Royals

by Emma Forrest

  ‘And she stayed converted!’ Marsha added.

  ‘Well, I mean, how would you “unconvert”?’ I asked, the voice of pessimism.

  ‘You’d just stop, I suppose. I don’t think there’s an actual ceremony,’ said the cheerful sister.

  ‘I bet there is,’ said the mushroom sister.

  ‘Well, she hasn’t had it. She’s still one of us, up in Beverly Hills in her pink palace.’

  I sat down on the floor. The sounds of all their voices was overwhelming. I wished they’d shut up, just a little bit, but my wishes went unanswered. They seemed to grow louder, and as they grew louder they also appeared to grow smaller.

  ‘Are you always doing that?’ said Edna, suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sitting around on floors?’

  ‘No. I don’t just sit around on floors.’ My voice sounded like the worst voice. In normal rooms, of people who actually wished me well, I sounded to myself like when you hear your voice distorted by an answerphone.

  ‘On other things? You do a lot of sitting, do you?’

  ‘He’s very active, when he’s with me,’ Jasmine assured them.

  ‘If he’s always sitting around on floors, no wonder his dad has such a stinking drinking problem.’

  My ears pricked up. In my house we didn’t talk about it, we only cleaned up afterwards. And now we’d said out loud twice what we usually kept a secret.

  ‘And he was such a lovely little boy…’

  ‘Me or him?’

  ‘She means you,’ said Jasmine.

  ‘I meant his dad. Lovely little thing. Always riding around on a bike, tootling around with his kazoo.’

  I tried to imagine my father being small and having a toy, and tootling with it. But when I did, I just wanted to take the kazoo and smash him across the face with it, and push him off his bike. Then he cried, in my imagining, and I comforted him. Funny when your own daydream takes you off-guard. The rest of the day, I tried not to think that he might have been on his bike, cycling as fast as he could from kids who didn’t like him. Or that he might have been on the bike, cycling around the neighbourhood just for joy, just because bikes are happy. Were his parents watching him? Or was he on his own? My brain went on a loop about it until it felt like there was a fifty-year-old metal kazoo rusting inside my head.

  I wondered what they thought about my mum. Had she scurried away like that when she brought me here because she was worried they knew how bad things were or because she was worried they didn’t know? She wanted me to be around them but she was nervy around them herself.

  ‘What’s this one?’ asked Jasmine, picking up an ivory number from a drawer.

  ‘WHAT’S THIS ONE?’ Edna called, even though her sister was standing three feet from her.

  Jasmine squeezed my arm in delight. I could see we were very exotic to her, like people you sail on your yacht to see.

  ‘That’s cotton twill…’ (Marsha)

  ‘Which is called “coutil”.’ (Edna)

  ‘Am I telling or are you telling?’ (Marsha)

  ‘You tell.’ (Edna) And then she didn’t let her tell. ‘Those are called “Hercules” clasps and then you got laces up the back. The bones are made of three different gauges of spiral steel. The open sections in each pocket mean you can take them all out and give it a good clean.’

  ‘They don’t make ’em like that any more.’

  ‘Well, people don’t want to be clean any more.’ The sisters nodded at each other.

  ‘I suppose you’re right. I suppose when I take a bath, I’m just stewing in my own filth!’ Jasmine sounded very, very posh compared to us.

  ‘Like a teabag!’ she added, and they cackled and cackled and she folded in with them.

  Seeing how easily she won them over, fell in step with their tone and their culture, despite being so different, I was impressed and I suppose, also, secretly, I judged her for it. Why did she need that? Why did she have to fit in? That’s what made me wonder why if, in the end, she never pursued her own art. Or work of any kind, really. It wasn’t entitlement. It’s that she couldn’t risk not being liked. And you can’t make great work if that’s always in your mind. All those years alone in my bedroom, I revelled in having no friends. I felt lonely as hell, I felt victimised, but I also felt proud of the fact that the kids at school disliked me.

  ‘I like to be clean,’ I said, not knowing why I’d said it.

