Royals

by Emma Forrest

  I didn’t fight her, even though she had. ‘Okay, I guess I just don’t know enough of them I want to be around,’ I said.

  ‘You should get out more.’

  ‘But I like being by myself.’

  ‘You’re here with me.’

  ‘Yes, but I feel like we’re alone, together.’

  ‘Well, that’s certainly not why I asked you to hang out.’

  The shot had made me feel funny, my chest so relaxed it felt too relaxed, an unzipped tote bag on the Tube. I might never see her again (I mean really, a girl from the hospital ward, it was amazing we’d met up this once). So I asked her, ‘You have your own ideas about clothes. And about art. And architecture and… so many things. Everything you say is interesting. But you can’t really do anything with your ideas if you don’t ever want to be alone.’

  ‘Well, we’re yin and yang like that. You stay stuffed up in your bedroom; I go out too much. What are you gonna do?’ she asked, raising her arms. Jewish slang from an upper-class goyish mouth is as confusing as porcelain fruit in the middle of the dinner table. My mum would have laid the place mats by now. My brothers would be hiding in the TV room so they wouldn’t have to help. Maybe I would see her again.

  I tried to press a little more.

  ‘Don’t you want something for yourself? Something to keep that’s just yours and that you can only get done alone?’

  ‘No. That sounds horrid.’

  I understood, much later, that, of course, for someone like her, when you’re by yourself, the bad feelings come, and with them, if not interrupted, the bad thoughts come. And that if you don’t get interrupted, you can end up acting on them.

  She would often read books during our time together, but she’d always have to keep reading passages out loud. She used her boom box, like Debbie Harry in the music video for ‘Rapture’. She needed to know you knew the words, too, that you had the same song in your brain, looping from her mind to yours in a figure of eight.

  ‘Face to face. Sadly solitude,’ she sang from her sofa.

  ‘Twenty-four-hour shopping in Rapture,’ I called back, from mine.

  Debbie Harry was the polar opposite blonde to our royal blonde: fiercely independent, confident, too old, too experienced, really, for the pop game she was in. I wondered if Diana had the tune stuck in her head like the rest of us, if she knew the words off by heart even if she didn’t know what the words meant. Maybe someone spun it at the after-party for her wedding.

  ‘Maybe Fab Five Freddie played their wedding reception and the papers just didn’t get that salient detail,’ she said, ‘because they didn’t know how important he was. And even if the marriage is a sham – which, my love, it is – she got to dance to that at her party.’

  ‘Maybe under the poofy dress,’ I continued for her, ‘like, he whipped it off, Bucks Fizz-style, and underneath was a very sleek forties-style bodysuit. So she could really dance and let loose.’

  Jasmine’s face was flush with enthusiasm for my vision. ‘Afterwards her hair would hang down instead of the winged updo, fall like Debbie’s around her cheekbones.’

  ‘Yeah. In her bedroom, afterwards.’

  ‘But Charles would be waiting in the bedroom,’ she said, darkly.

  ‘I don’t want to know!’ I cried.

  ‘I bet she didn’t want to know, but it’s true. And then…’

  Jasmine crept towards me. She started humping me from behind. No one had done that to me before, not ever, and though she was the wrong gender, I instantly got an erection. I had to tuck it away and waddle off and thus, the action replay of Charles and Diana’s wedding night led to our first truly awkward silence. She looked politely away while I rearranged myself.

  But she was never able to be polite for very long. ‘Well. Now that’s happened, you may as well stay the night.’

  I called my mum, who sounded almost as excited as on the day of the royal wedding. I was relieved not to eat her lonely broccoli tonight. Part of me thought how well her half-moon nails would go with all the emerald velvet in this house and wished she was here with me. Part of me felt ecstatic she was not.

  ‘Debbie Harry is so beautiful,’ Jasmine whispered as she started to get sleepy, ‘that if I ever saw her walk into a room, I would need to stand up and applaud.’

  Then her eyes closed and I looked around the room at all the other beautiful things: the flowers, the vases. The clothes that hung outside the wardrobe instead of inside so she could fall asleep looking at them. The pastel satin hangers themselves. The dress I made her would become part of this parade of well-wishers. The only ugly things that were treasured in the house were gifts her dad picked up at duty free.

