My mother is in hospital for a week, slipping in and out of consciousness, hallucinating that the tall, swaying trees outside the windows are whispering secrets to her. She doesn’t tell the doctors about these hallucinations; she worries that if she does the doctors will keep her in hospital longer and she won’t be able to return home, to her life, to us. Just as I do not tell anyone about my tears. We keep our vulnerabilities to ourselves.
10
1989, London
It was cream and brown, mostly fur. Its bones were tiny. I could feel them as I held it on my knee, a quivery, shivery creature, its warm heartbeat too fast against my fingertips.
‘I’m going to call it Dizzy,’ I said. ‘After Dizzy Gillespie.’
It was one of the smallest rabbits in the garden. I had spotted it at once, bouncing towards me rather than away from me, as though it wanted to be mine.
‘How old do you think it is?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Bella.
She was on her knees by one of the hutches, pulling wads of pale straw from a big plastic bag; shoving the fresh straw into the hutch without clearing out the old, damp, flattened straw. She had copper ringlets and she wore a black Lycra miniskirt, a white vest and sandals that were scuffed and brown, like her bare legs.
The rabbit garden was around the corner from Bella’s house in Chelsea. It was attached to a block of flats that her father was renting out and he had loaned the garden to Bella for her pet rabbits. The garden had a black metal gate that creaked on its hinges and a huge ash tree which shaded it. At first there had only been four rabbits, but they had multiplied fast. Now they were in piles in the corners and nestled among the roots of the tree. Old fat ones sat slowly munching blackened carrot stumps; small new ones darted about what little space there was, scampering over the backs of their parents, aunts, uncles, their velvet ears flapping. I had to nudge them out of the way with my toes to get to the bentwood chair under the tree.
‘How many are there now?’
‘Don’t ask. I hate them. They are such randy little shits,’ she lisped. Bella shuffled next to me on the seat, late September sunlight warming us through the branches and leaves. She grabbed one of the biggest, oldest rabbits, yellowish white with scummy pink eyes. ‘But I don’t hate you, oh no I don’t, I love you,’ she said, holding the rabbit’s face to hers, then draping it over her shoulders like an expensive stole.
‘What are you going to do about them?’
‘Don’t you start. The people in the flats have been complaining. They say they can smell them, but it takes so long to clean the bloody hutches. Dad says we should start eating them.’
‘Lapin à la moutarde,’ I said, remembering something I’d seen on a sign outside a restaurant on a school day-trip to Boulogne.
‘I’ll kill him before I let him kill any of them.’
‘Well, I’m taking Dizzy, so that’s one less rabbit for dinner.’
Bella gave me a hutch and a bag of hay. Her mother drove me home over the river in her green Morris Minor, which had moss growing on the wooden interior panels. I held Dizzy on my lap, even though they both said I should keep him in the hutch for the journey.
I hadn’t told my parents I was getting a rabbit.
‘You can’t keep a rabbit in your bedroom,’ Dad said.
‘Yes, I can,’ I said. I had already set up the hutch; Dizzy was inside, comfortable in the hay. I had put in some fresh lettuce leaves and a carrot but he hadn’t eaten anything yet. ‘Anyway, Mum says it’s fine.’
Dizzy was a very cute baby rabbit with curiously human tendencies. I discovered that he didn’t really like raw vegetables, he much preferred buttery toast and double cream. He would bounce around the flat as though he was in a field, gaily cocking his white fluffy bottom, leaving sticky raisin droppings all over the carpet. He liked to sit with me in front of the television, watching Neighbours and Home and Away. One time I came home from school to find my mother with the rabbit on her lap, singing to it. Mum began to feed the rabbit, preparing dainty snacks for it, steamed asparagus and tender-stem broccoli. She took over the job of cleaning the hutch, taking a dustpan and brush to it, making sure the hay was always plentiful and fresh, so that Dizzy would have a soft, scented bed to sleep on at night.
