Namedropper (6 page)

Jeru the Damaja faded out and “Shame on the Nigger” by the Wu-Tang Clan started playing. Treena reacted as if it were “Boys of Summer.” She was still clutching him and he began to come to life like a dying plant spritzed with Baby Bio. I didn't know if it was Treena or the song that was the Bio. They did a weird balldance to “Shame on the Nigger” as it thumped rudely around us. She slipped her feet on top of Marco's orange Air Max Nikes and he wrapped his arms round her slender waist and carried her across the floor. The kids in the store didn't even look up, just kept flicking through the Foxy Brown 12-inches and MC Shaan rarities. I sat on the radiator, watching them dance together, and realised that I was not going to be the only person ever to love her.

Back in Camden we stopped at George and Nikki's for a plate of chips and a coffee. The waiter gave us the coffees for free because he fancied Treena. He handed us two lollipops when we paid him and pointed at a beanie hat on the counter. “See that hat? It belongs to Dillon from Skyline. He left it here when he was with some bird.”

I fixed him with a sweet smile as I grabbed the lolly. “I don't care.”

But I kind of was interested. I was interested in his hat, in him leaving a little clue.

I made it home with my complexion glowing. Soaked and serene, I sunk deep into the mattress of my bed, turned on the radio, and looked up at my posters for approval. “We love you, Viva,” said Ava Gardner. “You don't need school!” spat Paul Newman. “I loved when you did the leap in the park,” said Sophia Loren, “and when Treena scared the kid on the subway,” giggled Marilyn. I kissed them all and tucked myself in. “Good night, everyone. Sleep tight.” But in the half light of my exhaustion, it looked like Liz Taylor was scowling.

Ray was smack in the middle of his British tour. He had already been to Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff, and Glasgow. The venues were medium-sized to large. No mega arenas yet, but 4,000-seaters.

I was planning to see him on this tour anyway, since during the school year he's always moaning about how I'm not interested in his music. I'm not, but I missed him. I missed him whining about how other bands were only doing so well because they appealed to the lowest common denominator, about how much he hated his fans, how he longed to be taken seriously, and how his hair wouldn't do what he wanted it to. He never shut up about Dillon from Skyline. Besides, I didn't want to face Manny's disappointment over the missed French exam.

“Look at his hair. It goes straight back, that's the only reason his stupid band are so popular.” Ray looked everywhere for a way to explain the phenomenal success of Skyline and, more specifically, the adoration heaped on Dillon. It was their haircuts, their Adidas sneakers, their Liverpool accents. He could not, for one second, entertain the notion that Skyline were such a big hit because they had unusually catchy songs,
and that Dillon was the man of the moment because everyone fancied him.

I decided to meet him in Edinburgh. All the way up on the train, I kept thinking, “Ha! French! It's not even that great a language. So overrated.” Listen, see a Chabrol flick and then see an Almodóvar film. Which, excuse me, is the more attractive language? Spanish. Italian is much better. Jesus, French is almost as bad as German. And I hate French film stars. “Oh, I am a pouty French enigma and I like to marry directors twice my age.” Fuck off. If you were the evil mastermind behind a plot to blow up Europe, you would definitely blow France up first. I would.

It's a long ride to Edinburgh. I played a game of seeing how long I could make a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps last. Two hours. You lick both sides of the crisp before you eat it, and when you do, you chew fifty times. It was moderately entertaining. I could see how anorexia might feel rewarding. Although, I'm not really sure anorexia exists. I think it's just a style decision, like bleaching your hair blond. You know there's a risk that your hair will eventually dry and break off, but you happen to think you'll look good very blond, so you do it anyway. I know there must be people who are phobic of eating, who die because of it, but from what I've seen in the school canteen, a large proportion of girls labelled “anorexic” simply went for it because it's cheaper than a pair of Prada loafers.

I found the whole slow-chewing experiment rather Zen, but every time I began to sink into sleep, I was jolted back into life by the yells of the proletariat. There were posses of screeching children running up and down the carriages, so
thank God for my Walkman. I listened to Carly Simon and watched the wretched five-year-olds trip on their laces, bawl unenthusiastically, and then wolf down the Smarties their mums bought them from the buffet car. There is something deeply unsettling about a child crying insincerely.

