On the evening in question we were eating, the three of us, when the phone rang and it was Zoë, saying she’d like to drop in to pick up the pictures of herself and Trix in about half an hour. Matt tried to dissuade her, but it wasn’t possible to put her off: tomorrow the band was going to Southampton and then on to Cornwall and she’d really like to have the pictures before she went. She was in the area anyway, and she’d just come to the door and be gone in ten seconds. Considerably less than half an hour later the doorbell rang. ‘Be right back,’ Matt said, but I was halfway drunk by now and in any case I’d been intrigued by Celia’s description of Zoë as a girl she couldn’t readily describe – ‘semi-feral’ and ‘guileless’ would have to suffice. I’d also seen a photo of Zoë’s pert and huge-eyed face, a very enticing picture in which she appeared to have just been told something about a friend that was funny, shocking and intriguing. (Perhaps, as well, I acted from the suspicion that there might not be many more evenings at Matt’s, and thought that I should therefore make the most of it. I thought I had detected a cooling – extremely slight – in Matt’s manner towards Celia, but I wasn’t sure. Another point in Matt’s favour was that he had always seemed to take care not to make a great show of his affection for Celia in my presence. This I took to be indicative of a sensitivity to the inappropriateness of advertising the pleasures of coupledom to the eunuch sibling.) In conclusion: I was the one who told Matt to let Zoë come in. ‘I can hide in the bathroom,’ I said.
There was a slight delay before she entered the room, which was to be explained – I told myself – by the necessity of her receiving a briefing as to what awaited her at the table. Certainly her entrance was that of someone who was seeing what she had expected to see. ‘Hi C. Hi Daniel,’ she called from the door. She smiled at me as if my face were an outfit I’d put on for the evening, and she approved of it. ‘Sorry for crashing in,’ she said, but Celia was already getting a glass for her, which was all right with me. The sight of Zoë was a delight: she was tiny, as Celia had said (many twelve-year-olds are taller), and was wearing heavy black boots that came halfway up her shins, with a short red kilt and a black T-shirt over a long-sleeved black fishnet top; her hair was dyed fuchsia, and rose three or four inches perpendicularly from the crown of her head, with spirals of paler fuchsia over the ears. Invited to sit down, she kicked off her boots at the doorway and walked over to the table with bouncy steps, as though crossing hot sand. She sat cross-legged on the chair as casually as she might have done at home, but her mouth tightened nervously as she lifted the glass.
On her nearer arm, through the mesh of the fishnet, I could make out a shape. A question formed, and in the next instant it barged out into speech: ‘Could I see that?’
Caught off-guard by the abruptness of my remark, she turned to me, and this time – unprepared – her eyes betrayed an instant of something akin to vertigo.
‘The tattoo,’ I said, with a nod at the arm.
‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘Yeah. Sure. Right. Of course. Be my guest.’
She rolled up the sleeve, revealing a little blue and crimson dragon on a bed of clouds, and placed her arm on the table. ‘It’s Chinese,’ she answered. Her hand trembled a little. Only later did I realise that Zoë’s nervousness was almost constant; whenever she spoke, her fingers shivered as if wired to a battery.
‘It’s fantastic,’ I told her.
‘I found it in a book.’
‘Really nice.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, with a smile that made me hear the pulse in my head. Answering a question from Celia, she turned towards her without moving her arm. She sipped her wine, apparently content for me to study her arm for as long as I wished.
I looked closely. Small segments of skin between the clouds and the dragon’s wings had been left uninked; it was difficult not to touch them. ‘Must have taken a while,’ I said.
‘Hours and hours,’ said Zoë. ‘But you ought to see Trix’s. We’re talking Sistine Chapel.’
I had already seen some of Trix’s tattoos, but I said nothing as Matt passed the package of prints across the table. Zoë took one out. ‘Get that,’ she said, grinning amazedly as she handed me a photograph of a Gorgon’s head in a tornado of serpents.
This was what had brought Matt and Zoë and Trix together: Trix was standing beside him, going through the racks in a record shop in Soho (this was shortly after the epiphany of the Ludgate Hill pavement), and he’d become transfixed by the snakes on her bicep.
