Namedropper (14 page)

Manny headed upstairs for bed. He looked old. I got the heart-pounding fear I used to have when I was eight, that one day he will die. How selfish of him. How can I put all my trust in someone who would do something so selfish as die?

“Viva, this is not within my realm of experience. I don't know how I can help you. If you really believe that Drew is
still with us, you believe it. Who's to say? It would be nice if you were right. Oh, Viva. Sometimes I feel so sad for you, being raised by me, not having a woman in the house.”

I don't think he felt sad, I think he just didn't know what to say. He was clutching at any word that might bring me back. He was going to say all of them, including “haystack” and “banana split,” in the vain hope that one of them would be the word that worked. I did that in my Biology exam last year. I didn't know anything and I hadn't done any work, so I put “nitrogen oxide” as the answer to every question because, since there were 103 questions, statistically, I was bound to be right eventually. So Manny had pulled the “needing a mother figure” card.

“We have her.” I pointed at Liz, whose photo was framed on our living-room wall. “And,” I shrugged my shoulders cheerfully, “I have Ray.”

Manny didn't even turn around to laugh. “He's not a woman.”

“No, but he has woman's hair.”

He does. Over the last few months he has allowed it to grow to his shoulders. A lot of men have shoulder-length hair. But for some reason, Ray has had his shaped, at a very expensive salon. It sways and shines like a Pantene model's. It is weird. It makes you want to touch the hair and forget about the man. It makes you feel unclean, which is not how a woman likes to feel in the presence of a man. One doesn't like to think that an attractive man has done anything to make himself so—he should just wake up that way. When you see Ray's hair, you see him in the shower, lathered up, rinsed out, in front of the
mirror, with gel and a blow-drier. Insanity, drunkenness, and preening are three attributes that are quite attractive on women but thoroughly disagreeable on men.

Ray came over at seven for dinner and he brought his woman's hair with him. It is very healthy, and highlighted the glaring truth that the rest of him looks less so. He too looked old. Crow's feet dug into the corners of his eyes and there were drooping lines of flesh on either side of his mouth. Weird to think they came from smiling. I was suddenly very embarrassed at how young I look. Which is stupid, because I'm a teenage girl. What were they expecting? Joan Rivers? I think they were. I realise how much my youth hurts them: Ray, Tommy, Drew, even Manny. Not Treena. She doesn't see faces, not her own in the mirror or anyone else's, just blurs of colour and form, shadow and light. “She looks like Winona Ryder,” she told a boy, grabbing my arm, as if she were trying to sell me. “He looks like Will Smith,” she told me, pointing at the boy. He didn't and I don't but it struck me that she really thought it. I asked her why she thought I looked like Winona Ryder and she said, “I dunno. You're little. And you've got dark hair.”

I looked at Ray, his face haggard and body language sheepish. I felt sorry for him having to be friends with me, having me as a responsibility. Tommy was right to be suspicious. Ray wasn't getting anything out of this, out of me. “Ray …”

He looked so worried. I decided to spit it out.

“Ray, I don't mean to go all Shirley MacLaine on you, but tonight, when I was doing the dishes, I had a major insight. I know that Drew isn't dead. He didn't kill himself. I know it.”

Ray blinked and put his hand up to shield his face from the
kitchen light and the craziness coming off me. “What do you know?”

“I know. Like I know the correct order of Elizabeth Taylor's husbands. It's just something inside me that I could never unknow.”

“Viva, they found his clothes on the end of Brighton Pier.” He stretched each syllable and held my gaze, to check that I was following. He must have spent the evening with Tommy.

“Okay, but did they find his body?”

“No, but it could have been carried out to sea. The currents are strong.” He was quiet and calm. He was almost smiling again.

“Ray, I promise you, I know I'm right. I would have more proof if you had told me sooner. But you can make it up to me. I need a favour. Will you take me to Brighton for the weekend?”

“What?” he spluttered.

I pulled my bra strap up from the edge of my shoulder, catching it with my thumb before it went into free fall. “I want to go to Brighton. I need to see where it was that Drew's switch was flicked. I need to be where he decided to do it. You have to come with me. You have a responsibility.”

