Namedropper (8 page)

I believe it. The people I know who enjoy life the most are
the ones who control their own sleep, who decide not to wake up at night, terrified of ghosts, and therefore never do. Treena can be up all night, doing speed, and then decide to sleep, and there she goes. And, no matter how much she's drunk, she can wake up when she wants to. Rather than use an alarm clock, she bangs on her head the time she needs to get up the next day. So if she needs to be awake by eight, she taps her head eight times as it hits the pillow. It never fails.

It struck me that Drew might be a figment of my imagination, an excess of energy generated by my hatred for Tommy Belucci and my fury at the bouncer and Ray, but something about his voice was so unfamiliar, so beyond my realm of celluloid experience, I could never have made it up.

“Drew, if I may ask, where did you get your accent?”

He turned up the volume on the TV and answered, fast and quiet, “It's Middle European.”

“It's what?”

“You know, Middle European. Hungarian. Or something.”

“Oh my God.” I dropped my glass. “Are you trying to do a Jewish accent?”

He ran into the bathroom and closed the door. Oh my God.

Maybe he was like one of those serial killers who are so good at deluding themselves that they become an innocent character who genuinely didn't do it. Four in the morning in solitary confinement they might have doubts. Maybe once at four in the morning Andrew called down to reception for a Coke and accidentally reverted to his real accent, Watford perhaps, until he caught himself. God forbid the part-time bellboy flicking through the
Sun
, returning to page 3 to keep
himself awake, God forbid he should hear Drew's real accent.

With some trepidation, I called Manny. The answerphone was on. “Hi, you've reached Manny and Viva. Viva is off gallivanting across the country with degenerates when she should be revising. Manny has gone to buy the new Barbra Streisand album proclaiming her love for James Brolin.”

“He can't be that worried,” I reasoned. I cleared my throat and spoke, as fast as I could, before he had a chance to pick up.

“Hi, Manny, it's me. I'm not gallivanting. I'm walking at a measured pace and I'm wearing sensible shoes. I'm getting very important life experience. I can't completely explain over the phone. I'm safe. Trust me on this one. It's a good cause. I love you.”

I realised as I hung up that the “I love you” was a bad move. It suggested a gun to my head, a tourniquet at my arm, last rites. Shit. “I'm safe,” I whispered, under sleepy, warm-wine breath. The alcohol was starting to hit. Please don't let me be a crappy, girlie drunk.

I didn't quite know what was going to happen, or what was expected of me, but I felt in control. In awe but in charge. He wanted me there to balance himself, I sensed, to hold himself back from the edge of something. I didn't yet know what. He just seemed lonely. The male equivalent of the girl so beautiful that no one asks her to dance. I perched on the edge of the bed to watch the end of the soap crackling through the TV. It was some late-night American import. Then I heard the water cut off. “God, please don't make me have to look at him with a tiny towel around his midriff.” That's when I realised that I was in love with Drew, this weird, skinny, Jew-fancying freak.

He mustn't do that to me. He mustn't bring sex into this. “If he is wearing a towel,” I decided, “I'll look away until he gets the message.” But it was worse, so much worse. Drew came out of the bathroom wearing white flannel pyjamas. His hair was tousled. He looked like a freshly laundered bunny rabbit. A fluffy chicken with jet black hair.

He reclined on the bed. The single bed. The only piece of furniture in the whole damn room. Unless I sat on the floor I had to sit on the bed. But I was blocking his sight lines to the TV. Because we had only gone up there to watch TV, I took a deep breath and lay down next to him on the duvet. I sucked in my body so that not one hair on my arm touched his. I even pointed my toes away from his.

“May I take my shoes off?”

“Of course.” He giggled.

I was terribly aware that my feet smelled. But it would look too silly to put my boots back on.

“Beatle boots.” He pointed at my shoes as he reached for the Vladivar.

“Ah, I s'pose so. I suppose so.” Enunciation. He's so big on accents. It matters to someone like him. “They're not supposed to be. I didn't mean them to be.”

It is terrible, the things clothes symbolise. You might have short legs and turn your jeans up and people might think it's a fashion statement and you're being pretentious.

