Strawberry Tattoo Read Free Page A

said enviously. “Does that mean you’re staying for a while?”
    “I have to get there a week or so before the exhibition opens,” I explained. “To install the sculpture. So, with what Carol would have had to pay for a hotel, I thought I’d see if I could find a flat to rent instead. A friend of a friend lives on the Upper West Side”—how easily I said that, without having any idea of what it signified. It might have been the equivalent of Mayfair, Brixton or Cockfosters for all I knew—“and she’s away for a month or so in October. She’s letting me have it for half the rent, as long as I water her plants and forward the mail.”
    “Well, fuck me,” said Lex, summing up the general mood of the meeting in a few well-chosen, if not particularly elegant, words. “You jammy cow.”

    “Bollocks! Bollocks!” This was Lex, in a near-seamless continuation of his previous ejaculation. Only by now it was many hours later, we had changed venue, and he was shouting the words over an insistently fast and thumping bassline. “How can you possibly fucking say that my work doesn’t inspire emotion? You should have seen people reacting to that piece I did at Black Box last year! They were all over the place!”
    I sneered at him.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, or rather shouted, as coldly as I could under the circumstances. “I really don’t see that a load of lads spitting out dilutedcough syrup all over the floor counts as emotion, except perhaps in the most literal sense—”
    “It wasn’t just sodding cough syrup! It was syrup of figs! It took me ages to get hold of that! And there was flat beer and tea, mixed together, in the Tallisker bottle, and vodka in the water—
and,”
he added with great pride, as if this would clinch the argument, “I left the chartreuse as it was! No one was expecting that!”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, Lex!” I was exasperated by now. “Just because you lined up a load of bottles on a table with different stuff in them from what it said on the labels, and some idiot boys were fool enough to taste them—”
    “It’s about challenging people’s perceptions of the real!” Lex insisted. “Breaking down our standard assumptions and showing how much we depend on labels—”
    “Of course we bloody depend on labels! Take all of them off the tins you’ve got at home and then try finding the baked beans!”
    “Well, that bit was more about mass-marketing,” Lex yelled across an increasingly loud break of sound, “how we expect certain things from a particular brand, because of advertising—”
    “Then what you should have done,” I said, sighing, because it was so obvious, “is bunged a lot of bottles of vodka, say, on the table, right from supermarket brands up to Absolut or Finlandia, to see if people could taste the difference.”
    Lex’s eyes went absorbed and distant for a second. “Nah,” he said, “that would be—”
    “What?”
    “That would be too practical!” he shouted. “So, what, you’re saying your stuff actually provokes emotion?” He put huge and sarcastic stress on the last two words.
    I was drunk enough by now not to be embarrassed by the turn the conversation had taken.
    “I dunno! I’m just saying that the emotional range you go through while swilling your mouth out to get rid of the taste of cold beer and tea mixed together and cursing the so-called artist at the same time—”
    “I don’t bloody call myself an artist! Well, only as a convenient shorthand—”
    “ANYWAY—that kind of sensation’s about as shallow as you can get. People probably experience a much more complex array of feelings watching
Babe
on video.”
    “I can’t hear a word you’re saying! Let’s go and sit on the stairs, OK?”
    I nodded. Lex turned and shoved his way through the crowd of people milling around the bar. I followed the shoulders of his battered fawn suede jacket as they jostled a path for me over to the staircase on the far side of the bar.