Namedropper (11 page)

But before the shot has come fully into focus, David Lean dies and David Cronenberg takes over. The dried blood is splitting and coming off in lumps. The wounds are opening, wider and wider. I can see the flesh inside his wrists. The blood pumps out and sprays across the room, splashing the teacher's blouse and making it stick to her breasts. The blood renders the
faux
cream silk a translucent pink and I can see her nipples. The fact that I can see my Maths teacher's nipples distracts me, momentarily, from the carnage in the classroom.

The teacher asks again. “Why are the rest of the class on number twenty-three and you're only on number three?”

I sigh and throw down my Biro. “Because they're good at Maths and I'm not.” The blood is gone. I see the question in front of me. It is a dumb question.

At lunchtime I stumble down the hallway to the canteen, where Treena is waiting for me. Girls sit as far away from her as possible. She is chewing tuna casserole with her mouth open. The girls at Griffins have enough of a food phobia as it is without Treena making it appear even more disgusting. When she sees me, she sticks her tongue out, displaying, on the end of the puce muscle, a lump of filo pastry and fish. At
the next table Cassie Souter is making exaggerated and compulsive chewing motions with her mouth. There is nothing actually in her mouth. She is chewing her own spit to fool her stomach into thinking she has eaten and is therefore not hungry. She weighs six stone.

Treena is cruel to the anorexics. When she first arrived at the school, she gawped at the walking skeletons whose faces were so thin, the skin stretched across their bones like clingfilm. She stared in a caring way. But now the milk of human kindness has turned sour, and Treena likes nothing better than to taunt a food phobic. “Cassie. Hey, Cassie, I can't finish my lunch. Do you want it?”

“Treena,” I snap. She's being mean. If I expressed my twentieth-century malaise by not eating Kit Kats rather than eating Kit Kats, it would be me she was picking on.

“Why? What? She's making me feel sick. She looks like a freak. And the bulimics. My God, their breath stinks! That constant vomiting. It's disgusting. Why should I have to look at those freaks? It's not exactly a pleasant environment to work in. Jesus, my mum took me out of state school because there was always rain coming through the ceiling onto the table I shared with twenty other people. But that's a lot less distracting than Karen Carpenter over there.”

I myself can't stop watching. It's like a late-night horror film. Treena's always egging me on, forcing me to look. “Oh my God, Viva, you've got to see. She's lost at least another five pounds.
Look!
” And we both look, and the poor girl feels our eyes, hot with incredulity, burning into her already scorched flesh, and thinks we're staring because she is so grotesquely fat.

Mr. Edwards, the only young, male, and handsome teacher
in our school, is on lunch duty, holding a bell that he has to ring between sittings, to let the young ones know their time is up, that that's all the tuna casserole they'll be having today. A man ringing a small bell basically looks stupid. You can't not look dumb. It's like there's no cool way of pronouncing “banana.” It's just a dopey word. Even Mick Jagger couldn't sing the word “banana” and make it sound funky. Mr. Edwards is clutching this little bell, but trying to hold it in a saucy, aloof way, like “Oh look, there's a bell in my hand. Oh look, I'm a teacher in a girls' school. What am I doing here? How odd.”

He is flirting with some long third-formers. Their hair is long, their limbs are long, their faces are long. These girls go on forever. I get bored just looking at them. They make me feel like a tiny, tiny, MTV news-update sound bite. Mr. Edwards looks uncomfortable when he sees Treena and stops chatting and starts pacing the dining room, nervously ringing his handbell, like some kind of Humbert Humbert town crier: “Young girls, young girls. And yet more young girls. No more news.”

Treena holds the swing door open for me with her foot, spitting over her shoulder at the Knights of the Emaciated Table. “Pah. Lightweights.” God, I love her. She truly makes school bearable. If she weren't at Griffins, I would be the most special person there, and it would simply be too much of a burden for me to carry.

