Royals

by Emma Forrest

  ‘Hang each night in rapture.’

  He came up to me and said, ‘She’s happy her papa’s here. She’ll feel a lot more comfortable now.’

  As he started to move past me, I shocked myself by spitting, ‘I can only guess how many times Jasmine must have done this for you. “It’s okay that your friend made out with me; I’m still laughing, I’m still dancing.” So you could keep dancing. All the times she reached you long distance and didn’t tell you how long she’d been trying to get you, how many different numbers she’d tried.

  ‘That you’d used the cover of a bad phone line on the yacht so you couldn’t tell that her voice was cracking and she was all alone, a young girl by herself on the top floor of a Notting Hill mansion, looking out across a massive city, with not a single person by her side.’

  I sounded gay. Even though I didn’t know for sure yet I was gay, I knew I sounded it. I’d never sounded as lilting as I did in his presence. Years later I wondered if, on a deeper level, I sensed that this public schoolboy may have had more gay experiences than most men I’d yet met. He was just watching me, his only response the inhale and exhale of his Marlboro. I was furious, and loud now, as well as gay.

  ‘No boundaries. No safety. No father holding her hand, just a dad waving to her in Polaroids that he had girlfriends take because he loved his daughter so much, but that he only sometimes remembered to post. The ones that did get sent were treasure like love letters, in a lacquered box, with her most special things. The waving Polaroid that made it across the ocean could have been displayed in the Musée de la Vie Romantique alongside the enamel floral pistol that you shoot yourself with when your lover betrays you. Tout ou rien. You did feel tout. You just gave her rien!’

  He was absolutely quiet and then he said, ‘Sit down.’

  ‘What?’

  Now he hissed, ‘Sit down!’

  I was used to an angry father who takes it out physically. I had no prep for gentle rage, a blade that doesn’t cut your skin as it shaves your face, but is still a blade.

  ‘My friend did not touch her at a party.’

  ‘Yes he did. She told me—’

  ‘She didn’t tell you the whole story. It was at her mother’s wake.’

  I searched his face to decide if he was telling the truth, but it was soft lit by smoke, instead of a lens smeared in Vaseline to make an ageing star look younger.

  ‘We’d come back from the funeral and I went to the balcony to smoke a joint.’ He put out the cigarette. ‘But I couldn’t roll it because I was crying. That’s the first time since I was twelve years old that I’ve failed in my attempt to roll a joint.’ He looked to me to see if I’d laugh with him, but when I didn’t, his face turned to slate like London sky in February. ‘I sprinkled the wasted hash over Notting Hill like we’d just sprinkled her wasted mother.’

  I couldn’t look him in the eye. Because it sounded a lot like the truth.

  ‘When I came back in, she wasn’t on the sofa where I’d left her. She wasn’t in the kitchen, which was always her comfort place with her mother. I found them together in the upstairs bathroom.’ The beautiful de Gournay wallpaper. The metallic birds hovering as a halo around her youth. ‘I put him in the hospital. I was trying to reclaim something for her. That’s what I’d meant it to be. But as soon as I punched him, I knew it was for me, not her.’

  He looked to where she lay. ‘It was all too much. I left her with a nanny and I went on the road.’

  I didn’t know what to say. ‘Her mother wasn’t wasted. Her mother made beautiful things all the time.’

  ‘She did,’ he agreed. ‘I saved some of my favourites. I used to look at them every day. Now I look at them sometimes, on special days.’

  I kept waiting for him to cry but he didn’t. He looked like he was waiting for himself to cry, surprised as the pain flowed but the tap stayed closed, his mouth gaping, an expensive shirt with a missing button to which your eye keeps being drawn.

  ‘Just because I couldn’t do it doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. She was my heart.’

  I saw, as he said it, the degree of difficulty it took to be him. To face himself every day. To face out, instead, towards incredible vacations, sunrises, sunsets, tropical vegetation, mountains climbing out of crystal oceans, was safer. Robin’s-egg blue with an aubergine lining would be a good combination. How, alone in his childhood library, he’d occupied himself with, ‘Burundi tribal drumming with William Blake is a good combination.’ I softened. I had to. I took his hand in mine.

