Free The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard Page B

“Desiderium,” I thought to myself, “a yearning for something that you once had, but is now lost.” It was a lovely word, like “desire” and “delirious” and “dearest” all smudged into one.
    Grandpa’s lazy eye was looking right at me, although his “real” eye was pointing in Dad’s direction. There was a puddle of gunk in the corner of both his eyes and a line of fluffy saliva on his frowning lips. Why hadn’t Dad wiped it off? The strange thing was, it didn’t feel like a very big moment. It didn’t feel like his “soul” left his body at that particular moment. He used to be a handsome man, he used to be charming, and he used to tell really dumb jokes all the time, mostly about politicians I hadn’t heard of. He used to wear colourful bowties and he used to give me pound coins when Grandma or Dad weren’t looking, but in my self-obsessed and childish opinion at the time, if he wasn’t doing any of these things then he wasn’t my Grandpa. Lying grey-skinned and vacant on the thin hospital sheets he didn’t look like anyone I knew. He looked like a painting or a sculpture before he died, and he looked like a painting or a sculpture after he died. When I glanced up from my yachting magazine, all I did was blink.
    “Dad?” I said eventually, when my father didn’t take his eyes off my Grandpa. “Dad?” I repeated.
    “I think he’s dead,” he said slowly, measuring the situation.
    “Shall I call a nurse?” I said calmly.
    “No,” Dad said.
    “He’s looking at me,” I said.
    “No,” Dad said again. My right leg, curled underneath my body, was welling up with pins and needles, but I didn’t move a muscle.
    “Dad?” I said again.
    “No,” he repeated.
    After that, Grandma had a number of strokes. She’d always been peculiar, though. For example nobody ever saw her eat. Ever. She was the talent behind the café, and a wonderful cook. She was the reason she and Grandpa started it in the first place, and the menu Dad cooked is still from Grandma’s recipes. She made fish pies and lamb stews and even fiddly, suburban middle-class dishes like cheese soufflé, but she never set a place for herself at the dinner table. Nothing made her happier than seeing Dad or Grandpa eat her cheesy mash potatoes or minced-chicken lasagna, but only water and instant coffee touched her lips in public. One time, when I was eight or nine, I came to get a drink in the middle of the night and saw her stuffing Ritz crackers in her mouth, the crumbs tumbling into the sink. I held my breath and stood still in the shadows while she tore open the wax paper and crushed the salty yellow biscuits into her mouth. She was wearing a cotton nightdress with teddy bears on it, and her hair was loose around her face. The crumbs stuck to her chin, and I could see the lumps struggling down her long, thin neck, like a mouse swallowed whole by a snake. The next morning the rubbish had been taken out before I woke up, and there wasn’t a crumb to be seen.
    She adored Dad. She was quiet about it, as she was about everything, but he was her whole world. Although before she had the strokes she fed me and corrected my homework and drove me to football tournaments and was almost always kind to me, she did all that for him. She didn’t really approve of me, because of how I came into existence. Years later I questioned Dad about her eating habits, and he didn’t believe me, never having noticed that she didn’t eat. Dad didn’t notice the way Grandma watched us all devouring the food she made or the pleasure she took in every fat chip and slab of crumbly quiche she made in the café kitchen. Perhaps it was to do with food rationing during the war, or some confused remnant of her Irish Catholic upbringing. The way she buttered bread for chip buttes was like a man putting suntan lotion on his new bride, or a priest at the rosary. It’s funny what Dad never noticed. He didn’t even notice that she occasionally spoke to