Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “I was there for a few hours. Then I went back to my hotel. But I stayed till four at least. I was waiting to see when Kate’d come back, but I was so tired by then I couldn’t wait any longer.”

  She said this almost defiantly, as if she were making an assertion that might be challenged. I looked at her hard, wishing I could see her face. Kate had been killed around midnight; in furnishing Lex with this alibi, Mel was giving herself one too. Her eyes gleamed in the dark, their whites the only feature I could distinguish. She looked eerie and half-mad.

  “Where are you staying, Mel?” I said. “Do you want to come back to mine? We could have a drink and talk about Lex.”

  She shook her head violently.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you about him any more. I wish I hadn’t now.”

  “It’s good to get things out of your system every now and then,” I said. Whenever I try to sound understanding, I fail dismally, and this was no exception.

  “Don’t talk to me like a bloody agony aunt,” she said contemptuously. “Or some phone ad. ‘It’s good to talk,’” she mimicked viciously. “Well, I don’t want to talk any more. I want Lex and you’re not helping me. What do you know, anyway? You could only keep him for one night, same as me. After that he went off with your friend.”

  She had started to shift from one foot to the other, eager to get away from me.

  “What are you going to do?” I said cautiously. I was treading on eggshells now and putting my foot down in all the wrong places. “Are you going back to Hookah?”

  “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” she said. “Maybe you’re trying to find out what I’m doing so you can do it too. Are you?”

  She didn’t give me time to reply. Leaning forward, staring at me intensely, she almost spat the last two words in my face, spun round and was gone, running fast back down the street in the direction from which we had come. I could have caught up with her, but what would have been the point? If she didn’t want to tell me where she was staying I couldn’t follow her until I found out. She was so paranoid she would know at once if I was on her tail.

  And I had to admit that I didn’t want to follow her. As I watched her disappear into the shadows I felt as if a great weight had been lifted from me. Mel was infected with her obsession. A strong sense of contagion emanated from her, almost tangibly. The best comparison I could find was something from a horror film: her aura was like a fog which could wrap itself around you and eat your soul out.

  I didn’t want to tell anyone about Mel. No logical reason for that: it was pure superstition. Just as only the bravest of us can look hard at the worst ravages of nature, we shy away from the destruction caused by love; we press tranquillisers on the sufferer, trot out the usual clichés about time healing everything and run away as fast as we can. Love scares the shit out of most of us, and I’m no exception. In a weird, twisted way I found myself actually admiring someone who could give herself to it so completely.

  So I felt oddly protective towards Mel. She might have crossed the line, but if it were kept quiet she would have much more chance of finding her way back over it again. And I would stay silent about it—as long as she hadn’t garotted anyone en route. That was my one stipulation.

  In the meantime, I had work to do.

  “Wonderful! It looks just wonderful!”

  I basked happily in Carol’s praise. This was the advantage to her being a no-bullshit kind of person; when she went overboard, it was clear that she meant it.

  “Yeah, you’ve done a great job,” Laurence chimed in appreciatively. “It’s really clever the way it looks site-specific but doesn’t have to be.”

  We were in the upstairs gallery, in which the mobile hung between the two pillars, just as Don and I had envisaged it. Only a close glance would tell that the mobile had not actually crashed into the second pillar, but was resting against it; the angle at which I had rigged the supporting chains created a powerful optical illusion. I had to admit to a sneaking feeling of smugness. Any paintings hung here would have to compete hard to hold the attention. The heavy silver mass of the mobile was so charged with kinetic energy it looked as if it had smashed into the pillar just moments ago.

  “Don has to take some of the credit too,” I said. “We worked it out together.”

  Mother, I cannot tell a lie. Actually this frankness was less due to my exquisite sense of honesty than to my wish to see the reaction Don’s name would provoke, mentioned unexpectedly.

  Carol, always in control, merely nodded briefly.

  “Don is sorely missed,” she said, as if pronouncing an epitaph.

