Royals

by Emma Forrest

  ‘She’s fine. I want to go and see her.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Do you want your dad to drive you?’

  I looked at her like she was insane and she seemed to remember, just then, that I had recently been released from hospital and what for and by whom.

  ‘I can come with you?’

  ‘I’m all right by myself.’

  And I really had been, all right by myself. I’d got by. But there was this secret little flame, this ember in my heart of wanting someone to talk to, someone I chose and who chose me back, someone who wasn’t family, who wasn’t tied to me by blood and duty. I’d kept it small for years but now it was spreading around my body. I felt it in my tummy and my brain like an arsonist had been on a street-to-street spree. This could not be contained. Not without a fight. And I was too injured to fight.

  I tried her number every fifteen minutes.

  ‘Well! I’ve been waiting for you to call! I thought you didn’t like me.’

  ‘I like you. I called you a few times.’

  ‘I was at my shop. Are you coming over then, or should I come to your atelier?’

  I looked around the room. My brothers’ wet soccer kit was hanging off the radiator, the newspaper open to page three, there was a half-eaten cheese sandwich on the sideboard that had given up on any sort of an ending and was just lying there, disconsolate.

  ‘I’ll come to you.’

  It was pissing with rain as I waited at the bus stop and then, by the time the bus arrived, the sun was out. One of those London weather days when you just want to throw up your hands and say, ‘What do you want from me? What are your needs? My needs are: I don’t want to carry three cardigans, a cagoule and a pair of fucking shorts every time I leave the house.’

  I did carry a load of fabrics on the bus, tipped at angles as I tried not to bother my fellow passengers with them or, even worse, encourage conversation. I desperately wanted a friend, but not one on a bus. I know that sounds snotty from someone who’d just made a friend in a hospital, but still. Transport befriending is a rancid idea. Thankfully, they were a sullen bunch. I got some dirty looks and some interest and that’s how it’s continued for the rest of my life, if I’m honest. That thirty-eight-minute bus ride was every response I’d ever elicit, encapsulated within one double-decker.

  I rode at the top, moving forwards when a seat became available to fantasise that I was ‘driving’ the bus. This was a happy memory I had with my mum from childhood, driving the bus, her as my co-pilot. But when I fact-checked it, I found it was actually my father who’d been sitting beside me.

  I got off where Jasmine had told me, right after a bookshop but before the laundromat. The laundromat threw me, that they had one in her neighbourhood at all. I peered in, and it looked like a regular laundromat with people no different from my mum, looking at their clothes and wishing they were less dirty, like their lives. But it was surrounded on all sides by things that weren’t part of our neighbourhood: fancy wine shops, rare-book shops, boutique clothing stores, florists with bouquets that looked like jewellery, jewellers with diamonds clustered on chokers like flowers.

  I turned left at the appointed red letterbox, picturing myself sitting on top of it, like Peter Cook in Bedazzled, which I’d watched with my mum but, when I fact-checked again, it was my dad roaring with laughter beside me on the settee. Mum was looking in from the kitchen as she made bananas and custard, smiling at us.

  I checked the address and knocked on the door. I waited and waited and grew anxious, more anxious than I already was, so anxious that when I fact-checked again, my memory of watching Bedazzled with my parents was this:

  Dad guffawed at the leaping nuns. Mum brought us our bananas and custard and Dad took one bite of his, said it was disgusting, pushed back the coffee table and stormed out of the house. As he left, she said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ and he said, ‘It’s lumpy. If you’re going to make it, do it properly, don’t be so bloody lazy.’ Then we watched the rest of the film in silence while she silently cried and I kissed her shoulder. He didn’t reappear until morning. I was upset she was upset, but pleased I got to sleep in her bed with her.

