Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “OK, Stanley, what’s going on?” I asked.

  He was too nervous to beat around the bush, for which I was grateful.

  “Do you—do you know where Lex Thompson is?” he said in a rush.

  I was taken aback, but not so much as to blurt out that Lex would almost definitely, from this evening, be staying in the Gramercy Park Hotel, into which Carol had booked him and the others. If I pointed out that very obvious fact, Stanley might simply run off to the hotel, waiting for Lex to show up. And I wanted to find out what was up with him first.

  “What do you want to see him for?” I asked inelegantly.

  Stanley looked at me. He could see that I wasn’t going to tell him anything until he vouchsafed some information. One hand went nervously up to smooth back his hair in the old lady-killer gesture.

  “Come on, Stanley, spit it out,” I said firmly. Stanley was reminding me of someone I had met years before, who I had nicknamed Egg-Face, and had responded best to bullying. Instinct told me that this would work for Stanley too.

  It did. His head started twitching again, but he began to talk. As long as I didn’t watch him I wouldn’t get motion sickness.

  Stanley apparently needed to get in touch with Lex because he wanted to find out if Kate had told Lex anything. I expressed annoyance at the vague way he put this.

  “What do you mean, anything? What was there to tell?”

  It took ten minutes of an insistent mixture of prodding and browbeating him to elicit the information. But it was more than worth it. To my astonishment, Stanley finally confessed that Kate had been planning to set up her own gallery.

  “What?” I exclaimed.

  “She asked me if I’d back her,” he said nervously. “It was really exciting. A new gallery, starting from scratch … my name on it….” This was clearly very important. “I’ve asked Carol about adding my name to Bergmann LaTouche, but she said it would be too complicated.” He huffed. “After all, I am a full partner. It seems only fair.”

  But I was staring at him, open-mouthed, and didn’t reply. Wheels within wheels within wheels… Now I could make sense of Kate’s putting Lex up in her apartment. Why else would she have risked Carol’s displeasure, perhaps even her job, just to do a favour for someone she hardly knew and—according to Lex—didn’t want to go to bed with? Kate must have been intending to ask him if he wanted to show in her new gallery, and through him to make contacts with more young British artists.

  “She’d found a space in West Chelsea, a garage building we could have converted,” Stanley was saying. “SoHo rents are just crazy now, there’s no way we could have afforded to set up there. And you can’t find places for delivery trucks to park either, it’s too crowded.”

  This must have been parroted direct from Kate. I couldn’t see Stanley concerning himself with the nuts and bolts of art consignments.

  “West Chelsea’s the place now for contemporary art,” Stanley was continuing. “SoHo’s getting more and more mainstream. Those are the only dealers that can afford the space. Do you know prices per square foot have gone up thirty per cent in the last two years alone?”

  “That’s fascinating, Stanley,” I said encouragingly, stifling a yawn. “So were you putting up all the money for the gallery? That’s got to be a pretty hefty whack, even in West Chelsea.”

  Stanley shook his head. “Kate had another backer,” he informed me. “We were going to meet up this week—” The sun was full in our faces and his forehead was getting sweatier by the minute. “Before—before …”

  A group of people passed us, oohing over the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty across the water. In their baseball caps and shapeless, sexless clothes, they were indistinguishable from the down-and-out rummaging furtively in the litter bin just behind them. I focused hard on Stanley, trying to wrench him back on course.

  “Did Carol suspect this was going on?” I said.

  Anguish and guilt in equal measure stamped his expression.

  “I don’t think so. I really don’t think so,” he said fervently. “She hasn’t said anything to me.”

  “Stanley,” I said slowly, “do you think it’s possible that Kate might have trashed Barbara Bilder’s exhibition to bring the gallery into bad repute? I mean, if Kate was trying to take clients and artists with her—and she’d certainly have wanted to do that—it might have helped to be able to point to the fact that Bergmann LaTouche was sloppy enough about security to let a show of theirs get vandalised.”

