Strawberry Tattoo (27 page)

Her face fell. “Not for years.”

“That’s terrible! You were so good! I still have that painting you did of all the fruit in weird colours. It’s hanging in my kitchen.”

“I liked that painting.” Kim was wistful. “I just—oh, when I first came here I had all these grand ambitions. I was determined to make Dad help me out, and he would have done. It was Barbara. She didn’t actually tell me I was crap in so many words, but she was incredibly discouraging—kept going on about how hard it was to make it as an artist. And gradually she just got Dad around to her way of thinking, that I’d better give up. I dunno, it kind of beat me down. I started waitressing, and I was still trying to paint, but it was so expensive, and I didn’t have any space … and then I started going to the gym, and really got into that. I’m studying for my
personal trainer qualification,” she said more enthusiastically. “And I’ve got a whole lot of clients lined up already, as soon as I get it.”

“That’s a great idea,” I said encouragingly. “I just think it’s a shame you’re not still painting as well.”

She sighed. “I know. When I look at what you’ve done …”

“I’ve been really lucky,” I said firmly. “I’m riding a wave that isn’t my own. I’ve got nothing to do with Lex’s lot, you know. They’re all self-obsessed conceptualists.”

“Whereas you’re a self-obsessed sculptor,” Kim teased me. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to say—you shouldn’t call yourself a sculptress, it’s really out of date. I heard you say it the other day.”

“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.