‘Your mum thinks that rabbit is Candy reincarnated,’ said Dad.
Candy had been dead for less than six months.
‘She has come back to us,’ Mum said.
Dizzy kept growing. When I’d first brought him home he was small enough to sit on my palm. By Christmas he was nearly as long as my thigh. We let him on to the table and tried to fix a paper crown to his head. We fed him chipolatas wrapped in bacon and dipped in gravy. But his favourite thing, we discovered, was brandy butter. He licked the plastic container clean. The following week my mother bought tubs of discounted brandy butter from Marks & Spencer and kept them in the freezer for Dizzy, to be defrosted and fed to him as a special weekend treat. She liked to eat them too.
Dizzy kept growing (and so did Mum).
He was getting too big for his hutch, but still I put him in every night before I went to bed. One night I was woken by the sound of him kicking at the wooden door, a sinister thudding noise. Two days later he kicked so hard that he broke it.
‘He’s a monster,’ Dad said.
‘He’s just growing up,’ said Mum, looking sad.
Spottynose never liked Dizzy. She was a clever cat. She slept at the end of my bed, checked my hair for fleas and always sat with me if I was sad. When we came home from the holiday in Tunisia, she looked at us, three instead of four, sniffed the air and pattered straight into Candy’s room. She did not come out for two days.
I came home from school to discover that Dizzy had once again kicked his way out of his hutch, even though we had fixed it. He was roaming around the house like a restless hoodlum. Spottynose had wedged herself under a radiator, the fur on her belly chewed away.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t have given him the chipolatas,’ said Dad.
‘I don’t think we can keep him any more,’ I said.
I had become scared of Dizzy.
My mother cried.
Bella’s mother drove back over the river to collect the rabbit. Bella told me that she had found a lovely family in Somerset who would take him.
‘They have two young children who really want a big rabbit like this. They have a massive garden; he’ll be so happy. He’ll be loved.’
That made me and Mum feel a bit better.
A month later Bella’s rabbit garden was cleared out. It had become impossible, unmanageable, with dead rabbits decaying in the roots of the trees.
Years later I spoke to her about the rabbits.
‘What did you do with them?’ I asked.
‘We packed as many as we could into the boot of the car,’ she said, her lisp now gone, her copper ringlets blonde and straight. ‘We had to really shove them in. It was mayhem. Then we drove down to Kent, found a field and let them out. It took three trips.’
‘Wow,’ I said, thinking that Dizzy was lucky to get out when he did. Those rabbits wouldn’t have survived a day in the wild. ‘And did you ever hear from the family who took my rabbit? Were they happy with him? He was a bit of a nutter, but cute. He loved brandy butter.’
‘Oh, Gavvy. There was no family. I’m sorry.’
11
2014, London
The Duke of Marlborough has died. This is a big story at Tatler. Sonny Marlborough was wealthy, much-married and the owner of Blenheim Palace, England’s very own Versailles. But even more thrilling to the team is his son, Jamie Blandford, former degenerate drug addict, now apparently reformed and about to take his place as one of the most senior aristocrats of England. Also a former client and friend of my father’s.
The editorial team know that Jamie was a ‘family friend’, so it is agreed that I should be the one to contact him and ask if he would like to be interviewed by Tatler. It would be quite a coup, alth
ough I make clear that I don’t think I could do the interview (and I very much doubt he would want to be interviewed by me).
I write a commiserating letter. I wait a week for the reply that doesn’t come, and then find Jamie on Facebook. I send him a personal message. He replies with his mobile phone number and we arrange a time to speak.
Just hearing his voice makes me feel strange. But I have to be grown-up and polite. He asks how I am. I tell him that I’m now married and have two children. He asks their names, their ages, and then he laughs. ‘How funny! I have a child who is the same age as yours.’ He says it as though this is an amusing coincidence.
‘How funny,’ I say.
I make an excuse to end the conversation.
