Strawberry Tattoo (5 page)

“OK,” I went on, “um, Alice left Tom—”

“For an
American hippie guru with a straggly beard.”

“Tom’s very savage about the beard, and in fact the guy’s facial hair generally,” I informed Janey. “It’s one of the best poems in the book. You’ll never be able to see a pair of sideburns again without shuddering.”

Janey refilled her glass with alacrity. “I’m really sorry, Tom,” she said, casting around her for a way to alleviate the situation. “Have a biscuit?”

Tom’s huge head lifted, a faint ray of hope beginning to gleam through the bleakness of his expression.

“Are they chocolate?”

“Double chocolate chip,” said Janey winningly, holding the box just out of his reach as if trying to tempt him back from the brink of a precipice. There was a long pause. Then Tom leaned over and took three. Janey let out her breath in relief. Tom still looked sullen with grief, but the rate at which he was cramming in the biscuits suggested that his life was not completely without incidental pleasures.

“What about you?” he said, wiping away with his sleeve the crumbs from around his mouth.

“Oh, everything’s going OK. With a few setbacks. I just came from a
meeting with the composer, who’s driving us mad. He keeps trying to write whole symphonies when all we’ve asked him to do is ten seconds of lurk.”

“Ten seconds of lurk?” I was baffled.

“Oh, you know. Music to create an atmosphere. Someone’s lurking in the shadows, and the music has to sound ominous. You piece in what you need. Fifteen seconds of panic here, twenty of rural calm there …”

“How weird. It’s like being a haberdasher, cutting lengths off different trimmings.”

“You could say that.” I didn’t think Janey was particularly amused by the comparison.

“How’s Helen?” Tom asked her. “She got a part in the new series?”

“Um, no,” Janey said in that faux-light tone you use to indicate that you’re all right about a recent break-up. “Helen and I aren’t together any longer.”

Tom looked incredulous. “Helen left you just when you started producing a series? She must be out of her mind! Or did she go off with someone more important?”

He had perked up considerably at the idea of Janey, too, being alone and bereft. This despite the fact that her ex-girlfriend Helen had made toxic waste look warm and caring.

“Tom!” I said curtly. “Hobnailed boots alert!”

“Actually it was me who left Helen,” Janey said, coughing. “I’m with someone else now. She’s my co-producer on the series.”

“Oh, right,” Tom said, deflated. “So I’m the only one who’s been abandoned. Brilliant. That makes me feel really great.”

“His book got excellent reviews,” I offered. “I’ve seen the cuttings.”

“The reviewers were the only people who read it,” Tom informed us, embittered. “And they get it free.”

“But poetry doesn’t sell, Tom,” Janey said, her tone rather too much that of a thriving BBC producer pointing out the obvious. “You know that.”

“Well, hark at you,” Tom said resentfully. “Callused by success. What
should I be doing, according to you, Janey? Writing TV serials with lots of gratuitous nudity and drugs and ten seconds of music to bonk to, which everyone’ll forget about half an hour after they’ve seen them? Maybe then I could afford to live somewhere a bit better than a co-op house in Stoke Newington where we have to have meetings of the washing-machine committee every two hours.”

This is the trouble when people actually start making it in their arty career of choice. While everyone’s struggling together, mutual support is constant and unquestioning: it has to be. Then someone takes their first step up the ladder and everyone else thinks you have it made. But, once you’ve got over the heady rush of actually standing on the sodding thing, you realise how far there is still to climb, and the friends who haven’t yet made it that far are resentful when you point this out. Whereas the ones further up the ladder can’t help looking down on you a little.

It was as sobering as a dash of cold water. Despite the success of my exhibitions to date and the prospects in New York, my income was still very unreliable, coming in great staggering bursts of feast punctuated by considerably larger periods of famine. And at least there was occasional money in sculpture; there was none in poetry. In one way Janey was right to point out this harsh reality. But from another perspective her doing so was an unbearably smug pronouncement which could only be made by someone safe in a much more commercial realm than mine and Tom’s.

