Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “But Kate was different,” he continued, bending over to do his line. “Shit, I hate seeing myself in this fucking mirror,” he complained as he straightened up. “Looking up my nostrils, see all my nose hair and pimples.”

  “I’ve got a friend who uses a black mirror tile. Much more flattering.”

  “That’s a great idea. I’m gonna get one. Anyway. Kate. She was pretty fucking special. Did you ever meet her?”

  “Just briefly. But I liked her a lot.”

  “That girl broke my fucking heart,” Leo said, handing me the mirror. “Just my luck. I fall for her because she’s really got her shit together. She was so driven. I really admired her, you know? Total career woman. Majorly ambitious. And of course that turns out to be why she dumps me. Because I’m a fucking bum who lives in a pit like this, trying to be a painter.”

  I passed the mirror back to him, having cleared its contents. I seemed to remember heroin use having been mentioned by Don and Suzanne, but instinct, not to mention manners, told me not to bring it up. Instead I clicked my tongue sympathetically.

  “I’ve done all kinds of stuff, job-wise,” Leo went on. “I mean, I’m not just this.” He gestured briefly to the mirror and the scales. “I got this gig for a while testing cocaine for a drug abuse centre, can you believe it? They stick you in this big brain scanner and give you a shot of the stuff and you have to register how high you’re getting.”

  He could see I looked disbelieving. “No, really,” he insisted. “Then you start coming down, you get the jitters, and you tell them when you start wanting more. All the time they’re monitoring your brain patterns. Nice gig, huh? And they pay you, too. I got two hundred and fifty bucks credit at a supermarket last time. Only downside is that they give you this lecture afterwards on how drugs are really dangerous. But they’re just going through the motions ’cause they have to. I mean, if there weren’t any drugs, they’d all be out of jobs, right?” He ran his finger over the mirror, cleaning it up. “And I’ve done foot modelling.”

  “You mean like hand modelling for magazines?” I said, baffled. Somehow I couldn’t see Leo at a photo-session wearing white silk socks and polished shoes.

  “Nah,” he said dismissively. “Foot fetish stuff.”

  I looked down at his work boots.

  “Don’t take this personally, but they look a normal sort of size to me. I would have thought they’d want really big ones.”

  “It’s mainly the width they go for,” Leo informed me. “This guy, the photographer, was a total width queen. I’m just a 10 but I’m an E. And bony, which they like too. You can see the veins more.”

  “The things you learn.”

  “Weird, huh?” Leo agreed. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff these freaks do to feet. I’ve got my video if you want to see it.”

  He got up and fished it out from the pile of other videos beside the TV. I didn’t recognise Leo’s feet from the teasing cover photo; it was the title which really gripped me.

  “Down and Dirty—An X-Rated Feet-ure,” I read.

  “Easiest five hundred bucks I ever earned,” Leo assured me.

  “You just have to sit there, right?” I said dubiously.

  “Most of the time I read a magazine,” he said. “But then I stopped because I was getting distracted. Like, some of the stuff they do is pretty nice, and when you forget about who’s doing it to you, it’s not too hard to start getting off on it, you know what I’m saying? Which was pretty goddamn strange.”

  A silence fell as we both contemplated this image.

  “I saw you checking out my hex symbols earlier,” he said eventually. “But I could tell you were cool with them. I got a lot of them from a book and then added my own stuff too. Sort of modified them.”

  “What are they for?”

  “Protection,” said Leo, very simply.

  I looked again at the hexes. In my head I heard, as clearly as if it had been playing on Leo’s stereo, the Massive Attack song of that name: Tracey Thorn’s clear dark voice, bittersweet as smoky molasses, singing about protection.

