by Emma Forrest
I gave her the handbag, noting, ‘That’s Bottega Veneta.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Did you peek at the label?’
‘I know by the stitching. Only Bottega does that latticework. Is it real?’
She reached her hand to her mouth, smudging black across her jaw, which I could see was small and pointed, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, only covered in grime.
‘One of my dad’s girlfriends left it behind and I snatched it. I’m sure he got a new one.’
‘Girlfriend?’
‘Handbag, Funny Face.’
‘You can talk.’
And that was how we started flirting. Although I was not that way inclined, considering myself thoroughly asexual, I knew, though it had never happened to me before, that I was flirting, or being flirted with.
She opened her Bottega and pulled out the make-up bag, rolling mascara, lipstick, pot of crème blush and a few eyeliners onto the tray by her jelly.
‘Are you any good at make-up?’
‘Why would you ask me?’
‘You are a homosexual, right?’
I looked nervously around the room. Nobody was listening, mainly because the others were unconscious or demented.
‘I haven’t decided yet.’
‘Yeah, right. I bet that’s why you have the black eyes. You were cottaging on Hampstead Heath?’
‘My dad beat me up.’ I took no pride at all in saying it, but her response was ecstatic.
‘Of course! So you are a gay! How marvellous. I mean, sad for you that your dad doesn’t accept you, but my good luck that you’re here with me. Can you imagine if I was all alone with them?’
She nodded to the vegetative patient and the burns victim. She tested a kohl on the back of her hand, as if it were new to her.
‘I like that eyeshadow,’ I said.
Her face lit up. ‘Have it. No really, please! I want you to!’
I realised, almost immediately, that if you admired something of Jasmine’s out loud, she would give it to you. If you were in a shop and you said you liked something, she would buy it for you. You either had to keep your admiration of beautiful knick-knacks to yourself – which is a constricting way to live – or you had to spend a lot of time at museums, where at least if you admired something she couldn’t get it for you.
I accepted the eyeshadow to shut her up. She started to curl her lashes with the little metal spoon that had accompanied her jelly.
‘I learn all my best make-up tricks from the Golden Age of Hollywood.’
I twinged with excitement. ‘Warren Beatty used to arrive early on the set of Splendor in the Grass so he could look in the mirror and separate each individual eyelash with a pin.’
She nodded: ‘That’s genius. I think he collected such incredible women because he was jealous of them. He wanted to keep Julie Christie and Natalie Wood and Joan Collins close because he was worried they might be more beautiful than him.’
My body started to tremble. I wanted to cry hosannah, but instead I quietly replied, ‘I collect vintage fan magazines from the forties and fifties.’
‘Me too!’ She was so loud that patients who weren’t meant to move their necks tried to turn their heads.
‘Really?’
‘We have to compare them when we get out.’
My brothers swapped football cards with their friends. I never imagined I’d have someone with whom to perform the equivalent. I felt my way towards the idea of a kindred spirit and, even though one was right there in the room, mentally my arm still wasn’t long enough to touch her and I imagined groping towards her with an outstretched stick.
‘This is a trick Rita Hayworth used to do, when she wasn’t being fucked by her father.’
I didn’t laugh, and she looked at me, anxious.
‘He doesn’t fuck you, does he?’
‘No. Just the punching.’
‘Oh, phew. I hate to put my foot in it with a brand-new friend.’
The horrible nerve pain began to subside as my heart swelled with the possibility that this was real and not a morphine-drip hallucination. That I had somebody I wanted to talk to. Right now, and I knew it was happening, like a lucid dream. It took me a moment to find my voice. When it came out, I could hear my own accent for the first time, as if I’d moved outside my body.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I took an overdose,’ she said cheerfully, her newly curved eyelashes nearly reaching to her eyebrows.
I got back in my bed. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s my fourth. They’re never successful but this was the first one I really meant. The housekeeper found me in time.’
