Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 8.3

It turned into a hot day. We left Fred asleep upstairs and went down to the fountain with our towels. We didn't have any bathers so I took off all my clothes.

"Ben!" Sophie shrieked.

"What?"

"What if somebody comes?"

"Nobody will. And who wants to look at a couple of kids anyway?"

So she stripped off too, and there we were, two strange-looking creatures leaping about in the hot sun, like a couple of freshly-skinned animals – rabbits perhaps. The water in the fountain was warm unless you dove deep down where it got suddenly icy and stole your breath away. We sat under the fountain and let the water splash down on us. It was great.

One thing I'll say about Crapper is that everyone there learned how to swim. There was a public swimming pool across the road from the home, and the Whistlers would take us there every Tuesday. It was the highlight of the week. The Whistlers knew this, and they would use it against us. If you did something wrong you had to stay behind at Crapper with an old Whistler called Marjorie, cleaning walls and toilets while everyone else was at the pool. Marjorie had a lisp and she smelled like a cupboard that hasn't been opened in twenty years. Anyway, me and Sophie could both swim like fish.

When we went back upstairs Fred was awake and bawling for another feed. I fed him. Then he sat in my lap examining his hands for ages, you know, looking at them front and back and wiggling his fingers. He was always examining his hands when he was a baby. It was like he'd never seen them before.

Me and Sophie played around with Fred all that hot afternoon and ate fruit we'd picked straight off the trees. We wrapped ourselves in some big towels we'd found and lay on our sides in the entrance hallway facing each other, with Fred crawling across the carpet between us and coming over sometimes to stick his fingers up my nose. My skin was hot from sunburn. Sophie wasn't burnt because she was already so brown. I asked her why she was like that, and she said she'd lived at the beach when she was little.

"You remember where you lived?" I said. This was amazing to me. "Do you remember your parents?"

"Yeh."

"What were they like?"

She shrugged. She was on her back, watching the ceiling, her knees bent under her towel and her feet drawn up underneath. She looked very small under the high dark ceiling. "My mum was sick all the time. I don't know what she was sick with. Then she went to hospital and a woman came around. When my mum came back from hospital the woman'd be gone."

Fred was burbling to himself and examining his feet, like me and Sophie weren't there, like all that mattered was his feet.

"Then Mum died," Sophie said, "when I was seven. I don't know what of. They didn't tell me. Then Dad went away somewhere and I was in the house by myself. Then the welfare people came and put me in the home."

I lay there, thinking about all this.

She turned to me and said, "You never knew your parents, did you?"

"No," I said.

"You're lucky."

She got up and went into the bedroom.

Fred crawled over to examine my belly button. I picked him up and lay him on my chest and played with him for a while, but I was thinking about Sophie's story.