  ‘After he washes his face,’ added Jasmine, ‘he uses toner.’

  I could see the sisters try to parse this information (that I use toner, so might definitely be gay? That she had such intimate knowledge of me, so I might not be gay?) I could tell that they weren’t sure which to hope for. That it would be wonderful to have another wedding, the high from Diana’s having begun to wear off. But that it was quite interesting and glamorous to have a gay nephew, even though I kept insisting I hadn’t decided yet.

  Most of the time I just wanted to be left alone. Though all I wanted was to escape my teenage bedroom, when I imagined where my talent might take me, my greatest dream was a fabulous room where I could be alone because it was so large, so wonderful, that I would never have to leave it.

  I helped Jasmine lace in and this was the closest we got to an apology from me to her for what had gone wrong in Paris. Me touching her while she took deep breaths. Just us, in the dressing room. I could hear the sisters outside, a few feet away, waiting with bated breath that was not very bated because I could hear it. Then Jasmine burst out of the dressing room with a flourish.

  ‘Hello, girls!’

  Marsha had a look of 2D horror, her mouth a perfect triangle. ‘But it doesn’t make sense: everything on the outside that’s meant to be on the inside.’

  ‘No, that’s it though, that’s what I’m trying to say.’

  They just looked at me.

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘That the secret things don’t have to be secret? That what makes you beautiful doesn’t have to be concealed. If you have a secret weapon, share it with the world.’

  ‘Can’t things just be pretty?’ Edna looked a little nervous.

  Jasmine tried to help her to understand. ‘Is it like… is it like how, during Hanukkah, the menorah faces outwards in your living-room window. So that anyone who walks by can be touched by the beauty? That we can be a light, and shine a light?’

  The sisters nodded, grasping it with ease, as I looked at Jasmine in amazement.

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Like that.’

  I knew what I was trying to say. But she could put it into words. Into the words of a religion to which she had no connection and owed no debt. I took her hand.

  She said to them, but really to me, ‘The corset is a very beautiful thing because it creates the perfect hourglass figure. And the hourglass connotes the idea of running out of time.’

  I could have kissed her, right there, on the lips. But Edna interrupted.

  ‘What do you think was under Diana’s dress for the wedding? Do you think she was wearing a corset or do you think it was built into the dress?’

  ‘Built in, I imagine,’ answered Marsha.

  ‘That way they could jack up the price!’ her sister cackled.

  ‘I’m sure she got it for free,’ said Jasmine, further breaking it to them. ‘Yes, I’m afraid you get a lot of things for free when you’re rich.’

  ‘Well, that’s inside out. Like a corset over a T-shirt!’ Marsha laughed and her sister laughed and they had a right old cackle together and stopped sniping at each other.

  My mum came back with the fish and chips, and when she saw Jasmine there was this look of surprise on her face that soon gave way to… I thought perhaps she might have been embarrassed for the relatives to meet my eccentric friend. It took me a moment, but then I understood it was possessiveness. Mum did not want to share Jasmine.

  They hugged like old friends, even though the metal on the corset, worn over Jasmine’s T-shirt, poked my mother in he
r chest. She was happy to be poked by her. Every single person felt validated when Jasmine noticed them.

  ‘I’m sorry they’re a bit boring,’ Mum whispered to Jasmine. She’d constantly denied that to me, said that they were completely not boring and that I was being totally unfair.

  ‘Oh they’re wonderful,’ Jasmine whispered back. ‘We’ve been having a ball. And look! Look what I did with the opal!’

  ‘Oh my goodness…’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  She touched Jasmine’s ear, bending the upper corner like a hamantaschen.

  ‘Yes. I actually do. You are clever.’

  ‘Can you take the fish and chips outside, please? To that table.’ (Marsha)

  ‘No, to that one. The light’s nicer right now.’ (Edna)

  She wasn’t wrong. I knew my aunt Edna was a frustrated artist, so deeply frustrated she didn’t even know about it. That’s maybe what had turned her into the shape of a forager’s woodland treat.

