Royals

by Emma Forrest

  She wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but I heard it before I saw it, the thump thump thump like a bad dream in neon: an all-night rave deep in the forest. It was before we had the term ‘rave’, but we did have city kids coming in to get wasted and dance until dawn in front of a country bonfire. We parked and disembarked. We were the only ones who’d made it there that way. The revellers had no cars I could see. If you’d told me their mode of transportation was shape-shifting, I’d have believed it.

  ‘I love your dress,’ said a girl in dungarees as she handed Jasmine a drink.

  ‘He made it!’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘He can make you anything, any kind of gown for any event.’

  ‘Wow,’ the girl said again, the metal hooks of her dungarees glowing beside the bonfire. She squinted her eyes at me and then back to her.

  ‘Are you the girl from the castle?’

  ‘It’s not a castle, it’s a landmarked former carriage house. But yes.’

  ‘And who’s he?’

  I waited for her to say I was a Jew or a striving son of a cab driver. But she just said, ‘This is Steven. He’s my best friend.’ And she handed me the drink she’d been handed. And I drank it, identifying it as cider, as full and fruity as my heart felt, no sour notes.

  We danced, cheek to cheek, to a song without words, just a beat. When there are no lyrics to cling to, I don’t know what, in life, to cling to, so I clung to her. She held me close, strong, the silk of her dress too cool to stop her nipples hardening against me. I wondered, I wondered, if I could kiss her there? Kiss her like a heterosexual, out of gratitude for pulling my teeth from my throat? As thanks for getting me hired after I’d lost my beautiful looks?

  Embers from the bonfire rose up, revolutionary sparks, gliding towards the stars, the same shape and glow, just destined for a shorter lifespan. I leaned my head against her shoulder and we slow-danced while everyone around us was pogoing. When I looked up, the uncle from the pub was walking towards us, his work boots crunching the leaves. She had told him where to find us. Cider-slutty, she ran towards him and leapt into his arms, wrapping her legs around his waist, my half-finished dress hiked up. The open air had set her free to act out; no walls, no witnesses except trees, except me.

  I backed away, but when she led him by the hand into the woods, I took another glass of cider from the girl in dungarees. But then her dungarees made me too sad – I told myself that what was making me sad – and I followed Jasmine down the path, walking softly so as not to alert them. They wouldn’t have noticed me, anyway.

  They were leaning against an oak as big as my dad in one of his rages. I knelt down behind a rock, as I’d seen my mother do, getting as low as possible. I watched as the uncle took off Jasmine’s dress – my dress. It laid there in a crumpled heap, as crumpled as I felt. I waited, like a handmaiden, to retrieve it, and silently help her back into it when she was finished. He walked away first. She didn’t seem to mind or feel self-conscious as she saw me approach.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Have you been having a good time?’

  She leaned heavily on me. She wiped between her legs with her discarded underwear and then absent-mindedly handed it to me. I put it in my pocket, cycling desperately to go with the flow, doing elaborate mental gymnastics so I didn’t scream: ‘This is wrong! This is dirty and gross and sick and the point you are proving, the groove you are stuck in, is untenable.’

  All the baths I’d taken in her presence and it culminated in a feeling of such derelict mental hygiene. It was the first clear moment I thought, ‘This is sickness and it could infect me.’

  The sun was stirring as we edged towards home. Pausing at a farm at the foot of her estate, she wanted to stop to brush their horses. She said it was her favourite thing to do with her mum when she was a little girl. She was walking in heavy, unbalanced footsteps like a mummy, the least terrifying monster, the one I’d always felt most pity for. I watched as she pulled her hairbrush out of her bag and tried to reach through the gaps in the fence. But she couldn’t reach the horses, so, as drunk as I’d ever seen her, she tried to brush the cows. That was difficult, too. She settled, in the end, for brushing pigs.

  Before we passed out, I washed her underwear, turning my head to the side so I didn’t have to see what I was doing as I scrubbed with the nail brush. Then I hung them in the window.

  When we woke up later that day, she said she didn’t feel well.