  This thought had obviously never popped into Stanley’s pea brain before. I was reminded of the joke that goes: “Why do men have bigger brains than dogs? So they won’t hump women’s legs at cocktail parties.” Intelligence-wise, Stanley was definitely on the cusp between man and canine. He looked horrified.

  “You think Kate did that?” he said, as shocked as if I’d suggested she’d had sex with donkeys and filmed it for posterity.

  “I have no idea. I’m asking you,” I said, firmly but patiently.

  “I—well, absolutely not,” Stanley spluttered. “Kate was a reputable person. She would never have stooped so low.”

  “Bet she was planning to copy Bergmann LaTouche’s client list and persuade as many artists as possible to come with her to the new gallery,” I rejoined. “How reputable is that?”

  But I had gone too far. Stanley started muttering about my not understanding normal business practices and looking nervously at his watch.

  “I take it the new gallery plan’s dead in the water now, without Kate,” I said.

  Stanley nodded.

  “You just want to get on with life at Bergmann LaTouche and pretend this all never happened, right?”

  Stanley’s nodding became vehement and uncontrolled.

  “So do you think someone killed Kate to stop it happening, knowing that you wouldn’t go off and do it on your own?”

  The agony in Stanley’s expression said clearly that he had spent every waking second since hearing the news of Kate’s death trying as hard as he could not to envisage this possibility.

  “I don’t know!” he practically wailed, his voice rising so that even the courting group on the next bench glanced over in our direction for a moment.

  “You said you’d tell me where Lex Thompson is,” he begged, leaning over towards me. I crossed my arms so he couldn’t clasp one of my hands in a pudgy grip. “You said you’d tell me.”

  Actually, I hadn’t, but I didn’t feel like pressing technicalities. I wrote Kim’s number for him on a piece of paper, which he grasped as eagerly as if it were a certificate absolving him of all responsibility for Kate’s murder.

  “I wouldn’t ring him, though, if I were you,” I advised as Stanley rose. He froze, confused.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think Kate told him anything,” I said. “I mean, why would she have started stirring things up till you guys at least had the premises for your new gallery? Kate wasn’t a fool, by all accounts, and Lex is about as discreet as a guest on Jerry Springer. I wouldn’t go giving him information he doesn’t already know. He’ll spill it out to everyone and then your goose really will be cooked.”

  Stanley stared at me bitterly.

  “You mean I told you all that for nothing?” he said, grasping the point faster than I had thought he would.

  I shrugged. “Not for nothing,” I said. “You satisfied my curiosity.”

  I gave him my best smile. It didn’t seem to help much. Stanley glared at me, made an impotent flapping gesture with his hands, and finally turned, making off towards Whitehall Street. I relaxed back on the bench, arms spread wide, taking the sun.

  Out on the water the breeze was glorious. I closed my eyes for a second and felt my head tilt back in the force of the wind. Beside me were three Hasidic Jews, father and sons, the latter no more than boys. Their hats were tilted back on their heads like Anne of Green Gables, and they fingered the ringlets at the sides of their faces nervously, as if they’d done them rou
nd a hot poker and were worried that the wind would blow out the curl. All of us were holding on to the chain for balance, entranced by the Manhattan skyline before us, the skyscrapers glowing golden in the sun, their panes of glass reflecting the blue of the sky. We were drawing closer to the point where the Hudson and the East Rivers met, and that moment seemed intensely concentrated, as if everything were flowing powerfully together and all I had to do was gather the various strings in my hand and knot them up into one single strand of meaning.

  Taking the ferry had been an impulse decision. As I walked out of the park, I had been swept up in the waves of people converging on the terminal, flooding through the gates, and I let myself be swept along with them into the ferry. Strictly utilitarian, its plastic seats were dented and beaten down by heavy use. It smelt of disinfectant and McDonald’s, that peculiarly identifiable McDonald’s smell that was at its height in the Big Mac special sauce: gherkins and mayonnaise and the crisp high-voltage fizzing artificiality of a cocktail of additives.

