Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  With huge thanks to all the New York posse who so nobly kept me company on the various bar crawls, gorge-fests and clubbing required by the demands of research. Bini and Francis, the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of Cobble Hill; Aaron—Mr. Connected; Katrien; Tia; Kelle; Gay, not only the blading queen but a job hostess who came to my rescue when I really needed it; and everyone else who took me to parties and did their best to keep me amused. Special gratitude to Angela Westwater of Sperone Westwater, who kindly answered lots of obvious questions without sneering at me, and to Andy and Kay for putting me in touch with her. Big thanks to Adrian, who couldn’t do a better job as a publicist if I paid him in hard cash rather than sundried tomatoes, and to Margot and Sandy for their editorial comments. Lois and Michelle, you have really lovely flats. Apartments. And thanks, on that subject, to my New York dialogue coach.

  There was a boy in it. As so often. He was very handsome and he was staring at me with flattering concentration.

  I was enjoying this immoderately.

  He was dark, which in general I prefer, with big dark eyes and full, pouty lips. But mainly I noticed his eyelashes. They were very long, and he was standing so close to me that I could almost feel the gentle whisper against my skin as he lowered them. He was looking at something below my line of vision, pointing at it urgently; I bent over to see what it was, rather reluctantly, because I wanted to go on looking at him instead. But all I could see was white, a shiny white surface stretching away into the distance, and I had no idea what I was supposed to be searching for. He was speaking, but despite the fact that he was pressed up against me, I could hardly hear him. I pulled back a little and was struck again by how dark his eyes were, how wide….

  We were in a tiny narrow room, the walls painted a dull dirty yellow, flaking and peeling so badly I thought of something funny to say about them and then didn’t. That kind of restraint is highly unusual for me, and I started to wonder if I were feeling all right. But I was promptly distracted by a more pressing problem. Literally: the room was closing in on us, exactly like that scene from Star Wars where Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia are trapped in the rubbish compactor on the Death Star. Suddenly we were braced against the walls, desperately straining every muscle to keep them from compressing us down into pulp. I looked around for the hairy one—what was his name? Chewbacca—to help, but he wasn’t around.

  “Quick, you call him!” I said to the boy. “He might come for you. He’s very hairy, you know.”

  But he didn’t know what I was talking about, and he started to bat his eyelashes, and suddenly such a gale blew up that the walls fell away and we were floating, caught helplessly by different multicoloured whirlpools and sucked down into their hearts, our limbs flung out by the wind. It was like being dragged into the opening titles of Charlie’s Angels. For a moment I saw us both, thrown apart, our silhouettes, black against the bright primary swirls of colour, dwindling into their centres….

  “Goodness,” I said. “This has gone very Seventies all of a sudden.”

  And then I woke up.

  My eyes opened and I knew with absolute conviction that I had recently done something very, very bad indeed. It was one of those nebulous sensations where your brain, already clouded by heavy mists of alcohol and various chemical substances, struggles simultaneously to retrieve the information and shove it into the deepest darkest pigeonhole at the back of the skull. Unfortunately there was so much stuff in there already that this latest atrocity wouldn’t quite fit.

  Damn. I could still feel it hovering in skull hyperspace. I sat up slightly, propping some pillows behind me, rather surprised that I wasn’t feeling suicidal with pain at the change of position. Oh, that’s right. Class A drugs. Always great for cancelling out the worst symptoms of the morning after. Which was another reason I wasn’t suffering too much physically: it was past two in the afternoon. People who complain about hangovers are always the ones who have to get up for work. I recommend simply cutting out the last part and sleeping through it instead. But then I can. I haven’t had a proper job for so long I can’t remember when.

  By now the mental torment had cranked itself up several gears and was giving of its best. I was still unable to remember the precise character of the abomination against nature I had committed, and the frustration was growing unbearable. As usual, I would rather know the worst than be tortured by endless speculation. That was me all over. Open the box even if the cat’s dead. At least that way you know what the score is.

