Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “Sometimes.”

  “There’s this bit where they’re all sitting around in Central Perk talking about the lines you give people, and what they really mean. You know, ‘I’ll call you’ means ‘You will never hear from me again as long as you live,’ and ‘I think we should date other people’ means ‘I am already, hahaha!’”

  “I didn’t see that one.”

  “Good, then you won’t have heard my punchline. Which is when Chandler says: ‘You’re such a nice guy’ means ‘I’m going to date black-leather-wearing alcoholics and complain about them to you.’”

  “That’s so true,” I said, struck by the profundity of this observation.

  “Tell me about it. Story of my life. I was crazy about Kate. And we’ll probably never catch whoever killed her. She’ll be just another number in the Manhattan yearly homicide statistics. Hell, now I want to get even drunker than I am already.”

  It was time for me to get going. Suzanne would be worried. As I emerged from the offices she was talking to Carol, but I could see by the turn of her head that she was looking out for me. Her hand curled into a fist, one finger emerging to point downwards. I slipped downstairs according to plan. Everything was going fine so far. It was on the ground floor that I hit an unexpected hold-up. Rob was starting upstairs just as I came down.

  “Sam!” he exclaimed. “I was coming to look for you! Group photo! Come on!”

  Rob was holding out his hand. I managed to wiggle past it without either touching it or giving offence. I hoped. The photographer was in the far room, and all she wanted was a quick group shot. It was over in five minutes and a series of bright flashing ricochets. I made my escape at once. Still, I had lost some time. I pounded down the staircase, heading for the basement.

  It felt empty without Don in the back room, stretched out on his Eaze-E-Boy, an ashtray balanced on his chest. I clicked on the light, blinking even despite the flashes that had so recently stung my eyes. The single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling was surely an affectation of Don’s; hard to believe that Carol wouldn’t have provided him with a proper light fitting if he’d asked for one. It glared at the centre of the room, leaving the edges weirdly shadowed. The effect was stark and unwelcoming, probably just how Don had wanted it.

  The glass wall was ahead of me, the lightbulb reflecting in the panel of the sliding door that opened on the small yard. It dazzled my eyes briefly and I blinked before focusing again, my gaze pulled beyond the room to its mirror image in the dark sheet of glass hanging behind it. My brain was buzzing lightly and pleasantly from the coke. I wondered if that last line had been a mistake.

  Like the rest of the gallery, this room had been thoroughly searched by the police in the aftermath of Don’s death. But this was the only place that hadn’t subsequently been tidied up. They must have pulled out all Don’s canvases, which were racked up against the filing cabinets, facing out into the room. These were crude and garish, the canvases fashionably large, their surfaces thickly plastered with paper collages, mainly of body parts, over which were scrawled apposite commands. “SUCK ME,” “EAT ME,” “SWALLOW ME.” Alice in Wonderland meets Hugh Hefner. Still, at least they were less pretentious than the bad drawings of women’s bodies with “WRITE MY STORY HERE” or “THE IMAGE IS THE REALITY” scribbled along their hips. One canvas even had a single red arrow with “READ ME” written over it pointing to a part of its model’s body recently immortalised by Mel. God knew what he had expected her back bottom to have to say for itself. As an artist Don had scarcely been a great loss to the world.

  I thought I heard a movement behind me and swung round fast, my instincts working overtime. Nothing, just an empty corridor. I let out my breath on a slow exhale and found my eyes tugged irresistibly towards the far wall where the room was reflected in the sliding doors. I had caught a movement there. For a second I thought someone was out in the yard, beyond the glass.

  And then I realised that the person was already inside the room: hidden behind the open door, still half in shadow, but moving now, coming for me. The shape was tall and thin and seemed to sway towards me, its hands outstretched, the wire between them held out as if in offering. It walked with a terrifying lack of speed. Like a zombie from a horror film, it held me paralysed long enough for it to reach the light in the centre of the room, showing me its face. And even then I couldn’t move.

