Namedropper (5 page)

She made Treena wait outside the door while she grilled me.

“Have you anything to say?”

I knew Treena was outside, and even though the door was four inches thick, I felt her spirit in the room and knew that she could hear me. “Yes, Miss Hoover, are you related to J. Edgar?”

“No, I am not,” she answered, trying to stay calm, smoothing her fawn nylon pantsuit with a thick, unadorned hand.

“But you like dressing up in women's clothing, don't you?”

“Watch it, Miss Cohen. Nobody likes a smart alec.”

“Do you think? I reckon Ben Affleck would have something to say about that.”

“I have never heard of Ben Affleck,” she hissed.

I raised my eyes from the “It Can Be Done” paperweight on her desk and looked at her properly. Her fringe was trimmed slightly askew, which wouldn't have been so noticeable if all the features on her face weren't so unimpeachably straight. “No, how silly of me. Of course you haven't.”

“Viva, you are a very bright girl,” she sighed. “You could be top of your class in everything. I know you're keeping your head above water in English and Religious Studies, but that's not good enough. Not for a girl like you. When you joined this school, we had you down as an Oxbridge candidate. Miss Danning gave you a C for your last English essay. You're supposed to be our best English student. You have your English GCSE in just over a month. Why did you only get a C?”

“I got a C because the essay went over her head.” Miss Hoover ignored me, despite this being the first truthful remark I'd made in the last half hour.

“Why were you hiding behind the curtains when you should have been in gym?”

“Because Treena's no good at it and I'm too good at it. That's why. What? You asked.”

Then Treena was beckoned in. She repeated her conversation with Miss Hoover to me on the way home.

“What are you going to do with your life? What will you do when you have no qualifications and nobody wants to employ you? It's not funny, Katerina, so stop smirking. You haven't stopped to think about what a tough world it is outside the four walls of this institution.”

“I have thought about that. If I can't make it by myself,
then I imagine I'll have to marry Donald Trump.” She meant it. This was her plan. Easy-peasy. “Of course, I wouldn't want to have sex with him. But one does what one has to.”

Miss Hoover informed us both that we had better pull our socks
up
and knuckle
down
for the year-end exams. “Up, down, all around like a seesaw,” sang Treena, by way of acknowledgement.

The first exam was on Monday. French. I thought about it over the weekend, even going so far as to buy a new pencil case. In my head, the clean pencil case would make up for whatever I lacked in revision. By Monday morning, I realised that this was not going to be the case.

We never actually said that we weren't going to go to school that day. And we never actually went either. I knew we were missing French. Treena vaguely recollected it once she was reminded.

Treena was relatively restrained for Treena, apart from one heart-stopping moment on the tube when she started cursing loudly that she had forgotten to put on her knickers. She swished her daisy-patterned skirt indignantly as I started talking to my shoes. Otherwise, we didn't talk the whole journey. I studied the tube map. Every stop represented a part of my life I wanted to change.

Covent Garden means the gym I belong to, and the perfect body I have yet to achieve. I have also to achieve actually setting foot in the gym. Piccadilly Circus is Soho. The Coach and Horses, strolling past the sex shops to see if they will try to recruit me. I'd like to be a high-class prostitute who gets paid a lot for doing no more than holding hands. Leicester Square is home to the Boho cinema, where they only show grainy
classics. The last thing I saw was
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
. I gazed at Julie Christie as if my very life depended on it. At times, after a particularly bad French lesson, or a row with Treena, it does. “What am I doing here, why am I bunking off school again?” I think, and then sink down very low in my seat so I can stay for the next show.

We got off at Knightsbridge, a stop I usually avoid. We looked like Lady and the Tramp as we made our way to Harrods: the tall, elegant dog, sashaying up the street, turning heads as she went. And the little, scruffy one, skipping along behind her and tripping over its paws. I looked dubiously at the NO JEANS OR RUCKSACKS sign and the ferret-faced doorman. “Why do you wanna come here, Treena? Can't we just go to Camden like usual?”

My voice sounded nasal, as if I had enlarged adenoids. Why was it me whining like a child, after the display Treena had put on last Friday night?

