Finally, as the evening draws in, the busboys, the bouncers and the barmaids arrive, the glitter ball is turned on, and the magic roundabout is off again, empty and ghostly for the time being, but still magically transformed from the morning’s ugly warehouse, with its damp, peeling walls and threadbare carpets, into a kind of time capsule, a sovereign state, a world of its own with alternative leaders, stars, police, markets and schools; a kingdom where reality is held at bay by the muscular arms of the bouncer and a velvet rope.
If you became a proper clubber, particularly in those final days of the New York Empire, when people went out every night from dinner or a disco nap, that particular peeling warehouse became a part of your identity. It was where you lost yourself, or at least your virginity. Billionaires danced with bent cops. Trannies swapped beauty tips with game hags from Dun & Bradstreet. Stars from the real world left their crowns outside. They were more down to earth in those days. They didn’t arrive in a phalanx of security guards, as they do today, shoved through the crowds like a battering ram, trampling underfoot the fans they pretend to love. (I remember going out one night with Cher, just after she had won the Oscar. Feeling jet-lagged, I wanted to leave. ‘Fine, babe,’ she said, pecking me on the cheek. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ And without a word she swayed off to the dance floor and disappeared into the crowd.)
Movie and rock royalty were still stars inside the disco planet, but no more so than the club stars themselves, that strange array of ‘ordinary’ people whose extreme looks or habits or dance moves set them apart, and without whom a night could not be complete, could never be ‘one of those nights’. These characters were, still are, like the old stars of Vaudeville or the circus, music-hall acts once loved, fêted, on kissing terms with kings, or at least Jackie O, but instantly forgotten. A club scene dwindles, another epoch ends and the clubber, with a reluctant sigh, moves back to the ordinary world, only to be remembered years later in cosy conversations of reminiscence, or because of some terrible misfortune. ‘Do you remember that awful guy John X? Well, you’ll never guess! She was stabbed sixty-eight times by that Moroccan number she forced to go and live with her in the country.’
Area was my club. The invitation to its opening was a pill like an Alka-Seltzer, which when put in water bubbled up into an invitation.
Isabella and I fell out. In her flat one night, I borrowed her diamond brooch. I was a terrible magpie in those days. She gave it to me reluctantly. Poor Isabella, she could never say no. That was a part of her tragedy.
‘I can’t believe I’m giving this to you.’ She laughed, honking and smoking to cover up her anxiety as she handed over the jewel. Of course I lost it. It flew off my lapel onto the dance floor at Area later that night, never to be found. Isabella was furious, but since she was unable to confront – behind the back was the only position from which she dared to fuck you – I never took her very seriously when she asked me to reimburse her, particularly since I was flat broke at the time.
‘Oh God, don’t worry about it, then,’ she said with droopy eyes and a sigh, meaning ‘Give me back my fucking brooch.’ But I wasn’t much of a linguist in those days.
Months later I paid her back, but she never forgot.
She moved back to England. I moved to France. At first she went to work for Michael Roberts at Tatler. It was a successful union, but then she landed a job in one of the crustiest institutions in the country. She became fashion editor of the Sunday Times and everything took off, exploded in fact. As usual Isabella was in the right place at the wrong time
The Sunday Times was no longer a club of brilliant eccentrics harbouring such stately galleons as Violet Wyndham, James Fox, Mark Boxer and Bruce Chatwin. Now it was a snitty, petty, rather common institution, and try as she might, or might not – the energy of her interest waxed and waned with the moon – Isabella was never going to fit in. The Sunday Times of the late eighties was a worthy institution of faceless bores, and she was constantly undermined, ‘gaslit by them, actually’, she always said. They all pretended to like her, but actually they couldn’t stand her.
Pretty soon she was a fully developed fashion freak, complicated, bitchy, treacherous and incredibly funny. She had developed some bad habits in America. The extravagance of Condé Nast was anathema to the penny-pinching world of the Sunday Times. What did Isabella care? Wads of fifty-pound notes were crammed into extraordinary bird’s nest clutch bags. Whether they were hers or just petty cash was not of the least interest to Isabella, as she gaily paid for lunch for sixteen, snorting with laughter as she unscrunched the cash from various pockets and purses.
