Vanished Years

by Rupert Everett

  At Lourdes we found a(nother) rather depressing hotel on the outskirts of the town. It was a half-timbered Norman inn surrounded by dripping shrubs. Inside, it had long creaky corridors straight from a horror film. In our room illness clung to the curtains and the beds, and the smell from the half-hearted central heating merged with the damp-stained carpets in a low fog. The residue of faith and broken dreams made Mo’s hackles stand up on end, but we were too tired to move on, so we fed him and then walked down to the basilica.

  And so there we were, the neurotic freak, the pixie and the bouncy dog, an unholy trinity, watching the torchlight procession wind around us in a giant halo through the hills above Lourdes, the heavenly music distant and chilling on the breeze, love and death all together, hope and despair, sex, drugs and St Bernadette: everything was included in a moment that was apparently buried alive, only to be stumbled upon twenty-five years later, by the same freak, calcified, with a blind major and his German nurse.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Plenary (Self-)Indulgence

  An ancient duchess in nurse’s garb stood on a podium with a microphone, incanting the ‘Hail Mary’ in a lethargic drawl, as if she had a cigarette holder clenched between her teeth. The mantra was delivered to the faithful via a clapped-out sound system that echoed and bounced around the sacred spot. It was the day reserved for the Knights of Malta to take the waters, and we were all there, with our ‘malades’ at the front of the line, for redemption. Behind us jostled less well-connected pilgrims, other nurses and doctors with different cloaks and costumes, but all wheeling the same the terminally ill creatures, their faces uncannily illuminated by the footlights of faith, extraordinary regards, eyes burning from shrunken faces on bodies twisted and turned by disease.

  My father sat upright in his chair, wearing his straw hat and a regimental tie to honour the occasion, and slowly we crept to the head of the line. Finally we were ushered behind a curtain into a marble changing room where three men removed my father from his wheelchair and his body from his clothes with the precision of fishmongers shelling oysters. Hat, shirt, shoes, socks, underpants in his racing colours: they all came off one after another as I gingerly undressed myself beside him. Naked and without his glasses, my father sat on a little stool, wrapped in a loincloth, another animal, really, an old tortoise without its shell, bones draped in thin skin, the pacemaker visible in his chest, and the scar from his heart surgery cutting across it – a botched magician’s trick. I couldn’t tell if I was touched or horrified. All I knew was that our roles had irreversibly changed. He was the ancient little boy waiting for the holidays, and I was the adult anxious to get back to the office.

  The men asked him to stand while they slid a kind of sling underneath him. He stood shakily with his arms stretched out, and they lowered him onto it and fastened him with straps. On a count of three they lifted him and threw aside another curtain, revealing the bath itself, a grey marble tomb of icy water. The duchess’s ‘Hail Mary’ was piped through to these inner recesses of the temple. Suddenly she switched languages and began the prayer in an extraordinary French devoid of any attempt at an accent. ‘Joo voo saloo Muree plenda grass …’

  I always find the French ‘Hail Mary’ slightly shocking because while we say, ‘Blessed is the fruit of thy womb’ (Jesus), they say, ‘Le fruit de vos entrails’, meaning the fruit of your entrails, which presents a rather grisly image to which the duchess gave a thrilling downward inflection.

  ‘Quite a talented linguist, old Podge,’ mentioned my dad as they took him down the steps into the inner sanctum, which was not unlike the RAC Club in London.

  These kind sweet men lowered him into the freezing water and I was afraid he would have a heart attack then and there, but he just moaned and shivered. A Knight leant over him; together they said the ‘Hail Mary’ in low urgent voices and there was something medieval about their two heads close together. Their whole lives were wrapped up in this belief, handed down and adjusted across two millennia. My father’s body, like the religion itself, was a mere whisper of its former self, but the faith remained. It was a gilded ship rowing him slowly across the twilight sky towards the faraway star. The old campaigner was heaved out of the water and the kind men put him back together again, while I wrapped my loincloth around my waist and stuck my toes into the freezing font.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Brief Encounter with Mo

  There were no lines of aristocrats, no chanting dignitaries, that windswept autumn morning when Bruno, Mo and I arrived at the grotto. Just a cluster of nuns, their robes billowing in the cold wind, chatting by the river. We tied Mo to a bench beside them, having ascertained that he could not take the cure, which was a shame because he loved water almost as much as food, and perhaps would not have got cancer at the end of his life if he had taken a quick dip.

