was a 2-cm-wide mottled gobstopper from a supermarket near school when I was ten years old. I saw the nugget of smooth sugar wrapped in some sort of crinkly cling film opposite the cash register, and I wanted it to fill up my mouth. I remember reaching very calmly over to the shelves of sweets and putting the candy up the sleeve of my jumper. None of the supermarket shop assistants looked my way, and I felt a rush of power. I marched out through the doors and skipped down the busy street with a smile, turning into an underground station where my lips forced themselves over the edge of the massive globe of chemical sweetness. I wiped leaking saliva away from the corner of my lips and turned away from the crowds flowing into the station.
After that I continued to steal little things occasionally until I was thirteen and got caught stealing cheap earrings. As I said before, there was something bland about me that often stopped people from noticing my presence, especially as a kid. Teachers never called on me for the answer at school, and I never raised my hand, even though I often knew the answer. I could skip class and nobody realized. Nobody bullied me. I was always naughty, but I very rarely got in trouble. Grandma cooked and cleaned for me, of course, but she always talked over me and never with or to me. I was there, around and about, with stolen gum in my pocket and filched biros in my bag, but nobody saw me. Even when I got a scholarship and moved from the state school to the grammar school, aged twelve, I somehow managed to remain relatively inconspicuous. I got in trouble more than I used to at the state school, but still had a knack of being incognito when it suited me.
When I was caught shoplifting a year after moving schools, I mostly just felt relieved at being noticed. I’d tried to steal some earrings worth £1.99, and the manager of Woolworth’s marched me into a little room full of cameras and showed me a video of myself palming some ugly fake-silver hoop earrings into my pocket. I don’t think I even meant to do it – I certainly don’t remember being conscious of the action. Seeing myself on the video was like seeing a doppelgänger or a ghost. The grey creature in the video hardly looked at the earrings, just slipped them off the rack and into her pocket without stopping. Her nose was greasy and her skin as pale as her hair. She could have been a boy except for a softness around the jaw and a curve of the mouth. Her face betrayed nothing of the action her hand was making, just like a trained magician. Standing in the little backroom and seeing the CCTV footage of my ghost, I was sort of scared. It’s amazing the manager even noticed, that’s how close I was to being invisible back then. The video made me think that if I blinked I might exit the world altogether. The manager called Dad into the shop, and we filled in paperwork and wrote a statement and I was banned from Woolworth’s for a year, which was hardly a big deal. Dad seemed a bit irritated at how much fuss the manager was making over some ugly earrings. I said sorry, and Dad made me do unpaid shifts at the café in penance.
Seven years after sucking the gobstopper, four years after being caught stealing ugly hoop earrings, a week and a bit after my mother’s funeral, and one day before the birthday of a man who loved my mother, I found myself walking around autorepair and mechanics shops in Los Angeles asking people if they knew Lily or recognized her distinctive-looking motorbike. The bike from Lily’s photo looked different from other motorcycles you saw in the street, so it made sense that someone who knew about bikes might recognize it or even Lily. Although I’ve never had any interest in cars or bikes or engines, Dad liked cars and talked about them quite a bit, so I knew something about them. I enjoyed trawling the LA mechanics shops asking whether any of them had heard of Eagle Motorcycles or knew where I might find the shop from the photograph in my mother’s suitcase. In the photo she was standing with the Eagle Motorcycle sign hoisted above her and her painted fingers on the pretty silver motorbike.
I’d typed “Eagle Motorcycles” into Google, but nothing came up except a Hell’s Angel-type Motorcycle club in South Carolina, which didn’t square with the photo of Lily and her slim, vintage-looking motorcycle. In the photo you can’t see much except for powder-blue walls, a door and the dusty sign. Ever since I stole the suitcase, a thought had been growing that maybe at some point I’d go visit Laguna Highway, the road where she had the motorbike accident. I could put down a flower or something and say goodbye to her. There are more autorepair shops in Los Angeles than there are Starbucks coffee franchises and Mexican restaurants. There was one on every other corner: the flat, warehouse-type façades set back beyond railings and motes of tarmac or concrete.
All day I kept getting on buses, whatever bus came first, and getting out again when I saw a mechanics shop. They were usually on the corners of big roads, advertising “front suspension”, “mufflers” and “electrical work”. I was hoping I’d stumble across a sign saying Eagle Motorcycles, but of course I didn’t, and it turned out that nobody had even heard of the name.
“Looks custom-made,” said a smart man wearing blue overalls looking at the photo of Lily. Massive bikes were lined up like a robot army in the window, their Cyclops eyes winking in the sunlight. These animals didn’t look like the motorcycle Lily was standing next to in the photo. These bikes were much bigger, with engines like swollen tummies. These were sci-fi creatures, time machines, tanks. The smartly dressed motorcycle salesman in the blue overalls adjusted his thin-rimmed glasses and squinted at the photo of my mother standing with her bike.
“I’d say it’s made out of used parts, you know?” he said. “Beautifully done, though. For sure. That’s a frame, I think, from an Ariel motorcycle? Maybe the engine too? But the wheels are from something else, maybe a Harley, I can’t tell. The photo’s too small.” He gave it back to me.
“You don’t know where I could find another one like it? Or where this one might have been from?” I said.
“Uh-uh,” he said, and shook his head. “Like I say, looks handmade.”
