Namedropper (17 page)

“Yes? What can I get you?”

“Um, well actually, I just wanted to ask you something. A friend of mine went missing from this hotel a couple of weeks ago. We haven't seen him since. I was wondering if there was anyone who might have spoken to him that night? He was small and skinny, with longish dyed black hair and big brown eyes. He looked like Natalie Wood.” She twitched when I asked her about Drew. I saw that he had touched her too.

“I don't know who Natalie Wood is,” she laughed nervously, “but, yes, I remember the gentleman you're talking about. I heard that he disappeared. It's quite upsetting because,” she paused, “we talked for quite a long time that night.” Her eyes glazed over. “He was all wet. He had been swimming in the pool downstairs and his hair was in his eyes.”

Drew had obviously been going around town, enticing young girls into his bedroom to talk about the situationists and Tennessee Williams. And they were never the same again.

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh. This playwright called Tennessee Williams.”

“Really? Are you a fan?”

“Well, I wasn't before I met Drew. I hadn't heard of him. But after our talk, I read a little bit.”

“Did you like it?”

She looked miserable. “Not really.” A gust of wind spun through the revolving door. With tears in her eyes, she whispered, “I don't read much. I don't know why he picked me.”

I didn't tell her the truth: because you were there; because you would listen. Instead I shrugged my shoulders, smiled forgivingly, and asked, “Did he say anything else?”

“He said a lot.” She shook her head and mussed up her hair. “I can't remember it all. Something about some old movie star. You know, the one who's a bit like Johnny Depp but fat?”

“Marlon Brando?”

“Yeah, him. And he said something about how you should “never allow yourself to feel anything, because the minute you do, you feel too much.' And that the male chromosome is just
an incomplete female chromosome. And that he truly believes his life would have taken a different course if he had been born with blue eyes.”

“Anything else?”

“He kept calling room service for more drinks.”

“Okay. I get the picture. Thank you for your help.”

I sat in the lobby for a little while with my head in my hands. I could ask anyone who'd ever met him if Drew had given them any clues in his conversation and they would all say the same thing: “Well, he mentioned Marlon Brando, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Judaism, and the futility of life past the age of fifteen.” I guess Drew had a little spiel just like everybody else. Mine is “I'm just an insecure teenage Jew.” His was “I just want to be an insecure teenage Jew.” Throw in “anorexic,” “alcoholic,” “self-mutilator,” and “deathwish,” and you have Drew.

I was more convinced than ever that his death was merely a wish. Like all great wishes, the last thing he wanted was for it to come true. As a matter of course, I looked at the pool he had swum in, but it was just a pool. A pool with fat ladies in bathing caps doing the backstroke, small children surreptitiously weeing in the shallow end, and suspicious white-haired men hanging around the women's changing-room. There were no mysterious markings on the bottom of the pool, or bloodstains on the side, or a note attached to the drainage system saying, “I didn't jump off the bridge. I've gone to Iceland to stay with Bjork. Here's my address …”

That girl behind the bar was probably just as bowled over by him as I was. How could you spend an evening with Drew and not go home feeling traumatised? Ray was the only one
who never paid him that much attention, the only one who wasn't bowled over by his beauty and genius. He had plenty of time to be won over—they toured together for weeks. But he remained resolutely unimpressed. Did that make Ray special or stupid? I thought Drew was the little boy in the Emperor's New Clothes, but maybe it was Ray all along.

With a heavy heart and a light backpack I walked to the station, trying to beat off the ferocious wind with a ferocious scowl. I couldn't go back to the pier. I would have been blown over the edge. I could hardly feel my fingers when I paid for my ticket. There was no point in paying since no conductor ever came through my carriage. Green-gilled boys dotted the rain, lolling with their heads against the windows, summoning their Thunderbird-tinged breath, every so often, to sing a snatch from a Skyline song.

Their hangovers deactivated them. They didn't laugh or jeer at me and I curled up with my legs on a spare seat and tried to sleep. The train took forever and I had to change at East Croydon—former home of Kate Moss and, judging by the lank-haired delinquents smoking on the platform, a variety of other surly girls. At Victoria Station I went into WH Smith to buy the
NME
and also ended up purchasing
In Style
, an offshoot of
People
magazine. It had Bette Midler and her beautiful Malibu loft house on the cover and twelve pages devoted to pictures of Sharon Stone in backless dresses. I spent the last of my cash on a cab home. I can't read in moving cars because it makes me feel sick. This is something I know from experience. But I did and I was and I'm sure I will again. Manny says that's the crucial difference between a neurotic and a psychotic: neurotics learn from their mistakes.

Manny didn't seem very pleased to see me. He had an egg-and-crabmeat soup stain on his pale blue silk blouse and toothpaste round his mouth. His new young friend, a student filmmaker called Keith, hadn't rung and they had last seen each other on Wednesday.

“Fuck him. Three days later is the cutoff date,” I trilled, repeating what Treena had told me.

“How do you know?” he snapped. “You've never had a boyfriend.”

We both blinked at each other for a few seconds. Then I cried and cried and Manny cried harder and begged me to forgive him. He was right, of course. I haven't ever had a boyfriend. I've had the Games teacher—my one great love—but that's different. And Manny doesn't know about him. Why tell him? It wouldn't exactly make me feel vindicated. And I knew, in my head, that that was probably the purest romance I'll ever be party to. Why turn the gleaming copper a mottled green by exposing it to the traffic fumes of the real world? Let it stay in my head and in my heart, tucked into a bed of song lyrics and film trivia.