  All around her, beauty was cheering her on. Keeping beautiful things alive was keeping her alive: the flowers were all well tended and had bloomed at the right time. The herbs were healthy specimens. The roses in the Wedgwood vase were the half-moon fingernails my mum looked at three times a day when she did the washing up. The pursuit of beauty can be vapid but it isn’t meaningless.

  The only place I’d seen this done before was in working-class homes – my aunties’– where the lack of storage space meant the most precious things were on permanent display. But at their house, you looked at impeccable porcelain plates while eating from cracked plastic ones. Here, every good thing was always in rotation.

  The toothpaste, I noticed, was the colour and flavour of Parma violets. I could not imagine it quelling decay, but the tube was silver with cherubs on it and a label from an Italian pharmacy.

  I napped on the sofa on the third floor. I felt quite distant from her, after having shared the bath hours earlier. But she’d covered me with a down quilt of such luxuriance you’d offer it to a child prince. One floor up, Jasmine slept in a bed with the boxed urns of two dead cats, plus two live cats, and a book I examined when I went to up to see her an hour or so later.

  ‘If it’s wrong to go to sleep each night with the remains of your dead cats and a copy of Cold Comfort Farm, I don’t want to be right.’ She yawned. ‘You can borrow that, by the way.’

  Uncomfortable, I picked up the urn. She started to laugh. ‘The book, not the cat!’

  ‘Oh. Good. Thank you.’

  I put it in my bag.

  ‘Are you leaving?’

  I thought about the long bus ride back, balancing the fabrics, hoping to incite neither abuse nor conversation. But clubs would be locking up, the drunks would be getting on about now and the ‘driver’s’ seat at the top would be taken by a couple whose furious snogging would remain immune to the glares of six old people and one teenage boy.

  ‘No. Not unless you want me to. I suppose I should be going?’ I was checking. I wasn’t really confident of anything, except my talent, which I also suspected might be a mistake.

  ‘Come lie down with me. I won’t bite.’

  She put the novel in her mouth and pretended to gnash it.

  I lay down, telling her, ‘I’m not sure why I feel so shy after I’ve seen you naked, got an awkward erection, bathed together and had you scrub me down.’

  She yawned. ‘Because sleep is so private, you can have just had sex with someone, been inside them or had them inside you, and then you separate and, even if you don’t roll to the other side of the bed, even if you’re spooning, you still go to your own world and leave them behind.’

  Because I hadn’t had sex, I said, ‘There’s a ceremony to break the Sabbath, the idea being it’s really hard to leave the world of the spiritual for the challenge of being earthbound. It’s meant to ease you between those worlds and I always think of it when I’m waking up.’

  I lay over the cover as she lay under it, staring straight up at the ceiling, whose crown moulding was grape vines dipped in lavender. I’d been wide awake and nervous but now, staring into the lavender grapes, I felt sleepy again.

  ‘This is cosy.’

  ‘Yes, linen sheets for summer, brushed wool for winter. My mother taught me that.’

&
nbsp; I turned to her, propping myself on one elbow. ‘Not satin?’

  Now she propped herself on an elbow, facing me like a mirror far more beautiful than the object it’s reflecting. ‘Oh how horrid! No, never satin, it doesn’t feel good, neither does silk. That Hugh Hefner nonsense is a poor person’s idea of how rich people live.’

  I bristled. ‘That’s me, I guess.’

  ‘Yes, since I’ve met you I thought how much you remind me of Hef.’ She could be dry as a cat’s tongue. ‘And when you do get rich, trust me, you must have linen on every bed in each room of your house.’

  ‘I’ll only need two rooms. One for me and one for my mum.’

  She got out of bed and took off her pyjama top.

  ‘And you’ll have a lover and they might be a nuisance, so give them their own room.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The word ‘lover’ made me feel embarrassed. But I felt embarrassed a lot. I waited for her to replace her pyjama top with something else – I could see in my peripheral vision a lovely mohair cardigan – but she remained topless.

