Namedropper (25 page)

I felt very worried that I had perhaps not been discriminate enough in my cultural sharing. I was too easy with him. I had been too eager to educate him about Elizabeth, giving away all my favourite films, books, and records. Really, it was as slutty as putting out on a first date. I hadn't made him work for it. That I had listened to
Darkness on the Edge of Town
with him and watched
Harold and Maude
wrapped up with him on his hotel bed. I was terrified that I might have somehow, through my actions, wiped them from my existence, the world over. I was too scared to listen to my Springsteen tape because I knew it would consist entirely of feedback and crackle. Kids would learn about Springsteen in history class and mystery would surround the alleged fourth album. The kids, without evidence to convince them, would not believe it had ever really existed, and in time the mere suggestion would be discredited entirely.

I don't know how I kept my mind free of Drew for so long, but when I got home, Manny told me that the police had found his body. I didn't cry. I didn't know him. Manny says he is glad I went away, that I have matured. But I don't think so. I spent the summer break being rather than seeing. I hate it. I don't remember anything at all. I know what I did well enough to write a “My Holidays” diary: went to Los Angeles with Ray and Treena, realised they were having an affair, eloped to Las Vegas with a rock star, yadda yadda yadda. But it's no good to me. The details aren't there because I was … I was too busy to make notes. They tricked me, Ray and Manny and Treena. They made me think it was an experience I couldn't pass up, a real big-budget film for me to star in. And it was all a ruse to make me stop watching films for a few weeks, to make me stop dreaming about Drew.

Things never come out the way you want them to, not if you speak them out loud. The minute you let the words out of your mouth, they react with the air and there's nothing you can do to change them back. Francis Ford Coppola readily admits that
Apocalypse Now
turned out very differently from the vision in his head. Sure, everyone thinks it's one of the greatest films of all time, but that doesn't change the fact that
it wasn't what he had intended it to be. I can't watch it because I'm obsessed with the other version, the one he couldn't communicate.

I failed the exams. Those I turned up for. Considering the amount of effort I made to fail, this did not surprise me. The school accepted that I was under mental strain and that the results were unreflective of my true ability. Manny said he was very disappointed. I said to him, “Manny, did you ever once see me revise?” He knew there was no way I could pass, yet he thought it would still come right. According to the rules, I should have done fabulously well because that's what would happen at the end of a film. The rebel comes right. I tried to reason with him: “It only happens because scriptwriters are too lazy to think of a proper ending. Like at the end of
Grease
, when John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John take off in a flying car. Hello?”

“It happens because people do their work. It happens because people have more pride than to waste their potential.”

I thought about the flying car. “No, I really don't think that has a lot to do with it.”

So I don't get to go to university. So I have to go out into the world right now and stake my claim.

Treena did work hard and, not illogically, it paid off. She passed everything and got a 96 percent in Religious Studies. I feel it is not a coincidence that Treena hates films. The part of her that can't sit still that long in the dark can sit still that long under the underpaid gaze of the adjudicator. Ray was immensely proud of her. “My girl's got brains.” I thought it was a little sick to talk about it. It rubbed in the fact that she
was three years old and he was a hundred. He took her to The Ivy to celebrate—she told me about it the next day. She said that there wasn't a lot she could eat because it all had green stuff sprinkled on top.

“Herbs?”

“Yes,” she answered, eyes narrowing at the memory. “Them.”

Treena was pretty much staying at Ray's every day of the week. Whenever I rang for him, she picked up the phone, and whenever he rang me, I could hear her burbling, “Say hi from me!” in the background. They planned to move in together officially once Treena was at college—which is nice if you want to see your two dearest friends at once and not so nice if you're thinking of a cunning plan to turn them against each other. I trusted they'd work that one out soon enough for themselves, without me having to waste my precious time.

I asked her if she had seen Marcus lately and she had to be reminded who he was.

