The Pink Hotel (6 page)

“You’re shivering,” he said, and put his hands on my knees even though I wasn’t shivering at all. The air was damp from the rain, but not cold at all. He looked at my legs. Lily’s black leather boots and purple dress only made my knees and thighs look more alabaster, more bruised and babyish clamped together there on the fire escape. This sort of thing had never happened to me before, so I wasn’t aware of the “cigarette outside, arm around shoulder, small talk, can we see each other again some time” cliché of it all. We both finished our cigarettes, and he stamped them out on the damp floor.

“Shall we go back inside?” he said.

Perhaps that was it, I thought. He was bored and he’d like me to leave now, because I wasn’t pretty or confident enough to be worth flirting with. He helped me down off the fire escape, though, and he didn’t let go of my hand as I swung my rucksack over my shoulder and followed him back into the main bar, where he turned off the over-bright lights and plunged the room into half-darkness with two lamps on. He let go of my hand, and it fell down to the side of my hips. We looked at each other.

“Maybe we could see each other again,” he said. He moved his face quite close to mine in the darkness. His breath smelt of olives, vodka and cigarette smoke.

“Sure,” I said.

“I like you,” he said. “I can’t work you out. I’d like to take you to dinner some time. Is that something that might happen?”

Of course he didn’t mean this, because I’d already told him that I was leaving the next day, but it didn’t seem to matter. He stood very close to me, then tucked my scraggly blond hair behind my ear and caressed my skin down from my earlobe to my elbow. I suppose I must have tilted my head up slightly, because somehow we were kissing in the middle of the bar, and only a moment later he unzipped the back of Lily’s purple dress and the silk fell to my feet. It happened very fast, and I didn’t have time to think. I had a sense of a crowd inside of me while all this happened, like I was sitting in a triple-exposed photograph with partially opaque faces layered underneath my own. I wondered how many women he’d shared cigarettes with in that alleyway, how many he’d asked for dinner in order that they kissed him and let him slip their dresses from their bodies. He kissed me under my ear. He kissed my shoulder blade, breathing damp cigarette breath onto my skin. Soon I was naked apart from my knickers and boots, his hands cold on my skin, but I couldn’t concentrate. I expect that Lily would have lived in the moment, but it was as if I could see the whole thing from the outside. Would she have moved in his arms like I was doing? How did her fingers feel against his body? Did he love her?

“Wait,” I said to him.

“Shhh... huh,” he mumbled into my skin, not really hearing me, and I let him continue for a moment, because the sensations were pleasant. I’d had sex a couple of times before, with Laurence, the shoplifting boy. The first time I had sex with him strange thoughts kept popping into my head. I had lain back and wondered who designed wallpaper and how it was made, then thought about whether it would be possible to melt tin in a saucepan. None of the feelings between my legs seemed half as interesting as the ache in my knees when I jumped off of a particularly high wall. This time, though, standing in the empty bar with August, I was trying to concentrate very hard on the present moment, the dots of bone snaking down August’s naked back and the changing textures under my toes as he unzipped my boots and I stepped out onto the floorboards of the bar. But really my mind kept fading away. Although the feeling of his tongue and fingers on my skin was far from unpleasant, it was still as if I was watching the scene from elsewhere. Then he began to undo the clasp on his belt and I frowned, suddenly scared.

“Wait, stop. August, stop.”

“How’d you know my name?” he said after an animal pause, his hand on the clasp of his belt. He pulled away and looked at me in the semi-darkness. “I’ve seen you before somewhere,” he said again, wary now. “I thought I recognized you when you first walked in. I said to Rob: she’s been here before, I recognize her. Have you been here before? Where do I know you from?”

The room felt draughty, and I felt naked, especially so because he was still wearing trousers and I was only wearing underwear. He took a step back and looked at me, prompting me to struggle Lily’s dress off of the floor and back over my pale body while he watched. My elbows got caught in the armholes, and another button bounced off of the high-necked silk material onto the floor.

“Sorry, August, sorry. I’m Lily’s daughter,” I said under my breath, as I straightened the dress over my body.

He stopped.

“Where is she?” he said.