‘There goes the whole budget for this month. God, I’m naughty.’
She developed a talent for talent. She found marvellous photographers, beautiful girls, fey Etonians, Philip Treacy and finally Alexander McQueen, at which point she became extremely grand, which was perhaps a mistake, because even though she was credited with all these discoveries, she was not Christopher Columbus. In fact, she was living in a world that didn’t particularly appreciate her medieval value system or aesthetic. The age of chivalry was over, and so Isabella lived on a knife edge, always homeless, or about to be evicted, always broke but addicted to spending. In the nineteenth century she would have ended her days in a debtors’ prison. In the twenty-first the final act was played out in an asylum.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Going Mad on the National Health
One beautiful spring afternoon in 2007 I was on my way to visit Issie in a run-down National Health mental institution somewhere in Victoria, the name of which eludes me. (In fact, I went to look for it the other day, and got lost and confused in that maze of identical mansion blocks behind the cathedral, streets of madness, one leading back into another, until I finally gave up the search. Maybe it disappeared with Isabella, a fortress in a myth where the spell had been broken.) It was one of those large ugly hangovers of nineteenth-century health, built in smog-caked yellow brick that reminded one of iron lungs, padded cells, polio and sleepy sickness. If you shut your eyes, you could still hear the screams of the insane as they were pinned down and subjected to those gigantic charges of electricity that Isabella had become partial to. (Now, they give them to you when you are unconscious. Then, it took four people to hold a patient down.)
The hospital overlooked a small park, which was sandwiched between the backs of three streets. It was throbbing with spring that day. Beds of daffodils and red tulips swayed in the breeze on the freshly mown lawn. Builders sprawled on the grass drinking beer, half naked and paint-splattered. Secretaries ate sandwiches in little neat groups. Mothers sat on benches dozing with an eye half open as their kids played in the sun.
It was the first hot day, and we all looked like ghosts, emerging from another dark wet winter. There is nothing like that first warm afternoon in spring in London. There was a palpable release of tension in the air, as if the earth was yawning and stretching, its grassy breath dusty and metallic perhaps, but elixir to us Londoners, weaned on exhaust fumes and rain. I sat down on a bench and closed my eyes. I had been out all night and was toxic and exhausted. The muted roar of the traffic, the screams of delighted children, and the sun bringing my dead skin back to life, lulled me into a trance from which I suddenly woke to find the park empty.
Hours must have gone by because the shadows had grown long. A girl in high heels stalked across the grass, singing. She held a bouquet of flowers in her arms and disappeared inside the hospital. Perhaps it was Posh Spice visiting La Blow. You never knew with Isabella. I looked up at the dirty Gothic windows of the asylum and couldn’t help smiling at the thought. Somewhere in there, dressed for a beggars’ ball, lipstick smeared across her mouth and teeth, sat Isabella, wondering already if all this was real or an illusion, when suddenly Posh Spice spins into the room.
I girded myself but remained rooted to my bench. Isabella was recovering from another half-hearted suicide attempt. A few weeks ago she had thrown herself from a bridge onto the moto
rway, breaking both ankles in the process, but still, unfortunately, very much alive.
‘Actually it was a footbridge,’ corrected Nicky Haslam, who always knew about these things. We were having lunch when the news broke. ‘According to Detmar, she held onto the railings as she jumped, so she only slid actually, if you want the real truth. She wouldn’t have broken her feet if she hadn’t been wearing silly heels.’
Nicky never had much time for her. Either way it was not the first time that Isabella had tried to kill herself.
