Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  Still, it was nearly cocktail time.

  It took me a while to locate a working payphone. Practically every handset in a half-mile radius round the gallery had been yanked out of its fittings and was dangling to the ground in an admittedly striking mess of tangled wires. Finally I found one which, despite being as bruised and battered as if it had gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson—there was even a large chunk of the earpiece missing, though no teeth marks through it—produced a dial tone on request and even accepted my money without spitting it back contemptuously. The booth was just a strut of metal and a pitiful little square foot of cover under which I huddled for protection. Standing in what was practically the middle of the pavement, people shoving past me, forced to shout my business into every set of half-curious ears, was like using a mobile phone without even the implication that you had a bit of money. Sod modern art, this was a real engagement with the harsher side of life.

  I stuffed the box with quarters till it burped and pleaded for mercy, then dialled Kim’s number. She picked up after only two rings, sounding as if she were in a hurry.

  “Yeah?”

  It was so strange to hear her voice, which was Kim’s and not-Kim’s at the same time, overlaid with an American accent and an unmistakably adult helping of stress.

  “Kim?” I said half-incredulously.

  There was a pause.

  “Who is this?” she said, puzzled.

  “OK, this is a blast from the past. Sit down and take deep breaths. It’s me, Sam. Sam Jones.”

  “Sam? Omigod! Sam, is it really you? Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m in SoHo. I mean,” I added, unsure about the pronunciation, “not Soho London, SoHo! New York.”

  “You’re in SoHo,” Kim repeated, not really taking it in. “I don’t believe it. I’m in shock. My God, how long’s it been? No, don’t tell me.”

  “Shall we meet up?”

  “Well, sure! You want to come to a class with me right now?”

  “A class?”

  “The gym,” Kim said rather impatiently, as if this had been so obvious only a fool could have failed to realise. “Cardio and crunch. You wanna come?”

  “What, now?”

  “Sure! I was just leaving.”

  “But I don’t have any stuff. I mean, it’s back at my flat. Apartment.”

  “I’ll bring you some. We could always share clothes. What’s your shoe size again?”

  “Five.”

  “Five English …Shit, a six …Well, I’ll bring you an extra pair of socks to stuff in the sneakers. Shit, I don’t believe this! OK, meet me at Abs Central. It’s on Sixth and Twelfth, east side of the street.”

  I boggled, both at the name of the gym and the casual way she gave the address. “I’ll get a cab.”

  “You’re not that far,” she said disapprovingly. “You could walk it.”

  “Give me a break, Kim, I only got here yesterday.”

  “Yesterday! Shit! OK, I’m out of here. Meet you just inside the doors in half an hour.”

  She was gone. I hung up and stared at the phone, which promptly evacuated its bowels of excess quarters, farting noisily. The anticipatory excitement of meeting Kim again—the kindred spirit of my late-teenage years, my equally evil twin, the nearest thing I’d ever had to a sister—was submerged temporarily under the implications of the words “cardio” and “crunch.” They sounded ominous. And what was even more unnerving had been the matter-of-fact way Kim had pronounced them, as one to whom they held no terrors. Actually, I was reasonably fit at the moment; Hugo kept himself so ruthlessly in shape that it shamed me into reasonably regular bursts of fat-burning activity. Still, I had the feeling that American definitions of fitness might be considerably more rigid than British ones.

  I sneaked a quick look at my bus map, keeping it partially concealed by the booth from any passers-by who might mock me as a tourist. Kim was right. Sixth and Twelfth wasn’t far at all. Still, it wasn’t just round the corner either. I decided to get a cab. Something told me I would need to hoard my energy.

  I didn’t recognise her. If there was one thing I would never have predicted could happen, it was that I wouldn’t recognise Kim, after however many years had passed. I was remembering the tomboy I had hung out with, big and confident, and then the skinny girl, shocked into unprecedented self-doubt by her father’s precipitate flight to America in the arms of Barbara Bider. The last time I had seen Kim had been at Heathrow, about to board the plane for New York and a confrontation with her father. A shadow of her former self, she hadn’t eaten properly for months, and her jeans were hanging off her, held up by one of his old belts. She was wearing a sweater of his, too. She’d have dressed in his clothes from head to toe if they had fitted her.

