by Emma Forrest
I stammered, ‘You’re wrong about the bows. I know those shoes she wears and they conjure the French court.’
She sat us down on a bench. My arse was killing me.
‘You’re very into it. Frocks and all that.’
‘Frocks and shoes, yes. I want to design.’
‘Can I see some of them?’
‘I don’t have anything with me.’
‘Draw me something now.’
I did, while she whipped out a bottle and painted her nails. By the time they were drying, I’d done her a sketch.
‘Oh, so you do design.’
‘I said that.’
‘No, you didn’t. You said you wanted to design. But this is a design and it’s very good.’
‘Thank you.’ I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me. ‘I never know when I’m being made fun of.’
‘That’s a strange Achilles heel. Or should I say, Achilles kitten heel.’
‘Oh no, I hate kitten heels. I’ll never put a woman in them. They’re degrading. Life is hard enough to navigate as it is. If you’re going to challenge a women’s balance it’s a crime not to lengthen their leg.’
‘I agree with you!’ Her mouth and eyes were round like planets seen at a distance. ‘I heard that high heels are meant to mimic the foot at the moment of orgasm, stretched out with delight.’
I blushed a crimson Diana would have been proud of. ‘I’ve read that, too.’
Seeing my scarlet cheeks, she used the paper to fan me.
‘Don’t do play on words with me again.’ I said. ‘Like Achilles kitten heel. I feel close to you. I don’t want us to have words that distance us.’
She said nothing, but kissed me on the lips. Our mouths were closed but soft, and she brushed her lips up and down mine. I wanted to open them but I was scared. She smelled of red roses and peppercorns, the scent saturating the downy hair on her upper lip. I was hard, but I was thinking of Shakin’ Stevens, who I hate. It was a very confusing time.
She stopped and sat upright like a uniformed nanny. ‘I love this sketch. Can I have it?’
‘Sure.’ I folded the paper and pressed it into her dressing-gown pocket.
‘No, I mean, will you make it for me?’
I must have looked alarmed because she added, ‘I’ll pay you for it, of course.’
I saw some beautiful pale white flowers, rows on a stem, hanging downwards.
‘I always think Lily of the Valley look like a corps de ballet…’ She misread my expression and added, ‘Like dancers.’
‘I know what a corps de ballet is. But I don’t think that’s what they look like. To me, they look like tears.’
‘Yes. That’s why another name is “Our Lady’s Tears”.’
I went to pick them.
‘Don’t!’ she said.
‘They won’t notice.’
‘It’s not that. Lily of the Valley is poisonous, the whole plant, not just the flower.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked, doubtful. She seemed like a person who could spin glorious lies to pass the time.
‘I used to help my mother with her garden. She’d never pick them without wearing gloves.’
I gazed into her eyes, green against green, flecks of mint and emerald interlocked: here is the church and here is the steeple.
‘If you don’t go to college, what do you do all day?’
‘Oh, darling, I have a job!’
‘You do?’
‘Yes! You must come and visit me there one day.’
The sky was dimming a notch, winding down for a bath, tea and bed.
‘Oh God,’ she shrieked, ‘I have to charge my crystals!’
‘What?’
She had the urgency of someone who’d left the house with the kettle on.
‘It’s a new moon tonight!’
She clutched her robe around her and hurried me back towards the ward.
‘Are you a witch?’
She cocked her eyebrow at me.
‘You can fight the patriarchy in many ways.’ Then she added, what seemed to be from nowhere, ‘I hope Diana’s honeymoon is picking up.’
I stopped her in her tracks.
‘Have you cast a spell on Prince Charles?’
She glided around my pause, shrugged her shoulders.
‘I’ve done a lot of things.’
Now I was following behind her.
‘Aren’t you meant to do it on a full moon?’
The nurses waved at us as we came back inside.
‘Yes, that’s true if you’re doing a receiving spell. But if you’re doing a spell to try and clear something, you do it on a new moon.’
