Strawberry Tattoo (39 page)

“Want some tea?” she said. “I’m just boiling the kettle.”

“Great,” I said, perking up at the thought of a restorative English cuppa after my climb.

“OK,” she said, pulling open a cupboard, “I’ve got liquorice, orange zinger, raspberry buzz, lemongrass and lime, camomile flower, fennel and nettle—”

“Whoah, whoah.” I held up one hand. “Can I just have a Cup Of Tea?”

Kim looked uncomfortable.

“You mean
tea
tea? I don’t drink it any more. The tannin’s really bad for you.”

“Not even one miserable teabag lurking at the back of the cupboard?” I pleaded.

Kim shook her head. “And anyway,” she confessed, “I don’t have any milk or sugar, so I couldn’t make it properly.”

“No
milk?
”

“Well, soy milk. But it wouldn’t taste right.”

I put my head in my hands.

“What’s
happened
to you, Kim?” I moaned. “This city has changed you, it’s sucked out your brains, you’ve turned into some dairy-free health nazi—”

“No, Sam, don’t be that way! That’s not a good way to be!” Kim said instantly.

This was an old, old catchphrase which we’d picked up from some long-lost Seventies TV programme and made our own. It was so immediately, achingly familiar that my head came up again as if it had been pulled on a wire.

“I’m still me!” she said, throwing her arms wide and doing her best cheesy winning smile.

“There’s a lot less of you,” I pointed out. It was a hot day, and she was wearing a little top which was a cross between a workout bra and a cut-off T-shirt and revealed most of her honed stomach, perfectly flat apart from the light curve of her ab definition. A pair of dark grey sweatpants hung just above her hipbones, and when she turned to take the whistling kettle off the gas it was obvious that her buns were made of steel. Her skin glowed and her short hair was shiny with health and deep-pack conditioner.

“You have completely changed your body,” I said, flopping down into her inflatable pink plastic armchair.

“Years and years of work and I have to watch it like a hawk,” Kim said. “Did you want any tea?”

“Yeah, give me that one with the buzz in it. I like the way you’ve done your place, by the way.”

Sunlight poured in through the single window onto the white-painted floor. The futon sofa with the fake sheepskin rug thrown over it must be the bed by night. Over it hung a canvas of a bright pink cauliflower on a white background. Like the painting of Kim’s I had at home, it was from her Inappropriate Colours series. Her collection of Barbies and Sindys was lovingly arranged on a series of silver-painted shelves, and stacked next to the bed was a pile of books on bodybuilding. One of those classic modern-woman contrasts.

“Do you remember those Daisy dolls?” I said reminiscently. “The Mary Quant ones you were always trying to find?”

“Shit, those are real collectors’ items now. There was a great carrying case for the clothes, too. Red with a white and yellow plastic daisy appliquéd on the corner. But you’d never find it in the States. UK distribution only.”

Kim brought the mug of tea over to me.

“Just don’t put it down on the armchair,” she warned, “or it’ll burn through and pop.”

“The thing I can’t understand here,” I said, settling back in the pink plastic chair and holding my mug well away from its surfaces, “don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising—but everyone lives in these tiny little studios. Why don’t people get together and rent a big apartment to share? There’d be lots more space for the money.”

Kim sat down on the floor, cross-legged, her back to the futon, blowing on her tea to cool it.

“It’d never work,” she said. “No one rents bigger places. Everyone’s too busy to bother about sharing, they just want their own pad to crawl back to at the end of the day. Besides, people are pretty tough here. They go through friends like potato chips. They’d want to be free to discard someone who wasn’t useful any more.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. People are your weapon here, you use them to get ahead. Besides, you can just step out the door here and meet everyone you know. I can bump into people four times a day in the East Village. And then there are all the lounges. I mean, you’ve got all the social life you can handle right there.”

“That’s how you knew Kate and Java?” I said.

“Yup. Well, Kate used to date Leo. That’s how I knew her.”

