Royals

by Emma Forrest

  ‘I think it’s marvellous that they’re so rude. Oh they’re vile!’ she beamed. ‘I adore it! It’s bracing!’

  ‘It’s bracing,’ I smiled. Somehow she made not standing up to bad behaviour seem like an act of defiance. Whenever I’d done the same, which is my whole life, I’d just felt like a doormat.

  We finished our coffees or, rather, she finished her own and then took mine away. Instead of any of the places I’d asked to visit, she took me to the Greek Quarter, where she bought us two tickets to the Musée de la Vie Romantique. The Museum of the Romantic Life. It contained, within its small frame, several minor masterpieces of nineteenth-century painting.

  ‘But I wanted to show you this,’ she said, leading me up the spiral stairs.

  There, under glass, was an eighteenth-century pistol, tiny and inlaid with enamel roses. The accompanying text explained it was for a lady to shoot herself with, if her lover were to betray her. Jasmine said she came to look at it every time she was in town. She knew I’d want it too and she was right. You’ll see a replica of it in the pattern I designed for my grand finale wedding dress in the 1992 show. I think she thought her suicides had not been as glamorous as they might have been. That it was not glamorous to survive or to end up in a public hospital ward with charcoal on your chin and that it was certainly not glamorous to have no lover to attempt it over, the only time art history truly celebrates the suicidee.

  Even the visitors to the museum were romantic, generally individuals from dreamy faraway countries. We followed a Japanese lady in a peach kimono as she moved from painting to painting, like an apricot cloud.

  I saw, in a case, a beautiful enamel hand with gold script on the outstretched palm that read ‘Tout ou Rien’. ‘All or nothing,’ she murmured, when I pointed it out to her.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I sighed.

  ‘I think so too,’ she agreed. ‘Let’s get it.’

  There then followed a back and forth with the museum guard who was, after all, just a museum guard. He was getting increasingly alarmed and turned the gallery director on to us, who immediately fell in love with Jasmine and invited us to tea in the courtyard. He wanted only her there, but she would not let go of my hand (romantique). Either he’d ascertained the same as the thugs at school (that I was gay) or he thought I was her boyfriend and didn’t give a damn. I hoped the latter, as it felt very French.

  Butterflies hovered as we were brought a selection of teabags in a Chinese lacquer box. Honey and milk arrived in delicate silver jugs and, of course, petits fours. When he saw how she gobbled them up, he either went off her or understood she was entirely out of his league. He wandered back into the museum and we went on our way.

  She liked to eat meals in reverse, so the sweets had made her hungry for the main course. She knew a Greek taverna, where they scowled at us, which I found upsetting and she found thrilling.

  ‘Don’t you want to be liked by people? I do!’

  ‘Yes of course, but people on holiday don’t count; they’re the exception.’

  ‘On our holidays or their holidays?’

  ‘Either will work.’

  I supposed that’s why her dad spent so much time on holiday.

  Back in our hotel room that night I told her ‘all or nothing’ was a silly concept. I told her that my ancestors who made it had escaped a Russian pogrom and that had been all or nothing. How they were turned down for citizenship in different cities. Then they got it in Dublin and stayed there a generation. Then they’d made it to London, where they’d opened a corset shop in the East End that was once a great success.

  As I described these feats of incredible effort and endurance, she looked at me lazily. ‘You should do a collection around that. What they were wearing when they escaped, and end it with how they looked when they arrived in London. In between you have how each city that rejected them influenced their look.’

  ‘That’s your response?’

  ‘It is.’ She yawned.

  ‘I don’t think I’d feel comfortable making clothes that are inspired by someone’s pain.’

  ‘Then you’ll never be a brilliant artist,’ she said as I recoiled. ‘If we don’t take our suffering and burn it on a pyre, as an offering to the gods, then it’s just sad stories. You have to make something out of them. You do! You have to make a collection about our time in hospital, have the models walk through the corridors, tell our story.’

  She seemed wistful, as if our friendship were long in the past and she lost in the memory of it.

