Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “Still is, presumably. And of course. How couldn’t I recall such a touching reconciliation scene? Poor Stanley went into a catalepsy. ‘On a happier note …’” Laurence said reminiscently. “And Barbara shooting more arrows at you than they let off at Saint Sebastian. You must have been picking them out for the rest of the day.”

  “That’s exactly the point. Jon had to make up an excuse and sneak away from her to give me Kim’s number. I think he was frightened I’d ask for it in front of her and provoke a major quarrel.”

  “The Bilders ought to have one of those medieval mottos, like ‘What I Have I Hold,’ or ‘Touch Us Not Lest We Cut Your Hand Off At The Wrist,’” Laurence said. “It would fit Barbara perfectly. She’s pretty hot on property rights.”

  “And Jon’s her property?”

  He shrugged. “She bought him, didn’t she? Paid for him and shipped him over here? No one had ever heard of him till Barbara married him, and suddenly he was this big art critic. She’s got a lot of strings. And she’s a great puppeteer. God knows if he had any idea of the kind of Faustian pact he was making …sell his soul to Barbara in return for being set up in a nice little berth, a couple of consultant editorships on magazines, she’s even wangled him a part-time job editing art books…and now that the merchandise has some independent value, thanks to her careful investments, she’s keeping an eye out that no one poaches it from her.”

  “Would anyone try?” I said blankly.

  “Well,” Laurence said with the profound cynicism which I liked so much in him, “she hasn’t made the mistake of getting him a teaching gig. Students are the big danger. Plenty of young, fresh meat sitting in the front row, crossing its legs and flicking its hair and purring ‘Oh, Professor Tallboy, I just luurve that British accent!’ No, Barbara’s too sensible for that. Still, you never know. There’s supposed to be this big shortage of attractive single straight men in Manhattan. Though frankly, I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m still available.”

  I grinned at him. “But she’s even jealous of his daughter,” I said, refusing to be distracted. “It’s crazy.”

  “Some people who buy property want to feel that not only do they have the full title,” Laurence said, “but that they’re the first ones to set foot in it. They want virgin territory. They rip out everything the previous owners did and start again from scratch. Then they boast to all their friends about what a wreck the place was when they bought it and how you wouldn’t recognise it now. The last thing they’d want would be someone showing photos of what it looked like before.”

  “Let alone its children popping up.”

  “Yes, my metaphor takes us only so far,” Laurence agreed. “But still, you see what I mean?”

  I nodded. Laurence was quite right. Barbara Bilder’s attitude to Jon could only be described as proprietorial. I saw the Bilder family crest in a more country-and-western vein, however. Hands Off My Man. Don’t You Go Messin’ With What’s Mine. You Can Look But You Cain’t Touch (You Slut).

  I got up and went to phone Kim. I was starting to get stupid. The only thing for it was a change of scene.

  I found the Ludlow without difficulty; it was barely ten minutes’ walk away, straight down West Houston. With the aid of my trusty subway and bus maps I was navigating smoothly around New York, or I would have been if there hadn’t been so many distracting shops on the way. I even went into Warehouse. It seemed ridiculous to cross the Atlantic simply to shop at Warehouse, but everyone had told me how much lower the prices were over here and I thought I might as well check out whether there was any truth in that. There was. The only thing that kept me under any sort of control was the knowledge that I was heading out for the evening and didn’t want to be lugging seventeen bulky carrier bags around with me during an East Village bar crawl. I made the rule that I could only buy what would fit in my rucksack.

  This still left me much too much leeway. By the time I reached the Ludlow I was wearing one of the woolly pull-on hats everyone had this year. Only mine was a soft charcoal with dark-blue velvet ribbon edging, definitely a cut above the average. While in my rucksack were a jar of iridescent body glitter, four packets of fake tattoos, a shocking green lace miniskirt, a silver choker which on first sight was very similar to all my other silver chokers but, looked at closely, had tiny little diamanté chips set into it, which clearly made it different and worth buying, a silk dalmatian-print scarf, and two sex toys which were Hugo’s present from New York.

