Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “What do I say, sculptor?”

  “Right. Like now there’s only waiters and actors. No -esses.”

  “Heading for the twenty-first century.”

  “Right on!”

  Kim had recovered her good spirits. “We better join the boys,” she said resignedly. “Or they’ll think we’re bitching about them.”

  “So what?” I said flippantly. “Aren’t we?”

  Kim shot me a warning look.

  “You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Leo,” she said.

  “Or?” My hackles rose at once. “What’s he going to do to me?”

  “Oh, shit. I should have known you’d take that as a challenge.”

  “He shouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of me,” I said with hauteur. I balled up the empty soup cup and threw it neatly into the refuse bin.

  “Nice,” Kim said. “You could always throw straight.”

  “It’s come in useful before now,” I said. “Mm.” I rubbed my tummy. “That soup was really good.”

  One of the crusties, walking by, heard this last comment.

  “Hey, come back next Saturday!” she said cheerfully. “We’re always here, and it’s always free!”

  Kim grabbed my arm. “Calm down,” she said urgently. I was already grinding my teeth so hard they’d be flour in a few more minutes.

  “I can’t bear it!” I wailed, as Kim guided me towards the boys.

  “Sam’s still freaked by the free soup,” she explained.

  “Man, I know what you’re saying,” Leo said, eyeing me with something approaching fellow-feeling. “It’s doing my head in too. Look, you’re near here, yeah? Why don’t we go back to yours and get stoned?”

  Lex looked at me hopefully, willing me to agree. I didn’t take much persuading. After all, it was Sunday afternoon, and I was on holiday. Besides, I was wondering if I could get Leo talking once the spliffs had been circulating for a while.

  “Why not?” I said affably.

  My motives were not entirely disinterested, quite apart from any purposes of investigation. I’d never been one for smoking puff; but Leo had the authentic air of someone from whom drugs which were more up my street could easily be obtained. If he didn’t know how to get hold of some speed or some coke, I would eat my new woolly hat, ribbon trim and all. And I had been thinking for a few days now that a touch of one or the other was just what I needed to make my Sunday night complete.

  We were playing Animal Snap on the living-room floor, and the phone had been ringing for quite a while before I registered the sound. Though that might have been denial. I was in no state to deal with the outside world.

  “EEEeecha! EEEecha!” Lex was yelling at Kim, who was too convulsed with laughter to be able to honk like a pig back at him.

  “No, man, that’s wrong. That’s clearly wrong….” Leo was cracking up too.

  “Hey, she’s a mynah bird, yeah?” Lex turned to me for confirmation.

  “Is anyone making a ringing noise?” I said, very confused.

  Kim, ignoring me completely, collected her scattered wits and managed to produce something that sounded enough like a grunt to qualify her as having won. Triumphantly she leaned over and collected the pile of Lex’s cards which were face up on the carpet.

  “I did the mynah bird!” Lex protested. “I should have won!”

  “I’m not a mynah bird, you dumbass,” Kim corrected. “I’m an alligator.”

  Lex slapped his head. “Swish, swish!” he shouted. “Swish, swish!”

  “Isn’t that the phone?” Leo asked no one in particular.

  “The phone!” I scrambled across the room, removed the receiver from its cradle, and sat looking at it for a moment. Something was coming out of it. Hesitantly I put one end to my mouth. Then I tried the other way, which seemed to work better.

  “Sam?” The voice was agitated. Too agitated. I didn’t like it. It gave me a bad feeling.

  “What is it? Who is it?” I said warily.

  “Are you OK?” the phone asked. It sounded concerned.

  I took a deep breath, which wasn’t a particularly good idea, as it made me start giggling when I let all the air out again. From the dark, saner recesses of my mind came a cold little voice telling me firmly to get a grip. I straightened up, slapped myself on the cheek, adjusted the phone to my ear and said clearly:

  “Yes, I’m fine, thanks. Who is this, please?”