There was a slight frostiness in Kim’s voice as she pronounced Kate’s name.

“Didn’t you like her?” I said, stirring.

“Never any hiding anything from you,” Kim said. “No, I didn’t much. I thought she gave Leo a really hard time. She soured him on women. He was really into her. I always thought that was partly because she worked in
a gallery, though…. OK, maybe I’m kidding myself,” she said ruefully, catching my eye. “But anyway, when she dumped him he got all bitter and twisted. I told him a while back I wasn’t coming to see him any more ’cause he’d just drop all this misogynistic shit on me. When we met him in the park I was livid.”

“I remember.”

“But he seems to have mellowed out,” she admitted. “Anyway, I was too busy trying to get into Lex’s pants to bother with Leo for long.”

“Having fun?”

“Sure.” She grinned at me. “I sent him off to the hotel today, though. Sort of felt I needed my own space for a while.”

“Very mature.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So what’s this news you were all excited about?”

“Shit, yeah. I forgot.” Kim sat up straighter and put her tea mug down. “You know we went to the cop shop yesterday? Well, Lex did. They kept him there for ages, it was really dull. Anyway, you’ll never guess what they told him.”

She paused for dramatic effect. I shook my head dutifully.

“That guy Don who was killed? Apparently he knew who killed Kate, or who trashed the gallery, or both, and he was blackmailing whoever it was.”

“How do they know?”

“He rented a room off this friend of his, and he was late coming up with the rent. So he told this guy he was coming into money, to keep him sweet, and they got drunk together and Don let that much slip.”

“If the police told Lex that, they must be on a big fishing expedition,” I said. “They don’t have much else to go on and they’re trying to stir stuff up.” I sipped my tea. “Knowing Don, I have to say that it makes sense.” I thought back, remembering Don’s air of mocking the world, the way he had so easily got under Suzanne’s skin. Not to mention my own. Don was the kind of person who liked working out what made others tick, knowing their secrets. “I can easily see him as a blackmailer. He must have been at
the gallery, late in the evening, painting, and heard whoever it was come in to do the graffiti.”

“Shit, everyone’s a painter in this town,” Kim said with a sigh. “Filmmaker, designer, writer, painter. All of us wannabes. Then there are the model/actress/whatevers. I call ’em the gaping MAWs.”

“Pretty good,” I said appreciatively.

“Hey, bitch, I can still turn a phrase.”

We grinned at each other.

“But it’s really tough,” she went on. “Packed onto this tiny island with everyone else trying at least as hard as you to make it… Jesus, sometimes I wonder why I bother.”

“Well, if your stepmother managed it with those industrial-effluent paintings of hers, then you can, too.”

“My stepmother screwed her way up the ladder,” Kim said bitterly. “You know that story, right? And when she’d got where she wanted she stole my dad away from us and rotted out his brains. It’s incredible how one person can change another that much. Most of the time he’s not even himself any more. He’s like her zombie. God, I hate that bitch.”

She blew out her breath. “Whoah, time to change the subject! Bitter and twisted alert! Why didn’t you drop into the bar last night? I was expecting you.”

“Damn!” A sudden flash of memory hit me. I looked at Kim, deciding that I had to tell her, if no one else, about what I had been doing last night. If Mel did turn nasty—if she already had—I couldn’t leave Kim in the dark about the situation; she was the person most likely to get hurt. Apart from Mel herself.

In a few words I sketched it in. Kim took the information more calmly than I had been expecting.

“Shit happens, you know?” she said. “People send each other crazy. Sounds pretty minor league for this town.”

“Still, keep an eye out, eh? She’s not all there at the moment,” I warned.

“OK. Poor thing. Lex hasn’t mentioned her to me at all.”

“Well, he wouldn’t, would he?” I said reasonably. “He’s not going to start telling you about all his one-night stands in the last few months.”