  Her hair hung lank round her face, the skin pasty and badly nourished. I had tried to look after her, but she hadn’t really wanted my help. All she wanted was her father back, and now the mountain was going to Mohammed. She was determined to impress on Jon that he owed her a place to stay in New York and help with getting into art school. It had been more than ten years since she got on that plane. I wondered how much use he had been. She had sounded pretty good on the phone—confident, together….

  I looked around me. A seemingly endless series of frighteningly fit and toned women in cropped sweaters and low-slung trousers were swinging past and heading through the gym doors. When one of them, her short dark hair slicing back from her face in the latest gamine cut, her navel studded with a tiny silver star, detached herself from the procession and threw herself on me, I found myself backing away, thinking she’d mistaken me for her girlfriend.

  “Sam!” the vision cried into my ear, hugging me so tight I saw a hundred clones of the star in her bellybutton flashing before my eyes. “It’s me! God, you look just the same! I’d have known you anywhere!”

  The shocks were certainly coming thick and fast today. Natalie Wood had gone native with a vengeance: this was the New York equivalent of fringed buckskins and a long plait.

  “Kim?” I said feebly. I could just about hear her London accent under the American patina. It was practically the only clue. “I would never have recognised you,” I confessed. “I feel terrible.”

  Kim, sensibly, took this as a compliment.

  “Shit, I’m not the same person,” she said, shepherding me through the doors and past the signing-in procedures with a slick efficiency that was alien to any memory I had of her. “I’m kinda glad you didn’t know it was me.”

  “You look so—so New York. Streamlined and superfit.”

  She beamed. “God knows I work hard enough for it. Remember how porky I used to be?” she said ruefully.

  “Kim, you were not porky. Ever.”

  She ignored this completely. By now she was leading me into the changing room and handing me some items of clothing which looked as if she’d bought them from a designer version of Mothercare: matte black and so small they would have been tight on a twelve-year-old.

  “How am I expected to wear this?” I said, holding up the crop top in disbelief. “What happened to your breasts?”

  What happened to you7. I wanted to say. It was true that, up till her father left, Kim had always been a little on the chubby side. Now she was half a stone underweight and her stomach was as flat—well, not as a pancake, which always strikes me as a silly comparison. Often pancakes aren’t flat at all; they have those bulging pockets of air which, translated into flesh terms, would be buboes. Kim’s stomach was as flat as one of the lightly rippled sheets of Perspex we used to mess around with at art college. She looked amazing, though the skin on her face was stretched a little too tight. I was aware what an effort it must have been for her to lose the weight and keep it off; though now she was a thin size six, her bones were still an eight.

  I struggled pitifully into Kim’s restrainer bra—thank God she’d brought me one, Kim was always thoughtful—and the rest of the exercise gear. For the second time that day I thanked God I was i
n a strange city. If anyone I knew, apart from my oldest friend, caught me in a too-tight bra which corseted my bosoms together into the scanty neckline of a leotard with a G-string back, I would have had to kill them.

  I turned round and squinted at myself in the mirror over my shoulder. At least the cycling shorts kept me relatively decent. Still, it was yet another shock.

  “My God.”

  “You don’t look so bad,” Kim said generously. “You’re really in shape.”

  “The clothes are in shape,” I corrected. “That’s what’s holding me in. Wait till the seams start to burst.”

  “Oh no,” Kim reassured me. “They’re double-stitched.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” I tugged at the G-string of the leotard, which was outlining my private parts rather more explicitly than I usually preferred outside the privacy of my own boudoir.

  “Come on,” Kim said impatiently. She was already jogging on the spot.

  “Hang on, I’m just sorting out my lip definition.”