  Leo, Lex and Kim, who were listening to my side of the conversation, all dissolved into helpless laughter, Kim repeating: “Who is this, please?” in an efficient-secretary English accent which cracked the boys up still further. Glowering at them, I concentrated on the response.

  “It’s Laurence,” said the voice, still not very reassured. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

  “Laurence! Hi! How are you?” I said over-effusively.

  “Not so hot. I’m at work—well, I imagine you’d assume that.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” I said with what was intended to be an easy confidence and sent the trio into roars of laughter once again. It was contagious. I had to slap my other cheek to stop myself joining in.

  “It’s a real crisis. Carol had three sets of people in to see Barbara’s paintings. The publicity this whole business has got means that she’s really in demand. There’s always a silver lining, as Stanley says. But Don didn’t show up for work. So we’ve been hauling the paintings up and downstairs ourselves, it’s a total waste of my and Kevin’s time. I mean, that’s what Don’s for, to move stuff. I wondered if he’d called you at all.”

  “Don?” I said, baffled. “Why should he ring me?” I put my hand over the receiver for a moment and turned to the others. “Did Don ring me?” I asked.

  They stared back at me, wide-eyed, temporarily laughed out.

  “Don,” Lex said experimentally. “Don, Don, Don. DON.”

  I unclasped my hand from the phone. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Are you stoned?” Laurence said wearily.

  “That’s a rather personal question,” I said reprovingly. “Anyway, who should Don ring me? I mean”—I recovered fast—“why should he ring me?”

  “Boy,” Laurence said wryly. “I’d really like to be where you are right now. And I don’t have the faintest idea why he should call you. I’ve tried everyone else. To be honest, I just wanted an excuse to talk to you. Hear a touch of sanity coming down the phone lines. So much for that. You sound pretty out of it.”

  The others had given up listening; they were slumped on the floor, and Kim had a couple of playing cards which she was holding up above her face, turning them round and round with the absorption of someone halfway through a trip.

  “Look,” she said to Lex. “The jack’s the same both ways up. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “If you’re not the mynah bird,” Lex answered after a while, “who is?”

  “Personally I think Don’s taken off for the Virginia hills,” Laurence was saying. “He goes into fugue every so often. I rang his roommate and he was furious. Says Don owes him a ton of money for rent and he figures he took off to score some.”

  “How?” I said, baffled.

  “Hell, I’m sure Don has his ways and means. But his roommate hinted at all sorts of dark possibilities. Maybe he’s peddling his ass at Port Authority.” He sighed. “I wish everything was completely different. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

  “What’s the time?” I said, trying to concentrate on the bare essentials.

  “Five-thirty. We’ll be here for ever at this rate. We’ve got someone from Minneapolis due in an hour and then everything to get back afterwards.”

  “OK. I’ve got to go now.” I knew this sounded abrupt, but I was safer with simple statements.

  “Right,” Laurence said, disappointment and fatigue etched into his voice. He had expected much more from me than this. “Look, call me sometime, OK? Maybe we could do brunch tomorrow or something.”

  “Sam?” Kim said dozily as I
hung up. “Did you know that the jack looks just the same, up or down? Isn’t that cool?”

  “Leo?” I said, ignoring her. “How long before this stuff wears off?”

  “You only had a quarter, right?”

  “Right.” No way I was doing more than a quarter of a tab of unknown acid from an alleged junkie with a poor reputation. I prided myself on my common sense.

  “Uh.” Leo stalled for a moment. He had dropped a whole one, as had Lex. It was no surprise that every so often he closed down. Kim, who had been reluctant to do any at all, had consented to share a half with me. We knew from old times together that we were pretty susceptible.

  “Uh,” he said at last, pulling himself together and speaking in a professional tone, “maybe—uh—say another hour or so.”

  I needed to do something to chill out. Resuming Animal Snap would just overexcite me. I decided I needed to be alone.

