Namedropper (12 page)

If you are going to have an affair with an older man, make sure you do it before you yourself get too old. I always think it's the girl who really risks looking silly in those relationships. When I see a twenty-two-year-old girl dining with a middleaged man, I think, “Jesus, girl, you're too old to be doing that. He's just a goofy guy, but you should know better.” Lolita was twelve when she began her affair with Humbert. She died in childbirth at the age of seventeen. Abigail Williams was eleven when her sixty-five-year-old lover, John Proctor, spurned her, messing with her eleven-year-old mind and causing her to spark the Salem witch hunts. What I'm saying is, if you want to play Lolita, you can't be older than sixteen, and even that's pushing it. If you have to toy with such a cliché, you might as well get it right. Do it properly. The key thing to remember is, you never actually have to have sex. Indeed, if you are playing the game correctly, it shouldn't even cross your mind. As any Lolita knows, it's all about tormenting the man, not the other way around.

I used to love older men when I was ten or eleven. I would flirt outrageously with the builders who were redoing the kitchen in our house in London. It was the middle of a particularly sweltering summer, and I'd make regular trips to the refrigerator, whilst wearing my knickers and vest and heart-shaped glasses. “Oh, hi, boys!” I'd coo on my way out. I don't
know who the hapless construction workers were more frightened of, me or Manny. I also enjoyed a long-running romance with my Physical Education teacher.

He was truly gorgeous, with a broken nose and spinach-green eyes. People said he was “rugged,” which, in my mind, had as much to do with his love of rugby as his jutting jaw. All the mothers made a big fuss over him, wearing five-inch heels and splashing themselves in Chanel when they came to pick their kids up from extra gym. He never looked them in the eye or responded to their come-ons, and got away as soon as was possibly polite. He was, I knew all along, madly in love with me.

I knew he loved me, because no matter how many times he cornered me in the gym changing-room or on a cross-country run, he would never make me touch him there, in that most pathetic and lonely of places. He was a poet, not a pervert. Instead, he'd make me touch his ears, to prove how much they burned when I was near him. For my part, I did little to discourage him. I would suck on lollipops and leave my laces untied so he would have to kneel at my feet and tie them, and I'd turn up for class with a Hello Kitty plaster on my knee.

It was never taken to any kind of conclusion. I did think he was handsome, but I was mostly interested in tormenting him. The day I left and headed off for secondary school, he couldn't even look at me. I
was
a sexy kid. I found a photograph of me and him at the school sports day. He is grabbing me, swinging me in the air, with his arms wrapped around my thighs, holding me close. His arms are flexed and bulging with muscles. His white V-necked T-shirt is wet against his taut chest because I had been squirting him with a water pistol. Thank God I knew when to stop. Aged twelve. Sometimes
I have horrible visions of Treena, dressed coquettishly and acting all kittenish, aged fifty-two.

I would do it, I would sleep with old men, if it meant I were admired. Which is all I want in life, for Lord's sake. I'd like to be told I'm gorgeous and stunningly clever and quite, quite different from any other woman on earth. Or that I have nice-smelling hair. Ray admires me when he's in a good mood, but I would never take advantage of him. I'm not stupid. I know he'd admire me less, or not at all, if anything sexual ever happened. But it's silly even talking about it. Not only is Tommy barred from talking to me, Ray isn't even shagging me either. So he gets no piece of that action. Tommy can't work out the deal and that bothers him. He presumed I was besotted with Ray, and Ray, being too kind for his own good, was humouring me.

Of course, there was always the possibility that Ray and I might really and sincerely like each other, that there might be things Ray talked about to me that he felt he couldn't discuss with Tommy. It haunted Tommy late at night, when he sensed the ghost of his father under his bed and when the traffic lights changed too soon and he thought he was about to die in a car crash, that there were things Ray didn't share with him.