  The front and back docking platforms of the ferry were the only places where you could stand in the open air. Probably I should have said prow and stern, but they seemed too grand for what was only a glorified shuttle bus. I watched the Jersey coast and the high delicate Verrazano Narrows Bridge, seeming to sway in the air currents, as we headed out to Staten Island; and when we reached it I crossed back to what was now the front and settled myself in prime position for the view back to Manhattan.

  There was a sudden flurry of movement at my side. Pushing up against me were two more small boys in over-large hats. Underneath them, attached with large unsightly hairpins, they wore, rather touchingly, black crochet snoods, presumably to wedge on the hats. Three little girls shoved up behind them, wearing matching floral dresses. It was practically the Hasidic version of the Von Trapp family. Directly behind them stood the mother. She too wore a heavy frilled dress and round her bald head was wrapped a turban of equally flowered material which looked as if it had been made from curtains—the Von Trapp references were coming thick and fast by now. The poor woman was worn out by childbearing. And having to shave her head when she got married couldn’t have helped on the self-esteem front.

  The children were everywhere, all around me, swarming like flies. Probably there was another little one in Mama right now, adding new stretch marks to her already interesting collection and bulging out her varicose veins for good measure. I shuddered, losing all interest in anything but escaping from the boat as soon as possible. Children in any quantity give me hives. I was the first person off when we docked, practically sprinting across the road towards the payphones. Some of the small fry had actually touched me with their horrid sticky little hands while trying childishly to clamber over the rails and get themselves flattened between the metal plates of the prow and the dock. Strange how they instinctively tried to cull themselves, as if knowing there were too many of them in the world.

  Kim was at home, merciful God. She answered on the second ring.

  “Sam!” she said at once. “Where are you? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages!”

  “At the Staten Island ferry terminal,” I said.

  “Oh, did you do the crossing? Cool! So why don’t you come around right now? I’ve got shit-loads of stuff to tell you.”

  “On my way.”

  I hung up and looked around me for a taxi. Sod the subway, I needed some civilised adult company fast. Well, OK, that was an exaggeration. Civilised adult company wouldn’t touch me with a bargepole. I needed Kim.

  Placido Domingo greeted me as the taxi pulled away, telling me to buckle the seat belt “because you are important.” Yeah, right. Placido sounded dangerously Americanised. What had happened to the European sense of irony?

  It was the first time I had been to Kim’s flat. Five flights of rickety narrow stairs to reach an apartment the size and shape of a pencil case, a gas ring in one corner and a shower room in the other with the grout from the tiles curling everywhere, like Revenge Of The Killer Worms.

  “Isn’t it great?” Kim beamed as she let me in. “It’s a good deal, too. I only pay seven hundred bucks a month.”

  I remembered Laurence welcoming me to his only slightly less cramped and dilapidated pit with the same self-congratulation. This whole phenomenon baffled me: people here not only lived in shoeboxes stacked on top of each other but considered themselves lucky to get them.

  “Want some tea?” she said. “I’m just boiling the kettle.”

  “Great,” I said, perking up at the thought of a restorative English cuppa after my climb.

  “OK,” she said, pulling open a cupboard, “I’ve got liquorice, orange zinger, raspberry buzz, lemongrass and lime, camomile flower, fennel and nettle—”

  “Whoah, whoah.” I held up one hand. “Can I just have a Cup Of Tea?”

  Kim looked uncomfortable.

  “You mean tea tea? I don’t drink it any more. The tannin’s really bad for you.”

  “Not even one miserable teabag lurking at the back of the cupboard?” I pleaded.

  Kim shook her head. “And anyway,” she confessed, “I don’t have any milk or sugar, so I couldn’t make it properly.”

  “No milk?”

  “Well, soy milk. But it wouldn’t taste right.”

