Namedropper (9 page)

After an hour of listening to each other with fixed smiles and talking without speaking because they were so excited, they started to take turns going to the bar. Now they were so drunk their legs were sprawled rudely to either side of their chairs and their coats lay on the floor. First impressions count, especially at dawn, so they had on just their jeans and tiny little T-shirts that tugged under their armpits and stretched taut across their breasts. The cotton was splashed with red wine,
so, with all of them collapsed with their eyes heavy, it looked like there had been a hotel massacre. The breasts were elegant and neat, but the T-shirts were slutty. The balance was, I calculated, pretty much on the mark, and if Ray had been there, he would have taken any of the lovely nubiles to bed.

I felt so much older than them.

On the train back from Edinburgh I didn't have to entertain myself by seeing how long it can take to eat a bag of crisps, because I had a photo of Drew to look at. It was from a fanzine I found in a record store off Princes Street. To be in the music business for only two months and already have your own fanzine! There it was, beyond the Ska and Goth sections, displayed
above
the Morrissey and Nick Cave tomes.

The picture was photocopied, smudgy black-and-white—but that was a fair enough description of how he looked in real life. Blissfully two-dimensional. Whereas someone like Ray spends his days trying to prove how multilayered his life is, Drew was more than happy to be a cartoon. This fanzine was called
Stellaaa!
and featured a profile of Montgomery Clift, a critique of Edgar Allen Poe's “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and a drawing of Drew by one fan's six-year-old cousin.

I was seated in the opposite direction from where the train was headed. Ordinarily I would have kicked up a fuss, stamped my little foot, threatened to report the guard to my dad, who owns British Rail. But it didn't matter now. I felt like I was being carried in the right direction. Pulled gently out to sea by a lovely undertow that did all the work for me. It swept me under the water in the stroke of a ballerina's slender arm. And now I was floating between the sea and the surf, I found
myself breathing properly for the first time in my life. I considered how constricted my chest felt when I was with Treena or Ray. No more decisions. I talked to Drew under the waves.

“I wish I could cram you inside my mouth, keep you behind my tongue, hide you in my cheeks until I looked like Lionel Richie. Keep you safe. Keep us both safe. You might slowly disintegrate, but at least you would still be in me. I wouldn't feel guilty and try to push the taste of you down with crisps, chocolate, Marmite on toast. I would never eat again. I would become slim and then thin and then skinny and then I would dye my hair black and cut my arms. And I would be so happy.”

I was so happy. A fat, runny-faced family across the way smiled at me sympathetically. They were so ugly and it was all so perfect.

I had called Ray from the station to tell him I had been and that I was leaving. A girl answered and passed him over. I deliberately only put ten pence in the phone so the pips would sound before he had time to ball me out. I rang Manny to elaborate on the “I'm safe” shocker. He then rang Ray and yelled, which pleased me no end.

“It's a mercy she met this boy, since your security guards wouldn't let her see you. Rather heavy-handed, don't you think? Turning into Aerosmith, are we?” I know what Ray was thinking, but he didn't say it: that if he had been Aerosmith, the security guards would have let me backstage in an instant, since I had begun to look, quite frankly, like a rock chick. Had Manny noticed I'd gone up a cup size in the last month? Ray had. He found it irritating, I could tell. There he was, trying to act like a kindly uncle, and my breasts kept getting in the way.

Instead he said, “Manny. Do you not think she should have called
before
she came up? Do you not think she should have been in school? And I don't like the idea of her becoming too close to that Kindness of Strangers weirdo.”

I took this up with Ray.

“If he's so weird, how come you asked him to support you? How come you didn't tell me about him?”

“I don't tell you everything. He's just a support act. I don't think he's that good.”

“Then why is he on tour with you?”

Ray sighed, as if I were a particularly dense fan hounding him for an autograph. “Publicity. I knew a pretentious little art-school kid like him would impress the serious musos.”

Manny was so thrilled to see me back in one piece, he forgave me everything. “The school is furious and so am I. They doubt you can re-sit those exams. You'll have to get straight A's in every other subject if you want to stay on for A-levels with Griffins. Darling, Viva, you do look beautiful.”

