Namedropper (16 page)

I was terrified to ask Ray what he thought, in case he dismissed it as shit, but when Skyline went offstage, Ray was smiling. “Yeah, pretty good. The kid's got style, I'll give him that.” But he didn't want to go backstage. And neither did I. When you see a band that great, you shouldn't try and go backstage and hang with them because by the end of the night, the experience will have lost its purity, from scrounging lights and sharing bottles of warm beer and making small talk. I was applying the same theory that Treena does to one-night stands. Great fuck? True romance? Then get the hell out of there before he wakes up, so you don't have to face the reality of bleary eyes, bad breath, and stubble.

When we got back to the room, I could hardly put the key in the door. My head was buzzing and my ears were ringing. It was one of the best shows I had ever seen. I've seen five—one of them was Elton John at Wembley Arena with Manny. I was writing a review in my head, considering buying space in the
NME
to print it as an advert. Ray went into the bathroom and began to brush his teeth. I pulled off my jeans and crawled into bed. I wondered where Dillon was and who he was with and what he was thinking and if he wanted to be there. I wondered
what Drew thought of Skyline and Dillon, and I couldn't believe that it hadn't come up. So much I hadn't asked him. So much he hadn't told me. How could he not have told me that?

Ray came back into the room and flicked off the light. I heard him take his jumper off over his head and heard his elbows crack. I listened as his belt came undone and he kicked off his jeans. Then he gingerly eased himself under the covers. Although I couldn't see him, I knew he was turned away from me. He didn't talk but his breathing was very loud. I didn't know if I was supposed to notice it or not. I thought I felt a hairy knee brush past me.

“Ray, is that your foot?”

He threw back the covers. “Oh, for God's sake. I'll sleep on the floor.”

“No, I didn't mean that.”

But he lay down on the carpet and pulled the cover blanket over him, up to his nose.

“Well, I'll sleep there with you, then.”

I cosied up to him and tried to get under his arm, but he turned away and huffed.

“Why won't you cuddle me?”

He pulled the cover over his head and lifted the side just enough so I could hear him. “Because you're in your knickers and you're a girl. I know you're just you, but men have reactions. You don't want to know.”

“No, I don't.” I pulled sharply away and ran to the bathroom. Oh God, he thought I was trying to … trying to do a Lolita.

How dare he be so presumptuous? How dare he think that?
I stormed back into the room. “Do you often think I'm trying to seduce you? Do I make you feel that uneasy? Because if you think that, then there's no point in us being friends. If I'm just another young girl you have to fend off.”

“Please, Viva, don't be like that. But try to understand. I'm a bit drunk. And I'm a man. I've got a penis.”

“You haven't, Ray. That's why I like you.”

Sighing miserably to himself, he whipped it out. “There.”

I looked at it in amazement. That's what all the fuss is about? It looked like such a rushed job, as if God hadn't had time to finish it properly. “Okay, Ray, I don't like you anymore.”

He put it away. I got back into bed and closed my eyes tight, willing myself to fall asleep as quickly as possible. I don't know if Ray slept well, but when I woke up, he was staring at the ceiling.

Ray pulled his covers back, inch by inch, as if they were the wrapping on the last present of Christmas, on the last Christmas of his life. Try as he might, he couldn't help looking disappointed at what the wrapping contained. He was expecting something else, something bigger, someone else. Gingerly, he stood up and crept towards me and then peered from four feet away—close enough to see if I was awake, far enough to pretend he was looking at the clock on the night table. When he saw my eyes were open, he stopped looking. Manny always says that it's disrespectful to look at a dead body because it can't look back. My limbs felt very cold and heavy.

Ray put on his clothes and gathered up his bag without once glancing at me. I didn't take my eyes off him. It's always a shock when I see Ray for what he is—not some amorphous lump of Disney sexuality, but a rollicking, frolicking, wounded-pride Peckinpah woman-hater. In other words, a man. And, like a man, he was acting as if we had had sex with each other, when the whole point was, we hadn't. I wanted to jump on his back and make him carry me round the room until he said sorry. But with the mood he was in, he would have reported me for sexual harassment. If, as Gloria Steinem stresses, sexual harassment is not about sex but about power, I
suppose his behaviour could be taken as a twisted compliment: he believed I had made sexual overtures to him because he felt I was stronger than him. However, in my heart, I knew he had put a sexual spin on us sharing a room, not because of any power struggle, but because he's vain. I wished he were Treena.