“God, Viva. It's one of the sights of London. I thought you wanted me to be cultured,” she muttered as she shimmied in. The doorman tipped his hat and smiled approvingly. I trotted behind her. He put his hat back on. We walked through the lobby, assaulted on either side by girls spraying perfume.

“Aaaagh,” breathed Treena, spreading her arms.

“Gross.” I stopped, as a squirt of “the delicate new floral fragrance from Chanel” shot straight up my nose, as delicate and floral as the final reel of
Rambo Part 6
.

We ground to a halt at the makeup counter. Rows and rows of lipsticks, pinks and golds, corals, rusts and ambers, vermillions and puce and the deepest, darkest red either of us had ever seen. Except it wasn't called dark red, it was called Petulant
Prune. Treena plucked it from between Harlot Scarlett and Aubergine Dream. She tickled the length of the tube until the red wriggled up, like one of those sea creatures you have to coax out of their long, slim shells. “Mmma.” She smacked her lips and the lipstick clung on for dear life.

“Let me try that,” I said, but Treena wouldn't let me, and gave me Timidly Taupe to fiddle with instead. It camouflaged my mouth entirely. Sometimes I think that's what she really wants. “I'm out of here, Treena,” I announced, which I thought carried both gravitas and an air of mall chic. Treena looked over her shoulder at me and made a silent
“Oooh”
through red lips. Then she pocketed five lipsticks and sashayed out of the store. Ahead of me. “Okay, Veeves. We've done commercialism. Let's go hang out with nature.”

To me, nature is a really boring accountant whom you don't want to sit next to at a party. I hate parks and trees and fluttering birds of all kinds. And I know whenever Treena's near nature she starts talking about the birds and the bees. “Sex on beaches is no good. Grainy fanny. So not erotic. It's good to be taken up against a tree, though.”

Treena then began to relate the tale of her lost virginity.

“Oh, gross, I don't want to hear any more,” I shrieked, almost convincingly. “I so do not need to know.” Treena was into her stride now, boasting that the guy had never even realised that she was only thirteen.

“Nah,” spat Treena. “It was years ago. It didn't hurt as much as having my ears pierced.” She paused. “That was really worth it, though.”

She told me about her favourite sexual experience.

“So he was taking me from behind.”

“From behind what?”

“Behind me.”

“Oh. OH.”

I couldn't imagine Marcus doing that and I told her so.

“Oh, God no. Marcus doesn't do it with anyone, full stop.”

“He doesn't?”

“Hell no. He only wants me. And if he can't have me he doesn't want anyone. He's a good boy. Marcus is a sweetheart. He's the only one I can stand waking up with.”

“Not me?”

“Viva! You don't count.”

“But Treena”—I looked at her long green eyes and curly blond hair, her wet mouth and honey skin—“Marcus must want to have sex with you.”

She stuck her little finger up her nose. “Well, he hasn't tried. He gets what he's given.” Still rummaging in her nose, she dangled one shoe from her big toe. “You know, I don't really give a damn about one-night stands. Sex is just sex. It doesn't have to be personal. It usually isn't.”

I don't want to have sex for the same reason I don't want to apply for university. What if I don't make it? What if I'm not good enough? Manny's always encouraging me to lose my virginity, telling me that making love is human nature. But if it comes so naturally, why do
Cosmo
and all the other women's magazines carry diagrams of how to do it? The way they write about the female orgasm has led me to believe that it's some kind of exam and you have to do serious revision to pass.

If I had photos of Madonna on my wall, maybe I would be keener to try sex. But I have Liz. And Liz is a frigid sex-bomb. A love goddess who claims to have married every man she
slept with. She never did a nude scene because, she scoffed, “Once you've taken off all your clothes, there's nothing left to do but put them back on.”

It began to drizzle, and Treena, with her knees curled round the branch and her hair in her eyes, lit a cigarette. The flare of the match cast a shadow across her heart-shaped face that made me wonder if I was safe with her. “What did you do that for?”

The rain was coming down in massive sheets across the park, ridiculously heavy, like the set-up shot in a bad soap opera before someone is murdered. Treena tilted her dirty thoughts to the sky.