“I was just saying—” she started.

“Yeah, right.” Tom ignored this. “We’re all doing so bloody well, aren’t we? I’ve earned about twenty pence from exploiting my heartbreak and betrayal, Sam’s got an exhibition in New York and is struggling pitifully to have something approaching a normal human relationship, which would be a laugh if it weren’t so painful to watch—it’s like a psychopath trying to go steady and settle down—and you, Janey, have turned into a power-crazed, superior BBC megalomaniac in a tailored suit.”

“That is totally unfair!”

The combatants needed distracting before they came to blows. I decided to throw in my adventures in toilet world last night as a bone.

“Janey, don’t listen to him,” I said. “I need your advice on a matter of the heart.”

This was a cast-iron certainty to make Janey sit up and pay attention. Briefly I recounted the details, with a short character sketch of the other protagonist. Janey listened, blue eyes wide, head propped on one hand in the classic agony aunt position, taking sips from her glass. Finally she said:

“And you’re sure you
need
to tell Hugo?”

“That’s what I said!”

“Shut up, Tom,” we said in unison.

“After all,” she continued, “you’re going off next week. Is this Lex going to be there?”

“Not at once. He’s coming over about a week later.”

“So you’ll have a bit of time together before the exhibition opens. I mean, to let the situation adjust itself. Hugo’s going over for the opening, isn’t he?”

I nodded.

“Well, look, by the time he arrives it’ll all have simmered down. By the sound of this Lex, once he realises there’s no joy to be had from you he’ll have forgotten all about you and be off chasing anything else with breasts and a pulse.”

“Gosh, thanks for the flattery,” I muttered.

“Everything will be over and done with when Hugo gets there,” Janey continued, ignoring this. “Relax. It’s really not going to be a problem.”

“Unless she gets pissed again and decides to make a Lex-rated night of it,” Tom said unhelpfully, still resentful at having been told to shut up.

I glared at him. “Your puns are crap,” I said coldly. “Always have been, always will be. Men,” I added scornfully to Janey. “Can’t live with them, can’t kill them except under a ridiculously narrow set of circumstances.”

“You should know,” Tom retorted. Still sensitive, he had been pushed too far and this was him snapping. Janey drew in her breath sharply. His reference would have been unforgivable if I hadn’t been making major efforts in the past year or so to come to terms with my homicidal past. It still was reasonably unforgivable, though, and, going by his shocked
expression, Tom had realised this as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

“I’m really sorry, Sammy,” he mumbled. “I feel like the biggest piece of shit alive.”

“Metaphor watch is bleeping,” I said acidly. “Last time I looked, shit was dead. Take a hint from it.”

Janey put an arm around my shoulders. “You’re redeeming yourself through art,” she said, only half-flippantly. “And there’s more to come in the Big Apple. Try not to kill anyone over there, OK?”

“Can’t promise anything,” I said, picking up my glass and shooting Tom one of my special evil glares. “But I’ll do my level best to avoid it.”

“Where to, lady?” the cab driver said without looking round.

“Spring Street. The Bergmann LaTouche Gallery.”

“Whatever.”

He couldn’t have sounded more bored if I had offered to recite him the collected speeches of John Major. Still, I warmed to him. At last this was the fabled New York misanthropy. I had been looking forward to the combination of malign neglect and random insults to make me feel at home.

The cab pulled away with a jerk that sent my head slamming back against the seat. A voice said loudly: “Prr! This is Eartha Kitt.”

I looked around me wildly, but I appeared to be the only person in the cab. And, going by his photograph, the driver was definitely not Eartha Kitt. So either the bump on the head had given me a light concussion, or…

“Cats have nine lives, grrr,” Eartha went on, “but unfortunately you have only one. So buckle your seat belt for safety. Have a purrrr-fect day!”

Obediently, I did up the seat belt. What Catwoman said went.