  In other words, I was glutted with shopping. I felt like a lion which has stalked, chased and successfully brought down a large and tasty gazelle. There comes a point, however, when even the most predatory lioness lifts her head from the carcass, decides she’s had enough for the time being and rises with feline poise to drag the prey into the shelter of a convenient bush. Then she strolls a few paces from the corpse and stretches herself out indolently. That was me. Only I was thinking more of a bar with comfortable armchairs (into which I could lower myself with the smooth lazy grace of a giant cat) and an imaginative cocktail menu.

  The Ludlow looked as if it was exactly that sort of place. It was practically a walk-in living room. The only catch was that the comfortable armchairs were already overflowing with people. Someone extricated himself from the depths of one as I walked in, thus ruining the delicate eco-balance of body distribution; the two people who had been sitting on either arm of the chair caved in on each other as soon as he removed himself. Two other people immediately perched on the small part of either arm that was thus exposed to the air.

  The boy who had been in the armchair was wearing pyjamas, faded tartan ones with a Snoopy on the right breast. He ambled through the crowds in the direction of the bar. On his feet were unlaced trainers and his hair stuck straight up at strange angles, as if he had just got out of bed. Maybe he had. And now I looked around, he wasn’t the only one in nightwear.

  I caught sight of Lex leaning against the far wall, a bottle of beer in his hand, and waved till he saw me. Chugging down the rest of his beer, he pushed himself off the wall and started the long slow-motion process of cutting a path through the crowd. The air was redolent with the sweet, rich, acrid smell of pot. I couldn’t imagine anything so overt in the equivalent London trendy bar. But then, people didn’t wear pyjamas out in London either. Shame, really.

  “Shall we head off?” Lex said as he reached me. “It’s packed in here.”

  We left the Ludlow rather reluctantly. The warm, overheated reek of pot and smoke and people had been welcoming, and outside it was getting cold and dark. I pulled my hat down over my ears.

  “Hey, like the hat,” Lex said, noticing it. He fingered the edging. “Buy it here?”

  “Just now. On Broadway.”

  “Really nice. Makes you look cute.”

  Resisting the impulse to pull off my hat, throw it to the ground and stamp on it, I limited myself to throwing him a cutting glance and setting a fast pace up towards East Houston.

  “There’s Max Fish,” Lex was saying, “but it’ll be jammed too. Let’s try 2A. It’s right up here, over East Houston.”

  Lex had certainly got to know his way around the East Village, at least since our meeting in London. I wondered if he had found out the location of Gramercy Park by now so he could pretend that he’d known where it was all along.

  East Houston was wide as most European rivers and lit with flaring streetlights which made it seem still wider. The cars roared past, fast as a film shot of speeded-up traffic, two strings of flooding lights running beside one another, pulling in different directions: white up, red down, a tug of bright geometric modern beauty, its edges softened as the lights blurred together. Running with the bulls at Pamplona would be a piece of cake after a few weeks crossing streets in New York. They ought to charter planes for Manhattan natives to do the festival en masse.

  “That’s the deli where they filmed the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally,” Lex informed me patronisingly.

  I
bet someone had told him that just last week, and now he was passing it on with as much casual assurance as if he’d been present while they were filming it. I shrugged. What did I care about some professionally ditzy blonde faking it in public? The point about Meg Ryan was that she made her living out of trying as hard as she could not to be scary. If it had been Ellen Barkin or Sharon Stone doing it, now that would have been interesting.

  “Thursday’s the best evening to go out,” he was saying as we made it to safety on the other side of East Houston. “Friday and Saturday all the B&T’ers flood in for the weekend.”

  Lex was hoping I would ask him what B&T stood for: but I already knew it meant Bridge and Tunnel, shorthand for the two main ways to reach the island of Manhattan and thus the disparaging term locals used for people who lived on the mainland. Frustrated by my silence, he added casually:

  “New Jersey and Brooklyn really pollute the city, you know.”

