by Emma Forrest
‘Do you have a drug problem?’
‘Everyone at my school had a drug problem when they were fifteen. No, darling, I’m an intermittent user when it’s around. I noticed someone left this here and I thought I might as well put it to good use. Might have been that party I had last month. Might have been my dad saving it for the next visit.’
I made a shocked face.
‘Oh, don’t be such a puritan, it doesn’t suit you.’
But, actually, I knew it suited me quite well. She kept babbling, her father’s visit having stirred a great unrest. She was, to herself, a new acquaintance at a cocktail party, to whom she thought it rude to delve too deep.
‘You should put a snake in your label. I saw a Victorian snake ring at Portobello and it stuck with me.’
‘They scare me. Snakes. Not Victorians.’
‘You don’t always have to explain yourself so thoroughly. I do understand you, you know. But I think it’s a good idea for you and what you’re trying to project. The average snake sheds its skin two to four times a year.’
‘Shedding your skin doesn’t connote anything good. Where I come from, it means you’re an imposter. I hate snakeskin, it’s the ugliest thing, belts, shoes, print on dresses. It really disgusts me.’
‘Right, leopard print is hot, though?’
‘Of course. It’s like “Rarrr, Raquel Welch!”’ I didn’t sound enthused as I said it. It was the least emotion ever put into a reading of Raquel Welch’s name.
‘Snakes’ skin doesn’t grow with them, right? But do you know why they shed it?’
I shook my head. It felt good to say no, and I’ve always liked the sense of my hair as it whips in and out of my peripheral vision.
‘It’s a great reason: to get rid of parasites that might have attached to them.’
I hoped she’d offer me some pyjamas; soon I hoped they’d be her father’s. I loathed him – apart from or as well as feeling attracted to him – and I wondered where he’d gone now, and on what terms they’d parted. But I didn’t want to mention him for fear of making her sad. Selfish. I wanted her cheerful tonight. It better suited my needs. There were moments when I was just as bad as everyone else around her. Just because you love and care about someone, doesn’t mean you’re not a parasite, too.
‘Jasmine. Don’t you think it’s… not normal to take drugs with your father?’
‘In what way?’
‘Shouldn’t he be stopping you from taking drugs?’
‘He should be stopping me from taking bad drugs, dangerous ones cut with baking powder and who knows what. He’s very careful about that; he makes certain it’s only ever absolutely highest quality, really safe. He’s very caring. He always says I’m his everything.’
I looked at the floor. She seemed flummoxed for a moment, a record player stuck on a scratch in the vinyl. When she spoke again, it was halting.
‘We could… source… little bits of shed snakeskin and put them in a pocket in every label.’
I laughed. ‘That’s disgusting.’
She turned serious, relieved to turn the questioning back on me: ‘Who are you designing for? Don’t you want to disgust people? Just a little? The killer ingredient in really fine perfume is oud. It smells like shit on its own. But it elevates a rose to dizzying heights. That’s what I see in your work. That’s why I asked you to make me a dress. Because you’ve got roses and shit. And you should be proud of that. A beautiful gay boy in a hospital, beaten up by his dad; that’s the definition of roses and shit.’
I didn’t correct her and tell her I hadn’t decided yet. I just asked, ‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’
‘Yes!’ She hugged me and I felt warm and loved, and then she added, ‘You’re beautiful-ugly.’
‘Oh.’ It was how I imagined it must feel to have her father come and go.
She saw my expression and continued, ‘But you’re stunning. You take all the light in the room. You eat it up.’
‘You give all the light in the room.’
She kissed my head. ‘I do hear that a lot.’
She went into the kitchen and heated up some chicken soup. That was Jasmine: chicken soup and cocaine, wind you up and try to soothe you at the same time. She reached onto the windowsill and plucked a leaf of bay that she added.
‘My mother taught me that. She approached cooking in the same way she did gardening, as a time to be quiet, to be alone with yourself.’
That was gone. It had been gone a long time. She looked very pale and very young.
‘Does it work for you, still, as a way to get calm?’
‘Mostly. But even when it doesn’t work, the food still tastes good.’
But here she was, growing herbs in an empty house too big for one small girl, adding them to her mother’s dishes but eating them alone.
‘Do you ever cook for other people?’
‘I’m cooking for you.’
‘I don’t count myself.’
‘Why on earth not?’
I thought about it.
‘Jews, historically, don’t get to stay any one place for too long. They always get kicked out in the end.’
‘I’m not kicking you out! I’m keeping you! Even though you’re so insecure!’
‘How many times have you been to hospital?’ I asked.
‘For what, for suicide?’
‘For anything, I guess.’
‘It’s not polite to ask a lady their age or how many times they’ve tried to kill themselves. It runs in the family. My mum. Her mum. My grandmother.’
‘Did any of them succeed?’
She ladled the soup into two Japanese bowls.
‘All of them.’
‘Your mum…?’ I trailed off, like an endless train on a dress, put there to keep anyone from getting too close.
Had she let me think it was a natural death because she didn’t want to talk about it, or had she done nothing of the sort? Had I just gone ahead and made an assumption so I wouldn’t have to go deeper with her?