‘She thought he was a perv,’ Zoë told me. ‘But she’s a vain cow, so she said OK, as long as I could come along.’ She took another picture out of the envelope and slotted it gently into my hand. ‘There’s loads more,’ she said, then she asked Matt, with a slight tilt of the head towards me, to signify that she was speaking on behalf of both of us: ‘Any more we can see? Done the colour ones yet?’
A movement of one of Matt’s eyebrows formed the first stroke of a frown.
‘Go on, Matt,’ urged Zoë, with the familiarity of a friend, rather than of someone who had spent no more than an afternoon in his studio. ‘What you worried about? Trix isn’t going to mind, is she?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Not happy with them? That it?’
‘Well—’
‘Please, Matty,’ she pleaded, applying a winsome simper.
Matt extended an arm in the direction of the room he used as his studio. ‘Over by the window,’ he said.
‘Love you,’ said Zoë, jumping up. She hooked a hand under my elbow; I felt her fingertips through the sleeve. ‘Let’s go, Danny.’
Overlapping prints, dozens of them, covered the top of the plan chest below the window. Zoë began to turn them over quickly, setting aside blow-ups of wood-grain, paving stones and tarmac. Vanessa’s scar brought a pause, as did a huge fried egg in a pan (the egg-white like wet marble with a fringe of amber curlicues; the grease around it gleaming). ‘Trix,’ she said, passing a picture in which huge arm-hairs sprouted from blue-tinted skin like rushes from a bed of blue silt.
(Trix, Zoë told me later, had always had a taste for pain. At school (where her name was Patricia Yeatman) she’d excelled at cross-country running; she got such a buzz out of feeling her lungs rip that she’d cross the line just seconds short of blacking out. Sometimes she’d take off her shoes and socks to walk up the path of gravel at a friend’s house. A good pain made her feel more alive than anything else did; pain was delicious. But that’s not why she went under the gun. The pain of the gun was nice, but it wasn’t big. It was a stroll up an English hill, when what she wanted was the Himalayas. (For Zoë, on the other hand, the pain was a major disincentive: that’s why she’d limited herself, so far, to the dragon and a couple of other miniatures.) An expanse of white flesh, as far as Trix was concerned, was a canvas in need of paint – it was as simple as that. Some people thought she was punishing herself with the needle, that she was deliberately disfiguring herself. That wasn’t it. Trix was the daughter of affectionate, patient and well-heeled parents, who may have been bemused by their daughter’s lifestyle, and couldn’t pretend to be happy about her mania for body decoration, but they had never so much as raised their voices at her, and would even have come to see the band play if they could have done so without causing embarrassment all round. If Trix had any problem with self-esteem, said Zoë, it was that she had too much of it – that’s why she was the lead singer, lead guitarist and main songwriter.)
After the blue-silt arm came a nipple as wide as a dinner plate. ‘Not Trix,’ stated Zoë. ‘Not me either. Maybe Celia?’ She extracted a photograph of a sunburst tattoo, another of a lizard on a hip, both Trix. At a picture of a carnation on a plump convexity of flesh she announced: ‘That’s my arse.’ (Said with a wondering pride, as a young mother might say, watching her daughter win a race at the school sports day: ‘That’s my girl.’) The carnation, she explained, was her first tattoo, so it was in a place where her parents couldn’t see it, not that they’d have
been bothered. It wasn’t very good, she thought, so one day she might have some new ones put around it. She pointed out where the inking was messy; perfectly unabashed, she might have been showing me a picture of her thumb. Next was the lizard again – ‘European Fire Salamander, actually,’ she said, mock-proud of her exactitude – and then the picture that Matt had taken right afterwards, which had come about because Trix had taken her kit off for the salamander shot and she’d told Matt he might as well take a pop at the dolphin while he was at it. Arching its back on the swell of a muscle, the dolphin pushed its snout towards a crease of skin, and at the edge of the frame one could see a little bit more of Trix – a small bulge of goose-bumped flesh, and a frill of darker skin, like the skirt of a snail. ‘It was no problem,’ Zoë assured me. ‘Celia was there all the time. She’s brilliant, your sister, isn’t she?’ (Half naked, splayed on the table, Trix – Celia reported – had chatted away throughout the session, as if she were having her toenails painted.) And Matt was brilliant too, said Zoë. A girl she knew had answered an ad from a company looking for models for a fashion shoot, but it turned out to be just a bunch of sleazy old tossers – all gold-rimmed bifocals, comb-overs and signet rings – who expected her to parade up and down, starkers, in a room above a pub in Deptford. But Matt wasn’t sleazy at all and he was really interested in what the tattoos were all about. From one look at Matt’s pictures she knew that he understood what it meant to be an outsider. (And here there was a significant sideways glance, at which was born my suspicion that her reason for calling at Matt’s on this particular evening was not the ostensible one. She’d known I’d be there.) ‘This one’s Celia,’ said Zoë, showing me a photo of the underside of Celia’s left foot, as if making a gift that she was confident would be received with pleasure. (I had recognised the foot at once, from the triangular scar on the heel, created by a broken bottle in the sand at Porthchapel.) ‘You’re very close you two, aren’t you? C told me,’ she said, with a nuance of curiosity.