  The bloody thing wouldn’t move. I felt like a lap dancer about to go to work. Incredible to believe that women had operations to enhance that sort of thing.

  Kim giggled, but it came a beat later than it would have in the old days, and lacked its usual full wattage. We had snapped straight away into our automatic, sisterly familiarity—impossible not to, we had practically lived together for our formative years—but the Kim I knew seemed to have been taken over, at least partially, by a New York Superwoman clone. I hoped that if I started digging I could excavate some shards of my old dirty-minded friend down in the depths of her soul.

  My instinct about the ominous title of the class had been bang-on. Car-dio and crunch turned out to be an hour-long extra-strength aerobics class—on bendy boards that made you work double-hard because you couldn’t go slow pretending you were worried about joint injury—followed immediately by half an hour of abdominal exercises. I had never heard of anything that bad. I couldn’t believe Kim hadn’t warned me; once the first sixty minutes were up I turned to her saying with relief: “Thank God that’s over,” only to hear the teacher yell:

  “Right! Here comes the part you’ve all been waiting for! Everyone hit the deck! We’re gonna work those abs till they beg for mercy!”

  This was what the adulterers had to do in the seventh circle of hell. Dante had probably concealed it from us because he felt the news was so brutal it would fatally unbalance the rest of the poem. Alas, since we were still, technically at least, on earth, all the participants seemed to be off-duty aerobics teachers doing this for light relaxation. I staggered out after the full ninety minutes, hitting the showers without a word. It took me five minutes standing speechless as the kind water sluiced me down to remember what my name was and what I did for a living.

  “Way to go!” Kim said, joining me in the opposite shower. “You’re in good shape.” She said this with as much approval as if she were telling me she liked my sculptures. Over here it was obviously considered the same level of achievement.

  “I used to teach weights,” I said, soaping myself, “but not for a couple of years now.”

  “Right,” Kim said sagely, “that explains your arm definition. How come you stopped?”

  “Oh, my sculptures started selling. Very slowly. I’d probably have gone on teaching, but someone got killed at the gym I worked at and by the end the atmosphere was so terrible—everyone had been suspecting everyone else—that I didn’t want to go back.”

  “Oh my God. Did they catch the person who did it?”

  “I caught the person who did it. That’s partly why I stayed away.”

  “Wow.” Kim was staring at me now. I stepped out of the shower, very reluctantly, and started towelling myself down.

  “That must have been hard to deal with,” she said respectfully. She wasn’t shocked, I noticed. New Yorkers, even adopted ones, made a point of not being shocked easily. They had a lot invested in being tough.

  I shrugged. “It wasn’t so hot. The person who did it”—I couldn’t say the name, even now, I noticed with detachment—“was acquitted and went back to work at the gym. Some people left and others just pretended it had never happened.”

  “In denial,” Kim said wisely. “I know all about that.”

  “Look,” I said, “do you have to be somewhere now?”

  “Not till ten. That’s when my shift starts.”

  “Well, let’s go for a drink and something to eat and catch up on everything, OK?”

  “Well, sure. I can take you down to where I work. You’ll really like it.”

  By the time we left the gym, evening had fallen on the Avenue of the Americas. I liked that name, even though Kim told me sternly not to use it, because the locals always said Sixth Avenue. I shot a glance back through the brightly lit floor-to-ceiling windows of the ground-floor gym. Despite the warm golden lighting, there was nothing cosy about the scene inside. A whole new set of enthusiasts were going for the burn. We didn’t call it that any longer, but that was what they wanted and everyone knew it.

  “How often do you work out?” I asked Kim.

  “About four times a week. I should do more, really. I’m putting on weight.”

  “Where?” I said incredulously. “On your eyebrows? Kim, you’re a shadow of your former self.”

  “Oh, there’s always room for improvement,” she said seriously. “OK, let’s head down this way. We can catch the 8 over to Avenue A. Show you a bit of the East Village.”

  “That’s where you live, right?”