He had to know the release date of the album, which venues had been pencilled in for the tour dates, and which song had been chosen as the first single, or he felt violently ill, as if a lump of kryptonite had been slung around his neck. All his powers were gone and he could no longer defend himself—against work, against other writers, against women. His
worst nightmare was that he would wake up one morning to find Ray had given an exclusive to another paper. But Tommy banished the thought from his mind. He eradicated from his mental files of grievances the possibility that Ray might like me better than he liked him. Blokes and chicks don't feel that way about each other. He reached across me for his cigarette packet.

“Oh, better that you don't, Tommy. Ray's got a sore throat at the moment. He can't afford to lose his voice. He's doing
Top of the Pops
tomorrow.”

Tommy glared at me, but tucked his cigarettes into his inside coat pocket, no doubt so he could pull them out again in slow motion later that night. He grabbed the remote control and turned the volume up on the television. Boys always have to be in command of any implement of power. That's all they have, because women, as Manny told me,
are
the power. I stared at the back of his head, which is pointy and thoroughly unflattered by such a short haircut.

“Why, Tommy, have you had your hair snipped again?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled, noncommittally, in case Ray noticed and decided he didn't like it.

“Again? Really?” Obviously he had. I could see and I had no reason to doubt his word, because whether or not you had your hair cut would be a stupid thing to lie about, even from Captain Stupid. So, as my French teacher is wont to tell me, I was being facetious.

“Yes. I cut it.” He nervously touched his inch-long locks. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing. It just looks so lovely and curly.”

Tommy's face dropped. He gasped for breath.

“Tommy, I thought you mods didn't go for curls. But it looks lovely. Very romantic. Very Marc Bolan.” He was about to storm out of the room when Ray came back in, sucking on his lip.

“Everything all right, man?”

Ray shuffled from foot to foot, looking past Tommy to me. Like a magnet, Tommy followed his gaze.

“What's happened?” I blurted.

“Oh, shit,” said Ray.

“What? Was that Manny? What have I done?”

Ray scratched his forehead with his thumb. “It's not you. Seems our boy has got himself in trouble.”

I heard my breath, too fast and stumbly. “Which boy?”

Ray's breathing became slower and more deliberate, as if we were a little front-room ecosystem. Tommy had no place in it, but he wouldn't leave. “Your friend. Drew. Look, Viva, I didn't want to tell you. But remember that Kindness of Strangers gig in King's Cross?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I didn't see him after that.”

“So?”

“Well, neither did anyone else.”

There was a dot of blood in the middle of Ray's head where his nail had been digging.

“What?” I screeched, the kind of “What?” that Joan Crawford gave before she beat her children with wire hangers. My eyes blazed and Ray began to back out of the room.

“He's been missing for a week or so now. We all figured, he's a grownup. He can take care of himself.”

“Yeah.” I felt myself start to hyperventilate.

“But that was my manager. Apparently they just found his clothes on the end of Brighton Pier. They're assuming …”

I couldn't breathe. I wanted to say “Paper bag” but it came out “Beer,” which I don't even drink. Ray went gladly to the kitchen. I followed him with shoes full of wet cement and a heart full of glass. I leaned against the kitchen door. Ray pulled a beer out of the fridge and handed it to me. I dropped it on the floor and watched as the green glass smashed and the foul beige liquid spread silently towards the stove, not wanting to get involved. We both watched it.

Tommy crept in and stood by the push bin, wanting to offer Ray support and also to be sure not to miss anything, all the while trying to look surreptitious. I spun around. “Yes, Tommy, I have noticed you standing there in your fucking funeral suit, you mod fucking cunt bastard.”

He put his arm across Ray, as if he were the one this was happening to. Through the layer of ice forming fast across my body like a shield, I stared at him, bore two holes into his face, one deep into each eye. I bored and bored and wrote on his forehead in blistering hate, “Leave this house now or I will kill you dead,” but he stayed rooted to the lino.

I turned my back on both of them and held cold metal hands with the fridge door.

I gasped, “What do you think has happened?”

“I don't know,” Ray whispered, as if whispers made it only half true.

“What?”

“I don't know.” I was the casting director and Ray was the nervous drama-school graduate, speaking too softly and then
too loud, booming on the wrong words, like a parody of Laurence Olivier. A kid doing Olivier badly.

