Namedropper (10 page)

You'll notice there's a high Italian female count. Anne Bancroft's real name is Anna Maria Louise Italiano. She changed it when she went to Hollywood because she didn't want to be perceived as just another lusty Italian wench. Now everyone thinks she's Jewish. Simone Signoret was, and I've had big rows with Manny about Paul Newman. Whenever I raise the subject, he practically rips his hair out. “How many times do I have to tell you? Newman is a
Catholic
name.” I really, really want Paul Newman to be Jewish, just like Manny
really, really wants people he likes to be gay. There just aren't that many Jewish sex symbols and I'm trying to help out. I know, Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, although I don't really rate him. Not enough.

I'm incredibly envious of the Italian broads because … well, Jews are pretty good, but Italians are even better. Can you imagine being an Italian Jew? I think I might explode with joy. And if you're Jewish, you're close enough that boys sometimes say, “Hey, are you Italian?” and I say, “No, I'm Jewish,” and they deflate, like “Oh, why has this image of Sophia Loren suddenly turned into Joan Rivers?”

I'd shown Ray the list because I knew it would annoy him. I knew it would have two effects—to make him feel like the white trash he is (Ray thinks liking Michelle Pfeiffer is the height of sophistication) and to make him jealous with the inclusion of Drew.

“Junkie poof!” Ray exclaimed, as if he were a football commentator, and that were Drew's number. To my disappointment, he would not be further drawn. Instead he initiated a discussion about who had the best chest, Yul Brynner or Paul Newman. We decided it was Yul Brynner. Ray had on a dressing gown at the time, chest casually exposed, and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to say, “Wow, Ray. You beat them all.”

I wanted to discuss my list with Drew and I waited patiently for the fishnet brigade to give up and go home. Drew wouldn't acknowledge Ray until Ray stepped right up and slapped him, hard, on the back, at which point Drew stretched out a skinny hand and said, “Hello, Ray, how very nice of you to come,” like an etiquette school graduate.

“C'mon, gal,” Ray barked at me, “I'll drop you home.”

“Uh, no thank you, Ray, I'm going to get a taxi. A little later.”

Ray put his arm across my back and let it rest on my hip. “Really, gal. You've got to be up for school.”

I was mortified. The way he put his arm round me. It had so little to do with affection and so much to do with property. It was hideous. I was terrified Drew would think we were sleeping together. The way he just rested himself on me looked like “I have her. I might have her again, if I want.” I was furious. No way would I let him drive me home. Besides, Ray's car is the most disgusting thing on earth. It is always overflowing with crisp packets and stinks of cigarette ash. Ray is a pig.

The first time he took me out to dinner he ate my dessert when I excused myself to go to the ladies'. I returned to the table to find my plate smeared with the remnants of chocolate fudge cake. This annoyed me because I had repeatedly offered him a bite and he had repeatedly replied, “Oh, no,” as if saying, “Oh, no, I don't touch hard drugs.” As I sat down, he began to sweep up the crumbs with a wet finger. One morsel of chocolate slipped off his forefinger and made a valiant Steve McQueen-style attempt to escape. In my mind, I willed it onto a tiny motorbike, to leap over Ray's stubby thumb. But he grabbed it and stuffed it between his lips, which were twisted with success.

“Yes, I ate it all.”

“You ate it all,” I said sadly.

He repeated himself. “Yes, I ate it all.”

I was determined that Ray was not going to win this time.

“Look, why don't you drop Treena. She wants to go home.”

“Cool,” said Treena, skipping out towards the car. Ray ground a cigarette into the floor with his boot and then followed Treena out, not saying another word. I tapped Drew on the shoulder and asked if he wanted a drink. He jumped a bit when I touched him and then backed out of the room, facing me, as you're supposed to do when being menaced by a shark.

“Thank you, Viva, but no thank you. I've got a fanzine interview to do.” He motioned to a tall, scraggly seventeen-year-old girl with pale blond hair and watery blue eyes. She didn't look Jewish, that's for sure.

“Well, should I wait for you?”

He smiled with two muscles. You're supposed to use eight. “I'm a little tired.” The girl tugged at his arm. He didn't flinch. He must have been very drunk.

“Oh, okay. Well, I'll see you soon.” But I knew I wouldn't.

When I think about Drew, I feel so alive that I want to die. His hair, his skin, his cuts. It hits me like a blast of hyperlife. It knocks me sideways so I can't get up. I am six, learning to roller-skate, falling on my coccyx again and again. But it's worth it for the five seconds I'm on wheels, not holding on to the railings, my pink ra-ra skirt blowing above my waist, kneepads strapped to my black leggings. I always fall over just as the mad old man from the next street turns the corner. My body is throbbing with the pain of concrete on butt and the mad old man is whispering obscenities right up close against my ear. I can smell the cabbage and scotch and pornographic magazines oozing from his pores. I can't get up. I can't get away. I can't tell Manny.

I have to stay in bed with a satin eye-mask on my head and eat white grapes with the skin peeled off. I don't think Drew would eat the skin, although I'm not sure. I am certain he pulls the string off the banana flesh before biting it and spits the pips out of apples and folds them neatly in a tissue. I can't stand people who eat apple cores. It's like saying, “Hi! I'm just too much. I will eat your head if you let me.”