  Oh God, what if I didn’t manage to remember what I did last night without help? I shuddered, perfectly aware that blackouts were one of the main signs of alcoholism. Like most people who drink with gusto, I had lists of these memorised from various magazines, with the ones that didn’t apply to me picked out reassuringly in mental highlighter. No, I didn’t have blackouts (well, not if I could remember what happened last night under my own steam, I didn’t); friends of mine had never said they were worried about my intake (not being hypocrites); and, um, it didn’t impair my ability to do my job. Such as it was. Somehow the lists never included vomiting in your sleep, which I found perplexing. A friend of mine from art school did this once—it was spectacular, in a perverse, Tarantinoesque kind of way—and it had always remained for me pretty much the benchmark for when you were entering I Have A Problem territory.

  In any case I would rather die than ring anyone who had been present last night and pump them for information. Hah! I thought triumphantly, effortlessly accessing that file. At least I knew who I’d been out with, which was a start. An embarrassing start, because it had been a group of young British artists, or yBas, a shorthand now adopted by some of the more fashionable art critics, and one I loathed. The sooner it was cancelled off the face of the earth the better. Not to mention some of the more pretentious antics indulged in by the leading yBas themselves.

  That was a thought. Could I have put theory into practice and murdered some young British artists? I perked up immediately, toying with a series of exciting possibilities. Maybe I’d sawed someone in half and pickled him in a giant fish tank—or knocked someone else over the head and videoed her in a coma for an hour—or shoved yet another into a vat of concrete and let it set, then cracked it open and removed her, leaving only the space she’d made (deeply significant)…. My own fate would be easy enough to work out: strung up on a chain like one of my own mobiles with lots of silver-sprayed ivy coming out of my mouth. Less meaningful, but then I wasn’t a conceptualist. And I wasn’t a young British artist except in the literal meaning of the word. I didn’t compact images of myself down into a garbage bag, or paint all the names of men I’d failed to get off with over gallery walls, or make fountains of chocolate that looked like rather dribbly poo. (Though actually I’d loved the chocolate fountains.)

  I was pretty damn unfashionable, actually. Which was why it had surprised me when, just after a joint exhibition I and some other not-at-all-shocking bods had done at a Kunsthalle in Germany, a very well known New York gallery owner called Carol Bergmann had asked me to take part in another group show she was organising in October. It was to be called “Two By Four: Works by Young British Artists.” But it was in New York. For that I bowed my head and let her hang the yBa label round my neck.

  Besides all the other obvious advantages of the place, my best and oldest friend—practically my adopted sister—had gone to live in New York more than ten years ago, leaving me a painting as a farewell gift. I hadn’t had a word from her since. As soon as the trip had been suggested, a vision had popped into my mind of Kim’s face as she turned to wave goodbye at Heathrow passport control, and a sharp pang in my gut had indicated how much I still missed her. On arrival I fully intended to hunt her down like a
dog.

  (One of my New Year’s resolutions was to give up saying gnomically, “If I had only known how things would turn out….” So I shall bite my tongue at this point. It probably wouldn’t have made that much difference in any event. People would still have died. And people die wherever I go—I’m more or less Miss Marple crossed with weedkiller—so staying at home would have made two sets of murders instead of one. Considered in that light, going to New York had been the right decision.)

  Anyway, that was what I had been doing last night. I had gone out for drinks with the other three yBas who were providing two works each for the exhibition. (Two By Four. It was a pun. If this were a sample of Carol Bergmann’s ready wit we were in for a non-stop laugh-fest in the States.)

  Most of them knew each other already to some degree, having all been at Camberwell and thus forming part of that neatly connected mafia, and I had bumped into one or two at various arty bashes: but still, a formal bonding session seemed like a good idea.

  I flashed back to the pub on Curtain Road; it would be Curtain Road, wouldn’t it, just as later on we had gone to the drum and bass night in Hoxton Square. It was as if we had wanted to fulfil the yBa stereotype that the Old Street roundabout was the centre of the known universe. Feature writers made it sound as if the caffs down Old Street were the Nineties equivalent of the Algonquin Round Table. It was a surprise that Hello! hadn’t taken some photos yet for their society pages. “Mr. Damien Hirst and Miss Rachel Whiteread sharing a joke over beans on toast, shortly to be joined by Miss Gillian Wearing, who has promised to drop by for a cup of tea and a bacon butty….”