  We sat in the pleasant blue air and ate the fish and chips, which were delicious. Edna sat in the shape of a young girl, one knee hoiked up easily so the foot rested at her crotch. To her horror, Jasmine got a spot of fat on her corset.

  ‘Oh, we should have thought of that. Darn.’ The sisters looked genuinely sad.

  ‘But I’m going to buy it.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ they said, as one. I could see they expected her to.

  ‘I wanted to. I was going to buy it anyway. Not just this one. I want the one with the removeable whalebone.’

  Now they looked at each other. I wondered what they saw. Were they still young in each other’s eyes or were they horrified by the way the other had started (and continued) ageing? It’s not that some people stay youthful, so much as some faces were more committed to ageing than others. Ridges and creeks, hollows, like fabric. If I could make an eyelet as textured as Harry Dean Stanton, I’d be happy. And I’d call it the Harry. I feared young people and I enjoyed old faces. Jasmine was my favourite young person of all time and again, I fought the urge to kiss her in front of all my living female relatives.

  ‘Are you sure? It’s pricey,’ warned Edna.

  My mum nudged her, attempting to explain through one knee-shove that Jasmine was so rich we shouldn’t even be talking about money in front of her.

  When she went to the loo my mum told the sisters, ‘She could buy the whole shop.’

  They looked a bit alarmed. ‘Has she come to buy us out?’

  ‘No,’ I reassured them. ‘She buys from everywhere. She just likes your stuff. She thinks it’s well made.’

  ‘It is well made.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you come and see us before?’

  ‘Well, now I know. Now I wish I’d come to see you before. That was my mistake.’

  ‘We forgive you.’ And they showered me with kisses, or at least they tried to but they were too near to the ground, so they blew kisses upwards and I grabbed at them, giddy and light-hearted, because Jasmine and I had repaired things and my embarrassing family had somehow impressed her.

  ‘This is the one you want. Since you’ve come all this way,’ Marsha said, handing her a corset from a floor-level drawer. It was cream with pale blue ribbon at the front and hooks at the back. It was cut at a rounded ‘W’ beneath the breasts. She seemed so sure that I suddenly wanted it, too.

  ‘This, you see, you cannot get into unless you have a friend to lace you in.’

  ‘Does it have to be a friend?’ Jasmine asked, ‘What if you want to be alone?’

  ‘If you’re feeling isolationist…’ Marsha looked pointedly at me. ‘That’s okay.’

  She shovelled Jasmine out of the one she had on and into this new one. ‘Once you’ve had help being laced in, it remains in place. After that, you can just do it by yourself with the front hooks.’

  ‘So you only need help the once, from one person?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Then that’s a very special job. I’d better pick the right person.’

  She smiled at me. Everything was back to normal, or to abnormal. Everything was… hopeful again.

  ‘Ouch,’ she said, pulling at her ribs.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ insisted Marsha.

  Edna cackled. ‘And at least, if it’s on the outside, everybody will know why you’re squirming. It’s good advertising for us, this whole over-your-T-shirt malarkey. You will wear it with a nice T-shirt? No offensive slogans or anything?’

  ‘I promise,’ she said, and I was already thinking of offensive slogans I thought might work well. She took it off and packed it in her bag with her other one, and three pairs of orthopaedic stockings that she said she would use in one of her arts and crafts projects. She was planning on making an erotic puppet of Ronald Reagan but I didn’t tell the sisters that (they wouldn’t have approved of the satire or the misuse of medical undergarments.)

  I felt very sad when we left. We all walked together, eventually parting ways when Mum and I went home and Jasmine went back to Notting Hill.

  ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’ Jasmine asked, her voice warm as a scented milk bath.

  I looked at Mum, who answered for me. ‘Go on, you’ll see him tomorrow. I’ll send some cakes along with him.’

  ‘Have you ever ridden the Underground before?’ My mum wasn’t being bitchy, as you know, that wasn’t her.

  But I snapped at her, ‘Mum! She rides the Underground all the time. She takes it more than we do!’