If she ever has an off-day, I love her twice as hard, willing her simmering specialness to spark into flame. When she's really hungover and useless, it takes a lot of enthusiasm on my part to get her kicking again, but I'd rather expend energy that way than spend the day feeling odd because Treena isn't as
good as she's supposed to be. I feel very alone with my love. It is the kind of love that needs nothing in return. In fact, it could not exist if I got anything back. It would make it less pure. Her beauty is burning so bright lately, I feel utterly alienated. It frightens me.

And add to that the way I feel about Drew. I feel like I have a permanent albatross fastened around my neck. The albatross is fashioned from the most delicate Tiffany silver. That's how they tricked me. That's how they got me to put it on in the first place. The bird is slim and neat and sparkles on my throat. Even if I could get rid of it, I wouldn't want to. It looks pretty fabulous, besides.

Drew's osmosis into my life beats even Treena's. It's like Treena has been shrunk and compacted and made more intensely obsessable. Drew and Treena. It's just too much to think about. They both crept through my ears and into my brain. And they're not happy about sharing the space. I can feel them kicking and fighting and tossing sarcastic asides across my cranium. It's like having different-coloured bright lights flashed off and on. I feel dizzy and nauseous all the time. Both of them are there and I need them, but I don't want to see them. They are so powerful that they don't make things clearer, they make things murkier. I can't see where I am. They are blinding me.

I try to turn down the light myself, use willpower, like I used to will myself to change the channel when I was having a nightmare. But now it's nightmares during the day, about the gingerbread house with posters of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, sliding to the floor because the walls are too
sweet to hold the Blu-Tack. Instead of trying not to step on pavement cracks, I am trying not to step on Liz Taylor's face. Her photos are sliding and I'm trying to avoid them, but when I look down, I'm standing on her eyes.

I went round to Ray's because I thought he might have some idea what Drew was up to. But within minutes we were rowing about Tommy again even though he was only next door buying cigarettes. He never had a go at Tommy for being so rude to me in Edinburgh. “Look, I told you, I don't want to talk about it. He's a good boy. He's been there for me.”

Ever since Ray made it, he's been there. Before then, when they were first starting out, Tommy gave Ray a terrible review:

He didn't even bother to slag him off properly, such was his lack of interest. Ray smashed up a whole pub when he read it,
which the record company paid for, and offered a bounty on Tommy's head, which they didn't pay for.

Despite the review, Ray began to take off and within the year had had two Top 10 hits and been on
Top of the Pops
three times. Tommy began to come round to him. “Yeah, he's coming on, man. Obviously been listening to some Faces. Must have run out of other cats to rip off.” Then Tommy found out he was from the same village as Ray and Ray found out they supported the same team and they became best mates and now Ray only gets brilliant reviews. They have both wiped that first review from their minds.

When I got to the house, Tommy was apologising for the review Ray got in Edinburgh and the unfavourable comparisons with Drew, even though he didn't write it and hadn't even seen it before it went to press. Ray slumped in the couch, his head in his hands, as Tommy bounced around him, a ludicrous purple scarf tucked into his suit, spitting and gesticulating wildly.

“That jerk, slagging you off, just trying to make a name for himself. He's just championing this little art-house kid. Ray, man, people are always going to have trouble with a singer who has guts, who has soul. Look at how they treated Dexys, man, and The Happy Mondays. Look at the shit they gave The Clash towards the end.”

“The end?” wailed Ray. Ray's anxiety hit Tommy in the gut, as if he were a mother watching her only child being rejected in the school playground. He tried again.

“All the way through. You know what I'm saying. Build 'em up, knock 'em down. But that's what the
NME
is there for.
What do they know? It ain't what it used to be. Who buys it apart from students, anyway? It doesn't mean anything. But don't worry. I gave the little bastard a dressing down. I won't give him any feature work.”

Tommy didn't explain why, if the
NME
was so insignificant, he had been there for over two decades. Neither did he mention that the reason he wouldn't give the bastard any feature work was because, despite his two decades' service, he was still not in a position to do so. Ray, however, seemed soothed by Tommy's dulcet, mod tones, and gave up rubbing his temples, stood up, and began to slap Tommy vigorously on the back, as if to stop him choking on bread.