  Our New York contingent consisted of two boys and two girls. The other girl, Mel Safire, I knew a little, though I had to squint around the pub for a while before making her out. She had gone full-throttle for that look where you deliberately downplay your sexuality, not to mention your sex. It’s easy enough to achieve. You start by dressing in the kind of utility chic—all hiking gear and walking boots and huge strap-across rucksacks with seventeen interior sealed waterproof pockets—that looks as if you’re just about to set off on a trans-Arctic expedition. Then you throw on an overlarge army surplus coat with big brass buttons and one of those ethnically patterned knitted hats with a floppy bit at the top where the pompom should be. Now you resemble a moujik who’s managed to get hold of a mail-order catalogue from a fashionable winter-sports shop. Your eyebrows are strong, dark and unplucked, your forehead shiny and your lips spurn anything more exotic than Lypsyl Rose. If you are thin, with cheekbones sufficiently pronounced so that you can cut off most of your hair without looking pudding-faced, this look will work for you. Mel was, and it did.

  She was shy. At least that was the most flattering explanation for the fact that she had a Walkman strapped to her waist and kept fiddling with the headphones as if she wanted to put them on and escape into another world. Still, she was friendly, with a surprisingly clear voice, like a single bell-note that cuts through louder conversation. We were probably too different ever to become friends, but I liked her well enough. I had heard she had a reputation for being an obsessive, but so far there was no sign of it. I didn’t mind her work, either: she did huge paintings of tiny, blown-up sections of naked flesh. They qualified as sensationalist enough to make her a proper yBa because they were usually of genitals or secondary sexual organs, but so enlarged that only by reading the label next to them would you have known what they were. This was pretty cunning, allowing her both to paint well and be technically rude enough not to remain excluded from the great tidal wave of cheap, fashionable sex-violence -and-mutilation that was currently so popular.

  Rob Robinson seemed quiet, too. That was a polite way of saying that he bored me. I had the impression that if he did start talking it would be about computer games or remixes of deliberately obscure records. His appearance was techno-geeky: he had entered the pub in the kind of big sur-vivalist anorak that men nowadays collect and for which they are willing to pay violently inflated prices. This was the whole irony: that his and Mel’s new brutalist outfits had probably cost six times the price of my little sweater and much-loved pewter slit skirt. Rob had then divested himself of the anorak to reveal that he was wearing head-to-toe denim, the very dark blue, new-looking kind. His jacket was snug, his jeans overlarge with three-inch turnups and, on the back pocket, the biggest and silliest logo I had ever seen. It might look all right in iD, but I bet none of the editors actually wore that kind of thing out. I smirked, hearing the whoops of the fashion victim ambulance siren, and smoothed down my skirt complacently. I had never seen the point of wearing clothes that didn’t fit.

  And then there was Lex. He breezed into the pub as if he owned it, positively proud of being late, cocky and convinced of his own charm. I disliked him on sight. They say you always hate the people in whom you recognise yourself.

  “All right?” he said cheerfully round the table. “Mel, my darling!” He ruffled her hair. Mel looked flattered rather than annoyed. “Rob! My man!” Lex ruffled Rob’s hair too. Even this didn’t seem to go amiss. By this time my lips were drawn back from my teeth. If I’d been a dog I would have been growling. I was waiting to see if his hand came anywhere near my head. Higher than my neck and I would bite.

  “You must be Sam,” he said. I had narrowed my eyes mesmerically in a stare that meant don’t-even-think-about-ruffling-my-hair, but, to my great annoyance, I felt the hostility fading as soon as we looked at each other. I heard the little click in my stomach, the one that happens as two people recognise their mutual attraction, and saw by the slight widening of his eyes that he had sensed it too. We nodded at each other by way of greeting; at this kind of moment you don’t shake hands, being nervous of the electrical currents.