One evening, a year earlier, she had taken a Condé Nast car and ploughed in it through a stormy night with a bemused driver, whom she entertained on the drive with her whole life’s story, including, rather imprudently, its planned grand finale, to Cheshire, in order to drown herself in the lake of her childhood home. (Isabella’s sense of drama was always impeccable. It was in this very lake that her only brother had drowned forty years previously.) Exhausted by the journey, she booked into a hotel, giving the driver enough time to alert the police. So that attempt was thwarted, as she was dragged to a police car and hauled off to another rehab. But the cards were on the table. Isabella wanted to be taken seriously, even if she wasn’t quite serious herself. Everyone was held to ransom.
Then she tried again, but this time she crashed her car into the back of an ambulance and was rushed straight to hospital. It may have been an unlucky throw in Snakes and Ladders, but she got the maximum mileage from it (if not from the car, which was totalled). She had us all eating out of the palm of her hand. She was mesmerising in her madness, sweeter and funnier than she had ever been before, brutally honest or dishonest, depending on the occasion, or on how mad she was feeling.
That madness looked like acting to me. Perhaps I have a warped view, but once you become an actor, a strange thing happens. Everything begins to look like acting. Isabella’s had gone out of control. She had nurtured the mad streak inside herself and now it had swamped her. Life became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t mean that Isabella didn’t have serious issues to combat. She did. She was abandoned by her evil father from beyond the grave, which was a terrible trick, but the drama she made of the calamity, the Chekhovian heroine she delightedly created out of it, corseted, deranged, was sheer theatre. This performance electrified us all, at dinner tables, at fashion week, in taxis, or in a sleepless night ill-advisedly sharing a bed, as she rabbited on until dawn, dressed in couture riddled with cigarette burns, hat fixed askew, mad with boredom.
‘I’m so bored I’m going to shoot myself.’
Bang. She shot herself in the foot. Time after time. She had a brilliant capacity to describe her condition. ‘I think I turned the colour up too high on the TV and the knob broke.’ The picture flared, blurred and compressed into a kaleidoscope of horrific images, like homelessness, that spiralled slowly into each other, as she watched speechless (some hope) through the eyepiece. Equally, when Alexander McQueen did not invite her to go with him to Givenchy as his official muse, her operatic reaction to the scandal made it impossible for her ever to turn back. Doors slammed behind her as she ran towards her doom, like Caroline Lamb, stalking the ballrooms of Mayfair, cutting her wrists in front of everyone and getting amazing attention from it.
Now she was addicted to electric shock treatment and, for a while, each time she had it she was briefly rendered functional. High and jangly, perhaps, charged, literally, with electricity, but she clattered on, rushing out, organising trips and dinners. The batteries soon wore out, and she broke down again. The bridge came after the latest power cut.
I got up and walked into the hospital. Two wide corridors stretched in each direction, with custard walls and old pink lino. A large stone staircase wrapped around a central hall, and behind a desk a large moody nurse read Heat magazine.
‘I’m looking for the John Carruthers Ward.’ My weedy public-school voice echoed through the asylum.
‘This way. I’ll show you,’ said a voice from above. It was Posh, leaning over the balustrade.
The gigantic lady looked at her sceptically. ‘You should be back in your ward.’ Her voice echoed up the stairwell.
‘Relax. I’m here, innit,’ said Posh.
The nurse grunted and went back to her magazine. ‘Follow her,’ she instructed and continued reading.
‘Who you here for?’ asked Posh without looking round, in a thrilling adenoidal twang.
‘I’m looking for my friend Isabella.’
‘Oh yeah? Well, you’ve come to the right place.’
We climbed three floors and I followed her through some swing doors into another dirty corridor. On either side large windows revealed grim dormitories of two or three beds, lockers and a sink. A vague smell of lunch, cabbage and mince, hung in the air. Posh walked me to another Checkpoint Charlie and peeled off without a word. I didn’t need to ask the new nurse for directions, because at that moment Isabella appeared at the end of the corridor on crutches.
‘Oh my God, I don’t believe it. Rupey, what are you doing here?’ she shrieked.
‘I’m checking in. Been feeling a bit edgy recently.’
‘God, well, you’ve come to the right place, hasn’t he, nurse? We’re all very edgy here.’