“Thanks, Tommy, man. I just thought it was really unfair. He wasn't listening to the message.” Ray is such a jerk when he hangs around with Tommy. “What message? What message wasn't he listening to?” I asked. “Your answerphone message? I'm not surprised. It goes on for so long. The message in a bottle?”

I did my best impression of Sting, kneeling on the floor with my arms over my knees in one of the three yoga positions I know. Ray burst out laughing and started hopping about the room, squealing, “Ey oh-oh, ey oh-oh, ey oh-oh.”

“String! String! I am String!” we coughed, fluffing up our hair in the mirror.

Ray and I find Sting endlessly amusing. We are also reduced to girl giggles by MTV presenters, endive salad, and Puff Daddy being a rapper even though he has buck teeth. Tommy watched nervously. He couldn't join in because it would crumple his suit. It was clear he didn't want to in any
case. I could see his little mind racing: “They look like fools. Yet Ray is clearly enjoying himself. I should join in. But I can't. They look like fools.”

Tommy watched me hopping and started his bristling. Then the phone rang and that's how Tommy Belucci came to be there when Ray told me what had happened to Drew. Tommy Belucci is always there, especially when I don't want him to be. I stared at him as Ray answered the cordless phone in the kitchen. He couldn't look at me. If I'd been wearing a low-cut dress, at least he would have somewhere to look. But I was wearing my school uniform. Not in an ironic, saucy way, but in a “I have just got back from an afternoon of double French, therefore I am wearing my school uniform” way.

Funny. The blazer, skirt, and tie become automatically sexy the minute you leave school, when you're eighteen or nineteen and pull it out for fancy-dress parties. But whilst you're still there, stewing through Maths, unable to find anyone who'll let you sit next to them in the cafeteria, crying in the toilet stalls, you know what it represents and you can't bring yourself to make it look alluring. That would be traitorous and phoney. I knew I looked like shit and I was glad I did because that's how the twenty pounds of grey polyester and itchy navy wool made me feel.

Tommy watched the TV screen. He never talks to me. At first, he simply did not know how to address me. He still doesn't know, but he has decided he doesn't like me. I hated him from the first second I spent in his company. Some people are born with natural charisma. This boy has negative charisma. He walks into a room and the oxygen starts to evaporate.
I guess that's why girls sleep with him. They find his awfulness quite transfixing. He's like a lousy 1970s disaster movie that they can't bring themselves to turn off, even though it is making their life worse every minute they leave it on.

Tommy can't figure out why I am there, what purpose I serve. I know what he's thinking:
If Ray wants to shag teenage girls, that's fine, par for the course and all, so long as he lets his mates have some too
. Personally, if I were a grown man, I would not care to make love to teenage girls. I absolutely can't see how it makes them feel younger, unless, as I imagine it, it makes them feel very, very stupid and that, in itself, takes them back to adolescence. Of course, I understand perfectly why a young girl should sleep with an older man.

Teenage boys are never grateful—for your presence, for your beauty, for your thoughts, for your breath. They aren't even thankful if you give in and do the deed, not just afterwards, but during. Which doesn't make sense. Surely the younger you are, the less chance you've had to have sex, the more excited you should be about it. Teenage boys should be prostrate at our feet, trembling with feverish anticipation. Yet when they do coerce their classmates into bed, they seem terribly underwhelmed about it. At best, teenage sex is an achievement on a par with scoring a goal at a Saturday football match. The goal posts consist of two empty Coke cans. The referee is a three-legged dog. At worst, teenage boys see sex as a duty, no more inspiring than taking out the rubbish.

Men, on the other hand, give that one little act unbelievable significance. You can spot the man having an affair with a young girl because he is the one struck dumb (and I do mean dumb) with inspiration—they get inspired to paint, to
cut their hair, to change their job, to write a song or a poem or a novel that never gets published. If a sixteen-year-old girl tells a forty-year-old man to read this or that book, because it's her favourite, he will read it, whether it's
Wuthering Heights
or
Valley of the Dolls
. When you're forty, you suddenly feel very strongly that young people should be taken seriously.