Time seems all the more precious when you spend it by yourself. All the time with Treena was crammed full of friendship bracelets, M&M's, face-packs, discount shoes, and whole days in bed. Ray and I spent it talking and talking, speaking reams of absolute crap, but it filled up space, so I thought it must be important. Now that I don't have either of them, I keep sitting bolt upright in bed, on the tube, at the cinema, and thinking, “So what am I going to do next?” I think of something fabulous to do, but nine times out of ten I don't do it, in case it's the wrong thing and I waste part of my life. Manny keeps instigating ice-cream frenzies, but I have lost the taste for it.

I tentatively put the scratched Kindness of Strangers single on the turntable. It was still awful. But I didn't miss him anymore. What will be will be. We wouldn't have been soulmates. He probably didn't even like me, with my lists and intricate dissection of the lyrics to “Like a Prayer.” “Oh, Drew.” I felt his name rise in my throat, then I gobbled it down again. It went slowly, sticking in my windpipe, stifling my breath.

I decided to write some bad poetry and, for the first time in days, got out of bed. I couldn't bring myself to take my nightie off, so I decided to keep it on. It didn't really look like a nightie, I reasoned. What is a nightie anyway? Just a pretty dress you put on for bed. Madonna wears corsets over her clothes. Why can't I wear a nightie to the park? Stuck in a tube tunnel, I had my answer: because, when you wear a nightie out into the world, everyone stares at you as if you are mad. Such hypocrisy. If I had cut up my arms, or starved my body, or injected myself with heroin, they could better recognise my badge of mental instability. But I don't like needles or razors and I do like food. So here is my madness, take it or leave it: I like to wear nightclothes during the day. That's how much I hate myself.

I had nothing with me, not even my keys. If I had had the foresight to bring my wallet, I would have ducked into the first M&S and bought myself a complete, non-nocturnal wardrobe. I felt very uncomfortable. This was supposed to be a film, but it had become a pop video. “So, Viva, your ‘thing' will be wearing nighties out in public. And we'll, like, film you in normal situations amongst ordinary people to show how disjointed you are from this society. And can someone from makeup
please put some gaffer-tape round her tits? I want them lifted higher.”

I felt better when I reached the park. It is an acknowledged fact: Everyone in parks is mad. Tramps with matted hair spit from benches. Old men hide behind bushes and hiss. Watch out especially for small children on tricycles painted with lambs—they are crazy. I climbed high up to the top branch of the tree, where nobody could stare at me and I could stare at everyone. The branches were thick and strong and the top branch was only eight feet off the ground. It would have been a great place to talk about Sartre.

I crept through Belsize Park, letting the rain soak me, mingling with calm tears—fantastic, I thought, my life is officially a movie—walking slowly, deliberately so every drop caught me full on for the cameras. How much practice would it take before I knew my best angles and most flattering key-lights by heart? “North London Jew,” Ray liked to mock. “Don't be such a chest-beating North London Jew,” he would have said, if he could see me in my film. His argument was that he so thoroughly worshipped and adored the Jews that he felt entitled to be rude about them. After all, he practically was one. He was short and depressed, wasn't he? He said “The Jews” as if it were the name of a hot new sitcom.

I put Ray out of my thoughts in the rain and locked the door. He banged against the patio windows of my mind as I concentrated my attention on the two abandoned parties who were probably feeling even worse than me: Marcus and Tommy.

I walked back to the station, my hair starting to frizz in the heat. I perused the magazines at the news-stall as I waited for
my train. Skyline were on three covers. All of them showed a close-up of Dillon's face, with the rest of the band in soft focus. Part of me wanted to see him. But the other part knows that if you have an amazing night with a new aquaintance, you should not try to repeat it. If you do, it will eventually become a carbon copy of itself so faint that it can barely be read. That's how relationships end: new aquaintances become old photocopies.