  CHAPTER 19

  She lay in bed a long time, turning down the tea I brought her.

  ‘Of course you don’t feel well,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the worst hangover in the county.’

  I didn’t mention the man or what I’d seen. She agreed I was probably right, and I bundled her into a taxi and then the train. She leaned against my shoulder and moaned, wordless but for that sound, which got deeper and softer. The volume on her skin was turning down, too. And by the time we reached London she was having trouble breathing.

  Jasmine looked at the doctor and the doctor looked at her and I was looking at a Vogue from five years ago but when I noticed the tone change, I put it aside.

  ‘We asked you not to check out.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘We left you a lot of messages,’ he said.

  ‘Did you ever remember to call the hospital back?’ she croaked at me.

  As pathetic as she was, I wanted to slap her.

  ‘It’s your liver. It’s shutting down. We need to keep you in.’

  ‘I drank too much? Ha! I finally drank too much?’

  ‘The alcohol certainly didn’t help,’ said the doctor, ‘but that isn’t what’s shutting your liver down.’

  ‘Shutting it down? How long am I staying on this drip? How long will this take to fix? We have a concert we want to go to tonight. Ian Dury is playing at the Astoria.’

  ‘There isn’t a fix.’

  My head was banging from the night before. I wanted a cup of PG Tips and bed, my own bed.

  ‘If there isn’t a fix, then how do you fix it?’

  ‘You don’t.’

  She looked over at me, as if I might translate for her. I started to feel the adrenalin coursing through my body, mine shocking itself awake as hers was winding down.

  The doctor took her hand and she looked at his fingers like he was a stranger on the Underground. ‘This is related to what brought you in to us two weeks ago.’

  ‘But I was fine. I survived. I made it through. Like I always do.’

  ‘Not this time. The toadstools you ate are an exceptionally dangerous kind called Amanita phalloides.’ The death cap.

  ‘I know that. My mother told me never to touch them.’

  ‘She may have mentioned there can be a delayed effect of up to a week before the effects kick in.’

  ‘No. She didn’t say that.’

  ‘She should have.’

  ‘But it’s been over two weeks!’

  He held her wrist. I flashed on the uncle holding her against the oak tree.

  ‘I suppose you’re very strong.’

  She flicked his hand away. ‘We have a concert tonight.’

  ‘We need to keep you here.’

  ‘What’s the prognosis?’ I asked. I wished I’d asked him alone, and so did he.

  He looked at me properly for the first time. ‘It isn’t good.’

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said, regretting it, as the words emerged, bleary eyed into the harsh hospital lighting, ‘Who’d have thought, so much damage from such a little mushroom?’

  It hit her. ‘This one is the closest it’s come to working. I’d better tell my dad.’

  I squeezed her hand as she told me, though she’d just told me a day earlier: ‘I gathered it from the estate in the country, brought it down in a leather pouch, as if I were a character in a Grimms’ Fairy Tale.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I know because you’re in there with me! We’re in the same story.’

  But I
felt our stories diverging, and I couldn’t stop that, no matter how I tried.

  ‘You have to get well.’

  ‘Of course I do. But what if I can’t? You heard them.’

  I shook my head, which annoyed her:

  ‘You have to trust in medical wisdom. It’s the hallmark of civilisation. Have you ever read Maimonides?’

  I could see she was really afraid. She was an out-of-control girl because she chose to be an out-of-control girl. But these events were not her choice; in fact, in the last week, she’d chosen the opposite.

  ‘No, I haven’t fucking read Maimonides!’ I was crying now. She ignored my tears, like someone with good taste.

  ‘Oh, but you must,’ her voice was trembling. ‘He’s one of the very best minds your people have to offer, and that’s saying something.’

  ‘How do you know everything you know? About art and medicine and fashion and the moon and herb gardens and…’

  Now her voice calmed down. ‘Because it’s all worth knowing. Can you imagine a life where we just look at pictures of ourselves? It would be unbearable.’

  She lay back on her pillow.

  I couldn’t face staying at the hospital. I went home to my mum. She climbed out of bed with my father and came up and got in bed with me and held me.

  ‘She’s really, really sick, Mum.’

  ‘You got a letter.’ It was a padded envelope full to brimming with swatches of fabric and trimmings in it. A note inside said, ‘Keep designing and follow your dreams, Love Zandra!’

  I held them against my mother’s skin and laughed out loud.

  ‘She answered my fan letter!’

  Mum smiled. ‘There’s such kind people in the world.’ Her half-moon nails were just visible in the dark. I wanted to tell her: ‘There’s a power in your crescent fingers, you can be a good witch, cast magick and have the things you deserve.’ I could imagine her as a sexual being, her red nails on the chest of a man she wanted and who wanted her back.

  I wanted to tell her everything. But we were quiet together and because of the darkness, it was only as I was falling asleep that I saw she had a black eye. She knew I’d spotted it, and she apologised.

  ‘I’m not a strong woman like she is.’

  CHAPTER 20

  This time Jasmine was put on the adult ward.

  She was passed out asleep when I got back, but when I took her hand in mine, her eyes opened and she asked, ‘Is my father here?’

  ‘No.’ She looked like she was holding back tears. ‘But I think he’s coming.’

  I couldn’t stand the silence, the whir of the machine in the background, a mouth breather on a Tube train stuck in a tunnel.

  ‘I got swatches of fabric in the mail from Zandra Rhodes.’

  I showed them to her, but she couldn’t see properly, her vision was going. I rubbed them gently on her skin.

  ‘See, you were right,’ I said. ‘It’s worth writing a fan letter. It’s worth going to hospital. You might make a friend.’

  ‘It’s worth going to hospital so you can get out and start afresh.’ Her skin was peeling off her nose and cheeks and a patch of her neck. Her breath smelled of blood and metal.

  ‘Steven? You know the Onslow Gardens flat has been paid up for a year? I don’t think you should let it lie vacant.’

  ‘I’m not going to stay there without you. I’ll wait for you. I’ll wait!’

  ‘No. Move in and get it ready for me. Your name is on the lease, too.’

  Her dad didn’t come that night, nor the next morning. She was disintegrating, like a vintage slip stored carelessly. We waited through the afternoon and I tried to distract her by finishing up her dress, sewing the halter strap around the shoulders with sequins on brown leather.

  ‘You’re going to get well. Because otherwise I’ve done all this work for nothing.’

  ‘I wore it in the countryside.’

  ‘It wasn’t ready yet.’

  ‘It worked fine.’

  ‘Then why did you take it off so soon?’

  I meant to rib her, but the question hung in the air, smoke from a votive candle that was lit as a blessing. I prayed the smoke would dissipate before it set off an alarm.

  She motioned to the other patients. ‘They’re worse off than me. I’ve had a life. A big one.’ She smiled, brave. And then it all crumbled, granules of courage sloughing off, along with her flesh, and she trembled and whispered, imploring, ‘Where is he?’

  She passed out again. I called all the numbers for her dad I could find. Finally, the girlfriend answered.

  ‘Please. I don’t know if she’s going to…’ I choked up and couldn’t speak.

  She said, ‘I’ll get him there.’

  I felt faint, truly, like I might hit the tiled floor. I steadied myself against the wall and tried to edge back from terror: a pencil skirt the earthy yellow of turmeric but with powder-pink lining. That would be a good combination. I closed my eyes and tried to visualise it.

  It was past 10 p.m. and I was edging the hem of the dress with sequins, but on the underneath, so they’d just appear in flashes. That’s when the girlfriend walked onto the ward with him. I heard the clacking of her heels. Stilettos have a different clack from steel-cap boots, which are different from the clunky heels on square-toed Mary Janes. When she had deposited Jasmine’s dad at the entryway, she walked away. He stood there, blinking, wearing a satin cowboy shirt that made no sense. Not the happy nonsense invoked by the idea of a dry-clean-only fabric at a rodeo, but because it was smattered with band badges that had ruined the smooth fibres. I felt sorry for him for wrecking it, sorry for him for wearing it still, sorry for him that he didn’t care it was wrecked.

  I didn’t know if it was because of the situation or because he was confused or annoyed to see me there that he stood there blinking. Just in case, I reminded him of my name, but he only drawled, ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Just…’ I took a breath and tried to think of a way to put it in language he might understand, ‘… make her feel fine.’

  My request at pretence triggered an alarm bell for him, pretence being the milieu of the wealthy and not what he expected from someone he’d believed to be ‘salt of the earth’.

  ‘Okay, sure.’ He was still bravado, wearing a sheen of it, like sweat staining his satin shirt.

  ‘Make her think everything’s all right.’

  He nodded and started to light a cigarette, and he looked so handsome that I got angry. How dare he get to keep his looks when the world was falling apart?

  He walked towards her.

  I think she told me more than she’d told others. I don’t think she was sorry she told me. I believe, as soon as she spied me, across from her on the hospital bed, all beat up and useless, she knew I was the right church confessional, even if I was Jewish.

  Her dad pulled up a chair and sat next to her, taking her hand in his. I moved to the corner of the room.

  ‘There’s my baby girl. Look at you, my sleepy angel. You look like your beautiful mama in this light.’ His voice sounded like gourmet honey, tucked away in a pantry and forgotten. I was so sad, I wanted someone to make love to me, maybe him, someone to make me feel like I was disappearing instead of her.

  She opened her eyes. ‘Papa?’

  ‘Yes, baby girl. I told you: I always come back. Papa’s here. Papa’s always here.’

  It was so untrue I wanted to stamp on him like the toadstools in the forest. But she looked so happy, her face finally untwisted from the pain. I could never give her the words she wanted to hear, or be the right scent or the right weight of hand in hers. That was him.

  ‘What did you bring me?’

  He hung his head in mock shame. ‘I didn’t bring you anything.’ He didn’t say, ‘I was pulled out of a nightclub by my young girlfriend after Steven tracked her down.’

  He patted her hair off her forehead. As he touched her skin, something seemed to move through his own. ‘I think you have enough stuffed bears. You have mor
e than enough toys from duty free.’

  ‘Make-up. I’m a grown-up.’

  ‘You’re not a grown-up. You’re my little girl. Rest, now. Dad’s here.’

  I could see how much he was enjoying comforting her, how good it felt, how right. I also knew that if he’d had to keep doing it, even with the best will in the world, it would not be something that he could sustain.

  ‘Do you want to listen to some music?’

  She nodded. Her eyes were starting to lose focus. He pulled out a ghetto blaster, put on Blondie, fast-forwarded the tape to ‘Rapture’, got up off the chair and danced for her, moving his pointing fingers in and out, an unlit cigarette in each, his elbows at his chest.

  ‘Face to face, sadly solitude.’

  Then he danced on the chair, free, devoted, fearless, rather than a middle-aged upper-class man riven with anxiety about his uselessness in the world.

  ‘You go out at night and eat up bars where the people meet.’

  He was a blur in front of her and even with the nausea, she was so enjoying the outline of him. It was a such a silly dance from one who’d wreaked such destruction.

  ‘Rapture! Be pure!’

  When he sat back down, she tried to clap, but she was too weak. A male nurse walked in, took her vitals.

  ‘Gentle, please,’ said her dad, as if he’d never been anything but her best and most present guardian. The nurse knew what was happening, that he’d walked in on an atonement, and he beat his retreat, looking sadly behind him.

  As soon as he was gone, Jasmine opened her eyes wide and whispered to her dad, ‘I don’t want to die.’

  She wasn’t whispering because her voice was shot. It was still there. She was whispering because she didn’t want others to overhear and think her weak or pathetic, even here, even now.

  ‘You’re not going to,’ he lied again, just as I’d told him. I don’t think he had any idea he was lying. He thought he’d got there in time to makes things right. Because he always had before. But he’d seen it in her eyes, and smelled it on her breath, how close this call was.

  ‘Barely breathing, almost comatose.’

  I was watching, always watching. I leaned against the window and looked at the moon, saying ‘Please save her, please save her.’