  The symbols came into focus, their strong powerful shapes seeming to float forwards as I concentrated on them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Leo watching me: Leo, tough as nails, with his East Village squat and his three padlocks on the door, still wanting old Pennsylvania Dutch hexes round his walls to ward off evil. Oddly enough, I realised that I identified with him. Leo reminded me strangely of myself, or of someone I might have become: rootless, edgy, deliberately emphasising my dark side, refusing to connect with anyone for more than a few fleeting moments, living in a cave with a chain on the door. It was a way of life I had rejected when I’d been knocking around London, restless and unfocused but too wary, too self-protective, ever to follow that path. I was stronger than Leo. I didn’t need hexes on my walls. But then, I was luckier, too. I had my own studio, my territory. I didn’t need to mark it as he had his.

  “You should make paintings of these,” I suggested, and as I did I knew I had said something significant. I shivered, a rush of memory and precog-nition swirling together through my head as I remembered Nat telling me years ago that my first sculpture, the Thing, looked like a fallen meteor. Leo would make his hex paintings, and they would be a success. I was willing to bet on it.

  But, like me when Nat had made that comment, Leo only half took it in, thinking about something else.

  “I offered to paint Kate’s apartment, too,” he said. “Customise something for her. I went through some books, found some stuff supposed to be specially for women, you know? But she said no.” He was staring at the hexes on the wall, but I knew that he could see Kate’s face beyond them. “I wish she’d’ve let me do it,” he said quietly.

  “She didn’t die there, Leo,” I said, in an effort to console him.

  He shrugged. “It might have helped, though. You never know.” He took a long deep breath. “It might have helped.”

  We both fell silent again. I was imagining Kate’s body on a bench in Central Park, waiting there, motionless, for dawn to rise and someone to find it, dew settling heavy and damp on her dark red hair. What Leo was seeing I couldn’t tell. Perhaps her apartment as it would have been with his white magic in place, the walls loaded with paint.

  “Protection,” Leo said. He was still staring at the hexes. “We all need some, man,” he said slowly. “We all fucking need some.”

  Leo’s room was a time capsule: the world stopped as you stepped over the threshold and the padlocks snapped shut behind you. When I emerged into the darkness of the night I felt weirdly disoriented. Though, on reflection, maybe that was the cocaine. Leo offered to see me down, but I declined, waiting on the iron walkway to hear him lock himself in again like a prisoner returning voluntarily to his cell. Or an urban guerilla monk in a futuristic film. This would make a perfect twenty-first century, Lower East Side version of a monastery.

  I rang Kim from a payphone in the first hole-in-the-wall bar I found. Over the pounding drum and bass at Hookah she yelled to come over and I thought I heard her say that Lex was there too, which was exactly what I had been hoping for. I set off at once. Hookah wasn’t far, and the cocaine jet-propelled my boots. I extracted my new hat from my bag and put it on, pulling it down over my brows in best homegirl style. It was horribly unflattering, but the dark helped with that. And I needed to look as anonymous as possible.

  It was easier than I had been expecting. There was nowhere really to hang out opposite Hookah’s frontage, just a couple of store fronts shuttered and barred so heavily the owners had probably been ram-raided a few times already. If that had caught on over here. Maybe we could add it to a list of Cool Britannia cultural exports, along with the Spice Girls and dead sharks.

  Beyond the shop fronts, however, was a doorway slightly recessed from the street. It too was barred, and slumped in front of it was a human form. Not someone sleeping rough, though. The figure was huddled up bulkily in its coat, but that was all: no other insulation, n
ot even newspaper, on a night as cold as this one. As I walked up to it, a glance darted at me out of the shadows, a brief glimmer of streetlight reflecting off two eyeballs which gleamed flat and orange for a second before the head ducked again, out of the illumination. If I had needed any further confirmation that this wasn’t a street person, this was it.

  I stopped in front of the huddled body. Tension radiated from it, every inch of its body willing me to go away. It was like a clockwork toy, wound up to the last turn of the key, just about to explode into action. Ignoring the danger signals, I squatted down, my eyes on a level with the orange ones.

  “Mel?” I said. “It’s Sam.”

  Total silence. I tried again.

  “Do you want to go and get a drink or something?”