Poor Manny. The cruelty with which he had addressed me made him shake and me feel very calm. There it is. Everyone has it in them. With Manny, at least it's a surprise. It upsets me more when Treena does it because I expect it of her. I practically will her to be mean. And when she is, I remember how formulaic the world is. You can only dodge the rules for so long. If you look like Treena does, you're supposed to act like a little bitch. That's the truth. Like Manny taught me, it is one's duty to judge a book by its cover. It makes understanding
your own role in life a lot easier. I can't get away with as much as Treena because I'm not as pretty. Life will be harder for me. But I will also get more out of it. I don't kid myself. Maybe one day I will wake up walking and talking like a tall blond cheerleader and that will be the first day of the rest of my life.

Everyone was starting to sound like the girls at school. Ray had been an unbearable bitch all weekend and now Manny too. It was an epidemic. These were the people I had surrounded myself with in order to combat the jerks in my class. My force-field shield had a tear in it. Strangely, the student body were less offish with me than anyone I talked to all week. Stacey Lyttle lent me her ink eradicator and Helen Barton-West let me eat two of her Minstrels.

School itself was becoming a colossal drag. Lessons dragged on so pathetically. I thought they'd collapse before they reached the end. In double Biology, I watched the clock so hard it started to move backwards and then I had no choice but to get on with my work. At least I tried to. You can say “Okay, let's get to work” as much as you like, but that doesn't mean it gets done. I was thinking all these positive thoughts, chanting educational mantras, but it made not a jot of difference. I still don't understand the question.

That Nike advert is such a crock. “Just do it.” I try so hard to do “it,” but “it” seems only to encapsulate the tasks of eating too many crisps, watching
Seinfeld
, spending money I don't have on things I don't want, and drawing Montgomery Clift's face on my hand. It's like, I love the idea of carrots, but not enough to actually eat them. I love the idea of knowing about history. I sit there thinking, “God, this is so great. I'm going to
know all about Italian unification. That really is fascinating.” And I spend so long imagining how much I'll know by the end of the lesson that, when the bell rings, I haven't heard a single word the teacher's said.

On Monday after my journey to Brighton, Treena was all psyched up, revising for the RS exam, our very last GCSE. I hate it when she does that. It's like she snaps, for no reason. She never warns me she's going to do it. Psychos shouldn't get psyched about anything. They should just
be
. A psycho with a cause is no fun at all. I don't know how she does it because she is hardly an incandescent mind. Still, she can cook when she wants to. She is, when she feels like it, perfectly capable of sewing back a button that has come off a coat. She knows how to work the computer in the library. What it comes down to is that we are differently brained.

I looked for her in the dining room, but she wasn't anywhere to be seen, and the dinner lady told me the box of Toffee Crisps was still at a healthy level, so I knew she couldn't have hit the snack counter yet. After checking the changing-rooms and banging on a few toilet doors, I found her at a table at the back of the library, leaning against the radiator. She had her folder spread open in front of her and was chewing on a pen that had a naked lady on it. The librarian was on patrol, throwing out anyone who was using her church to chatter, read
Just Seventeen
, or deal acid. I tried to pass Treena a note but she wouldn't take it. I kicked her leg and she exhaled sharply.

“What, Viva? I've got a lot to do.” Yeah, right. She only has ten fingers and ten toes. How long could it take to paint twenty nails?

“Sorry, Treena. It's just … I still don't understand about the roots of Islam. Do you want to work on it together? You can come to my house after school.”

She began affixing white binding rings to each page of work in her folder. “Can't you work it out for yourself? You're supposed to be the smart one.”

Yeah, I thought, I am supposed to be the smart one. Get off my turf. I felt my cheeks flush and was gripped by the nauseating sense that Treena, once again, held a flush deck. I wish she'd tell me when we're playing. Not even having a pack of cards to play with does make me feel as if I'm somewhat at a disadvantage. My legs started to tingle and I began to feel a little faint. I opened the wrought-iron window opposite the table and took deep breaths from the pit of my stomach, which had housed so many different brands of chocolate over the last few days, it was becoming a kind of safe house for unwanted confectionery. I provide sanctuary for out-of-date Kit Kats that would otherwise end up on the streets. Treena stood up and slammed the window shut. The clatter reverberated around the hushed room. In a flash of comfortable footwear, the librarian was beside us.

“She closed it,” I sulked.

“She opened it,” hissed Treena, giving me the evil eye.

“She stuck gum behind the radiator and ripped a page out of an Evelyn Waugh book for no reason other than she thinks he has a silly name.”

The librarian's eyes blazed. She looked like a Quentin Blake illustration in a Roald Dahl book. “Did you do this, Katerina?”

“Yes.” She rolled her eyes. “A year ago.”

The librarian couldn't have been more upset than if she had caught us using the library to have tattooed heroin sex with members of Mötley Crue. She looked like she might cry. “You find Evelyn Waugh amusing?”

“Well, not him, strictly. His name.” Treena sighed, really not wanting to go into it. “It's a girl's name.”

I interjected. “Not just that, it's a creepy girl's name.”

The librarian slammed the table with her hands. “Evelyn Waugh is not a laughing matter. Although you might find, if you took the time, that his writing is very funny indeed. Katerina, you will scrape that gum off after school.”

I burst out laughing and they both glared at me. I tried and tried, but I couldn't stop and was, to my enormous relief, thrown out.

I cut afternoon lessons and went into town, attempting to adjust my uniform so it didn't look like I was skipping school. I pulled my tie, shirt, and grey wool tights off and wore my white vest and bare legs. I looked weird and felt cold. Placing myself by the coat stand in Patisserie Valerie, I wolfed down a cappuccino and a book of Truman Capote short stories. They're stories and they're short and they're by him. Bliss. I ordered a vegetarian club sandwich because I thought it sounded healthy. But when the waitress set it in front of me, I saw it involved no actual vegetables, just a lot of different types of cheese and some celery.