Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “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.

  Lounging in front of Bergmann LaTouche’s high, white-painted door was a man who looked like an albino gorilla with tattoos. I would never be able to compare Tom to a primate again. This guy was the real thing, right down to the low forehead and the huge, dangling arms whose knuckles nearly scraped the ground. He wore a long-sleeved thermal T-shirt under a baggy pair of dungarees. Despite his being long-waisted, the dungarees hung so low that the crotch was at mid-thigh, the hems puddling around his work boots. This made it impossible to size up his bottom. Perhaps it was saggy, and he had adopted this style of dress to conceal it.

  He said something in such a low drawl I couldn’t make it out.

  “Sorry?”

  “What’s goin’ owen down there?” he said, raising his voice with what seemed like an effort. There was an entire symphony of honks going by now; the cabs were blocking the road and other drivers were protesting vehemently.

  “My cab driver’s beating up another cab driver.”

  “They fightin’ over you?” he said, as if this would be quite a normal occurrence.

  “Of course not,” I said blankly.

  “Goin’ at it good?” He was almost coming to life now, his voice reaching a normal pitch.

  I shrugged. “Why don’t you go down and have a look?” I suggested, rather repelled by his obvious enthusiasm for a fight. It was all too easy to imagine him in a zoo with a sign saying: “Partially Evolved Hillbilly. Dangerous. Please Do Not Feed.”

  “Nah. Cain’t leave my post,” he said with more than a tinge of irony.

  “Do you work here?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He added something I didn’t catch.

  “Sorry?” I said again, increasingly annoyed.

  “I’m the handler. I move stuff. You English?”

  “No, I’m from Brooklyn.”

  “Huh? Oh.” He grinned. “Brit sense of humour, right? Hi, I’m Dahn. You must be part of the next show.”

  “Hi, Dahn.” I assumed this was Don. “I’m Sam Jones.”

  “The installation one.” Don pulled a face. “I hate theym. Too much like hard work. No offence. This your first tahm in New York?”

  “Yup.”

  Down the road the cries of testosterone-charged rage had ceased, as had the panel-beating, though the klaxons were still blasting at full volume. Cutting like a knife through the din I could hear the increasingly loud whine of a siren. Clearly the drivers had heard it, too.
A cab shot past us from the direction of the fight, going so fast it was a mere streak of yellow vanishing into the distance.

  “It’s broken up,” Don said superfluously. “Well”—he spread his hands wide, as the second cab speeded past, it too making good time—“what can I say? Uh, I guess ‘Welcome to New York’ would be good, right?”

  As soon as you walk into any serious gallery, the receptionist will size you up to see if they think you’re capable of dropping a few grand—at least—on a work of art. Duggie, who runs the gallery where I show in London, trains his assistants to check out the visitors’ shoes, which he swears by as the most reliable indicator of wealth. But the usual procedure is the quick, full-body, up-and-down flick with their eyes, which, if they are skilled enough, can feel rather like someone scraping a steel brush over the more sensitive parts of your anatomy. I assume that if the verdict comes out positive, the sensation is more one of being lovingly caressed by the silky hair of highly trained and enthusiastic sex slaves, but so far I haven’t been in a position to confirm this theory.

  The girl on the desk at Bergmann LaTouche was so beautiful that to be sized up by her was a privilege. And I appreciated the skill of the extra sideways-and-down glance to see if I was carrying a portfolio and might therefore be a trouble-causing aspirant artist.

  “Hi!” she said in a bright automatic tone. Her accent was American, but she was a mix of races in which Asian had won by the shortest of heads. Her skin was smooth and the pale fawn of buffed expensive suede, her eyes wide and dark and almond-shaped. And now her smooth forehead was creasing into a frown.

  “I’m sorry,” she said politely, “but don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  She was wearing a pale silk shirt and charcoal gabardine trousers, her hair was scraped back into a little knot at the back of her neck, and she appeared to be wearing no make-up at all. But she looked eerily flawless, which in practice meant that she was wearing a lot more than I was, only applied with infinitely more cunning. No jewellery, no adornment, apart from the silver twist of her belt buckle, but the shirt and trousers looked as if they had been cut to fit her, and her hair was beautifully done, with a few perfectly groomed little strands emerging with artful care from the knot. New York minimalism done to perfection.

  “I’m Sam Jones,” I said. “Part of the next show.”

  “Oh, of course! I must have seen your photo in the press stuff.” She looked relieved to have placed me. “Hi, I’m Java. Nice to meet you. I’ll call Carol down for you. I don’t think she’s in a meeting.”

  “Java?” I said, after she had buzzed up to Carol Bergmann.

  She gave a rueful smile. I was glad to see that her teeth were sharp and slightly irregular in a non-American, reassuringly imperfect kind of way.

  “I had this hippie Dutch mother. My dad’s Korean. My mom still doesn’t know where she got the name from.”

  “A pack of coffee?” I suggested. “Lucky you didn’t end up being called Continental Blend.”

  Java’s smile remained exactly in place, but her eyes froze. For a horrible moment I thought I had offended her, but then I realised that she simply hadn’t understood me.

  “I’m sorry?” she said, polite as ever.

  “Huh!” Don said behind me, in a way that I interpreted as meaning amusement rather than disdain. He heaved himself off the door jamb and strolled over to us.

  “British humour,” he informed Java. “Really dry. Like sherry,” he added to me. I blinked, partly because he had pronounced dry as “draaah,” and it had taken me a few seconds to work it out.

  “Well, some kinds of sherry,” I said cautiously. My head was spinning slightly, and not just from the jet lag. I was beginning to feel as though I were trapped in one of the more surreal Monty Python sketches.