  “I’m going to lie down,” I announced, padding through into the bedroom and lying down on the four-poster bed. As soon as I closed my eyes, however, detailed and confusing hallucinations started to swirl before my eyes. I saw Kate, floating down a river, her red hair trailing out behind her like exotic seaweed, scarlet as the paint splattered over Barbara Bilder’s paintings. Kate was a painting, too, something very pre-Raphaelite—Ophelia, that was it—and now she was turning into the original pre-Raphaelite model, Lizzie Siddal herself. Eyes closed, lying in her coffin, the body decaying but the hair still growing, spilling everywhere. Round her neck was a thin red line which widened as I watched it, separating her head still further from her body….

  I opened my eyes, my heart beating fast, and lay for a moment staring up at the ceiling through the gauzy muslin draped over the top of the bed. Then I started to see shapes in that, too: ghosts trailing long scarves behind them like Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the Rain. Only the ghosts in their white chiffon dresses were all Kate, hundreds of Kates, and each of them had a single strand of their long red hair caught by the wind machine and blown to wrap around their necks in a thin crimson line—

  This wasn’t working. I rolled myself off the bed and headed back to the living room. Lex was sitting propped against the wall, curled up on himself foetally, moaning softly into his knees.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “He got real upset when I said I was the mynah,” Leo answered.

  On hearing this, Lex started sobbing.

  “Lex?” Kim leaned over and put her arm around his shoulders. “Cheer up, OK? It’s not that bad.”

  Lex raised his head and looked at her through his tears.

  “I want you to be the mynah,” he said at last.

  “OK. I am. All right now?”

  Slowly he nodded. A couple of large tears were running slowly down his cheeks.

  “Whee, look at that, two little mermaids,” Kim said, losing it slightly. She shoved her face right up to Lex’s, staring at him intently. “Look at their little tails! That’s so pretty!”

  “Does anyone want to watch some TV?” I said, fumbling with the remote. By some miracle I found a repeat of Absolutely Fabulous; when you’re tripping and you want to come down, it’s always a good idea to watch people behaving more outrageously than yourself. It restores a sense of proportion. After two episodes, I felt revived enough to contemplate leaving the flat. Leo, totally spaced out, was lying on the sofa, mumbling quietly to himself. Kim and Lex were twined in some sort of embrace. The young in one another’s arms and all that. I was still spacy enough to beam on them fondly before going through into the bedroom to change into something decent enough for gallery visiting.

  Half an hour later I emerged from my building. Being outside was something of a shock: I had a brief rush of paranoia, suddenly convinced that someone was watching me. Sternly I told myself to sober up. I was still dazed with the effort of concentration it had required to assemble a suitable outfit and do my make-up. I had the theory that the smarter I looked, the more appropriately I would behave. So I was wearing my chocolate leather jeans, a violet button-through sweater and a dark brown leopard-skin print scarf knotted around my neck. It was a Fifties French starlet kind of look. I would have to hike up my vivacity quotient to carry it off.

  The doorman called a taxi for me. The drive was relatively uneventful, apart from the recorded message, in which Judd Hirsch spoke so warmly and intimately that I became convinced that he was a long-lost friend. By the time we reached SoHo, however, I had got a grip on myself, and hardly jumped at all when the second part of the message came on.

  There were still lights on in the gallery. I had left things pretty late: it was already seven-thirty and the door was locked. I rang the bell and after a short while Laurence opened it. Half his hair was sticking up and there was a cobweb on his shoulder. He looked distinctly frazzled.

  “Still busy?” I asked.

  His pale freckled face broke into a beaming smile.

  “Sam! Just what the doctor ordered! You, uh, feeling better?” he added more discreetly.

  “I think so,” I said cautiously.

  “Well, come in!” He threw the door wide open. “It’s party central in here.”

  “You two still heaving the paintings around?”

  Laurence pulled a face. “Yep. The latest bunch of suckers want something to hang in an alcove in their second main reception room. You want to come up and watch the deliberations?”

  “Sure.”

