The Consequences of Love

by Gavanndra Hodge

  I was always imagining things like this, the worst thing that could possibly happen.

  I managed the steps without incident.

  Adrian was not at the party yet, but Anya and Bella were there, sitting on the floor because there were no chairs, drinking from a bottle of wine because there were no glasses, flicking their ash on to the white carpet because there were no ashtrays. They were with another girl, Kitty, who was at school with Bella, pretty and dark with an absurdly slender waist, of the sort that men like to encircle with their hands, of the sort that turns a girl into a possession. Kitty was explaining how she had kissed Prince, Gary Stretch and Billy Idol (not all at once, on separate occasions). I was impressed and a little envious. Maybe this was just what happened if you had a waist like that.

  We had run out of wine so I went to the bar to get another bottle. Dad was at the bar with his friend Alethea, and she was whispering in his ear while watching the people in the room nervously. She smiled when she saw me though, and gave me a hug. Her father was Lord Chief Justice or something, which always made Dad laugh. He and Alethea left the main room, looking for somewhere more private to continue their conversation. I went behind the bar and took a bottle of wine from an ice bucket.

  The party was busier now, a strange mixture of fusty middle-aged Sloanes, sleek Euros and dodgy-looking types who worked in the local shops and pubs. I kept looking around, hoping to see Adrian, and it was as though he appeared from nowhere, because suddenly he was there, a dark presence looming in the doorway. I fetched him and brought him to sit down with our group, offered him the bottle of wine, which he held to his lips for a long time, not seeming to care that he was finishing it and we were meant to be sharing. He smelt of three-day-old rum and cigarettes. He seemed angry, as if he was here under duress. But his mood softened when he saw Kitty, Bella and Anya: their long hair, their made-up eyes, their lovely young bodies.

  It upset me, sitting there, watching him watching them, so I went to get more wine. On the way I decided to look for Dad. I wanted to introduce him to Adrian. But I got a bit lost, going into different rooms where he never was, finding people talking who looked up at me as if I was intruding, or people embracing who didn’t stop kissing and groping even though I stared. I was surprised by how big the place was, all the corridors and doors, and I was more drunk than was enjoyable, lurching and bumping along walls. For a time I panicked because I couldn’t work out how to locate the main party room again, but I made myself breathe and focus, followed the sounds of music and voices, and found my way back there. The crowds had thinned out a little now. Adrian was still sitting on the floor, looking like a pile of rags, but, instead of the girls, I saw that Dad was with him. I smiled. Dad must have seen the girls, gone to sit down, been introduced, and now he was chatting with Adrian. The two men in my life. And then I saw the look on Adrian’s face. I went closer and realized that he was shouting at Dad, talking about me, twisting some of the things I had told him about us, telling Dad he was a bad man, a bad father, that he should look after me better, it was his responsibility. Dad caught my eye. He pulled himself up off the ground.

  ‘I’m still talking to you,’ said Adrian.

  ‘And I’m bored of listening to you,’ he replied.

  When Dad walked past me he was holding himself differently; he seemed to have grown denser, stockier, his muscles bunched up in preparation for a fight.

  ‘Your boyfriend wants to beat me up,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, sorry, embarrassed, confused, unable to work out which extreme emotion should take prominence in my heart.

  I would have gone with Adrian that night. But he said no, he had other places to be, other people to meet. So Dad and I took a cab home and I felt drunk and exhausted, my head bouncing against the hard black interior of the taxi, Dad staring out into the night, still tense and angry, like someone I didn’t know.

  In the week that followed I tried calling Adrian but his Marxist flatmate always answered and said he wasn’t there. Eventually Adrian himself answered, sounding surprised that it was me, as if he didn’t know that I had been calling every day, sometimes twice.

  ‘I’m in trouble. It looks like I might end up in prison,’ he said.

  ‘Oh God, that’s awful. Let me help.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘Yes there is. I can talk to my dad – he knows people.’

  ‘That won’t help.’

