The Pink Hotel (7 page)

When I was eleven, all gangly-boned and scrawny with large gaps in my mouth that hadn’t yet been filled with second teeth, Grandpa (Dad’s father) bought me a box of magic tricks and a dictionary. Who knows what made him buy that particular pair of presents, but I’ll always like him for it. In the magic box there were red plastic thimbles, coloured marbles, little sponge bunny rabbits and playing cards with prank corners. At home the only full-scale mirror was in the tan-tiled bathroom on the back of the door. I would spend hours and hours sitting on the edge of the bathtub practising sleights of hand in the mirror, but if anyone except my own reflection watched me perform, I’d mess up. Similarly with the dictionary, I almost never used my favourite words out loud. I hoarded them and used them to communicate only with myself. “Beguiling,” I’d say before I fell asleep, thinking of cunning bumblebees. “Ecclesiastical,” I’d mumble in the bath. “Exacerbate. Nebulous. Redemption.”

Grandma and Grandpa owned the café and the flat then. They slept in the main room, Dad slept in what became my room, and I slept on a collapsible bed in the living room. Grandpa died of prostate cancer during my Christmas school holidays when I was eleven, a month after he gave me the box of magic tricks and the dictionary. Grandpa had one lazy eye, which was a putrid yellow like the yolk of an old egg. The iris bled out into the white area, which was grey with age. It was difficult to know where he was looking, and I used to think that he did it on purpose. “Just keep practising, kiddo,” he’d say when he saw me, cross-eyed and dizzy, trying to look at two things simultaneously. I still don’t understand whether he was blind in one eye, or whether his eyes could focus on separate objects at the same time.

Dad and I were with Grandpa in the hospice room when he died, but Grandma was in the cafeteria buying coffee. It was a white room with beige furniture, a framed seascape on the wall above the bed, and an itchy blue armchair near the little window where I was curled when Grandpa stopped breathing. It was like the hospice was trying to make death as banal as possible. I was reading a yachting magazine that I’d picked up downstairs,
Yachting Digest
or something, and was flicking through dull photographs of boats when I felt the air in the room congeal slightly. I knew that he was dead before I looked up, and my most coherent memory is of the shiny magazine page resting on my knee. The light from the frosted windows was hitting the curl of the page in such a way that the photo was almost obscured by a pillar of white glaze, but underneath there was a small white boat, photographed from above, ploughing through water. My throat tightened with the atmosphere, and I glanced up. “Desiderium,” I thought to myself, “a yearning for something that you once had, but is now lost.” It was a lovely word, like “desire” and “delirious” and “dearest” all smudged into one.

Grandpa’s lazy eye was looking right at me, although his “real” eye was pointing in Dad’s direction. There was a puddle of gunk in the corner of both his eyes and a line of fluffy saliva on his frowning lips. Why hadn’t Dad wiped it off? The strange thing was, it didn’t feel like a very big moment. It didn’t feel like his “soul” left his body at that particular moment. He used to be a handsome man, he used to be charming, and he used to tell really dumb jokes all the time, mostly about politicians I hadn’t heard of. He used to wear colourful bowties and he used to give me pound coins when Grandma or Dad weren’t looking, but in my self-obsessed and childish opinion at the time, if he wasn’t doing any of these things then he wasn’t my Grandpa. Lying grey-skinned and vacant on the thin hospital sheets he didn’t look like anyone I knew. He looked like a painting or a sculpture before he died, and he looked like a painting or a sculpture after he died. When I glanced up from my yachting magazine, all I did was blink.

“Dad?” I said eventually, when my father didn’t take his eyes off my Grandpa. “Dad?” I repeated.

“I think he’s dead,” he said slowly, measuring the situation.

“Shall I call a nurse?” I said calmly.

“No,” Dad said.

“He’s looking at me,” I said.

“No,” Dad said again. My right leg, curled underneath my body, was welling up with pins and needles, but I didn’t move a muscle.

“Dad?” I said again.

“No,” he repeated.

After that, Grandma had a number of strokes. She’d always been peculiar, though. For example nobody ever saw her eat. Ever. She was the talent behind the café, and a wonderful cook. She was the reason she and Grandpa started it in the first place, and the menu Dad cooked is still from Grandma’s recipes. She made fish pies and lamb stews and even fiddly, suburban middle-class dishes like cheese soufflé, but she never set a place for herself at the dinner table. Nothing made her happier than seeing Dad or Grandpa eat her cheesy mash potatoes or minced-chicken lasagna, but only water and instant coffee touched her lips in public. One time, when I was eight or nine, I came to get a drink in the middle of the night and saw her stuffing Ritz crackers in her mouth, the crumbs tumbling into the sink. I held my breath and stood still in the shadows while she tore open the wax paper and crushed the salty yellow biscuits into her mouth. She was wearing a cotton nightdress with teddy bears on it, and her hair was loose around her face. The crumbs stuck to her chin, and I could see the lumps struggling down her long, thin neck, like a mouse swallowed whole by a snake. The next morning the rubbish had been taken out before I woke up, and there wasn’t a crumb to be seen.