  My heart, which had been pounding away, had stilled itself all at once, blocked. I was reminded, in one of those crazy flashes that were exploding inside my head this evening, of an Agatha Christie novel I had read when I was small, which had always terrified me—the moment at the end when the heroine, who as a child has witnessed a murder without ever realising who the killer was, sees a family friend, a doctor, pulling on a pair of surgical gloves, and suddenly she realises how familiar the gesture is, that it was him she saw all those years ago, about to strangle his own sister … and when she screams he starts to come after her, climbing the stairs towards her, the rubber-gloved hands reaching for her neck….

  I knew this man. For most of my teenage years he had been my surrogate father figure. Unable to turn round, as if seeing him in the flesh would make it too real, I watched in the glass doors as Jon Tallboy advanced towards me from behind. The wire between his hands was reaching out towards me, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of concentration.

  He didn’t speak. Crazily, I was waiting for it. It seemed impossible that he would kill me without saying a word of apology or explanation. More fool me. My hesitation nearly got me strangled. I was frozen, unable to believe that he would actually go through with it in utter silence. He had the wire almost over my head before my survival instincts snapped into action, and then it was nearly too late.

  I came to life in a surge of violence, throwing myself back against him as hard as I could, pushing myself clumsily off the filing cabinets to give me extra leverage. It took him completely by surprise. I heard a startled yelp behind me as we crashed back onto the floor together. We twisted as we went down, sent off-balance by the shove of my foot against the filing cabinet, and I landed heavily with my left arm wrenched up behind me from a thrust back I had given him with my elbow. It wasn’t the only thing caught between us. One of the toggles of the garotte was cutting into my shoulder blades. I felt him desperately scrabbling to work it free. With my right hand I reached round and caught his, connecting on the two middle fingers and wrenching them back, away from the wire, so hard I heard them crack. He cried out, his arm going limp. The garotte was useless to him now; he needed two good hands to grip it tight enough. But he thought fast. As I tried to roll off him and get to my feet, my weight came off his left arm. Immediately it closed round my neck, his upper arm digging hard into my windpipe, cutting off my breath. For a moment the tweed of his jacket scratched against my throat, and then I couldn’t feel the texture any longer, only the terrible insistent pressure.

  The canvas in front of me spun and blurred crazily before my eyes, Don’s lurid images whirling in a riot of crimson like the blood dancing in my head. Choking, I hammered my right elbow back into Jon’s rib cage, trying to reach down to his stomach and wind him too. He writhed, attempting to avoid the worst of the blows, and his contortions only made his arm grip me harder. I was nearly unconscious, gasping for breath. Perversely, I had the sudden lucid thought that if people who self-asphyxiate for pleasure had ever tried getting their kicks this way it would put them off the whole experience for good. Whether or not they put a satsuma in their mouth first.

  The idiocy of this idea gave me an added charge of energy. Or maybe it was the thought of dying like a Tory MP or Michael Hutchence. My left arm was still caught behind my back, trapped under the weight of my own body, twisted painfully up as if Jon had got it in a lock. But I still had my right one. Hooking it back, I reached above my head; my fingers closed on his nose and I shoved it back as hard as I could with the palm of my hand. He threw his head from side to side as if he were a horse trying
to shake off a fly, not caring how his skull bumped up and down on the floor as long as he dislodged me. The arm which wasn’t throttling me pounded against my rib cage, clumsily, because of the broken fingers at the end of it, but enough to catch the air in my lungs on one long spasm which would have been a cough if I hadn’t been being strangled. I thought I was going to pass out then and there.

  Desperately I forced my arm still further back and my hand sank over his cheekbones and into the pits of his eye sockets, my thumb and middle finger outstretched like twin prongs. He had jammed his eyes shut to protect them, his other arm coming up now to try to beat me off, flailing at my hand like a club. But I was already sinking into the lids, shoving them against the eyeballs, down, down till I could feel the slits parting and the jelly-like texture of the balls yielding with a sudden, horrible ease as my hand slid off the shelf of bone and sank into them hard.