I knew Jamie had remarried. But the idea that he should be in charge of a child, this man who took drugs in my house when I was a little girl, makes me feel helpless and sad in a way that I could not have predicted.
The new Duke of Marlborough declines the opportunity to be interviewed by Tatler. Instead, one of the journalists on the magazine, David Jenkins, writes a profile of him, one that portrays Jamie’s past shortcomings as well as his recent rehabilitation. I help by putting David in touch with some of Jamie (and Dad’s) old friends, like Michael, whom I meet in the gilt VIP bar of the Café Royal hotel where he is employed as a ‘host’. Michael is still handsome, louche in his purple suit, his blond hair gone to grey. He is with some acquaintances, glossy young people who find him entertaining, a living slice of decadent London history. He introduces me.
‘This is Gavanndra. Her father was my drug dealer!’
How they laugh.
‘I first met Gavin when I was, what, sixteen? On exeat. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there for that bit,’ I say.
Michael laughs, laughter that morphs into a phlegmy cough. He will be dead from liver cancer within the year.
I thought they were his friends. But what I realize as I sit there, listening to Michael shouting over party music, drinking my complimentary vodka and tonic too fast and asking for another, is that to most of these people Dad was just a drug dealer. And here am I, deputy editor of their magazine, the daughter of their drug dealer.
I don’t know if the joke is on them or me.
The next day I tell David about Jamie coming to our flat when I was young, how I would watch him take drugs and find him asleep on the floor of our living room the next morning. I do not tell David about the last time I saw Jamie. We were in Dad’s basement hairdressing salon in Knightsbridge. It was late. I was there with some school friends, drinking, smoking, getting high. Jamie tramped down the stairs.
‘Hello! Would anyone like some crack?’ he said.
Perhaps he was joking, perhaps not. Either way, Jamie and Dad went to the back room, the place where the hair colours were mixed, where powdered blue bleach filled the air like a sour dust cloud and where clandestine transactions took place.
David has finished writing his piece about Jamie. The picture editor has chosen the images, the designer has laid out the story, and it lands on my desk so that I can come up with the headline. There is a huge image of Jamie on the opening spread, at the age he would have been when I knew him, sweaty and wild-eyed.
My past is crashing into the present with ever-increasing violence and it is all I can do to keep standing.
12
1990, London
I would smoke in bed when I couldn’t sleep, drink strong coffee and listen to Dad’s old records played very quietly, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, watching the brightness move on the ceiling, patterns made by the cars’ headlights on the road outside.
One night when I was lying there I heard a black cab pulling up outside, and then Dad’s voice. I listened to him, stumbling up the stairs, struggling to get his key in the lock, slamming the door, humming loudly, not caring that everyone was meant to be asleep.
Usually I would just lie there as he weaved his way drunkenly about the flat, knocking things over and giggling, but that night some old instinct made me get up and go to him, even though it was late and I had school the next day.
He wasn’t where I expected to find him, beached on the sofa, the ashtray balanced on his belly, his feet on the pouffe, buckle of his jeans undone.
Where was he?
Then I spotted him sitting on the arm of the chair by the open window, blowing thick smoke into the night.
‘Bloody hell!’ he said, coughing when he saw me.
The cigarette he was smoking was not a normal one – I noticed that at once; it was homemade, a roll-up, the smoke smelt different too.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Dad smiled his wolf smile and took another drag. The cold air from the communal gardens where we used to play, trees and grass and icy black sky, made me shiver as I stood there, barefoot in my nightie.
‘It’s just dope, my darling,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
I took a step closer. Dad was taking drugs again. This should have scared me, but it didn’t. I was numb to everything. ‘Does Mum know?’ I asked.
Dad looked at me; his eyes were laughing as though he didn’t care. ‘It really doesn’t matter, it’s nothing, it’s not my drug of choice.’
I watched Dad’s hands as he flicked ash on to the window ledge. It would be blown away in the night, I thought. No one would ever know, I thought.
‘Is it nice?’ I asked. I don’t know why. The question just popped into my brain.