  No answer. Well, that approach always worked with me. I couldn’t see her eyes now. Maybe she was working on the ostrich principle: if she couldn’t see me I couldn’t see her.

  “Mel, I’m not going to go away,” I said patiently. “I know it’s you. Look,” I added cunningly, “I know everything Lex’s been doing over the last few days. I could tell you all about it….”

  Open Sesame. Or Arise Sesame. Mel must have been in that doorway quite a while, because she was so stiff and cramped it took her a long time to get to her feet. Finally, with the aid of the bars on the door behind her, she managed it. We stared at each other for a moment, and then I turned, heading for a bar I had passed earlier. Mel’s footsteps dogged my own, walking just behind me. Maybe once you developed the habit of following someone it was hard to give it up.

  The bar was a nasty-looking cod-Irish place with coloured fairy lights strung haphazardly outside its narrow frontage; through the dirty little panes of glass in the door I could see plastic booths and a fake fire. We didn’t go in, though not on aesthetic grounds. Once Mel had started walking she wouldn’t stop, ceaselessly patrolling a circle around Second and Fifth, with Hookah—and Lex—at its centre. Any time it looked as if we were straying too far, she brought us back again, retracing our steps as if pulled by a magnet.

  “How did you know it was me?” was the first thing she said.

  “I didn’t know,” I admitted. “I just guessed.” I wasn’t going to tell her that at first I had thought it was Suzanne following Lex; Suzanne, who had seemed hostile to him, who was so often absent on mysterious business of her own, who had declared her intention to track down Kate’s killer…. But I felt it would just confuse Mel to demonstrate my lack of omniscience. “Lex kept saying someone was stalking him,” I continued, “and after a while I started to take him more seriously—”

  “He knows!” Mel’s voice rang out happily, cutting through my explanation. “He knows there’s someone there! That means he can sense my presence. There’s a connection between us, don’t you see? There’s a real connection.”

  I took a deep breath. It was a dark night, and despite the yellowish pools cast on the pavement by the occasional streetlight, Mel was half in shadow, hands thrust into the pockets of her coat, head ducked. Still, I was shocked by the change in her. There were dark hollows under her eyes and cheekbones; something was eating her from inside, consuming flesh she could ill afford to lose. And her eyes were too bright, as if she were feverish. I thought of the strange nervous energy of tuberculosis victims, high spots of colour on their pale cheeks, eyes burning like an Edgar Allan Poe heroine. Two references to Poe in one evening: New York was certainly showing me its darker side.

  “What exactly happened between you and Lex?” I asked. “Was it after we all went out that evening?”

  Once Mel had started telling me, she couldn’t stop talking. Apparently she and Lex had bumped into each other at a do the week after our meeting in the pub, got drunk and fallen into bed. A one-night stand which Mel had built up in her mind to exaggerated proportions. She recounted every banal little detail as disappointed lovers always do, turning over the tiniest sentence or action, handling it obsessively until it’s worn away and grubby with use, trying to make it yield proof that they are loved after all.

  “… so then he said he’d call me, but I didn’t hear from him for three days, but then I thought, oh, he probably doesn’t want to call me at home because Phil’s there—that’s my boyfriend,” she added casually, “so I called him, and I got his machine, so I left a message saying that Phil was out all the next day and he could ring me then, but he didn’t—well, someone did and hung up, and I 1471’d it but it was a payphone, so I thought: maybe it’s Lex and he’s run out of money….”

  I had half-tuned this out, listening only to see if the flow would throw up something more significant. It was appalling to hear, the familiar and terrible power one person’s casual action has to throw a switch in another human being, unintentionally turning on a great explosion of emotion like water bursting through a dam.

  “… so I got into ringing him and hanging up, he usually leaves the machine on, and if you’re fast you can hang up just before it clicks on so it doesn’t register someone’s rung, but sometimes I’d want to hear his voice … then I heard he was going to New York early so I knew I had to come too.” She sounded deadly serious. “I’ve got to find out what he’s doing, what he wants—exactly what he wants, so I can be that for him. Once I work that out then everything will be all right, I know he likes me already, I’ve just got to work out what he wants and be it….”