I sat guiltily on the table where I’d been reading all night, and he sat on a table way across the room. He had his head in his hands, and I could see the thinning hair on the crown of his head. It took me half an hour to persuade him that he couldn’t under any circumstances be my father, and then he calmed down a little.

“That sounds like Lily,” he said, when I explained how she died out on a desert Highway because she wasn’t wearing a helmet. “I wish someone had told me she was dead.”

“When’s the last time you saw Lily?” I asked tentatively.

“Ten years, I guess,” August said. “She was twenty-two when we divorced. We weren’t on great terms when she left though.”

“You didn’t see her again?”

“No.”

“How old were you when you met?”

“Eighteen,” he said. “Married when we were nineteen, divorce three years later.”

“Were you happy?”

“In a way.”

“What sort of way?”

“I’m not sure I feel comfortable talking to you about this,” he said. “I don’t believe I just tried to fuck Lily’s kid,” he laughed nervously, then frowned again and laughed again to himself. He wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” I said. “That’s why I came tonight. Then I thought I’d wait till everyone left before I brought it up and then...”

“And then. Yeah,” he said.

We were silent for a few moments.

“You really didn’t know Lily at all?” he said eventually, tilting his head and glancing thoughtfully up at me. He seemed a very long way away, across the bar. “She never wrote or came to visit?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” he said, taking a deep breath. Suddenly he looked like a different person, much more grown-up. “She was up and down. She was an adrenaline rush. Like in one moment she could make me extraordinarily happy and then extraordinarily unhappy. So yeah, we were happy a lot of the time. But we were unhappy a lot, too.”

“Did you meet in Los Angeles?” I asked.

“Nevada actually,” he said. “She was sitting on the kerb outside my Dad’s grocery store in Jackpot, this little town on the edge of Idaho and Nevada. She had her hair in two French braids.” August grinned, relaxing more. “One resting on her shoulder and one down her back. She was wearing this shit-hot blue miniskirt, right, kind of tacky, but childish-tacky, you know? Like it was from a school uniform. She was only eighteen. And a white tank top with blue birds embroidered around the neckline.”

“What was she doing in Jackpot?” I asked August. I imagined August strolling over the hot tarmac motorway in the middle of a non-descript town, towards my teenage mother. I imagined Lily’s bare feet resting in the dust and her arms around her stomach. With neatly painted fingers she shaded her face from a sun that was so clean it almost made the dry grass around the grocery store look as if it was about to bubble or go up in flames – and in my imagination August smiled at her.

“She didn’t
mean
to be in Jackpot,” August said. “Nobody ever means to be in Jackpot. She was on her way from New York to LA, getting Greyhounds and hitching. Some trucker was giving her hassle, so she got out.”

“Did she have an English accent?”

“She’d only been in the States a few months when I met her. It was when we moved to LA that she started pretending she was from Nevada. She could do the accent, and she liked pretending. Pretending was her hobby. Every day was theatrical, you know? If she was sad, she’d dress entirely in black, if she was excited she’d sing show tunes in the shower till the neighbours complained. She wore high heels to the supermarket and fake fur to the cinema. We used to have ‘character nights’, where we’d go out bar-crawling pretending to be aristocrats, or invisible superheroes, or ninjas. She was never boring, but she was exhausting.”

“Did you love her?” I asked.

August nodded.

“Sure,” he said. “Of course I did. I married her.”

August let me stay at his flat above the bar that night, because it was late and the West Hollywood hostel was a while away. He looked nervous when I asked to stay, but he couldn’t really say no at that point. He relaxed once we were at his place, though, him sitting on the mattress, me on the sofa. It was just one room with a beat-up-looking sofa, a mattress, and a tiny kitchen table. He gave me pyjamas trousers to wear with a T-shirt. He still tried not to look at me, although his eyes kept flickering over to tiptoe across my skin and then jump away again. It felt strange, almost powerful, that I was making him nervous, even if it was only by association.

“Are you sure I don’t look like her?” I said to August. I glanced up at him and tried not to bite my nails or tear up loose skin on my fingers and draw blood.

“Not really,” he said. “I don’t know, you seem like more of a... tomboy than she was. Right? You walk different. You seem quieter than her, too.”

I shrugged.

