Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 5.3

I woke up at sunrise. There were pigeons cooing somewhere outside. The sunlight was creeping across the bed where Sophie slept with the baby in her arms. I took the baby gently from Sophie's arms and she murmured something and rolled over onto her belly. The baby was wide awake.

"Morning Freddy," I said.

He yawned.

I grabbed his bottle and went down the hall and behind the staircase and out onto the first floor balcony. It was already warm outside, everything red and orange and purple under the rising sun. The little houses in the distance shone like gems. There was smoke coming out of one of the chimneys. It was only after you watched it for a while that you realised the smoke wasn't moving.

I sat in an old chair with Fred in my lap. I had to tilt the bottle to get at the milk with my finger because he'd drunk so much the night before. I soon got tired of that, so I went to the kitchen and got a cup from a cupboard and rinsed it under hot water and poured the milk into it. Then I took everything back out to the balcony. That was better.

Fred was grabbing at my chin now. Jesus, I thought, imagine being a baby and being interested in chins. He was warm in my arms and smelling of good fresh-woken baby. The sun was getting hot by the time I'd finished feeding him. It was going to be a good day, I thought.

And it was a good day, until the Hobgoblin took Fred.

We ate breakfast at the kitchen table. I'd already forgotten about the book so I didn't end up telling Sophie about it, and then a bunch of other stuff happened and it slipped my mind. It just didn't seem that important at the time.

After breakfast we laid everything we had out on the table, to take stock. We had the milk and half a loaf of bread and one apple and an almost-empty bag of chips and a ballpoint pen and three dollars sixty.

"We need more stuff," Sophie said.

"Not fruit," I said, remembering the trees in the orchard outside, which were loaded with peaches and things.

"Nappies," Sophie said, turning Fred around so I could see his bare red arse.

"Better write it down," I said, but then I realised we didn't have any paper.

"Write it on your arm."

It was surprising how much stuff I could fit on my arm. I guessed three dollars sixty wouldn't cover it, but we didn't say anything about that.

"I'll go later," I said. "Let's look around first."

So we went downstairs and outside to where the fountain was now splashing away. Strange. It must have come on in the night. I looked down into the water and still couldn't see the bottom, even with the sun shining down. I wondered why a fountain needed to be so deep.

We left Fred wrapped up in a blanket, asleep in the shade at the bottom of the front steps, and went around the side of the hotel. There were cicadas going like crazy in the tall grass. I wondered if there were any snakes in there.

We looked through the ground floor windows. The first room was empty except for a big bed and a wardrobe. The next was empty too. One room had a big snooker table in it with a red lamp hanging over it and a blanket of dust over everything. We didn't see anyone in the rooms.

"I can't see Fred," Sophie said.

"He's a baby," I said. "It's not like he'll run off."

This seemed to satisfy Sophie, and she didn't check on him.

I kept tripping over things in the grass: a car tyre, a golf club with no handle, an elbow of pipe, the dirty skull of some small animal. There was a woodpile up against the hotel that had fallen over. Near this was the headstone I'd seen the day before. I had to pull the grass aside to read it. I heard Fred make a sound from the front of the hotel. Sophie glanced up, but she was too curious about the headstone to go check on Fred.

This is what it said:

Alice Ambrose

1953 – 1971

In Loving Memory

"Eighteen years old," Sophie said. She was better at maths than me. She went to touch the headstone, but drew her hand back. "Maybe it was his daughter?"

"Whose daughter?"

But she didn't say.

We scouted the thicket behind the hotel. You couldn't see through it. Sophie assured me that there was quicksand in there and I believed her. I could smell standing water and hear mosquitoes droning away like an AM radio on a Saturday afternoon.

Attached to the back of the hotel was a tool shed with dirty cracked glass windows and a warped door that I had to wrench open. Inside was a a big heavy oily vise, tins of paint, a big bag of white powder with no label on it, a bike wheel with missing spokes, and a stool with a nylon cushion that had cracked and split so the green foam inside pushed out like a tongue, as well as heaps of tools, as you'd expect. There was a ladder going up to a loft. I could just make out shelves and cupboards up there in the darkness. I could smell sawdust and canvas and kerosene. I got dirty just walking around in there. I decided that I liked this place.

After that we went back through the grass to the front door. When Fred saw us he gurgled and clasped at the air with his fat little claws and I put my hands out so he could grab at them.

We took him back upstairs and ate some more bread. I didn't mind the bread, but I knew people couldn't survive on just one thing, like bread for example.

"While you're gone I'll pick some fruit," Sophie said.

"Okay."

"Be careful."

"Okay."

I could tell she was worried about me going back out into the city. Before she could change her mind I went and got my bag. At the little green door she gave me a hug. I had to prise her arms off me.

"Back soon," I said, and crawled through the door.