Strawberry Tattoo (16 page)

“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 the 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.”

“There are lots of things I haven’t tried yet,” I said evasively. Then I wondered if that were still true. “I’ll put it on the list, right under wheat-grass shots and operating on myself without anaesthetic.” I looked up at the menu again. Once I came to terms with the lack of my favourite ingredient, I had to admit that many of the concoctions didn’t sound so bad. Avoiding anything that would have been improved by the addition of vodka, so that I didn’t get wistful, I finally went for a Blue Apple (blueberries, apple juice, non-fat yoghurt and banana), which was perfectly nice. Kim, alas, had her regular, which was wheatgrass and carrot with bee pollen and ginseng. I tried, for the sake of old friendship, not to say aloud what this concoction looked like but when she offered me some I jumped back, jibbering and shaking my head like Quasimodo on an off day.

I was missing the old Kim with a powerful sense of loss, as I had never done before meeting her again. I had always known she was out there; I even had the painting she had given me on permanent display in my kitchen, reminding me of her. With my usual laziness I had assumed that we would meet up again one day and things would be just as they were, only we would be ten years older and maybe even able to afford the things we had shoplifted before. And probably we would have moved on from drinking lager and black; we’d catch up over vodka and tonics, get blasted together and do some speed in the loos for old times’ sake before cruising
out to harass boys and lig our way into a club where we would pretend to dance around our handbags and drive DJs crazy by asking them if they had any Abba. Small pleasures, but our own. The Kim I had before me now probably eschewed dairy products, let alone tabs of acid.

I looked at her again, familiarising myself with the bone structure that had been hidden beneath the chubby cheeks and rounded contours of her teenage years.

“Kim,” I said, it having just occurred to me, “how come you got to stay here? I mean, isn’t it really difficult to get a green card?”

“Oh, I married this guy,” she said blithely. “He was gay and wanted to go live in England, so it worked out great. Well, for me anyway. We lived together for a couple of years and then the irony was he got this great job offer in LA and ended up moving there instead. So much for wanting to go to London. He was always a bit of a flake.”

“Did you stay with your dad when you got here?”

“Not for long.” Kim’s jaw tightened. “That bitch Barbara made it pretty clear she didn’t want me around. I mean, I didn’t know anyone, it was all new to me, I was just finding my feet, and after I’d been there barely a week, you know what she says to me? With a nice smile, like she’s pretending she doesn’t know what she’s doing?”

I shook my head.

“‘You know, Kim, my family’s always had this old saying,’” Kim repeated, mimicking Barbara’s wispy little voice. “‘Guests are like fish, they start to smell after three days.’”

“My God.”

“Right. I’m seventeen, I don’t know anyone, it’s a pretty scary city, and she’s basically telling me to get out of her house and go fend for myself. Of course Dad wasn’t around when she said it, but you know what? Even if he had been, he wouldn’t have heard it. I mean, he wouldn’t have, like, processed it. He’s so blind to how jealous she is of me. Any time he sees me, she’s got to come too. And then it’s not about him and me anymore, it’s about her. As soon as she’s there, she dominates everything. Plus he’s not real when he’s with her. I mean, he’s not my dad anymore, he’s
her husband. No way she’ll let him be both at once. If she could wipe me off the face of the earth, she’d have done it the moment I showed up here.”

If I hadn’t been a recipient of one of Barbara Bilder’s powerful warning -off stares, or seen the way Jon had tiptoed round her back to give me Kim’s phone number, I would have thought Kim was verging on paranoia. As it was, none of this surprised me. There was a bitterness in Kim’s rant for which I couldn’t blame her. Though she sounded resigned as well. This wasn’t a fresh complaint.

“I’ve pretty much come to terms with it,” she said, echoing my thoughts. “Though it was really hard at first. I felt so rejected. You know how close we all were at home. I felt he owed me for breaking that up, and he just wasn’t accepting his responsibility. Of course I’ve got beyond that now.”

She sipped some more green muck. Some of it had stuck on her teeth, but it didn’t seem the time to tell her.

“That’s why I never wrote back to you,” she said. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Look, I don’t remember sending you loads of information about my life either,” I said, wanting to make her feel better. “Knowing me, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of postcards.”