She limped slowly towards me, dressed as an extra from Les Mis. Her hair was dyed black and cut short. She was hatless for once and her eyes were, finally, smashed plates. She loved the effect it was having on me and laughter gurgled up from inside her as we hugged.
‘I’m dying for a fag. Do you want one?’
‘Not really.’
‘Good. Let’s go to the smoking room then.’
She swung down the corridor past a table where a large clammy young man sat.
‘Give me a hug,’ he said in a dreary monotone.
‘Oh God!’ Isabella rolled her eyes. ‘You’d better do it. He goes ballistic otherwise. Only once, OK? Rupey’s a film star and he has to hug people all day.’
He humbly nodded and then clung to me for what seemed like an eternity. Isabella began to laugh.
‘OK, that’s enough, you two,’ she said and tried to prise us apart but the boy held on tight.
‘Oh God!’ giggled Isabella. ‘Nurse! Ray won’t let go of Rupey.’
‘Yes I will,’ said Ray sheepishly as the nurse strode purposefully towards us from her post. She looked fairly steely and even I shrank back. Maybe she would hose us down, but no such luck.
‘Be good, now, Ray,’ she reasoned, instead. ‘I’m sure they’ll let you go with them, if you Be-Have. Won’t you, Isabella?’
‘God, yuh.’ For the first time I could see the head girl in her. ‘Come on, Ray,’ she said. We limped on with our new friend shuffling behind.
‘Can I have another hug?’
Issie turned and looked at me, eyes glittering with merriment. ‘Darling, I know. It’s Bedlam.’
I don’t know what they had filled her up with but she was like the Merry Widow that afternoon, jangly and intense, a mad grinning puppet.
We settled down in a room with a few armchairs and a TV. On the floor was a gigantic ashtray full of cigarette ends next to a bowl of fruit. Isabella quickly lit up.
‘Rupey, could you get me some drugs?’ she asked gaily, through a cloud of smoke.
‘Not really. Why?’
‘I’ve got to kill myself before the end of this week.’ She might have been talking about a planned visit to Peter Jones.
‘Couldn’t you hold off for a bit?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so, no. And as you see, one can’t even throw oneself out of the windows here.’
They were covered with chickenwire. She honked with laughter, watching my confusion like a parrot, her face cocked to one side, making strange clicking noises through her nostrils.
‘Would you like a coffee? Only Ness, I’m afraid.’
Posh stalked in and sat down. She handed Issie two packets of cigarettes.
‘God, thanks. I’m just making some coffee. Want some?’
; ‘Could you pay me now? I’m right out of cash,’ demanded Posh.
Isabella seemed mesmerised by this ice queen, now decked out in après-ski with a headband and gigantic dark glasses covered in fingerprints. Issie’s nervous hands were like two sand crabs with black claws, crawling from their holes. They scuttled through her bag and extracted a fifty-pound note, which Posh immediately snatched and snapped into her own purse.
‘I haven’t got any change,’ she said, meeting Isabella’s adoring gaze with a challenging glare. Isabella looked wistfully for a moment as another fifty disappeared. Then she laughed. The one she did when she caught someone out. The quacks of a duck taking off. Wha-wha-wha!
‘This is Yaz. Wha-wha-wha.’ We shook hands. ‘Yaz is my assistant. Aren’t you, darling?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I saw you in the park,’ I said.
‘I saw you.’
‘It’s good that you can come and go like that.’
‘She can’t!’ accused Yaz flatly, pointing at Isabella like a robot.
‘I’m the worst case they’ve ever had, Rupey,’ nodded Isabella modestly.
‘She can go out because she’s not that mad. She’s really together, aren’t you, Yaz?’
‘Oh yeah,’ replied Yaz lazily, and they giggled like evil schoolgirls, lighting up new cigarettes from the stumps of their burning butts.
‘She’s got her own company and everything,’ continued Issie, as smoke belched from their collective funnels.
Vanished Years Page 23