  Jon Tallboy screamed, his head snapping back, his whole body arching away from me. The arm cutting into my throat slackened its grip momentarily and I gasped in air, my head swimming. His right arm was levered against my hand, the thumb hooking under it, dragging it away from his eyes. Finally I managed to wrench my left arm free and, closing my mind to the pain as the blood flooded back into it, I used it to drag at the fingers of his good hand, forcing them down, releasing the pressure on my windpipe.

  Through the blood roaring in my ears I heard something crashing nearby, metal bouncing off metal, and what sounded like laughter. Crazily I wondered if the lack of oxygen was making me hallucinate. I grabbed at Jon’s arm with both hands, gripping it like a vice, desperately dragging it from my throat, still struggling to draw breath. And then there was another crash and I heard voices.

  “Ssh! Ssh!”

  “Fuck, the light’sh on! Ish there shomeone here?”

  “Come here, you dumbass—”

  “God, you’re shexy—”

  “Lex—aahh—yeah—”

  “You’re a hot shexy tart—”

  A bang, the scuffling of feet, Kim’s giggling, the wrench of clothing. They were very close and they must be drunk as skunks because otherwise they would have noticed us already.

  Jon recognised the voices at the same time as I did. Suddenly the arm I was tugging at wrenched free in one movement as his muscles slackened in shock. My lungs cramped and coughed as the pressure on my throat vanished. I was gasping, my body torn by different impulses, sucking in air and trying to roll off him all in one movement. I collapsed in a heap over to one side and managed to get up on my knees, doubled over by spasms of wheezing. When I finally got my head up I was looking at the glass again. In its reflection was a motionless tableau: Lex and Kim had slammed each other up against the doorjamb and frozen there, suspended in that instant like the effect I had painstakingly worked to create for “Organism #2” upstairs. Lex’s shirt was open and ripped half off his back, his hands up and under the bright orange skirt of Kim’s dress. They would have looked as sexy as anything out of a Calvin Klein advertisement if their expressions had been the lineaments of unsatisfied desire; the only incongruity was their blank and disbelieving faces.

  On the floor behind me Jon Tallboy lay unmoving. One hand was covering his eyes. After what seemed like an age, the other one started across his chest, groping slowly, painfully, two of its fingers sticking up at an impossible angle. Something fell to the ground, dislodged by the broken hand. The wooden toggle of the garotte made a tiny hollow sound as it hit the concrete, the wire slithering after it like an unwound puppet string.

  Kim caught her breath as she realised what it was. But still no one moved. It felt as if I would never stand again if I didn’t get up right now. Somehow I dragged myself to my feet, using a filing cabinet for support. I bent over it, drawing in my breath slowly. It hurt every time. My throat must be badly bruised.

  “What the fuck—” Lex said finally, sounding as if the words had been dragged out of him. “This is unreal…”

  It wasn’t the first time I had fought people who were trying to kill me. But always before I had had my anger to spur me on, winding me up to a point of no return. I had hurt people much worse than I had hurt Jon Tallboy. I had even killed someone I had loved. But never had I felt this weird, disbelieving lack of affect. In fighting him off I had been fuelled only by the most basic instincts of simple self-protection, and they had ebbed at once, leaving me without the usual charged-up aftermath to protect me from the knowledge of what had just happened. I felt as vulnerable as if I were missing a layer of skin.

  I lifted my head now, no matter how much it hurt, and looked at Kim. She and Lex were detaching themselves from each other, slowly, almost unconsciously, as if sleepwalking. Their eyes never left the scene in front of them. In a trance she pulled down her skirt and stood there, staring at her father’s body. The hand which had been fumbling for the garotte now lay on his chest, the broken fingers protruding straight up as if he were giving some kind of signal. They were already beginning to swell around the breaks.

  “Dad,” she said, her voice flat, utterly toneless, as if she were trying out for the first time a word in a language she had never heard before.

  Jon Tallboy didn’t answer her. He was breathing; I could see the shallow rise and fall of his chest. But apart from that he was motionless, as if the machine that moved him had broken down.