“They were funny, though. It made me really happy to get them, but then I got so sad. I couldn’t write back and tell you how unhappy I was. I had to be strong, focused, you know? Or I’d just have fallen to pieces. Anyway, I got lucky. I answered this ad in the
Voice
, this guy looking for an English wife, and we really hit it off. I moved into his apartment right away, and he sorta looked after me. Him and his boyfriend took me under their wing. I was so fucking lucky,” she said thankfully. “Everyone’s got their coming-to-New-York story and mine’s always the happiest.” A couple of people, leaving the bar, squeezed her shoulder in greeting as they went past. She waved back at them.

“See that girl who just left? When she first moved here, she went to stay with a guy who picked her up on the subway, an older guy, right, and he gave her her own room and everything, so she thought he was OK, and the first night she wakes up early and he’s got all these lights set up around
her and he’s photographing her while she’s asleep. The next morning she wakes up feeling something itching her, and he’s got a cotton swab with Sea Breeze on it and he’s cleaning her face. He says he can’t understand why she gets upset, because all he was doing was cleansing her because her face was a little oily. Then she finds a notebook with all the good and bad things about her written down, he’s been observing all her movements around the apartment and he says at the end that on balance she only gets five out of ten as a substitute daughter.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, she got out of there. Went to stay in a women’s hotel and then couch-surfed for a while. Still.”

Kim pulled a face at me. I tapped at my front tooth and, understanding automatically, she wiped at her own, removing the grass. “All gone? There are some real crazies out there,” she went on. “I could tell you some stuff….”

She was flashing a smile at me, about to embark on an even stranger anecdote. But her casual remark had made me remember Kate, who was dead, strangled only last night by a crazy person. I couldn’t grin back at Kim.

She picked up on my change of mood at once.

“Sam? What is it?”

I looked at her, realising that Jon couldn’t have rung her yet. Though she was Barbara’s stepdaughter, Kim still knew nothing about what had happened at the gallery. I had the feeling that I was diving in and out of different people’s lives in a series of scratchy cuts on a speeded-up film. My head was spinning, and not because of the multivitamins in my Blue Apple. I took a deep breath, feeling a wave of post-exercise-class, travel-induced tiredness sweeping over me, intensified by the bad news I was about to relate.

“Look, Kim, there’s some stuff I have to tell you.”

Briefly I filled her in on the events that had happened earlier that day. Kim’s eyes became wider and wider as I ran through them. I finished with the story of Detective Frank thinking that the graffiti on Barbara’s paintings
was some kind of installation, knowing that would amuse her. It did, but not for long.

“I don’t
believe
it,” she said when I was done. “And
Kate.
Strangled. I especially can’t believe that.”

“You knew her?”

“She lived around here,” Kim said casually. “Everyone knows everyone else, at least by sight. It’s a village. Literally. But she broke up with this guy she used to be dating and since then I haven’t seen her in the usual places. I guess she needed a change.”

“Do you mean Leo? The guy she was dating?

“You know him? How come?” There was an edge to Kim’s voice that made me curious.

“I just heard about him from Laurence and Suzanne. And Java. Do you know them? They all work at the gallery.”

“Java? Really pretty half-Korean girl?”

I nodded.

“I’ve seen her around. I remember the name, anyway.” She let out her breath on a long sigh, and glanced at her watch. “I gotta go to work,” she said.

“I don’t even know where you work,” I said.

“This bar called Hookah. You’d like it. Want to come along?”

I shook my head, pleading tiredness. Also I was starving. Too many sensations were flooding in on me. Kim and I had ten years to catch up on, and the weight of all that pressed down on my shoulders as if I were fathoms deep. She looked as if she were feeling the same way. Talking to me about her father and Barbara had probably opened wounds she had thought safely scarred over long ago. We walked out onto the street in silence, hugging each other goodbye. I gave her my phone number and she promised to ring me the next day before she disappeared up the street. I found a café and got a huge sandwich to go before hailing a cab. Already my building felt like home. I greeted the doorman with such enthusiasm he looked taken aback.

My limbs ached and my stomach felt as if Xena, Warrior Princess had
been using it as a punchball. I crawled into bed and turned on the TV. Nancy had cable, and I found something called the Comedy Channel: I ate my sandwich and washed it down with a beer I had found in the fridge to the accompaniment of
The Daily Show
, a spoof news programme. Its presenter, besides being very easy on the eye, was blessed with a sly sense of humour, and his catchphrase was “Too much information!,” which he used to great effect.