  ‘Freak ’em out. Confront them. Don’t let anyone but the toughest or the most broken want to wear your clothes. You’re not going to make froufrou. You’re never going to be asked to design a dress for Diana.’

  ‘You don’t know that. I might.’

  ‘The best thing you could do is take your idol and have her not want to wear your clothes at all.’

  ‘I’m not Vivienne Westwood.’

  ‘You’re right. You’re just a teenage boy from Bow. But you’ll get older. And you’ll get braver. I got braver with age.’ She spoke as if she were decades ahead of me, not a few months.

  ‘Well. What do you want to do?’

  ‘In what way?’ There was an edge to her voice because we both knew I’d tried to ask this of her before.

  ‘With your life?’ I was scared to ask the next part. ‘For a job.’ I didn’t say ‘for a living’, because I knew she didn’t need one.

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘But you have so much to give.’

  ‘And I’m giving it. When you get the reins at your own fashion house, just take me with you.’

  I didn’t want to fight, not even a little, so I said, ‘Okay, Jasmine, I promise.’ We put on her Walkman and listened to ‘Summer Breeze’ by the Isley Brothers. We were quiet apart from both singing along out loud, singing about Jasmine. I’ve always felt sad not to have a song with my name in it. I used to feel it was why I had no luck in life. She fluffed the pillows under our heads, then adjusted the blanket under my chin just so.

  ‘You’re such a good homemaker. For an anarchist.’

  She pulled aside the headphones.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind smashing the system. But after I’m finished, I just like to use the broken shards to mosaic a tea box.’

  She sounded sleepy and the sleepiness was drugging her just a little bit less guarded, her voice between worlds.

  ‘My mum was the ultimate homemaker. She could cook and garden, and make beauty anywhere and everywhere, catch the corner of your eye with, like, a bleach cupboard whose door she’d upholstered in kimono fabric. She was the opposite of me.’

  ‘She sounds like you.’

  ‘She had been making a papier-mâché cat head with me in half term, and we’d been doing it over days, because you have to let each layer dry. I think Dad was supposed to find her when he rolled in. But I woke up early because I was waiting to see our work. And I got out of bed right before the sun rose to check on it, then I ran to show it to her.’

  She rubbed her nose on my cheek for a moment then pulled back to face me again. I looked into her eyes, trying to let her know she could go on.

  ‘I couldn’t open her door and I pushed and pushed with all my strength. I was so strong as a kid! She was hanging on the other side. I tried to lift her down but I couldn’t. I tried.’

  ‘It would have been too late. She was gone.’

  ‘But I couldn’t lift her, it didn’t matter how much I…’ She looked at me, imploring, as if my hand of friendship might still extend back through time and space to help her. ‘I did try.’

  I stroked her hair, soft and perfumed with nicotine.

  ‘What did you do next?’

  ‘I put on the papier-mâché head. And I cried. And it melted on me and when my dad came home he saw that first. And he was trying to deal with that, all the glue and newspaper on my face, before he understood what he was really there to deal with.

  ‘I sort of did everything with her,
like you and your mum. I was her shadow. But it’s hard to shadow someone who lives in the shadows. How do you think a person gets to that place?’

  ‘You got there.’

  ‘I suppose so. But it’s really different. To me, it always seems like a reasonable option. Feels like I’m picking a tarot card, one of many choices. She felt she had no other choices.’

  She was lying on her back now, looking up at the ceiling without looking. Her eyes were open but all her vision had turned inward.

  ‘And the biggest difference is, I wasn’t leaving anybody behind.’

  ‘Your dad?’

  ‘He’d have been okay without me.’

  There could have been the most beautiful antique envelope opener or a chandelier made of Murano glass roses, and she wouldn’t have noticed. The beauty she searched for had become more addictive, more intense as she felt the increasing pull to the interior. If there had been no more beauty to distract her, if her world were populated only by ugly objects and people, what would have happened? Would her life had become necessarily sorted, her tragedy sifted through, bills all settled, debt-free from trauma?

  ‘But mostly, I’m different from her because I never meant it to work. You know that, right?’

