Strawberry Tattoo (41 page)

“Bye, Kim, nice to see you again,” Barbara had the chutzpah to throw over her shoulder as they turned to go.

Kim might have been turned to stone. Even Stanley, Mr. Insensitive, noticed that something was wrong and withdrew his arm from her waist.

“Kim?” Lex put his arm round her shoulders. “Hey, fuck them, OK? Fuck them all. Come and have a drink.”

I took Kim’s hand and we guided her across the room and upstairs, away from Barbara’s orbit, with a brief pause at the bar for a bottle and three glasses. When it’s your own show they give you a bottle all to yourself. Further perks to be noted.

“Stanley, can I have a word?” I heard Carol saying in savage tones as we left them. Stanley was about to get ripped to shreds. I wished I could be there for the explosion.

Just in front of us on the staircase was Kevin, trotting up the steel treads with a glass in each hand and—I caught a glimpse of his expression as he rounded the bend—hope in his eyes. I made a bet with myself which I duly won as we came into the upstairs gallery and he headed straight for Java, who was circulating with a bottle of her own refilling guests’ glasses with a perfect waitressy manner. The idiocy of bringing a drink to someone who was busy providing them didn’t strike home till he was actually proffering the glass. Then he went red, laughing nervously. Actually, embarrassment
quite suited him; his blond handsomeness was too smug in repose, and the blush softened it. Not enough. Java gave him a kind rebuff, accompanied by an I’m-really-busy look which showed no promise of being improved on by time.

“He’s just a bastard, Kim,” Lex was saying comfortingly as we reached a quiet corner of the room. “Fathers are bastards. Nothing to be done about it. Here, have some bubbly.”

He put a glass in her hand and after a moment she raised it to her lips.

“I hate him,” she said after having drunk half its contents. “Bastard.”

“There you go!”

“And she’s a total bitch. Bitch, bitch, bitch. With those fucking awful ethnic sacks she wears.”

“That’s the spirit!” he encouraged.

Kim emptied her glass and looked around for more. I was already un-popping the bottle of fizz.

“It looks brilliant, Sam,” she said once the second glassful had gone down. “Your mobile. Brilliant. And so does Lex’s. You’re all brilliant.”

I didn’t think this was the time to mention her own paintings; I sensed that it would make her maudlin. Kim needed happy thoughts right now. I cast around for one.

“That’s a nice skirt,” Kim said, lightly tipsy. She was staring at a girl who had just come through the door.

“Too skinny,” Lex said, concentrating on the contents rather than the packaging. “Scary. Nothing under there but bone.”

“I’m thin,” Kim said in a fit of self-doubt.

“You’ve got lots of lovely muscle,” he said, squeezing her waist at the exact place Stanley had previously been fondling. “Feel that. Something there to get a grip on.”

The girl in the Chinese silk skirt accepted a refill from Java, and as she turned towards her I caught a glimpse of her face. I had been right when I had thought before that she had looked as if she were being consumed from inside. On fashion shoots, if the clothes don’t fit properly, the stylist nips them in at the back with bulldog clips, where it won’t show for the camera. Mel’s skin was as tightly drawn over the bones as if it had been
pulled back and held in much the same way. She was wearing a little vest which should have been snug but instead hung loose over the horizontal slats of her ribcage, baring their vulnerability. Above them her collarbones were as defined as a skeleton’s.

I noticed that her eyes lacked the frightening intensity they had had a few nights ago. Instead they seemed dulled, as if there were a film stretched over them. Perhaps the immediate proximity of Lex meant that she couldn’t afford to burn at high voltage, or she would explode.

“It’s Mel!” said Lex, happily unaware of any undercurrents. “Oi, Mel!” He waved at her. “Over here!”

Mel turned. Her gaze scarcely flickered when she saw Lex. She was carefully made up, simply and effectively: mascara on her long dark lashes and lipstick the same flaming shiny red as her silk skirt. The few touches of colour threw the pallor of her lightly powdered face into relief, her eyes black against her skin, her mouth crimson as a geisha’s. She looked macabre and beautiful, like a painted death mask.