I used to have a nanny from Edinburgh who, any time I said “maybe” in answer to one of her questions, would retort, “Ooh, Mrs. Maybe and her Amazing Baby.” I'm a big fan of the Scots. Has there ever been a more perfect face than Sean Connery's? I think not. As I walked through Waverley, I undipped my hair. It kept my ears warm and, besides, I kept expecting Sean Connery to be waiting, in the newsagents or at the cab rank. I hear he lives in Marbella, but I felt I should look good for him, even if he couldn't see me.

Edinburgh is basically like San Francisco. You always seem to be walking uphill and taxis always cost three pounds—or dollars—no matter where you go in the city. Both are apparently violent cities, with terrible drugs and AIDS problems, but I feel very safe in them. It's always more frightening to read about a terrible crime in a beautiful, tranquil neighbourhood than your average, sleazy crime in your average, sleazy neighbourhood. I suppose the reason so many tourists and au pairs get attacked is that you automatically feel safer away from where you live. In my experience, the closer you come to your own home, the more danger you sense. You know your own bedroom back to front, that's why it's the scariest place in the world.

I could see people bristle when I talked, every hair on their body made static by my clipped London tones, so I didn't ask for directions to anything. I just wandered. There was a market
by the National Gallery selling healing crystals and hand-painted T-shirts and I thought of Camden and Treena. I went to the gallery and looked for
Ophelia Drowning
, but she wasn't there. For some reason I thought
Ophelia Drowning
was like a branch of McDonald's—at least one in every major city. The French one would be fancier, the New York one graffitied, and the Beijing one censored, but I assumed she would be there.

I found my way to the hotel to hook up with Ray, but he had already gone to the venue. The man on reception flicked a small, tight smile that told me he had already seen several young girls come up to him and ask to speak to Ray today. I left a note for Ray saying I was there and watched as the man folded it up and put it in his pocket. Pervert. I snuck into the toilets and applied one of the lipsticks that Treena had stolen from Harrods, that I in turn had stolen from her. Bright Red. Red times ten. I kissed the mirror and hailed a taxi to the Playhouse. Three pounds exactly.

By the time I got there, the street was already overflowing with manic pubescents. We're talking nubile fans a-go-go. Scores of girls crowded around the stage door, clad in Miss Selfridge's finest, pale, with legs like plucked chickens. Some were so white they looked blue. Their teeth chattered and goose pimples covered their bare legs. A very few of the girls were so white they looked luminous. The cold made their long hair shine brighter and their hungry eyes sparkle. It was the luminous ones who had backstage passes proudly pinned to their blossoming chests. The passes had the same effect as Baby Bio, and the teenage breasts puffed and swelled under them.

I calmly pushed my way through them and they glared at me, like “Who the hell are you?” The moustachioed security guard stopped me with a weary “Can I help?” and I told them who the hell I was.

“I'm Ray's sister.”

The girls looked at me in wonder. The guard just looked at me.

“Are you on the list?”

“No, but that's only because he doesn't know I'm here.”

“Sorry, I can't help you, then.”

I spoke fast and brittle as panic gripped my lungs. I was in Edinburgh, with nowhere to stay and no one to stay with. “Look, he'll go ballistic if he finds out you've turned me away. I'm his sister.” His moustache quivered. I looked around for support. And I realised that I didn't look like the sister of a pop star. I looked like a short girl wearing a lipstick she couldn't carry off, which only accentuated the sad truth: that my skin wasn't luminous enough to merit a backstage pass. I bought a ticket from a tout, who spat a gob of yellow phlegm onto the icy street as he balled up my money. Once I got into the foyer, more security tried to check my pockets, but there was nothing in them, just a ten-pence piece and an empty crisp packet.

Inside the venue, I decided that the best plan was to work my way to the very front of the stage, where he would definitely be able to spot me. He'd get the fright of his life, he'd probably forget his own lyrics, but he'd see me and I would have somewhere to stay. Maybe he'd even make a joke of it and dedicate the next song to his “truanting
compadre
, Viva Cohen,” and then everyone would know how special I was. It's weird being in a strange place and having no one to back
you up. You could try selling yourself—“Hey, I'm great!”—but the point is, they're not interested. They don't give a damn.

