Namedropper (3 page)

Last time my mother came out of the Buddhist retreat, she tried to set up a reunion with me. But I didn't want to meet her. She'd been in a Buddhist retreat for five years. I know she wouldn't have heard of Ben Affleck and that it would just annoy me.

If I'm absolutely honest with myself, which I am when it's three in the morning and I still can't sleep, I do look for mother figures everywhere. Not because I want one. Because I'm curious. Because I can't get my head around it. I'm a tiny bit obsessed by the idea of mothers, the same way I'm obsessed by the idea of a jar that contains both peanut butter and jelly in one spread.

When I'm paying the checkout lady, I think, “Oh, she's a mother,” like “Oh, she's a Mormon.” It's just something some women are. I see it as a cult. It shouldn't be outlawed, but you don't really want to let them into your house. Most girls are daughters. It's something they have to be, whether they like it or not, another burden when it's already enough work just being a girl, then a teenage girl, let alone a teenage girl who belongs to someone else. Luckily I don't have that. I think I'd feel like a split personality if I had a mom. I would call her Mom and not Mother, which makes me think of Jane Austen, or Mommy, which makes me think of Joan Crawford.

Mom said Manny could care for me better than she ever could and she was right. I think she found herself. Every now and then we get a postcard from an artists' colony in Topanga
Canyon, an Israeli kibbutz, or a monastery in the south of France. If I found myself, I'd say, “Well, there you are, Viva, so nice to meet you,” and then I'd go back to bed. I don't think about her. I think about pasta in the shape of Hello Kitty, stockings with diamond seams up the back, Marilyn's crumbling cake-mascara, and Liz Taylor's new white hair. I haven't got time for the trivials.

I was always a highly strung child. I had to take eleven days off school when I was five after Uncle Manny took me to see
Bambi
. Four years later I was still undergoing therapy for separation trauma brought on by the scene where Bambi's mother is shot by a hunter. This was not an uncommon phobia at the time. In nursery, I became friendly with a boy called “Superman Jeff” who wore his pants over his trousers and cried when his mother dropped him off because it reminded him of baby Superman being sent to earth as his planet exploded around him. Still, he was not nearly as traumatised as me. At least Superman's mum and dad came to life as holograms of Marlon Brando and Susannah York. Bambi's was dead, full stop, no deer hologram. No magic powers. Shot by hunters with nary a Gucci deer jacket to show for it.

I liked the idea of therapy—it was something I had heard Woody Allen talk highly of. I could tell Manny was worried that everyone would think I was a five-year-old freak because he kept saying, “If you have a session that clashes with a lesson, just tell your friends you have to go to Hebrew class.”

“No way,” I choked, “that's so embarrassing,” and every time I had an appointment I'd raise my hand and say, as
loudly as I could, “Miss Matthews, I have to be excused. I have an appointment with my therapist.”

She'd blush and whisper, “Oh, your
therapist
,” as if “therapist” were actually a code word for “Hebrew lesson.”

Uncle Manny looked after me in the eleven days I was away from school, in self-enforced Bambi exile. He drew me a cartoon strip of
Crime and Punishment
to read, so my education wouldn't suffer. I wriggled about on Manny's boyfriend's lap whilst he was trying to read an E. M. Forster biography, and lay my head on the page so my chocolate curls obscured the writing.

Now here I am, seventeen with a bullet, failing school miserably, even the subjects I'm good at. The bullshit classes. The ones I can talk my way out of. English, Art, Classics, History, Religious Studies. Sample Religious Studies question: “Is racism a good thing or a bad thing?” It's enough to make you become a Klansman, just so the answer will be less dull to write; and the two black girls in my class feel the same. I just can't be bothered to answer anymore. I expect to fail Maths, Biology, French. I fully intend to. But even I am a little ashamed about being bottom of the class in Religious Studies.

We're sitting our mocks at the moment. School is mocking me. Not just the kids and the teachers, but the timbers that hold the building upright. The end-of-year exams are a big deal. They determine whether or not you go to university. I don't want to go to university. I don't like unity and I hate verses—I just love the chorus of songs. I have no motivation because they can't threaten me with not getting into college since I don't want to go anyway. College is for people who want to extend their childhood for as long as possible. Education
really doesn't come into it. The only way I get through school is to pretend it's a set-up for a musical number. As I talk to Treena, or listen to Madame, I am working out where the song is going to come in.

You know: “I am so enjoying getting to know you …
Getting to know you!”
or “My goodness, we've talked so long it's now the next morning. And what a lovely morning …
Good morning!”
On the walk home from school, I wonder what's going to inspire that policeman over there to start dancing, or when Frank Sinatra's going to come careering round the bend dressed as a sailor. It's never when I expect. Then, back at the house, I put on full makeup and drink coffee because that's when I know the cameras are really on me.

“Gosh,” sniffs Manny, “you look like Ava Gardner today.”

I scrunch a wedge of dark-brown hair from my cheek and bite my lip. Sometimes I worry I might be really homophobic and then I remember, no, I just hate Manny. “You always say that.”

“No I don't. Usually I say you look like Elizabeth Taylor, but today you look like Ava Gardner. There is a Southern fire in your eyes. You look like you've just made love to a bullfighter!”

“How can you say that when you know I just sat through a two-hour math class?” I howl.

I don't like the whole “Oh, you know who you look like?” thing. First off, it's usually not true. When Manny says I look like Ava Gardner, what he really means is, I have dark hair. When he says my mother looked like Rita Hayworth, what he's trying to tell me is that she had red hair. Or that we have
Alzheimer's in the family and that's the kindest way he can think of to say it. I wouldn't be surprised. My first memory is of my mother giving me cat food and giving the cat my mushed meatloaf.

