The Pink Hotel (18 page)

The first set I worked on with Sam had been on a fake suburban street, and the second was a Korea Town pet shop. There was a front area full of spider-webbed plastic castles, fake seaweed and rancid dog chews, then two long corridors – one lined with fish and the other with yelping dogs who looked like they were about to drop dead, their little paws scratching at their glass walls. Every night the owners and their two teenage sons would climb up a wooden ladder to a small attic above the shop. They slept up there on four tidy futons while we filmed. In the morning, when the light was just beginning to ruin the continuity of Sam’s shots, the family came yawning down the wooden ladder in matching blue cotton pyjamas to make tea in the kitchen, where they also cleaned out the daily mulch of a hundred animal cages. The family seemed entirely at ease with the camera crew. We learnt later that they’d had other film crews in over the years. Only in Los Angeles is every mom-and-pop shop also regularly a film set.

There seemed to be a lot of crazy people in that part of town, their presence amplified by our shooting through the night. The shop was opposite a Kentucky Fried Chicken branch, one built in the shape of a giant, dirty, concrete KFC bucket on North Western Avenue. When the crew arrived in the evening, religious zealots would be preaching of martyrdom out in the strip-mall parking lots, while Korean men skulked in and out of a 24-hour convenience store. The convenience store smelt of aerosol cans, and the shopkeeper sat behind a safety cage. Next to the store was a tanning salon with a blown-out neon sign outside, which I can’t imagine attracted many customers, and above it was a window display full of dusty wedding gowns and taffeta prom dresses the colour of dried phlegm.

“Maybe there’s a Meth lab in the tanning salon, and they deal from the shop,” suggested Sam on the first night of shooting when I mentioned that the tanning salon and the dress shop couldn’t possibly make any money. “That would make sense.”

“What about the dress shop?” I asked.

“That’s where they live,” he said, “with wedding dresses for duvets and veils for pillows.” I smiled at him. A year or two later, after all of this was over, I stopped by at the strip mall and peeked in at the dress shop. There was a sign on the window that said “appointment only”, and through the dusty glass I could see a woman changing her baby’s nappy on the counter. I could have sworn they were even the same dresses in the display, so perhaps Sam was right.

We worked till 7:00 a.m. that summer morning. Sam gave me a ride home, and it was around eight when I let myself into David’s flat. The first thing I noticed was a wooden chair missing from around David’s kitchen table and dents in the kitchen walls, where a confetti of paint was drizzling off. It was quite a small mark in the wall, but I couldn’t help noticing that the laminate kitchen floor was dented now too. David got out of the shower just as I walked in, and he smelt clean like a baby or a shampooed dog. I walked through the slightly askew living room and into the bedroom. I kissed him on the cheek, but he turned away from me and started to dry himself with his back to the bedroom door. Perhaps there was a faint hint of alcohol in the air, but mostly all I could smell was shampoo.

“How was your night?” I said. My voice sounded relatively calm considering the adrenalin suddenly in my brain. I hadn’t been to the Serena for over a week, not since we saw the Coyote and David accused me of keeping secrets.

“All right,” David said as he dropped his towel and started to get dressed. He seemed to be moving slowly, in a slightly odd way: swampy and thick. The atmosphere was very different from our talks about going on holiday to the moon.

“Want me to make you breakfast?” I asked him.

I didn’t mention the little cuts on his knuckles, or the fact that several plates were missing from the kitchen cupboards. He was looking at me strangely while I made scrambled eggs in his little pink-tiled kitchen. There was a gap between us that I couldn’t put my finger on. He was definitely drunk, or he had been. Maybe he’d just fallen off the wagon and it was nothing to do with me, I thought hopefully, but something was certainly wrong, and I could feel his angry thoughts while I whisked up the eggs in a ribbed-glass cup and added milk. The eggs lolloped around in the glass, and I broke the yolks against the sides with my fork, merging them like bleeding sea creatures into the thick surrounding water. I concentrated on feeding crumbs of salt into the mixture and turning olive oil to fume in the saucepan before I poured the mixture in and watched it sizzle.

