Royals

by Emma Forrest

  Jasmine admired my magazines, selecting at random from the pile like she was having her Tarot read. The Fool: Cheryl Tiegs wearing a swimsuit and skin on the cover of American Vogue. Death: Gia Carangi on the cover of Cosmopolitan. Not just years of Vogue and Elle, but a Paris Vogue I’d procured, my most prized, and a few Cahiers du cinéma, which Jasmine was amazed by. Even her dad hadn’t brought her back Cahiers du cinéma. We looked through the pictures together and we talked about which were our favourites.

  ‘That’s a very heavy blush,’ said my mum, and, ‘I do like this hoop skirt.’

  ‘But Vivienne’s a genius.’

  ‘I suppose she is,’ said Mum, seeming unconvinced but hopeful of being convinced in the fullness of time. Having Jasmine near my mum – Jasmine, who I’d come to worship like a song on the radio at 2 a.m. when no one understands you – made my mum shine bright to me again. I kept looking at Mum more than I did my new best friend. It was my mum I found utterly beguiling that day.

  Jasmine frowned at my room. She tried out different spots: the sofa, leaning out of the window, lying back on the bed, looking up. She held her hand up like a cinematographer. ‘Let’s stick the magazines over your bed.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Just cut them up.’

  ‘Cut them up? I’ve been saving them.’

  ‘Yes, and you get them out to look at on special occasions. I want them over your bed, so they’re the first thing you see when you wake up and the last thing you see when you go to sleep, so you’re confronted by beauty! It will seep into your subconscious and it will power you to your goal.’

  ‘He wants to be a designer,’ said Mum.

  ‘He is a designer. I bought his first piece. The first piece ever sold by Steven and I own it.’

  ‘Ruffles,’ I said to Mum, by way of explanation.

  ‘How exciting.’

  Jasmine had found my fabric scissors and was cutting. She handed me a pair of nail scissors. ‘You too, Jean. Do you have any more?’

  My mum came back with her gold sewing scissors. Jasmine cocked her head. ‘These are lovely. Do you sew?’

  ‘I do embroidery.’

  ‘So that’s where he gets his talents from. I’d love to see your work.’ When she described what Mum did to distract herself from the prison she’d built for herself as ‘her work’, I thought Mum might start crying, for everything she’d never cried over since it all went wrong. Instead she just said, ‘Well, I’ll fetch it,’ and she came back in with a square of embroidery in her hand and her cheeks pink.

  ‘Nice nail polish,’ Jasmine said. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you that since we walked in.’

  ‘Thank you. Ladies used to do half-moons during the war, to make the polish last longer. It was just a way of making do with what you had, but it became a proper style.’ Now I thought I might cry. I dug into my collage, cutting around Brigitte Bardot, in her original brunette, not blonde (I’m not a savage).

  Mum sat down on the floor to cut out her pictures. I’d never seen her cross-legged before, like a little girl. I was so transfixed by the sight, it took me a while to look at the pictures she was choosing. She was cutting out glamorous women and men. Was this what she wanted to be like? Was this the man she should have ended up with?

  After we had a good selection, Jasmine oversaw us sticking them to the eaves and she moved one or two. By evening it was a sea of faces looking down on me as I looked up at them. Eye contact, someone who sees you. Jasmine giggled. I started to become aware that my father would soon rise from his drunken slumber, like Dracula posting himself across Europe in a pinewood coffin; that he would send himself back to us on vaporous fumes and that we would retire early to bed and clutch at ourselves, trying to stay alert even as we drifted off.

  ‘I should finish this up?’

  Mum nodded at me. She knew what I was thinking. From Cahiers du cinéma she cut out a photograph of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift looking into each other’s eyes between takes.

  ‘They truly loved each other,’ said Jasmine. ‘If he could have been straight, he would have done it for her. She pulled his teeth from his throat when he was in his car crash and saved his life. Afterwards, his face was a mess, but she insisted the studios still cast him in her movies, even though his beauty was wrecked.’