Treena runs around naked, but it isn't showing off. Half the time, she doesn't seem to realise that the knockout body is in any way attached to her. Now and then she'll catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror and hoot, “Well, will you look at those,” and “Hot diggity! Nice ass, baby.” She loves her looks but doesn't think about them, unlike most teenage girls, who dislike their looks but think about them all the time.

She's the only one in the gym changing-room who doesn't give a damn. Nobody looks at her anymore because they've seen it so many times now. I'm always fascinated by the shy girls who turn changing into their kit into an obsessive-compulsive sadomasochistic ritual. They take their knickers off without taking off their leotards, or put their T-shirts on before they take their school blouse off, so you never catch a glimpse of their bra. It's like watching a tropical fish trying to mate with itself at the bottom of the ocean.

Ray went into the bathroom. I heard him tinkle. I also heard the lock flick. Oh, wise precaution. Like I was going to burst in and plead, “Go on, Ray, let me watch you wee-wee.” I made sure I was turned away from him when he unlocked himself and came huffing back in. I talked to the wall, which I noticed was fern green with a wood-panel border. I cleared my throat, like I was about to declare a new law.

“Morning, Ray. Sleep well?” He harrumphed and I kept
talking. “I'm going to get up in a minute and go to the hotel. I want to try and talk to anyone who might have seen Drew. That's why we came here, after all.”

“Well, look,” he answered, with the cool, steely tones of an outlaw, “I'm going to go back. I've just remembered that I have an appointment back in London. I'm meeting someone for lunch. Um …” I know he would have kept talking if he could think of anything else to say. He couldn't, so he tried to hustle me into a corner with his manly silence. I spun around to face it and it crashed over my body like a ten-foot wave on Zuma Beach. I swam forty-five degrees parallel to the shore so I wouldn't get dragged out to sea, coughing the salt water up and out of my lungs and trying to keep my swimsuit from getting ripped from my body.

“You just remembered you've got an appointment? Who are you meeting?”

“The girl I like.”

“Oh.” Now I felt as if we
had
done something the night before and that Ray was about to cheat on me. How I must bore him with my non-cocaine, no-sex-in-toilets lifestyle. How he must long for leggy models and hard drugs when I'm talking to him about Kubrick and Kafka. I always thought he was listening intensely, but now I see he was merely bored. Hotel rooms are funny things. They make everything look different. If people have to sleep with each other, sexually or platonically, they should do it in kitchens. The kitchen is the epicentre of truth in any home or building. You could never misconstrue a look or a word or a touch in the icy cool, compartmentalised presence of a fridge.

“How will I get home?”

He checked his woman's hair in the dirty bronze-framed mirror. “The train goes every half hour from the station. You're a big girl now. You don't need me to chauffeur you.”

Well, for a start, I'm not a big girl and I never will be. If you don't get fat or tall by my age, it's unlikely you ever will. And, actually, I did need him to chauffeur me. I love being driven. It's the curse of the Springsteen fan who doesn't know how to drive. You're always going to have to seek out someone willing to cruise into Badlands with you with the top down and the radio blasting. To live Bruce's hymns to the independence of the open road can offer, the non-driver has to have a friend who knows how to work it. It's a tough call. You may find someone who will let you ride with them, but they'll probably be grumpy about driving with the top down and may well order you to take that Springsteen shit out of the tape-player.

I'm never going to learn to drive. I refuse to learn how to do anything I can't do naturally. In my head I'm such an accomplished and creative guitar player that I'm still surprised every time I pick up Manny's acoustic to find that I can't play at all. Not one note. That's why I hate French so much. God, I would love to open my mouth and be fluent, and I believe one day I will. But sitting down and learning how to form the words—it seems, somehow, like cheating.

Ray zipped his bag, closing, with it, the subject. Then he wrinkled his nose, mimed a gagging motion with his throat, and growled, “Since when do you wear perfume?”

I gathered the sheet around my neck. “I've always worn it.”