Manhattan was the least welcoming sight I had ever seen. The skyscrapers, each trying to shoulder away and outdo its neighbours, were so totally uninterested in leaving space for any human inhabitants that the choppy grey waters of the East River looked positively inviting by contrast. As we crossed them I had the sensation of a giant portcullis raised above our heads, not as a threat, but as a warning. New York’s motto
would definitely be something medieval and pitiless. The only thing missing was a collection of freshly severed heads spiked along the bridge.

We shot past a parked Mack truck, so huge it was like a flash from
The Terminator
, the opening sequence where the machines have taken over. A delivery man was swinging himself down from the driver’s seat, mountaineering gingerly down a series of crampons set in the side of the truck to help him reach terra firma intact. He looked like a tiny, frail, partially evolved joke of nature which the truck could crunch up and spit out any time it wanted to. And the cars were enormous, too. Why was that? Maybe people in America were widening out just so they didn’t feel dwarfed by their vehicles. The problem of obesity here could be solved in a stroke simply by banning everything bigger than a Nissan Miera.

Suddenly we screeched to a halt five centimetres away from another cab. I was grateful to Eartha Kitt, as her advice had stopped me fracturing my forehead against the partition. These cabs were so solid they felt bullet- and probably even bomb-proof; the driver was the real menace. We pulled away with another potentially neck-dislocating manoeuvre, jumping the light so that we (I use the pronoun figuratively) could pass the hapless driver in front and scream abuse at him. Unsurprisingly, he promptly took offence. At the next traffic light he pulled up next to us and started yelling:

“Fuck you, man! Fuck you!”

“Fuck you!” spat back my driver. I mean the spat part quite literally. Dribble ran down his mouth. He looked like Hulk Hogan’s thinner, nastier younger brother, right down to the stringy fair hair and the trailing moustache.

“Fuck you!” responded the other driver at full throttle. The lights changed. We were off again. It was turning into a race out of the Dastardly and Muttley cartoon. Luckily I was jet-lagged and spacey enough to treat it with a kind of dopey, detached appreciation, rather than panic at being trapped in a speeding cab with one lunatic while another snapped at our hubcaps. My driver speeded up still further, upping the insult stakes triumphantly by yelling:

“Fuck your
mother!
Fuck your
mother!”
out of the passenger window as the other cab pulled level, accompanying it with the kind of gestures of which even a visiting Martian would have grasped the significance.

“AAAAAAH! Fuck
you!”
ululated the other driver. “Fuck
you!”

“Where in Spring Street didja say?” my driver asked me, swivelling his head round to stare at me while scorching rubber with the speed of our passage. His voice was relatively normal, which made the homicidal, eye-popping mask of rage on his face even more unnerving.

I gave him the number.

“OK, next block,” he said. At that moment the other cab shot up beside us on the wrong side of the street. Leaning over towards us, one hand precariously on the wheel, its driver doused mine with a great spray of water from a plastic bottle. At least I hoped, for everyone’s sake, that it was water.

We did a screaming emergency stop that bucked the cab in the air like a bronco, tyres shuddering, cutting the other cab off. My driver was out so fast I wasn’t sure if he’d bothered to open the door first. I squinted at the meter. Nine dollars eighty. I dropped a ten-dollar note on the front seat and jumped out the other side—prudent me. I didn’t want to find myself being used as a human shield.

“AAAAAH! PIECE OF SHIT! I’M ALL WET!” my driver shouted while trying to rip the other’s door off its hinges with his bare hands.

“I left the fare on your seat, OK?” I yelled.

“Right, right,” he said abstractedly, going back to his cab and reaching for something under the front seat. Over his shoulder he yelled: “COME OUT AND DIE, YOU FUCKING WATER-SPRAYING PIECE OF SHIT!”

Making a quick check on the street numbers, I realised that Bergmann LaTouche was only a few doors away. I trotted along briskly, looking neither to right nor left. Behind me the screaming and honking was getting louder, now accompanied by what sounded like someone trying to compact down a car using only a large hammer and a lot of excess energy.