  Jasmine stuck the picture up. I saw Mum watch her little body stretch out. Mum had had a body as good as Jasmine’s and probably better. But she’d been far more tightly coiled; you never could have admired how she moved, because she stayed still. You teach yourself how not to be a moving target. Stay in your teenage bedroom. Stand at the sink doing dishes.

  ‘Monty has been gone for almost twenty years now and Liz is still alive. Strange to keep going when everyone you love is falling at the wayside.’

  ‘I love her, too,’ said Mum. ‘The only one who didn’t have a sad life. Marilyn Monroe.’ She tutted sadly. ‘And Natalie Wood. And there was that awful business with Lana Turner…’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Jasmine, ‘It’s tough being a Love Goddess,’ and we thought she included herself in that category.

  ‘Do you want some sausage rolls? They’re from yesterday, but…’

  ‘Thank you, Mum. I’m starving.’

  ‘No you’re not, Steven, you’re just very hungry. There’s children in Africa starving.’

  ‘I know this awful girl,’ replied Jasmine. ‘She always says, “Lush, orgasm,” when she eats cake.’

  My mother’s eyes widened.

  ‘As if an orgasm could be compared to a carrot cake!’

  I worried from my mother’s expression that she might not know from experience.

  ‘I think a woman should have an orgasm daily. How can we, as feminists, find the “courage to be”, if we don’t do that?’

  ‘Feminists? Courage to be?’ Mum looked alarmed, like she was already foreseeing having to get her dustpan and brush and clean up the shattered patriarchy so no one got a sliver of it in their foot.

  ‘It’s from Beyond God the Father. By Mary Daly?’

  We looked blank, so she added, ‘The radical lesbian theologian?’

  As Mum and I leaned against different walls, Jasmine stood in the centre of the room and quoted, in a mysterious baritone, ‘“Courage to be is the key to the revelatory power of the feminist revolution.”’

  Then she tapped my mum on the hand, and smiled. ‘The thing about Steven is he can do anything, he is so brilliant. The world is going to quake for him.’

  My mum looked amazed. She’d always felt it but would never dared have said it out loud, let alone in such a booming voice. If she felt sad that she wasn’t young and beautiful like Jasmine, she let that be superseded by her newfound belief that I was going to get out of here, and I saw on her face the play of heartbreak and hopefulness that I might leave one day. It took me a long time to understand that my mum was still young then, only forty-two; that’s nothing today. But her face was so different from the forty-two-year-olds I know now. It was overlaid with every wrong and disappointment, like a layer of tulle that obfuscates the shape underneath.

  Jasmine needed to go, and on the way downstairs, we roused my dad, who stood in the doorway. We scuttled to – what? Hide ourselves? Pretend to be asleep? We didn’t know what to do with ourselves, so we stayed where we were, except for Jasmine, who strode across to him and said hello, but before she said it, when she was striding, there was a beat where it seemed she might walk right through him. Prove to me that in all these years, I’d only been hating a hologram.

  He stood rooted to the spot. It was a hazing of sorts, only he didn’t seem to know it. When she was picking up her handbag, he just looked at us and said, ‘My God! If she didn’t have those pins through her ears, she could be an exotic dancer.’

  She was still in the hallway, and she said, ‘I don’t like being talked to that way, actually.’

  ‘Oh, la-di-da.’ But he couldn’t think of anything else to say. I could see it was agitating him and th
at would make things worse for my mum, so I tried to hurry Jasmine out.

  ‘I’ll call you soon.’ And I whispered, ‘Thank you for everything,’ because I didn’t want Dad to start questioning how much, exactly, I had to thank her for. I didn’t want him to start work on how he might spoil it.

  After that, I knew I’d be allowed to be with Jasmine whenever I wanted and that I didn’t have to worry about my mum worrying.

  I’d forgotten about the beating, or at least had put it into a part of my mind where I wouldn’t take it out to look at for at least a year. These sad things that happen to us get moved into special photo albums to be looked at when the mood strikes us rather than every single time we open our wallet. I don’t think Jasmine had moved anything to any photo album. I think she’d been taking endless photos in her mind of the bad times, so many that they were double exposed and worthless and she both thought about it all the time and not at all.