I pretended not to feel this horrible itch on my skin where he was looking. I turned and smiled fakely at him across the kitchen table. I’d been wearing one of his T-shirts all night on Sam’s set, from some death-metal band I’d never heard of, and the jeans he bought me rather than Lily’s stonewash skinny pair. My hair was long enough to be up in a ponytail now, although there was only a tuft of blond hair caught up in the rubber band. He had got dressed in his normal ridiculous fashion – tracksuit bottoms with holes in them and visible elastic at the waistband, a nice pressed shirt with blue stripes, a pair of purple plastic sunglasses on his shorn head. His hair was still damp, and his camera lay dormant on the table next to his hand.

“You want cheese in your scrambled egg?” I said to him.

“Is that an English thing?” he replied gruffly, and I turned to look in the fridge, just so that I could use the door to shield myself from his look. He’d been irritated with me before, for moments, but never for long, and it never felt as heavy as this. We didn’t have any cheese, and when I turned back to the eggs they were already setting in the saucepan. I gave them a quick stir, scraping the yolk from the sides, and put toast in the toaster. If I’d known this moment was so important, I would have done something interesting with the eggs.

Perhaps I did know what was happening, although not how or why. Perhaps I was stretching out the time before I had to make contact with the problem, or perhaps I was waiting for him to speak first. While scrambling eggs in David’s little kitchen, the trouble seemed to be contained beyond a glass wall. I felt groggy and feline, like someone had weighted down my ankles with sandbags, but I didn’t feel like it was the end of the world. All I wanted to do was curl up and be unconscious, preferably near him. Instead I buttered his toast in the kitchen. The smell of coffee filled the kitchen from the gurgling machine.

“How’s Sam’s set?” David finally said to me as I tumbled the scrambled eggs onto his toast and turned to put the plate in front of him. Then I swung my back to him again and busied myself arranging the remains on the eggs onto another piece of toast for me.

“Yeah, fine,” I said. “Bit crazy.”

“It’s in a pet shop, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, picking at my food. “What you been up to?” I wasn’t hungry. Neither was he, it seemed, because he didn’t even pick up his knife and fork.

“Just developing photos at the office,” David said.

“Anything good?” I said nervously.

We paused. David looked at me, then shrugged and glanced back at his hands. I felt all brittle and jumpy. Film sets often ran on a prescription drug called Adderall, which I’d never taken until Sam gave it to me. Nobody takes it in London, or at least I’d never heard of it, but Los Angeles seemed to use it like morning coffee. It’s meant to be for people who find it difficult to concentrate. It makes you speedy and focused, but after a while it makes you hollow and sleepless. Everyone took it on Sam’s set.

David didn’t touch my scrambled eggs. He looked like he was hardly awake at all, and his body reminded me of a tethered bull or a tranquilized horse. His tanned shoulders were hunched forwards slightly over the table, and his heavy eyes followed me languidly as I moved around the kitchen.

“What’s wrong, David?” I said finally. “What was wrong with the photographs? You’re scaring me.”

“When are you going in to work today?” he replied, pale, formulating his words with care.

“Sam’s picking me up at three,” I said. “We could say fuck it. Go to Mexico today. Can we go away to Mexico today? Or the moon, or Rio, or wherever? Sam can find another script supervisor, it doesn’t matter at all. What’s wrong?”

David looked like he was holding his breath or biting his tongue.

“I don’t want to talk to you now,” he said. “I need to go out, clear my head. Okay?”

I felt like we were in one of Sam’s movies, only the eye lines didn’t match up. Or like I was trapped in a game of charades and we hadn’t read any of the same books or watched any of the same movies.

“What’s happened? How did it happen?” I said.

“When will you be home?” he said, not answering.

“The film wraps this time tomorrow. I don’t have to go, though.”

“Let’s talk tomorrow then.”

“Are we actually arranging a date to argue? Let’s just do it now,” I said.

He was standing up, within touching distance of me.

“No,” he said.

“Why not now?” My voice was getting high-pitched.

“Cos neither of us have slept, and the sight of you is making me feel sick,” he said, and lifted his hand in a way that made me flinch, although it turned out he was merely reaching for his bag on the hook behind my head. “Plus I have a hangover,” he said. My skin lifted where I thought it was going to be hit, blood rushing to the surface and making me flush.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re a liar,” he said.

