Strawberry Tattoo (28 page)

Half an hour later I emerged from my building. Being outside was something of a shock: I had a brief rush of paranoia, suddenly convinced that someone was watching me. Sternly I told myself to sober up. I was still dazed with the effort of concentration it had required to assemble a suitable outfit and do my make-up. I had the theory that the smarter I looked, the more appropriately I would behave. So I was wearing my chocolate leather jeans, a violet button-through sweater and a dark brown leopard-skin print scarf knotted around my neck. It was a Fifties French starlet kind of look. I would have to hike up my vivacity quotient to carry it off.

The doorman called a taxi for me. The drive was relatively uneventful, apart from the recorded message, in which Judd Hirsch spoke so warmly and intimately that I became convinced that he was a long-lost friend. By the time we reached SoHo, however, I had got a grip on myself, and hardly jumped at all when the second part of the message came on.

There were still lights on in the gallery. I had left things pretty late: it was already seven-thirty and the door was locked. I rang the bell and after a short while Laurence opened it. Half his hair was sticking up and there was a cobweb on his shoulder. He looked distinctly frazzled.

“Still busy?” I asked.

His pale freckled face broke into a beaming smile.

“Sam! Just what the doctor ordered! You, uh, feeling better?” he added more discreetly.

“I think so,” I said cautiously.

“Well, come in!” He threw the door wide open. “It’s party central in here.”

“You two still heaving the paintings around?”

Laurence pulled a face. “Yep. The latest bunch of suckers want something to hang in an alcove in their second main reception room. You want to come up and watch the deliberations?”

“Sure.”

The group gathered in the upstairs gallery included the artist herself, which surprised me. She was there with the faithful Jon, who hovered behind her shoulders like a shadow executed by someone with only the most minimal ideas of perspective and proportion. In addition there were Carol, Stanley, Kevin and a couple who at first sight looked extraordinarily youthful. Then I started noticing the amount of tucks, lipo-sucks, and implants that contributed to this impression. I was willing to bet, too, that they had had Botox injections to freeze the facial muscles and avoid the formation of lines. Their expressions were as blank as the mannequins in the windows of Bloomingdale’s. Doubtless they would have been flattered by the comparison.

“Sam!” Carol looked pleased to see me, which was a relief. I hadn’t been sure if this would be considered barging in. She came towards me, hands outstretched. “Taylor, Courtney,” she said, towing me over to the couple, “this is Sam Jones, one of our newest artists. She’s showing next week with some other young Brits.”

“Oh yes, I have the invite,” said the husband, shaking my hand in a manly kind of way. “Good to meet you. I’m Courtney Challis.”

The wife followed suit. I noticed that neither of them smiled, beyond a twitch of their lips. Still, it looked as if they were trying to; there was a little tic at the corner of each eye, as if the muscles hadn’t yet forgotten what they were for.

“I don’t want to be a distraction,” I said firmly, already sensing that Barbara wasn’t jumping up and down and screaming for joy at my intrusion. I looked over at her. She gave me a fixed smile, scarcely larger than Taylor or Courtney’s had been. But she didn’t have the injections as an excuse.

“Not at all,” Stanley oozed at me. “Not at all!”

But it was a subdued flicker of his habitual smarminess. He looked as if he would jump out of his skin if you sneaked up behind him and whispered “Boo!” in his ear.

“We were just finishing up,” Carol said, flicking a glance at her watch. “We have a table booked for eight-fifteen.”

“I guess it’s up to us, honey,” Taylor said to Courtney. Or it might have been the other way round. They were dressed identically in dark blue blazers, pressed jeans and white shirts. Their shiny blond hair was cut the same and they both smelt of Ralph Lauren cologne. It would be hard to tell them apart if you were in a hurry.

“I guess so!” Courtney agreed. “It’s just so damn difficult to choose. Excuse my language.”

I bit my tongue to avoid saying: “That’s OK, you can’t help being American,” and turned to survey the pictures. Indeterminate shapes shoved themselves sulkily through the general messy murk which characterised Barbara’s painting style. She had confined herself to her usual palette of dingy greys and mud browns, with here and there streaks of feverish orange or a splodge of stuff the colour and shape of offal. It was like a series of paintings of the First World War trenches, seen through distorting glasses with a pounding headache.

“What do you think?” Jon Tallboy said to me enthusiastically.