  ‘I suppose so. I didn’t know you then.’

  ‘But you know me now. You know what I’m like. Do you believe me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was upset. I’m still upset that I don’t have that papier-mâché head to remember her by. The last thing we made together. That I broke it.’

  ‘But there’s so much you remember her by. And you do it every day, so many times a day, you’re keeping her alive.’

  ‘She got it done in one, first time she tried. That last time, when we met? That was it for me. I haven’t got the strength to keep doing it.’ She laughed. ‘I may as well just stay alive.’

  ‘You may as well.’

  I fell asleep, trying to think of the appropriate title I’d give her when I got my own fashion house.

  When we woke up, she was different. It was very faint at first, like wondering if someone had switched their signature scent from eau de toilette to eau de cologne. You might be right. You could be wrong. But something felt ever so slightly off.

  She’d set an alarm for 6 a.m. because she wanted to be at the front of the queue when her favourite bakery opened. My whole life, I’ve been afraid of street corners in the early morning and dark alleyways at night, because my mum told me to be afraid.

  I’ve been afraid of walking in the rain because Mum would look out of the window and fret for me, just for me, not my brothers, because she loved me most. But now, because someone loved me most, they were telling me not to be scared, that it was fine to walk in darkness through the rain on strange streets to a shop you could kind of remember where it might be. That there were drunks still going from last night, and men too cheap to pay for prostitutes blowing kisses at Jasmine, and I didn’t think, shit, I’m going to need to protect her and myself if something goes awry.

  I just assumed everything was all right. Not blinders on to reality. But a faith in the universe, which is strange from a girl who’d been so hurt. Maybe because she’d had the worst card (the suicidal mum, the wandering dad) and the best card (the wealth, the glamour) it gave her comfort that chips just fall where they may. And that it’s okay to eat chips off the floor if they’ve only just landed. Or the food has fallen on the floor in a country you’ve just landed in.

  I knew, despite having met and liked my new friend, Mum would have an anxiety attack at all this. I felt fucking free. I told Jasmine how happy I was until I met her and why, and she sang Joni Mitchell, sang those lines about being free and unfettered, about her future being nobody’s to decide. What can be better than singing Joni Mitchell, in the rain, in Paris, with someone you love? It was one of the happiest moments of my life. These moment are easy for me to pinpoint, as easy as telling you the five best dresses I ever made. I know which ones they are. I can show them to you.

  All the time we walked, Jasmine was very quiet, like she regretted the night before, telling me what she’d said, and now taking a vow of quiet to redeem herself. I tried to get her chatting, but it didn’t work until I picked an apartment as the one I would buy if I had all the money in the world. Then she was chatty again.

  It’s funny to play that game with someone who really could have any of them. But she could pull the magic trick of making me forget, in her closeness, that she was different from me. Is that the sign of a brilliant illusionist or a hustler? Depends whether you’re fighting or not.

  There was already a queue when we got to the bakery, even though they were just pulling up the metal gates. Almost everyone there was a local and they looked at us with those pissed-off Parisian faces that just made us hoot with joy. They wore flat caps and carried special bags for their baguette. They had their bikes at their side. Jasmine went to bum a smoke off the cranky old man in front of her. He actually said, ‘Non!’ and it couldn’t have amused us more. The happier we seemed, the more unhappy he became. That happens a lot in life. I noticed it, early on, with my dad. If he caught Mum being thrilled by a doll’s gown I’d made out of a yarmulke, he’d be wretched the whole afternoon.

  I’d never seen such a long line of unhappy people buying such a list of beauteous objects. Raspberry tart. Caramel éclair. Green-tea cakes before green tea was a craze.

  We got home and towelled off and I put on the kettle while she got into her pyjamas. It thrilled me to see her put her nightwear back on after she’d only taken it off an hour earlier. Coffee came to the boil and she made it with a plunger, pausing me when I tried to press it too soon. I didn’t want to tell her I’d never seen a coffee press before, that we’d only ever had instant.