  I put my head in my hands.

  “What’s happened to you, Kim?” I moaned. “This city has changed you, it’s sucked out your brains, you’ve turned into some dairy-free health nazi—”

  “No, Sam, don’t be that way! That’s not a good way to be!” Kim said instantly.

  This was an old, old catchphrase which we’d picked up from some long-lost Seventies TV programme and made our own. It was so immediately, achingly familiar that my head came up again as if it had been pulled on a wire.

  “I’m still me!” she said, throwing her arms wide and doing her best cheesy winning smile.

  “There’s a lot less of you,” I pointed out. It was a hot day, and she was wearing a little top which was a cross between a workout bra and a cut-off T-shirt and revealed most of her honed stomach, perfectly flat apart from the light curve of her ab definition. A pair of dark grey sweatpants hung just above her hipbones, and when she turned to take the whistling kettle off the gas it was obvious that her buns were made of steel. Her skin glowed and her short hair was shiny with health and deep-pack conditioner.

  “You have completely changed your body,” I said, flopping down into her inflatable pink plastic armchair.

  “Years and years of work and I have to watch it like a hawk,” Kim said. “Did you want any tea?”

  “Yeah, give me that one with the buzz in it. I like the way you’ve done your place, by the way.”

  Sunlight poured in through the single window onto the white-painted floor. The futon sofa with the fake sheepskin rug thrown over it must be the bed by night. Over it hung a canvas of a bright pink cauliflower on a white background. Like the painting of Kim’s I had at home, it was from her Inappropriate Colours series. Her collection of Barbies and Sindys was lovingly arranged on a series of silver-painted shelves, and stacked next to the bed was a pile of books on bodybuilding. One of those classic modern-woman contrasts.

  “Do you remember those Daisy dolls?” I said reminiscently. “The Mary Quant ones you were always trying to find?”

  “Shit, those are real collectors’ items now. There was a great carrying case for the clothes, too. Red with a white and yellow plastic daisy appliquéd on the corner. But you’d never find it in the States. UK distribution only.”

  Kim brought the mug of tea over to me.

  “Just don’t put it down on the armchair,” she warned, “or it’ll burn through and pop.”

  “The thing I can’t understand here,” I said, settling back in the pink plastic chair and holding my mug well away from its surfaces, “don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising—but everyone lives in these tiny little studios. Why don’t people get together and rent a big apartment to share?
There’d be lots more space for the money.”

  Kim sat down on the floor, cross-legged, her back to the futon, blowing on her tea to cool it.

  “It’d never work,” she said. “No one rents bigger places. Everyone’s too busy to bother about sharing, they just want their own pad to crawl back to at the end of the day. Besides, people are pretty tough here. They go through friends like potato chips. They’d want to be free to discard someone who wasn’t useful any more.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure. People are your weapon here, you use them to get ahead. Besides, you can just step out the door here and meet everyone you know. I can bump into people four times a day in the East Village. And then there are all the lounges. I mean, you’ve got all the social life you can handle right there.”

  “That’s how you knew Kate and Java?” I said.

  “Yup. Well, Kate used to date Leo. That’s how I knew her.”

  There was a slight frostiness in Kim’s voice as she pronounced Kate’s name.

  “Didn’t you like her?” I said, stirring.

  “Never any hiding anything from you,” Kim said. “No, I didn’t much. I thought she gave Leo a really hard time. She soured him on women. He was really into her. I always thought that was partly because she worked in a gallery, though…. OK, maybe I’m kidding myself,” she said ruefully, catching my eye. “But anyway, when she dumped him he got all bitter and twisted. I told him a while back I wasn’t coming to see him any more ’cause he’d just drop all this misogynistic shit on me. When we met him in the park I was livid.”

  “I remember.”

  “But he seems to have mellowed out,” she admitted. “Anyway, I was too busy trying to get into Lex’s pants to bother with Leo for long.”