  ‘How long do you think you’ll have to go to prison for?’

  ‘About a year. I’ll call when I get out.’

  ‘When will you go into prison? Can I see you before you go?’

  ‘No.’

  A couple of months later Anya and I were going up the escalator at Brixton Tube station. It was about 11 p.m. Once again I had told my mother I was staying at Anya’s and she had told her mother she was staying at mine. We were going to the Fridge nightclub. Anya had been flirting with the DJ who worked there and he had put us on the guest list. We liked dancing to the new song, ‘Gypsy Woman’ by Crystal Waters. We didn’t know where we would go after the club; we would see where the night took us.

  As I was going up I saw Adrian going down the escalator on the other side. He was with a woman. She was beautiful, wearing baggy jeans, slipping her hand into her pocket and passing something to him in a way that was so intimate that I knew they were together.

  He’d pretended that he was going to prison, that was how much he didn’t want to be with me. That was how absurd and fucked up he was. That was how unappealing I was. But that night I didn’t care, that night I could laugh about it, because I drank alcohol, took drugs, danced, and didn’t go home.

  15

  2015, London

  It is 5.30 a.m. My husband and children are asleep in their beds. I am in the sitting room, my laptop on my knees, a cup of green tea balanced on the armrest. I am still in my pyjamas, although I am wearing the jumper and woollen socks that I laid out for myself last night and found in the dark this morning.

  I am awake because I have made a decision to devote myself more zealously to writing the story of my childhood. I have been doing this for months but still nothing makes any sense. I can’t pull the disparate threads into a satisfying narrative order; they are just getting more tangled and confused. I still haven’t found Candy and I still haven’t found any sort of peace. Quite the opposite. I feel jangly and detached, only just keeping a lid on the spewing mayhem in my head, holding on to my husband and children so hard, as though they are some sort of lifeline to reality.

  The solution must be to try harder. This is the only thing that has ever worked for me. Keep grafting, never give up, believe in yourself, you’ll get there in the end, you always do.

  My plan is to wake up at 5 a.m. at least three days a week to write, as well as writing on the way to work and at weekends. I will be doing this in addition to editing a magazine. Kate has gone on maternity leave and I am now the editor of Tatler. I have a staff of thirty, my own office and a young girl whose main job, it seems, is to make me cups of tea.

  Dad would be so proud. He would tell everyone I was running the whole of Condé Nast.

  I have been trying to organize things chronologically, as this seems the best and simplest way, rather than being jazzy and trying to do it alphabetically or thematically (drugs, death, sex …), but on this morning I find I have come to an impasse. And that impasse is my other sister.

  The night Dad met Mum, he wasn’t just driving back to London from Marbella, he was leaving behind his family: his common-law wife and baby girl.

  Gavin met Kerstin on the beach in the early seventies. Back then southern Spain was a retreat for all sorts of hippies and freaks, bare-footed bohemians in the sun, barely aware that Franco was still in charge. Kerstin was a nineteen-year-old Swedish model, a skinny blue-eyed blonde in cut-off denim shorts who loved getting high, didn’t really matter how. Dad was already burnt out at twenty-five. He had been a hairdressing star when he was w
orking at the London salons, Evansky’s and Leonard’s, famous for his immaculate up-dos and ebullient chair-side manner, a slim-hipped fixture on the sixties scene, partying at nightclubs like Sybilla’s and the Arethusa, friends with actors and musicians (he always claimed he was the inspiration for the philandering hairdresser character played by Warren Beatty in the 1975 film, Shampoo). But he had fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old debutante and show jumper called Jayne Harries. They had eloped to Gibraltar to marry, chased by the paparazzi, and had laid low in Marrakech with the Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Not long after they returned to London, to race through her inheritance on fast cars and hard drugs. The relationship soon imploded (Harries would later die of a drugs overdose in a public loo in Cranleigh aged twenty-four). Dad had come to Spain to mend his heart and make the most of the hash and heroin that came direct from Morocco. He opened a hairdressing salon called Gotama (he had never read Hermann Hesse, he just knew the name was kind of groovy). Kerstin couldn’t speak much English and he couldn’t speak any Swedish, but they fell for each other anyway. They made love, took drugs, hung out. One day Kerstin strolled out on to the motorway into the path of an oncoming car. Dad rushed to push her out of the way and was run over himself. When he tried to stand he realized that his foot was pointing in the wrong direction. Kerstin went back to Sweden. Gavin convalesced, his leg in plaster, his waistline expanding, his girl far away. She wrote him letters complaining about a stomach ache that turned out to be a pregnancy; he wrote her a letter begging her to keep their baby.