  “Yeah. You’ll go for it.” She grinned at me. I saw a flash of the old Kim. “It’s right up your street.”

  “Dirty and druggy?” I suggested.

  “Exactly. Lots of people with green hair and piercings. You’ll feel right at home.”

  “Oi, watch it. I remember when you went fuchsia. Anyway, that green hair wasn’t so terrible.”

  “I used to really envy you, not having anyone to shout at you when you did something like that,” Kim said reminiscently as we waited for the bus. “Mum was so angry with me, do you remember?”

  “That was mainly because we stained the sink and it never came off,” I pointed out. “She quite liked you fuchsia.”

  “Mum was always so hung up about it being a council flat,” Kim said. “She could never get over it. That’s why she wanted everything perfect.”

  “It was really nice, your house,” I said.

  “But it Backed Onto The Estate,” Kim said in such an accurate imitation of her mother’s voice that I started laughing. “Mum was always like, I grew up on a sink estate like that one and now I’m right back where I started. That’s why marrying Dad was such a big deal. He’d been to uni and everything. And he was a teacher. It was really marrying up in her eyes. God, it’s funny to think of it. You know who she’s with now? A cabbie. And she’s much happier.”

  “Good. Your mum was always great to me.”

  “She went to pieces after Dad left,” Kim said, her voice hardening. The bus pulled up and we climbed on. I liked the New York buses; they were like liners, with their smooth motion and whooshing doors. London buses stank of dirty diesel fumes badly enough to give you a thumping headache if you sat too close to the ventilation panels. And the trails of black smoke they left were so filthy and reeking they would have furnished Dickens with ample material for a whole page of masterfully-paced invective.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” Kim said for the hundredth time as we sat down in the bar she had chosen. The East Village was full of people wearing those over-long pull-on woolly hats. The girls’ sweaters were too small and the boys’ were too big. Boys here, as I had already lamented to Hugo, seemed to wear all their clothes too big. I wondered if it were so no one thought they were gay. This was a very regressive theory, but the only one I had so far.

  “It’s really bright in here,” I complained, resisting the impulse to shield my eyes with my hand as I peered at the drinks menu hung over th
e bar. There was something odd about it, but I hadn’t worked it out yet. I was too busy wondering why a supposedly fashionable hangout had hired the same designers McDonald’s used to make their sitting areas so unwelcoming that people would bolt their food in twenty seconds and make for the door. Someone could make a fortune selling antacids just outside to ward off the subsequent indigestion pangs.

  I didn’t mean to imply, however, that this bar was done up in brown plastic wood with red and yellow seats slanting at an angle which a coma victim would have found uncomfortable. It was bright pink instead, and the white lighting made everyone look as if they had just been artificially revived.

  “I thought New York bars were dark and cavernous,” I continued petulantly.

  “Not juice bars,” Kim said brightly.

  “Juice bars,” I repeated slowly.

  “Well, sure! Want an energy shot? Everything’s non-fat, by the way. It’s the policy. I love this place.”

  I put my head down on the table. So that was what was wrong with the picture. Spot what’s missing: anything more than one degree proof.

  “Kim,” I said through my arms, “I love you, you’re like a sister to me, but when I say, ‘Let’s get a drink,’ I mean alcohol unless I deliberately specify otherwise, OK? I take it if I ask them for a vodka and tonic here they’ll stone me to death with capsules of multivitamins.”

  “Do you really need a drink?” Kim said, deep concern in her voice. She put a hand on one of mine. “Is it a problem? You wanna talk about it?”

  “I don’t need a drink,” I said crossly. “I want a drink. Oh, never mind. We’ll stay here and I’ll have some health-food sludge with barley extract just to prove to you that I can go without.”

  “Are you going to be OK?”

  “I’m not going to have DTs, if that’s what you mean…. You’re teetotal, aren’t you?” I said belatedly. “How long has this been going on?”

  “About five years now. And I’ve never felt better.” She beamed at me. “You should try cutting it out, Sam. Just for a while.”