  ‘Which one of them was your heart?’

  He looked down at my hand, his fingers so huge over mine, squeezed it in something I surmised to be gratitude, and then let go.

  ‘Both of them.’

  When she slept again, her father moved from the chair, quiet as a cat, and slunk to the back of the ward. There, he leaned against the payphone and started making calls to experts on the continent. When the doctor approached him, he waved him away, as if they, who had been trying to make contact for days, had no useful knowledge to share of this illness.

  It was all too much. I took my canvas bag with my notepad and wallet and started walking. First up the hall, then into the empty lift. I must have pressed the button, but I don’t remember doing it. I just remember the sensation of descent.

  Brown might look good with powder pink.

  With baby pink.

  With bubble-gum pink.

  With dusty rose.

  No. It wouldn’t look good with them at all.

  Outside the hospital, London was very much alive, a strong heartbeat that pulsed with each step I took. An echo chamber of record-breaking temperature rising off bodies, couples’ kisses heating and expanding.

  It was my least favourite English weather: when it’s hot but the sky is still grey. I moved towards the West End, like a pilgrim towards Mecca, unable to lose myself in religious devotion because the sky was the wrong colour grey. Not dove. Not powdery. It was slate, as only London sky can be. And it’s never a blank slate. It’s full. There’s no space for any new ideas. Not mine. Not hers. If I thought that weather would never change, I would want to die too. Except she wanted to be alive, that’s what she’d decided. Rip that fucking sky apart and find the sun. Now she was too weak to do it.

  The soul-numbing sky was matched by a dull ache in my heels, as if I had been walking upside down through the city, my feet absorbing the grey. I pinched my hand to try and slap at the melancholy, as if sorrow were a bug that could be caught. I dug a fingernail into my wrist until my eyes watered. All the while, I never stopped moving. And I understood, as I dug my nails in, what Jasmine had been angling for through all those attempts: pain, in small bursts, that can be described in place of pain that is indescribable.

  When I got to Oxford Street, I saw that Selfridges was still open, beckoning summer, Friday, late-evening shoppers, the flags outside waving ‘Shabbat Shalom’ at congregants. I paused, for the first time since I’d exited the hospital. I stood still and looked in the windows. Ordinarily, I’d have been in awe of the full-length gowns, swathes of satin set at an angle across long, lifeless limbs so you could see the diamante heels. Selfridges had stood at that spot since 1909. It had passed from its youth to its teens and then twenties. It had become old enough to require a facelift. It had made people happy.

  But that night the clothes in the window just made me feel exhausted. I didn’t want anything rich. Not rich face cream or leather-bound diaries, or pricey food-hall delicacies.

  All the other shops were closed, the reasonable middle-class bastions: Marks & Spencer, Phase Eight, Monsoon. The places still open were only the tatty souvenir shops. The diametric opposites – extravagance and discount shop – were the ones most closely in sync, the ones with a shared nocturnal rhythm. My feet now blistered – a true pilgrim – I walked all the way to Marble Arch until I was standing outside Jasmine’s shop.

  I went inside. It was evening and people wanted to buy things. If this was all the
y could buy – Brighton rock and novelty bobbleheads of the Queen – it would do. Shop hours are all wrong, since shopping can fill the same insatiable hole as late-night eating. The internet was many years away. For now, no midnight shoes online from Farfetch, couriered from Turin or Tokyo, to plaster the fear that your husband was cheating or your children would leave for university and never come back.

  Fat Americans picked out miniature flags. Slender Swedes bought caseloads of Scottish shortbread. The boy behind the counter was a boy like me. Useless. Ugly. But, as I waited for the buyers to move on, he looked at me like I was beautiful. Like I was special. Like she looked at me. He looked at me like I didn’t belong in there. His hair was the kind of electric red that looks dazzling on women, but that renders many males merely stricken by it. He was one.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked. I was going to say ‘I don’t think so’ and then tell him where I’d come from and who was waiting there, between worlds. Instead, I chose a lighter with the Union Jack on it and took it up to the till.

  ‘Do you want your receipt?’

  ‘Sure.’ Like I would change my mind about the lighter or find it not up to scratch.

  ‘Do you know Jasmine?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m her manager. I was. But she hasn’t shown up for work all week. So she’s been let go.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘She will when she comes back to work.’

  How I wanted to think that she’d go back to work and get fired. It would mean she’d been able to get out of bed.

  ‘I’m her friend. I’ll tell her for you if you’d like.’

  He shrugged. He couldn’t have been older than her. He’d have been there, not as a psychiatrist’s experiment to occupy his mind so as not to let it wander to darkness, but because this was his best job option. His skin was ridged so badly with acne that it looked tender, both to the touch and the heart. I smiled.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  It took a minute for him to remember.

  ‘I’m not hitting on you,’ I said, and he blushed, because he hadn’t decided yet. But he knew. He knew.

  I put the lighter in my pocket and went outside and something made me turn off Oxford Street and go round to the side of the shop. The wall was cracked, despite having been plastered over several times. I took a biro from my bag and then dug for my notebook but found, as I did, my fingers brushing what I thought was a leaflet. When I pulled it out, I saw I was holding a piece of Adam Ant stationery. His face on the letterhead in place of the monogram I’d one day have. The Highwayman’s hat. The stripe across his nose. I knelt on the pavement and wrote on it:

  ‘Save her.’

  I folded it up and wrote her name on the front. I hoped her dad was talking softly to her. I hoped he had hung up and was at her side. If I couldn’t get to the Wailing Wall, then I could slip prayers between the cracks of the wall outside the tat shop. I tucked the folded receipt into one of the cracks.

  ‘Please,’ I said, looking at the flag of Diana kissing Charles, her neck long. ‘Please let her live. Please.’

  Then, before I left, I took out another piece of the paper, folded it and wrote her father’s name on the back. Inside I wrote:

  ‘Forgive him.’

  I tucked it into the wall.

  Forgiveness is different from redemption. The blushing boy caught sight of me through the glass. He saw I was crying. He put his hand on his heart. I walked away.

  When I walked back onto the ward, a doctor was waiting, a nurse at his side. ‘Can you get her father to talk to us?’ the nurse asked me.

  Despite the circumstances, I was flattered that they had registered my place in her life and that they imagined I might have some influence over him and his reckless, unredeemable beauty.

  Thus emboldened, I walked towards him to bend his ear, trying to mimic his cat steps, that he might think me one of them instead of one of them. I’d spent enough time with her to understand that her class pick it up in the most minuscule signals. Not who you have become, but how you were raised, in your every movement, in the way you breathe. I think my family – my whole neighbourhood – walked with such heavy steps for fear no one would ever notice us.

  When I got to his side, he looked up at me, cupping the telephone receiver with one hand. The hand was huge, which made me hard, and it was manicured, which made me sad for him and therefore even harder. I’d carry that sexual quirk for ever.

  ‘I know a surgeon in Switzerland,’ he whispered. ‘I met him on a boat in Monaco,’ as if the meeting place and the mode of transport by which it had been reached were themselves a part of the lifesaving surgery he’d map out.

  ‘They want to talk to you.’

  ‘What do they have to say? They let this happen!’

  So he knew. He knew it was over.

  ‘They tried to stop it.’

  ‘What utter rot.’

  ‘They tried. I think you should talk to them.’

  ‘So they can tell me how hopeless it is? Anyone would feel hopeless in here.’

  And he motioned around this room where, landing there, battered and bruised, I had felt the first spark of real hope I’d felt in perhaps my whole young life.

  I put my hand on his arm. ‘They want to make her as comfortable as possible.’ Beneath my palm, his bicep rippled in disgust.

  ‘Well, don’t! Wake her up! Get her dressed! Get her uncomfortable and get her the fuck out of here. She can pull through. She can be just fine. I have the best medical contacts in the world.’

  ‘Well, where are they? In discos? On yachts? On twin-engine planes? They’re here…’ I pointed at the nurses, ‘Five grand a year. They’ve been really good to her, like they were good to me and they’ll get maybe five or six hours’ sleep by the time they get home. And then they’ll be back. Because they give a fuck. And they know what they’re doing. Talk to them.’

  He nodded. He looked, if not shamefaced, then as if he was having two thoughts in opposition and was being pulled to the one that was the harder work, an action at which he was unpractised. But now a switch had been flicked. He nodded again and went to hang up. Just before the receiver made it back to the cradle, a voice murmured on the line…

  Her father jerked the receiver back to his ear.

  ‘Pierre!’ her father exclaimed. ‘Thank goodness! I’m sorry to wake you, but my daughter’s in a bit of a pickle and we rather need to pull a favour. Well, they’re saying she’s had an overdose. Which of us hasn’t? Ha ha, just a good night on the town. But they don’t know what they’re doing here. She’s ended up in some ghastly NHS hospital and I’d rather get her perused by you. Excellent. Yes, of course. Price no problem.’

  Then he hung up and started dialling again, making calls to his accountant so a plane ticket could be booked for the continental surgeon. As he made his arrangements, I took his place beside her, rolling her hand in mine. There was a chip in the varnish on three nails and so I busied myself fixing them, as I did on a regular Sunday night with my mum.

  I blew the first coat on each nail before starting the second.

  One leg crossed over the other, Jasmine sat bolt upright, admired my handiwork and cooed, ‘You’ve got bloody good eyesight.’ Except she didn’t say anything, just slept, a gurgling audible from her lungs like a visible stitch. I’d got to her little finger when she passed away, just after midnight, with a sigh. In her father’s re-telling, he said it was just a sigh. But that wasn’t true. I was right beside her and I heard a word: ‘Mama.’

  Her father stayed there a long time, even when the doctors and nurses he’d declined to talk to came in.

  ‘We’re so sorry,’ said the doctor, and I crumpled into the ledge, weeping.

  When I came back up to draw breath, her dad still hadn’t moved.

  I heard the clippy-clop of his young girlfriend’s stilettos as she came back into the room, but she saw my face, she saw his position on the bed, she saw, last of all, Jasmine, her skin turning grey
, and she walked out and didn’t come back. I didn’t blame her. She was too young for this. I was too young for this. I needed my mum.

  Her dad came up and hugged me and I hugged him back and, despite my resentment, I didn’t care; it felt right. We held each other.

  ‘I did the best I could,’ he said. I knew that part was not a lie, not to me, not to him. He really had just done the best that he could do. That was his best.

  I walked around the hospital in a daze, buying a can of Coke I wouldn’t drink. I pressed it against my temple. I passed the maternity ward, all those new babies with their wrinkled red faces and wrist tags, tiny VIP passes for a club that was way too loud for their just-hatched ears. They wriggled and screamed that they were in the wrong place, that this was all a terrible mistake, that they were meant to be back in the womb.

  The next day’s papers arrived at reception. They said Diana was back from her honeymoon. Now her life would begin.

  CHAPTER 21

  All the days I stayed in bed, my mum sat by my side, working on an embroidery.

  I was mourning Jasmine, of course. But, rippled through that, I was also in shock that I wasn’t going to get to leave my family after all. Jasmine had been Joan of Arc, hearing voices and born with a silver sword in her hand, and I was going to follow her into battle. She was so charismatic and her sword, held above our heads, caught all the light. I could see myself in it and I looked beautiful. But it doesn’t matter how impressive she was, Joan was doomed. Now there was no more saint and no more war. I avoided my reflection.

  ‘Why don’t you get out of bed?’ Mum asked.

  I felt for the edge of the duvet, rubbing my thumb and forefinger on the well-worn cotton. It was the softest thing in the house.

  ‘I am so entwined with you. I don’t know how to get us both out, and I can’t leave you here.’ I tried very hard to keep talking. ‘I felt like I finally had somebody reaching out their hand and guiding me through the smoky corridors to safe air.’