Strawberry Tattoo (12 page)

I wondered whether I was supposed to stand up and do a twirl. Stanley crossed the room to stand behind my chair, pressing my shoulders as Jon was doing to Barbara.

“This is Sam Jones,” he said, sounding as enthusiastic as if he had just blanked out the content and implications of the whole preceding conversation. “Sam, I want you to meet Barbara Bilder and Jon Tallboy. Barbara is one of our most respected artists.”

He beamed over at her.

Having reached the point where tragedy shaded into surrealism, the situation had, lemming-like, taken a leap right over the edge. Laurence was staring at Stanley as if he had lost control of himself and were running round the room screaming hysterically: “Help me! Help me! I can’t go on!” while tearing off his clothes. And, in a sense, he had. This retreat into some bizarre kind of polite ritual was an impassioned cry for help.

The trouble was that everything was about to complicate itself still further. It wasn’t simply that Barbara and I, like two marionettes under the control of an increasingly deranged puppeteer who had decided to segue into a drawing-room comedy halfway through a rendering of
Psycho
, found ourselves impelled to stand up and go through the motions of shaking hands while murmuring greetings to each other; no, it was even weirder. Because as soon as Stanley had pronounced the surname of Barbara’s husband, I had known at once why his face seemed so familiar to me.

“You’re Kim’s father!” I said to Jon Tallboy as I shook his hand, with the relief of someone who has finally solved a particularly nagging riddle. “Do you remember me? Kim and I were at sixth-form college together, and then art school—no, hang on, you went off to New York when we went to art school, and then Kim went over to see you and never came back. Is she still here?”

My voice was triumphant. Poor Jon Tallboy, however, still reeling under all the appalling revelations of this visit to the gallery, looked as if this strange coincidence were the final straw.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice dazed, “I don’t quite—”

Beside me Stanley was practically gibbering. His nice social impulse had comprehensively derailed itself, taking him with it. I felt rather sorry for him; in a way it hadn’t been too much to ask that we all say hello and pleased to meet you, providing him with a brief shining moment of sanity in a world gone mad. Instead Jon Tallboy looked as if I had just sandbagged him in slow motion.

“I’m Sam Jones,” I said helpfully, spelling it out for him more slowly. It seemed better to get the recognition part over with straight away. “I was a friend of Kim’s. I used to hang out at your house all the time.”

He was still staring at me wildly.

“OK, I had green hair,” I said with resignation, realising that I was going to have to embarrass myself. In for a penny and all that. “And a dog collar. You always used to make a joke about it.”

He had meant well, though. That was why I didn’t mind reminding him. My punk phase hadn’t lasted long, but it had been full-on at the time. Jon’s brow cleared.

“Sam? Sam!
My God! How are you?” he said, recognition dawning. He hugged me, then drew back to look me up and down. “Well, I can see for myself. All grown up and comparatively respectable! I remember that green hair as if it was yesterday…. Didn’t you and Kimmy once dye hers red in the bathroom sink? Her mother was furious with you.”

I winced. Maybe I had made a mistake initiating this whole old-school reunion thing with the entire staff of Bergmann LaTouche listening in, their ears flapping, pathetically grateful for the tiniest distraction. I was just glad Hugo wasn’t there. He would have bombarded Jon Tallboy for humiliating pieces of information about me and employed them for his own amusement at my most vulnerable moments.

“I should have known straight away,” I apologised. “I was staring at you for ages, sure I knew you from somewhere.”

“It’s been a long time,” Jon said, waving away this apology. “And I didn’t recognise you either…. My God!” he said fondly. “To see you all grown up—the last time I saw you, you looked like Return of the Living Dead.”

I thought it best to interrupt these reminiscences before they became terminally embarrassing.

“How’s Kim?” I asked.

“Oh, good, good. She’s got this trendy downtown life, working as a waitress in some restaurant in the East Village—that’s where she lives. You should get in touch with her.”

“I’d love to. I was meaning to look her up.”

At least something had gone more easily than I expected today.

“So you’re showing here? That’s wonderful!” Jon Tallboy was looking positively cheerful. Nice to have someone actually perk up when they remembered me, rather than holding up a crucifix and starting to babble the Lord’s Prayer. Or maybe at this unpropitious moment he was simply milking any piece of good news for all it was worth. I could scarcely blame him.

“It’s a group show,” I said self-deprecatingly, not wanting him to think I was elevated above my station. Maybe in twenty years, if I were lucky, I too could have my own one-woman show here. Why, perhaps someone would even break in and daub “Whore” and “Slut” all over my pieces. I brightened up at the prospect. At least that would imply that I was still enjoying an eventful sex life at nearly fifty.

Unfortunately Jon Tallboy had followed me a short way along the track of my mental processes and stopped dead at the point where we reached the connection between the one-woman show and people trashing it. His face fell. This wasn’t just a metaphor; his skin sagged visibly as his smile drooped and faded.

“This is such strange timing,” he said, looking helplessly over at his wife. “I don’t know what to say.”

I too looked at Barbara Bilder, and was taken aback. Up until now, despite her distress, she had basically been projecting friendliness, as if she felt that through all this trouble she was at least surrounded by people who meant well. Now, for the first time, I had a hint of what she could be like when a situation did not please her. The shiny brown eyes had become as flat and cold as if she were trying to bounce me off her stare, away from her and her husband. It wasn’t that she disliked younger artists; she had been
perfectly nice, if disoriented by Stanley’s bizarre timing, when we had shaken hands. I decided that she must be jealous of Jon.

The impression that she was physically repelling me was so strong that I nearly took a step back. I had thought she was charismatic when she entered the room, but that was nothing to the effect she was projecting now. I got the message. Jon Tallboy was completely off-limits.