  I ploughed through the raspberry tart, caramel éclair and dug into a mysterious lavender triangle dusted in rose petals. Jasmine was smart and saved those for later and just kept gnawing on baguette, crusty and fresh, and swiped in apricot jam like a credit card through a machine. It was the best food I’d ever had in my whole mouth. Then I started, quite quickly, to regret my breakfast choice, as my stomach lilted this way and that.

  And then it went wrong.

  She helped me to puke, which was nice, and she seemed like she’d done it before so I said, ‘Did you used to help your dad puke?’ and she laughed and said, ‘Yes, how did you guess?’ and I said… well, I said, ‘Because you’ve had to parent him. Because your relationship is so dysfunctional.’

  She didn’t say anything, so I added, ‘My dad is terrible, just like yours.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was hoarse, as if she were the one who had just vomited.

  ‘That they’re as shit as each other, in different ways.’

  She pulled away from me and started to make the bed. I’d never seen her make a bed before.

  ‘Your dad’s a monster. My dad’s wonderful. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Jasmine. He let you get sexually abused while he was in the next room with another girl.’

  She spun around and I thought she’d slap me and it stung just as badly when she didn’t. I heard the unsprung violence in her voice.

  ‘How dare you say that! My dad was there, looking out for me, making sure I was okay.’

  ‘But you weren’t okay. The story you told me last night. You needed him more than a girl could ever need their dad.’

  ‘How do you know? Who made you judge and jury? Or cabbie and tailor?’

  I whistled through my teeth, which was something my dad did when my mother’s blancmange collapsed.

  ‘That’s a nasty thing to say.’

  ‘Not as nasty as what you just said to me, after everything I’ve done for you.’

  ‘You weren’t asked to do any of it. Anyway, I thought we were doing this all together.’

  ‘I was the one paying for everything.’

  ‘Have you been keeping a running tab?’

  If the conversati
on had taken place under the canopy bed, would it have been softer?

  ‘I hadn’t been but now that I know what you think of me, I want to look back through everything.’

  My tummy hurt, as if she’d just punched me. I tried to curl up in a ball, but with my words.

  ‘I think you’re wonderful. You’ve survived unbelievable trauma. I think he should treat you with greater care. You pine for him and he’s never there.’

  ‘You’re crazy. You’re just a sick, crazy boy from a hospital.’ She was pacing the room, zigging this way and that. I looked to the door to measure how long it would take to get past her.

  ‘I wasn’t the one there by choice. You were.’

  ‘Is this a contest about which of us is more fucked up? In your mind, all this lovely time we’ve spent together was just about overlapping trauma? Was it?’

  ‘I think that is a part of it. But it isn’t all of it. I love you.’ I couldn’t believe I’d said it. ‘Shall we go and pick up the ear cuff?’

  ‘Oh, God, why bother. It isn’t even worth the cab fare.’

  My face stung.

  ‘You can’t just leave it there. My mum gave it to you.’

  ‘Oh right, yes, anything to do with your precious mother, sorry MUM, is worth more than gold. Worth more than geese on flocked wallpaper.’

  ‘It’s one of her treasured possessions.’

  ‘Yeah, well, she should get out more.’

  She started to cry.

  I gathered up my things and started to leave, electing to walk slowly past her instead of making a dash.

  ‘Don’t leave!’

  ‘Then don’t say these things. That’s not how friendship is.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know?’

  I opened the door, and she added, again, ‘Don’t leave!’

  I could hear her sobbing as I walked up the street. I had no idea where I was going. I used the last of my cash and, knowing I couldn’t afford the flight back, got myself to the ferry before they pushed off.

  The sky was grey and the sea a deeper grey and I think it’s why I avoid that colour, though it can look lovely in eyes. I’ve seen it in Dominican people, now I’ve travelled the world. But the people I went home with were ugly. My fellow passengers were as ugly and lumpen and poor as me. They had terrible children and terrible lives, but I was the one in a terrible mood. I was devastated, quietly devastated, and like a true Brit none of them could tell and if they could tell, like true Brits, they’d have said nothing at all.