This is where I said: ‘Are you here because you wanted to get a look?’
‘A look at what? At these?’ Tears had started into her eyes instantly and she half-turned away, glaring at the floor.
‘At me.’
‘No I didn’t,’ she answered in a wavering whisper. ‘Is that what you think?’
‘It occurred to me.’
‘This was the only night I could get here. I wasn’t going to come in,’ she said. Jutting her lower lip, she gave me a slighted glance that was plausible and winsome, then started to leaf through the rest of the prints. (Many months later she owned up: ‘I did want to meet you. But not to take a look. That wasn’t it.’) She smacked at a tear on her cheek, as if swatting at a mosquito. I apologised. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, dragging an arm across her face. We were in the room for another ten minutes or so, waiting for the redness to go from her eyes. The empty streets, we agreed, were more interesting than the close-ups. Soon after we had rejoined Matt and Celia (a brow-downturn of wry enquiry from Celia as I followed Zoë out of the studio), Zoë announced that she had to be going. ‘Nice talking to you,’ she said to me, in the tone of a remark made to conclude a disagreement that had almost expired, then at the door she added that the band might be playing down in Forest Hill and would I mind if she dropped in to say hello, on the way to the gig? Two months later, with barely an hour’s forewarning, she came to the house for the first time.
She brought some beer and a tape of the band. Gunnr – that’s what the band was called. Track One (Graveheart) sounded as if the guitarists and drummer and vocalist had recorded their tracks in different places; the singer shrieked as though bawling from a tenth-storey window. The second track was less arduous: there was some evidence that the musicians had at least been in the same room simultaneously, and the vocalist (a different one) sounded more like a girl trying to get the attention of a friend on the other side of a busy street. ‘That’s me,’ said Zoë, glancing at me in a way that suggested that the music was intended as a serious-minded provocation, and that sooner or later I might understand it. She roamed around the room, touching the computer, TV, video, books, CDs, phone, as if compiling an inventory. She wished she could live like this, she said, and perhaps she thought she meant it. ‘People are rubbish, ninety-nine percent of them,’ she said, and high on her list of rubbish people she would place her parents. Her father was a fucking shitbag arsehole: that’s all there was to say about him. On the subject of her mother she was little more expansive: ‘a slob’ (watching TV in her nightdress – the same one week after week, till you could smell the thing three streets away), ‘bone idle’ (she’d never held a job for more than two months), ‘a dope-head’ (dope, for Zoë, was the drug for people who were happy just to sit on their big fat arses all day long), ‘an ignorant bitch’ (far from being impressed if Zoë ever received half-decent marks at school, her mother reacted as if praise of her daughter were a criticism of herself; books, she thought, were for people who had no life). When Zoë had her tongue pierced (she was fourteen) her mother pretended not to have noticed and didn’t say a thing. And when Zoë left home her parents didn’t even ask where she was going. It was just like checking out of a hostel, she said, and she never saw them again. She didn’t hate them. Hating anybody was a waste of time – her parents didn’t exist for her any more, and she didn’t exist for them.