We drove to Brighton. I felt sick all the way. Ray's car is full of empty cheese and onion crisp packets and his radio is jammed to Capital FM, which fades to a hiss once you get past Burgh Heath. I put my feet on the dashboard and he snapped at me to sit up properly or he would take me home.

I went very quiet for half an hour. Then I pulled my eyebrows down over my eyes and whimpered, “I want to see the hotel where he was drinking,” with the same voice and expression I used at age four to demand ice cream.

He should have told me off, but instead he chose to ignore me. He doesn't even find me cute anymore. When I first met Ray, he thought I was adorable, just about the cutest thing he ever did see.

“Fucking hell, Viva. I could be back in London, at a party or having a shag. I've met a girl.”

“Congratulations. I've met a girl before in my life too.” I stared at his ear, behind which he had tucked his shiny hair and a half-smoked cigarette.

Then
he
shut up for half an hour until we were in Brighton, when he suddenly banged his hand against the wheel and exclaimed, “God. You bring so much baggage with you.”

“I haven't brought anything,” I smirked.

“I mean, emotional.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I know you know.”

He was being so boring. “Oh God, shut up, Harold Pinter. Enough with the pregnant pauses. Fine. I don't see why this whole thing should be such hard work. If you're really my friend, you must want to help me find out what happened to the love of my life.”

“The love of your life?” he screeched.

“Yes. I know you think I'm being a teenage girl. Well, you're right. That's exactly what I'm being. Okay, it's out of character and you find it a bit unsettling, but I think it's my right. People who work in offices are allowed five weeks' holiday a year. Five weeks a year I should be allowed to behave like a teenage girl and not like Norman Mailer, or whoever it is you keep confusing me with. You picked the wrong self-obsessed Jew.”

He kept one arm on the steering wheel and looked slyly over at me, probably to check whether I was Viva and not Norman Mailer. “Fine, you've decided you're in love. Whatever. But this is serious. A man has taken his own life. Viva, it's not a picnic. You're talking like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Enid Blyton. You want murder and chips.”

“I don't bloody want murder. That's the last thing I want. I hadn't even thought of it. Damn, now I have to wonder about that too. Thanks a lot, Ray. By the way, I do want chips.”

We parked in Ship Street and found a good chip shop, which is not hard to do in Brighton, and sat on the pebbles with our two-pronged forks.

“Pebbles. How stupid,” Ray muttered through a mouth full of potato squish.

“Ray. How eloquent.”

He threw down his fork. The pathetic wooden stick didn't even make a sound as it hit the beach. No one ever notices when Ray throws down a gauntlet. It's not that he doesn't throw hard enough. It's just that he always picks such tiny gauntlets to throw. “Look, I don't have to be here. I'm doing you a bloody favour.”

“Okay, okay.” I tossed a fat pebble into the slate grey sea, which splished on and on, for no good reason, like a Tom Hanks film. I popped another chip in my mouth. The vinegar stung the back of my throat and made my eyes water, like one of Treena's Prodigy records played at full volume. “So who's the girl?”

“Oh, just some girl I've had my eye on for a while. She's beautiful. So beautiful you feel very lonely when you look at her.” He picked at his sneaker, pulling the A out of the rubberized Adidas logo. “I've met her a couple of times, but we've never really talked properly before. We bumped into each other at the Met Bar the other night and got chatting.”

“The Met Bar? You went there of your own accord? God, you're so sad. Who chats at the Met Bar? Were you in the toilet?” I laughed so loud that some old people in deck chairs turned round and scowled.

“Yes. We were taking cocaine in the toilets. And then we had sex in the toilets.”

“Oh my God, I don't want to know. You're disgusting. Sex in the toilets at the Met Bar? That's the worst thing I've ever heard.”

“Worse than the war in Bosnia?”

“Yes.”

“You're just jealous because you've never been to the Met Bar. You can't get in. You don't look old enough.” Sometimes Ray really sounds exactly like the girls at school.

He said I looked too young, but that's not an insult. I knew what he really meant was that I wasn't pretty enough to get in. Tears sprung in my eyes, like Russian ballet stars. What a stupid thing for Ray to say. Surely it should be ugly girls who have sex in toilets. Because in the toilet everything is so ugly that they're bound to look better.