“Very evocative,” I said. “And powerful.” Such useful words.

They did the trick. Barbara relaxed, giving me a smile that was more welcoming than anything I had seen to date. It softened her features pleasantly. She was wearing an ankle-length dark red embroidered skirt and a vaguely ethnic sweater and with her hair wound around her head she looked like a Russian doll, face painted and calm, stocky and strong despite her diminutive size. I felt I could reach out and push her and, just like the dolls, she would rock back and forth on her plump little feet before regaining her balance.

In a huddle a few paces from us, Courtney, Taylor and Carol Bergmann were coming to a hard-won decision. I half-expected them to jump up in the air like American football players when they had finished. No one had bothered to include Stanley in the group and he hung around its fringes, a schoolboy hoping the others would finally ask him to join their game.

“OK!” Taylor finally said. “Boy, that was a tough one, wasn’t it, honey?”

“Sure was, sweetie,” Courtney agreed. They smiled at each other fondly. I was reminded of John and Mary, the couple on
Father Ted
, who
fought bitterly in private and snapped into an extreme parody of marital bliss every time the priest passed by. I could just see Courtney and Taylor going at it hammer and tongs as soon as their audience was removed.

“‘Memories of Spring’?” Carol asked, indicating the one which looked like a rubbish dump with more than its fair quantity of mud, not to mention fungus.

They both nodded. “Whew!” Courtney added. “Nice to have got there at last!”

“It’s one of my personal favourites,” Barbara said, swishing forward to applaud the purchasers. She behaved as if it were they who ought to be congratulated for having made the right decision. They didn’t seem to feel patronised, however.

“Oh, that’s so great!” said Taylor, clapping her hands together girlishly. “It’s such an honour to have had you here while we were choosing.”

Barbara smiled graciously.

“It truly has been an honour, Ms. Bilder,” said Courtney gravely.

“Well,” Carol cut in brightly, “we should be getting ourselves together and heading out.”

“Reservations wait for no man,” Stanley said, happy to have found a subject on which he could pronounce with confidence.

“We had to fax the restaurant with our credit card number, and sign a form promising to be there or pay a penalty, before they’d take the booking!” Taylor informed everyone. “Can you believe it? I don’t know what New York is coming to.”

This was the cue for an outpouring of New York nightmare restaurant stories, all recounted with mock horror and, underlying that, a repressed triumph that the speakers were doing well enough to afford them. Laurence and Kevin exchanged a glance and started carrying the rejected paintings over to the lift. Once they were inside, Laurence remained there to hold them steady while Kevin and I took the stairs. Although not quite as dishevelled as Laurence, Kevin’s bland face was shiny with physical effort and his hair was not as neat as it had doubtless been when he left the house that morning.

“You guys aren’t going to the dinner, are you?” I asked.

“You must be kidding,” Kevin said bitterly. “We’re kind of lowly anyway, and today we’re just the art handlers. Goddamn Don, when I catch up with him I’m gonna kick his ass. We’ve had a shit-awful day and it’s not over yet.”

The elevator was already at the basement when we got there. Laurence had blocked the doors open and started heaving out the first Bilder. While the boys started slotting the paintings back into place in the complicated sliding storage apparatus—rather like an IKEA-designed CD stand, only on a much larger scale—I wandered through into the room beyond, Don’s territory, with its broken-down loungers and odour of cigarettes and beer. This evening I could smell whisky, too, or maybe it was bourbon. I bet Don liked his bourbon, a country boy like him.

The ashtray on the arm of one of the loungers was brimming with cigarette stubs, and a glass half full with beer stood on the floor by its side, a fly buzzing around its rim. Don might just have stepped out for a moment. It was very still in the room, the strip lighting casting weird shadows over the grey walls. I felt a rush of claustrophobia. For some reason I remembered the dream I had had in London, the part where the walls were closing in on me, and in a brief fit of paranoia from the acid couldn’t help turning my head to check that they were where they should be. In the next room I could hear Laurence and Kevin shifting paintings and swearing to each other. The sounds were strangely muffled; they seemed to come from very far away, as if heard through water.

One of Don’s paintings was turned to face the room, propped against a filing cabinet, glue jars and paint pots in a muddle next to it. I gave it a cursory glance but I was all stared out of art at the moment. Besides, it was of a huge naked woman with a bit of red paper stuck next to her, pointing to her private parts. Just what I would have expected from Don. In front of me were the sliding glass doors which led out onto the small concreted space outside, as cramped and nasty as the exercise yard of a prison. There was another strip light outside, garishly lighting up the yard’s far wall. It turned the doors into dark mirrors, reflecting the contents of the room back at me.