We ran across the park. We ran past the stadium. We ran around the lake, where the rain splished sheepishly against the water, in the knowledge that something wasn't quite right, like cousins making love. We unbuckled our shoes and we ripped off our sweaters and we ran with the rain slashing against our bras, dragging one another along.

I arched and leaped, spun and jetéd, and told myself I was the secret love-child of Baryshnikov and Savion Glover. Treena pogoed, a perfectly groomed punk. Her body was so long that it looked faintly ridiculous. A gust of wind tore us apart, slamming me into a bush. I lay panting on the ground as Treena turned cartwheels, then slid on her belly towards me. She rolled beside me, straddled across my tummy, and held my face in her hands, obscuring my view of the overwrought sky.

“Wasn't that beautiful?” she gasped as if she had just converted to a new religion. “Wasn't that just beautiful?”

I nodded, but the truth is, as we ran I had been terrified
that I was going to tread on glass and that's what kept me moving so fast. I hadn't planned it. I didn't like it. I wasn't ready for my close-up.

Then she kissed me. Her tongue snaked into my mouth. I understood that this was not a gay kiss, just a romantic one. The rain and the park meant a kiss was supposed to happen and I was the only one there. I didn't resent her for it.

We plodded wordlessly back across the park, stooping now and then to pick up a shoe or a sweater. The rain had slowed to a splatter, and by the time we reached the station, had ceased all together. People made way for us on the train. One small boy, glancing at the dripping, mud-stained figures, began to cry. When his mother turned away, Treena made faces at him.

The movie started just as the French exam was ending. I had pulled Treena into the cinema showing the French New Wave festival. I tried to explain to her that it was a different kind of French from the one we're supposed to memorise. You don't learn it, you feel it. You have to understand the eye makeup, as opposed to the verbs.

Treena was engrossed in placing popcorn in the bouffant hairdo of the woman in front without her noticing. She did it very skilfully. “See,” she failed to whisper. “I am good at something.”

I nodded my head enthusiastically. But she really isn't. She can do things, but that doesn't mean she's good at them.

Last time I was at the flicks was at the repertory cinema, with Ray, for a performance of
Bananas
. It's one of Ray's top seven Woody Allens. I was finding it all quite trying and was only shaken awake by the sight of Sylvester Stallone in an
early role as a subway thug. “Wow! Look, it's Sylvester Stallone!”

Ray slapped his thighs with his hands. “Oh, first of all you grump all the way through, and then Sylvester Stallone comes on and it's time to break out the fucking popcorn.”

He was angry. I don't even like Sylvester Stallone. I don't not like him. I just … who thinks about Sylvester Stallone? I tried to explain, “Don't you think it's interesting to see a young, struggling actor in reference to their current iconic bubble?”

Ray was just furious, acting as if I had stood up, walked to the front of the cinema, and started licking the screen. He doesn't like me making a fuss of anyone more famous than him in his presence. He thinks it's ungrateful. I know he wouldn't say it to my face, but in his warped head, he thinks I'm a namedropper. To him, saying, “Look, there's the young Sylvester Stallone,” is akin to parading outside his flat with a banner shrieking, “You suck, Ray Devlin, as a celebrity and as a human being.” Treena doesn't mind me “name-dropping,” because she's never heard of anyone I talk about, not even the Prime Minister.

After the movie, we fixed ourselves as best we could, using the hair-drier in the ladies' loo and some of the makeup Treena stole from Harrods, then we went into Uptown records on D'Arblay Street, where Marcus was working the afternoon shift. His hair was braided up on one side and Afro'd up on the other, and when he saw Treena he started twirling the three-inch fuzz as if he were Heather Locklear in a shampoo commercial. Treena went over and gave him a bear hug. It was so funny because Marcus is this six-foot-four
hardcase, but it was Treena who was doing the bear-hugging, and he crumpled in her arms like Vivien Leigh. Peeping over her shoulder like a baby being winded, he saw me and flashed a Versace smile. Treena didn't let go and, as the music pounded out of the system, she moved him from behind the till and on to the shop front, where they started dancing. Not hip-hop dancing, ballroom dancing. As I said, she can do anything when she feels like it. They looked like they were on wheels.