  The group gathered in the upstairs gallery included the artist herself, which surprised me. She was there with the faithful Jon, who hovered behind her shoulders like a shadow executed by someone with only the most minimal ideas of perspective and proportion. In addition there were Carol, Stanley, Kevin and a couple who at first sight looked extraordinarily youthful. Then I started noticing the amount of tucks, lipo-sucks, and implants that contributed to this impression. I was willing to bet, too, that they had had Botox injections to freeze the facial muscles and avoid the formation of lines. Their expressions were as blank as the mannequins in the windows of Bloomingdale’s. Doubtless they would have been flattered by the comparison.

  “Sam!” Carol looked pleased to see me, which was a relief. I hadn’t been sure if this would be considered barging in. She came towards me, hands outstretched. “Taylor, Courtney,” she said, towing me over to the couple, “this is Sam Jones, one of our newest artists. She’s showing next week with some other young Brits.”

  “Oh yes, I have the invite,” said the husband, shaking my hand in a manly kind of way. “Good to meet you. I’m Courtney Challis.”

  The wife followed suit. I noticed that neither of them smiled, beyond a twitch of their lips. Still, it looked as if they were trying to; there was a little tic at the corner of each eye, as if the muscles hadn’t yet forgotten what they were for.

  “I don’t want to be a distraction,” I said firmly, already sensing that Barbara wasn’t jumping up and down and screaming for joy at my intrusion. I looked over at her. She gave me a fixed smile, scarcely larger than Taylor or Courtney’s had been. But she didn’t have the injections as an excuse.

  “Not at all,” Stanley oozed at me. “Not at all!”

  But it was a subdued flicker of his habitual smarminess. He looked as if he would jump out of his skin if you sneaked up behind him and whispered “Boo!” in his ear.

  “We were just finishing up,” Carol said, flicking a glance at her watch. “We have a table booked for eight-fifteen.”

  “I guess it’s up to us, honey,” Taylor said to Courtney. Or it might have been the other way round. They were dressed identically in dark blue blazers, pressed jeans and white shirts. Their shiny blond hair was cut the same and they both smelt of Ralph Lauren cologne. It would be hard to tell them apart if you were in a hurry.

  “I guess so!” Courtney agreed. “It’s just so damn difficult to choose. Excuse my language.”

  I bit my tongue to avoid saying: “That’s OK, you can’t help being American,” and turne
d to survey the pictures. Indeterminate shapes shoved themselves sulkily through the general messy murk which characterised Barbara’s painting style. She had confined herself to her usual palette of dingy greys and mud browns, with here and there streaks of feverish orange or a splodge of stuff the colour and shape of offal. It was like a series of paintings of the First World War trenches, seen through distorting glasses with a pounding headache.

  “What do you think?” Jon Tallboy said to me enthusiastically.

  “Very evocative,” I said. “And powerful.” Such useful words.

  They did the trick. Barbara relaxed, giving me a smile that was more welcoming than anything I had seen to date. It softened her features pleasantly. She was wearing an ankle-length dark red embroidered skirt and a vaguely ethnic sweater and with her hair wound around her head she looked like a Russian doll, face painted and calm, stocky and strong despite her diminutive size. I felt I could reach out and push her and, just like the dolls, she would rock back and forth on her plump little feet before regaining her balance.

  In a huddle a few paces from us, Courtney, Taylor and Carol Bergmann were coming to a hard-won decision. I half-expected them to jump up in the air like American football players when they had finished. No one had bothered to include Stanley in the group and he hung around its fringes, a schoolboy hoping the others would finally ask him to join their game.

  “OK!” Taylor finally said. “Boy, that was a tough one, wasn’t it, honey?”

  “Sure was, sweetie,” Courtney agreed. They smiled at each other fondly. I was reminded of John and Mary, the couple on Father Ted, who fought bitterly in private and snapped into an extreme parody of marital bliss every time the priest passed by. I could just see Courtney and Taylor going at it hammer and tongs as soon as their audience was removed.

  “‘Memories of Spring’?” Carol asked, indicating the one which looked like a rubbish dump with more than its fair quantity of mud, not to mention fungus.

  They both nodded. “Whew!” Courtney added. “Nice to have got there at last!”