It was a blow, considering my well-known weakness for grey-haired corduroy-wearing father figures. I would just have to bear up bravely and try to forget him.

“Today is like riding a roller-coaster,” I said to Laurence a short while later. “Just when you think you’ve finally oriented yourself the ground drops away and you’re screaming all over again.”

“Tell me about it.” He still looked terrible. “I still can’t get over Stanley.
‘Let’s try for a happier note,’”
he repeated, incredulous. “It was frightening. I’ve never realised before what people mean when they say someone came apart at the seams. You could practically see him unravelling before your eyes.”

“Is he OK?”

Laurence shrugged indifferently. “Who’s OK? Carol sent him to his office and he’s probably on the phone to his shrink right now, popping Prozac like breath-fresheners.”

We were following Barbara, Jon and Carol as they toured the gallery, examining the damage to the paintings at close range. I was tagging on because my usual morbid fascination with disaster and destruction wouldn’t let me leave until I had sucked the situation dry and spat out its bones.

“I would take another antidepressant, too,” Laurence said seriously, “but it wouldn’t do anything. I’m too wound up. Besides, I’m trying to cut back.”

“God.” I was finding this hard to believe. “And you guys call me an alcoholic when I have an extra margarita. What a bunch of drug snobs you are.”

“Look, Barbara,” Carol was saying as she indicated a particularly disfiguring streak of paint over one of the canvases. “It’s not wonderful, OK? This is oil-based. That means trouble getting it off. There’s some hope, because of that fixative you always use. But I don’t want to be too optimistic. It’s not really my field.”

“If they’d only used water-based paint!” Barbara said plaintively. “The difference it would have made!”

“No point expecting this scum to be considerate,” Jon Tallboy said, stooping to clasp his arm still tighter around his much smaller wife. “We can just thank God it wasn’t an aerosol spray.”

Barbara shivered. “I can’t even think about that,” she whispered.

“I wonder why it wasn’t,” I said
sotto voce
to Laurence. “Much easier to use.”

“Yeah, but these splashes make much more of a
statement,”
he said, with a partial resumption of his mocking tone of yesterday. “I mean, you can just throw this stuff around as crazily as you want. It looks much
angrier.”

“It certainly does.”

“No, I see exactly why they chose this medium.” Laurence was getting into his stride. “It says rage to me, it says uncontrolled, it says blood on the walls—”

His voice was rising dangerously high. Carol swivelled her head and shot him a furious glance. Meekly he subsided as she turned back and said reassuringly to Barbara:

“I’ll be calling in a specialist restorer right away. I know just the person. Maybe she can even drop by this afternoon and give us a first opinion.”

“That would be wonderful,” Barbara said sincerely. “Please let me know straight away what she says. I’ll be sitting by the phone.”

“Of course. Barbara, I want to assure you that we will do everything we can to track down the person responsible. Even if it is a member of my own staff.”

“I’m sure you will, Carol. I have complete faith in you.”

Barbara was being surprisingly docile. No, on reflection I wasn’t that
surprised. She was a sensible woman; throwing a tantrum now wouldn’t have helped, apart from giving her and everyone else a headache. This way she was surrounded by people reassuring her, ready to attend to her every need. Much more pleasant.

The small phalanx—Queen Barbara, her consort, chief advisers and courtiers—proceeded downstairs to survey the situation there. I swallowed hard. It was definitely worse down here. The vandal had obviously started on the ground floor, which had received the whole first flush of energy and enthusiasm for the task at hand. Upstairs, for all its crimson paint splashes, did not look like a slaughterhouse. This did.

The door buzzer sounded. Carol, probably relieved to have something concrete to do, went over to the intercom by the door herself instead of despatching Laurence. After a brief colloquy she unbolted the door and drew it open.

“Come in, officers,” she said politely.

A man and a woman strolled in as slowly as if they had all the time in the world. As Carol closed and locked the door behind them, they paused and looked around, sizing up the scene. I stared at them with great interest, never having seen plain-clothes American police officers before. I was already garnering details to report to Hawkins, a friend of mine who’s a DI on the Flying Squad.

They seemed to know exactly how far they could push the concept of plain clothes without actually abandoning all the rules completely, like schoolkids modifying their uniforms by unbuttoning their shirts or hiking up the skirts while still being able to protest, with an air of injured virtue, that they were conforming to all known regulations. Both of them were big and chunky, the woman’s hair caught back so tightly from her head it accentuated the squareness of her face, which was so marked I could have plotted the ninety-degree angles at each corner with a protractor.

They wore their down-at-heel clothes and apparent lack of physical fitness with such nonchalance that it made their presence more impressive than if they had been smart and super-energetic. Briefly they shot glances
around the gallery, checking out their surroundings as comprehensively as if they were shooting photos of the crime scene. The woman said in a flat, uninflected voice:

“Hi. I’m Detective Thurber, and this is Detective Frank. You must be Ms. Bergmann.”

“That’s right.” Carol drew a long breath. “I’d better introduce you around.”

“Please,” Thurber said.

A woman of few words was somehow more impressive than an equally taciturn man. Carol seemed unusually rattled.

“This is Barbara Bilder,” she said, indicating her. “She’s the artist currently showing here. Her husband, Jon Tallboy. And this is Laurence De-bray, one of our assistants, and Sam Jones, who’s about to take part in our next group show.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Detective Frank, nodding generally to us all. “I gotta say, ma’am,” he continued with increasing animation, addressing Barbara, “this is some show you got here. Usually I don’t go so much for modern art, but this is pretty powerful stuff. Really makes a statement you can’t ignore. I guess you’d call this deconstruction, right? Where you do the paintings and then trash them yourself?”