‘That’s absolutely terrible. I’m so, so sorry. I had no idea. Do you want to talk about it?’
She studied me. ‘Do you want me to be more sentimental about it or brave? Which version?’
‘Whichever version is real.’
It didn’t seem like ‘sentimental’ was the right word.
She slurped her soup. ‘We have stiff upper lips. The women more than the men. That’s why we do it. They’d like to do it, too. But they haven’t the courage.’
She didn’t want to talk about her mum, or, rather, the only way she could talk about her was through herself. I tried to follow her lead, unpicking a tangled necklace of gold thread in the half-light.
‘Why don’t you get it right?’
But she couldn’t go there. She put her bowl of soup to her lips, slurped it until it was finished. When she re-emerged, she suggested a scheme to do with reselling flowers from the market as dried arrangements, as if we’d never been speaking of anything else.
But I knew: she didn’t get it right because she still wanted to be alive. Some part of her. Enough of her. Stay alive enough to keep getting it wrong. I saw, for the first time, there was a picture of her mother in every room in the house. All of them were small and tucked into a corner. All of them were there. Her bad stories were very, very quiet, diaphanous secrets hinting at the shape of the body underneath.
Whereas all my pain was noise. I wondered what passed through my mum’s mind when she was picking up after one of his rages. Whether she daydreamed more of killing herself or of killing him? Or whether neither occurred to her, that she kept herself preoccupied with her embroidery, going deep into each pattern instead of deep into the dark thoughts. And every decade or so, there was a royal wedding to think about. None of us would get bored of projecting our desires onto Diana.
Jasmine and I lay on our individual second-floor sofas like an old, married couple, at peace with a silence broken only by the sound of the television. That night, BBC N
ews reported the latest on Diana’s honeymoon (we called it ‘Diana’s honeymoon’ as if Charles had not even been present).
‘Fourteen days yachting around the Greek Islands,’ yawned Jasmine. ‘That’s too many days. And there’s no way to get away from all the staff attending them. Nobody goes to a beautiful remote isle because they want to chat to a lot of people. You can’t relax on a remote isle when, everywhere you look, people are standing to attention.’
‘Maybe you can.’
‘No. My father and I went to a remote island with Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall and it was extremely difficult.’
I found that so strange, this image of the super-couple with Jasmine and her dad as the supporting pair, and stranger still that she didn’t think it strange. For all his faults, I never imagined her dad was sexually attracted to her, that never crossed my mind. But the adoration girls feel for their fathers was compounded by her longing for him through his extended absences and celebrated reappearances. Adding Mick and Jerry into the mix – a model and rock star, the model and rock star, designed to be adored – was unbearable.
After the chicken soup was finished, Jasmine brought out champagne and chocolates for dessert. She took a bite of each one, like a five-year-old would. But there was nobody to send her to her room and if there had been, which room would she have gone to? It was all hers. And there were such wonderful things in every room. How could being shut in solitary ever be a punishment when you could stare into the birds of the de Gournay silkscreened wallpaper? How could you hope to grow up safe, how could you grow up to not attempt suicide? I pulled her into my arms and she lay beside me like a silver spoon.
She pressed her back into me, as if my limp penis were a friendly woodland creature and she Snow White. ‘If I went on honeymoon I’d like to go somewhere that they say will eventually vanish.’
I stroked her hair. ‘What sort of school did you go to? The one where everybody had a drug problem?’
She sighed, annoyed at the rising memory, like her still water had turned out to be carbonated. ‘It was a rural boarding school where the philosophy was that the students made the rules themselves.’
‘How did you know the drugs were a problem if there were no rules there?’
‘Well, I knew they were illegal. But mainly, I just felt really bad about myself. I was too young, too little, much slimmer than I am now. It just wrecked my system.’
‘You have to have rules so you have something to break.’
‘I agree with you. I’d have benefited tremendously from boundaries. It was probably my parents biggest mistake.’ She smiled and pulled herself up like a soldier. ‘Well, too late now!’
I decided that that was a good way I could help her. I would tell her to go to bed on time and stop eating crappy food and drinking late and sleeping in to odd hours and managing on no sleep and sleeping around and giving her love too freely. Well, I meant to. I meant to do all that for her. It just didn’t happen that way. I was having too good a time to set boundaries for her, and I think everyone felt that in her presence, even her dad. She made the rules. It might have been why he ran away. To get away from her setting the pace.
We fell asleep together on the sofa. It was the nicest sleep I ever had. We woke up occasionally to hold each other tighter; I’d wrap an arm around her or she’d roll her leg across my waist. And then we’d go back to dreamland. I felt strong, that night, in my body, in my head. I felt like I had some power – not too much, like hers, that rattled around her body and kept her unable to focus. But just enough power to start opening up my life, to finally figure out how to get the fucking top off the marmalade jar without asking my mum to do it.
At 3.12 a.m. I woke up just enough to whisper, ‘Tomorrow, I want to go to Saint Martin’s and pick up the application form.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’d already planned that.’