The burns victim’s family were here, as ever, and they looked at us pityingly. I wondered how many times people in bad situations had looked at me with pity in order to assuage their own sadness.
‘What are you trying to clear?’ I was whispering because it felt like something you should probably whisper about. We weren’t talking about drugs or sex, but the occult seemed to deserve the same public parameters.
‘I’m clearing this fucking overdose out of my system!’
I nodded.
‘And the patriarchy from this government. Thatcher’s made it up there as a woman, but she’s got an all-male cabinet. She’s using her feminine wiles on them, I’m telling you. She’s been using witchcraft, I guarantee it.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe she’s just an arsehole.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I have to fight back.’
She fished past the make-up bag and pulled the crystals out of her handbag.
‘I need a bowl, some warm purified water and some sea salt.’
I put on the face I wear when I help my mother with her baking.
‘I don’t have any sea salt.’
‘Go ask the nurses.’
Even as I resented being bossed around by a posh girl, I found myself hobbling to the nurses and they found me a bag of Epsom. They didn’t even look at us curiously. Perhaps they’d seen many an odd-couple friendship flourish under the auspices of illness.
‘Wonderful!’
Jasmine put Epsom in the bowl, then the water, then popped in the crystals. She turned her back, as if I was trying to copy her homework, and did a blessing with her hands, moving them up and down like a hula dancer. I tried hard to overhear but failed. I still have occasional dreams where I’m able to hear of her secret incantation. Sometimes it’s my mother’s shopping list for dinner. Other times it’s been the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Sometimes she’s reciting the Top 40 countdown.
She finished and turned towards me with the bowl.
‘Put these on the windowsill, please.’
As I opened the window, the pigeons looked at me like I was mad.
‘There’s no moon out there.’
‘That’s the point,’ she smiled. ‘You can’t see a new moon. You have to trust it’s there, watching out for you.’
‘Do you think the moon’s watching out for you?’
‘Of course.’
The scars on her wrists varied in colour and texture from pink to greyish-white, keloid to flat, some ancient history, beneficent grandparents of the youngest scars.
‘Well it’s not doing a very good job.’
She looked hurt for a microsecond, but she recovered.
‘That’s not true. There must be a perfectly good reason I’ve landed here, at this moment in time.’ She studied me, checking if I might be the reason.
‘It’s not me,’ I said, pre-empting her. I didn’t want it to be me. I’d been sent to this hospital to think, to be alone with my chattering brain, try and calm it down and figure out what to do with my life. She’d distracted me. She’d intoxicated me. I needed to focus inward. But, look: out there! A friend!
She was chattering and I tried to block her out, but she was very beautiful and I found I kept looking. Like when there’s a baby in the room. Even if you don’t really like babies, you watch them the whole time. It’s impo
ssible not to.
‘When I have a daughter, I’m going to call her Luna. That’s where the term “loony” comes from, how we are influenced by the phases of the moon.’
‘Well, you’re not going to have a daughter if you keep on trying to top yourself.’
‘Now, I object; the other times were cries for help – this was the only real attempt.’
‘So the cries for help didn’t work?’
She lay back on her bed, pulling from her bag a pale blue shawl of thinnest cashmere.
‘My dad gave me some beautiful history of art books to cheer me up. That did work for a while. Here, let’s call him, I should let him know what’s happened and where I am.’
‘He probably knows where you are by now.’
‘He’s very busy. Nurse? Has my father called?’
The nurse shook her head. When the nurses left the floor to get their dinner, Jasmine lit a cigarette, curling the cashmere around her body, the smoke twisting around the cashmere, the burns victim across the aisle unmoved. She slipped into a funk for a few hours and I went back to my bed and tried to draw. But I kept looking over at her until I fell asleep.
When I woke up, she was back to her old self, chatting and opining as if her life depended upon it. Even when the nurse brought my food, Jasmine stuck her nose in, wanting to know what I was eating, Oh, chicken? Had I ever tried the chicken at Le Cirque in New York?