The reflection did not allow me to see beyond the doors. Moving
closer, I pressed my face nearly up to the smeared and dirty glass and stared out. There was hardly anything in the yard besides a bicycle rack sheltered by a lean-to. A single bike stood inside it, chained by its frame to the rack. Beyond it was a pile of rubbish. No, it couldn’t be rubbish. I could scarcely imagine Carol Bergmann allowing people to use the yard as a dump. But it was covered in black plastic, and had the authentic lumpiness of an unevenly filled garbage bag.

I looked at it for what felt like a long time, fighting back the idiotic urge to giggle. The acid was trying to make a brief comeback. When I had myself under control, I took a deep breath and walked back into the storage room. The boys were dusting themselves off resentfully.

“Look,” I said, “would you two come through here a moment?”

Oddly, it was as if Kevin knew at once what I suspected. His handsome features flattened as if smeared across his face like dough, artificially blank. It was Laurence who said, wearily but quite naturally:

“What is it, Sam? I can’t think much beyond a beer at this point.”

“Just come through a second,” I insisted, leading them into Don’s room. I noticed for the first time that the sink in the far corner was dripping, very slowly, the drops plinking down like water torture.

“Shit, this place is a dump,” Laurence said absently.

“He could at least empty his fucking ashtray,” Kevin agreed. “He always keep it like this? I hardly ever come down here.”

“Look out there in the yard.” I pointed to the lean-to.

Kevin didn’t say anything. He had shoved his hands into his pockets, and stood like a statue, his face unmoving. Laurence leaned forward.

“You mean the bike? It’s mine. Don’t tell me you want to borrow it.”

“Did you bike in this morning?”

“No, I haven’t used it in a couple of days. What is this, a fitness quiz?”

He turned away. Kevin still hadn’t moved or spoken.

“Beyond the lean-to,” I persisted. “What’s that?”

Laurence sighed a long, slow, humour-the-woman sigh, and swivelled back, poised on the ball of one foot, wanting just to answer me and be gone.

“Refuse. Junk. I don’t know. Bottom line is, it shouldn’t be there. But I’m too tired to deal with it right now.”

“It looks pretty big, don’t you think?”

“I don’t give a shit how big it is.…” Laurence’s voice, which had been edgy with annoyance at being kept back from his beer, tailed off. Our eyes met in the reflection on the glass doors. We stared at each other, the shadows behind and before us stretching away into the half-illuminated night. There was a long, unpleasant pause, broken by Kevin’s feet shifting on the concrete floor.

“Well,” I said. “I think we should go out there and take a look.”

The key was in the door. We all focused on it.

“What about fingerprints?” Laurence said presciently.

I shrugged. “What can we do? We have to check.”

Laurence found a filthy rag by the sink and used that to turn the key, trying to hold it by its edges. The doors slid back. The night air was scarcely less cold than that of the basement, but damper. The yard was clammy and we shivered as we crossed it.

There wasn’t room for all of us to gather round the refuse sack. I knelt down and prodded it as gently as I could.

“It’s just garbage or something,” Kevin said, his voice loud. “Dumped here till someone got around to throwing it out.”

More than one bag had been used, and only the uppermost one was actually pulled over the mass it contained. The rest were draped over the larger part of it, which had been pulled as far behind the lean-to as it would go. I took hold of the one nearest to me and dragged the bag off, taking care not to shift anything more than I had to.

“Oh,
shit
,” Laurence said. “Oh
shit
.”

It was as fair a response as any. Don’s face, livid under the strip lighting, lolled back on his neck, looking up at us. Kevin was the furthest away, but he took a few quick steps back. Golden light projected down in long slanting rectangles from the windows on the first floor, casting an inappropriately benevolent glow over the scene. As the plastic bag came away it looked for a moment as if Don were wearing a choker, a thin strip of
leather cutting tightly into the skin of his neck. But once I had laid his head gently down on the concrete, I could see clearly that it was a long narrow bruise indenting the skin, dark and strong enough to have been traced with a marker pen. In my hallucinations earlier today I had seen something like this. Reality was contradicting me: the line wasn’t red. It was black with dying blood.