I know all about how to deal with emotional pain. The methods I know, the ones I learnt as a young woman, they don’t stop the tears, but they do stop you feeling the tears, so you can just wipe them away and start laughing again.
That’s what Dad would want. Not this morose introspection, not this sitting in drab South London cafés drinking cold tea and tap-tap-tapping away on a computer, lost in the past. ‘Who cares about yesterday, how about right fucking now?’ That’s what Dad would say. That is what he does say, when I make him speak inside my head. ‘Candy and me, we’re having a laugh up here. You’re the one we’re worried about.’
OK then.
Kate and I are organizing a big Tatler party. It is going to be an Art Ball, put on in partnership with Christie’s auction house and filmed by the BBC. We want the party to be as decadent and wild as possible. ‘It needs to have tables loaded with so much food it is almost disgusting,’ I say in one of the many, many meetings we have about the party. ‘Roman, orgiastic, half roast chickens that people pick up with their fingers and eat in one go, chins shiny with animal fat.’
Kate thinks this is an excellent idea. The tables will heave with roasted meats, as well as caviar, oysters, cold vodka and colder champagne.
Because it is an Art Ball we must all come dressed as a work of art. I consider something complicated, like a recreation of a Renaissance miniature of Elizabeth I, complete with circular frame; but then I think: Fuck it, turn a party dress inside out and wear that. ‘Woman’ by Rachel Whiteread. Empty space where a person should be. Mike wears a Leonardo da Vinci T-shirt.
It is one of those parties where your glass is never empty for long (and I drink faster than anyone I have ever met, except my father, who could down a glass of red wine and pour another one straight away, like iced water on a hot day). After innumerable glasses of champagne, I move on to vodka and tonics, doubles please. At midnight I persuade the travel editor, the only other person on the editorial team with children, to down two espresso Martinis in succession with me.
When we get home Mike holds my hair from my face as I vomit into the loo.
We go to another party. I get drunk again, this time by having a shot of sambuca between every glass of wine. I attempt to get up on to the table to dance (something I used to do in pizza restaurants on the King’s Road when I was fifteen; I am now thirty-nine) but the ceiling is too low and it doesn’t really work. I feel so ill in the long cab ride home, window open, my head hanging out like one of those dogs on holiday.
‘Make him stop,’ I say to Mike, my words slurred.
The cab stops. We are in West Norwood. I get out, bend forward, clutch my knees, try to get myself together.
‘Just leave me here,’ I say, thinking I can’t get back into the cab, anything would be better than getting back in the cab, falling asleep here on the pavement would be better than that.
‘Yes, leave her here,’ says the cab driver, nervous for the interior of his car.
‘Don’t be crazy, get back in,’ says Mike.
Another party. First we are taken out for dinner by some friends who like expensive wine. I am on some crazy diet so am not eating carbs (not even peas or carrots) but I am drinking the wine. Then we go to the party. There is a starry crowd, actors and film directors. Edward St Aubyn, the writer and famous former junkie, is there. My friend, the hostess, thinks we’ll have a bit in common. ‘Gav’s dad was very wild, a wonderful hairdresser, and a heroin dealer in Chelsea!’ she says, leaving us sitting opposite each other in a corner. I blabber a bit about Dad, the dealing, Jamie Blandford. Edward tells me a story about a drug deal involving a classic car and a corpse. We stare at each other. I find him intimidating and drink some more. I am relieved when we make our excuses and move on to people that we can talk to and it not have to be about junkies and dead people. Later that evening, after I have taken MDMA and drunk so much Laurent Perrier champagne that I will never be able to bear the taste of it again, I spot him. He is standing against a wall, observing the mayhem, the drunken, drugged dancing and smoking. Haven’t you come far, daughter of a drug dealer?
My mum is staying the night, babysitting. She is asleep in our room. Mike and I have to sleep on a mattress on the floor in the girls’ bedroom. I pass out and wake up an hour later. I run to the loo to vomit. Vomit again. I get a mixing bowl (the one I use to make birthday cakes for the girls) and keep it by me. I spend all night being sick into the bowl. By morning there is nothing left in my stomach and yet I am still retching, grunting noisily each time. The girls giggle and copy me.