  She’d been good to me. She’d made my heart sing for the first time in years and now she had made my mother happy too. How could I help her?

  CHAPTER 14

  When I picked Jasmine up from the tourist trap, she was just closing up the shop after performing her ritual sageing.

  ‘Keep Diana safe,’ she said, as she circled a stick of Palo Alto over a commemorative wedding mug. When she had finished locking up, she turned to me and said, ‘I want us to go to Paris.’ From inside the shop, the phone started to ring. She motioned me to ignore it. It was still ringing as we left.

  She’d said this almost daily since we met. Only this time she followed through, that same evening. If someone keeps talking about a dream you have to do together, you can almost bet it will stay a dream. She was the exception. She made dreams happen. The only thing was, they had to be her dream and only she knew exactly how the dream in her head went, and if you didn’t get it right you were spoiling it.

  I objected, a little, just to seem polite, but if someone wants to take you to Paris, you should let them. That’s one of my biggest life lessons.

  We made it to the airport just in time to catch the last plane of the day, and she paid in cash at the ticket counter. The lady behind the counter looked from the money, to her, to me – I had seen this particular move so many times lately (the estate agent, the youth-club bullies, Terry, my father) it had started to seem like a dance move, a craze we had inspired.

  I hated the aeroplane, the takeoff and landing, the turbulence in the middle, I hated it and this would haunt me my whole life, the fear of flying. But she seemed to get off on it, whooping when we hit a pocket of air. She squeezed my hand. ‘If we’re going to crash there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it!’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘But it’s brilliant! It means that nothing that happens here is our fault.’

  It was a strange thing to say. I wondered about the things, down on land, that she might think were her fault. As if I weren’t entirely sure, as if I only had an inkling. Teenagers are fearless but they’re also cowards. It wasn’t until I was much older I could admit to myself that I knew precisely the blame she assigned herself. But there, on the plane, I thought about how often I told her to ‘Shut up!’ out of fear or embarrassment, occasionally out of crossness, and I resolved to be gentler with her. You couldn’t watch Jasmine sleep and not want to be kinder to her. I imagine all the men (and some women) who’d ever woken up beside her had experienced the same compulsion. I imagine it made most of them leave. But for me, I felt more determined than ever to stick around, no matter how hard she tested me in her waking hours.

  In the taxi from the airport to the hotel, she reached into her handbag, the same one I’d identified as Bottega when we first met. ‘This is our handbag,’ she said, and at first I thought she meant that we could share it, but soon understood she saw bags, gloves and hats as favourite songs, playing when particular people or places or events appeared to her. From its inner zip she produced the pouch in which my mother had handed her the opal.

  ‘I’ve called ahead to Monsieur Pierrot, the jeweller. He knows I’m coming in to have this set.’

  ‘Monsieur Pierrot?’

  ‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, ‘in Paris, even sad clowns get respect.’ She nudged me in the ribs. ‘There’s hope for you yet.’

  I smiled and didn’t say how absolutely terrified I was that I was eighteen years old and this trip might be the highlight of my life.

  The hotel was either on the left or the right bank, but I remember it had five stars and that I got a disdainful look from the concierge when I leaned against an antique side table. It was much the same look my dad gave me when I stood in front of the TV during Match of the Day. I moved off the 1920s side table and into the 1920s elevator.

  The bed had a canopy that I drew around us after Jasmine nodded off. As she was drifting away, she held the opal in her hand, rubbing it gently between her thumb and forefinger, as if that’s what she always did every night to get to sleep.

  I’d never been in a canopy bed before. I’d never slept in a bed with a girl before, either. But the canopy was the part that caught my attention, the way it softened us: our skin, our breath, my thoughts. I started to feel sorry for my dad and then, when I opened the canopy curtains and stepped out for a 3 a.m. wee, I didn’t feel bad for him any more.

  He was sick, that’s true. But beneath their addiction, addicts all have their own personality. And I believed, and still believe, that my father is a person of low character. Not only because he lashed out; it was also the way he blocked us from getting close. That’s abusive, too. All those passengers he picked up: I don’t think he was listening to any of them. Worse, I don’t think he was asking them any questions. If you don’t ask questions, you may as well be dead. That hit me so hard after the days I’d spent with Jasmine; everything around us was so fascinating to her, everything worth enquiry. That wasn’t because she was rich; it was because she was alive. More alive than anyone else I knew, which was why, every time she tried to kill herself off, she failed.

  I looked at her dear face as she slept. How much had they all been a cry for help? How much had she really wanted them to work? We had so many people in our family who’d been killed off. We didn’t have any ever attempt suicide, not that I knew of. Maybe my father counted, thought it was just that he was doing it very slowly and hoping to take us all with him.

  I listened to her snore, gentle, the little puffs of air a baby makes. She slept diagonally and even though she’d done all this for me, and even though I felt close to her, I didn’t feel like I could shove her over onto her side of the bed. That’s the downside of letting someone take you to Paris. But it’s the only one and though I got little sleep, as soon as I saw the sun rise over the rooftops, I was buzzing.

  She kept sleeping past nine, so I put The Specials in her ears and she sat up, happy, the only person I’ve ever known to always wake up from sleep in a great mood, no matter how it might darken during the day.

  ‘I had a vision! I’m going to get Monsieur Pierrot to turn the opal into an ear cuff. I like the idea of the stone whispering in my ear.’

  ‘Mum would never have thought of that.’

  ‘Yes, she would have. She just doesn’t know such a thing exists. If she did, she’d have thought of it.’

  ‘That makes no sense.’

  ‘You’re just jealous because you hated sharing your mum, even for a few hours. You were itching to get rid of me.’

  But she was still smiling and she threw off the covers, threw them so they landed on the ground at the foot of the bed, where they lay, prostrate like mourners paying homage to a dead dictator.

  ‘I want you to taste the best croissant in Paris,’ she said.

  If someone wants you to taste the best croissant in Paris, you should let them. I bought a few for my mum, but then I ate them while we walked around Canal Saint-Martin, which looked like a delicate pencil sketch of Camden Lock.

  Though I understood little of what they were saying, I
enjoyed the ambient sound of French spoken around me, a baby’s noise machine switched from ‘Waterfall’ to ‘Gallic Babble’.

  Our first stop was Monsieur Pierrot, where a security guard hit the buzzer to let us in when he saw her in the distance. Inside, she spoke immaculate French to a shopkeeper who was closer to Scary Clown than Sad Clown, his teeth mottled with nicotine stains like the pattern on a piece of agate. When she opened the pouch to show him the opal, he shrugged and said in English, ‘It’s nothing special,’ but she stood her ground and told him it had great sentimental value.

  ‘Opals are bad luck.’

  ‘Not to us,’ she said. ‘We make our own luck.’

  She drew him the ear-cuff design and he sighed but promised it would be ready by the time we left town.

  ‘Would it cheer you up if I told you to add a diamond border to the design?’

  His agate teeth were revealed in a new shape that I took to indicate good cheer, or as close as he could manage.

  ‘Are we going to see the Louvre?’ I asked her, as we waited at the lights. I noticed she obeyed them more stringently than she did in London whereas, in a foreign country, I always feel rules are make believe.

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Arc de Triomphe?’

  ‘Fuck that.’

  ‘We are going to see the Eiffel Tower?’

  She pointed. ‘Over there.’ And she was right, there it was, in the distance.

  ‘But shouldn’t we go inside?’

  ‘How dull. You don’t want to be a tourist all your life, do you?’

  I didn’t think I’d even started being a tourist in life yet, I hadn’t seen anything of anything, except the streets in which I was raised.

  She took my face in her hands. ‘I want you to be part of every city you visit.’

  We sat in a children’s playground, drinking coffee. She read the paper, because she could read French as well as speak it; so well the French treated us with less contempt than I’m sure they’d have preferred. When a child accidentally kicked a football at her feet, it did not occur to her to kick it back. I did (badly) and they didn’t say, ‘Merci.’