  Kerstin was an addict during her pregnancy and their baby Maranda was born an addict too. According to the stories, the surgeons inserted a tube into her stomach and via this tube they were able to flush away the opiated maternal blood that ran in her tiny veins and replace it with clean blood, so that baby Maranda wouldn’t have to endure the dangerous agony of cold turkey. The family were reunited in Spain, but in less than a year they separated. Dad came back to London and Kerstin returned to Stockholm with their baby. On his way back he met Mum and soon conceived me, replacing one lost daughter with a new one.

  When I was little I knew I had a sister in Sweden but I rarely saw her. Sometimes when Kerstin was going through a rough patch with booze and drugs Maranda would come and stay with us (I was too young to remember these trips). When I was nine I went to visit her in Stockholm. All I can remember is eating the delicious cream and potato pie that Maranda’s grandmother cooked, and hoovering a spotless flat to Abba turned up loud on the stereo.

  Dad was a bad father to Maranda, only starting to pay maintenance when he was ordered to by the court (she was fifteen and he had to back-pay three thousand pounds). Kerstin was unstable, alcoholic, unpredictable. One afternoon, when Maranda was sixteen, she asked her mother for some help with her homework.

  ‘I’ll help you when I get back. I am just going out to buy some food,’ she replied.

  She didn’t return.

  Maranda remained in the flat in Stockholm for a couple of weeks, waiting for her mother. Then she went to live with her grandmother. One day she decided she wanted to come to England. She had another family there, didn’t she, one that might be less fucked up than her family in Sweden.

  Maranda came to live with us in Battersea less than a year after Candy died. She couldn’t have found a more fucked-up family if she’d tried.

  She was put in Candy’s room and told not to move Candy’s things. She wanted to learn how to be a hairdresser, to be like her dad, so he gave her a job at his salon in Knightsbridge. She washed hair, swept hair, made endless cups of tea for clients. She saw her father selling drugs, she saw him taking drugs, she saw him giving drugs to his other daughter and flirting with his daughter’s friends. She suspected that he was doing more than flirting.

  She tried to clean the flat where they lived; she found the dirt and the squalor disgusting. At weekends she would scrub the bath, but it never seemed to get properly clean. She tried to make friends with her sister, but found her uncommunicative, angry, drunk, high, or just not there.

  She felt sad and lonely. Her stepmother would buy her sister new clothes, but there was never anything for her.

  There are conflicting reports of what happened next. Maranda was a challenging teenager who’d had a difficult childhood. She was desperate for love, but found none. My mother couldn’t handle her and our father didn’t want to. He was busy with other, less confrontational, young women. Maranda was thrown out of the flat, leaving late at night in the rain, her possessions in two black plastic bags. ‘You have tried to destroy this family,’ Dad said, even though he was the one who was destroying the family, what was left of it.

  Maranda found a place to stay, a squat in Camden. She started work at a different hairdressing salon, continuing her training. When she went back to see my father, to ask him for a bit of money, he gave her amphetamines to sell.

  I find this hard to write not just because it is hard, but also because I cannot remember any of it.

  I know that Maranda lived in our flat, in Candy’s room, but I have no recollection of this. I cannot remember standing in the kitchen with her in the mornings eating Marmite on toast, or sitting on the sofa with her in the evenings watching Minder. Maranda worked in Dad’s salon in Knightsbridge, a place where I spent a great deal of time, but I cannot remember seeing her there.