  We took off our clothes and wrapped ourselves in loincloths. Everything was full of meaning, and the image of a mother God was never more appealing nor more present. She would forgive Alfo and me, and keep an eye on Geppie, even if that old mood-swinger Yahweh wouldn’t, and it felt secure to be there. Mo’s furious barks could be heard from the river as we were completely submerged by two local boys in charge, and came out spluttering but glowing into the chilly air. We put our clothes on without drying, which is supposed to be one of the miraculous aspects of the experience, and left, shocked and revitalised. It was all over in five minutes.

  Outside, the nuns were making a fuss of Mo and he was tugging at their robes. They were screaming with delight, and the whites of Mo’s eyes informed anyone in the know that he was getting turned on. As we sat down he saw his moment and leapt on one of the poor novitiates, the glistening pink lipstick of his member peeking through its furry foreskin, and humped her with urgency. An older nun intervened, as the young sister turned red and screamed louder. This was probably as near as she would ever get to having sex, which was a gruesome thought, because Mo was not a gentle lover. He was in the full vigour of his youth. Consensual sex was anathema to him, and he liked his partner to put up a spirited resistance. I finally managed to disengage him, without having to throw the proverbial bucket of water over them both, apologising profusely while giving a sharp tap on the nose to my dog, who lay down with a grunt and sulked for as long as his memory served him, which was about fifteen minutes.

  The sisters were French, from Toulouse, with pink scrubbed faces under their wimples, and bright virginal eyes, unclouded by desire.

  ‘What brings you to Lourdes?’ the older nun asked, clearly in charge.

  ‘I want a miracle for my friend Alfo,’ I replied.

  ‘And my dog died,’ said Bruno, and we both burst into tears.

  With the grotto in front of us, our story spilt out. The ladies listened with compassion and dignity, the elder nun invigilating the proceedings with concern. They were a small flock of tame blackbirds, their little beaks framed in starched linen, perched on the bench, gripping it against the wind, leaning towards us to hear better, while we were a pair of lost parrots from a faraway jungle, shivering in tie-dyed T-shirts and ripped jeans. (It was the first summer of love, that year.) Bruno’s hair flew in the wind. Mo looked up from his sulk, from one group to the other, and thought we had all gone mad, but actually this was religion, an affectionate contact from opposite ends of the earth, and there was no trace of judgement in these girls’ eyes.

  ‘This Aids,’ asked one of them. ‘Is it very easy to catch?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then you must be very careful.’

  I began to sob again.

  She took my hand and looked into my eyes. ‘I’m sure you’ll be all right. As for your friend, why don’t you come with us to the basilica and say a rosary for him. You could even make a novena!’

  ‘A novena?’ For the uninitiated that’s nine rosaries a day for nine days.

  ‘Yes. I think that would be very beautiful.’

  I did say a novena fo
r Alfo. But praying can be sidestepping and is not always really religious. It gave me a sense that I was doing something, but Alfo needed support, an actual shoulder to lean on, not the distant buzz of a thousand ‘Ave Marias’ said in a village church three hundred miles away. In reality, I had stolen his tragedy for myself.

  My test came back negative. Of course it would. My paranoia had run amok and I had more or less destroyed poor Alfo under the weight of it. He had been careful and responsible, while I had behaved like a ‘rich tourist witch’, Tom said, out of my depth, not tough enough to play the game.