‘Who am I? Bleurgh, Bleurgh?’
‘Mummy!’
14
1990, London
I met him on one of those wild nights when Anya told her mother she was staying at mine and I told my mother that I was staying at Anya’s (they never called each other to check, our mothers). This scheme offered great freedom; it meant we could stay out all night and do whatever we wanted with whomever we wanted. But there was also jeopardy. No one knew where we were and we couldn’t go home when we’d had enough. Often we would end up at the twenty-four-hour cinema in King’s Cross, laid out on the floor, trying to sleep on crushed popcorn and spilled beer, half an eye open for the film (usually one of the Mad Maxes) and possible molesters.
We were fifteen years old, one month between our birthdays, but we looked older: old enough to be sold cigarettes in the newsagents around the corner, old enough to be served Bacardi Cokes in bars, old enough to be admitted to nightclubs, often without paying, for there never were enough teenage girls in those places and they always wanted more.
When I was little I found my mother’s sugar-coated contraceptives and ate them, one by one, crunching the cute pink pills between my baby teeth. I had swallowed them all by the time my parents discovered me and took me to hospital. The doctors decided not to pump my stomach. The pills wouldn’t do too much harm, although I might start adolescence a little earlier than my friends, the doctors said. They were right. I was wearing a bra and got my period when I was still at primary school.
Anya and I were in a bar with green neon signage just off Leicester Square, a place full of Europeans and musicians, a party crowd. There was a small group who were having the kind of fun that we wanted, laughing and dancing. We began to talk, shouting over the music, making ourselves part of their gang. Among them was Adrian, the boy I liked, mostly because I sensed that he might like me. Drinks were put in our hands; we didn’t ask what they were, we just drank, a sour taste that I recognized again when I kissed him, at the bar, the people around us whooping encouragement.
The streets were a carnival that night and we were part of it, walking down the middle of the road, bottles and cigarettes in our hands, an uproar of fun, collecting people as we went, to another bar, another club. No one asked our age, where we were from, why we were still out at 4 a.m. Soho loves a wayward young vagabond.
We stayed the night (what was left of it) in a squat on the Latimer Road estate in West Kensington. At dawn I kissed Adrian goodbye with tongues. We arranged to meet in the same bar another night soon.
At school I told people I had met a boy. After school I went to my father’s basement hairdressing salon in Knightsbridge, with its pot plants and leather armchairs. I had taken to doing this rather than going home, where grief still hung in the air like a damp fog; where at night I had panic attacks, the numbness spreading up my arms, my chest tightening so I thought I would die, the only thing for it a trip to the Chelsea and Westminster hospital A & E (again) and the calming neon lights that meant I was safe. At Dad’s I could drink beer while I did my homework. Then we might go to the pub, Dad and I; anything to put off going home. I would sit with Dad and say, ‘Will I ever get a boyfriend? Everyone else has a boyfriend, no one likes me, they always like the other girls.’ Sometimes I would cry. He would hug me and say, ‘It will happen.’ Or laugh and say, ‘Boys aren’t that great anyway.’ Sometimes my friends would come to the salon with me after schoo
l. When the clients and the other hair stylists had gone we would smoke Dad’s joints and take his speed, drink his wine while he dispensed his intoxicating wisdom. ‘Always remember, girls, you hold the keys to the kingdom, don’t let down the drawbridge for any old Tom, Dick or Harry.’
He was talking about sex, about our virginities. And we nodded as though we were listening to him, when really our virginities were the thing we were all most desperate to lose, we didn’t really care who with. At least I didn’t.
‘I’ve got a boyfriend,’ I said.
Dad and I were in the salon, sitting across from each other at the reception desk, scratched mahogany with a green leather topper tooled with gold. We were working. I was making little packets for the cocaine that he sold to his friends and clients. They would come to his salon to get their hair cut or have a blow dry for a party, and collect their drugs as they left, a kiss on the cheek and a discreet palm-to-palm exchange. I was slicing the pages of fashion magazines into squares with a razor, folding the squares into neat envelopes. I was being artistic with the packages, trying to make them visually exciting so that, when folded, there would be something cool and iconographic on the front, like a pair of glossy red lips, a shoe, a conical Madonna breast. Dad would then fill the envelope with a measured gramme of cocaine mixed with crushed Pro Plus tablets. It was nearly time for my school fees to be paid and Dad needed a bit of extra cash.