If it is true, if you really do look like someone, well, that's even worse. How terribly sad it must be to actually look a bit like Daniel Day-Lewis, but not as handsome, or something like Isabelle Adjani, but not quite. How could you live with yourself?

Because Manny is gay, we never had that icky part where I developed breasts and he freaked out and didn't want to hug me anymore. Instead, he points them out at every occasion: “Stand back, Viva, you're going to poke my eyes out.” “Even when you were eight years old,” he gushes, “even when you were flat as a board, you were just such a woman!” When I did get a figure, he just went crazy for it, like if I never did another thing in my life, I've made him as proud as he could possibly be. He buys me fancy fifties gear—vintage pointy stuff—and takes a lot of care hand-washing them. Not even Treena is wearing a suspender belt under her regulation A-line skirt.

I'm trying to read over my History notes. The garter belt is making me nervous. I clamp my legs tight together and tug at the grey flannel skirt that scratches my legs. The unnatural fibres of the skirt lap at the tops of my exposed thighs like a one-night stand you don't want to touch you in the morning. The train clunks gingerly up the line, a supermodel descending the runway in six-inch platform shoes. I place my satchel on my knees and flex my thigh muscles so that any hint of
underwear is obscured. I'm always convinced that the person in the seat opposite is trying to look up my skirt. It's usually a seventy-year-old Granny happily ensconced in a book called
World of Crocheting
, but it doesn't stop me worrying. The world is full of perverts.

“Veeve,” drawled Treena in her MTV VJ accent, an unsettling fusion of Swedish and North London streetspeak. “Veeve, have ya revised for that French exam?” In class I pretend I can't be bothered with the language, I am above it. In fact the knowledge that I'm bad at it upsets me because I associate French with beautiful people. The other day I scribbled, with lipstick, on a photograph of Catherine Deneuve.

Treena began to bite around the edges of another finger of chocolate. She looked up from her dark, velvety lashes. She knew, from her mother's experience, that blond eyelashes are ineffectual, and dyed them brown. “I ain't revised.”

“That's great, Treena. Because not only have I not revised, I haven't learnt. I have sat in French class for five years, watching Madame turn grey and die in front of my eyes. I have learnt nothing. I can ask myself my date of birth, but I can't reply. I can issue myself with a return train ticket to Dieppe. I can ask at what time the swimming pool opens, and that's it. I'm fucked and I don't want to talk about it.”

“That's funny, man. Because I was, like, totally fucked last night. Me and Marcus was out of our fucking heads, man.”

“Marcus and I,” I corrected her, and went to bang my head on the door of a toilet stall.

On my way home from school I bought a copy of the
NME
because Ray was on the cover in an article by Tommy Belucci.

I read the opening paragraph of Tommy's interview:

Tommy Belucci, Ray's best mate and a “crackerjack” music journalist, has a chemical reaction to women. The minute a girl walks into a room, he bristles and sits up dead straight, like he forgot to take the coat hanger out of his suit before putting it on. That's how comfortable the female presence makes him.

The way he deals with his discomfort is to take them to bed. He will say anything to get them there. If they are brunette, he'll say he hates blondes. If they're a blonde, he hates brunettes. If they are studying fashion, then fashion is his single greatest interest in life. His intent is so great that for the next hour, as if by magic, he truly does know everything about the world of couture. If they loathe football, then so does he. If they will only date black men, his skin gets darker. If they like Mel Gibson, his accent becomes Australian. If they fancy Hugh Grant, it turns out Tommy was educated at Eton. Tommy is the Zelig of playboys. I get the feeling he doesn't especially enjoy the sex. The point is that, once he has slept with them, the enemy has been confronted and defused
and he will never have to acknowledge their presence again. I'd hate to be him. Life must be one big game of Alien Invaders. Every time he blows up, another comes along.

His eyes are his best feature, brown flecked with green and so heavy lidded there is no crease at all—they are almost Oriental. But instead of deflecting attention from the rest of him, his beautiful eyes just make it worse. Immediately under his eyes are deep, deep bags, the colour of school uniforms. His tiny snout of a nose is much too little for his big face. His eyebrows don't so much meet in the middle as have elaborate and well-catered functions in the centre of his forehead.

Tommy is a mod. He has an extensive collection of Motown 45s and Small Faces rarities. He owns an astonishing array of Savile Row suits and Fred Perry suits. They would be a wiser investment if he just dotted them around his room for everyone to admire because, no matter how well they are cut, they hang badly on him, like clingfilm around a bowl of day-old dog food. He is concurrently thin and lumpy, and elegant suits accentuate this.

Over his suit, he wears a camel-coloured three-quarter-length coat. He doesn't put his arms through it. The coat is draped nonchalantly across his shoulders. So nonchalantly that Superglue is bound to be involved. He carries a briefcase. Like his life, he bought the heavy model to disguise the fact he has nothing in it. Tommy is always pulling things out of his inner coat pocket. Chewing gum, a lighter, a packet of cigarettes, a pen. He pulls them out very slowly, allowing his hand to rest in the pocket like a child patting a bunny. He takes things slowly out of his pocket because he wants us to think it might be a gun. He wants it to be a gun. One day I think it
might be, and he'll be so shocked he'll drop it and shoot his own foot off.

Tommy thinks he is in the Mafia. Tommy thinks he is the Don. I'm not sure what he thinks he is the Don of, exactly. The Don of mod. The Don of Small Faces B-sides. If there is, at any point in your conversation with him, a lull or brief silence, he will seize it as an opportunity to talk about his Italian heritage and how he is a son of the Sicilian ghetto and how, even in his flat in Muswell Hill, his homeland stays with him. The only way to shut him up is to hiss, “Tommy, eh? That doesn't sound very Italian. Bloody cold day in Sicily when you were born.”