  Finally, I heard footsteps in the distance, snapping me out of the ugly memory and back to the lovely street on which I was standing, wisteria creeping from windows and Neighbourhood Watch signs on gates. A middle-aged dog was in the arms of a middle-aged woman and they were both dressed in small fluffy jackets. It would have been the idiom about people and their dogs looking alike, but their faces were very different and I wasn’t sure if I felt impressed or depressed that she’d tried so hard. I saw a young nanny leading her charges while wearing a pair of kitten heels and she didn’t look off kilter at all and I started to badly doubt myself on everything. When it comes to clothes, being a true believer can elevate your confidence, but it can also really fuck up your day. Thank G-d, the door finally opened.

  By this point, I’d decided it would be a butler, an intimidating butler like the one in Sunset Boulevard who turns out to be her ex-husband. But it was just Jasmine, all alone with five floors to herself. There was no trace whatsoever of her hospital ordeal. Her dark hair was up in a bun and, with it sitting high like that, I could see traces of copper at the temples, like someone who’d been playing a lot of tennis in the sun. Her arms were covered by the sleeves of a billowing kaftan, white with gold and blue embroidery round the square neck. Everyone who knows me knows how I feel about blue and gold and they know, obviously, how I feel about square necklines. I almost fainted with pleasure but it might just have been the weight of the fabrics I was carrying.

  ‘Hi!’ she cooed. ‘You made it! I was just upstairs making Spanish eggs. Do you want some?’

  She pulled me up the stairs. I remember it as physical pulling, but truth was she had more of a gravitational pull.

  ‘Go on, let me feed you. Oh, good, you brought your fabrics. Oh, wow, this is going to be fun.’

  And then she tried to put them down in the remnants of her egg murder, but I intervened. The dish itself looked tasty, scrambled with tomato and spinach and served on a porcelain plate. She’d just raised a forkful of it to my mouth, when she said, ‘Do you want to see the house?’

  I took the biggest bite I could and followed her up the next flight, leaving behind the chef’s kitchen with a big enough centre block to stage a burlesque performance on, knives, colanders and exotic equipment hanging down from overhead like gallery spectators.

  There seemed to be a living room on every level and each floor smelled of something new. This floor of patchouli, the next of Fracas perfume, the third of incense, the last of candles and then cannabis at the very top. The windows were almost floor to ceiling and they hugged the curves of the wall like drunks. In the centre of each was a built-in bench covered in cushions on which a real-life drunk could lie back and let the grand view spin.

  Every now and then, a cat would appear and at first I thought it was the same one moving really fast, but then I noticed each had a slightly different placement of dots on its ears, like how a child’s flipogram booklet works to make a still image seem like it’s moving.

  Notting Hill was a conundrum. Here we were, in a listed mansion, yet I could see real people outside the window, shopping bags splitting, families splitting.

  We reached her bedroom, which was painted pistachio with dusky rose trim. There was crown moulding on the ceilings, which were so high that you could let go of a helium balloon and have time to kiss before it reached the top. I know because she told me. She told me everything, like I imagined an American would.

  How many lovers she’d had. Who had been the best. When the best time was for a woman to have sex. She had a lot of opinions, mainly about me, and she wanted to be involved. It’s like she’d taken out a flag and stuck it in my chest. It’s really hard to say ‘no’ to someone who has a brass claw-foot bathtub in the middle of their bedroom.

  ‘I’ll bathe you and then I’ll feed you properly.’

&nb
sp; I watched in silence as she poured various tinctures into the tub. Who takes a bath in the daytime? People with time on their hands and depressives, I can tell you, with a life of experience behind me now. But I was a teenager. I didn’t know anything. She was so peppy, she could have poured herself under the running tap and been the bubble bath. I didn’t know that people who are always happy are the ones you have to watch.

  ‘You didn’t get enough to eat. Does your mum make you matzo brei?’

  ‘She doesn’t really make Jewish food. We don’t talk about Jewish things or even go to Temple unless somebody dies.’

  ‘Oh really, who was the last person?’

  ‘My grandfather. Who was your last person?’

