The Pink Hotel Read Free

first time she ever felt remotely real to me was when I found out that she was dead, because at least that was physical. It wasn’t the half-remembered smell of her or a story about how she stole money from Grandma’s purse, or how she and Dad went on their first date to an aquarium. It was fact. She died. She was thirty-two. The accident happened on a road called Laguna Highway, somewhere outside Los Angeles, in the desert. She was riding a motorcycle too fast and not wearing a helmet. She never regained consciousness, and died in the ambulance twenty minutes later, the hospital administrator told me over the telephone while I stood motionless in our “Ruby Fountain”-coloured living room off the Finchley Road in London. The hospital administrator thought I ought to know that my mother was dead, since I was her only blood relative, but the hospital only knew I existed because of some information on an old healthcare document.
    “It wasn’t easy to locate your information, but I left a message on your machine four days ago,” she said. I frowned. Dad hated talking about my mother, his first girlfriend. He’d mentioned her a countable number of times in my life, and all the small snippets of information came from my grandmother or family friends: Lily was a coward, a slut, a terrible mother.
    “Are you still there?” the woman from the hospital said over the phone after I held my breath for a moment.
    “I’m here,” I said, exhaling. Downstairs, underneath the flat, Daphne and Dad were cleaning in the café kitchen. I knew every sound so well that I could almost see Daphne and Dad winding rhythmically around each other amongst wet metal and plastic.
    “Well, I’m sorry to give you bad news,” said the woman.
    “I didn’t know her,” I said, picking at the skin around my nails and sucking little pockets of blood as they rose up. “Is there a funeral though?”
    “She ran a hotel with her husband in Los Angeles. The funeral will be in Venice Beach, followed by a wake at the hotel nearby. I’m afraid it’s set up for Friday afternoon. I am really sorry: I left a message earlier in the week.”
    “Nobody passed it on,” I said. “Do you think she’d want me to come? Did her friends know she had a daughter?”
    “I just work at the hospital where she died. I never met your mother,” the woman said.
    “Did she have other kids?”
    “No other children are mentioned on her documents,” said the voice.
    If Dad had sat me down and told me that Lily was dead, perhaps I would have shrugged and gone back to watching TV or reading my book: it’s not like I knew her. But he hadn’t told me, so instead of shrugging I packed my savings from the café and stole Daphne’s credit card from her handbag, which was sitting on the sofa in front of the television. I knew the number, because Daphne had a terrible memory and had it written on an index card in the cutlery drawer along with Dad’s mobile number. It took me ten minutes to book a ticket online, for early the next morning, and twenty-or-so hours later I was in my mother’s bedroom at the top of a vast pink hotel in Venice beach, lifting a wedding dress up against my body. I glanced briefly at her unconscious husband and took off my own damp T-shirt to slip the dress over my head.
    If the red-haired man had woken up at that second, he would have seen torn tracksuit bottoms sticking out from a milky froth of his dead wife’s silk-and-lace wedding dress. For a moment I was caught inside the cloud of perfumed silk. The music was getting quieter in the layers of hotel underneath the bedroom, the party finally winding down. It must have been five or six in the morning by that point. I could have taken off the silly dress and snuck out. Nobody would even have known that I’d been there, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the creature in the mirror. I didn’t look anything like Lily. Nobody would recognize the connection. Who knows if her husband or anyone else