Then she put on my nemesis, Kate Bush, which I could hear tinnily through her headphones and when I made a face like she was bothering me, she offered to share the headphones so I could listen too. Her radar was always up to help you, but it was never quite right. My mother used to say, ‘If you can’t help, don’t hinder,’ but Jasmine would do both at once; that was kind of her specialty.
We were standing at the window, painting a watercolour from her bag of make-up, when a doctor we’d never seen approached her.
‘I’m Dr Thomason.’
‘Hi,’ she said, without looking up.
‘We want to run some tests,’ said the doctor.
Now she looked at him. ‘Who are you?’
‘Dr Levin is on holiday for a week…’
‘How nice for him.’
‘…And, looking at your files, I think your proteins are low, which isn’t surprising given what your body’s been through. But it’s worth investigating. So I’d like to get some blood from you today.’
‘You want to get more money, you mean.’
I looked around.
‘But this is all free. You’re in an NHS hospital.’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
I walked back to my bed. She followed me, a tad anxious.
‘It used to happen to my mother all the time. People were always after her money.’
‘You’d have to be pretty nefarious to train for four years so you can become a doctor in a paediatric emergency ward so you can divest wealthy teenagers of their parents’ cash.’
‘You’re not going to let me get away with anything, are you?’
She agreed to have the test run, looking out of the window at the moving clouds as her blood filled first one vessel and then another. She winked at me: ‘I’ve done this before.’
The nurse marked Jasmine’s name on the tubes, designer labels.
‘I won’t let you get away with it, either.’
‘With what?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t decided yet. But you won’t get away with it.’
My mum came to see me that night. Jasmine was in therapy and I was glad because I definitely did not want them to meet. With everything else Mum was dealing with, she should not be subjected to the philosophical ramblings of a half-demented posh girl.
Mum was wearing a blouse I’d made her and I could tell she’d been trying, because she’d worn more make-up than usual to try and cover the bruising up. She read me to sleep from the Oscar Wilde book. When I woke up, it was the next day and she was gone.
So was Jasmine. I knew she was gone and not just in therapy because her belongings were absent and her sheets were neatly folded. Her perfume left a crime-scene sketch on the bed where she’d been lying.
‘Where’s the girl?’ I asked the nurse on duty, trying not to sound frantic.
‘The damaged princess? She discharged herself. She said she had to get back to her shop.’
‘Do you know what it’s called?’
The nurse shook her head and I shook with anger at her, wanted to tear apart her machine-stitched uniform and string it together to make an escape rope. Instead I just said, ‘Thank you, anyway,’ accepted a fruit bowl and went to my bed.
After sitting, numb, in my bed for an hour, I set about tracing any remnants. There were eye-pencil shavings under her hospital bed. I held them under the light, identifying the kohl as black with jade streaks.
The bigger find were her crystals, which remained on the windowsill where she’d placed them. I was hoisting them back in, when I heard my name called in that handwashed Yiddish accent, colour still vivid. I turned to see my aunties waddling towards me on their sausage-dog legs, torsos so close to the ground they’d get soaked if it rained.
‘What happened?’ Edna cried, dragging her sister behind her like a toy caterpillar on a string.
‘I don’t really want to talk about it. You didn’t have to come all this way. I’m really okay.’
‘But you’re family. Of course we show up.’
‘He’s family, too,’ I said sharply, my voice a bitter herb on their comforting dinner offering.
‘He’s a horrible man,’ Marsha said, looking up at me as she stretched to take my hand in hers (I wondered if her sister had to reach her toothbrush for her from the bathroom shelf).
‘But,’ interjected Edna, ‘but it’s his spirit.’
‘What does that even mean?’ I snapped. ‘Look,’ I said, lifting my shirt, showing my bruises.
‘Ach du lieber Gott,’ said Marsha, and I knew they had to face the gravity of what their brother was. Then she continued, ‘What a marvellous body you have.’
‘No I don’t!’ I snapped, lowering my top.
‘The girls must be lining up to get to you. You’re such a catch!’ agreed Edna, before adding, ‘Not facially, of course.’
I sighed and sat back on my bed.
‘We brought you something to cheer you up.’ And Marsha pulled a fat envelope from her handbag. It appeared to contain a diploma. When I looked closer I saw that it was a membership to the Monster Munch Club.
‘The Monster Munch Munchers!’ said Marsha. ‘With a pen and a storybook. Because we know they’re your favourite food.’
I took it, sadly. ‘I loved them when I was a kid. I don’t think I’ve eaten a packet of Monster Munch in years.’
‘Oh,’ said Marsha, downcast. Then she brightened. ‘Well, here’s your chance.’ And she handed me a packet of crisps. On the front was the orange monster, the flavour described beneath his face as ‘Giant Prawn’.
‘You can’t taste a size,’ I sighed, uselessly. But she opened them and handed me one, which I was too depressed not to eat. Edna took one from the crinkly bag.
‘Isn’t shellfish verboten for you ladies?’
‘Oh, Steven, it’s just a baked corn snack with some flavouring. You’re so literal-minded.’
I looked again at the orange monster with its flavour descriptor.
‘Prawn and orange is a terrible colour combination.’
But they sat, smiling and watching and patting my arms until I finished the bag.
‘We love you,’ they said. ‘Get your strength back and come and see us at the shop.’
After they finally left, I put the crystals in the empty bag of Monster Munch and held it to my heart. As I was staring at the ceiling, trying to feel the energetic waves, the nurse tapped me on the shoulder. ‘I meant to tell you: this was on her pillow for you.’
It was a pale blue envelope so thick it felt heavy in my hand. Scented with red roses and peppercorn, ins
ide was a folded note that said: ‘If you need to fit me for my dress you can reach me at 01 988 7651. I meant what I said about your dad.’
If I hadn’t have searched so diligently for some sign of her, would the nurse, overworked and under-slept, have remembered to pass on the letter? As I thought then and say today: refusing to let go (of a person or a dream) can occasionally pay dividends.
I decided my sides no longer hurt. I put on my clothes, called my mum and pleaded to go home.
CHAPTER 5
I called Jasmine as soon as I got back, but the phone just rang, no answerphone and I was afraid she’d written down the wrong number, by accident or on purpose. It was difficult at home. My dad couldn’t look me in the eye while I was still hobbling or had bruises, so he stayed out. It was always this way. My brothers played loud football outside our window, chanting, ‘Go on, my son!’ and other sentences that culminated in exclamation points. My mother sat on a stool in the corner of my room and did her embroidery. The in and out of the needle was rhythmic, as comforting as the imperceptible movement of water in a lake.
I was so anxious from not being able to contact Jasmine, I had to talk about her to someone and there was only one someone in my life, at least outside my daydreams. I remember thinking that referring to ‘daydreams’ was better and safer than saying, ‘Inside my head,’ which always indicated the possibility of mental instability.
‘Mum. I met someone.’
She looked up, her eyes glowing with hope and confusion. We hadn’t had the conversation, but she knew I was gay, even though I hadn’t decided yet.
‘I met a girl.’
‘Where?’
‘When I was in the hospital.’
‘Which one was she?’
I was protective of a relationship I didn’t have yet. If you’re meant to hold those you care about lightly, I was squeezing my ‘future’ like a toddler holding Play-Doh. You have so little, then, that’s actually yours, what you imagine is yours you’re constantly breaking with the ecstasy of ownership.
‘You didn’t meet her. But she’s out now, too.’
‘Was she very unwell?’
I thought about this for a moment.
‘No. Not really.’ I mean, they’d wanted her to stay so they could run more tests, but that was a legal precaution. We all saw she’d bounced back like a Victoria’s Secret Model after a birth. Her suicide attempts were her children and they gave her renewed purpose. I was too young to dwell on how sick that was. That, yes, she was quite unwell.