There followed a lull in conversation, after which she brightly offered, ‘Would you like to see my note?’
I demurred, which seemed to surprise her.
‘People usually want to see it, then?’
‘Of course! I mean, I assume so. I’ve never offered before now. The nurses had a peek.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They said I had beautiful handwriting. They were just being kind. It slopes rather leftward, a sign of psychopathy, you know.’
‘Are you a psychopath?’
‘Well, if I was, I wouldn’t tell you, would I? I’d adapt to the situation so you wouldn’t know. I’m probably a borderline.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, politely put, it means I’m a troublemaker.’
I quite liked the sound of that and I got back off my bed and leaned in closer.
‘Do you want me to help you clean your face?’ I asked.
She looked at herself in a hand mirror.
‘This is rather Adam Ant. But, yes, I’m done.’
I wiped her down. Underneath, her face was lovely. Wide-set green eyes, black upper lashes and the bottom lashes were a double row. I looked at her numerous eyeliners and handed her a grey one.
‘Use this colour. You’ve got some golden flecks in your iris within the green. The grey will make them pop.’
She seemed impressed and said, ‘You know, Marilyn used this. It looks like black liquid liner she had on in photos, but it’s grey, always grey.’
‘So she used the same tricks.’
‘Well, yes. But she used this actual eyeliner,’ and she pointed it at me.
She may as well have been wielding the sword in the stone. But I knew she was telling the truth.
‘My father bought me it from Sotheby’s. It’s hers. I’m not lying to you. There’s no real stars any more. Who do you think has replaced them?’
‘The royals, I guess.’
‘I don’t think so. Because they don’t really want to be there. They don’t want the golden contract; they all want the hell out.’
‘Diana married in.’
‘Diana looked like she was being frogmarched up the aisle. That’s why her dress was so big. Someone was under it, forcing her to keep walking.’
‘No,’ I frowned. ‘She’s happy.’ I needed to think she’d end up happy.
‘I think Siouxsie Sioux has immaculate bone structure, don’t you?’
‘So does Adam Ant.’
Jasmine was only asking the question so she could tell me the right answer. ‘He does, and so does Debbie Harry. Why would you be born with bones like that if you weren’t meant to be a star? I was right down the front at Siouxsie’s last gig and the light was bouncing off her browbones as if it was a shot set up for Marlene Dietrich. Have you seen her play?’
‘No. I’ve heard there’s a lot of spit.’ I didn’t even like seeing my own saliva, and I changed the subject: ‘What does your dad do?’
‘Nothing at all.’
It was very intimate and strange to watch a girl put on make-up for no one except me, on a hospital ward late at night when the world was sleeping (and some, vegetative). It was more intoxicating than any drug experience I would ever have.
She patted the bed beside her and I found myself sitting down, closer to any woman than I’d ever been befo
re, except my mum.
‘If your dad does nothing, then why is he so rich?’
‘Hello? Have you ever been to Great Britain before? It’s a class system rooted in antiquated notions of land ownership.’
She took a spoon of rice pudding, the texture of which is seared in my mind. One day, looking at a cream blazer bearing a lapel scattered with intricately shattered lumps, I realised that I had, for years, been attempting to commemorate that rice pudding in my collections. She was using the same spoon she’d used to curl her eyelashes.
‘He’s rich because his parents were rich, and his grandfather and his great-grandfather were rich. It’s completely absurd. But that’s how I ended up with Marilyn Monroe’s liquid eyeliner.’
She handed it over for me to admire.
‘Where’s your mum?’ I asked, as I examined the liquid liner, marking the inside of my wrist.
‘Oh, she left us some time ago.’
‘I’m sorry. That’s tough’ I said, and tried to give her back the liner.
‘Please take it,’ she insisted, ‘I’m sure Marilyn would have wanted you to have it.’
I fell asleep that night, clutching it as lightly as I could without dropping it, trying to keep it safe, but knowing I was holding something very rare and fragile.
