The Pink Hotel Read Free Page B

Similarly, fine-pointed stilettos and push-up bras draw a woman’s attention to herself, and so she exists visibly to the world. Laurence used to say that I had “kleptomaniac chic” down to a T, which apparently meant dressing as if unsure about my own existence. Even as a kid I was incognito. According to Dad I neither smiled nor talked until I was five, which caused everyone to think that I was either deaf and dumb or autistic or both. He said I was a “personified shrug”, a kid on whose face fear, anger, amusement and love all looked the same – just a tilt of the head and a blank stare from inhumanly wide eyes.
    I tried to be invisible as I rushed out of the private flat at the top of the Pink Hotel, but it’s hard to pull off when you’re scared. I dragged Lily’s suitcase through the waning party, and at first I thought the red-haired man would clamber up from the floor and follow me. I kept looking back, but he wasn’t there. Other people seemed to be looking at me though. There was a woman in a leather minidress, and a man with a gold stud in his nose who looked thuggish except for neatly parted black hair. I only noticed this man very fleetingly at the hotel that first night, but the mixture of schoolboy hairstyle and a thug face made me remember him later. The techno and electro music had stopped by now, so maybe someone had heard noises from upstairs. There were people asleep in different rooms, or still dancing to themselves in the hallway. Someone was vomiting in a toilet and I swear she looked up and smiled crookedly at me as I passed. Someone else was crying. I hurried downstairs and out of the hotel onto the boardwalk, where the light was just beginning to turn blue behind street lamps and palm trees. The suitcase wasn’t heavy, just clumsy to carry. It kept banging against my leg, and I looked behind to check nobody was following me.
    There were people smoking on the steps and two people kissing against the pink stucco walls, but nobody followed me. On one block of the road, homeless men slept in bundles of rags and corrugated cardboard. One of them looked at me with heavyset narcotic eyes, but the rest were curled up with their dusty eyelids closed. I gripped the suitcase tighter and kept walking until I couldn’t see the homeless men or the pink walls of the hotel any more. Then I sat down on a bench in front of the blacked-out beach to open Lily’s suitcase for a jumper or jacket to wear as the sun came up. From the chaos of my thievery I chose the leather motorcycle jacket that Lily had been wearing in the photo of her posing with her bike. I thought about phoning Dad to tell him I was OK, but decided to calm down before that battle. I zipped the leather jacket up to my neck.
    At first it seemed unlikely that I’d be able to doze on a bench in front of a picture-postcard cliché of a beach, but soon the sun started to come up, and my adrenaline stopped pumping quite so hard. I lay down with the suitcase under my head on the bench. The light was beautiful, sort of frosty. I hadn’t seen the sea since a caravan holiday in Cornwall six years ago. I don’t love the sea in any cosmic sense, but I do like it. The Pacific looked like a different animal from the Atlantic. If the Atlantic was a foaming, snapping Rottweiler, the Pacific was a sleepy gecko in the sunlight. I had a recurring dream throughout that strange summer, which always began as a conscious thought while I was trying to lull myself to sleep and ended in dull panic. I’d begin with a deserted beach, all warm and wonderful. I would be naked in my dream, and for some reason pregnant, the thick water touching my white thighs and then my belly as I stepped further into the sea. The sky would always be full of blue seagulls in my dream, and I would find myself unable to ignore a red coin of colour that appeared on the horizon and grew. It looked like a sunset that had started in the sea before it hit the sky, and I wouldn’t be able