  ‘And you’ll likely want a work space in your home, even just for noodling around.’

  ‘Okay. So that’s three sets of linen.’

  ‘Have a daybed in your studio because some of the best ideas come lying down. But that could just be some velvet fainting-couch situation.’

  I stayed on the bed, the better to focus on my fantasy future. ‘I’d like it to be teal.’

  ‘Yes,’ she pondered. ‘Or maybe duck-egg blue. So how’s it going to happen, then? Have you made a plan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, you just sit in your parents’ house and the women of Paris flock to your living room while you’re all watching Match of the Day?’

  ‘I don’t watch Match of the Day. That’s when I go to the library.’

  ‘So they’ll all find you in the library and whisper, so as not to raise the ire of the librarian, “May we have our gowns please? You can fit us behind this bookcase…”’

  ‘Yeah yeah, and here’s a million pounds.’

  ‘A million pounds is not very much. You can’t live on a million for very long. I think you should be aiming higher. Are you going to be like Vivienne, you come out of a movement?’

  ‘I suppose so?’

  ‘There’s no movement left to come out of. You need to go to art school.’

  All of this was in her bed and I rolled further from her as I confessed the truth, until I was practically hanging off the edge. ‘The best one, I reckon, is Saint Martin’s.’

  ‘Well, obviously, darling, where had you been planning, the London College of Toilets? There’s nowhere for you to go but Saint Martin’s. May I read your application letter? I know that sounds pushy but I’m a Capricorn, I’m going to have to get quite involved.’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘Right, well, we can do that tomorrow. I believe you’ll need to submit sketches and several pieces. So you’ll finish making mine and you’ll have to do one or two more. When’s the deadline?’

  She was making it all sound very real and I was starting to feel myself sweat against the linen. I’d like a ranking of fashion designers, according to who sweats the most as they work and who the least and then compare to the fabrics they lean into. I’ll bet you the most prodigious sweater leans heavily into silk with their designs.

  ‘Is the deadline coming up?’ she asked, as my mind continued to accelerate. I went to the bathroom and ran my hands under the tap. The taps were gold. The sink was marble. My face was still bruised. The poor people were still visible beyond the oak trees. What was I doing here?

  As if sensing I might be considering making my excuses, she appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Don’t go home.’ She could tell. ‘Not yet. You can have your own bedroom. I don’t know why you slept on the sofa. Stay. There’s so much more fun to be had.’

  There’s always more fun to be had. She said it with the edge of a hard worker, someone who would power through the difficult uphill part of their jog to get back onto flat land and pretty views.

  ‘Don’t you have to go to work?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t have to,’ she said. ‘I can take a day off.’

  But the people beyond the oak trees had sealed it. I missed my mum. I really did want to go home.

  ‘I won’t ask about Saint Martin’s again today. I can see it made you nervous.’

  ‘No, it didn’t, no worries,’ I said, wrapping up my fabric rolls. ‘I just think my mum will really be worrying.’

  She seemed so thrown by the memory of matriarchal anxiety, as if it were a country she’d definitely visited because the stamp was in her passport, but she had no memories of it. In a bit of a tizzy, Jasmine started pulling things out of drawers.

  ‘Wait! Do you want to see a picture of a female lion?’

  I paused, confused. ‘Okay.’ She showed me the picture. It was a shoot from Paris Vogue. The lion was wearing beautiful gold chains with lions on them.

  ‘I don’t think the lion much likes that.’

  Jasmine looked genuinely crestfallen, as if she’d automatically assumed that the lion, like a reasonable human, would love to wear solid gold chains depicting herself.

  I tried to backpedal. ‘Animals don’t like being dressed up for the camera. How sad chimps always look on TV sitcoms. But maybe she does.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Chimps on TV sitcoms look sad because sitcoms are sad. Why do you have to think of the sad things?’

  ‘I think, maybe, I’m naturally quite a sad person. I agree with you about sitcoms. But that’s not how everybody else sees them. So maybe you’re as sad as me.’

