Strawberry Tattoo (4 page)

The brief amusement I felt at the way I had handled my exit faded fast, the smile on my lips spreading wide into a silent scream. I rolled over in bed whimpering and biting the pillow, and not, I stress firmly, because the
memory of Lex’s tongue halfway down my throat had rekindled any passion in my loins. Oh, the shame, the horror. It was worse than anything I could have imagined. I had kissed—no, Sam, look the brutal truth right in the face without flinching—I had
fumbled in the Blue Note toilets with a young British artist.
How I was going to live with myself after this I didn’t know.

And what on earth was I going to tell Hugo?

“Are
you going to tell Hugo?” was how Tom chose to put the question when he came round the day afterwards.

I couldn’t deny that the idea of pretending the whole small sorry incident had never taken place appealed to me with near-overpowering force; but against that I had to weigh the possibility of it all coming into the open later, and how much worse it would look if it did.

“The thing is,” I said, topping up our vodka and tonics—it made me feel incredibly sophisticated and mature having a mixer to hand rather than just a bottle of hard liquor—“the thing is that Hugo’s really good at spotting when something like that’s happened. Particularly if he ever sees me and Lex together. Because, knowing Lex, he’ll either ignore me pointedly or try to get off with me again in a proprietorial kind of way. Either of which will be so obvious to Hugo’s super-trained powers of observation that Lex and I might as well have neon signs over our heads saying: ‘Have Had My Tongue Round That Person’s Tonsils Recently’ and arrows pointing to each other.”

“Does Hugo really have super-trained powers of observation?” asked Tom jealously, going off at a tangent. Being a poet, he considered himself to have the monopoly on
mots justes
, piercing insights and an unerring perception of the subtleties of human behaviour. Sheer fantasy, of course. But he was very good at descriptions of plants in iambic pentameter.

“He is horribly sharp about anything to do with sex,” I admitted. “And
it extends into more general areas. He says it’s the actor’s honed eye onto the world.”

“Sammy, please.
Not
honed eye.” Tom shuddered. “Just try to imagine what that would look like.”

I did. “Ick.”

Ever since Tom’s first collection of poems had been published a few months ago (covering, fairly extensively, the flora and fauna of India, which he had visited last year, with a side order of heartbreak and despair) he had become unbearable about picking people up on their less wisely chosen metaphors.

“What I can’t understand is why you’re getting hot and bothered about it,” Tom complained. “I mean, what’s it matter to you? You always run a mile if the bloke you’re shagging starts trying to tell you that you can’t feel up other blokes in toilets. Frankly, I’ve always thought you considered that a basic human right, like not being tortured, or proper sewage provision.”

India had really scarred Tom on the dysentery front. He had lost two and a half stone and was now obsessed with plumbing.

“The thing is,” I said again, fiddling with the lemon slice in my vodka and tonic (lemon slice, note. Next I’d be getting a hostess trolley), “I don’t really want Hugo to be off snogging some tart of an actress in the loos of a sordid pub in Stratford.”

“Well, if he is, dump him,” Tom said blankly. “Isn’t that what you always do sooner or later, anyway? I mean, what’s the problem here, Sammy? You’re the Don Juanita of Holloway and Camden Town. You’ve probably shagged more blokes in toilets than I have girls in my entire life.” He paused. “OK, I’m depressed now,” he continued. “I don’t want that to be true. Could we do some counting up, please?”

Eyes squinting with concentration, he started mumbling girls’ names under his breath and pressing down one finger after another.

“You don’t get it, Tom,” I said, exasperated. “I like Hugo.”

He stared at me in shock, girl-tally momentarily forgotten.

“You
like
him? You mean, you
like
him?”

“Yeah, I like him, OK?” I said gruffly.

“You mean you—”

“I like him! OK! Could we just leave it there, please?” Writhing in embarrassment, I finished my drink in one go and curled up into a ball in the corner of the sofa. “Ow,” I said, rubbing my bottom.

“You’ve got to get that bloody spring fixed.”

“I know.”