CHAPTER 4
The best week of my life up to meeting Jasmine had happened the previous year, when ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’ reached Number 4 in the charts. Now I had met her, I hoped I wouldn’t be checked out too soon. The nurse had said it should only be a couple of nights and, if I’d seen it as an appealing respite before meeting Jasmine, now it was a necessity. I couldn’t go home when I’d finally made a friend. I tried to make myself look as beat-up as possible, which, of course I was, but in truth this was less of a beating than I’d endured before. It just landed on such a special occasion that a lot of people happened to be watching.
I was relieved to see Jasmine emerge from the bathroom. As she did, she handed a waiting nurse a razor.
‘Thank you,’ she said sweetly, and then less sweetly, ‘See. Shaved my legs and I didn’t try to top myself.’
I was thinking of a way to get over to her bed, but instead, she stopped at mine. She was wearing a dressing gown.
‘That’s lovely,’ I said.
‘Thanks, my dad picked it up for me in Tokyo, from an artisan kimono maker who’d learned the craft from his grandfather.’ It looked just like a hospital dressing gown. I tried not to blink. She waited a blink and then laughed in my face. It’s difficult to explain how the tricks and teases that would have seemed cruel if they’d come from one of the kids at school were friendly in her hands.
‘Can I get in bed with you?’ she asked.
‘Jasmine!’ warned the nurse with the razor.
‘What? He’s a homosexual.’
‘He hasn’t decided yet,’ said the nurse, and I nodded, grateful to her but wanting her to fuck off. ‘And anyway, I don’t want you lounging about all day. Neither of you. You need to be moving about, get your blood flowing. It will help you heal, circulate oxygen to your lovely young brains.’
‘Shall we take a post-prandial perambulation around the grounds?’ Jasmine asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, not knowing what it was I’d agreed to, only that it would be with her.
She slipped her arm through mine as we walked, adjusting my elbow height to her specifications. It was a rubbishy garden, heavy on patio.
‘Do you go to college?’ I asked her, the concrete surroundings drawing from me a pedestrian question.
‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘of course.’
‘Where?’
‘I mean, “Yes, of course, I thought about it.” If I had gone, I’d have studied history of art or classics, probably both.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
‘Well…’ She thought about it. ‘It did seem like quite a lot of work. I like knowledge as much as the next person. But I prefer it on my schedule. One doesn’t like to feel like one is being pushed to the ground and having education kicked in one’s face.’
I nodded and she clasped my good arm.
‘They really need some peacocks here. Wouldn’t that brighten things up?’
‘It would be nice for the patients but it might be sad for the birds?’
‘Oh, you’re terribly thoughtful! And I notice you often end a sentence with a question mark, even when you aren’t asking a question.’
‘Maybe it’s a Jewish thing.’
‘Does that run in your family?’
‘Judaism does, yes.’
‘No, the self-doubt in speech patterns?’
‘I don’t know. I think it’s just me.’
‘Oh, you’re lovely. I’m so glad we’ve met. Do you feel blood oxygenating your brain?’
‘I feel in pain.’
‘Well, darling, that’s the human condition. I mean, just look at us. We’re like a Neapolitan ice cream of pain, sandwiched together in our different flavours of suffering.’
I thought for a moment. ‘If we’re a Neapolitan ice cream, don’t we need a third flavour?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I like it just us. The world can be the vanilla against which we lean.’
I smiled. My ribs hurt so much but I couldn’t remember the last time I felt this happy.
‘Have you ever been to Naples?’
‘I don’t think so.’ I racked my brain, even though I knew full well my brain contained only a slide show of pebbly beaches in Brighton and Portsmouth, pebbles of different sizes like different troubles.
‘Oh, well, you must go. You must.’
‘Okay.’ I didn’t ask her how. It would not have occurred to her as a question.
‘I usually stop there after Paris. It’s easy, you know?’