  She started to strip off her clothes, undoing the sash on her kaftan and lifting it above her head. Her body, in its white cotton underwear, was sensational. White cotton knickers don’t sound chic, but hers were the thinnest pointelle, like you’d expect a Cuban baby to wear as a onesie on hot nights. Lots of little tiny perforations letting her tan skin breathe. Coco Chanel popularised tans to show that one had leisure time and was therefore upper class. It remained instantly effective on a drizzly day in London.

  ‘The last funeral I went to? My mother.’

  ‘Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘But she was a wonderful mother.’

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said, ‘Poor Diana doesn’t get on with her mum at all. You know that, right?’

  ‘It’s probably better that way. That way, when they pop their clogs, it doesn’t leave you so gutted.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Mmm, fifteen. Yes. I remember because my father had moved out of home the year before.’

  ‘Moved out of home?’

  ‘Left us.’

  ‘Shit.’

  She pulled down her knickers and got into the steaming bath.

  ‘Darling, it was so shit. But… life goes on and here we are!’

  She sounded like my mother, who wouldn’t tell any of the bad stories from our history. And there were so many of them. All of them were sealed off, though some wormed their way to the surface, like whack-a-mole. She’d slam down and that was it, not to be discussed. But something would always pop up, somewhere.

  I wanted to know, just like I wanted to know how it was her mother had died. I waited for her to tell me, but when she didn’t I had to let it go. This was before the internet. You couldn’t sleuth out someone’s background. They were allowed to keep secrets until they felt like sharing.

  ‘Are you getting in, then?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, immediately. She looked at me.

  ‘I’ll wait until you’re done.’

  ‘I’m looking at you askance.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m not having a bath with you. We just met.’ The last person I’d had a bath with was one of my brothers. I was probably five and he’d shoved a peeling rubber duck between my buttocks. He already knew. The memory rising to the surface, I turned around, took off my clothes, took a big breath, faced her, and got in.

  I don’t think I’ve ever since done anything so strange and so glamorous as having a bath, in a bedroom, with a girl, in the middle of the day, oak trees beyond the window, and beyond the oak trees, people going about their business. It wasn’t that time stood still, it’s that we seemed to be in a parallel universe.

  Whatever it was she’d added to the running water, my muscles, still warped from the beating, started to unwind. My mind, tight from eighteen years in Bow, started to soften and expand. I could see it before me, a miniature sponge thrown in a tub that slowly unfurls to become a star or butterfly.

  She said she’d bathe me and she did, scrubbing my back and flicking a washcloth behind my ears. While my mind expanded, my penis shrunk into the form of a sleeping cat, curled up, content and semi-lifeless. I was relieved.

  She looked at me and smiled. ‘I’m so glad you came over!’

  It occurred to me later that she may have wanted me to wash her too. I just wasn’t there yet. We dried ourselves in huge towels that she told me her dad had brought back from a Turkish hammam. After she’d moisturised with an oil that smelled of tuberose regret and which stained the towel like a scratch-and-sniff Turin shroud, she put on her pyjamas – right there, in the middle of the day!

  ‘I got these pyjamas from the Paris flea market. Nineteen forties’ dead stock. When I take you there, we’re going to have to allocate a day to the flea market, make a battle plan before we get there of which stalls we’re going to hit first, and then stay really focused. Otherwise, you get overwhelmed by the choice and come home with a Dior suit that’s too small, three wicker chairs and a porcelain dildo. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She had a cigarette and then she wanted to work on her dress.

  She was short, not like a model at all, but it only made her body more amazing. All the lengths were just right. Out of the bath, I got to look properly.

  ‘Do I turn you on?’ she asked.

  ‘Does everything have to be about sex?’

  ‘Everything is about sex. Take you and me, for example. We see that the other is very attractive, but we aren’t going to fuck because we’re of different sexual orientations. So what do we do with that undeniably sexual excess energy? We make art! Or, rather, you make art. I just inspire it. Do you want to see my bum?’