I grinned. “It's catching.”

All day long I was the Queen of Sheba. I bathed for an hour and a half, plucked my eyebrows, did a face-mask with Manny, painted my toenails. And then I did my homework. I could do my exams if they were for him. Next up was Maths. Maths, so honest and pure, only one answer to everything.

Ray called me from a Newcastle hotel room in a strop. If the call was to apologise for the Edinburgh fiasco, he was doing a very good job of not letting on. He had gained weight, he moaned. I couldn't stop myself from extolling the virtues of Andrew's tiny waist.

“Really, most men that thin look gaunt, but Drew is just so perfect.”

“Huh,” said Ray. “I have to go.”

When Ray got back to London, he tried to make amends by pretending to get excited about my birthday, which wasn't for another six months anyway. Treena rang and wanted to go clubbing. She always wanted to go clubbing. But I knew how the evening would unfold:

Treena forces me to wear something I'm not comfortable in, something meant for a tall person, but I'll want to wear it because it's hers. She'll look amazing. We'll go to the club, which will, for one night only, be populated by an assortment of scary old men and scary teenage yardies with gold teeth. I will spend most of the time in the toilets, trying to soothe my smoke-stained eyeballs with damp tissue. Treena will get out of her mind on snakebite, snog a yardie, lose her purse, and then we'll have to walk home, hiding behind cars from Treena's new admirer. No thank you.

A prebirthday celebration with Ray, on the other hand. Now, there's a depressing thought. He'll probably give me a copy of
Take the Money and Run
and say, “This was my favourite movie when I was your age.” Just as he did last year. Then he'll get maudlin because he's not a teenager and I am. And the more miserable he becomes, the less I'll relish being young because I know for sure I'm going to be like Ray in a few years. Getting to twenty-four and pretending to be really old because the alternative—being an in-between age, neither young nor old—is just too scary.

I wished he could just leave it alone.

“Ray, it's in six months. Nobody cares, least of all me.”

“But eighteen, that's a serious one.”

“Look, I don't want to celebrate my birthday. Drew says with every year we just get sadder.”

“Drew lives in a tree.”

“He does not.”

On the other end of the phone, Ray began angrily to tie back his hair, tugging until the elastic band snapped. “When are people going to realise that madness and suicide are not synonymous with glamour?” he growled. “The only difference with your Drews and your Kurts is that they are the people who go through the door, while the rest of us stand in the corner, looking at it. It doesn't make them better. It doesn't make them braver. It just means … they have a shorter attention span.”

I snorted disdainfully. “Look who's talking. You're just jealous because he hates himself more than you do.”

Ray slammed the plate of pasta he was picking at to the floor, which was a wasted gesture since those Sharper Image video phones never really took off and, therefore, I could not see him. “Don't be such a fucking teenager. Don't fall for it.”

“Look at you. You are so full of rage. Drew is just full of sadness. It wastes him away.”

“Are you saying I'm fat?”

“No.”

“Drew doesn't give a fuck about you. He's only interested in himself. I'm on tour with the cunt, I know. Did he ever ask you one single question about yourself? Did he want to know about what makes you unhappy? He doesn't know you exist. No fucking talent, no fucking hope. Poncey fucking band that's never going to get anywhere. He's full of shit.”

“I know he doesn't know I exist. I know he doesn't care. I know I've made him into this great thing and he's never going to be a success and he's never going to amount to nothing. I know I believe in nothing.” I looked at Marilyn, Monty, Marlon. “But it is MY nothing.”

Drew hasn't called to tell me his schedule. I didn't expect him to. He's far too delicate a person to deal in telephones. I only gave him my number to show he had a confidante. It's not as if he asked for it. So I found his London date in the
NME
listings page. He was playing some godforsaken hellhole off Charing Cross Road, but I dragged Treena along for protection. She seemed bored, which pleased me. As I said, I only wanted her for protection. I didn't want her to like
him
. I knew he wouldn't like her.