  Laurence looked uncomfortable and Kevin looked sick. Which was no change in their reactions from the moment I had found the body. Suzanne, who was sitting behind her computer at the desk, didn’t bat an eyelid. And Stanley, who was hovering nervously behind Carol like a satellite in danger of decompressing if it strayed too far from the mother-ship, flinched. I looked at him more closely. Stanley was interesting me more and more. He was as groomed as ever, but since the murders he had lost the glossy sheen which had been his signature. No longer did I associate his shine with that of a rich man’s fingernails buffed to a high lustre; now it was plain old sweat and nerves.

  It was definitely time to have a chat with Stanley.

  “Sam, you’ve been a heroine to organise this all yourself,” Carol was continuing. “I’d just like you to know how grateful we all are. Usually we do not expect our artists to have to install their own pieces—well, not to this extent.”

  She was alluding to my having spent most of the morning up a steplad-der with a drill in my hand. Nice of her to worry, but since that state was pretty much my idea of absolute happiness, she didn’t need to bother.

  “It was fine,” I reassured her. “In a way I prefer doing it myself. And Kevin was a great help. Well, Laurence too, until his dust allergy started kicking in.”

  A sour expression flitted across the latter’s face. This was only the start for him and Kevin: now there were Lex and Rob’s installations and Mel’s paintings to hang. And since Mel had started her series of close-ups on the genital areas, her canvases—not to mention their subjects—were gigantic.

  “Let’s check out the one downstairs as well,” Carol said, heading for the stairs. “I just know that this is going to look spectacular too.”

  The second mobile didn’t have the visceral, action-laden impact of the first; all it did was hang enormously in the middle of the room. But modestly I had to say I thought it did that damn well. I had really let myself go when I made it, knowing I had all the space I wanted, and I was very happy with the result, which was better, on purely aesthetic grounds, than “Organism #2” upstairs. God, I hated the names I had to give them. Other people usually picked them for me. If it were up to me they’d just be “Thing 14: The Return.” I could see that “Organism #2” had a touch more intellectual credibility but I disliked it anyway.

  “Organism #1” was a great silver seed pod, half-open, a series of strange silvery leaves and tendrils emerging from it like a monster in a science-fiction movie. This, again, was only how I saw it, and Carol would doubtless prefer me to keep the image strictly to myself. The catalogue notes drew comparisons which were much higher-class. The usual litany of pretentious babble, in other words. But hey, if it sold more pieces…

  “Wow,” said Suzanne, who had followed us down. “That’s fabulous.”

  This was exactly the kind of response I liked. I grinned at her.

  “Isn’t it just great?” Java said enthusiastically. She had been watching us as we hauled it up and most of her comments had been spot-on. Much more so than Kevin’s. While a useful source of muscle, he had been a broken reed in the constructive-criticism department.

  “Java was a lot of help,” I said to Carol, rendering favour for favour. “She has an excellent eye.”

  Carol smiled at Java, a brisk, acknowledging smile. “Good. I’m glad to hear it,” she sai
d. A neat tick had just gone in the column opposite Java’s name on Carol’s mental score-sheet. Five and you got a gold star; ten might even be a promotion.

  I thought of my gallerist in London, Duggie, with his rounded paunch, his slightly stained waistcoats and his long-term feud with his partner in the gallery, an ex-boyfriend with whom he loved to squabble. Duggie had a series of brawny young American or Australian boyfriends. He liked them meat-fed from birth, with expensive white dentistry, like a surf god from a daytime soap. Thus he never ceased complaining about the assistants hired by Willie, his partner, who stocked the gallery with the effete aesthete type he preferred. I couldn’t see Carol existing in that happy confusion for more than ten minutes: she’d walk in, sack everyone who wasn’t up to scratch and energise the rest.

  “OK,” Carol was saying, “this is a great start. A really great start. This show is going to be a big success. Let’s get everything else up here and play around with it a little. I have a pretty clear idea of where I want everything, but I’m open to suggestions. Laurence, Kevin, could you start bringing up the paintings first?”

  The boys were dismissed. Kevin wasn’t too happy but went off docilely enough. Laurence however, after shooting Carol a resentment-filled glare, slunk away, trailing bad attitude. I almost expected him to hiss like a villain in a Victorian melodrama.