I felt incredibly low for my first week back in London. Depression is like falling in love for the first time. You honestly can't imagine that one day you might not feel that way. It's inconceivable that you might fall out of love and it's inconceivable that you could ever be happy again. I'm not talking about “Oh God, I'm so depressed” depression, which, being a teenager, I battle with every minute of the day. Or even the excruciating Ecstasy comedown depression that Treena had every Tuesday after her Saturday night on the town with Marcus. I mean, this thing that chokes your heart and nestles in your hair and won't go, no matter how often you wash it, no difference what colour you dye it. That's why there are so many hair-dye products on the market. Black hair will fix it all, no, ginger, no, ash blond, no, deep, gothy purple will change your life. There are so many shades of hair colour out there. They bring in about ten new ones a year.

According to the rules of courtship, if you're a girl and you want to get your guy, you must never, ever phone him and you must never let him end the conversation. Treena just walked out on my phone call. I guess she got distracted by a picture in the paper, or a cloud in the shape of Ireland, or a word in her
head. She left me here, on the other end of the phone, babbling until I realised I couldn't hear her breath, and then crying, “Hello, hello, are you still there?” She has made my voice sound very shrill. I was always “the little girl with the deep voice”—that's what they called me at school. I loved it. I felt like a starlet with a Harry Cohen sobriquet. “The Oomph Girl” (Ann Sheridan). “The Magnificent Animal” (Joan Collins). “The Little Girl with the Deep Voice” (Viva Cohen). But now Manny says, “Oy, Viva, your voice is so squeaky lately.”

Recovering from love is like falling down steps. You're a girl with balance. You're a compact and graceful mover. You think you've got your footing. But somehow you trip over your trouser leg and tumble to the bottom. Each time you're more frightened of the steps and the more you try not to think about it, the more you obsess until descending the stairs becomes your life. Where you're going and where you've been becomes irrelevant.

I feel like a broken record, scratched on my favourite song. I fell in love so hard, it's left me with a scratch on my brain. I should have handled this vinyl by the edges, without getting greasy fingerprints on it, like Manny always yells at me. But the cover was so pretty, I just whipped out the record and whammed it on. I know it's my fault for being a klutz. But how do you fix a record? You don't. That's why they invented CDs.

When I got home I was inexplicably consumed by the urge to speak to Tommy Belucci, to know for sure if he was as miserable as I was. He was. I got his number from Directories, and quickly wished I had left it alone. I never wanted to be in a position where I would have to feel sorry for Tommy
Belucci. He was so distraught, he didn't even sound surprised to hear from me.

“Have you, uh, seen Ray lately?” he asked desperately.

“No, not really. Not since he and Treena got together.”

“No. Neither have I. He hasn't returned my phone calls. I guess he's been really busy. First flush of true love and all.” He began to sob. “He was my whole life.”

I couldn't think of anything nice to say, so I said, “Tommy, without being rude, you're in your forties, aren't you?”

He snivelled. “Yes.”

“So you must have been doing something before you met Ray?”

“Yes,” he answered testily.

“So you could go back to your old friends, your old life.”

“But he's left me with nothing,” he shrieked, hysterical. And I was so embarrassed for him, I had to scrunch my eyes tight shut. “I gave him all that time, five years of my life, and he's left me with nothing. It's okay for you, you had sex with him.”

I gasped. “No I didn't.”

“You didn't?” he asked, sniffing away snot.

“Christ, no.”

“But …”

“But what?”

“But, he was in love with you.”

My heart leaped into my throat, out of my mouth, and across to the other side of the room, where it perched on the couch, pumping blood on the cushions. “Tommy, don't say that. He was not.” I clutched my chest. “He told you that?”

“He didn't have to tell me.”

I went down to the kitchen, wearing my bra and knickers. Manny was sipping coffee, reading the newspaper and listening to the radio. It was as I was rooting around the fridge that it happened for the third time in as many weeks. “The time's coming up five-fifty. It's a swelteringly hot day and here's Don Henley with those ‘Boys of Summer.'”

My reactions aren't as sharp as they were before I wasted them on Drew. I sunk into a chair, cracked open a Coke, and starting singing along.

“
I can't tell you my love for you will still be strong, after the boys of summer have gone
.”