If he partakes in chocolate, it would be Kit Kats, which are a great favourite of the neurotically inclined: you not only
have the four chocolate walls to bite off per finger, but also four individual wafer layers, which you can pull apart like an airline drink mat if you're very skilful. I like Smarties. When I was little, I liked to arrange them in patterns around the toilet seat for Manny to find. And he was always very appreciative and made a big fuss about how artistic and talented I was and how I was going to be the next director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I became director, we would be moved to New York and we would buy back the old family house in Brooklyn plus an apartment in Manhattan, probably a TriBeCa loft next door to Robert De Niro. I bet Drew's favourite Smartie is the yellow one. If you like Sartre, you'd like the yellow one. I just get that impression.

I sense he might have a penchant for olives. His breath is ever so slightly metallic and jagged. If you drink that much, you only have time for bar snacks: mini-pretzels and stale crisps and olives. People who eat olives, who actually like them, are by nature perverse. Because olives do not taste nice. They make you gag the first, second, third, and fourth time you try them. You really have to work at it to start liking them. You have to like pain. Really like it. Because the acrid oil lines your palate for days. Even when you brush it away, the taste comes back to haunt you on those hot, restless nights spent kicking one leg over the sheet and folding your arms under the pillow.

Drew savours unpleasantness, unhappiness, and discomfort like a sucking sweet you take to combat nausea on long car journeys. It keeps him going, stops his stomach flipping over. If you are always miserable, at least you know where you stand. My problem is when I'm happy, I'm too happy. I'm
clutching the string of a helium balloon. Manny's crying, “Jump, jump!” but I never do because I have no sense of distance. I can't see how high off the ground I am and what a long way down the real world is. I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.

See, I was talking about Drew and now I'm talking about me. Manny says I obsess on other people because I don't want to focus on myself. But in the end, all my crushes come back to me. All roads lead to Viva.

I like the fact that Drew only drinks vodka. True, it is the choice of the alcoholic. But that's good. It means Drew is drinking for nobody except himself. Vodka is the most honest and workmanlike of alcohols. It is there to make you drunk. It does not taste nice. It does not come in a fancy bottle or in an appealing colour. It holds no appeal for aficionados of smelly cheese and fine wines. There is no such thing as a vodka-tasting party. It is clean and see-through and straight to the point.

I can't stop thinking about him. I can't stop relating every situation to him because I know he'd have the definitive view on every situation. Taking the rubbish out is symbolic of the human condition. Watching Australian soaps is symbolic of the human condition. Brushing your teeth is symbolic of the human condition. Have I said that his hair is in really great condition? I've never met a man with such soft hair. Like a
chinchilla. Snakes are really very soft and nice to feel too. I guess that's why they flinch. Because they've got to protect their reputation. Otherwise everybody would be coming up and trying to pet them and their skin would probably go all thin from people rubbing their dirty fingers on it. It's like those signs in art galleries: “Please do not touch the sculpture. Even if your hands are very clean you can still damage the bronze.” Drew can see the dirt that no one else can see, not even on their own bodies.

I've found that if I do go to school, thoughts of Drew usually come during a Maths lesson.

If I stay at home, under the covers, it happens more slowly, more pleasantly, descending like a fog, like a soothing aromatherapy steam bath. I feel pampered and slightly embarrassed. Manny knocks on the door and I promise I'll get up in a minute. Manny thinks I'm masturbating. I'm not. I never do. My attention span isn't long enough. Treena told me, “You do this and keep doing it until you
have
to keep doing it.” No household object is safe from her: cucumbers, hairbrush handles, deodorants. I hope she never wins an Oscar. And she goes on and on about it, which is one of the times with her I just have to switch off.

“Try it again, Viva. Try it for longer.” It sounds too much like learning to use tampons. I just think, how stupid. I can't even listen to my favourite two-and-a-half-minute pop song all the way to the end without having to fast-forward. I'm never going to have the patience to have an orgasm. To say, there, no there, up a bit, faster, softer. Here's the bottom line about masturbation: sex must be humiliating enough as it is. But to make all those faces and all those noises by yourself … how inelegant.

I wonder how Drew will die? He might pierce his heart with a long knife and then collapse on a pre-readied funeral pyre. For me, I don't mind death, I just don't like the idea of pain. I would take pills, one by one, savouring them like M&M's. I love the taste of Ibuprofen, but I don't know how long it needs to take hold, so I would have my letter written the night before and I would have clean hair and shaved legs. I would lay myself on my bed, with arms folded across my chest, holding in my left hand the list of songs I want played at my service, the photo of me I want to adorn the programme, and the people I want at my funeral. Everyone who had not invited me to their parties at junior school would be invited and made to sit at the front.

Drew would be so struck by my death that he would write a concept album about the little girl, too good for this world, who so touched and inspired him. The girl on the cover would look like me but better. It would sell seventeen million copies. T-shirts with BETTER-ME on the front would be freely available at Kensington Market and Camden Lock. Not so much an album, more a cultural phenomenon.

But I wouldn't kill myself. If I did, I wouldn't be able to think about killing myself anymore. And I wouldn't be able to think about Drew. Part of me says that if I did it, he wouldn't be that impressed anyway. He'd just be jealous that I beat him to it. He might think I stole his idea. Everyone always thinks I'm stealing their ideas. When I sit next to Treena in class, she always covers her tests with her arm, even though all she's done so far is write down her name.

The Maths teacher asks me again: “What is the answer to number twenty-three?” I had completely forgotten the question by now. She writes it on the blackboard. The squeak of the chalk makes me gag. I look at the snail-trail of white powder dotted across the board, but all I see are Drew's cuts beginning to come undone. The scars that were starting to heal turn purple, then blossom into red, like an atmospheric David Lean shot of a flower.