  She turned around. I blinked, because I don’t think I’d been asked that since I’d ridden the bus with my toddler cousin ten years ago. I said what I said to him: ‘No!’ but I felt what I felt with him: ‘Yes. I do. I didn’t know until you asked me but now, yes.’

  He showed it to me on the bus and that’s one of the first times my dad walloped me. I’d inspired the behaviour, you see. I’d been a muse, in my way, as Jasmine hoped to be to me. But now we were free. There was no one here to chastise me. There was no way I could get hurt.

  She pulled down her pyjama bottoms. ‘There.’ Then she lifted off her top. ‘Bonus tit!’ She put the top back on, what the Americans call a wife-beater, a term, for obvious reasons, I could never warm to. ‘I think, with design, you need to have something concealed to really make clear what you’re revealing elsewhere. That’s my bum. How should we dress it?’

  I felt like I was in a life-drawing class. I tried to take it seriously and not giggle. ‘I’d like an A-line skirt in gold…’

  ‘Unconvinced.’

  I picked up one of my fabric rolls and wound it around her.

  ‘In pleats of very light chiffon.’

  ‘Convinced!’

  She sucked in her stomach and turned forty-five degrees towards the full-length mirror, whose glass was framed by Baroque angels.

  ‘Well, you’re easily won over.’

  I pulled a cord of golden rope around her waist then removed it because it was too Wonder Woman and, if I ever invoke a superhero through my designs, I prefer it be via their human alter ego.

  ‘I trust you. Do you think I invite anyone into my home, let alone my bath? Just anyone that I strip off for?’

  In truth, that’s exactly what I thought. I could see a ghost chorus of near strangers she’d invited in, traipsing up all those flights of stairs, lying across the kitchen table on their backs, blind drunk, pulling the chain on the loo, passing out beside her. But I was happy to be wrong, and I kept it to myself.

  ‘Do you think your shop might be a good venue for my clothes?’ I asked, and she shook her head so quickly I immediately added, ‘One day… when I’m more established?’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s not the aesthetic at all.’ She ruffled my hair, an absurd gesture from a teen a year older than me. ‘Really. Come by one day. You’ll see. You wouldn’t feel right there.’

  I was hurt because, it was her shop, her aesthetic. Was our taste so different, and if so, why had she asked me to make her a dress?

  When the sky turned the shaky streaked red of a cheap cocktail, my hurt dissipated. We lay on velve
t sofas in the upstairs living room and turned on the TV. Trevor MacDonald told us, in his sonorous baritone, that Charles and Diana continued their honeymoon, moving on to the Greek island of Hydra.

  Jasmine mixed a drink and lit a spliff.

  ‘Do you worry about Diana?’ I asked.

  ‘In what way?’

  There were actual gold flakes in the drink she made me, which was served in a shot glass with ‘Las Vegas, Nevada’ printed on the side.

  ‘That she is so much younger than him? He’s her first love. Have you been to Las Vegas?’

  ‘My dad has.’ She drank her shot. ‘I don’t think she loves him at all.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Look at him. Would you?’

  ‘Maybe. Why not? I think he’s elegant. He likes gardening.’

  My mum would be putting dinner on.

  ‘And that’s your big sell on a partner. They like gardening?’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Do you garden with them? No. They do it alone.’

  ‘That’s okay. Maybe it’s like a therapy session where you don’t just feel better for talking, you see a literal outcome. Every day. You manifest beauty.’

  I thought about my mum bent over her embroidery after one of Dad’s bad patches.

  Jasmine was unconvinced. ‘A devotion to gardening means he’ll always be able to get away from her. Have his private time to think all alone.’

  ‘That seems like a good thing.’

  ‘No. We’re meant to be around other humans. We shouldn’t be alone.’

  The ghost chorus yawned from the billiard table, their past midnight wins ricocheting across green felt. There is no game I am good at. Not even solitaire.

  ‘That isn’t what you said before. You said even honeymoons should be taken separately.’

  ‘I said no such thing!’