“What’s happened to you, then?” Lex was saying as she hesitated for a long moment and then slowly started towards us. “You’ve got really skinny. What’s all this? Been dieting?”

He prodded her stomach. Men like Lex, who had an easy familiarity with other people’s bodies anyway, became even more physically affectionate once they’d had sex with them. It was a near-brotherly gesture. But poor Mel didn’t know that. A wild flush scorched her cheekbones. I thought again of Edgar Allan Poe: his wife Virginia had died of tuberculosis, and if this was how she had looked, I could understand the strange glamour that was attributed to the illness.

“I haven’t been very hungry lately,” she said, looking him straight in the eye as if neither Kim nor I existed for her.

“Well, you’d better get something down you. Eating disorders are so last year, as Kim would say.”

He hugged the latter affectionately. Mel went rigid. If I had reached out and pushed her at that moment she would have hit the ground all in one piece, like timber.

“This is Kim, by the way,” Lex said. “She’s an old friend of Sam’s. Mel
did that body painting you liked,” he added to Kim. “There’s another one in the next room.”

Lex was being unusually socially conscious: making introductions, giving useful information. It must be the coke.

“Shall we go and have a look?” Kim suggested. She was looking uncomfortable and I couldn’t blame her.

“You go,” Mel said in a little hard voice. “I’ll wait here with Sam.”

“OK,” Lex said with unabated cheerfulness. Wrapping his arm round Kim’s shoulders, he drew her across the shiny parquet and into the next room. Mel watched them go. Her body didn’t move, just her eyes, swivelling as if they were made of glass and set into the plastic head of a doll. It wasn’t pleasant.

“You didn’t tell him, did you?” she said when he was out of sight.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?” For the first time this evening she stared directly at me. I wished she hadn’t. It felt as if she were trying to drill into my skull and find out what I was thinking.

I shrugged, uncomfortable as I always was when caught doing someone a favour.

“No reason.”

Meeting Mel’s eyes was like looking down the twin bores of a shotgun. I cracked at once under the silent interrogation.

“Call it female solidarity, OK? We’ve all been fools for love in our time.”

“You haven’t,” she said with certainty. I felt like I was wriggling on a hook.

“Well, OK, not like that. This. You.” I flapped my hands around in a Stanleyesque way.

“Not about him,” she said as if confirming this to herself.

“Not about anyone! Look, Lex and I never went to bed, Mel. OK?”

I wanted to get this clear, not so much because I cared what she thought as my concern that Hugo might in some way hear a different version of the facts. But her gaze didn’t waver. It was with tremendous relief that I saw Rob across the room, talking to Suzanne and some of her Belgian
friends. The latter were unmissable: not a man under six foot three, and built to match their height. There must be growth hormone in the mussels. Why Hitler had thought the master race originated in Germany was a mystery. Beside the males of her species, even Suzanne looked small and delicate. It was quite an achievement.

All the men looked as if they had come straight from negotiating some enormous bid, trousering a hefty commission in the process. Their watches were made by Rolex and Patek Philippe, their suits Armani and Hugo Boss. The meanest of them would be more than capable of keeping Suzanne in the style to which she wished to become accustomed. How long she would endure it before dying of boredom was presumably not her principal consideration.

And mine right now was being rescued from a cross-examination by Mel. I waved Rob over as eagerly as if I were standing on the hull of a sinking boat and signalling frantically to a passing ship. Although he seemed taken aback by the warmth of my welcome, as well he might be—I barely knew him, after all—he joined us with alacrity. Staring at Belgian men’s nipple areas couldn’t be that confidence-building for a guy.

“Hi,” he said. “Suzanne’s been showing me round the gallery. Did you clock all those Rodriguez paintings in the back office? Really wicked.”

“The egg cup ones?”

“Egg boxes,” he corrected me. “Yeah. Pretty powerful stuff.”

