Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 9: The Police

We'd been living at Ambrose for six months when the police caught me.

Six months might sound like long, but Fred pretty much doubled in size in that time, and me and Sophie had become full-blown hoteliers. Sophie called us "hotellers" at first, but it didn't sound right to me, so I looked it up in a fat dictionary I'd bought at an op shop. She got pretty poisonous when I corrected her. Sophie hates being corrected, especially by me.

There were lots of people staying in the hotel now. The Great Lucio and his Ape were still there of course, and Katy and her Dad – but then there were all these others that I won't tell you about because it would take a million years. They all paid us every month, so we ended up with loads of old crap. There was even some money, except it wasn't dollars, it was pounds. We didn't know what to do with this strange money so we hung onto it.

The first time I went back to Bill's Antiques I asked him if he'd sold the clock, but he didn't seem that interested in talking about it. I couldn't imagine he made much after giving me fifty bucks for it – if he managed to sell it at all. But then he surprised me by giving me a hundred bucks for a little statue of a horse with a cowboy riding it. A hundred bucks! After that he always gave me at least twenty bucks for whatever I brought. Every time I handed something new to him, I stood there nervously, waiting for him to say: Well that's just a useless old piece of crap Benny. I can't give you anything for a piece of crap like that. But it never happened. So we had plenty of money to live on, and we never went hungry or anything.

That first winter at Ambrose was a cold one. Sometimes we lit a fire in the lounge room and sat in front of it as we watched our guests on the TV. I wondered why we never met any of them. And one day something occurred to me.

"Sophie?"

"What?"

"What if the reason we can't see them is because they're in the past?" I'd been thinking about the strange clothes some of them wore, and how they always paid with old things. And in Joe's book Lucio and the Ape had been in the twenties, which was a long time ago.

"I dunno," Sophie said.

"It makes sense though, doesn't it?"

"I guess so." It made Sophie uneasy – the TV and the people on it – and she didn't like to talk about it.

So I came to think of them as people from long ago. It didn't explain how they paid for their rooms and wrote us notes, but still, I felt like I was on the right track. I wondered how many of them were dead now. The Ape? The Great Lucio? Katy's dad? I also thought about the man in the painting. I went downstairs to look at him sometimes. I wondered what he would have been like in real life. It was hard to tell. I only knew that he would have been strange.

Fred started waking us up at night. At first we thought there was something wrong with him, but Sophie looked it up in her women's magazines, and told me he was teething. She gave me a lecture on it, as if she'd known all along. Anyway, it meant that he was ready to start eating real food. So we bought him baby food in jars. At first he only ate a little bit before he'd grab for his bottle again and I'd end up eating the rest of the baby food. It wasn't bad. But eventually he got a taste for it, and after that he wanted whatever we were having.

As he got bigger Fred got faster. I didn't know babies could travel so fast. He liked to babble as he went. Sometimes he'd shout out. It wasn't words or anything – just shouts. He liked to hear his own voice, old Fred. He'd have long conversations with himself while sitting up and looking at his fingers and wiggling them, going ba-ba and ga-ga and chirping like a bird. I always wondered what was going through his head.

One day we were having breakfast and he suddenly called Sophie ma-ma. I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. Sophie took Fred up into her arms and smothered him in kisses and told me to go fuck myself. I could tell she was really touched. A week later he called me da-da. I was glad Sophie wasn't around when it happened, because it made me feel very funny. I got used to it though. You can get used to anything.

We explored the hotel, right up the white floor where we found Elinor that time, but we never went any higher. I never found my way into those funny little towers you could see from outside the hotel, and I never found the door to the basement.

"Maybe there is no basement," Sophie said.

"There has to be."

"No there doesn't."

"Every hotel has a basement," I said.

"No they don't. You're thinking of lobbies."

"Girls don't know anything about hotels."

"Look for your stupid basement then."

"I will."

But I soon gave up looking for the basement. I had this weird feeling that the hotel was watching me when I was doing it. It wasn't a nasty feeling, but it wasn't exactly nice either.

Sophie's birthday was a week after mine, so for a whole week we were the same age, which was weird. I made her a dinner for her birthday. I said it was a pheasant but it was just a stupid chicken. I burned it and we had to pick off all the black bits. Sophie was happy I'd cooked for her though. It didn't take much to make Sophie happy.

The day after her birthday was when the police caught me.