by Emma Forrest
‘Do you use the mirror by your front door to check your outfit before you go out, or are you more interested in using it to see how you look on your return?’ Jasmine asked. ‘How the weather and the world has diminished or enhanced what you left the house with? I think the world can be divided into two sets of people. Those who really study themselves closely in that glass both before and after are mostly psychopaths and only really fit to govern. However, having dressed in tandem with another gives you, I believe, a pass to look at yourself both times.’
I threaded my arm through hers, as happy as I’d felt in a very long time, and we were about to open the door when we heard footsteps approaching.
Jasmine cocked her head like a dog waiting for the sound of its owner to return from work. Then her face broke into a smile as a key was heard in the front door.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked, nervous, alert to the possibility of being murdered.
The door pushed inwards and before us stood a tall, slim middle-aged man with Jasmine’s same piercing blue eyes and black double row of bottom lashes.
‘Daddy!’
CHAPTER 6
‘I came as soon as I heard!’
Unless he’d come from somewhere inaccessible to planes or trains, he hadn’t. He took her face in his hands, which were exceptionally large, something I noticed and then despised myself for feeling instinctively a-flutter for.
He was wearing a Savile Row suit with a pair of busted Green Flash tennis sneakers and a white T-shirt whose torn neckline showed off his old man chest. From the neck up he radiated youthfulness, with thick hair more chestnut than grey and freckles outnumbering the crow’s feet around his intense eyes, the light blue centre surrounded by a stark navy ring. The outer rings seemed designed to hold in the overflow of periwinkle. I’ve learned, since, that eyes that intense, that full of complexity, often betray an emptiness behind them. There was a heavy gold ID bracelet on his wrist, its impressiveness undercut by him carrying a bag that said ‘Duty Free’.
‘You been at it again, baby girl?’
She collapsed into his arms. ‘Where were you?’
‘I’m here now,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to squeeze you and squeeze you until you haven’t a breath left in you.’
It was an unfortunate thing to say to a suicidee.
It didn’t seem like we were going out any more. Still. As much as I’d wanted to make my exit the night before, now he was here, I didn’t offer to leave. Even though she didn’t introduce me. He reached into his duty-free bag and pulled out one of those retractable perfume cases they only have at airports.
‘I told you: I always come back. Even when I’m away for a month. Even when I’m away for more than that, I always come back.’
They held each other for a while and, seeing myself in that mirror by the door, I cleared my throat. They both turned around as if startled to find me there. Jasmine remained attached to her dad, but took my hand in hers.
‘This is my dear friend Steven. He was so good to me in the hospital and really nursed me through my recovery.’
None of this was true. Plus, she’d discharged herself within forty-eight hours.
‘He’s Jewish. And he’s a homosexual.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ her father said. His teeth were a white I’ve only ever seen on Americans. That her father was rarely without a cigarette or cup of coffee just went to show, as we are reminded in myriad ways each hour of every day, that life is not fair.
I didn’t really know what to say in front of him. Jasmine sat with her retractable make-up case and put on more batwing liner that went out to her temples and then painted a constellation of stars on her cheekbones. He didn’t say, ‘Why are you wearing so much make-up? You can’t leave the house like that!’ like any normal parent would have said. I didn’t know if I admired or disliked him for it.
Now and then he’d stop holding her, but then he’d think better of it and go back to playing with her hair. He’d lifted her onto his shoulders – as if she were still seven – when the phone rang. He answered it with her still balancing there.
‘Daddy!’ she squealed, wobbling, and he steadied her with one arm, speaking into the receiver: ‘No. She can’t talk right now. She’ll call you back,’ and he hung up.
He bounced her round the room on his shoulders and she asked, ‘Who was that?’
‘The hospital.’
‘You should call them back,’ I said and they both looked at me.
‘Yeah, yeah, let her hang out with her old man for a bit. I haven’t seen her in for ever.’ He said it as if some terrible force had conspired to keep them apart. From the way she let him squash and squeeze and clutch her, I felt she was complicit in his narrative. It was distasteful. But not so distasteful that I would leave.
