Strawberry Tattoo (17 page)

I knew exactly how he felt.

Hugo woke me up at four in the morning. I had fallen asleep at ten, which is the crack of dawn for me. So when the phone rang I was in the Twilight Zone of semi-consciousness, body and brain deeply confused.

“Who? What? Where?” I croaked, bewildered, into the receiver.

“What’s the time?” Hugo was asking in a pointed way.

I located the clock. “Four,” I said automatically. “Oh, right. Ha ha.”

“You’re not pissed off with me for waking you up.” Hugo was immediately suspicious. “Why aren’t you pissed off? What have you been doing? Is there someone there with you?”

I was so hazy I actually lifted the covers next to me to check there wasn’t a sleeping body under them.

“Apparently not,” I reported. “Unless he’s deflated in the night. What time is it over there?” I said, trying to make my brain work. It was like starting a reluctant car on a frosty morning; it kept making turning-over noises and then giving up the struggle. I watched it from a distant perspective, as if I were having an out-of-body experience, floating up to sit on a cloud and looking down on myself through the mists of vapour. I was often like this when untimely ripped from sleep.

“Nine,” Hugo said reluctantly.

This did the trick. I howled with laughter. “You got up at nine in the morning to ring me! You sad bastard!”

To Hugo and me, nine in the morning was much, much worse than four. Four might at least mean that you’d been up all night being decadent and corrupt, while nine was undeniably, teeth-flossingly respectable.

“I had an early call,” Hugo said coldly. “I was up anyway.”

“Liar liar pants on fire,” I retorted.

“Try to restrain your acid wit, my love,” Hugo said in even colder tones. “You know how piercing it can be. I have to go now. I have to take my clothes off and rape a teenage prostitute.”

“Will you manage to fit that in before going to rehearsal?”

“Not funny.” He sounded more bitter than angostura. “Doing Pinter is nothing to this. You should see the foulness of the boy. He has poorly bleached hair and no projection. Thank God we’re doing it in the studio. The director only cast him because he wanted to get into his pantyhose.”

“And has he?”

“Oh, the first day. The first
minute.
The young thing makes Jack Nicholson look like a blushing violet. Much, much faster than shagging one of those boys from the arcade at Cambridge Circus. That’s always preceded by about thirty seconds of financial negotiations. This little tart just drops to his knees before you’ve said hello. Probably
is
his way of saying hello.”

“Poor Hugo,” I said sympathetically, reading between the lines. “Director completely ignoring you?”

Hugo sighed assent. “Not that it matters. The play is so nonexistent anyway that discussion of my character would be laughable. It’s just a series of increasingly Goya-esque tableaux with spatterings of fake blood from a different orifice each time.”

“Ick.”

“At least I’m not getting the worst of it,” Hugo said, cheering up a little. “That poor cow who plays the girl is completely
persona non grata.
I may be too old for our esteemed director’s tastes, but I’m still male, and I wear tight trousers to please him. She’s getting the silent treatment. Thank God she’s on Prozac already, it’s the only thing holding her together.
Every time she has to take her clothes off he just gives her this look of contempt for having a vulva. I can’t describe how awful it must be.”

“Does she take her clothes off a lot?” I found myself asking with rather more emphasis than I liked.

“Sweetie,” Hugo reassured me, “I like my women to look like women. If I want a boy I’ve already got one in an hour and a half. We’re doing the frottage scene.”

He sighed again. It was a deeply poignant moment.

“How’s everything else going?”

“Ooh, very, very well,” Hugo said with instant complacency. “A riot. I’m plumbing new depths of evil with Ferdinand. It’s terribly easy, I just pretend that the Duchess is being played by that shocking little tart and I come over all fiendish without even having to work myself up. And my costume’s too pervy for words.”

That was actors all over; the same attention paid to their outfits as to the role. Hugo always said when challenged that the clothes made the man.

I yawned again, the kind of long slow yawn that feels as if it’s turning your tonsils inside out.

“Go back to sleep,” Hugo said, sounding guilty. “I shouldn’t have revenged myself this way. Doing Jacobean tragedy has warped my moral values.”

“Oh, it’s OK. …” I mumbled.

“Go back to sleep,” he said with increasing emphasis. “You’re not yourself. Ring me when you are.”

“OK. Good luck with the frottage.”

“Thank you
so
much, darling.”

The yawn had been well timed. I had sensed that he was about to ask me how things were here, and I didn’t want to inform him that someone had been killed the evening of my arrival. Although he would never dream of telling me as much, I knew he’d start fretting about me, which wouldn’t do either of us any good. I had learned the hard way that men need plenty of protection from the harsh realities of life.

Don rang me at eleven. Because of his accent I thought he was Hugo again, this time putting on a silly voice, and we had to battle through this initial misunderstanding before he could inform me that my sculptures had just arrived.

“Shippers don’t seem to have fucked ‘em up any,” he said. “Which is pretty good goin’, I can tell you. Carol wants to know when you’re comin’ down to look ‘em over.”

“How’s this afternoon?”

“Fine by me. Any time’s fine by me. Be a nice change from cleanin’ the floor.” His drawl gave “floor” at least three syllables.

“How’s things there?” I asked.

“I’ve seen better. Still, the restorer lady thinks she can get thet paint offa Ms. Bilder’s masterpieces. So we’re all as happy as sandboys.”

Did no one like Barbara Bilder? I wondered as I put down the phone. Or was it simply sour grapes on Don’s part? Working in a gallery was the worst job for an aspirant artist. It would embitter even a Buddhist on their last life before nirvana.