“Well, it used to smell different. Light and girly.” Bloody hell. “Light and girly!” He was, of course, describing his ideal woman: lightly sketched, in face and character, and very
young-looking. He was in a total rage, as powerful as it was pointless. I looked up at him and his face was the colour of Paloma Picasso's mouth.

“Why?” he yelled. “Why do you suddenly smell like a French whore?” Then he walked out the door, slamming it like it was the new Skyline album. And all I could do was laugh. How does he know what a French whore smells like? You're so vain, you probably think this pong is about you. Calvin Klein got it wrong—he shouldn't have called his perfume “Escape … For Men,” he should have called it “Escape … From Men.” Then every sane woman in the Western world would buy twenty bottles.

It was only ten-thirty—another hour and a half before checkout. Knowing Ray, he would soon forget to settle the bill on his blaze through the front door. I'm sixteen and I'm always picking up the bill after Ray, who is twenty-six and a pop star. It's not that he's deliberately mean. It's just that he only ever has a million-pound note that he can't possibly break into. Luckily, I had my cheque book with me. I was incredibly proud when I first got it. Ray immediately mocked it, dubbing it “My First Cheque Book” because of the endangered animals of the world printed on each slip.

I was so angry. Straight men are absolutely disgusting, they really are. They're always jumping to the wrong conclusions, and picking their noses and farting, and they're always masturbating. Ray told me that when he's in the studio he sometimes does it seven times a day. He says that's nothing—Tommy told him he likes to masturbate over the backs of sleeping girls after he's had sex with them. Treena slept with a man who advocated male sex with melons. Once a week, he'd go down
to the market in Portobello, buy a medium-sized melon, take it home, slice it in half, make a small hollow in the centre, and have sex with it. I have this perverse reaction whenever I know someone has a slant on me—I play up to it. If I think there's a girl at school whose family doesn't like Jews, I always make sure to offer her a bit of my bagel or to ask her if she wants to come see the new Woody Allen film with me. I think that's one way to make it clean again—to take it to such an extreme that everyone starts laughing. So if Ray wanted me to act like a sexpot, I would, even if he wasn't there to see it.

I took my underwear off and arranged myself in what I imagined to be a postcoital position. I thought postcoital thoughts, like “My, I feel so satisfied and inspired” and “Is he going to ring me?” and “Was that it?” But my mind kept wandering to who was my favourite character on
The Simpsons
and whether short hair makes a short person look taller or smaller. Treena later assured me that those are legitimate post-sex thoughts in her book, and that, since I asked, excessively long hair makes little people look dumpy.

When I got downstairs, reception was abandoned. It was like the bed-and-breakfast had become a ghost town overnight. I wanted to pay, but I was suddenly frightened—where was the woman we checked in with? Why had she been so insistent that we sign into her thinly used guest book? Why were all the mirrors so dirty?—and I walked out the door without looking back. I stopped momentarily, blinking in the sunlight, and fumbled in my Jackie O sunglasses. Scrambling to hook them over my ears, I ran, as fast as I could, up the side street and onto the promenade. It was incredibly blustery, and to get to the Metropole I had to cling to the railings beside the
boardwalk and pull myself along as if I were on roller skates. The boys from the night before were throwing up in the gutter and crashed out on benches, even collapsed in heaps on the crappy pebble beach.

I swung through the revolving glass door of the Metropole, the hotel where Drew had last been seen, behind a businessman wearing a Stetson hat. He marched up to the bar and started complaining, in an undulating Texan accent, about the weather and how he had been assured it was going to be sunny this weekend. Assured by who? God? The girl behind the bar had pixie-cut red hair and big green eyes. She listened to him with ill-disguised boredom and he got even angrier. She pointed out the weather report from
The Times
and he shut up. “Weekend forecast: overcast.” To Americans, the English
Times
is even bigger than God. Primly adjusting his hat like it was a tiara, he crept off to the lift. I sidled up and placed my hands on the maple between me and pixie-hair. My nail varnish was fucked. It was thick and gloopy, apart from the tips, where dirt glared unashamedly through, like a peeping Tom, unaware that it could be seen. We both gazed at my fingers disgustedly, forgetting briefly who and where we were. I moved my hands and her head snapped up.