She made coffee, again, while her dad showered. He had left the duty-free bag on the table and I saw it also contained long multipacks of cigarettes. When he came back into the kitchen, wearing a towel around his waist, he was smoking one and had another tucked behind his ear, where it rode his chestnut hair obscenely. I’d never seen an adult smoke without an open window before. Even my dad sat on the patio to smoke and my mum made a big huff and drama about it, picking his least offensive trait to take a brave stand against. As if by saying the smoking was not okay with her, she’d inoculate herself against having to ever deal with the rest of it.
Her dad hopped around the kitchen, quite manic, one minute hugging her, then making marmalade on toast, the spread going over the countertop and being left there. Then the toast had been put aside and he was sitting on the kitchen counter reading aloud from Keats. I needed to do a wee, but it didn’t seem like you were allowed to go to the toilet until he had finished reading.
Then he turned his attention to me, as if reciting poetry had given him the ability to notice other humans for the first time.
‘Where have you appeared from, young man?’
‘He lives in Bow!’ said Jasmine, feeding her dad. ‘Isn’t that fantastic?’
Her father nodded sagely and, on finishing his mouthful asked me, ‘You know who came from the East End?’
‘I don’t know if I’d be thinking of the same person.’
I’m just going to say it now, and then later, maybe more than once, I’m going to say it again: her dad was a handsome man. My dad, beyond being shit, was also just a dad, there was no recognisable human form beyond his place in and effect on our family. This man was a man, first and foremost. I suppose maintaining that delineation with his frequent world travels was his intention and, unfortunately for her, it worked.
I’ve come to believe you can be attracted to an entire family: the sister, the brother, the mum and dad, even the grandparents.
I wanted to fill the silence and stop looking at his chest, so I said, in a voice far higher than I’d intended, ‘Angela Lansbury was from Poplar.’
He frowned. ‘I wasn’t thinking of Angela Lansbury.’ He paused. ‘Harold Pinter! From Hackney!’ He shouted Pinter’s name like he was in a Pinter play. ‘He’s a Jew! Like you!’
‘Samesies,’ I answered, absurd, because I didn’t know what to say, and Jasmine was staring at me in a way that was meant to be encouraging but was having the opposite effect, like when you make eye contact with an beggar on the Underground to show sympathy. ‘Sandie Shaw, too.’
‘You do like ladies,’ chuckled her father, though a chuckle run through a cigarette is more of a bark.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do.’ Then I racked my brain. ‘Vidal Sassoon.’ I was aware that naming a famous hairdresser did not make me sound more masculine.
Now her father smiled. ‘I’ve been at some of his parties. He’s a dour sort. Of course he lives in Bel Air now.’
‘Probably the weather has lifted his mood.’ I said, awkwardly, and Jasmine wasn’t helping even a little, now taken in by the retractable duty-free make-up box, as if it contained all of life’s secrets.
‘Well, Daddy, we were just on our
way out to look for some buttons. He’s making me a dress.’
‘Ohhhh,’ said her father, and tapped his nose, as if the word ‘buttons’ explained everything about me he could ever want to know.
‘Do you want to come with us?’ she asked.
‘I’m absolutely knackered from the travel. I think I need a kip.’
The recovery time needed to get over holidays is a consistent issue of the ultra-wealthy.
‘But, I really want to hang out with my girl. So let me get my clothes on and we’ll go.’
She waited on the pavement in her cape, twirling a parasol, beaming with happiness. When he materialised on the doorstep she said, ‘Daddy!’ again, as if each reappearance to her stage warranted a celebration, like how American audiences clap when a movie star enters or exits a Broadway play.
We walked down Westbourne Grove to Portobello Market. I know because she said, ‘This is Westbourne Grove,’ as if giving me a tour of a museum. The museum of her childhood. ‘I used to skip here. I did my chalk drawings on this street.’
She had a wealth of happy childhood memories for someone who’d repeatedly tried to kill herself.
They held hands as if she were a little girl, and sometimes he leaned on her shoulder and other times she leaned on his. They helped each other pick out jewellery and then they pinned a war medal on me, which they thought was hilarious. ‘For services to flattering bias cuts.’
‘Don’t you think that’s kind of disrespectful to war heroes?’
Jasmine’s dad leaned on her and started singing ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T’ to her, while she sang the backing vocals. They were in perfect sync.
I realised that I was, left to my own devices, a curmudgeonly sort. Like Vidal Sassoon. I found their joie de vivre rather repulsive. But I was also jealous of it. I’m barely different from my teenage self in that sense but, thankfully, as you age, there’s less requirement to ride roller coasters or attend New Year’s Eve parties. They say being young at heart keeps you looking great. Whereas, being prematurely curmudgeonly aged me early enough that now, as an older man, I barely look any different.
We all went to the button stand, where she decided she wanted nineteenth-century French military buttons, but I explained to her that they’d be too heavy on the silk. Her father concurred and I was both flattered and irritated by his involving himself in my vision for her dress. I guided her to little white ceramic ones with tiny Russian folk-art flowers painted on them and he was very interested in them and then, all of a sudden, not.
At the vinyl stand, her dad bought a few records for her (Damn the Torpedoes by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis), which I found to be tonally incompatible but I kept that to myself.
She plucked out a copy of Adam and the Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier labelled ‘Gently Used’ and asked the stallholder to play it, ‘just to check it isn’t scratched’. As soon as the staccato drumming and howls of ‘Dog Eat Dog’ began, her father began to dance, doing a Cherokee war cry and beckoning us both to join in. Jasmine took his hand as I pressed myself as deep as I could into the stall, seeking camouflage between a copy of Bridge Over Troubled Water and Peggy Lee’s Greatest Hits.
But she pointed at me and called to her dad, ‘He loves Adam Ant! He admires his cheekbones!’
I blushed as her dad held his hand out to me, proclaiming, ‘He’s right to,’ as he pulled me into their dance. It was fascinating to me that upper-class men could openly admire the beauty of other men without having their straightness queried. I’ve learned since that so long as they’re 80 per cent with women and only 20 per cent with men, that counts as completely heterosexual to them.
I shuffled my feet uselessly like a prehistoric creature trapped in tar about to be eaten by something larger. When he sang the line asking what’s a warrior without his pride, her dad beat his chest like a great ape. A really great one. People were clapping and cheering, and I tried to pick up my feet a little to the beat, but it was so complex, I had the sense I was now doing an Irish jig. I still don’t know how to dance to New Wave. I don’t know if my jig tipped him over the edge, but the stallholder turned off the music and said, ‘Are you buying it or not?’
‘Not,’ said her dad, and returned the album cover to its place, adding, as he did, ‘Though they’ve quite brilliantly brought the Burundi beat to popular music.’
‘What’s the Burundi beat?’
He turned his bright gaze to me. ‘The signature tribal drumming of Burundi. It’s the Central African nation that borders Rwanda. Jasmine’s been there with me.’
‘No I haven’t.’
‘You didn’t come along on that trip?’
Then he walked ahead with all the swagger and camp of the Dandy Highwayman. She bit into any anger she felt and from it oozed a soft centre of admiration.
‘See? Dad knows everything about music!’
I nodded and tried, then failed, to bite my tongue as I motored forwards to call to him, ‘I’m surprised you bought Damn the Torpedoes. Tom Petty’s sort of a bit hard to avoid. I couldn’t wait for “American Girl” to leave the Top Forty.’
I don’t think I understood, necessarily, that this was an attempt to flirt, but it was.
He turned to face me. ‘Well you’re wrong, because he’s a genius! You can write him off as a lightweight of the American singer-songwriter canon when compared to Dylan and Cohen and Paul Simon – all your people – but it’s that lightness that makes him such a relief and a release. He’s a brilliant, brilliant artist.’ I thought he lingered rather too long on the word ‘release’. But it might have just seemed that way, because his lashes were so long; I might have got his lashes confused with his phrasing.
Jasmine was listening keenly to this discussion of the virtues of keeping things upbeat.
He moved purposefully up Portobello, stopping to buy us all corn on the cob doused in butter and lime. He fed her a bite and I thought it was a disgusting sight. I am, in many ways, the most puritanical Jew I know. Watching him feed her also made me jealous. I just couldn’t identify which one of them I was jealous towards.
Then he turned to me and tried to feed me and I was disturbed and turned on, and in trying to take a step back from him, trod on an old lady’s toe. He made a great show of tending to the lady, who scowled at me as she accepted his kindness, which was as demonstrative and loud an act as any of the street performers strolling the market.
And then he drifted off.
Jasmine realised, with panic, that he was missing, and I could see her give him what she considered an appropriate amount of time to return, having us wait where we were. She clearly had experience with this. It made me think of being separated from my mother in the supermarket. Walking those aisles by myself, knowing she’d be worried but still feeling excited about being on my own. Like I’d felt in the hospital. When the voice came over the supermarket tannoy saying my name, I was suddenly sick with fright. It felt like police and fire trucks might come and perhaps, also, a rapture, plucking us from the aisles, taking us both to heaven, but different heavens, and we’d watch each other vanish upwards, she from household cleaning, me above the sugary children’s cereals I’d been stalking. When moments later, we were reunited, I sobbed into Mum’s chest with gratitude and stayed glued there, pretty much for the next ten years.
Jasmine’s mood was downcast when she realised he wasn’t coming back. Unable to fake her customary élan, she suggested we go to the pub. It wasn’t like the pub in my neighbourhood, the ones Mum and I avoided because we knew Dad was likely there, with pickled eggs on the bar in a jar and old men playing darts.
Jasmine leaned us against the bar stools (upholstered in deco palm trees). The room was full of people who looked like her, but not as young and not as beautiful. They all knew her and smiled at me as if they knew me too, because I was by her side. Even though she was clearly feeling low, she helped me up onto my stool.
‘He’s a designer,’ she said to her public-school pu
b acquaintances.
‘Amazing,’ they answered as one, with slight variations for jaw setting.
It seemed that getting a positive reaction to her support of my talent was easing the unease at her father’s vanishing.
‘He’s the real deal,’ she said. ‘I discovered him in a hospital, of all places. He’s a brilliant but troubled young artist.’
I didn’t know what she was talking about, because I didn’t know at all that I was the real deal. But nothing she said about me felt phoney or like I oughtn’t to trust her. I didn’t think of myself as troubled, but I had to admit I was surrounded by trouble. They looked at me expectantly, as if I might get down off the bar stool, slide down onto the floor and design something. I looked back at them.
‘I should call my mum.’
‘Oh my God, you and your mum, it’s pathological.’ This coming from someone who was having a near meltdown after her father wandered off at Portobello market.
I went to the payphone in the back and tried to be heard over the din. I tried to decipher whether or not Mum had been crying but I couldn’t make it out over the music. ‘I’ll be home, soon, Mum!’ Then my brother came on – I couldn’t tell which one and I couldn’t tell what he was saying. But everyone sounded okay. I looked across the room at Jasmine, who was laughing and pouring champagne – who drinks champagne? At a bar? – and I decided I’d rather be there, with her, than go home.
I did my best to put home out of my head, because I wanted to stay here, with Jasmine, whose huge empty house – for better or worse – left her alone to be herself, just as my tiny one was filled with family crushing in on me.
We had a few drinks with the public-school pub patrons, who were perfectly nice. Problem was, a lot of posh accents together all at once is a truly horrible thing, whereas one alone is charming. I steered her back on to Portobello and we bought a bunch of gladioli, which she asked them to thread with irises. They didn’t want to, but they did it, accommodating her as a regular, like a familiar face in a restaurant who asks for something not on the menu.