‘I’ve never been to Paris.’
‘What?’
She reared back, startled.
‘But how can that be?’ She put a hand on my chest. I curved my spine backwards so as to feel her palm less without having to ask that she remove it. I didn’t know what I wanted then, and I still have times I crave touch but my brain denies me it.
‘I just… I guess our people travelled through enough countries way back in the day. Now they’ve found somewhere we’re accepted, we just stay. We don’t move. I mean, ending up in this hospital is quite a long way for me, geographically speaking.’
‘It’s not right. I mean, look at you. You have “Paris” written on you from head to toe.’
I scanned myself, seeing only poor posture and skin the colour of mayonnaise. The one piece of writing I knew of was on the band of my Y-fronts, which said ‘Marks & Spencer’. My mother hysterically maintained their freshness and whiteness in case I ever ended up in hospital. And that had worked out, at least in that sense. At least none of the blood had reached them.
‘They’re on their honeymoon now,’ I noted.
‘Who?’
‘Them. Charles and Diana.’
‘Oh, them.’
‘How do you think it’s going?’
‘Oh, horrid, I’m sure. When I get married, I’m going to do it in a favourite hotel, Claridge’s probably…’
‘Claridge’s is good.’
‘…Have one beautiful night of blissful passion with my brand-new husband…’
‘Obviously.’
‘…and then each of us should go our separate ways for ten days, the appointed honeymoon period, and just revel in what it is to be alone, so when we reconnect we know how to be alone, together, how to reach for each other, as loners.’
‘I think that’s what you’d have, like, a bachelorette weekend for. I think that’s the point of those.’
‘Yes, I know, but I don’t have any friends.’
‘Why not?’
‘I mean, of course I have friends, just nobody I really like. Only people I enjoy saying bad things about. I’ve really been waiting for a friend I could say good things about. But then, I hadn’t met you. So I might reth
ink it all now. Maybe I will have a honeymoon, but bring you along.’
‘I don’t think he’d like that.’ I was getting really stressed out about her imaginary husband and how pissed off he’d be to see me there in their private plane, or in a cabin across the hall on the Orient Express.
She must have felt me tense up because she said, ‘We can talk about it nearer the time.’
‘So you want to get married?’
‘Why not?’
I told her about my mother and my father and how rotten it was to grow up watching their toxic love simmer on the hob next to the porridge. And how I feared they’d stayed together because of the kids.
‘No. She probably just really loves him. It’s an addiction, you know, with women like that. Goes across the classes. I know society lasses who are patrons of charities for battered women. It’s happening to them at home, too. They’re just not allowed to talk about it, so they raise dosh for working-class women who can.’
‘Did your dad ever hit your mum?’
‘Gosh, no. My dad is the best. It’s my mum who was trouble.’
‘He doesn’t hit my mum any more, not really.’
‘He’s moved on to you instead,’ She sniffed the patio’s one rose. ‘I’ll kill him if he ever harms you ever again. I’ll fucking kill him. So, just know that.’
I didn’t know how to process such a threat from an heiress I’d known for one night, so I changed the subject.
‘What do you think of Diana? Do you really think she was marched up the aisle?’
‘I’ve met her; she’s very naïve.’
‘You’ve met her?’
‘Yes, at a very dull wedding in Surrey.’
‘What did you say to her?’
‘I told her I liked the bows on her shoes. I didn’t; they were foul.’
‘You lied to Princess Diana?’
‘Firstly, she wasn’t a royal yet. Second, you’d rather I’d told her the truth? We must live by the harmless untruths that make us healthy and happy. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that, as you know.’
I didn’t know, and she may as well have said, ‘Starfruit tastes like a cross between apples and grapefruits, as you know.’ She’d seen and read and eaten so much more than me. It felt like she must have been seeing some other level of this shit patio garden as we walked it, one full of medieval art and exotic Caribbean fruit.