  ‘Well, that’s nonsense. Nobody has to be that way. I’m a happy person. You’re just not trying hard enough to be happy.’

  But she knew. Because she was one. Because she tried twenty-four hours a day. Only sleep gave respite from trying to fill every corner of her heart and mind with joie de vivre. I looked at her and thought, if I still know you ten years from now, you’re going to look older than me, because you’re wearing yourself ragged with your joie de vivre.

  The sadness had made Jasmine very sleepy and she was out within minutes. As soon as she fell asleep, I took the opportunity to snoop, something I did even in my own home. But this house had five floors to explore. The best room was the library. There was a section about classical Arabic music, histories of Polynesian peoples, a big shelf just for travel writing. The editions of Debrett’s seemed silly in this context, but maybe you can care about both: the history of Polynesian tribes and your place in the social strata. Maybe it was the same thing.

  I lay on my stomach, looking at atlases, my happy place, alone, but with someone within shouting distance. She just needed a rest. In the morning, she’d wake up brave again. And if she didn’t, would I like her less? I feared the answer might be ‘yes’, that I was coward enough for one person.

  I could see, quite clearly, why Victorian gothic centres around grand homes. You could go mad here.

  The huge rug on which I lay was embroidered with flowers, like my mum liked to do, but these were exotic blooms, woven, I suppose, by exotic peoples a long, long time ago. Before we ended up under the grey skies of the East End, watching Match of the Day in the TV room, my family was an exotic tribe from a faraway land.

  I’d been so busy climbing the rolling library ladder, it was only when lying on the floor and rolling onto my side that I noticed there was a whole section, at a lower level, of children’s books. They were first editions, mainly, and had notes to Jasmine from her mum. Doting, heartfelt notes. Why did she not talk about her? How present she seemed to have been for such a good period. They went all the way up until 1975. Then, abruptly, they stopped. I thought of how my father’s record collection stopped the year the first child was born. Like he’d switched over all his attention to his kids. Too much attention.

  I took a book and went back to my room, which was her room, she hav
ing taken over her father’s four-poster.

  In the morning she was standing over me with a cup of tea and smiling. It wasn’t a fixed smile. She was happy again. It made me happy, too. I sat up against the pillows and took the mug, but she only permitted me a few sips, and then she couldn’t help herself. ‘Let’s get out of our fug. Let’s go and buy something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything! What do you want? Or we could just go and look; we don’t even have to spend money. But let’s go into the world now.’

  I allowed myself another big slug of tea. ‘I could do with some interesting buttons, for your dress.’

  She leapt straight on the spot, like she was front row at The Clash.

  I called my mum. She sounded less excited now, and more curious, an edge of anxiety creeping in. I listened for the sound of Dad raging, but I could only hear my brothers and him chatting normally about the game.

  It seemed a big deal, to go out into the world when we had, so far, only spent time together indoors, beginning with the hospital. I wondered if the natural light might blow out my features in such a way that she might suddenly think herself silly for pursuing my friendship.

  I felt my anxiety and excitement grow with each flight of stairs. The world would see me with her, this beautiful creature (and she really was: she’d done up her eyes so she looked like a raccoon who was the life and soul of the woodland forest party). If we went into the world, I would have an eye out to protect her from it, as I always did with my mum. In our home, I knew I had no powers to keep Mum safe, but on the street, I steered her by her elbow, far taller than her now. If I saw a street drunk I tried to give them a fearsome look, even though I was trembling inside as we passed every pub.

  The worst would be if my dad was visible in the window or doorway of one of the pubs. When I was not inside the walls of our house, I didn’t know how to act around him. Neither, to be fair, did he. In a different context, both of us seemed confused about our roles, and he’d come out and smile. Once or twice he even asked Mum and me if we wanted to come in, but we made our excuses and left, and at home that night, it was not mentioned.

  As we approached the front door, Jasmine took a coat from the hooks, a denim jacket that she held up against my chest and then slung over my shoulders. Then she rummaged deeper into the layers hanging from those brass hooks and pulled out a peach capelet that she tied around her neck. We looked at ourselves in the mirror and it could not be denied that we looked ideal together.