“I should have told you,” I said.

“I’ve really fucked up,” said David.

I wasn’t really sure what was going on. If I could do it again, I’d make him hit me. It would have been nice to add David’s anger to the physical map on my body. Through all our bedtime wrestling matches he never left a scar, and I badly wished that he had.

“I’m not going to hit you,” he said, measured.

“Why aren’t you shouting at me,” I said.

“Valium,” he said, and there was almost the trace of a smile on his lips. He’d got drunk and lost his temper earlier, and now he was sedated.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again. It was all I could think of to say. It sounded lame and beside the point. I wished I’d been there when he smashed the chair to pieces and smashed plates on the floor. Some physical pain would have been better than the absence he left me with instead.

“Just get some sleep,” he said. He hesitated at the door before he left, a funny look in his lopsided green eyes.

I went to the pet shop as planned that afternoon, believing David would be home when I got back and we could somehow talk everything through. Even though I was about to spend the night on a sweaty film set, I wore David’s favourite navy-blue dress, black kitten heels and the little pearl earrings he bought me. In our breaks during shooting, Sam and the crew huddled in the strip-mall parking lot clutching cups of coffee and taking pills from the cinematographer, whose girlfriend was a narcoleptic set dresser. We’d just shot a scene where the main actor was trying to choose from a tower of translucent plastic jars, each containing a nearly identical blue tropical fish with a chiffon-like tail. They put blue dye in each jar of water, so it looked like a parody of water.

I told Sam that David was angry with me, but Sam didn’t say much. Sam just gave me a hug and wink, and told me that his bed was always open for me. I was standing with Sam in the car park when everything suddenly started to melt in front of my eyes. I’d been exhausted and tired and tearful all night, of course, but by 5:00 a.m. I was feeling sick. Some others – a gaffer and an extra – had gone home with food poisoning earlier in the night. It’s amazing how your life can hinge on one moment of awful timing, like bad film-set pizza toppings. I tried to keep my surroundings steady, as if I was holding up a falling bookshelf. The flat sky, the concrete buildings, the cars winking by the pet shop – everything began to lose its definition, and suddenly I desperately wanted to be horizontal, with my hot cheek resting on the cool early-morning tarmac. All my dreams of fainting that summer didn’t prepare me for that feeling of wanting to pass out.

“What’s wrong?” said Sam, taking coffee from my hand. I felt nauseous, but I could have remained standing, I thought, if it wasn’t that I wanted so badly to fall.

Before I passed out, I didn’t think about David or Lily or the fainting game, but about fish. There was a time, when I was little, when Dad said he was going to the fish shop. I knew that Grandma and Grandpa’s café downstairs had fish on the menu, but somehow I’d missed a link between the things that swam around in the nursery school aquarium and the white flesh caked in batter that we sometimes sold drenched in vinegar and riding on a bed of yellow chips on the café menu downstairs. In retrospect we were probably at the fish market so that Dad could speak with a supplier, but of course I thought we were going to get a pet fish. I imagined my own private underworld of plastic treasure chests and seaweed arches like the bowl we had at school. I was very quiet and good all the way to the market, where we walked through corridors of fruits and vegetables – plums and apples and baskets of fresh strawberries. Then we turned a corner into a funny smell. Suddenly I saw a mausoleum. Hundreds and hundreds of heavy eyes stared. There were tiny little ones overflowing their boxes, big silver monsters with damp pink flesh hanging from sliced open stomachs, ignominiously open-mouthed, salivating ice and blood. Each one was staring at me accusingly. I lost Dad like I often did in crowds because he walked so fast, but he looked behind in time for me to run forwards and grab his hand.

“Bad fish,” I said to Dad after some mental gymnastics, deciding they must be bad, because they had been killed. Good fish couldn’t possible end up like that. What I remember most is a bit of a fish’s face that I picked up from my father’s feet as he talked to one of the vendors. It was half a head, the eyeball very much intact, with a visible spinal column coming out of the neck for a few centimeters before snapping. The flesh that was still clinging to the spine felt sopping wet, the texture of conditioner-soaked hair in the plughole after bath time. Then the scales were dryer and firmer than expected, as was the eyeball itself, which I touched with appalled glee.