“Why did you divorce, then?” I asked. “If you loved her?”

“Life isn’t that simple. We grew apart, I guess,” he said.

“You said she left you,” I said.

“We grew apart,
then
she left me,” he grinned. He had a nice smile. “For most of the time we were married she had this awesome enthusiasm, you know? She would suck you into her moods, her whirlwinds, but at some point she started spinning too fast. She worked at a bar downtown called Julie’s Place and started having an affair. I’d met the guy a few times at parties and stuff. He was some slime ball who lived above Julie’s bar, the sort of guy who’d sell his grandma for cigarettes.”

“What was his name?” I said.

“Richard, I think?”

“She married him,” I frowned. “Richard Harris?”

“That’s him.”

“But – you know – he can’t have been
that
bad. I mean, as an influence. Lily did nurse’s training a year after they got married, you know? I found her report card from a nurses training college, and it said she was ‘dedicated and enthusiastic’.”

“Well, she was enthusiastic,” August said. “But never for the right things, at least when I knew her. But you’re right, it’s not like I saw Richard’s good side. He just wanted me out of the picture.”

“Did you put up a fight?”

“Not much. Like I say, we weren’t on cloud nine any more by that point.”

“Do you know when she was a model?” I said.

“She was in a few things while we were together, toothpaste and stuff, but she was always missing auditions and forgetting to turn up to shoots. She wasn’t the most reliable girl, your mother, but you know that.”

“She must have got better, to be a nurse,” I said hopefully.

“Maybe she changed, who knows,” said August.

We were quiet for a moment. The late-night air went silent. If you listened you could hear cars buzzing like insects down the road underneath his apartment and the click of a woman’s high heels on the damp streets. I turned my head to look out of the window and caught that 6:00 a.m. city moment where the workaholics and alcoholics, early birds and insomniacs fleetingly collide. There were spotty teenagers walking back from the night shift at some garage, dragging their oversized limbs and not talking to each other. One of them almost bumped into a smart businessman getting into his Mercedes, and the businessman swore, already hating the day.

“She wanted an abortion. My Grandpa talked her out of it,” I said to August. He sat down on the sofa next to me and I turned my face towards him slightly. The beige linen sofa was uncomfortable, and it had a rip in the back, like he got it off the corner of a road and never fixed it up.

“Well, sounds like she was just a baby herself; you can’t blame her for that,” he said.

“Dad says Lily wasn’t the nurturing type – that’s why she left me, I suppose. My Grandma, my Dad’s mother, she gave Lily two goldfish to look after when Lily first let slip she was pregnant. Lily named one of them Satan, one Guinevere, and they were both dead within a week.”

August laughed.

“She vomited the only time they tried to make her breastfeed,” I continued. “She didn’t touch me if she could help it. She even left me in the supermarket once.”

“On purpose?”

I shrugged and put the tips of my fingers lightly on August’s brown skin, tracing the muscle of his shoulders, pressing my finger into the space like a button behind his earlobe. I paused for some sort of reaction, but he didn’t stop me. I kissed his ribs and tasted bone. August held my hips and hesitated for a second, then lifted my spine to place his body inside mine. He left his blue T-shirt on my torso and heat crackled bitingly at our cool skin. He did it with his eyes closed, as if the sight of me was peculiar, like I was a wet dream from his teenage days.

I hated sleeping in the same bed as anyone else, let alone in someone’s arms. Even the thought of sleeping while in physical contact with another human being used to make me so conscious of breathing that inhaling became as complex as keeping a drum rhythm. Even if comfortable, I’d itch to turn over into another position, my knuckles would ache to be cracked and I wouldn’t fall asleep until I’d excavated myself. I’m better with sleep now. That night, though, August fell immediately asleep a few moments after he came, while I lay awake and wished that I wasn’t sober. Sleeping in the same bed as someone seems more intimate than sex. Sleep has been a kind of demon in my life – seductive and spiteful. I used to talk in my sleep, throw things even. I’d wake up backwards on the bed with my pillows on the floor and my alarm clock in my sock drawer. In other centuries or other countries they might have called me possessed. I used to keep bottles of night-time cough syrup packed side by side in my bedside drawer, too, and took spoonfuls of codeine so that I’d fall asleep without having to invent stories that I had no control over, which, if I wasn’t careful, could sink into terrifying dreams that I had even less control over. I hated my imagination. I hated my lack of control over it. Then at the age of twelve I decided that the stories in my head were better than reality, and so I slept as much as possible for nearly a year and a half of my life without a drop of cherry-flavoured syrup.

Lying next to pretty August in the small bed in Los Angeles, though, I didn’t sleep at all. I studied the shadows and tried not to move much or wake him up. I did a lot of thinking that night with my face against the wall and my back strategically making a barrier between our bodies. I wondered how much Richard wanted the suitcase back, and if David was still drunk. It sometimes seems that men and women are born to be a particular age. David was meant to be in his twenties. I’m meant to be fifteen, maybe. Children are allowed to be perplexed, but adults are judged on how well they mould to the world around them and how well they connect. If you’re no good at connecting then you’re a failure. There were some girls back in London with slick back ponytails and low-slung jeans who seemed only to be biding time until they were thirty-five. Their eyes were ahead of their sharp mouths as they sat on the railings, smoking dope and waiting for something that never happened. Often their skin was bracing itself for wrinkles while they blew smoke out with a flurry of guttural swearwords. These girls occasionally came to the football field to find boys, but they didn’t speak to me. There were chubby little boys with greased hair, pin eyes and oversized football shirts who ought to be nineteen and ever after would be faintly absurd. Occasionally a slump-shouldered woman would walk past the football field on her way back from the all-night supermarket, and it would be obvious that she was born seventy-two: her body only needed to catch up, and she might be considered beautiful.

In the same way, August had the ephemeral expressions of an enthusiastic child still brimming on his face, and it made the laughter lines around his mouth stand out. He must have been unapproachably pretty at seventeen, but his forehead had contours now and his nose was broken in the middle with a jagged bump. I wanted to draw a map of his body while he slept – like the maps in Lily’s suitcase of memories – especially the sheet wrapped around his right thigh, and how what must once have been a perfect washboard stomach now inched out, just a little, towards gravity. For a moment there was nothing else in the world but that yawning breeze in the white curtains and the gurgling dripping of a tap in the kitchen. There was nothing more than stretching naked next to a sleeping boy and running my fingers over a cool patch of material at the top of the bed, feeling the nerves down my spine awaken inch by inch. I rolled over onto my back and took in my surroundings, which for a moment did not make sense. Martini bars and cityscapes, dusty roads and blue miniskirts, everything came back to me simultaneously and with equal luridness.

I turned onto my side and closed my eyes on the darkness. I lay there for hours trying to regulate my breathing. I thought about David again, then about August. I swallowed, and the body next to me stirred. It was a peculiar feeling, almost like I could still feel his touch on my skin, like I was indented. I told myself to calm down, be normal, fall asleep, but it felt as if ants were crawling between my muscles, my sweating skin kinetic with them. The air in the room didn’t have enough oxygen in it. I was breathing August’s carbon-dioxide, and my breathing sounded so loud I was surprised it didn’t wake him up. It wasn’t dark enough in his flat, either, and I could hear the day beginning outside. I couldn’t stand the proximity, the weight of his presence on the bed, his breathing near my ear, the feeling that he was full of dreams. He seemed to be smiling in the darkness. Eventually I pushed August’s bed covers slowly off my legs, peeling my anxious limbs from the mattress inch by inch, heavily, escaping. I stuffed Lily’s purple dress into my rucksack and zipped Lily’s knee-high boots on underneath August’s tracksuit bottoms. I took the Polaroid wedding photograph from the Enkidu book, placing it carefully on the pillow next to August’s sleeping body.

Outside his block of flats I lit a cigarette and felt giddy with relief. Emptiness and air hit my skin. Skyscrapers flanked the busy road. Sucking happily on my cigarette I started to walk in the direction of a bus stop at the top corner of the street, Lily’s boots clicking on the pavement as I hugged her leather jacket over the T-shirt August had leant me to sleep in. The morning air was cold in the shadows of the Los Angeles skyscrapers and hot inside the pockets of light that snuck through between and above the buildings. My plane back to London was meant to leave that afternoon.