Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “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 pre
ferred 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.

  “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?”
<
br />   “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?”