In the space of eighteen months Zoë came to our house a dozen times or so. Usually she brought a video (she had a penchant for sci-fi & Italian horror movies), or a tape borrowed from one of the girls in the band, whose boyfriend worked on nature programmes and had an amazing collection of sounds – warring chimpanzees, howler monkeys screeching like a man under torture, a bird imitating the whirr of a camera’s motorwind. On one occasion she brought a tape she’d made after a gig, in a pub: a boy was chatting her up, and was so pissed he hadn’t noticed that the recorder was on. Snyznem, Zoë. Sluvlynem. Tis. Sluvlynem. Sbootfulnem. Nyurrabootfulgirl … Ummamushishn musself. Yam. Ummamushishn. Drumsh. Ummadrumma … Yoonme, wodyazay? … Cmere. Cmere babe. Cmere. [Glass breaks.] Fakit. Fak. Fakfakfak. [Zoë speaks, inaudibly]. Duznmarra. Znuffin. Cmere. Gwon, cmere. Cmon. Wozfunny? Wozzofunny? Cmere baby. Cmere. Oooh babybabybaby.
She rode a bike that had no lights. Having no lights, she reckoned, was safer for a girl after dark – people walking on the pavement couldn’t see her so easily, so no creep was going to jump out from behind a tree, which is what had happened to someone she knew. The world was full of creeps, Zoë was convinced, having by the age of twenty encountered a greater number of unsavoury men than most women come across in a lifetime. But the creators of the slasher necrophiliac movies she brought on a couple of occasions – all male, all with a predilection for naked girls in conditions of extreme peril – were not creeps. They were visionaries and poets of the camera, who saw the human soul for what it was: a pit of black desire, to quote a Zoë-penned line from a Gunnr song.
My mother, taking Zoë’s jacket at the door on her second or third visit (a nice piece of leather like that had to go on a hanger), glimpsed (having already heard about) a portion of the dragon on her forearm, and remarked upon it, whereupon Zoë pulled up the sleeve to show the entire tableau. Inclined to like Zoë for the simple reason that Zoë had become a visitor (this just about outweighed the various irregularities of which my mother was by then aware, the chief of which were that she had no job, had no proper home, was a bit mad-looking, and had taken her clothes off to be photographed, albeit by Celia’s boyfriend), my mother commented: ‘That’s very … bold.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Brennan,’ Zoë replied, as freshly as a schoolgirl responding to a compliment on her fetching new haircut. ‘And there’s this as well,’ she said, yanking her top and bra-strap off her shoulder to expose Saturn and its moons.
I saw a tremor of panic on my mother’s face, at the possibility that the stripping wasn’t going to stop here. ‘But doesn’t it hurt, when they do it?’ she asked.
‘
Oh yes,’ said Zoë, sighing.
My mother was not sure what to make of this, nor indeed of Zoë in general. ‘She seems a very nice girl,’ she remarked, after Zoë’s other arm had acquired a rose bloom and droplets of blood, ‘but I don’t understand why she has to do that to herself. Does she think it looks nice?’ It was a shame, she thought, because Zoë was a perky little thing, and she liked her – and not solely because she was the only person (other than Stephen) who visited me with any regularity. (My father recognised that Zoë was a kind-natured girl. He had little more to say about her than that, but it was plain that there was nothing in her way of life of which he could approve.)
The next time Zoë called, my mother kissed her: a peck on one cheek, which was the cause of some embarrassment and pleasure (embarrassment at the pleasure, in part), and also a twinge of anxiety – detectable in a momentary widening of the eyes and a floorward glance – that the gesture might signify an overestimation of the depth of the relationship (which it did), and was furthermore a request (almost a demand) that she should remain loyal to me. My mother, it’s almost certain, had got it into her head that sexual activity was at last taking place in her son’s bedroom. This notion was not based on the observation of any intimate non-verbal communications passing between myself and Zoë – there were no such communications to be observed. Rather, I believe that the reasoning was that a girl who’d vandalised her skin with pictures of dragons and bleeding flowers clearly had an eccentric angle on the issue of body image, and that her presence in my room for a whole evening and God knows how many hours of the night (usually the parents were asleep when Zoë left) did strongly suggest that some form of sexual congress was occurring, given that it was impossible to imagine what the bookworm and the wacky elfin rock-chick could find to talk about for so long. It was of course less than ideal that Daniel’s girlfriend should be quite so young, but on the other hand my mother knew that less than ideal was the best the misshapen son could hope for – and the very fact of this problematic full-blown relationship was further proof that this strange girl was fundamentally a good little person. But in fact no sex was taking place, though the exposure of the additions to the tiny solar system on Zoë’s shoulder was not without an erotic charge, for one of us at least. Talk was all that was happening, and less of that with each visit.
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