Royals

by Emma Forrest

  CHAPTER 12

  Oh, to be weightless.

  The dancers floated in the air like the trick with lit amaretto wrappers at the end of a boozy dinner party. The men were amaretto wrappers too. The heaviest thing on them was their make-up, and you couldn’t even tell that until you saw the photos in the programme.

  No wonder every designer of any real significance wants, at some point, to design for a ballet. That moment when you first felt free. People who move exactly as you do in your own dreams, when you look at your friends and family and say, ‘I forgot to tell you, when I run and jump, I can hover in the air for many long moments. It just comes naturally to me.’ Even with success, nothing beats that moment, and the memory of it is bittersweet. Like amaretto.

  I loved the dancers. I loved the dance. I loved the stage and the curtains at the side of the stage. I knew the auditorium was full of people but I couldn’t describe any of them now, I was so focused on memorising every detail of the performance.

  Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. The Young Man and Death. Why did she take us to see a ballet about suicide? Of anything we could have seen? Because she was still fascinated? Because it made her feel alive? In control? On the edge between worlds? Or because it was on at a time we could make it and it wasn’t sold out?

  Death was played by a dancer with the longest arms and legs I could imagine working in ballet. She was different from any of the other women we’d seen perform: a tall ballerina. But the poor, tormented suicidee, weakened as he was by sorrow, could still lift her above his head. The world Jasmine had chosen for us today was one where even the weakest had the strength to protect themselves.

  ‘This!’ she’d said. ‘This is the perfect thing for a Wednesday afternoon!’ And it was, because it was beautiful, because it made me cry. The first time I’d cried in front of her. She put a tissue in my hand then used her own hand to move my hand across my cheeks and wipe my tears.

  ‘Beautiful boy,’ she whispered. ‘That’s why I love you.’

  I was loved.

  In the dark, surrounded by strangers, Jasmine squeezing my hand.

  I was loved.

  By the first person who wasn’t my mother. It was cataclysmic. And as the feeling rushed over me, the boy onstage ascended to the sky, a noose around his neck, his feet kicking, his dance over. The woman playing Death removed the mask from her face and placed it over his. It was sensory overload – to be loved, to be heartbroken, to be astonished by art, to be inspired and devastated by it, to want to end it all, to want to live for ever. It was, I imagined, how Jasmine spent much of her days feeling. All of that. Too much. Of course there’d be times when you felt invincible and others when you just wanted to lie down and sleep and sleep.

  Afterwards, Jasmine said she wanted to go backstage to say hello to one of the dancers. Evening had fallen and the audience pulled their expensive coats across their mostly aged shoulders. The young people were beautiful and in love. Like us.

  She told the stage manager she was here to see Ekaterina Spiv. ‘Who’s Ekaterina Spiv?’ I asked. I flipped through the programme; a minor dancer in the corps. When the stage manager left to relay the message, Jasmine walked right past him. Seeing that I had not followed, she beckoned me and I took a moment to decide whether to leave her there or follow. I fucking followed.

  I Fucking Followed. The name of my memoir, should I ever give in and write one.

  She led me up the stairs and into the attic. There were score of costumes, boxed away and hanging out in protective plastic. She ran her fingers along them.

  ‘Don’t you want to see them?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes, but. They’re not for us to touch. See?’

  There was a sign that said ‘Do Not Touch’.

  ‘There was also a sign that said “No Entry” and you ignored that.

  ‘I did not ignore it, you made me.’

  She was unzipping the dress and trying it on.

  ‘Your breasts are far too large for a dancer, you’ll never fit inside.’

  I sighed, I couldn’t bear to see a costume being yanked about like that.

  ‘Let me help you.’

  I ever so gently undid the fastening and told her to turn sideways as she wriggled in. I’d seen it in forties’ guides to getting into girdles. Rita Hayworth did it in Gilda; Glenn Ford looks like he works in a pet store. That’s what I saw when I was reflected at her side. They got that guy because they couldn’t get the guy they’d actually wanted for the role.