Drew watched the TV contentedly, as if it were not an American sitcom so bad it was being shown after midnight, but the finest Austen adaptation. His black eyes seemed to suck up all the light from the screen. The room was getting darker and darker, until only Drew's face was lit up. Traces of
eye makeup remained despite his shower. Golden-brown shadow around his eyelids, with grey kohl along the lashes and sweeps of black mascara. He used the makeup to enhance his beauty. “So he must know,” I thought, smiling. He knew how pretty he was, so pretty that the straightest of straight Edinburgh lads felt fluttery when they saw him.

He stroked his left arm, which was a mess of cigarette burns, thin white welts, and freshly healed scars. The incision he had made in front of the promoter had crusted over with black blood. His forearm looked like a work of modern art. There was something almost beautiful about it. The beauty of organised chaos. I tried not to look, but I couldn't help it and he didn't seem to mind. He even began to explain the marks as if they were notes in a diary.

“That was after a row with my manager. That was after I read
The Grapes of Wrath
for the first time. That was after I saw
Wings of Desire
. That was the other day when a taxi crashed into the side of my car.”

“Why didn't you have a row with the driver?”

“I wanted to. I was furious. But I told you, I don't like confrontations. So I went home and I did this and then I felt a lot better.”

The guided tour of his mutilated arm completed, he scratched his nose and gave a running commentary on the next programme.

I couldn't stop looking at his arm. He saw me staring but didn't attempt to cover it.

“Drew, I have to say something. A Jew would never do that to himself. We've been through enough pain without inflicting it on ourselves.”

Tears pricked his eyes. “I know everyone thinks I'm Blanche, but I really want to be Stanley,” he whispered, and a fat tear trickled down his cheek. I didn't know what to say, or what to do. I reached out to touch his hand, but he flinched like a lizard, like a cold-blooded animal.

I was shocked. “I'm sorry, Drew, I'm not trying to, you know … I'm not trying to get off with you. I just wanted to hold your hand, because you look so unhappy.”

“I don't like being touched.”

“Drew, I promise, I will never touch you.”

He smiled and I saw all his teeth.

I felt flustered. I'll go out of the room for a minute, I decided, and when I come back, everything will be fine. I excused myself to go to the toilet. I washed my hands and as I did so I noticed a razor on the side of the sink. It was a ladies' disposable razor. The protective guard had been snapped off and the blade stuck out at an angle. The white plastic stem was dotted with red. What was that in response to? The new dog-food commercial? “All right?” he fluted, as I came back into the bedroom.

I meant to answer, “Yes, I'm all right,” but it came out, “You know, Tennessee Williams hated Jews.”

“He did?” squealed Drew, genuinely startled.

“Yes, probably. He was from the South. Truman Capote has an evil Jew in
The Grass Harp
. And they were great friends, weren't they?” Drew was on tenterhooks, so I attempted to qualify my statement. “I mean, everyone hates Jews, don't they?”

“I don't,” he chimed. “I love them.”

I started to laugh uncontrollably, until my tummy felt like
it had thumbtacks in it. But when I raised my head to look at him, I felt strangely calm. I forgot how silly he was. Ray was such a big lunk. Drew was the tiniest man ever to have existed. A waif in sheep's clothing. Oh God, I felt myself turning into Manny. Drew had a blob of excess mascara in the corner of his left eye. I really, really wanted to clean it off. I just wanted him to be perfect. I just didn't want him to have conjunctivitis. And such chipped nail varnish. That's how much he hates himself. He walks around quite happily with chipped nail varnish.

“Do you have any nail polish with you?” My voice sounded very deep and ancient, like I was the chain-smoker. If I couldn't prevent him getting an eye infection, then I was at least going to fix his fingernails.

He hopped off the bed and rummaged in the Hello Kitty makeup bag on the dresser until he found a bottle of ruby red Helena Rubinstein. I winced when I saw it. Winona Horowitz changed her surname to Ryder. You would have thought Helena would have had the good grace to think of a nailpolish stage name. Real old ladies' varnish. But I knew that was why he had chosen it.

I moved his hand to the knee of my black jeans. I saw the terror in his eyes and could see what he was thinking: “Oh shit, she wants me to touch her.” I did, but not like that. As I painted his nails I thought that this was probably the happiest I'd been in a long time. With every stroke of varnish, I felt happier and less worried. I admired my neat job and leaned back on the bed.

