Free The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard

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