  She sucked in her tummy, then stuck it out again. She looked at herself in the mirror and did a belly dance.

  ‘Jasmine, I feel like we’re being disrespectful.’

  ‘To who?’

  ‘To these valuable clothes!’

  ‘I think it’s respectful. They’ve been sitting up here, all alone. We’re keeping them company.’

  I did notice that the attic room the costumes were stored in looked rather like my attic room, and it made me feel sorry for them. I ran my hand along the leotards.

  ‘Haven’t you been waiting a long time to have someone keep you company?’

  I nodded, yes, ashamed, but she was on to the next thought.

  ‘Do you think the male dancers are good in bed or rubbish?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know.’

  ‘Rhythmic, so that’s good. But peacocking for a living, so they might be selfish lovers. I know they all smoke and get hammered.’

  She paused, thought about it, looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Shall we smoke and get hammered?’

  But in looking up, she had noticed there was a skylight with a ladder.

  ‘I wonder what’s up there?’

  ‘The roof, obviously.’

  ‘The roof of the London Coliseum is a dome; is that still a roof?’

  ‘I mean… yes? It’s all semantics.’

  ‘I’d love to see it.’

  ‘So let’s go out onto the pavement and look.’

  ‘I mean, I want to see it, from it, get up, right up close.’

  I groaned. One of the highlights of her young life, she once told me, had been when she and her father went inside the Statue of Liberty; an experience that warped her both for monuments and for humans. ‘You don’t have to be up close to everything, not every single thing.’

  She made a face. ‘Yes I do,’ and she reached for my hand. ‘When I was a little girl, I’d say to my mother when she put me to bed: “Can you get inside me?” And she was shocked for a moment until she understood I meant, “Can you spoon me?” So she did and that’s how I fell asleep.’

  She disarmed me by talking about her mother, so warm and loving and gentle, and I felt heartbroken for her and that’s the only reason I followed her. Except for that I’d followed her in the first place, so what was one more floor, even if it was a floor that led into the actual sky?

  She led me up to the roof exit.

  ‘We really, really can’t go there. When you open the door, it’s going to set off an alarm.’ In truth, I liked the image of half-dressed dancers fleeing out onto the streets of London at Magic Hour.

  She pushed gingerly at the door as I pressed my ears with my hands and got ready to run. No alarm.

  ‘You’re such a worrier. Are all Jews such worriers?’

  ‘Yes. And we’re right to be!’

  She took me by the hand and pulled me up the staircase. It felt as treacherous as our friendship. I couldn’t deny my life before her was not devoid of drama, in so much as my father had landed me in hospital after a particularly bad beating on the day Diana became the Nation’s Sweetheart. But my life also felt very steady and boring laid out in front of me. Just because you get beaten up by your dad doesn’t make it interesting – not to me, the beatee.

  As she pulled me up I felt myself a freediver moving to the surface of the ocean with my last reserves of oxygen. I burst to the surface and gasped in the London skyline, as far as the eye could see. I have 20/20 vision. I could see far. She scrambled up the til
es around the pregnant belly of the building, and I had no choice but to follow her. Well. I could have turned around but, obviously, I didn’t. I’d been so intoxicated by Jasmine these last days, the first thing that had drawn my attention from her was the city itself.

  I’ve moaned and complained my whole life about how much I hate where I’m from. But that evening was when I fell in love with London, as London designers must do in their own way and time, before they make their name. It’s usually to do with a view. Our lives feel so small, it’s no loss to us to spend our days hunched over a small piece of sewing with the insularity of Talmudic scholars, making our worlds even smaller so that one day they might, from that small square of material, contract so tightly they suddenly expand. There’s a reason designers, no matter how posh they end up, tend to emerge from the working class. Bruce Oldfield was a Barnardo’s boy; Vivienne came out of punk; Zandra the child of a schoolteacher from Kent… just boring lives. We think staring into the fabric, the pen and ink and design book is our only way out. But it doesn’t happen until you combine it with that secret ingredient: a view. It can happen on the top of Primrose Hill. On the top of a double-decker bus. Oh, I may hate everyone I know, but it’s fucking wonderful here! If you have a viewpoint and a view, you will become unstoppable.