  “Oh, come off it, Lex,” I said, provoked beyond endurance. “How long have you been here, five minutes? What do you know about it?”

  “Hey, man, it’s what everyone says, OK?” Lex remained unabashed. “Here we are.”

  He pushed open the heavy door of a bar as dark inside as a black hole, seeming to suck in all the light only to extinguish it in the gloom. Just inside the door a bouncer was sitting on a high stool which in proportion to him looked like a child’s toy. He nodded us in with a smile that for a normal person would have been reasonably friendly and for a tattoo-covered, black-shrouded bouncer was practically a kiss on either cheek and an affectionate pinch on the bottom. In some ways New Yorkers actually had less attitude than Londoners. Maybe they felt that a person who could survive in Manhattan had nothing to prove to the rest of the world.

  He should have issued us with dark glasses for the first ten minutes we were here, to help our eyes acclimatise. I stood, blinking, trying to adjust to the sensation of having walked into somewhere even more tenebrous than the street outside. Not that I was complaining.

  Lex was forging over to the bar. It was less crowded in here, and when we secured our drinks and went upstairs we had little difficulty finding a corner of a black leather sofa on which to perch. It was the ideal kind of sofa, sagging just the right amount without lowering you so far down to the floor that you needed a winch to get you out again. The only catch was the noise it made whenever you shifted around. The leather was stiff enough to respond to every little movement and its range of sounds was as wide as if it had a small zoo trapped under the upholstery.

  “Cheers,” Lex said, clinking his vodka and tonic with mine. We took a long pull at our drinks, and I smacked my lips appreciatively. Here when you asked for a vodka and tonic they gave you a triple vodka and just showed the tonic bottle to the glass fleetingly, as if to remind it of the tatter’s existence.

  “I do like it here,” I said, sounding maudlin already.

  “What, here here? Or New York?”

  “Both. But I meant New York.”

  “Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it? I never want to leave. If I didn’t have my nice little council flat in London … but still, I could always rent it out to someone.”

  “Dodgy. I mean, it’d have to be someone you could trust.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Where are you exactly?”

  “Bermondsey. You should come down, it’s really cool. It’s this big block right on the river.”

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah, sweet.”

  “Better than some junkie’s floor in the East Village,” I said, cutting to the chase with what I prided myself was a deft touch.

  Lex looked slightly stunned. “You what? Oh, you mean Leo? Why’d you call him a—who’s been talking about him?”

  I shrugged. “Everyone seems to know everyone else in this neck of the woods.”

  “Yeah, that’s true enough. Specially round these parts. It’s like Notting Hill.”

  “So,” I said in an intimate tone designed to elicit confidences, “tell me what’s been happening.”

  Lex shifted uncomfortably, rooting himself further into the sofa, which produced in response the honks, squeaks and flaps of a group of playful sea lions. Then he lit up a cigarette, and we sat for a while as he smoked it. But I bit my tongue and didn’t say a word, following the Don method, and finally my silence forced him into speech.

  “Man,” he said eventually, “this has been such a fuck-up I can’t tell you. One minute I’m having a really good time, just hanging out, making friends, doing Manhattan, you know? And I really liked Kate. She was cool. I like American girls. When they’re together they’re really together, you know? Kate was so sussed it wasn’t true.”

  “I heard she liked guys with drug problems,” I said. “That’s not so together.”

  “Leo? He’s not so bad. Well”—Lex faltered a little here—“OK, he’s not in the best of shape right now. But they were just friends. I mean, they hadn’t been going out for a while. He was totally cool about my staying with Kate. So it was him I rang up when I heard what had happened.”

  I noticed with a flicker of amused detachment how Americanised Lex’s speech had become since coming to the States. And he was dressing more like the boys here, too. The jeans he was wearing right now looked suspiciously large.

  “How did you hear?” I asked.

  “Kate always asked me not to answer the phone,” he said, ducking his head. The dark lashes stood out against his pale olive skin as if they had been painted on with a fine brush. He splayed his legs and propped his elbows on them. I bent forward a little to catch what he was saying.