  Java had obviously decided not to pursue my comment, which was a wise decision.

  “Sam, this is Don,” she said. “He’s the preparator.”

  “My God, really? I had no idea he was so important.”

  “I’m sorry?” Java went into the lovely-smile-but-what-the-hell-are-you-saying routine again. She was a very sweet girl, if, perhaps, a few maggots short of a Damien Hirst installation of a rotting cow. This was only in the British sense of humour department. In everything else she turned out to be more than competent.

  “Yeah, right,” Don said to me. “Preparator. More like the bellhop. Anyway,” he yawned, “I got art to shift. See ya later.”

  At least, I thought that was what he said. He started well, but tailed off as he neared the end, falling back into the familiar mumble. Shambling past me, and managing not to drag his knuckles along the floor as he walked, he crossed to an open door behind Java’s big white desk. Through this I could see steel lift doors framed on either side by the treads of an equally industrial-looking staircase. Don pressed the button to call the lift as a high-pitched clinking noise signalled the arrival of a woman in high heels coming swiftly down the metal staircase from the floor above.

  “Don’t tell me you’re calling the elevator just to go down to the basement, Don,” she said incredulously.

  “Hey, why walk unless you have to?” Don drawled.

  The lift doors opened with a ping.

  “Here’s my ride,” he said, giving us a little wave. “Bye, ladies.”

  “He’s a real character, isn’t he?” Java said to me. “Big Don. Most of our clients love him.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “Uh”—she grinned—“they think he’s a tad disrespectful. And kind of shabby.”

  “Which he is,” said Carol Bergmann, approaching me with her hand held out. “But he’s damn good at his job. Sam! Hi! You only landed a couple of hours ago, didn’t you? I wasn’t expecting to see you today.”

  “I dumped my bags at the flat and came straight out again,” I explained, shaking her hand. “I thought if I stayed there I’d go to sleep and mess up my time clock.”

  “Probably very sensible,” she commented. I had never seen anyone who, in their way, was more stripped for action than Carol Bergmann: hair cut short and brushed firmly back from her face, black trouser suit designed for the working woman who just wanted to put it on and forget about it, no make-up at all, visible or otherwise. The only touch that could have been considered slightly frivolous was the height of her heels, and she obviously did not consider them a weapon of seduction. In fact, the noise they made as she sped along meant that, if anything, they intimidated anyone who got in her way. It was like being in the path of an express train bearing down at full throttle.

  “Well, so how was the flight?” she was continuing. “Driver pick you up OK?”

  “Everything was fine, thanks.”

  “Good, good. So you’ve met Java and Don already. Maybe the best thing is for me to give you a tour of the gallery and introduce you to everyone else who’s in today. Be a good start. Did you have time to look around the exhibition?”

  I had actually cast a glance round the main room as I came in. It looked like there were a couple of others leading off it to the right, but the contents of the first one had not encouraged me to explore further. It was hung with four huge and splodgy canvases daubed with a variety of unattractively murky colours. (Daub and splodge are not technical terms, by the way. I get to use them because I’m an artist.) If you stared at them hard you could finally make out a couple of banal images lurking in their depths, rather like a high art version of those Magic Eye pictures. Not trusting her viewers to work it out for themselves, the artist, someone called Barbara Bilder, had helpfully provided hints to these with the titles. Thus, the cesspit-like swill of “Three Cypresses” turned out to contain, when squinted at in the right way, three cypress trees surrounded by a load of glop the texture and colour of a barrel-load of decaying human waste. And so on. Tact was definitely called for.

  “A little, yes,” I said smoothly. “But they’re very subtle. I’d really need more time with them.”

  And a frontal lob
otomy. But there was no need to spell that out.

  Carol Bergmann was nodding approvingly. “That’s what I’ve said from the beginning. Isn’t it, Java?”

  “Oh yes, Carol.”

  “Barbara sells slowly. But the collectors who have her pieces say they just get better and better the longer they look at them.”

  And the more their eyesight deteriorates with age, I thought.

  “I’ll show you around here briefly,” Carol said, whisking me through the open space at the side of the entrance area and into two linked rooms which seemed much smaller only because the main gallery was so vast. The walls were painted a uniform white and the floor was concrete throughout, like Java’s desk, which was an unapologetically unadorned slab of the stuff.

  “So this is the downstairs. The entrance is one of our big viewing areas,” Carol said, waving a hand magisterially as she clicked rapidly towards the staircase, sounding like a Morse signal in a tearing hurry. “It’s wonderful to have those high ceilings, isn’t it?”

  I was trotting so fast to keep up with her I hardly had breath to answer. We clattered up the steel openwork treads of the staircase and up through a narrow white lobby into a room whose floor was so shiny that I fumbled instinctively for my dark glasses. A ray of the setting sun, piercing under the translucent blinds on the huge windows, struck the pale wooden floor so brightly it looked as if it were about to burst into flame. There must have been half an inch of polish, like a single sheet of glass. You could almost have skated on it. Now if this had been an installation, I would have got the point at once.

  “This floor is spectacular!” I said, hoping that Carol wouldn’t notice that my tone was much more enthusiastic than it had been for Barbara Bilder’s paintings.

  She gave me a funny look.

  “It’s so shiny,” I clarified, realising that I sounded as if I were tripping.

  “Well, yes. We’ve just had it polished,” she said kindly, as if humouring a child. “Now, this is the other real viewing room. I think we’ll be putting your installation downstairs and the other one suspended in here. We need a lot of space for your pieces.”