CHAPTER 9
She insisted her shop could manage without her, that this was too important to not accompany me. I thought she’d dress up for our visit, but she dressed down, a simple uniform of black jeans, white T-shirt and ballet shoes. She was the first person I’d ever seen wear black jeans, and she’d dyed them herself in the bathtub. I didn’t see anyone in black jeans again for five years, like they’d noticed her around town looking splendid and it had taken them all that time to pluck up the courage to give it a go. Her hair was pinned up so her lovely neck was showing and she didn’t have on any of her crazy make-up. She looked like someone sensible and hard working, but still striking.
In years to come, St Martin’s would count among its alumni everyone from Alexander McQueen to Jarvis Cocker. Stella McCartney. Hussein Chalayan. If you had serious aspirations to make art your profession, that’s where you went. In the years I’d fantasised about attending, my favourite former students were probably Antony Gormley and John Hurt, neither of whom went into fashion but both of whose work informs my own.
As we walked to the Tube, I checked my notebook. ‘We get out at Tottenham Court Road, then walk down Charing Cross Road.’
Jasmine looked at me askance. ‘I’m not taking the Tube to one of the most important days of your life.’
Leaving aside the fact that you can’t take a Tube station into an actual day (though I accepted that was how things seemed in her own life), I felt uncomfortable showing up in a taxi.
‘Today isn’t the biggest day of my life. It’s not a big day unless I get in. We’re only going there to pick up the application form. Let’s just take the Tube.’
‘No. I’m tired.’
For someone on a single-minded mission, she was moving like all her bones had fallen out of her body. Worried she was going to ask me to carry her, I agreed to let her hail a cab, but I made the driver drop us around the corner. What if I did get in and there was someone exiting or entering who also got in and then they’d have seen me and dismissed me as ‘taxi boy’? I didn’t understand, then, that people of vast wealth were inextricably entwined with all artistic life in Great Britain and always had been. That Jasmine, in her efforts to support my work, wasn’t an outlier; that her patronage was possibly the only way for a boy from where I came from to get where he wanted to go.
Someone who’s known a lifetime of grand buildings had no qualms about stepping inside Saint Martin’s, and she did so as if walking into McDonald’s, and proceeded to request the application form as if ordering a Big Mac with fries and a Coke, as if she were doing them a favour.
She sat in the reception room and read through it. The receptionist’s shoes were surprisingly ugly. When I told Jasmine this on the way out she said it wasn’t a surprise. Most fashion is, that’s why I was different. Because I championed beauty, just like her.
She asked me if I wanted to hold the application myself, and I flashed back to my mum letting me hold my own train ticket. I was not unaware that I may have been attempting to transition from the arms of one nurturer by throwing myself into another’s. But it was hard to describe Jasmine as nurturing, exactly. I’d have hated, for example, to have been her actual child and found it impossible to imagine her with an actual child, that it might, in fact, lead to her death like the coda to Lolita. I know about the coda to Lolita because she read it to me on the Tube. Now we had the form, we were allowed on the Underground.
But she got an urge and had us leap out at Green Park, just as the doors were closing. We left the station, up into the sunlight and went through the park, pausing to sit on a couple of deckchairs and eat ice creams. She never worried about her figure, at least not out loud. We never discussed whether there might one day come a time that she could not devour a 99 Flake with an extra flake and then take a supplementary flake from her companion’s ice-cream cone.
Either struck by inspiration or on a flat-out sugar high, she decided that what we absolutely must do to celebrate our excellent morning was go to a charity shop. Back then, there were no fancy ones. The clothes were all somewhat dingy and sticky, while the shop itself was overlit, a co
mbination that she found energising.
‘Look at this!… Now look at this!… Tell me this isn’t the best thing you’ve ever seen!’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve seen better things than that.’
‘Hello, can I help you?’ asked a volunteer.
‘Yes,’ said Jasmine. ‘Do you have any Murano glass in the shape of tropical fish?’
The volunteer looked at her. ‘I don’t think we do, love.’
She looked to be deciding whether Jasmine was mocking her. I knew she wasn’t. I knew she just expected her heart’s desire to always be available. It made up for her dad. You couldn’t have the most basic thing a girl deserves, so instead you could have the most complicated and obscure. She was genuinely surprised the charity shop had no glass Murano fish.
This seemed to trigger something in her, some sense of betrayal on the shop’s part, because she sprang into action on a scheme.
As we moved between the aisles, from grotty to tatty, lonely to depressing, she kept putting on layers and layers of clothes until she was huge, and she never stopped talking to me while she did it, never tried to hide her crime, wanted me to watch her do it. Every single thing she held up in front of herself to admire she then took off the hanger and placed over her head.
The volunteer was now preoccupied by the world’s oldest woman. She had a look on her face like she, too, might be asking for glass Murano fish, as the assistant seemed at her wits’ end. When Jasmine could barely move any more, she waddled out of the store, pausing only to engage the shop clerk in a chat as she left.
‘Thank you! Have a great day.’ Just before the door closed behind us.
‘I don’t like that, Jasmine.’
‘Saying “Have a great day”? I know, it’s very LA, isn’t it?’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.’
I was furious that she’d included me in the theft.
‘It was an anarchic prank. That’s what they do at art school, darling. So it was thematic, really.’