  During our late-night calls from the station in Turin I began to disengage. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, deal with the very real problems Alfo had. Finally he cracked one night as a train to Viareggio was delayed, and shouted at me down the line. He accused me of playing with him, of being utterly selfish, and finally of being a typical Catholic, all noise and no compassion.

  He was right.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam

  Twelve years later, I was walking down a rainy street in Amsterdam with my friend Rifat from Turkey. It was a freezing New Year’s Eve at the beginning of the new century, and Christmas trees swayed in the wind outside the big hotels. Their lights and tinsel were wavy blurs in the rain. The potheads looked out dreamily from the warmth of the coffee shops, and freezing tourists hurried through the streets, wrapped in scarves and hats.

  ‘Mum, look at that number in the window,’ said Rifat.

  I looked around and there was Alfo. Older, tougher, no boyishness left; a marine, in fact, with short-cropped hair, wearing army fatigues He sat with a thin blond Dutchman at a table behind a large window.

  I banged on the pane and he looked round. His brain’s machinery flew through a series of images before matching up the ghoul in the window with that uppity lover from the last century. Then his eyes bulged and a huge smile cracked his unshaven face in half. He bounded from the bar, and there we were again, the same but completely different, weathered and harder, but amazed and thrilled at the universe throwing us together. We exchanged numbers and party plans. Later that night, as midnight struck in some dungeon dance hall, and klaxons blasted, and streamers and glitter fell through the air, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was him. We hugged as the chimes banged out. My Turkish friend arrived with some other friends. I turned around to introduce them, but Alfo was gone.

  A couple of evenings later, as the festivities wound down, I was lying, toxic, in my room when there was a knock on my door. It was him. On closer inspection he had a haunted look about him. He produced a huge bag of cocaine and chopped out lines as he told me all that had happened since that faraway morning in Turin.

  He no longer worked in a bank. Obviously. He had fled Italy, first to America, where he met a man, and things were OK for a while. But then the disease kicked in and he nearly died. Only for the fact that he had been a body-builder, and was massive, had he survived the onslaught of Kaposi’s sarcoma, which had grown over his entire body and eaten him away. In a sense he had been lucky, because his immune system had held on just long enough for the miraculous anti-retroviral drugs to become available. He was saved, but as soon as he was in a fit state was forced to leave America. He was too proud to go back to Italy. So now he was on the high seas, waiting for something to happen. In the meantime he had become a dealer. Soon, he said, he would try escorting.

  He was matter-of-fact, light-hearted, still a graceful colossus, but Aids had hollowed him out. He had survived it but it had marginalised him, exiling him to a life of muddling through and moving on. He wanted to go back to the States, but that was pretty much impossible, considering his condition, so for the time being he was stuck, roaming Europe.

  ‘Just think,’ he said, ‘what a normal life I had. And now this!’

  We stayed up until dawn, talking. I could speak Italian now, and many things were clarified that had been lost in translation. As he was leaving we promised to meet again.

  ‘I’m sorry for everything,’ I blurted out as we hugged goodbye.

  He laughed, and his eyes glittered. ‘Everything ended well. That’s the main thing. Do you want some valium?’

  It was still raining outside, and I watched him through the window, hunched against the cold, hands dug deep into his pockets, as he walked across a bridge over the canal and disappeared in the deep blue darkness. I never saw him again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Charitable Feelings

  ‘I am feeling very holy,’ said my father as we left the grotto. ‘I think I shall make a substantial donation to charity.’

  Charity? Now it was my turn to feign deafness.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The End of Charity

  It is five o’clock in the morning deep in the Cambodian jungle. A twelfth-century temple called Bayon with fifty-four towers looms black against the purple sky. A full watery moon glides through space above us, outlining the vast temple in silver and throwing long shadows from the forest onto the clearing upon which it stands. It is like a day-for-night scene in a movie from the fifties. The woods behind us are silent, shredded with moonbeams and fragrant with weird Cambodian night flowers. The air is still and warm, and the beauty is so intense that for a moment our anxious lives – with their situation comedies and dramas – briefly stand back and dissolve into the night.