  “Sam, I’d just like to thank you again,” Carol said, taking my hand between both of hers and pressing it for a moment. “You’ve been a real trooper. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this. Right, Stanley?”

  Stanley jumped at the mention of his name, horrified that she had actually noticed his presence. Maybe he had thought that if he stood still enough he would be taken for an installation and mercifully overlooked.

  “Oh yes, of course, absolutely,” he managed to burble with a sadly faint resurrection of his once oozing charm. “Charming girl, wonderful…”

  Carol, favouring him with a look which indicated as clearly as a slap round the face that he should pull himself together, fast, turned back to me.

  “When does everyone else get here? The other Brits?” I asked.

  “Lex is here already. Well, you know that.” Carol’s lips tightened a little. She was much too professional to express out loud her dislike for the whole situation, which was now generally known; once Lex had told the police that he had been staying at Kate’s, he could scarcely try to keep the staff at the gallery in the dark. He had rung Carol this morning and told her. The gossip had spread at once. Carol, naturally, was furious at what she saw as Kate’s act of disloyalty. Lex’s behaviour had been less reprehensible, as he was not an employee of Bergmann LaTouche, but that didn’t seem to have made Carol happier about it. I suspected that most of the anger which Carol was prevented from channelling Kate’s way was being diverted onto Lex instead.

  Stanley cleared his throat nervously. We both looked at him, expecting him to say something, but he flapped his hands to indicate that he hadn’t meant to distract us. When Carol’s gaze returned to me it had a distinctly long-suffering glaze to it. Stanley’s weight was not inconsiderable, and he wasn’t pulling a pound of it.

  “And Mel and Rob are due in tomorrow,” she said. “They’re on the same flight.”

  Which would mean that she would have sent a car for both of them, and thus wouldn’t know that it contained only one occupant. Unless anyone bothered to tell her. I wondered if Rob knew the truth of Mel’s earlier-than-anticipated visit to New York. It was quite probable. The London artist scene was small and more incestuous than Sunday lunch in Appalachia.

  That solved one of my problems. Later on today I would know at least where Mel was supposed to be. I could leave it till then to work out what I thought the situation required.

  “Sam, thanks again. I won’t forget this,” Carol said to me, pressing my hand once again in a valedictory gesture as the boys emerged from the stairwell. An unfeasibly large painting by Mel was hoisted awkwardly between them, being much too big to fit in the lift.

  “Careful with that!” she called.

  I could hear Laurence’s snarl quite clearly, so I assumed Carol could too. But she was too smart not to know about the discretion/valour connection. She confined herself to a raise of the eyebrows as Kevin and Laurence, puffing slightly, carried the painting over to the far wall under her supervision, propping it there. Carol went over to a bank of switches and turned up the spot-lighting till the white wall was suffused with gold, like sunlight on an Aegean village. It made a perfect background for the silver sheen of the mobile. Still, I doubted Carol’s gratitude to me would extend to granting a demand that she leave that wall empty.

  “OK, now hold it up,” she directed. “I want to see how the light hits it.”

  The enormous canvas rose slowly up the wall in the sweating grasp of two very pissed-off assistants who by now were as demoralised and miserable as the chained-up galley slaves in Ben Hur. It was mainly executed in what some hosiery and cosmetics manufacturers still unreconstructedly call flesh tones, by which they mean a pale beigey-pink. At the centre was a large and puckered dark brown area which I had no difficulty in identifying as what my Aunt Louise would have called the back bottom. But then I was already familiar—as the actress would have said to the bishop—with Mel’s work.

  “Which is this one?” Carol looked around for her notes.

  “Over here, Carol,” Java said, coming round the desk with a plastic folder in her hand. “It’s called ‘Anal Mouth.’”

  I suppressed a terrible impulse to burst out laughing, imagining the caption to the press photo. “Seen at the Bergmann LaTouche Gallery: Sam Jones’s ‘Organism #1’ in front of Mel Safire’s ‘Anal Mouth.’” I turned away to cover my giggles and found myself directly in front of Stanley. He was nodding his head to one side, repeatedly, in a way that I took first for a particularly neurotic tic and then realised was a request that I accompany him into the second room.