“No, I meant with her turning up here for the show. He might have warned me there was something. I mean, he wouldn’t know she was stalking him, but if she’s been making all these phone calls he must guess something’s up.”

“You know men,” I said. “Bury their heads in the sand and then complain when it gets in their eyes.”

“That is so fucking true.”

“So what’s up with Lex?” I asked pruriently. “I mean, is it serious?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just having fun at the moment. I don’t think I’m ready to start seeing someone seriously. I got hurt a while back and I’m still recovering.”

I wondered if she meant Leo.

“And anyway,” she said with a wicked smile, “I mean, Lex is good in bed, but he’s not
that
good. I mean, he’s not
stalker
good.”

We started giggling. This was the old Kim, in spades. The more we hung out together, the more she was coming back. I listened happily as she expanded on her theme.

“I mean, you have to be pretty damn hot to get
stalked
after just one night of luuurve. You have to be
all that
. Why, you have to be goddamn—”

“Finger lickin’ good!” I chorused with her as we fell about laughing. It was another of our old catchphrases.

Kim was putting a tape into the stereo. The first chords of our favourite songs filled the air: the Pointer Sisters with “Slow Hand.” And soon our caterwauls were flooding out through the open window into the East Village.

“If I want it ALL NIGHT—” Kim sang, pointing at me.

“He says ALL RIGHT!” I yodelled back, the two of us sounding even more crap than early Bananarama. Probably Kim would put on early Bana-narama next—Robert de Niro, talking Italian…. There was no way Kim and I could embarrass each other. That was the glory of it. We had already done our worst to each other and survived.

That turned out to be an exaggeration. But some things are impossible to predict. Even for Miss Marple crossed with weedkiller.

My first New York gallery opening should have been one of the best nights of my life. So of course it was an anticlimax, like seeing the Statue of Liberty. Oh right, tick that one off the list, and is there a bar anywhere round here? The best nights of your life sneak up on you when you’re not expecting them and take you completely by surprise, on the day you put on your oldest, tattiest pair of underpants.

I should have known better. I did know better. Openings are always hard work. You get to be the centre of attention, but the payoff is having endless ghastly tedious conversations with people you’ll never see again while fixing a bright smile on your face. I try, but after a while I lose it completely, go over to the bad side, get pissed and turn raucous. Which, ironically, is probably what the buyers prefer—some yBa bad behaviour to spice up the purchase. If there is one.

At least in a group show the burden gets spread. And you can always push off and talk to one of your fellow artists, rather than hanging round the bar alone, waiting to have the next buyer or journalist produced to be serviced with a few soundbites. Unfortunately, the camaraderie among the yBa posse had been eroded since our merry encounter in Old Street. Only Lex and Rob had arrived so far. Mel had left a message to say she’d be a little late. Carol, while annoyed by this, in the way of a teacher checking everyone was on time for the school outing, put it down to Mel’s having problems deciding what to wear.

“It’s easier for men, isn’t it?” she said to me and Suzanne. “It took me twenty years to decide what suited me, what would do for work, and combine the two.”

“Carol’s black suits are famous,” Suzanne told me. “She never wears anything else.” She herself was statuesque in a white knit dress which was totally unfashionable and suited her perfectly. Round her neck was her usual strand of pearls and her white-blond hair was swept back and up, adding inches to her height.

“They’re so easy,” Carol said cheerfully. “Jil Sander is my heroine. Cost a fortune and worth every penny. I hope Mel’s here soon, though,” she said sharply. I was taken aback by this swift change of tone. Carol could switch moods faster than a Morse code operator could send an SOS. “Maybe I’ll just go and ring the hotel to hurry her up.”

“Carol never, ever loses sight of what’s happening to business, even when you’re having a chat with her,” Suzanne said as the former clicked away. “She can separate out the two halves of her brain.”

“Like playing games of chess simultaneously,” I suggested. “No, like playing a game of chess and having a conversation about which colour lipstick suits you best.”