He looked at me. ‘Have you done any drugs yet?’
We are in Anya’s bedroom in Chiswick, sitting on the carpet, our grey skirts so tight and short it is hard to cross our legs.
‘Do you think we need one each?’ asks Anya, holding up a big peach-coloured towel that she has just fetched from her bathroom.
‘We haven’t got any contagious diseases, have we? Let’s share,’ says Sarah.
Anya sits down, crosses her legs, lays the towel over her knees and reads the instructions on the side of the can of deodorant, as though they might be helpful at all.
‘So … what do we do?’
‘Just hold the towel over your mouth and spray, inhale, repeat,’ says Venetia.
Anya holds the towel to her face, brings the deodorant to her mouth and presses the nozzle, keeping her eyes open. It makes a loud, fizzy noise. She stops, smiles, says, ‘Ooh, it tastes weird!’ and presses again, inhaling for about ten seconds, her eyes closed. She makes a choking, giggly sound and falls back, so that now she is lying on the carpet, her legs still crossed.
‘Was that meant to happen?’ whispers Sarah.
And then Anya opens her eyes and begins laughing, still lying on her back. ‘Oh my God! That was amazing!’
‘Me next,’ I say. I hold the towel to my face and push the nozzle down with my finger. The chalky taste of Natrel deodorant fills my mouth, but I keep going, breathing in the fumes until my hands are weak, like rubber, and curtains are coming down on my mind, blackness and a whomp-whomping sound in my ears, which is like the sound of my heart, but only if my heart was huge, and in my head, and my head was the size of a football pitch, and the blackness is infinite and I am floating in it and everything feels soft and amazing and there is no one except me.
The sounds fade and the black becomes grey and suddenly I am in the room again, lying on my back. It takes a moment to work out what just happened, I don’t know how long I was gone, thirty seconds or thirty years. I start laughing; I can’t help it. The laughter starts in my belly and bubbles up and out. Everything is just so funny and brilliant; it is impossible to suppress how happy I feel.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Dad stared out at the night, the joint crackling between his fingers.
‘Do you want some?’ he said, reaching out his hand.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
I took the joint from him. I brought it to my lips; the end was thin and wet from his mouth. It was hard to take a drag, but I sucked har
d and eventually the end glowed and I felt the sharp, dry fumes slide down my throat into my lungs.
‘Hold it for as long as possible,’ he said, but I thought I might choke so I coughed out the smoke and he laughed.
The effect wasn’t as instant and overwhelming as the aerosol, but it made my brain nicely heavy and my body feel as if it was swaying even though I was sure I was standing still. I took another drag, wanting to be sure of the sensation. It was easier the second time, now I knew what I was doing, easier to hold the smoke down, to blow it out smoothly rather than cough it up.
I handed the joint back and Dad chucked it out of the window. I felt my legs go soft so I sat down.
‘It’s nice stuff, probably stronger than you’re used to,’ he murmured.
‘Mmmm,’ I replied, interested by how my lips felt against one another; they sort of buzzed.
‘You should come to me, you know, when you want to get stuff. I mean, I know you’re gonna do it, so this way it’s safer. Who knows what you’ll get out on the street, rat poison and all sorts of crap. But if you get it from me it will be good, and I’ll know what you are taking. Much safer.’
I felt dizzy and a little sick, my thoughts going around in circles. Dad was telling me that he would get drugs for me, if I wanted them.
‘That would be cool,’ I said and he reached into his jeans pocket and took out a lump of black stuff wrapped in cellophane. He unwound the plastic, broke off an edge and handed it to me.
‘Here,’ he said.
The hash was soft and warm. I held it tightly in my fist.
‘Don’t tell Mum about this. She wouldn’t get it.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Come on, bedtime,’ he said and he shut the window.
As he left the living room he patted the wooden box on the mantelpiece.
‘Night night, Candy,’ he said.
13
2014, London
The Consequences of Love Page 7