  CHAPTER 13

  I hoped the youth club had not called my mother. I knew they probably had.

  But I didn’t want to let go of my newfound London love, my ability to see the city in certain slivers from special vantage points, so I asked we ride the bus home instead of the taxi.

  ‘Who’s your favourite designer?’ she asked.

  ‘Zandra Rhodes.’

  ‘Write her a letter.’

  ‘I wrote her a letter, actually, but I never posted it.’

  ‘Oh gosh, I’m the same. I write fan letters all the time and I never get round to posting them.’

  When we got home, she showed me a sheaf of them. One to Kate Bush, one to Siouxsie Sioux, one to David Hockney, one to Tony Benn, MP. We spent the rest of the night finding the right addresses, licking and sticking stamps. I rewrote my letter to Zandra from memory, lightly edited to seem less insistent, admiring rather than demented. When we were done, she showed me drawings she’d done when she was a kid. They were vast landscapes, vast, all from aeroplanes.

  ‘They’re places my father has been. I painted them as I imagined they were, him looking out of the window. They’re not quite right, I know he’d never take the window, he always gives it to the woman he’s with, he’s very old-fashioned like that, you’ll notice he also stands when a woman enters or leaves the room. There’s no men like that any more.’

  They were lovely, dreamy, sad, endless horizons of different colours with tail wings in the corner of the frame.

  ‘I think they’re really good, Jasmine.’

  ‘That’s kind, but I have no real talent. I’m just very good at spotting it.’

  ‘Forget about other people’s talent. What could you be in the world?’

  She put the pictures back in their drawer.

  ‘I am in the world. I couldn’t be more in the world.’

  She laughed, but I wanted to say, ‘You’re a helium balloon with nobody to hold the string. You’re going to fly away one day.’

  ‘Can you stay the night?’ she asked, as if she could hear what I’d kept to myself.

  ‘I skipped youth club. I’m going to be in so much trouble with…’

  ‘With your mum?’

  ‘My mum’s going to be upset, but I’m going to be in trouble with my dad. I think.’

  ‘We’ll deal with it. We’ll deal with it. Just give me a little more time with you to myself then I’ll give you back.’ It was strange to be described as a possession with a value. I could see why women didn’t like that, apart from the times when they did.

  I picked up the phone and called my mum, my heart beating in my chest. She did not answer, nor did he, nor did anybody, to my relief and alarm and then relief again, like the bleeding colours of the horizon from an aeroplane. When you pick up a phone today, there’s no weight to it, like there’s no difference between holding it or not holding it. Then every conversation felt heavier, because the receiver was, and there was a truer beginning and end to it, when you put the phone back in its cradle, a fitful baby soothed back to slumber.

  When we woke up the next day, we posted our fan letters. Then we went apartment hunting together in South Kensington.

  ‘I’ve chosen South Ken so we can be near the V and A. That would be where one or the other of us would walk off steam if we ever got into a fight. I don’t ever want to get in a fight with you, but if it happens, we need to have precautions in place.’

  It wasn’t clear to me whether this flat near the V&A was make-believe or serious, whether it was a fan letter written or a fan letter posted. The guy who took us around was trying to make sense of us. When she saw him looking at her legs, she kissed me and said, ‘Oh darling! Don’t you think it’s perfect for us? We could have a nursery there!’ I knew she was pretending, but it also felt like she was practising for an alternate universe.

  ‘Do you want to have children?’ I asked her, when we left.

  ‘Of course!’ she said, without hesitation. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugged. ‘My mother was so good at it, she made it seem easy.’ Then she seemed to remember that her mother can’t have been 100 per cent mum of the year, her being gone by her own hand and all.