  I don’t know why memory and sisters are so weird and slippery for me. The only thing I can remember about me and Maranda as teenagers was a holiday in Ibiza. Maranda had got into an empty bath and cried because I refused to go clubbing with her.

  ‘I just want to go dancing with my sister,’ wailed Maranda.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Dance with me,’ said Candy, her brown eyes hopeful.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I don’t know what my relationship with Candy would have been like. I cannot imagine the shape of that loss. So much would have been different had she not died that the absence of a close relationship with a woman who shares my past has never seemed like the most fundamental part of my story. But perhaps it is. And the fact is I do have a sister, one who is alive.

  Maranda is now a successful hairdresser living in Los Angeles. We barely communicate. I see her about once every two years when she visits London for work. We usually get drunk.

  I decide not to include her in the stories I am writing. They are complicated enough already.

  16

  1990, London

  It was a Sunday in summer and we were going for a family lunch at our favourite restaurant, Leonardo’s. The night before Anya and I had gone to a party in a garden square in Notting Hill and had somehow ended up in a house that looked like a museum in Holland Park, sitting around a table drinking Thunderbird with people we had never met before. I drank so much that when I stood up I realized that I couldn’t walk and I had to crawl out on my hands and knees to leave, laughing as I went.

  ‘Hello! Everybody, hello!’ said the restaurant owner, Paco, taking our coats from us as we entered the restaurant. He had black eyebrows and white hair and was so tall that when I was little I made a game of running between his legs.

  ‘Hello, my darling,’ said Dad.

  Paco turned to Mum. He held her by her shoulders and kissed her on each cheek; then he touched my hair as though I was still a little girl.

  He made a small ‘follow me’ gesture with his hand.

  Our table was by the window. The restaurant smelt of fried garlic, bread sticks, cigarette smoke and red wine spilt on thick cotton tablecloths. The smells were as familiar to me as the sounds, the clink of cutlery, the noise of corks being popped, the trundle of the metallic dessert trolley, constantly wheeled about with its wobbly trifles, torta della nonna and profiteroles.

  We had been coming here since I was a baby, every weekend. We came for celebrations, for birthdays, for New Year’s Eve. There were always friends at the other tables, and they would stop by our table for a chat, pull up a chair to sit with us and have
a glass of wine: Sarah, Michael, Quentin, Andy (although he was dead now too, tipped his chair and smashed his head on the stone dining-room floor at John Jermyn’s Tuscan villa, was put to bed, no one checked on him, cold by morning). We came here with our family, my grandparents unsure of the exotic menu, my grandmother asking if she could just have a prawn cocktail. The waiters – Paco, Pepe, the tall one with the glasses who had attended Candy’s cremation – they all called me bambina, even though I was fifteen years old and hungover with black eye makeup on my cheeks, even though they were Spanish and not Italian.

  Our table had been laid for four people and Paco whipped away the unnecessary crockery, handing it all to a passing waiter as though it was radioactive.

  ‘I think we should eat what she would have eaten,’ said Mum. ‘Artichokes to start and then spaghetti vongole.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, looking at them both. Dad was staring out of the window, his lips tense. Mum raised her eyes to meet mine.

  ‘Today is your sister’s birthday.’

  Candy always ate artichokes and spaghetti vongole at Leonardo’s.

  Paco was standing behind Dad, his hands on the back of his chair, looking mournful in an over-the-top Mediterranean way. He knew the right thing to do; he knew how to grieve. They teach them that in Spain.

  ‘Artichoke to start and then spaghetti vongole, for three,’ said Mum.

  Paco nodded solemnly, as if to say: Yes, this will be the most delicious and the most tragic food you will ever eat.

  I didn’t want artichoke and spaghetti vongole. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted less. I didn’t even want Italian food. Why did we have to keep coming here? Why did she keep doing this to us?