‘Finally! When can I meet him?’
‘I don’t know. Soon, I suppose.’
‘If he hurts you I’ll break his kneecaps.’
‘For God’s sake, Dad!’
‘Do you want another line?’
‘Go on then.’
I met Adrian’s parents before he met mine.
Adrian lived on the Tulse Hill estate, in a barely furnished flat, the decrepitude of which – torn wallpaper, moulding sofa, peeling floor tiles, stained bathtub – was unmitigated by any personal touches like a cheap ethnic throw or Bob Marley poster. The flat had been given to him by the council when he had left care six months earlier. He wanted to work in the film industry, carried a second-hand copy of Verlaine in the pocket of his too-long greatcoat and listened to Chopin on his stereo. There was a single bed in his room that I sometimes shared. We did not have sex. Instead I would go through his things when he went out, searching for a different route to intimacy. At the back of a drawer I found documentation from his time in care; I learnt that his parents were unstable alcoholics. I read the notes from the child psychologist that talked about how Adrian preferred to create fantasy worlds with his Star Wars toys than live in the real one. I understood that. I spent years playing Dungeons and Dragons, giving myself a new name, a new identity: invincible warrior queen.
One night his mother came over when I was there. I tried to be charming, to play the game of meeting my boyfriend’s parents. Adrian’s mother had blonde hair greased into a thin ponytail, and a swollen face red with booze and rage. It was impossible to tell how old she was, in her late sixties or in her early thirties. Her stomach was bloated but her legs were emaciated. She didn’t even see me, I don’t think, her eyes roving and incapable of focus. She was drunk and staggering. She shouted at her son, swore at him, then they collapsed into each other crying; she stroked his hair and he laid his head in her lap, whimpering. Adrian always said to me that we humans only tell the truth about ourselves when we are smashed. I felt I shouldn’t be there, I definitely shouldn’t be watching, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. Finally I had found somewhere worse than my own house. Finally I had found someone more damaged than me.
I think that was what I saw in him.
I told my friends at school that Adrian was now my boyfriend, even though sometimes we would arrange to meet and he wouldn’t turn up. Sometimes when we were together he would talk to other girls and I could see something in his eyes that I never saw when he looked at me. That pain felt familiar too.
There was a party. An older guy called Rosco who had been hanging around with Dad was selling his flat in Pont Street, or he was renting and was moving out, it wasn’t clear, but the flat would be empty except for the imitation Matisse paintings on the walls and the bar and we were all invited, me, my dad and ‘all your pretty little friends’. I invited Adrian and his crowd too. I wanted to show him a bit of my life. I thought maybe the shiny decadence of it would make me more attractive, or at least give us something to laugh about, all the silly old men with their fat wallets chasing young girls.
Dad and I were having dinner first. It was a Friday night. Dad had some friends over from the old days in Spain, when he ran a hairdressing salon in Marbella. They were tanned and rich-looking in a retro criminal kind of way, cream suits and gold signet rings, muscular hands that looked as though they could strangle a man (or a woman). The wine they bought in the pub was more expensive than the stuff we usually got. Dad was pleased to see them. There was talk about people they’d known. Dad’s accent changed when he spoke to them: it became more like theirs. I didn’t speak much, I just watched, holding the beer bottle to my lips. There was a woman with them who didn’t speak much either. She was the girlfriend of one of the gangsters, short and petite but with huge breasts that made her look unstable, as if she might topple forward when she stood. She wore a ruched Lycra miniskirt and old-fashioned stockings with a black line up the back for an intrepid index finger to follow. Her patent stilettos were so hard to walk in that the traffic had to stop for her as she tiptoed across the road from the pub to San Lorenzo, where the gangsters were joining us for dinner. We went through the black-tiled entrance into the restaurant, which was like entering a parallel world, because suddenly we were in the Mediterranean. There were lilies and palms, a fan whirring gently above. We sat at a round table in the upper balcony with white linen and heavy silver crockery.