  ‘Even if I had a limo, which we haven’t had in some years, I want all the modes of transportation. Because each one sparks a different kind of thought. Walking, or the bus, or the Tube, or a taxi or plane, or if you’re very lucky, the train, they all make me think in a different way, and when they’re all in rotation, that’s when I get my best ideas.’

  I made note of this and practise it to this day, and I advise every one of you to do the same. I’ve added to it: different times of day. Different thoughts come on a bus at night than early in the morning. What I think she was saying is: you don’t ever get your best ideas sitting at your desk. That’s just where you jot down what came to you while you were moving.

  Mum also really looked sad to see Jasmine go. I watched as she followed her into the crowd with her eyes, Piccadilly Circus separating them, my mum’s attention returning to me.

  I wondered if she was fretting about what or who we might be going home to. Just the boys. Or Dad. And Dad in what state? I felt her whole body tense. But maybe I felt the tense-ness of everyone, all worrying about what they were walking in on when they crossed their own thresholds in half an hour’s time.

  Mum put her arm through mine, as if I were a proper gentleman or as if she wanted one more shot today at being treated like a proper gentlewoman.

  Our footsteps echoed up the underpass and I realised I was less worried than I used to be that we would be horribly attacked before we reached the other end. My nerves were less frayed, certainly than they had been earlier in the day. But I noticed, in general, I had started to feel braver. Maybe there is not light at the end of the tunnel, and if that were the case, maybe you are the light.

  The sky was elegant when we got back into the world, a beautiful dove grey, with a quarter moon. I wondered what spell and which crystal was appropriate for a quarter moon.

  As soon as I got home, I called Jasmine to ask, dodging around my father who, thank G-d, was slumped in front of the TV.

  ‘Now is a time for sloughing off dead past,’ she said. ‘The snake.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The snake is the animal that sheds its skin instead of growing with it.’

  I felt sad, wondering whether the sisters knew that their corset shop would soon be over. And whether they knew that reason it was coming to an end was because women wanted to be free now. And I felt sad, very sad, for Diana, wearing a boned dress up the aisle for a wedding she was contracted to.

  I wished she could be happy.
Like I was.

  CHAPTER 16

  Fashion is a manipulation, if you’re doing it right. The cut of the dress is so skilful that people just assume your waist is really that tiny. The cowl neck directs people to look into your face, framing it, like it’s worth a great deal, even when you’re no oil painting. Since I started going to galleries with Jasmine, I realised ‘He’s no oil painting’ is a strange saying, since oil paint has been used to create the most confrontational art. Perhaps they mean ‘She’s no watercolour’?

  But I watched how she moved in the world and I took what she did to people – how she flattered them, lied to them ever so skilfully and without malice, the way she veiled things, her touchability – and I applied it to clothes. You stay loyal to a particular designer’s particular point of view because you not only accept the manipulation, you enjoy it. The subtle trickery is a form of relaxation, both for the wearer and the maker. It was the same as I watched Jasmine and the people with whom she interacted, myself included. Both sides felt soothed, even if only one side had achieved something. The day she came over to my mum’s and admired her embroidery and got her to help us with the cutting and pasting, that was pure manipulation. Its success meant I was freer to travel with Jasmine, me to go and her to take me. But, in the course of the manipulation, they also had a good time.

  When she went to my aunties’ corset shop and made such a fuss of their wares, she could have lived her life without buying from them; she didn’t need what she walked away with (she never did make the erotic Ronald Reagan puppet). But both sides had a good time and my aunties even made money, and got some hope that the shop would take off again.

  I couldn’t tell them it was just one outlier girl, one liar outlier with great intentions and no ability whatsoever to see things through. All the great paintings, the great ideas, the possible novels, the film scripts in her head, make-up range, satirical puppet shows, literary salons, tea salons, Pilates/karate hybrid, moon-cycle workshop: they were with all good intentions and no solid base. There was nowhere in her or around her from which these things could be sustained.

  And now she kept banging on and on about the country estate. ‘It’s a train ride!’ she said, as if that were the answer to any doubts about anything.