Ray looked embarrassed. Because he'd had sex in a toilet and because he knew he had made me feel bad and ugly. And if I felt ugly, I might eventually become ugly and then he would have to explain to everyone why he was hanging around with an ugly girl.

“Let's go on the dodgems!” he yelped and spit came out of his mouth. He pulled out his wallet to pay the man in the booth, and a wad of twenties fell out.

“Jesus,” I hissed, “put it away.”

Here we were on the pier where the love of my life disappeared, and Ray wanted to go on the dodgems.

I climbed gingerly into the car, which was about as well-kept as Ray's real car. With each bump, I leaned away from him. I was not enjoying myself. He kept looking over at me, the way I do with Treena when I take her to the movies. She never laughs when she's supposed to. “That's not funny,” she says, and I feel very guilty and low, because it must be being in my presence that has made it not funny, since everyone else in the theatre is doubling up. Our dodgem was whacked so
hard from behind that Ray bit his tongue. I refused to crack a smile. Ray finally gave up and drove slowly to the side of the circuit before our time was even up. We stepped out of the car wordlessly.

As I dusted myself down, I realised that there were kids everywhere, specifically teenage boys. My mortal enemies. They weren't there before. It was as if they had descended on the city en masse, from the sky, from a previously unreleased Alfred Hitchcock film, too terrifying for human eyes. If I had been feeling insecure all afternoon, I immediately felt incredibly self-conscious. The boys were probably laughing at my hair, at my shoes, at my body. They swigged from cans of beer and bottles of Thunderbird. They pushed each other and spat and wolf-whistled at every girl in sight. Even me. Although I know they were just being sarcastic. Even worse, several of them recognised Ray and pointed at us. They didn't say anything, just held their arms out in front of them, as if claiming their five pounds.

“Ray. What is going on? I thought this town was supposed to be full of old ladies. Why are there so many seventeen-year-old boys drunk at five in the afternoon? Is that a Brighton thing I didn't know about?”

“Skyline are playing tonight.” He spat the words. He hates Dillon, the lead singer of Skyline, more than anyone in the world, more than Margaret Thatcher or Hitler or Jack Lemmon, because Dillon is more famous than he is, although he won't admit it—either that he's more famous or that he resents him for it. He just shakes his head and wails, “It's football-terrace music,” as if he is a curator at the British Library watching Charlotte Brontë first editions being replaced by Jackie Collins.
He hates Skyline more than he loves Woody Allen. “I told you I really didn't want to be in Brighton this weekend. I know you don't like to mingle with the proles.”

“You mean
you
don't like to mingle with Skyline!” I pulled up my hood and tied the cord tight so that the icy wind wouldn't cut my cheeks so badly and the teenage boys couldn't laugh at my face.

“Same thing. I hate that bloody Dillon. He's a cunt.”

“Excuse me. Please don't use the female genitalia as a word of abuse.”

“Viva, he's a cunt. And he looks like a geography teacher.”

I thought of Mr. Edwards and how everyone at school thinks he looks like a rock star. “If he looks so much like a geography teacher, why was he on the cover of
Smash Hits
and
NME
in one week?”

“I don't know,” raged Ray. “Those hack bastards probably all had crushes on their teachers.”

“Ray, you're talking really weird. I don't like it. You always get het up about Dillon. What's the big deal? If you don't like him, you don't have to talk to him. Why do you hate him so much?”

“Because he's called Dillon. You can't be a pop star if you're called Dillon. Who's called Dillon? Who spells it that way?”

“Well, obviously he does. Why do you care?” I felt like a psychiatrist trying to get a twelve-year-old to explain why he kept yelling the word “fuck.” Ray had no good justification, although he bit his nails and tried to think of one.

“He's always trying to get one up on me.”

I stared at him. “Why would he try to get one up on you?
He
is
one up on you. You are quite famous, but they're massive. Skyline are bigger than anyone. They're probably the biggest band in Britain, apart from U2. Don't judge yourself by their standards. Anyway, Skyline are proles stuff. Even Treena likes them.”