Free The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard Page A

the proximity, the weight of his presence on the bed, his breathing near my ear, the feeling that he was full of dreams. He seemed to be smiling in the darkness. Eventually I pushed August’s bed covers slowly off my legs, peeling my anxious limbs from the mattress inch by inch, heavily, escaping. I stuffed Lily’s purple dress into my rucksack and zipped Lily’s knee-high boots on underneath August’s tracksuit bottoms. I took the Polaroid wedding photograph from the Enkidu book, placing it carefully on the pillow next to August’s sleeping body.
    Outside his block of flats I lit a cigarette and felt giddy with relief. Emptiness and air hit my skin. Skyscrapers flanked the busy road. Sucking happily on my cigarette I started to walk in the direction of a bus stop at the top corner of the street, Lily’s boots clicking on the pavement as I hugged her leather jacket over the T-shirt August had leant me to sleep in. The morning air was cold in the shadows of the Los Angeles skyscrapers and hot inside the pockets of light that snuck through between and above the buildings. My plane back to London was meant to leave that afternoon.

11
    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.