His thighs were so skinny. Mine spread around me, they seemed to envelope us both. Why does my body have to be so
aggressive when I'm feeling so timid? Drew saw no different from the builders on the street. To him, my body was rampant and cheap and therefore I must want to have rampant, cheap sex. Josephine Baker said she had an intelligent body. Mine is so lazy and common and ignorant, as if it has seen nothing but salt-and-vinegar crisps. As if it hadn't been there when I read
Pride and Prejudice
or saw
Taxi Driver
. It only recalled the popcorn I ate in the cinema.

He lit a Marlboro and I looked up at him. He had no five o'clock shadow, just fine, downy hairs on his face that caught the light and made him look even more like Marilyn Monroe in heaven. He was so un-Jewish-looking, I again had to stop myself from laughing. He dragged on his Marlboro. There couldn't be a more inappropriate brand of cigarettes for him to smoke. He wasn't the Marlboro Man. He was the Fairy Liquid baby.

He managed to pull himself off the bed and fumbled again in his Hello Kitty bag. When he came back he handed me a seven-inch record and beamed. “This is my new single.”

I didn't especially want to hear it and I was glad there wasn't a record-player in the room. To be honest, I wasn't that keen on his music. It sounded like a bleepy racket. I just liked him. I felt like a studio executive who wanted to shag a starlet without having to put her in his movie. How could I touch him again? In a pre-agreed way. Without, you know, actually touching him. I had to think of a way I could be allowed to touch him. Maybe if I said that it was Jewish law. I daren't ask to paint his toenails. Maybe he would be too drunk to notice. So, holding my breath, I awkwardly began to stroke his hair and ask a lot of dumb questions.

“Is your hair the same colour as mine, really?” If it was, this would give us something in common and he would have to love me. If his hair was an entirely different colour, he could comment on the loveliness of my hair and wish his was the same colour as mine.

His nose was in his vodka. He snorted, by way of reply. Perhaps he couldn't bring himself to say I love you.

“I'm just quite a touchy-feely person,” I apologised, and he sniffed, “I noticed,” sounding for one second like one of those terrible, cruel girls at school. Then he spun around and stared dramatically at me, as best he could through his snow-drift vodka haze.

“What hope do you hold for your sex?”

He saw the horror on my face and realised he had said “sex.” I could see he had an even stronger abhorrence of sex than I do. “Gender, gender,” he corrected himself. “What hope do you hold for your gender?” As if that were any less of a stupid question to be asking at three in the morning.

I took a deep breath. “I think things will get better.” This did not sound like an answer as important as he seemed to think the question was. I thought quickly and added, “Women are better than men.”

He nodded his head enthusiastically, then closed his eyes, relishing the truth. Not only was he not Jewish, but also the gender he belonged to was, indeed, inferior.

I should have been thinking, “What a jerk,” but all I thought was, “Baby doll. Poor, sweet, exploited baby doll.” I decided there and then I would protect him from modern society. Or from horrible groupies anyway. Idiot words kept coming out of my mouth. There was so much I wanted to ask
him, but he couldn't talk anymore. His eyes were glazed, his head lolled.

I had to be strong and leave. I could not be there the next morning or he might not remember that nothing had happened. I told him, “I'm going now. Thank you for having me,” like it was a goddamn children's party and he was going to give me a going-home present. I slowly did up the buttons on my jacket and heard myself ask, “Can I give you a hug?” He consented and I threw my arms around him. I was careful that my breasts didn't touch him but surprised myself by kissing his neck. He wouldn't remember. I left him lying on the bed, swathed in smoke, ashtray on his groin, ash overflowing onto his white pyjama bottoms.

It was 5 A.M. and I was on the streets of Edinburgh by myself. It was the third day of June, but I was so cold that if I hadn't been so drunk, I would have sat down on the pavement and cried. When I left the hotel, there were still girls sitting in the lobby, waiting to meet Ray. They had been there all night, at first sitting up straight and looking chatty, trying simultaneously to seem engrossed in their conversation and keep a nervous eye on the door for when Ray did make his entrance.