She adored Dad. She was quiet about it, as she was about everything, but he was her whole world. Although before she had the strokes she fed me and corrected my homework and drove me to football tournaments and was almost always kind to me, she did all that for him. She didn’t really approve of me, because of how I came into existence. Years later I questioned Dad about her eating habits, and he didn’t believe me, never having noticed that she didn’t eat. Dad didn’t notice the way Grandma watched us all devouring the food she made or the pleasure she took in every fat chip and slab of crumbly quiche she made in the café kitchen. Perhaps it was to do with food rationing during the war, or some confused remnant of her Irish Catholic upbringing. The way she buttered bread for chip buttes was like a man putting suntan lotion on his new bride, or a priest at the rosary. It’s funny what Dad never noticed. He didn’t even notice that she occasionally spoke to herself in a nervous, heated whisper, especially while she was cooking.

A few months after Grandpa died, Grandma had the first stroke. I was practising my magic tricks in the bathroom when she collapsed onto the shop floor. As she screamed a gurgling, broken scream, Dad and I rushed out into the hallway and down the stairs. I was eleven and barefoot as I stumbled helter-skelter down the cramped staircase. She was sitting on the floor, half her face and body sort of melting, muscles sunken. I grabbed the phone and called an ambulance while Dad struggled to stop her thrashing out at him. She never really recovered, especially because the nurses kept making her eat. She had other strokes and died in a hospice six months later. Again I worried when “souls” left bodies, and whether they could leave before a person really died. Our neighbours, and people at the hospital, kept saying that Grandma “wasn’t herself”, but I wanted to know what that meant. She was strange before the first stroke. Was that strangeness part of her “self” or a deviation? When did she stop being herself? If she didn’t know she was different, was she unhappy? What happened to her “self”? How did she lose it?

After Grandma and Grandpa were both dead, I slept an awful lot. I’d wake up in cold sweats imagining that I’d lost my mind. My brain would be empty, bombed out, wordless. My most extreme panics are the wordless ones. It isn’t quite terror, then, but a glimpse into that amorphous baby time before language, when terror couldn’t be tamed by words. So my panics are also hallucinations of death, because Grandpa didn’t have language in the weeks before he died, and neither did Grandma. With Grandma it was horribly gradual. She got her pronouns muddled, and then she lost her nouns, until she spoke a sort of jabberwocky language.

“I’d really rather fall off now. I’m just dafting today,” she’d say. “When I was then I knew everything and now I know nothing.” But soon it disintegrated into “horrorgroves” and “nickelush”, “logeytongues” and the “dollish dead”. She’d speak this nonsense incessantly though, which I assume is because a silence without words to bind your thoughts was even more terrible.

The summer I was in Los Angeles was one of the hottest on record for California. “Drought Forecasted for Los Angeles Summer,” announced news broadcasts on the little televisions at the front of the public buses as I travelled from August’s flat back to the youth hostel. “Heatwave Threatens California Power Grid!” “Fire warnings!” The Serena Hostel’s air-conditioning machines groaned and dripped into foamy puddles on the wooden floors, while pigeons huddled for shade on the window ledge next to my bunk bed. There were swarms of seagulls on Sunset Boulevard, pecking at the steam from loosened dustbin bags. Perhaps the heat upset them, and they got lost on stray currents of boiled air, landing in a panic on hot concrete instead of sand.

The café near David’s office was a self-conscious space with multi-coloured tables and bad art on the walls. Mostly people put earphones in their ears and worked while drinking their soy lattes and black coffees. I saw the same faces, the same Apple Macs and Graduate Law textbooks each day, so it didn’t seem particularly strange for me to arrive in the morning and stay until closing. People wearing suits held meetings there, too, and I eavesdropped on scared-looking producers stuttering with coffee-induced confidence about their ideas for quiz shows or sitcoms. Los Angeles must be the only city in the world where you sit in a café and hear one guy say, “No, no, you don’t understand – the radioactive monkeys have escaped” – and then hear another person analyze their own lives in movie-writing language. “Consciously I’m in love with my wife,” one man said to his friend, “but unconsciously I’d rather do my secretary. It feels like this is a real first-act turning point for our marriage, though, you know?” The men nodded solemnly at each other.

A friend of mine at school used to complain about how irritating it was that a woman couldn’t sit alone at a café without men thinking that she wanted company, but nobody came to talk to me, and I didn’t catch anyone’s eye. I happily read Lily’s racy paperback, studying how Shamhat the whore begged Enkidu the animal to fight a demigod called Gilgamesh in her hometown of Uruk. I pawed avidly over these warlords and their love lives until finally, nearly three days of café-living later, David swung into the café again and ordered a double shot of espresso.

I lifted my chin to watch him pay for his coffee. While waiting for his espresso he glanced around the room and half-smiled at two paparazzi boys on a far table, who waved back at him. A blonde girl glanced up at David and then went back to reading a book called
Building a Character
by Stanislavski. David noticed the blonde, then took the coffee off the counter and poured a vast amount of sugar into it at the sideboard. He looked in my direction as he did this, but didn’t see me: he looked straight past me into the wall. Instead of going over to him or saying his name to get his attention, my elbow carefully knocked my tea mug to the floor. It smashed into three little pieces, and tea splashed all over the place causing everyone in the café to turn and look at me. I pretended not to know that David was there while I apologized and helped the waitress pick up wet ceramic from my feet. Only when she was mopping up the tea did I glance around the room and see that David was finally frowning in my direction. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember me at all. My heart started to beat too fast. At first he certainly couldn’t seem to place me, but I raised my eyebrows in feigned surprise at the sight of him. I smiled hesitantly and waved at him.

“No way,” David smiled in disbelief, and then paused for a long time, as if making sure. “It’s the grave-robber, right? You’re the girl from the beach?”

I didn’t really know what to say, so I pulled my knees up to my torso and then immediately put them back down again. I closed Lily’s book and put it away. My mouth was dry.

“Guess so,” is all I could think of.

“You look different. Remember me?” he said.

I was wearing Lily’s stonewash skinny jeans, her grey ballet pumps and her black T-shirt. I wasn’t wearing my baseball cap.

“You threw up on the road,” I said. “Of course I remember. It’s weird to see you again.”

“Been to any productive funerals recently?” he said.

“I tried to give the clothes back the next day, only Lily’s husband had a hangover and wouldn’t see me. I felt bad about it,” I said. “Did you know Richard?”

“No,” he shrugged. “Not really. So what did you do with the clothes if you didn’t give them back?” David said.

“Kept some. Sold most of them,” I said.

“So lunch is on you,” he grinned. I glanced up, and when I didn’t reply he said: “What brings you to this part of town, though, anyway? I always thought coincidences hardly ever occur in Los Angeles, but recently I keep being proved wrong.”

“I’m just hanging around in LA for a while,” I said. “You?”

“Work. You should try it some time: it beats grave-robbery.”

“Stop it,” I said. David and I remained silent, watching each other. Perhaps he was remembering the exhaustion of that morning, or how the taste of Lily’s cigarettes mixed with salty morning air.

“You look different,” he said. “A little less feral.”

“You look worse, if that’s possible,” I said.

“Thank you,” he replied, sarcastic. He did look worse. There were swollen pockets under his eyes, and his skin was sallow with several broken veins on his cheeks, like tiny fireworks. It looked as if he’d lost a lot of weight quickly, all in the week since Lily’s wake.

“You know, I felt sort of guilty after I left. Like, I harassed you and hit on you and then left kind of abruptly. I was crazy blind drunk, and to be honest it’d been a rough couple of weeks.”

“You were chatting me up?” I said.

“Don’t pat yourself on the back, I have awful taste in women.”

“And a terrible sense of timing,” I said.

“Says the girl who stole from a funeral,” he smiled, then paused. “Have you had lunch?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Would you like to?”

“I’m not buying,” I said.

Lunch was a sort of picnic in his car, which had that new-car leather smell. He parked in the derelict parking lot of a bar called Platinum. It had tinted windows and a metal door with a small grate at eye level. It was either a strip club or a casino, but there was no music or noises coming from inside. There were one or two cars outside the little building, and lots of graffiti around the edges. David and I listened to basement remixed hip-hop from his iPod and shared his homemade sandwiches – each one had its crusts cut off and was wrapped in silver foil. There was something paradoxical about David from the start. He was disdainful, yet anxious. He was too old for basement hip-hop remixes. He had a brand-new SUV with DVD players built into the seats, satellite navigation and big leather seats, but the back seat was covered with turrets of girly gossip magazines. He lurked in the parking lots of z-grade strip joints to catch celebrities or politicians at compromising moments, but he cut the crusts off his own sandwiches and kept emergency Oreo cookies in his glove compartment.

“I’m not strobe-lighting,” he told me, when I picked up one of the gossip magazines he worked for and asked how he decided to join the paparazzi. “If there are thirty cameras waiting for Britney outside the Roosevelt, I’m not one of them,” he insisted. He had an ironic smile and mischievous eyes that goaded me to ask where he would be – up a tree in her back garden? Skulking in the gas station where she bought her cigarettes? Waiting in the parking lot of a bar with blacked-out windows in the middle of the day? Where? But I didn’t ask. The photo David took that afternoon in the parking lot was of a film star I didn’t recognize. The stout and balding middle-aged man came out of the heavy metal doors of the Platinum Club looking bedraggled, his shirt limp across his shoulders from sweat and his bald head glowing. I didn’t even feel very sorry for the man. He already had gallows in his eyes as he walked straight to his car, like some haunted storybook villain transplanted awkwardly into the Los Angeles sunlight. The villain didn’t even know he had his photograph taken. The LA Times ran an article about the famous actor’s crippling gambling addiction the next day. I wondered why David had asked me to share his sandwiches. Was he being nice, or had he recognized me as a relation of Lily? Did he really believe the coincidence of me turning up at the café?

“Where’d you get your scars?” I said to David after a long silence between us. The car now smelt of crumbled Oreos mixed with new leather. His scars, like mine, weren’t immediately obvious, except in certain lights, when they flashed for a second.

“Accident-prone,” he smiled. “You?”

“Mostly fighting,” I said, crossing my arms and touching my face with the tips of my fingers.

“Fighting?” he smiled.

“Playing football. I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Not proper fighting. Where you from?”

“Coney Island. You ever been?”

“No. It’s a fairground near New York, right?”

David laughed.

“There are fairground rides on it, sure,” he said. “But people live there.” I blushed and felt stupid.

“Were you a ‘carnie’ at the fair, then?” I pushed on, even putting on an American accent to say the word “carnie”, which I’d heard from some American sitcom. I didn’t really know what a carnie was, and my accent was awful.

“You know, I kinda was,” he laughed. “My dad was a mechanic – he worked for The Astroland Amusement Park. Not quite a carnival, but near enough. My mother died when I was twelve, but she used to work there at a popcorn stand. My first girlfriend was a mermaid named Emma. She worked at the Coney Island Freak Show.”

“A mermaid? How’d that work out?” I laughed. I was happy at that moment, hearing about mermaids and freak shows, I almost wanted to tell Dad. He wouldn’t even have been interested, though. He lived in a world where you got by. You didn’t live, but you kept going. Maybe that was why Lily left him. He’d have been expecting me home three days ago, and I hadn’t called yet to explain yet. He’d be very angry by now, but I knew he wouldn’t actually call the police.

“It’s caused a lot of confusion, the problem of how mermaids make love,” David said, “but in my experience they unzip their Lycra fins and unknot their plastic glitter-coated shells from around their adolescent breasts and fumble around in the gritty backroom of a Coney Island Theatre.” I laughed, and he continued: “She dumped me for a realtor three times her age.”

“You really do have bad taste in women,” I said.

“Ah, there are plenty more fish in the sea,” he laughed.

“You’ve used that joke before,” I said smiling, and he might have blushed. He looked straight out into the windscreen, and I remembered the desolate look in his eyes when I watched him sit in the car a few days ago.

“Couple of summers after Emma dumped me,” he continued thoughtfully, “a friend of mine got a job at Disney. He was Donald Duck for two months, and he started dating Sleeping Beauty – who, somewhat ironically, was a methamphetamine addict. One weekend I went up to visit him and ended up sleeping with the girl who played the Little Mermaid at the underwater grotto. I don’t remember her name.”

“Ariel,” I said.

“Lucy to her friends,” he said.

We paused.

“You have little lines around your eyes,” he said to me.

“Yeah, so do you,” I said and closed my eyes briefly, touching the thin skin around them.

“But I’m old, I’m thirty-two next Wednesday,” he said, and then paused. “You said you’re, what, twenty-two? I think you’ve either had your heart broken one too many times, or nobody ever told you to moisturize.”

“What a weird thing to say,” I frowned, looking away.

“Just observing.”

“My mum died when I was three,” I said.

“Yeah? That’s hard.”

“You can’t miss what you don’t know,” I said.

“Bullshit,” replied David. “Course you can.”

I shrugged.

“Would you like to have a birthday drink with me next Tuesday?” he said.

“Dunno,” I said, trying not to smile. “Maybe.”

“I’ll pick you up from your hostel if you give me the address, say 6:00 p.m.?” he said.