  “I saw that article on you in the Herald a while back,” he said easily to me, pulling up a stool and straddling it in that male way that means “my balls are so big I have to sit with my legs wide apart.” “Nice photo. And you did the set for that Shakespeare down King’s Cross, didn’t you?”

  We hopefully-up-and-coming artists all kept tabs on each other. However different our aspirations might be—Richard Serra or Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp or Paula Rego—everyone else was a kind of rival, for critical acclaim at least. Lex was being honest in acknowledging this, which I appreciated. I didn’t warm to him, though. I thought he was only doing it to show how secure he was. I’d been about to use exactly the same manoeuvre myself.

  “Yes, I haven’t exactly had an orthodox career to date,” I said amiably. “Not like you—Camberwell, Black Box and now Saatchi, so I hear.”

  Black Box was the gallery all the young and self-consciously iconoclastic artists aspired to. It had been mean of me to mention Saatchi, though. I hadn’t heard that this was a done deal and Lex would doubtless be superstitious about it being discussed too openly. But I am usually nastier to people I fancy—I like to see if they can take a bit of punishment—and Lex was a professional rival, too. He was asking for it on several fronts.

  “Saatchi’s interested in you?” Mel said, wide-eyed. “That’s brilliant, Lex!” I noted that she sounded impressed rather than jealous. Lex’s charm had made her forget that he was the competition.

  “Oi! Never say that out loud, it’s bad luck,” Lex said, holding up his hands in instinctive protest. “The S-word, I mean. That’s still pretty far down in the pipeline.”

  I tried not to smirk. My source of information had told me that he had been boasting about it in the Groucho a few nights ago. But there couldn’t have been any other artists present.

  “Change the subject, change the subject,” he continued, when it looked as if Mel was about to say something more. “I’ll get another round in, shall I? What’s everyone drinking?”

  “Saatchi,” Mel breathed when he was at the bar. The mere word itself was enough to conjure up a heady atmosphere of money and renown.

  “Bit of a mixed blessing, though,” said Rob, who obviously considered himself the voice
of reason. “He always wants to buy up most of your stuff. Then it sits in a basement for years, where no one can see it, and if he dumps you all in one go your value drops like a stone.”

  “Yeah, well, I know that,” Mel said acidly. “But what I couldn’t do with all that dosh …and the space is brilliant.”

  “If you ever get to show in it. I mean, you might just stay in the basement for ever.”

  “I wouldn’t turn him down if he made me an offer, Rob. Would you?” Her tone was even more cutting.

  “I dunno, actually,” he said. He had short ginger hair which contrasted with his pink face so that it was hard to see if he was blushing or not. Now he fiddled with his heavy black-framed spectacles, looking embarrassed. “I might,” he said finally.

  Mel gave a snort of disbelief. I didn’t. Somehow I thought Rob meant it.

  Lex returned triumphantly with all four glasses pressed tightly together between his two hands, the way amateurs or boys showing off carried them. He dumped his burden onto the table, foam splashing from his pint into Rob’s Guinness. Rob flicked it off ostentatiously, but Lex ignored this by-play.

  “So, how’s it all going?” he said. His presence raised the energy levels of everyone round the table; there was a charge coming off him which we could not help but acknowledge. I observed his body language, the legs once more straddled across the stool as if it were as wide as a Western saddle, the way his easy gestures—reaching for his pack of cigarettes, bumming a match off Mel—took in more than his own share of space. As he lit his cigarette, ducking his head to the match, he looked up at me from under his eyelashes, his big dark eyes unashamedly flirtatious. Lex Thompson was a raging tart.

  “Anyone else but me met this Carol Bergmann woman?” he was saying.

  “Oh, you know her?” Mel said. Her voice changed, softened, whenever she talked directly to Lex. We were each responding to him in our different ways; when I fancy someone I tend to get tougher with them, even more sarcastic than usual, and tonight was no exception.