As soon as I swung through the heavy main doors, my wind-nipped ears were assaulted by the most fearful racket since Manny had been told his table at The Ivy was double-booked. This, however, was not a queeny tantrum, but a rock ‘n' roll catastrophe, exploding through the auditorium. I could hear a helpless guitar being choked of its life and a bass thwacked soullessly. But there was only one person onstage. I found out, backstage, that it was all made by one machine, a Casio keyboard bought with a kindly aunt's money, and programmed by one man.

I couldn't see that clearly, the hall rendered gloomy by the relentless noise, but I could make out a tiny black-haired boy, all angles and light. He was mouthing words from his mark at the centre of the stage. I could barely hear him, but I could see the sounds creeping, softly, frightened, out of his full mouth, as if they didn't want to leave it. He was so soft, he was almost silent, but all the noise being made onstage clung to his hair and clothes like static and formed a protective laser shield around his little body.

The crowd was indifferent, impatient for the main act to come on. It was booing, throwing bottles, and opting, in droves, for the warmth of the toilets or the overpriced excitement of the merchandise stall. And at the stall, above Ray's promotional hooded sweatshirts and moody black-and-white posters, there was a skinny-ribbed T-shirt that spelled out, in gothic letters, the cause of the commotion: THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS.

This person, the hugely unloved “Kindness of Strangers,” was, the merchandising man explained, the “up-and-coming techno-punk outfit” hand-picked by Ray to support him on his British tour. The man, who looked most unamused, handed me a copy of last week's
Melody Maker
. “The Kindness of Strangers—Britain's new existentialist electro-punk genius!” I was unaware that there had been an
old
existentialist electro-punk genius, but I let the subject lie. I wandered towards the stage, dodging the hail of beer cans and blocking my ears, to take a closer look at Ray's new favourite performer.

He looked like he had been separated from his mother and, in the hubbub, somehow ended up onstage. As I reached the foot of the stage, I saw that the little dark-haired boy was, in fact, a young man aged about twenty-two, twenty-three. He was wearing tight, white cord jeans and a homemade T-shirt depicting Vivien Leigh.

His eyes were lined in black kohl and his arms were lined with long, symmetrical cuts, as if someone had started a game of tic-tac-toe on him and then become distracted by the beauty of the board they were playing on. He was pathetically skinny; he couldn't have weighed more than seven stone. When he swept his silky dark hair from his face, I saw he had the most perfect bone structure since the girl on his T-shirt. As the bouncers pulled the plug on the man known as The Kindness of Strangers, dialogue from
A Streetcar Named Desire
crackled onstage.

I was transfixed. He was so thin. He was sooo thin. He had real proper black hair, so black it shone blue. Not many people have that. He was beautiful. The roadies began to clear the stage for Ray's imminent arrival. I hadn't seen Ray play in
a few months, but I didn't really want to now. The second the boy crawled offstage, I began to feel unanchored. A few sickly pale girls at the front also seemed agitated. I couldn't quite tell if they were upset that the boy was gone or impatient for Ray to arrive. From their black Miss Haversham clothes, I guessed the former. I went up to a man with a notepad. “Are you a reporter?”

He looked down his John Lennon glasses at me and smoothed his CLASH ON BROADWAY vintage T-shirt. “Yes. I am. From the
NME
.” He spoke in sentences punctuated too liberally with full stops, and I knew his writing would be the same.

“What did you think of them?”

“Fucking brilliant. Reminds me of the old days. Clash. Pistols. Stones. Rock 'n' roll as revolution.”

“Brilliant.” I tried to sound enthusiastic, although, scanning the room and the bottles thrown onstage, I knew this simply wasn't true.

He smiled at me, revealing teeth like a bag of chips. “You're one of the kids. What did you think? Do they match up to your heroes?”

“Um, well, my heroes are dead, so they've already got one up on them.”

He laughed approvingly. “Vicious. Hendrix. Cobain? All the greats are dead.”