“And you’ve never met the woman in the photo?”
“Uh-uh,” he said.
The other mechanics and salesmen in other autorepair shops all said the same, squinting at the photo and shrugging over its heritage. Never heard of it. Nice thing. No clue.
“Beautiful bike, though,” said one mechanic. He seemed to be studying Lily’s legs more than he was studying the bike. She was wearing a short suede skirt and beige high-heeled sandals in the photo, her legs and shoes the same colour as the sand at her feet. You couldn’t see the sky in the composition, or the surrounding buildings.
“Can’t help you,” he said, and went to serve another customer, leaving me to absorb the smell of oil and singed metal in the shop, browsing shelves covered in handlebars, oil and mosaics of wing mirrors. I went to five autorepair shops that morning, but none knew anything about the bike except to say it wasn’t a brand they knew. Then the idea – a sudden thought, not quite an image – of crushed metal came into my head. I blinked away the idea of Lily’s accident.
Sitting on the stone bus-stop bench an hour later, I studied one of Lily’s tourist maps with my knees dragged up to under my chin for a while, thinking, letting red-and-yellow buses fly by through the low-slung layers of smog. I took the waxwork Marilyn Monroe out of my rucksack and put her out on the pavement. A young woman walked past the bus stop wearing a bikini, and I took another look at my map, figuring I couldn’t be too far from the sea. The waxwork Marilyn looked sad in my sweaty hand, smelling of wax and chemically created lavender. I didn’t have the suitcase with me, and I had no intention of giving it back to Richard now if I could help it, but I was curious about him and the hotel. If I was careful, Richard wouldn’t need to see me. Even if he did see me, he probably wouldn’t recognize me from the split-second moment we’d locked eyes in their bedroom during the wake. I left the stolen Marilyn Monroe on the kerb of the road, a tiny little wax hitchhiker, and hailed the next bus I saw that was bound for Venice Beach.
The boardwalk was fairly empty that weekday afternoon, with only a few surfers and sunbathers dotted around the beach. It was a Monday, ten days since the wake. From a distance, the hotel looked just how I remembered it – with stucco pink walls and pale-green window frames. The fire escape snaked down the beach side of the hotel, and the words “The Pink Hotel” were stencilled on the side in faded mint-green paint. There was some graffiti at the bottom of the building that I hadn’t noticed before, and as I edged slowly closer it was obvious that all the lights were off in the windows. Even closer, right up to walls near the door, I saw there was cardboard on the insides of the bottom-floor windows and pieces of wood nailed over the front door. “Do Not Enter,” ordered a rusty metal sign nailed onto the door. I had been bracing myself to sneak a look through the doors or the windows and see Richard in the lobby, or to jump out of the way and hold my breath if he were to bump into me rushing out of the front door. I tried to look through the bottom-floor windows, but you couldn’t see anything except shadows. After a moment I noticed that a waitress in the opposite café was staring at me, so I backed away from the now derelict hotel. I touched the stucco walls of the hotel and stepped away from them. There were cigarette butts around the edge of the door, broken glass in one of the windows. I remembered sneaking out of the front door ten days ago with Lily’s suitcase heavy in my hand. I lit a cigarette with Lily’s green lighter and smoked it slowly in the road while feeling the waitress watching me from the window behind. Eventually I stamped the cigarette out amongst the others on the concrete outside the nailed door and walked over the road to the café. It seemed strange that only ten days ago this had been entirely alien and now it seemed much more normal: the smell of salt and hot tarmac, the unsteady palm trees down the beach front, the homeless people blowing their noses on rags and leaning on their shopping trolleys full of plastic bags, the sea.
A bell rang as I pushed through the doors of the Alchemy Café opposite the Pink Hotel. The café was around the same size as Dad’s café at home, and it was laid out in a similar way, with the sandwich counter at the end and mismatched tables dotted around in a way that’s meant to suggest bohemian chaos, but in fact is carefully orchestrated. The waitress who smiled at me wore her brown hair in pigtails and had black bushy eyebrows. She wore a little silver crucifix around her neck.
“Hi,” I said, sitting down in front of the window and not taking my eyes off the abandoned hotel across the road. “Can I have a vanilla milkshake?”
“Milkshake coming right up,” said the girl with the pigtails and bushy black eyebrows who’d been staring at me. The café was clearly a family-run place because there was a second woman with big bushy eyebrows and a crucifix, the waitress’s mother or aunt maybe, counting receipts by the till. A familiar smell of fried bread and ground coffee beans filled up the air, and the walls were stained with greasy fumes just like Dad’s café at home. While the younger waitress was in the back making the milkshake, I caught the older woman’s eye and smiled at her.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.
“Do you know why the hotel opposite is closed?” I tried.
“Management problems,” said the older woman. “One of the managers died the other week and a few days later they boarded up the windows.”
“How long after she died did they close the hotel?”
“Maybe three or four days after the wake?”
“Did you know the managers?”
“We didn’t socialize with them, if that’s what you mean. Have you stayed at the hotel before?”
I shook my head.
“It had quite a reputation,” she said.
“A reputation for what?” I asked, just as the younger waitress came out of the back with my milkshake.
“Awesome parties,” said the young waitress with a smile. “I saw you looking through the windows. Didn’t you know it was closed?”