The English GCSE had gone okay. My hand killed at the end, which is always a good sign. It didn't hurt in Maths—I took one look at the paper and excused myself because I was going to be sick. Classics was great. I wrote a fantastic composition about Dido and Aeneas, saying that more lovers should kill themselves on funeral pyres and then there wouldn't be such a high divorce rate. And I think I did all right in History. I was unprepared for questions about Germany's “golden years” of the 1920s, so I wrote an essay about “Golden Years” by David Bowie instead, managing, skilfully, I thought, to link it to the Weimar Republic.

I deserved a night out. Ray was loitering at the bar. Drew was as beautiful as I remembered, only this time his eye
makeup was silver and he was wearing a Marilyn Monroe T-shirt. The sound was as irritating as I remembered too, tinny and noisy at the same time. How could such a deep man make such hollow music? I blocked it out and just watched him, going over everything we had talked about in Edinburgh.

He told me that he never had a headache. If his brain ever throbbed, it was because he was suffering a particularly acute attack of twentieth-century malaise, or so he said. In reality, his frequent migraines were a side effect of the anorexia he had been calmly cultivating since the age of fifteen. Although he had the utmost respect for fat people, believing they symbolised the desire for spiritual cushioning prevalent in modern society, he felt thinness was his duty. So half an unbuttered potato was cut into quarters and made to last until five and then he would start drinking—vodka, neat, so as not to have the unwanted calories involved in orange juice, lime cordial, or cranberry. No social drinking, he drank to get drunk. He drank in his bedroom until he felt sleep spreading through his veins. If that didn't work, which it didn't lately, he'd have a joint. He very much wanted to be a heroin addict. It seemed like a shiny drug, a romantic drug. He hated himself for smoking dope, so middle-class, so Sussex University, but he found it was the only thing that sent him to sleep. “Off to beddy-byes,” he'd say, turning his back on the party and walking upstairs.

In his room, he'd brush his teeth, tone and moisturise, and unwrap the polythene bag. He wasn't very good at rolling joints. He was not very good at making things work: washing machines, answerphones, his guitar. He took his washing home to his mum, left the phone mostly off the hook, and allowed the technician to do almost all the computer programming
in the studio. Although I wasn't supposed to repeat that part. Lately he had taken to chewing the hash whole: foul as it was, at least there was no smoke and no rolling. It pleased him—it felt like taking medicine.

With the sound blocked out, I was enraptured by The Kindness of Strangers' London debut. So were several other girls in the packed pub back-room. I say girls, but they were more women. Too old to get away with ripped fishnets and dyed black hair. And they didn't get away with it. Drew eyed them with ill-disguised distaste. No, no, this was quite the wrong audience for him. These doomed romantics who display all their hurt and isolation through their dress sense. Too literal. And they looked unclean. Drew definitely deserves a better class of hanger-on, I told myself. I see him with Joan Baez. Who he hasn't heard of. He blushed puce when he admitted this and I told him it was no big deal, most people his age didn't know who she is, and he started muttering, “Gaps, gaps, too many gaps,” and yanking at his hair.

Ray smoked furiously, tutting softly as Drew sang and then clapping far too loud when he stopped. Treena didn't think much of the show. She referred to Drew as that “weird boy that looks like a girl.” I suspect she didn't like him because he was prettier than her. I knew Drew wouldn't fancy her. He liked the type consumed by their appearance, knocked sideways, unable to function because of their snake hips, colt legs, and doe eyes. He liked someone to compete with, and Treena has child-bearing hips with clearly no capacity for anorexia.

That night in Edinburgh, he had told me he enjoyed my face. Something around my eyes suggested the suffering of concentration camp victims, he had decided. Later, on the
train home, I realised I had never been so offended in my life. But there and then, I thought, “What a sweet thing to say. He likes my face. How generous.” I knew my body terrified him, made him feel physically sick. I could see it—every time I moved towards him, he wanted to scream.

For a while now, I've been trying to compile the definitive list of the ten best-looking people of all time. At twelve-twenty that day, it read like this: