by Emma Forrest
We were considering seeing a film at the Coronet when we found her dad, taking cash out of the cashpoint by the World’s End. He was smoking and the woman queuing behind him huffed, then smiled and blushed when he turned around.
‘I think I need my lie-down now,’ he said, as if we’d been walking alongside him the entire time with no interruption. Maybe he thought we had.
‘Steven. I bought these for you,’ he said, and handed me a blue plastic bag. Inside was Adam Ant stationery, sealed in cellophane, his image at the top where the letterhead would be. Many packets of it.
‘I wandered into Woolworths to get some jumbo matches. You know, the kind you can use to light a votive if you’ve a day off in a Catholic country? I saw these on the shelf between a beach ball and buckets and spades, which is quite weird because you’re not going to write a letter to Adam Ant on the beach, with all that sand.’
Jasmine took them out of my hand to examine them.
‘You’re not going to write a letter to Adam Ant with his face on it. You’d send it to anyone but him.’
Her dad took them from her and handed them back to me.
‘I wouldn’t mind. Anyway. I got you them all. Fourteen packets. That was all they had left.’
Unencumbered by the bag, he wrapped his arm around Jasmine’s shoulder and I noted, and have never forgotten, what a difference there is between someone putting their arm on your shoulder to comfort you versus using you to balance themselves. I don’t think she even knew how much of his weight she was shoring up.
Jasmine was so happy to see him she made no attempt to convince him to stay out with us. In fact, she seemed quite relieved to drop him off at home, staying until she’d seen him get into the bed and fall asleep with her own eyes. She gently took the cigarette from his hand, took a drag, then stubbed it out. You’d think he’d burn to death if that’s how he fell asleep every day of his life. But then I imagine there was a woman in every room he ever slept in, ready to put out his lit cigarette as he slumbered.
We had an afternoon pastry and a cup of tea and took catnaps ourselves on the sofas of the third floor, and I fell asleep pondering the meaning of the fourteen packets of Adam Ant stationery. I woke up before her and started work on her dress; just the pattern-making. When she got up, she didn’t change out of her silk pyjamas, just added make-up and heels and we went out again, her dad still snoring.
‘How does he know about Burundi tribal drumming?’
‘And Arabic classical music. And Appalachian folk. He was left to his own devices by his parents.’
‘Where were they?’
‘They were just huge narcissists. They’d go out to parties and leave slices of ham on the edge of his cot in case he woke up hungry while they were out. By the time he was ten, he’d just spend all his free time listening to music and reading. I think he’s read every book in our library. None of them are for show.’
She brushed my eyebrows with a tiny comb on a stick, explaining as she did, ‘It’s why he got married and had a kid so young. To build a real family.’
‘But…’
She looked at me. I couldn’t believe I had to relay to her what he’d made of his family.
‘But what?’ she asked. So I didn’t.
I tried to get the image of ham on a cot out of my head as we ate Thai food in what was, apparently, a Thai restaurant, but also seemed to be somebody’s front living room. As the noodles were set before us, an old lady walked down the stairs in curlers and turned off the TV. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’ And she went back upstairs. ‘Mothers,’ said the waitress.
The waitress hovering behind me, I called my mum again, just to let her know I wouldn’t be coming home. I think I woke her. But I could hear her clearly, now.
‘Have you been drinking?’ Mum asked.
I detected a note of hopefulness. That I might have friends. Even with Dad and his drinking, the signifier of sociability, of social success, remained alcohol. Despite the myriad ways class made its peculiarities known between Jasmine and me, we had this in common.
‘I haven’t, Mum. Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘You’ve never disappointed me. Just stay safe.’
That’s different from telling someone to be happy. I didn’t feel safe. But I did feel joy.
Jasmine, who’d paid the bill while I’d been on the phone, threw her arms around me and took me back into the night. As we left, I saw the mother come back down the stairs, still in her slippers, now holding a pair of green ballet slippers that she threw at the waitress. It struck me that not only might we not have been in a restaurant, but maybe the ‘waitress’ had never invited people in before. Had we been invited? Or had Jasmine just walked into someone’s house and asked for dinner? I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Then I started to drink and kept going, far longer than I ever had before.
I’ve sipped wine before and thought not too much of it. But the bubbles of the champagne she kept conjuring, and the glasses it came in and then eventually no glass at all (we sat by the Thames swigging straight from the bottle), that was worth drinking for.
‘You’d keep your mother there with you?’
‘I couldn’t leave her there with him.’
‘You have to take your mother with you, when you leave home?’
‘I just said that. I said I’d not leave her there.’
‘Well, you really shouldn’t, it would be so wrong.’
‘She’s coming with me.’
Jasmine looked uncomfortable and held her tongue a moment before speaking. ‘But she can’t really live with us. It changes the dynamic. When you make it, you have a home atelier so, rather than a home, you probably need a castle.’
‘Okaaay.’
‘I’ll start scouting for castles next to each other that can be joined by a footbridge or a moat.’
‘Are there lots of castles near each other? Is that a thing?’
‘I honestly don’t know. But I’ll find out. And maybe we find one in Portugal and we replace the moat with a swimming pool.’
‘I think we should stay Britain-based.’
‘Would Ireland be okay with you?’
‘I suppose Ireland would be fine.’
I got so carried away in her daydreams that it took me a while to notice she was the only friend I’ve had who conjured daydreams on my behalf. She whiled away hours, losing herself to the fantasy of what my life could become. You’ll hardly meet anyone in my business, or any business, who thinks that way. Maybe managers – and maybe she could have been a manager – guided some actor she truly believed in to an incredible career. But her heart was too big. And she was rubbish at maths. Her brain wasn’t linear, and it wasn’t lateral; it seemed to jump backwards and forwards in time like jazz, with a portal here and there to another dimension. But it was a fucking great brain. I think it’s why she had such a lovely high forehead; her brain was always working away.
The quietest I’d seen her was when she was doing her make-up and I reckon that’s why she reapplied it four or five times a day, not because she was insecure about her looks (she knew quite well she was beautiful), but so she could make her mind stop racing. Everyone has a mirror face, usually pouting or arching their brows or both. But when she was looking in the glass, applying her slap, her face would go slack like the look a kitten gets when it’s being carried around in the jaws of its mother. She was relaxed.
‘We could have two homes.’
They say that money can’t buy you love, and that’s true, but it can buy you a great view. That’s what the very rich have that we don’t. They have weeping willows. They have palm trees swaying in the breeze. Cherry-blossom trees in Kyoto or on the Washington Mall, for that matter, a gift of friendship. I thought of twin towns as I wrapped my time up with Jasmine’s. This has been gifted to this random, shitty city from this ineffably exotic and beautiful town on the other side of the globe. Why. Why were they connected?
Beaches – white sand like you’ve never seen! Pin
k sand like you’ve never seen! There’s different textures right there; that can keep you going for a long time. This patch of ocean is a different temperature from that patch. That’ll keep you alert to life. This area of California is so different from this one that you need a place in each, your Los Feliz Spanish revival and your all-glass Malibu beach house, sunlight streaming in. And they’re not wrong.
Great views and new places can keep you going for a very long time. I can’t imagine how much earlier she’d have made her first suicide attempt if she’d grown up where I had. If her people had travelled from country to country to make it to England, but then she herself had never left London. And life can be very sad when you’re poor, but that’s not necessarily the case, not by a long shot, usually because you have your family. But the richer you get, the sadder you get, that’s for sure. There’s no way to get above a certain point and not be riven with existential doubt and melancholy. There’s a reason all those billionaires have yachts of their own. They have to be able to get away at a moment’s notice. Get to a new textured beach, different kind of tree, seasonal cuisine, better party, but most importantly, at a moment’s notice, be able to get away from themselves.
‘I’ve thought about buying a place in Paris, but I think it might take the magic away to have roots. We can look, when we get there, if you want.’
‘Where are we?’ I asked, leaning into her as the water glittered, shards of glass bobbing along the buoys.
‘It’s the Thames.’
‘But the Thames goes all through London. Which part is this?’
‘How long were we walking for before we got here?’
‘About an hour.’
‘Then we’re probably in Hammersmith.’
She looked into the river, its filthy waters varnished by the night, and smiled. ‘I once had sex in Ravenscourt Park. In a greenhouse at night, among the most beautiful flowers. It was summer and the glass had heated the room, so we moved so easily. Then, as we were recovering, it started to rain. We lay on our backs and looked up at the trees as the branches shook. It was one of the most beautiful nights of my life.’
‘It sounds so romantic. Who was he?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. But I know it was one Tube stop from Hammersmith.’
She seemed neither sad nor troubled that her partner for this great event was anonymous to her. I buried the thought that I might not matter to her enough to be remembered, that she might one day search the recesses of her mind for the name of the boy from the hospital whom she sat on the banks of the River Thames with.
We tired of reflecting on our reflections in the water and took a cab back into town. There were no mobile phones then, no group texts or e-vites, so how she sniffed out the place to be, the room that had spontaneously become a fantastic party, missing only her, I don’t know. The truly great stars, the real ‘It Girls’, not only have ‘It’ but also a nose for the best, most invigorating rooms. They never end up queuing for dud events (they never queue) and, like a figure skater skating the thin ice of their own life, they get out before it all goes wrong. They’re so good at getting away from a party, premiere or playdate before it does go wrong, they tend to leave their own lives before it turns ugly. Think about Edie Sedgwick. Jasmine was one of the few who got away with it, that final suicide attempt failing to take.
We needed to talk about that.
We needed to have a real conversation.
But not tonight. Wasn’t this closeness real? Wasn’t the intimacy she made me feel we were sharing really a way of talking about the hard things without actually having to? Idolising someone is the opposite of intimacy, but I didn’t know that then. Breathing her name calmed me down. Breathing her name meant I wasn’t alone with myself.
We ended up on someone’s rooftop garden, gorgeous, secret, looking onto a private garden square filled with revellers, looking down on all the people who thought they were moving secretly, not knowing of our bird’s-eye view. Strange to be looking at a garden from a garden.
‘Can you smell the honeysuckle?’ She took a few buds and held them in front of my nose.
‘Are you taking those for one of your witchy moon potions?’
‘No. I just like stealing.’
We drank more and did the dance from Bucks Fizz, and she really let me whip off her skirt and then she didn’t want it back and walked down Ledbury Road in her underwear. It was around there I noticed my pain was gone. It made me want to lie back on her bed and look up at the ceiling and feel my body with its newfound silence.
‘Are we going home?’ I asked.
‘Not yet,’ she said, knocking on a red door doused in black graffiti. A slot opened and a man’s eyes appeared. ‘Wah g’won?’
She answered him in perfect patois: ‘Bombaclod!’
This being the password, the red door opened and we got let into a Jamaican after-hours club, descending a narrow staircase to a narrow room that reeked of weed and alternative narratives. Men who’d been policemen in Kingston working as dealers in Notting Hill; women who’d been married to abusive priests, leaving the marriage and the religion for London, taking all the kids and the responsibility. But someone else was watching the children tonight, as their mothers weaved the dance floor.
Needless to say, Jasmine was as well known here as she had been at the pub full of trust-fund kids. She sang along to Barrington Levy and leaned back into my chest as I imagine she had in Ravenscourt Park after the rain. It still felt like home – not the home with the needlepoint flowers, but the home I deserved, where night flowers bloomed on rooftop gardens. Hadn’t my mother given me everything? Yes. Almost everything. Just not this.
She took a drag of a tiny spliff. ‘That spliff is the size of a bumblebee,’ I said. She blew out the smoke and corrected me: ‘It’s the size of a bee’s dick!’ We collapsed with laughter.
‘That spliff is so tiny, Prince could use it as a hair clip.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense!’ she laughed, but it made sense to me, especially after I’d had a drag.
‘You don’t have…’ – she fumbled a moment with a new wrap but was also rolling up her words – ‘way-back cash?’
‘We have a family business in Whitechapel. We don’t have much money, but the business does go back to the 1880s, I think. It’s run by my aunties. The money goes to my dad, too, except no money’s been coming through lately. The neighbourhood’s changed so much.’
‘That’s where Jack the Ripper stalked.’
‘Yes, exactly. Now we know it was maybe the royal doctor but at the time, there was a Jewish community and they were just so terrified Jack would turn out to be Jewish. That was what the anti-Semites were putting about.’
‘Everyone was an anti-Semite then.’
‘Feels like everyone is now.’
‘I’m sorry you feel that way. Do you really feel that way? I love England so much, I can’t bear to believe it’s true.’
‘Well, you’re proper English.’
‘So are you.’
‘No. I remember reading the most beautiful book of Oscar Wilde children’s stories. It just set me free and I knew that he would have loved me, that he’d have seen my talent and felt my heart.’
‘And you’d have been lovers?’
‘No. But he’d have taken me away.’
‘He didn’t have anywhere really to go himself, poor Oscar.’
‘I just knew he’d understand me. Then I turned the page and within this beautiful story was this description of the nightingale flying over the ugly, old haggling Jews as they argued over money.’ I can still feel how my heart just closed in on itself. That the person who would take me away from the ugliness might see me as the ugliness to be taken away from.
‘It was just the times,’ she said, swatting at the air, not wanting me to harsh her high. ‘Everything’s different now.’
I nodded, but I still felt sad when I thought about it. I didn’t know why I was in a Jamaican after-hours club ta
lking the pros and cons of Oscar Wilde. That seems really an ideal situation for someone who cares about the fabric of our country. But I was tired and didn’t care just then. I wanted to go to bed.
She asked what the aunties who ran the shop were like and I said they were a pain in the bum. ‘I avoid them because they keep kosher. My dad looks down on them because they’re religious.’
‘And you look down on your dad because he’s a violent drunk. He believes in getting blotto. They believe in religious reverie. I know which one I’d rather be around.’
‘You make them sound like Sufi mystics; they’re just East End Jews. I don’t want to be around any of them. You know that.’
‘I think you’re a snob.’
‘You think I’m a snob?’
I looked around us. The smoke was hurting my eyes.
‘Yes. I do.’
She seemed to really believe it and she seemed also not to hold it against me. I did not believe it and I would have held it against myself. But she had me turned all inside out with my zipper flipped and my label showing. It’s like, she did that and then said, ‘Yeah, so what, that’s your look.’ When you think you might be gay but you haven’t decided yet, your look is very, very important. It’s both a protective stance and an invitation to conversation. I’d wanted to have someone my age to talk to for so long, and now I did, I couldn’t get a word in edgeways.
When we got home, her father was up.
‘Where have you been? I missed you so much!’ And he sat on her lap. She didn’t say he was hurting her, though I could see he was.
Finally, she bounced him side to side. ‘Get off my lap, you fat old junkie!’
And they laughed as, muscles rippling, he cut out a line of coke and she shoved him out of the way to get to it. They both sort of offered me some, but without turning themselves from the powder or each other. It was easy to say no. I’ve never really been a happy person, but I did, basically, always know who I was and what I needed. Even then.