I started to sway. “He could just have left the country, couldn't he?”

“Maybe. He made good money on this tour, I made certain of that. I made sure he wasn't ripped off. But now they've found his clothes in Brighton. That's where he lived.”

“He lived in Brighton? He never told me that.”

“Well, Viva, he didn't tell you everything because you didn't really know each other that well, did you? I know he looked after you in Edinburgh, but … Look. He had been drinking in the bar of a hotel in Brighton. He went out to the pier and no one ever saw him again. That's all I know.”

I interrupted him, sobbing, “Oh my God.”

Through my splutters I heard Tommy's malevolent voice. “You were right not to tell her before, chief. If the kid's this upset, she'd only have worked herself into a total state.”

“Leave it alone, Tommy,” Ray hissed. If I had been paying attention, if I hadn't been so distraught, that hiss would have pleased me no end. But all I heard was that Ray knew all along. Tommy, for fuck's sake, knew all along. This event that I had been so busy foreseeing had actually happened, and nobody had bothered to let me know.

I turned and pointed at Tommy, like a sniffer dog who, instead of heroin, had been trained to pick up the scent of evil mods. “And he knew and I didn't.”

“I had to know,” Tommy huffed. “I'm from the
NME
. It's news.”

Ray glanced up.

Tommy caught himself. “But not that big news.”

Ray sighed, a big man's sigh, bigger and louder than a young girl's tears. “Viva, I don't understand why you're making such a big deal of this. You met the guy twice.”

“Yeah, but he changed my life.”

“Come off it, Viva. He told you about French situationism and he tried to shag you.”

That was too much. I ran out of the kitchen, down the stairs, and onto the street, my expensive scarf uncoiling from my neck and dropping to the pavement, my snot flying behind me like an expensive scarf. I had one exam left and no one to love. God, if I had just shagged him, that would be easy. At least he would have left me something, something I could put a name to. But it's true, all we had was one night. If I was pregnant, if I had his baby, then I would have a legitimate reason to be destroyed. Everyone would feel sorry for me and I would have part of him forever.

But all we had was talk. Just words, from two people who wanted to be able to write it down but hadn't the dedication or the courage. If all you are is lazy, then there's always the possibility that you might one day overcome it and do something great with your life. Even when you're ninety, and lying in bed watching reruns of
M*A*S*H
, you can still say, “Hey, today is the day I get up and write my masterpiece.” But if you lack courage, that's it, that's final, it's out of your hands. It isn't going to come to you in the night and there's no way you can make it without it. Soul-destroying for someone like Drew. All those thoughts, for what? For who? For himself, at 1:30 A.M. in front of the BBC1 close-down?

I was honoured that he shared his thoughts with me, even
though I could see how it was for him—that it wasn't a case of sharing, but of giving them away: “Closing-Down Sale: Everything Must Go.” Ray's right, I could have been anyone. But not anyone would have been interested, and I congratulated myself for wanting to hear. And then I couldn't stop listening. As the alcohol thickened his tongue, I had all but begged him to stay awake, to keep talking. I already knew it was a lost cause, that I was witness to a dying man's last words.

So I tried to write down as much of our talk as I could remember, but I know I missed a lot of it. Words are slippery and disloyal. As soon as they came out of his mouth, they made a run for the door, and finding it closed, slipped under the crack for the light. Everyone wants to be in the light, apart from potatoes and moles. And Drew. Who was too weak to fight, and embraced the darkness, the failure, and the nightmares, and let the soil consume him and fall into his mouth.

In the back of his head he always thought, “The soil will take me and then I will finally be able to make my mark. If I have roots, I can bloom. I shouldn't fight it.”

My misery carried me home, told me when to change lines on the underground and when to get off and how to slot my ticket into the machine. Treena says that when she is at her most drunk, she manages to do the most surprising things. The next day she can't work out how she made it home in one piece, or how she managed to paint such an excellent picture, or pick out such a pretty outfit at Miss Selfridge, or find the money to pay for it. I put my key in the door. “Why didn't I sleep with him? Why didn't I sleep with him?”