“Hey!” the doorman said as I emerged from the lift. He was the one who had been on duty when I had arrived, a tall, well set-up Hispanic guy, whose nice-looking face was unfortunately marred by the tiny pocks of old acne scars. They gave his skin the texture of an obscure and expensive kind of leather that, made into a handbag, would cost a fortune on Fifth Avenue. As human face covering it was distinctly less valuable. Context is all.

“You’re Ms. Jones, right?” he was saying. “They find your camera?”

Merciful providence ensured that, just in time, I remembered Detective Frank’s cover story.

“Not yet,” I said. “They haven’t let me know, anyway.”

He grimaced. “I wouldn’t hold out much hope. You leave something in a taxi here—well, forget the next passenger. Driver’ll boost anything that’s not tied down.”

“You think that’s what happened?”

He shrugged. “More than likely. They track down the driver?”

Under this well-intentioned barrage of questions, I decided that my best course was to imitate Manuel in
Fawlty Towers.

“I know nothing,” I said regretfully, restraining myself by a hair’s breadth from doing the accent too. He might think I was taking the piss out of his.

“Shame. Your first night in New York and something like this happens.”

“Well, it was insured,” I said airily. “Look on the bright side, eh? Oh, I wanted to ask you something. How do I get to Strawberry Fields?” I was half-expecting him to say: “Second star on the right and straight on till morning.”

“Oh, that’s easy!” he said cheerfully. “Just turn right on 72nd Street and keep going till you hit the park. It’s straight in front of you, you can’t miss it.”

He looked at me more closely. “Might want to give it a few days, though,” he advised. “You hear what happened there? Girl got killed. Real nasty. Strangled, they say. It was on the news. Pretty girl, too. They showed a photograph. Oh, and we had a hold-up on 71st two nights ago. Couple kids with handguns. You might not want to walk down there at night.”

“God, it’s like living in an episode of
Homicide,”
I commented.

“No, no,” he said quickly. “The city’s much safer now since all the Giuliani reforms. Really. You’ll be perfectly OK, Ms. Jones.”

That would be a first.

Today the first block of 72nd Street was as dead as a recent Martin Amis novel. It was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and everything kosher—the Italian restaurant, the bookstore, the Glatt Mexican takeaway—was shuttered up tighter than a bad face-lift. I crossed the great teeming intersection where Broadway and Amsterdam merged, throwing up islands in their wake. The flood of traffic surged past like fast-moving boats, people jumping back from the sidewalks as if frightened to get their feet splashed when the liner buses swept perilously close cutting a corner. The motorbike couriers were the jet skis, dashing between the buses with
the insistent buzz of giant bumblebees. Huge Mack trucks ploughed straight down the centre of the road, the great furrows of their passage buffeting cyclists off balance as they struggled to hold their own against the cross-currents of wind. How the bladers managed I had no idea. With their black helmets and the pads buckled to knees and elbows, they looked like urban warriors, heads down, legs moving fast and rhythmically, weaving along the streams of cars, pushing themselves off ones that came too close with the metal protectors strapped round their palms.

Crossing New York’s busiest avenues felt as if an invisible Moses were holding back the roaring torrents for a tiny space of time; if we didn’t make it across fast the Red Sea would surge in, drowning stragglers and Egyptians. It added the thrill of danger to a cross-town walk which Giuliani’s city reforms had apparently removed from most other areas of possibility. Between Amsterdam and Columbus was Hispanic territory, and I was besieged by horny would-be studs.

“Yo, baby,” they called. “Nice lady …” And “Whoah!” when something particularly nice went by. Or they hissed between clenched teeth in a long slow Ssssssss of approval, like the evil snake Prince John in the Disney Robin Hood. “Nasty,” another one said to me with appreciation. He was sitting on a fold-up stool in the middle of the sidewalk and handing out leaflets.

Ahead of me I could see the green glow of Central Park. The last block was almost all residential, with perfectly spaced, well-maintained trees lining the sidewalk, casting elegant shadows onto the long awnings that reached nearly to the kerbs. I crossed the last intersection and found myself at the open mouth of a tangle of little paths, like tributaries running together into a river. They dipped and turned away, thickly hedged, their surfaces glimmering in the sunlight. The grass shone, each blade glittering with light like tiny green slivers of mirror, and the chaos of cars on Central Park West, just behind me, faded into a background hum which hardly disturbed the clear fresh air.

I loved London’s parks, but this was something special. Even Regent’s Park, with its boating lake and swans and bandstand, its wide open stretches of football and rugby fields with tantalising glimpses of the poor zoo animals, is flat. Only Hampstead Heath provides hills and wildness and mystery, not to mention the raucous man-to-man sexual encounters of Golders Hill Park, and that’s scarcely in central London. Highwaymen hung out there only a century and a half ago. Whereas this, bang in the middle of New York, was a forest.

Strawberry Fields turned out to be practically in front of me, a little section of grassy knolls and an inlaid “Imagine” mosaic, so much less spectacular than I had envisaged that I walked round it a couple of times before realising that I was in the correct spot. I was put right by the arrival of a tour group of Japanese who immediately gathered round the mosaic and started taking pictures. There was no police tape closing off any particular area, and no one there on duty.

“You hear about that chick who got killed here?” a kid behind me said. He plopped himself down on a bench and gestured to his companion to join him. “Right where you’re sitting, man. Got her from behind and—
chhkk.”