  We are not alone. A few other tourists grope their way, beetles in the half-light, up the steep, ruined stairways. Banyan trees weave through the walls, across the balustrades, sucking this forgotten civilisation back into the earth. Huge porticos balance precariously on teetering columns and vaulted ceilings are caught in the branches’ embrace, as they fall in ghostly freeze-frames like broken card houses. It’s probably quite dangerous, and it won’t be long before someone is buried alive, and there are signs and barriers and officious tour guides with megaphones, but for the moment we are watched by a few young Buddhist monks – just kids, really – who are the keepers of these temples of Angkor.

  I’m soon separated from the rest of the group in a maze of black stone corridors deep in the temple. A little girl beckons me to follow her. We enter a small room where sits an enormous Buddha and a tiny old nun. There are offerings at the feet of the statue including a packet of Lays crisps, and the nun is arranging things as I come in. She has no teeth, a shaved head and unwavering blue eyes. She sits on her haunches, proffers some sticks of incense, which I light from a candle on the floor. She motions for me to kneel beside her and pray. I gaze up at the huge face of the Buddha; his smile is inscrutable through the wisps of smoke that billow and curl my prayers to the heavens. I’m transfixed. He seems to be looking straight at me. The nun nudges me in the ribs, and motions for me to bow. I do.

  ‘One,’ she says in English.

  ‘Two.’ She’s bowing with me this time, showing me the way.

  ‘Three,’ we say in unison. And then:

  ‘Peace!’ she explains, as if it were that simple.

  Charity may begin at home, but it ends in Cambodia. I am here in my new capacity as ambassador for the Global Fund, a G8 invention to combat Aids, malaria and TB in the third world. They have pledged $59 million to this country and I am here to see how it is being spent. I have in my entourage this moonlit night: a TV crew from the BBC, a photographer from Vanity Fair – a German prince, no less – and an extraordinary woman from Geneva (that mountain spring from whence all rivers of charity coil) called Mariangela Bavicchi. My Sancho Panza on this escapade is David from Miami, without whom I cannot take one charity step. He is standing right next to me this morning, looking like Frankenstein’s monster in the moonlight.

  We have become an unusual double act on the scene. Our previous field trips include Haiti, India and Africa. We have lobbied in Washington and Moscow, and even headlined the disastrous Aids Walk in Miami where no one showed up, but I got the keys of the city anyway. (Where are those keys, by the way?) David hel
ps me write my speeches and is a world expert on Aids, when he is not larking around.

  This morning we are going to take a moody dawn shot of me for the Vanity Fair article I shall write about the situation. We have been driven to the forest by a rabble of gorgeous Cambodian boys on scooters and I have even done some jaunty shots riding side-saddle, whizzing past a monk taking a shit. Dawn arrives and I am standing on a parapet surveying the jungle. The German prince is shooting me from below – not my favourite angle. He has nicknamed me Frosty.

  ‘Frosty, stop worrying. You are looking marvellous. Just like a lesbian explorer.’

  ‘Good,’ I reply. ‘I don’t want to set a frivolous tone.’

  The view from up here is better than The Jungle Book. The abandoned towers of a thousand other temples reach out from the swaying forest. They are drowning in it. Their sharp black silhouettes flail against the green ocean, which is now screeching and squawking with life. Mist swirls from the ground and curls into the morning air. The smell of woodsmoke chases off the subtle fragrance of night as we jump back onto our scooters and drive all the way to the Tonle Sap River where a boat is waiting to take us back to the capital, fifteen hours away.

  ‘If today’s newspaper is anything to go by,’ I lazily observe over breakfast the next morning, ‘it seems as if there’s a coup brewing.’

  The government here in Phnom Penh is at a standstill, and the king, Norodom Sihanouk, has fled (as usual) to his chum Kim Il-Sung’s state-of-the-art hospital in North Korea. There goes my introduction from Nicky Haslam!