  ‘I’d better take you home now,’ she said, sadly, the princess aura having faded from her, and I half expected us to get into a pumpkin carriage, but it was just a regular black cab she flagged, like one my dad drove but a slightly newer model.

  We didn’t talk all the way back. The rain or her memories had fogged up the windows and she sat in silence, drawing flowers with her finger on the glass. When we got to my street, my dad’s cab was in the driveway. Seeing it there, Jasmine perked up. The life drained back into her like watching a syringe being filled. The satisfying pop of air, the excitement and fear of how the liquid would feel in your veins.

  ‘I’m going to come in with you.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Why? Are you ashamed of me?’

  ‘No. Why would I be ashamed?’

  ‘Because I’m rich.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Of course you can come in. They won’t feel good enough for you, that’s all.’

  But I looked at her and knew they would not recognise her raggedy glamour for its superiority, they’d just see unbrushed hair, punk make-up and bitten nails. She was right, though. I was embarrassed by her wealth. As embarrassed as often as I was excited by it. For the rest of my life, I have approached the defining characteristic of all my intimates this way. I didn’t always want to be around rich people – not at all – but I did frequently hold against lovers what it was that drew me to them in the first place.

  I put my key in the lock and walked in, as nervous as I’d ever been, the scene in the film where the American cop has their gun drawn and is peeking around the wall, trying not to breathe too loud, clearing one room at a time. Thankfully, Dad was passed out drunk, there in the very first room.

  My mum was so happy to see me.

  ‘Oh. Hello! It’s you!’

  ‘It’s me,’ Jasmine agreed.

  ‘I never expected I’d have you right here in the kitchen.’

  She was intimating Jasmine was too good for that. But she wasn’t. Jasmine wasn’t too good for anything. That’s what made her different. And now my mum was seeing it.

  She remained aloof for a bit but then, within an hour, they were holding each other’s arms and giggling. When my mum laughs really hard she clutches her huge breasts. I think I don’t do a lot of high necklines because they don’t flatter big breasts. I want her to feel good about how she looks. I want her to feel good. She deserves it.

  ‘There’s something I want to give you,’ said my mum. �
��I’ve been waiting for someone to give it to but I had all boys, and I never liked any of their girlfriends. Not so far.’

  She left the room and came back with a small leather pouch wrapped in twine.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Let her open it,’ said Mum, and Jasmine unwound it with happy little breaths, like someone lovely was kissing the back of her neck. Inside was a small, milky gem.

  ‘Is it a moonstone?’ I asked, trying not to be perturbed by this gaffe.

  ‘It’s an opal,’ sighed Jasmine, holding it to the light.

  ‘Yes. I got it in Australia when I was about your age.’

  ‘Oh I love Melbourne! The best art deco apartments! And the botanic garden in Sydney…’

  ‘It’s the one trip I’ve done abroad,’ said Mum. ‘I don’t think it’s worth all that much, but I think it would look so pretty if you set it the right way.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, squeezing my mum. Mum took a moment and then patted her on the back, a bit embarrassed, embarrassed at the display and perplexed that she’d given it to her.

  ‘It could be a lovely necklace,’ I said, trying to get in on it, but Mum interrupted me: ‘She’ll come up with something great.’

  Jasmine said thank you again and squeezed Mum’s hand, threading Mum’s crescent moons between her own bitten fingers. ‘There’s a jeweller I love in Paris who’ll know exactly how to make it sing.’

  After that, we all three of us checked on my dad’s breathing. Mum didn’t seem to mind, now the ice had been smashed, doing it in front of our guest and it was Jasmine who said, ‘Oh yeah, he’ll be out for a couple more hours.’

  ‘He’s good-looking,’ she told my mum, not at all lasciviously, but with sympathy, and my mum received it gratefully.

  I opened my bedroom door and it was exactly as I’d left it, as if I were my own missing child. It was the only time Jasmine ever came to my place. We sat and looked through a stack of magazines and she asked my mum to join us, and to my amazement she did.