I wrinkled my nose in disbelief at this criminal misuse of words. If those things were powerful, what did you reach for to describe a Rothko? Still, I was too glad to have had my tête-à-tête with Mel broken up to start hammering Rob about the paucity of his vocabulary. I could do that any time.

“Yours look excellent,” he said generously. “I really like the way you’ve hung this one.” He gestured to “Organism #2.” “Good stuff.”

“Oh, thanks. And your pub video’s great,” I lied unctuously in return.

Rob was a video artist. He had made his name with a film of three girls sitting still for twenty minutes; his latest piece had been made by putting a hand-held camera in the middle of the table when he and a group of
mates, all lads, went out drinking, and turning it every ten minutes to face a different member of the party. There were six of them, so the video lasted an hour, which was fifty-nine minutes more than I had watched of it. Below the TV screen which was showing the video on continuous loop were pinned Polaroids of each of the participants with their names signed at the bottom. Riveting stuff. It was amazing what boring crap you could get away with if you were clever enough to call yourself an artist. A filmmaker with the same project wouldn’t have held an audience for any longer than Rob’s video had me.

“Yeah, it’s all right,” he said modestly. “Andy was pretty cool. You know, the second-to-last guy, where he says all that about Tarantino.”

Oh God. I pasted a smile onto my face. Even Tarantino couldn’t do Tarantino any longer without sounding derivative. I mumbled some further polite words of appreciation and hoped devoutly that I would never have to watch the wretched thing all the way through.

Rob was flushed with the wine and the accolades, which meant that his skin, already subject to breakouts, looked as raw and pink as if he had just run a cheese grater over it. He was still in his dark blue denim outfit, but now one of his popcorn-bucket-sized turn-ups was much higher than the other. I had the feeling that this was some kind of hanging-with-the-homeboys, I-just-got-out-of-prison statement.

“God, it’s great to be here, isn’t it!” he exclaimed, raising his glass. “New York and all that! Brilliant, eh?” Then he looked round our little group: me distracted, Mel in a voodoo trance. “What’s up with you lot?” he demanded. “We should all be on top of the world!”

Mel stared at him without saying a word. Her expression was enough to take most of the wind out of his sails.

“Mel! Sam! Rob! You guys can’t stand and chat together! You’re supposed to be circulating!” Carol cried, bearing down on us.

I couldn’t help relishing the irony of this.

“Stay here for now,” she said to me and Rob, speeding Mel away efficiently. I pitied the poor buyer who tried to get a few friendly words out of Catatonia Girl. “I’ll be bringing someone up to talk to you.”

I pulled a God-I-hate-this-social-shit face at Rob. Then I noticed that he was wearing one of those long Leo-type knee chains.

“Tell me something,” I said, succumbing to curiosity. “Isn’t it really difficult to keep that from getting wet when you go to the loo?”

I pointed at the chain. Rob was taken aback. Reaching down, he felt along its length. A strange, distant look flittered across his face and as he straightened up he wiped his hand discreetly along his jeans.

“Nah, no problem,” he said bluffly.

I made a mental note not to touch any part of Rob’s body. Nice, for a change, to have a resolution which didn’t tax my self-control to the limit.

An hour or so later I had done most of my polite conversations with potentially important people. One of Mel’s paintings had been sold, for quite a lot of money, and the rest of us were trying to be pleasant about it rather than succumbing to jealous fits. It helped that we had all imbibed freely and consequently were able to take setbacks in a broad and generous spirit.

Released by Carol for the time being, I went upstairs, finding the door to the offices wedged open to allow people access to the toilets without having to tap in the entry code every time. How thoughtful. I cast a quick glance round the gallery and saw Suzanne on the far side, heading towards our target. Sensing my eyes on her, she flickered her fingers at me discreetly. I didn’t have much time.

As I emerged from the loo, refreshed and ready to face the world once more, I bumped into Laurence.

“What’re you doing hanging round outside the toilets?” I said reprovingly.