  Kim’s head turned towards me. She stared at me and I braced myself for the choice she was about to make between me and her father. All my emotion seemed to have drained away; I felt as empty as an upturned bucket. I tightened my grip on the filing cabinet. Against it was propped one of Don’s canvases, the one that had been whirling in front of me as Jon’s arm cut off the blood flow to my head. Slowly I leant down a little way and looked more closely at the big red arrow pointing to the woman’s backside. Through the bright scarlet paint I could see that it was made of lined paper. And it had “READ ME” written on it in black marker. I caught a fingernail underneath it and peeled it off. It came away all in one piece, and underneath there was writing on it. As I straightened up, Kim finally spoke.

  “Your neck,” she said, sounding stunned. “Your poor neck—oh, Sam …”

  And in a rush she was by my side, her arms around me, holding me up. I wrapped my own around her with more gratitude than I had ever imagined I could feel. Kim tightened her grip, taking my weight easily, her strong body a prop for me to lean on. I let go completely. One of Kim’s hands closed over the back of my head, easing it down, resting it against her. My eyes closed and I realised that I was crying into her shoulder. Each sob caught at my bruised throat with a spasm of pain. But I couldn’t stop, not for a long time, not until other people came running down the stairs and piled into the room. Not until Jon Tallboy, like a reanimated corpse, finally stirred, pulling himself up to a sitting position to slump, arms wrapped round his head, blood from his eye sockets trickling down his cheeks.

  “The so-called white man has stolen our heritage! It says so right here, people! Let me tell you how Esau, for a piece of meat—”

  “FAGGOTS are pro-FANE! FAGGOTS are pro-FANE!”

  The first man broke off and glared at the second. They were supposed to be a team, but they had no coordination. Faggot Guy seemed incapable of letting Piece of Meat Guy get on with his Bible reading. Maybe he was jealous of his colleague’s outfit, a red silk military jacket, tied at the waist with a wide gold fringed lamé belt, worn over baggy blue silk trousers. On his head was a little red toque set at a fetching angle. I might have thought that Faggot Guy’s interruption had been meant to make some kind of point about the campness of Piece of Meat Guy’s outfit if Faggot Guy himself hadn’t been dressed like an expensive biker queen, head-to-toe gold-studded black leather with a big gold medallion at his forehead like a Village People wannabe. Took one to know one.

  Piece of Meat Guy adjusted his toque and started again.

  “Esau, for a piece of meat—”

  “LESBIANS are pro-FANE!” Faggot Guy cu
t in, his voice cracked with belief. “LESBIANS are pro-FANE!”

  “Aren’t these Farrakhan guys the business?” Kim said to me sotto voce.

  “Do they always talk across each other?” I asked. “And if he’s going to say faggots, why doesn’t he say dykes? I mean, at least it would be logically consistent.”

  A guy standing next to us hushed me disapprovingly. There was only a handful of spectators gathered on this street corner in the middle of Times Square, and most of them were unashamed kitsch-collectors like ourselves. It was just my luck to be next to the one person who was taking this seriously.

  “Brothers! Sisters!” Piece of Meat Guy shouted through Faggot Guy, who was beginning to sound like a broken record. “Listen up, now! ESAU, FOR A PIECE OF MEAT—”

  Just at that moment a police car shot past, its siren going full blast, deafening everyone temporarily. We were clearly destined never to hear about Esau and what I remembered as having been a mess of pottage. Not that I fancied arguing the toss with Piece of Meat Guy, who was having a bad enough day of it already.

  I stared behind him at the giant video screens at the far end of Times Square, stacked one on top of each other up the side of a building. The displays were ever-changing, an endless, unstoppable parade of advertising, the quality sharp as crystal. On the top perched an enormous cutout of a coffee cup with a constant head of steam, swirling up and away into the clouded sky with infectious enthusiasm. A perfect Blade Runner moment, from the luridly dressed crazies in front of us to the latest in technological displays above our heads. To my left three bands of mandarin-orange tickertape wrapped another endless stream of figures round the top corner of another building. Everything in New York moved fast and dragged you right along with it, hurrying you up so that you didn’t have time to look down at your feet and see how dirty the pavements were, how poor and ragged some of the people, how scummy this area still was despite the famous musicals that were playing all down the street.