  “I was supposed to let the answering machine pick up and see who it was,” he started. “In case it was someone from work, right? So that morning, I mean, I knew she hadn’t got back. I was sleeping on this blow-up mattress on her floor and the flat’s so small she had to walk practically over me to get to the bed. I just thought, OK, she’s pulled, or stayed over somewhere. I mean, it wasn’t any of my business. The phone went at dawn. I was all blurry and I nearly answered it. But just as I was about to pick it up—thinking it was Kate, right—I hear this voice going: ‘This is Detective Thurber calling from Manhattan South, Homicide. I have some news about Kate Jacobson. Would anyone there please pick up.’ Something like that. I tell you I jumped off that fucking bed like it was a trampoline. I stood there, staring at the phone like it was a bomb about to go off.”

  “What did you think had happened?”

  “Fuck knows. But she said Homicide, yeah? So, I dunno, I panicked. The only thing I could think of was that I wasn’t supposed to be there. It was like”—he raised his head and looked at me imploringly—“I know it sounds stupid, but I was still half-asleep, and it felt like someone had dumped me into the middle of a film. Or NYPD Blue. I thought: I’m staying in the flat, so I’m suspect number one.”

  “And you jumped to the conclusion that Kate had been killed?”

  We were speaking quietly; there were other people at the end of the sofa and on the others surrounding the big smeared glass coffee table, though it was so dark it was easy to forget their presence. I looked around me, checking that nobody was listening in, my gaze sweeping over our surroundings. The walls were a dirty dark orange and God only knew what colour the carpet had been originally. Even the faded pink neon sign over the toilet door was askew and missing one of its letters. I quite liked the word “Oilet.” It sounded like the technical term for a tiny but vital screw-part.

  At the far end of the room was another, smaller bar, its bottles and glasses gleaming dully in the white lights set behind its mirrored shelves. People came and went here like bulky ghosts in a strange dark limbo of lost but not unhappy souls, no one seeming the slightest bit interested in what we were saying. Still, I realised I had just lowered my voice even further.

  Lex looked violently uncomfortable by now.

  “Well, yeah,” he said helplessly. “What else was I supposed to think? I just panicked, you kno
w. Like I said, it was this nightmare situation. All I could think was, ‘Shit, I’ve got to leg it!’ I grabbed my stuff and I wiped my fingerprints off everything I could think of I might have touched, and I got out of there as fast as I could. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “You’ve really cocked up,” I said. “That’s the most suspicious thing you could have done.”

  “I know!” he wailed in a semi-strangled voice. “I was such a prat! But I’d been out late the night before and I was still pretty much out of it, you know? My head wasn’t right yet. I’d been hanging out, smoking a lot of gear—really strong skunk, and there’s this puff they’ve got here called kindbud—have you tried that? It’s bright green—and hydro, that’s another kind….” His enthusiasm faded as he reconnected to the subject under discussion. “Anyway, I was gone, you know? Fucking gone. I think I must have been a bit paranoid when I woke up.”

  “I’d say so,” I commented drily. His whole story was stupid enough to have the authentic ring of truth. And it made psychological sense. I hadn’t known Lex that long, but already I could see that his cool-dude image was as thin as the fondant coating on a chocolate. Take one bite and your teeth sank into a marshmallow-soft centre.

  “What am I going to do, Sam?” he said, leaning towards me so our knees were touching. “I’m really fucked, aren’t I?”

  I couldn’t reassure him. “They’ll know there was someone staying at Kate’s,” I said. “No way if you were in that sort of condition you managed to remove all traces of yourself. They’ll be looking for the mystery man right now.”

  Then I knew exactly how a seal clubber would feel when he had only stunned his victim and had to come in again for the final stroke. Lex was staring up at me piteously, his brown eyes wide and pleading, as if imploring me to finish him off, not to leave him any longer in this terrible pain. All he needed was some white silky fur and a cute pair of flippers and the resemblance would have been complete.