  “What is it, Stanley?” I said, following him dutifully.

  He wouldn’t answer me until we were round the corner and out of sight, at least, of everyone else. Then he whispered, his eyes darting from side to side:

  “I need to talk to you! Can we meet up in a couple of hours?”

  “What’s wrong with right now?”

  It was a stupid question. Stanley’s head started jerking, and this time it really was a nervous tic.

  “No one must know!” he said frantically. “We can’t talk here!”

  “Sure,” I said, by now dying to know what it was all about. “When and where?”

  “Three o’clock. The Staten Island ferry terminal. At Battery Park. Not a word to anyone!”

  “I promise,” I agreed gravely.

  Looking briefly relieved, his head relaxed to its normal position. Then the give-this-man-some-Prozac routine started up again.

  “Quick! We must go back or they’ll get suspicious!” he said, ushering me back into the main room. No one even seemed to have noticed our sixty-second absence, but Stanley stuttered something about having been showing me the facilities next door. Since it contained nothing remotely resembling a facility—unless he meant the power sockets—this was a pretty awful lie, and he compounded it by stammering unconvincingly. Stanley was the worst conspirator I had ever met.

  Further proof of this was offered to me as soon as I stepped off the bus and looked around, shading my eyes against the sun. Crossing the street to the ferry terminal, I realised that to give it as a rendezvous was like telling someone to meet you at Port Authority or Bloomingdale’s: there were far too many rendezvous points. Stanley wasn’t outside the subway entrance. I went up the long curving concrete ramp to check out the main ticket office, but drew another blank. The massed rows of plastic seats inside were almost empty. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were full to bursting. I would have been able to spot Stanley instantly from his nervous tic.

  I would just have to keep circling till I found Super Spy. In the meantime I
could do with a trip to the ladies’ room. It was a bizarre contrast. The whole toilet area reeked of excrement, and yet the floors were wet with disinfectant whose sharp, would-be-fresh scent somehow made the smell of faeces even worse, like perfume on a rotting corpse. It was almost unbearable. I’m one of the least fastidious people I know, but though all the fixtures seemed clean enough, this was one of the few lavatories where I recoiled from touching anything without six layers of toilet paper between me and it. I had a sudden rush of sympathy for Tom. Maybe I hadn’t taken all his dysentery stories seriously enough. I determined to put aside some quality time for him when I got back home.

  As I came out of the toilets, the sun, streaming through the glass wall of the terminal, lit up the hall, brightening the shiny sweep of floor, exposing the dirt trodden into it by millions of commuters. Crossing the hall, I pushed open one of the glass doors, leaning on the concrete wall and looking at the water rippling into the distance, its surface beaten and teased by the wind into an endless flurry of tiny waves. London couldn’t compete with this. I thought of the flat brownish waters of the Thames, and grimaced. Beyond and to my right was the Statue of Liberty, small and perfectly formed, yet provoking less of a reaction. As with so many totem landmarks, I had seen it so many times in replica that its reality was an anticlimax.

  “Sam? Sam!” I looked down to see Stanley standing on the pavement below, waving up at me anxiously.

  “Shall we go and sit on a bench over there?” I suggested as I came down the ramp, pointing towards the scrubby beginnings of Battery Park.

  A few guided groups of tourists ambled past, but the riverfront was as relatively quiet as the City of London on a workday afternoon. We found an unoccupied bench with ease. On the next one were a couple of girls flirting loudly and happily with a young man who was scuffing his trainers on the ground in the traditional shy peacocking of the mating ritual. Apart from their gold jewellery, the three of them were dressed completely in black, from their leather jackets to their hooded sweaters and the girls’ high-heeled shoes. Even their faces were the colour of that expensive dark chocolate which guarantees at least seventy per cent cocoa solids. They looked smart and shiny and well-to-do, all the attributes that Stanley had so noticeably lost since I first met him. And they certainly weren’t interested in eavesdropping on our conversation.