‘This was where me and Jan had our wedding reception,’ Dad explained.
‘I remember,’ said one of the gangsters. ‘How is she?’
‘She got fat,’ said Dad.
‘Shame.’
It was exciting to be there, to drink the white wine that was so cold the glass sweated, to eat the creamy asparagus risotto, to listen to the stories, the ones they told about the semi-famous people they knew out in Spain, the rockers and bank robbers, the pools and affairs. Eventually, Dad turned his attention towards Ali, the girl. She was heavily made up with sparkly powders, pinks and blues. Her ash-blonde hair was piled upon her head in airy, lacquered whorls.
‘So, what do you do, my darling?’
She looked at him in surprise, and then smiled, a delicious side smile that showed off unexpectedly small, pearly teeth.
‘Don’t take the piss,’ said one of the gangsters.
Dad stared at her. She lowered her eyes, so heavy with mascara I thought she might not be able to lift them again. She looked at her tits.
‘Fuck, sorry, darling, of course.’
She was, it transpired, a famous page-three model.
‘Jan did a bit of page three, in the early days, along with Viv and Jilly.’
‘Trailblazers,’ she said sweetly, and smiled at me, as if this information had made me part of her world. I smiled back, pleased by the air of sophistication this new connection gave me. Perhaps Ali would come to the party and I could introduce her to Adrian. What would he make of that!
‘It’s a real pleasure to meet you in the flesh …’ said Dad and he took one of Ali’s pale, tiny hands with the sharp red nails, gently pulled it to his mouth and kissed it, holding her hand to his lips much longer than was necessary. He let go and took a gulp of wine. ‘So, can I see them?’ he said.
Ali giggled. I watched her meet eyes with her scary boyfriend, his little nod.
She then gracefully unclipped two hidden fastenings at the front of her dress. She was not wearing a bra but her breasts did not droop at all on being released from their confinement – they remained almost impossibly buoyant, two vast milky orbs with very pale pink nipples. I felt m
y own chest constrict. This was happening, at dinner; people could see. And yet Ali didn’t rush to close her top, she let my father’s gaze linger on her body, as well as that of everyone else nearby. Waiters serving adjacent tables laid down plates of food with their heads turned. I remembered a thing a teacher had told me, about when the Greeks were going home after the Trojan War. Menelaus had his recaptured wife Helen on his boat and went at her with a dagger, intending to kill her for all the death and destruction her beauty has caused. But Helen simply pulled apart her gown, showed Menelaus her perfect tits, and he stayed his hand; he fucked her instead of killing her.
‘Beautiful,’ said Dad, raising a glass. ‘Thank you.’
‘Pleasure,’ Ali replied, and refastened her dress with an easy movement that suggested she had done this a million times before.
Dinner was going on longer than expected, with coffees and cognacs which came in massive bowl-like glasses, the golden liquid coating the inside of the glasses as the gangsters swirled them in their tanned hands, interspersing gulps of liquor with sucks on their cigars. Dad had a cigar too. He offered me a puff, which I took even though I hated the smell and it made me nauseous. He passed me a packet of cocaine under the table and I went to the white marble loos to do a line, aware of the serious and rich-looking older women waiting outside. The coke made me jittery, worried that Adrian was already at Rosco’s house, flirting with my friends.
The gangsters had got the bill by the time I was back at the table. Dad was thanking them for dinner, not getting out his cheque book. We left in a hurry to be sure of avoiding paying our share. At the exit I waited for Dad to walk down the steps first; the paparazzi who were always waiting outside for Princess Diana or Elizabeth Hurley, or some other celebrity, lowered their big black cameras when they saw that it was only us. I wanted Dad to go down the steps first because I had got it into my head that I might slip and the back of my skull would crack against the hard granite step-edge and I might die, right there in Beauchamp Place, while the paparazzi watched and didn’t know if this was something they should take a photograph of and my dad cradled me as he had my sister.
The Consequences of Love Page 8