  Perhaps it was doing her good to discharge all this sadness, pus purging itself from an open wound. I hoped so. I was still trying not to listen too hard in case Mel’s story seeped into me, wrapped itself round my bones, and started eating away at me like corrosive acid.

  Mel had stopped talking. She seemed to be expecting some kind of answer. I racked my brains quickly to summon up the last thing she had said.

  “How did I know it was you?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Well, I saw you around a couple of times. It was you who passed us outside Hookah a few nights ago, wasn’t it? In a balaclava? And in Washington Square Park today I saw you sitting on the steps in front of us, in your overcoat, and your hat rang a bell. I thought I’d seen it in a shop, but I went back and looked, and it wasn’t there.… Then I was in a coffee shop today, and a guy sitting next to me was wearing this woolly hat, pulled down over his headphones. And for some reason I remembered you wearing yours with your Walkman that time we all met up, and the pieces started fitting together.”

  “Did you tell Lex?”

  “No. I came to find you first. To make sure.”

  “You were going to tell me what he’s been doing,” Mel said intensely. She stopped walking. We were on a dark, narrow stretch of street, buildings looming over us on either side as if they were trying to meet and shut out the sliver of black sky completely. New York had a strange facility for concentrating you in the moment; perhaps it was the sense I always had here of living between inverted commas. The few cars that passed seemed miles away.

  Mel was a shadowy silhouette whose expression I could not see. But I could feel her stare, utterly focused, scorching my face with its unhealthy heat. To give her too much information would be dangerous. Like the fact that Lex was seeing Kim, for instance.

  “He’s been hanging out,” I said, playing for time. “He stayed over at mine one night. You were there the afternoon we came back there, weren’t you? Me and Lex and my friend Kim and Leo? I sensed something when I went out later, as if someone was watching me, but I thought I was just being paranoid.”

  “He’s staying with her, isn’t he?” Mel said suspiciously. “And he’s in the bar with her right now.”

  I said easily:

  “He was in a bar with me a few nights back. And he stayed over at mine.”

  “I know,” said Mel, and there was something in her voice that I didn’t like.

  “Lex is just couch-surfing,” I said, keeping it light. “He doesn’t have anywhere to stay.”

  “Not now that that girl’s been killed,” Mel said instantly.
“He didn’t tell me anything about her in London. He didn’t even say he knew her.”

  I wondered why Mel thought that Lex should have told her about his plans to stay with Kate.

  “Everyone’s running scared at the moment,” I said. “Did you know that someone else at the gallery had been killed?”

  “Lex went to the police station this afternoon,” she said, her mind still on one track only. “That friend of yours went with him. They were in there for hours.”

  “He was telling them about having stayed at Kate’s flat till she was killed.”

  “Well, he didn’t do it,” she said at once.

  I let a moment pass, and then said, picking my words with extreme caution:

  “Do you know that because you were keeping an eye on him?” Tactfully, I had decided not to use the word “stalking.” Mel might have thought it had negative connotations.

  “He went to the cinema,” she said. “By himself. Well”—her voice softened—“I was there too. He didn’t know it, but I was there.”

  “And then what did he do?”

  “He bought some hash from a guy on the street. Then he went for a couple of drinks. He talked to the waitress. And then he went home.”

  It was very neat; this was just what Lex had told me he had done. Sometimes when things correlate so perfectly it makes me even more suspicious.

  “What did you do when he went home?” I asked. “Did you hang around?”

  “I waited,” she confirmed reluctantly. She had taken a couple of steps back and was now completely in shadow, pressed against yet another heavily barred set of windows. A light shone behind them, through the dark curtains. Each bar was as thick as my wrist. It would be like living behind the metal screens of a South London off-licence, passing the money through the grille, a sawn-off shotgun next to the cash register and a Doberman in the back room, bored and angry, battering at the plywood partition in a constant attempt to get at the customers.

  Finally she said: