Royals

by Emma Forrest

‘It’s safe here!’ she said.

  ‘It’s not, Mum.’ Now I started to cry. ‘Don’t say that to me. And don’t say that to yourself.’ I was so angry at her. ‘I don’t know why you chose him.’

  The needle paused and for a moment I thought she was going to sew it through her own hand. But she put it aside and sat on the edge of my bed.

  ‘Because I wanted to get away from my parents. They’d been through so much. I couldn’t figure out how to separate from them. He asked me to marry him. And that was my way to leave. I couldn’t think of any other.’

  I took her hand in mine. Her nails were bare.

  ‘What are you making?’

  She squeezed her eyes shut and when she opened them again, they were glossy with every bad decision she’d ever made, because she thought she’d been doing it for her children.

  ‘It’s for Jasmine,’ she said. She handed it to me. When I saw the words she’d written on it, between the roses and the flower pots, I got out from under the duvet and took her face in my hands.

  ‘I’m going to get you out of here. I’m going to look after you for the rest of your life. I promise you. I’m going to make it. I’m going to make clothes that make women feel good about themselves. Even if they’re having a terrible time.’ I looked her in the eye. ‘Leave him. Let’s both just go. We can’t stay here any more.’

  The Onslow Gardens flat – paid up for a full year – was empty and it would stay empty, unless…

  Diana probably only did end up where she was because she was a bit directionless. She was great-looking and looked beautiful in clothes – so what? She had a big heart, that’s all. She had a big heart and she was a bit fucked up. That’s a powerful combination: beauty, heart, unhappiness. She gave a lot of people their direction.

  CHAPTER 22

  The coffin was carved from rose quartz, the stone you carry with you to give and receive love. Someone can carve you a coffin from crystal in only a week if you have the money.

  Jews, like Muslims, have to be buried within twenty-four hours. We have to take what we can get in our mad dash to the afterlife which, for us, is cyclical. There’s no before and after. Which is hard for me because I feel as Semitic as anyone in England, but my life is a panoply of ‘Befores’ and ‘Afters’.

  She was wearing the dress I made her, her commission complete, too late, but just in time. Her father was there with his girlfriend. The pain he had not been able to transmute into tears was now flowing out of him like water through a colander. He looked as though he was crying for everything that had ever happened to him and everything he had ever felt ashamed for. I wouldn’t see that in an Englishman again until Diana died, when the streets were lined with men like him. The girlfriend stepped away and he cried alone.

  My mum came with me. When the opportunity arose, she walked up to the casket. She took her embroidery from her pocket and laid it in the coffin. I went up next and looked inside. The rose quartz was beautiful for Jasmine’s skin. The dress lay not quite right because she wasn’t standing, and would not stand to let me check where the hem fell now the sequins weighed on it, no matter if I implored her. She’d lay like this, spread on her back, aged nineteen, for the rest of time. My eye travelled down her perfect body, soon to be imperfect, one day to be gone completely, and I saw my mother’s embroidery. In intricate stitching it said: ‘Courage To Be Is The Key.’

  I was so proud of Mum my heart could have burst. I was so sad there was no heart to burst.

  When I walked back, I touched her dad’s arm, nodded at the rose-quartz coffin. ‘She’d have loved that. She’d have known you really understood her.’ And I didn’t say, ‘Even though you don’t know yourself.’ But it was there. Looking at his broken face, I knew he’d not be much longer for this world. Or that he’d live to 105, haunted, too decrepit to keep running away to different boats and parties and concerts. Finally alone with himself. All those years of picking up stuffed bears, duty free, a life of parenting duty free, fatherhood with no tax. The pain was being held in escrow for him. It would hit one day and I couldn’t say whether that made me happy or sad.

  At the wake, I found him outside the bathroom with the de Gournay wallpaper. He was trying to smoke, but he couldn’t draw it to his lips, his hand was shaking so badly.

  I kissed him on the lips and he was so grateful, and kissed me back. Then I pulled away.

  ‘Can I see you again?’ he asked.

  I knew he was asking because he was desperate, because he didn’t know what else to ask or of whom, and that I was in front of him, like an ocean-front view.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ As I walked back downstairs, I heard his lighter finally spark and catch fire.

  I find I often say of someone, ‘Well, they got what they deserved.’ But I rarely know if that pleases me or not. Sometimes it does and half an hour later I find myself crying. I take a hot bath. I light a candle. I think of her, jumping into my bath with me. If I look into the candle long enough, sometimes she’s no longer nineteen when she gets in. She’s in her thirties and her body has changed from childbirth, is softer. She brings a baby in with her. She’s late forties and she’s let her hair go grey and of course it looks smashing. Like David Hockney got to have with Celia Birtwell. The beauty of watching your dearest friend age alongside you. Then she gets out, to dry herself and she says she’s going to get me a towel. But she never comes back.

  What is the Top 40 pop song that you know you’re wrong to love as much as you do? A song by an artist for whom you have no particular respect or interest, who you’d never in a million years pay to see in concert. If you were at their concert you’d resent and judge the concert-goers around you and know you had nothing in common.

  Except loving that song.

  Except you only love it in an ironic way, hiding it behind something equally well regarded in your well-regarded collection, like a Playboy behind a copy of the Guardian. I’ll start:

  ‘Drops of Jupiter’ by Train.

  ‘Pure Shores’ by All Saints.

  ‘Summer Breeze’ by Seals and Crofts.

  You can see yourself doing karaoke to it, and it’s the greatest karaoke performance ever given, plus you’re singing in a voice you never even knew you had. It breaks hearts and it heals hearts (the people who need to be broken open have instinctively gathered together in a section across from the people who need to finally have closure). It’s a performance that rights wrongs. It brings together Heads of State who had for decades broken off relations.

  Which is incredible because, as you have accepted for years, the song is not even a good song. It is quite surprising that people should be healed like this by ‘Pure Shores’ by All Saints but then, finally, we understand why they are Sainted.

  Except, when you finish your performance there’s nobody in the room except you. Which makes it all the more magick; that this was the most healing moment of your life and nobody else was around to witness it.

  They’re all one-hit wonders, or, maybe, at a stretch, two-hit wonders, because it couldn’t last. It’s become popular in recent years for a serious artist to do an acoustic reworking of a song that is a camp classic. It works because that’s how we live inside our heads, right? Turning something silly into a piece of profoundness. It’s pop cultural alchemy and it lives in every one of our hearts, if we could only sing.

  That’s Jasmine.

  You were never wrong to love it as much as you do. You were wrong to question yourself for loving it. And anyone who tells you otherwise can go straight to hell.

  It’s weird how this one-hit wonder makes the hair on your arms stand on end. It’s really weird how it makes you cry, by yourself, at your desk, on your jog, in the toilet cubicle, holding your breath best you can when you hear someone enter. That you find you once request it, by yourself, to a late-night phone-in radio show on a Saturday, as night becomes early morning. You dedicate it to yourself, though you pretend you’re talking about a friend. You’re kind of m
aking it up, but not really.

  After all, you are your own friend.

  In the end the death card she pulled from her Tarot deck meant huge change, but it also did just mean death. Both the esoteric and the realistic can be true at once. You can be earthed and floating above the atmosphere. That’s what I reach for with my designs. But then that’s a very ‘he’s floating above the atmosphere’ thing to say. Maybe my clothes are nothing more than me trying to make you happy, as I tried with her; only with the clothes, when I don’t succeed, I know there’s always a season to come.

  Because the line has done so well, my mother has her own floor of the house, with a claw-foot tub on which I painted red half-moon claws. She has a rail of velour tracksuits with her name on the back. I told her she could have a beautiful wardrobe made, but she wanted the tracksuits out there on the rail to look at as she falls asleep to the sound of Radio 2. You’d suspect it was daft for anyone but a pro boxer to have leisure wear with their name emblazoned on it. But women who’ve been beaten or gaslit or both can do with the visual reminder that they were once their own person and that they can be again. She embroiders them for other wives and girlfriends now. She sponsors a shelter in north London, and it’s the first thing the women receive when they make it there.

  ‘If he were dying,’ she told me recently, ‘if I knew he were really at the end, I would go to his bedside, and I would sit next to him and I would hold his hand and be gentle with him. And I’d do it so he could see that I’m back to who I was when he met me, not who he made me become.’

  CHAPTER 23

  I don’t talk in public about how often I’ve thought about going the way she went. How every few years I think hard about it. All people do, not just artists. But I stitch the clothes as a suicide note, with everything of worth and beauty I can think of. Then, when I’m done, the feeling has passed. I never get fatally overwhelmed because, so far, my work makes me feel ‘whelmed’. I know I am one of the lucky ones.

  After Mum and I moved to Onslow Gardens, I saw my father once, because I hailed a cab and he was driving. I thought about letting it go, not getting in. But I found myself, as if propelled by an outside force, opening the door, sitting in the seat, buckling my seat belt, and telling him the address. We didn’t say anything to each other the whole way from Shepherd’s Bush. But when I looked at his face in the rear-view mirror, I saw that he was crying. I paid my fare through the slot in the cab, so he didn’t have to turn his head. He let me out at my house, and my life.

  My aunties’ corset shop did close down a few months after Jasmine died, as if in solidarity with her passing. As soon as I could afford to, I had the sisters come to work for me, using their secret sauce recipe that had been handed down through the generations. As you know, the corset is the hallmark of my work, and my aunts, who I’d avoided all my childhood, were a part of launching me on the international stage. They stayed with me until not long before they died, just a few weeks apart. It’s all right to die of old age, so long as you don’t get left alone for too long, without the people you’ve loved most.

  As I segued into adulthood, as nineteen got further and further in the rear-view mirror, I kept a running list of all the silly things Jasmine never got to see. That U2 became global superstars in 1983. That would have infuriated her, I think. To have to share them. To have to share them with Americans! Michelle Obama’s toned arms and shift dresses, oh she’d have loved that. Trump. The Spice Girls. Certain dance crazes. The Macarena. The true birth of hip-hop. Amy Winehouse’s life. Amy Winehouse’s death. So much death you have to see, if you stay alive long enough.

  Kate Bush’s comeback gigs at the Hammersmith Apollo, even though it’s not called the Hammersmith Apollo any more. That you can be feted and loved in old age by young people just as young and beautiful as you ever were and they love you for still being there, they love you for existing, no matter how much weight you’ve gained.

  Jasmine’s in all my clothes, things that aren’t able to last (they are supposed to last, they just are not able to, like the silk she had to wear because fabrics have a lifespan, before they decay). If you know things are going to end soon enough, you can cut valuable dresses off at the hem with a big pair of scissors because that’s what makes them look best.

  I remember how, after the wake, I went back home to the estate and lay on my bed and looked at the collage ceiling she’d made for me. Each night it was the last thing I saw before I fell asleep. Each morning it was the first thing I saw when I woke up.

  How, one day, my mum said, ‘There’s a letter.’

  That it was from Saint Martin’s, telling me I’d got in.

  I remember looking out my bedroom window at the ugly grey buildings and ugly grey sky. And how, the morning the letter arrived, the pigeons on the phone wire were gone. They’d been replaced by two brightly coloured parakeets.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  At Bloomsbury, I’d like to particularly thank Alexa von Hirschberg, Marigold Atkey, Allegra Le Fanu, Alexandra Pringle, David Mann, Sara Helen Binney and Philippa Cotton. I’m grateful to Justine Taylor, who was lovely and her edits thoughtful.

  Thank you to my agents: Felicity Rubinstein, Kim Witherspoon and Elinor Burns.

  This was the last I got to write before I left California after a decade living there. I want to especially thank The Chain of Los Angeles women who hiked with me, had my daughter and me to stay, watched her so I could snatch a few hours work on a Sunday, passed me books that made my month, sent me unexpected letters or flowers:

  Annie Segal, Natalie Portman, Marieme Djigo, Lindsey Garrett, Lucy Fisher, Noor Haydar, Debra Diez, Bella Heathcote, Shaye Nelson, Tiffany Kimball, Autumn Durald, Jemima Kirke, Elishia Holmes, Sia Furler, Lola Kirke, Marnie Alton, Christina Stone, Minnie Driver, Kim Roth, Rosanna Arquette, Sarah Bennett, Jennifer Grey. Gratitude eternal to Una Leiba – no childcare, no novel.

  I landed in London to the kindnesses of Susie Ember, Eliza Mishcon, Barbara Ellen and Indira Varma. I am endlessly supported by my sister, Lisa Forrest and my sisterwife, Leah Wright.

  I want to thank my parents, Judy and Jeffrey, for turning me on to Sister Corita, for providing the particulars of the family lingerie business and for buying me Adam Ant stationary when I was little.

  Thank you dear Gaetano, who shall remain surname-less but who has helped so many of us.

  And last but not least, Rowena Arguelles – my favourite reader alive.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  EMMA FORREST has published three novels, an essay collection and the memoir Your Voice In My Head. An Anglo-American currently based in London, she recently wrote and directed her feature debut, Untogether.

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  First published in Great Britain 2019

  This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Emma Forrest, 2019

  “Rapture” written by Deborah Harry and Chris Stein. Published by Music of Windswept (ASCAP) and BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd (PRS) c/o BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. Used by permission. All rights reserved

  Emma Forrest has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

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  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-9521-4; TPB: 978-1-4088-9541-2; eBook: 978-1-4088-9520-7

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