Authors: Anna Stothard
The windows were all boarded up, and the blonde concierge girl was long gone from the crepuscular lobby of the Pink Hotel. I breathed in a lungful of dust and flicked a light switch, which popped quickly and remained dark. In the communal area to the left of the lobby an anxious bee was jumping against gaps in the taped-up window panes, chasing little nuggets of California sunlight that were subsumed into the darkness almost as soon as they touched it. The beat-up-looking sofas were still there in the corner of the large room, but the vending machines and television were gone. The floorboards were covered in cigarette butts and broken glass, which crackled against the bottom of my trainers when I walked over them.
In the corner was where one of the bathtubs full of ice and beer had been during Lily’s wake. You could still see little paw prints in the wood, like the tub had only been taken away recently. This was where I’d noticed a giant man drinking vodka from the bottle, and a skeletal woman dancing on her own. Over by the stairs was where I’d seen the man with the nose piercing, and the man with vivid red hair who stuck his chest out when he walked. On the window sill at the first flight of stairs I’d seen people cutting lines of white powder with gym-membership cards, and on the first landing I’d followed the red-haired man and listened to how Lily was late for their wedding because she couldn’t find appropriate underwear.
One of the stairs on the way up to the top floor was loose now, and I nearly tripped on it. I peeked into rooms where revellers had been huddled, dancing, all those nights ago, and bathrooms where people had passed out or been kissing. I found my way up towards the top of the hotel and the door marked “private”, which was swinging open in the breeze from a broken window. The air smelt of seawater.
The bicycle and rollerblades were gone from the hallway of Richard and Lily’s flat, as were the lampshades and carpets and kitchen table. I felt sick as I opened her bedroom door and saw its gutted walls. No suspender belt caught under the chair leg or mink scarf curled like road kill on the floor next to the bed. There was no bed. No dresses and shoes flung over burgundy carpets, no overflowing ashtrays or spilt perfume. There was no gilt-framed mirror reflecting an image of me looking out of place in her world. All this emptiness, this sea air and dust, was my world.
If I could draw a map of my memories, a few years now after inheriting the Pink Hotel, I’d be careful to label things that used to be there. I’d label the erasures of my memories with as much precision as the ones that lasted. My mental map would be a lattice of tunnels leading nowhere, like to where particular kinds of now-dissolved hatred and nervousness and self-harm used to be, or to where memories of David linger, morphing continually, depending on my mood and on his. I’d insist on carefully labelling every shift in my feelings for David, from sitting beside him in that little Long Beach garden to the letters we wrote each other while he was in prison, to all the stupid arguments and reconciliations after that. I’d try to label the exact feeling, the terror and relief when we met up again after he got out. There would be bulldozed pleasure catalogued on my map, multi-layered incarnations of love. I’d collect my memories like he photographed the Pink Hotel as we worked on it when he came back. I’d insist on holding on to how I used to feel about Dad, too, all that vitriol and disappointment and sadness, even if we’re friends again now. There would be contours on my mental cartography for Daphne, for Mary, for Sam, for Laurence and, of course, for the shifting existence of Lily. Even now I can imagine her walking around the rooms of the Pink Hotel wearing that fuchsia sundress and knee-high black boots. Sometimes I still blink, and see her smiling at me from a doorway.