“So.
So,”
Tom said, pouring me some more vodka. “You
like
him. Well, well, well. I never thought I’d see the day. Sammy actually
likes
—”

“Shut up. Fuck off. All right? Anyway,” I said, waving away the proffered tonic bottle and drinking my vodka neat—sod sophistication, sometimes you needed to dispense with anything but the bare essentials. “Anyway, I thought you got on with him OK. I mean, you thought he was all right.”

Tom hadn’t warmed hugely to Hugo, who—I was the first to admit—could be very annoying. But I had suspected that he had summed up Hugo as being able to deal with me, which was equally annoying, if true, and had given him the all clear on that account.

“Yeah, he’s OK. I was going to say he’s nice, but he isn’t. If you know what I mean. But then, you aren’t nice. At all. So it’s fair enough. Actually,” Tom said reminiscently, “we had a good crack about the footie while you were off getting the drinks in.”

“You and
Hugo
talked about
football?”
I stared at him in disbelief. The only sport I could imagine Hugo being remotely interested in was cricket; I suspected him of having modelled himself largely on Psmith. But football lacked all the qualities which Hugo would consider sufficiently aesthetic.

“Yeah. We had a good crack, I told you.”

I decided to let this one pass. Clearly Hugo had been playing one of his elaborate games of bluff with Tom and the poor naive lunkhead hadn’t realised. In which case I could only do harm by pointing it out.

“How’s he doing?” Tom added, having warmed to Hugo in retrospect.

“Really well up till now.” Hugo was at the Royal Shakespeare Company,
down in Stratford, on a roll after a very successful Edmund in
King Lear
at the National. The RSC’s rep policy meant that he was juggling several roles, and so far—Berowne in
Love’s Labours Lost
and Ferdinand in
The Duchess of Malfi
—it was perfect casting: one witty intellectual and one evil sororicide. Doubtless he would be horribly sexy in both. Still, from the sound of it his nemesis had just checked in.

“But he’s just started rehearsals for this new play, and he’s hating it with a passion.”

“What’s it called?”

“Don’t remember. Something stupid. Hugo calls it W**king and F**ting. He plays a pimp who falls in love with a rent boy. Only the rent boy’s so scarred he only wants sex if someone’s raping him. And the rent boy’s sister is in love with Hugo, who beats her up a bit to please the rent boy, who hates her because their mum abused him and not her. But what he doesn’t know is that their father, besides being a drug dealer—”

“Enough. God.” Tom was holding up a hand. “I just hope it’s bloody well written. Otherwise that kind of thing’s just cheap exploitation.”

“You pompous bastard. But I agree, actually.” In my recent spell as girlfriend-type-person to up-and-coming actor, I had found myself attending more plays than I had done for a very long time. Most of them were rigorously modern dramas requiring all the actors to say “cunt” repeatedly, this being considered the worst swearword possible and therefore cast-iron proof that the author was young, rebellious and hadn’t told his parents what time he’d be back that evening. I use the male pronoun because, with a couple of exceptions, the authors were all male. The women’s plays, of which I had also seen a few, tended to be more subtle stuff which didn’t attract the fanfares and shock value of the Angry Young Lads tendency; still, if I saw one more sensitive play about mother-daughter relationships I’d dig up my own and hold a black mass over the coffin.

What I had particularly noticed about the boys’ plays was that there was usually only one girl in them, and that she would, in the course of the evening, be called upon to take her top off, dress as a stripper, or both. The would-be intellectual authors restrained themselves to informing us that
the girl was wearing no knickers or had epic tits without actually causing her to produce them for display purposes. Still, this attention inevitably meant that at least half the audience would have its mind trained only on her VPL or bosom area for the rest of the evening.

In short, I had not been impressed. I said as much to Tom, who made the right disapproving shocked noises and then ruined it by inquiring, about as subtly as Jim Carrey registering surprise, which of the plays I had mentioned in my little rant actually involved full-frontal female nudity. I sneered, and was about to start bugging him about some of the more lurid flower/vulva comparisons in his book when the doorbell rang, sparing him temporarily.

