The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard

Author:Anna Stothard [Stothard, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2011-09-12T03:22:55+00:00

21

It was a warm day when I took a deep breath and rang David’s doorbell. There was a long pause when I didn’t breathe at all, but then he answered the door in orange tracksuit bottoms and no T-shirt. He smelt of shampoo.

“Hey there,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I’m glad you came,” he said. “You got my note, then?”

“How do I know you’re not the protein-powder killer?” I replied with a smile, not coming in through his door.

“Cos I don’t like blueberries,” he said.

“The murderer would say that,” I smiled.

“I’m the one inviting a known thief into my apartment.”

“You’re very brave,” I said sarcastically, putting on a sweet voice for a second and then snapping out of it.

“No suitcase?” he said, looking me over. I’d swapped lockers at the Serena. Vanessa and Tony seemed to have taken a shine to me, and they let me rent a locker. I was wearing Lily’s fitted white cotton dress with black buttons up the front, which I hadn’t worn before, plus her grey ballet shoes. I had the strap of Lily’s tan suede shoulder bag in my fist, and a plastic bag full of her clothes. In the plastic bag I had Lily’s jeans and T-shirts, and ballet shoes and sunglasses – even the stilettos, but I left the leather jacket, knee-high boots, silk fuchsia dress and black minidress.

“Sold it, remember?” I lied. I was careful not to have any of her letters and photographs on me when I was in David’s flat, or at least not when he was around. Having gone this far without telling him, I didn’t want him to guess who I was just yet.

David was out most of the time. His block of flats looked like an army barracks from the outside and a Spanish motel from the inside. The four floors all had balconied corridors outside them, which looked down on a fetid swimming pool where nobody ever swam, but people socialized around and used to cool their feet in the crazy sunshine. It was only if I knew he was going to be out for a while that I’d bring Lily’s letters to his flat and spend my days smoking his cigarettes on the hot steps while reading Lily’s love letters. It was a relief not to have to sleep in the Serena Hostel any more, and although I was still always looking over my shoulder, I felt safer than before.

“To my darling,” wrote the anonymous writer of the typed love letters, which I read while sitting by the swimming pool in the sun. “Do you remember the lunar eclipse?” the letter said. “You asked me why it happened, and when I explained it to you, lovely you, there was this thoughtful sweet look in your eyes and you said, ‘So, it’s a coincidence of geometry.’ What a beautiful phrase, I thought. You liked words. Another time I explained ‘non-locality’ to you – a phenomenon I hardly understood, about when two particles remain synchronized over vast distances? Again, you liked the word.

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