“Hi, babe,” said Janey, my other best friend. She was laden with her customary huge satchel and a Marks & Spencer carrier bag, which was clinking and rustling temptingly. As she came in, I relieved her of the latter. Its contents had to be more interesting than the scripts with which the satchel was doubtless stuffed to the gills.

“You’re so thin!” she exclaimed to Tom, not having seen him since he got back from India.

“Spent a lot of time in Diarrhoeabad,” Tom said. “It’s this little town in Gujurat. They have a guaranteed weight-loss programme. You have to keep drinking fluids, otherwise you die, which is the only catch, but apart from that it’s better than a health farm. Cheaper, too. God! You’ve lost a lot of weight too! I could get my arms around you twice!” He held her by her shoulders and looked her up and down. “What happened? Did you get dysentery as well?”

Janey smiled complacently. From being a plumply formed Rubens, she had turned into a still curvy Renoir. The extreme pallor of her skin and her fair curling hair gave her an air of fragility, emphasised by the unexpectedly fine jawline that was now much more visible.

“Oh, I’ve been working very hard,” she said with elaborate casualness that fooled neither of us. “I’ve been too busy to eat.”

“Janey’s a PRODUCER AT THE BBC,” I announced, since Janey had clearly been struck by a fit of modesty. “She’s just finished shooting her first series.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant! Congratulations!” Tom enfolded Janey in an embrace. “Is that why you’ve got so smart? What happened to all those hippie-ish scarves and jewellery and stuff? It’s going to take a while for me to get used to you power-dressing.”

With the disrespectful familiarity of a brother, Tom plucked at the single strand of hand-beaten silver beads around her neck, rather like a gorilla toying with the idea of ripping them off to see if they would taste nice. His hands were as unwieldy as bunches of bananas. Sometimes I wondered if his opposing thumbs were fully evolved.

“Stop it, you oaf.” Janey slapped him off. Tom retired, looking hurt. “Sam, can I have a drink? I brought some nice white wine.” This was her tactful way of indicating that she preferred not to drink any rotgut I might be storing under the sink.

“Opened it already.” I handed her a glass and ripped open the packets of Marks & Spencer’s designer tortilla chips, placing the eviscerated shells on the table with their contents spilling out.

Janey stared at this prospect distastefully.

“Don’t you have a bowl to put those in?”

“Ye-es. Technically speaking.”

Janey knew exactly what that meant. “All right, I won’t ask what you’ve been mixing in it. Mm.” She drank some more wine. “This is very nice. So, Tom. How was India? Apart from the dysentery.”

Tom stared at her. “You haven’t read the book, have you?” he said dolefully.

Janey looked guilty. “I’m sorry. I’ve been shooting on location in Wales and I haven’t had time to do anything else—I’m really sorry. I’ll go out and get it this afternoon.” She paused. “What do you mean? Is the book a travelogue? I thought it was poems.”

“It is,” I said. Tom was too steeped in gloom to answer, and not because Janey hadn’t purchased a copy of So
Near/Too Near
(I told him those de-constructionist backstrokes went out of fashion a decade ago, but he wouldn’t listen). Chronicling in detail Tom’s break-up with the girlfriend who had accompanied him to India, it served as a useful shorthand guide for people wanting to know how the trip had gone, indicating all the
points of sensitivity to be avoided. In fact, after a perusal of the increasingly brutal and depressing events so faithfully described by poor Tom, the reader was fully warned that the only really safe topic of conversation would be floral. Vulva comparisons an optional extra.

“Tom and Alice,” I continued, deciding to summarise this for Janey to get Tom’s pain over with as quickly as possible, “split up in India, and the book’s mostly about that—”

“She
left
me,” Tom corrected bitterly. He was slumped into the armchair, head ducked, staring dully at his shoes. His familiar old navy Arran sweater, normally padded out at the front by a small but firm beer belly, hung loose around his torso as if his body had been deflated several degrees. It was pitiful for a man who had once resembled an extra-large and cuddly version of Paddington Bear. Even his chunky Irish face looked drawn without a nice amount of flesh round his jowls.