Mark took a small step closer so Anthony had to bend backwards. ‘You’re not going to pay her back her father’s deposit. So she doesn’t have to do shit. Why don’t you just leave?’
Mark was right. Anthony had no power over me. I didn’t have to do anything else here. I could leave. This empty place wasn’t Dad’s flat. It wasn’t gone. It wasn’t rubbish in a cage or stained mattresses. Dad’s flat was in my head, I realized. In my head Dad could still sit on his sofa, drink wine, have a cigarette, play his music on his stereo, eat crème caramels in his kitchen, spray his house plants with water.
I heard Anthony stumble as he went down the stairs. He slammed the door behind him.
‘Thank you,’ I said to Mark.
‘You’re all right,’ he replied.
33
2016, London
We are having a Christmas drinks party. It is mostly local friends, many of them parents from Hebe and Minna’s school, people we chat to at drop-off and collection. It’s a nice, gentle party. Prosecco and posh crisps. Mike is playing something jazzy on the record player; everyone has dressed up a bit, jewellery and lipstick.
I am in the living room, talking to a couple of people, including one of the more serious and high-flying mothers. She keeps looking above my head at the wall. I twist around to see what has caught her attention.
‘What is that?’ she asks.
Two of my dad’s most treasured possessions were prints by Willy Feilding, a seventies artist whose central themes were dragons and sex. These prints were an important part of my childhood. I would stare at them for hours, fascinated by their intricate weirdness and explicit ribaldry. The prints are companion pieces; in the first a dragon with a massive erection looms over a maiden wearing nothing but a silky ribbon tied about her waist. This sacrifice/gift/lover is held aloft on a large pillow by a gaggle of naked and hirsute dwarf-like characters. She looks dreamily ecstatic; he (the dragon) ravenously lusty. In the second picture the dragon enters the maiden, who arches her back and tips her chin, an expression of faraway pleasure on her face, while he opens his dragon jaws and sticks out his pointy dragon tongue with crazed delight. The force of the inter-species lovemaking shakes the structure made by the dwarfs, who scatter and tumble, fire spurting from their penises.
It is this second ‘copulation’ image that hangs on the wall in my living room. I brought it home after Dad died.
‘Ah, that belonged to my dad. It’s a print, quite rare now. The artist has a sort of cult following – apparently Keith Richards collects a lot of his work.’
‘Gosh,’ she says, still staring at the picture. It takes a while to fully grasp what is going on.
‘I got Mike to hang it up high so the girls can’t see it properly. Normally no one notices it.’
I took so many things from Dad’s flat after he died, trying to re-create the spirit of it in my own home (just like after Mum sold the flat in Battersea when I was twenty-one, and I had to re-create my childhood bedroom in various rental rooms across London). Dad loved knick-knacks, bits and bobs; he filled his flat with them to make it cosy, like a hobbit-hole. I do the same thing. But I think I do this to secure a sense of who I really am, my past charted in artefacts. After all, things are more trustworthy than memories, object not subject, archaeology not history. This painting, this little bronze elephant, this wooden carved box.
I took so many things from Dad’s flat, including his diaries and brown leather Filofax. He didn’t really use it as a diary, more a place to collect mementos, mostly from the time when I was a teenager and his world suddenly became flooded with young girls. In it there are sexy drawings and secret messages, a collection of love letters tucked between the pages. The letters talk of ‘heavenly union’ and ‘love of the most magical kind’. They talk about secrets, sex and longing. They also talk about homework that must be completed and parents who must be deceived.
My father said it all started one night when one of my friends was staying with us, even before Candy died. She and I were up watching television. It was late and we were just in our nighties. She was wearing a loose T-shirt that fell off her shoulders and a pair of white pants. She was golden and beautiful, loose and languid. Dad would later tell me that night was ‘when the dragon woke up’. As a heroin addict he’d had no sex drive, he told me; when he was newly sober he’d had no sex drive, he told me; Mum had put on weight so he didn’t fancy her any more, he told me (he always told me too much). But just looking at my friend’s youthful body and the thoughtless, trusting touch of a naked thigh against his leg, that was enough to rouse his dormant sex beast.
Nothing happened, not at first. He looked; he admired; he made friends with my friends. He talked to them as no other adult talked to them. He was funny, generous, full of street wisdom. I loved him and felt special for having a dad like him. All my friends envied me my father.
But after my sister died the renewal of his sexual urges coalesced with another kind of longing, a longing for lost little girls. The two things seemed to become confused in his mind. At the end of Dad’s Filofax there is an in-built wallet; inside is a collection of onion-skin-thin receipts from the hotel in Tunisia, including one for a pancake, signed by Candy Hodge in joined-up handwriting. He kept this in his diary, along with those love letters from teenaged girls. All his lost little girls.
Candy’s death might be an explanation for some of my father’s behaviour but, unlike my mother, I don’t think it is an excuse. He gave drugs to those girls. Girls who were my friends. Girls who went to my school. Girls whom I brought down to his hairdressing salon. Their parents thought their children were safe because of me. But I couldn’t keep anyone safe.
I thought that I might want to write about the strange sexual politics of the late eighties and early nineties, how sexual relationships between young girls and older men seemed normalized, fetishized even, all over the newspapers, Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith. I could write about how we competed for the attentions of older men, how older men thought our bodies were available to them, perhaps because we seemed to be offering them, even though what we were really doing was play-acting, because we were children. But that just feels like me finding more ways to excuse my father’s behaviour and I don’t want to do that any more.
The imagery still astonishes me, that he thought of his sex drive like a mythical creature that lived within him and could not be controlled once it had been unleashed: wild and glorious, winged and ferocious.
My father never said sorry. The drug addiction was a disease; the sex drive was a dragon. It’s not my fault, he told me, again and again. It’s not my fault, my darling, it’s the dragon.
And yet I still have that Willy Feilding print hanging on my wall. Why don’t I take it down and sell it? Why do I keep it in my home, endangering the shiny happy world that my husband and I have created for our children? Cut out the rotten nastiness and leave only the healthy goodness. Is that the answer? Is that how it works?
I don’t think so. Not for me at least.
I have the Willy Feilding print because it is as much a part of me as my Latin texts (which I also still have). Order and chaos, life and death, past and future. These opposites must be accommodated and held in a state of balanced oscillation. I love my dad and I am furious with him. One of the hardest things for me is accepting who he really was. I cannot just pretend that he was fun and funny, because he was also dangerous and manipulative and hurt people in ways that are unforgivable. This is painful and lonely knowledge. I wish I had someone who understands how it feels to be a daughter of a man like him.
But I do.
My father had two Willy Feilding prints. They are companion pieces. I have one. The other is in Los Angeles.
34
2016, London and Los Angeles
I have eaten smoked salmon, tender steak and dauphinoise potatoes. I have drunk champagne and too much expensive red wine. I am wearing a dress that sheds gold glitter all over the grey-carpeted floor. It is a fashion d
inner and I am having fun with people I barely know in a private room in a posh new Scandinavian restaurant in St James’s.
Someone strikes their glass with a silver teaspoon.
‘I’d just like to say thank you all so much for coming, it means so much to me that we can share this magical day. What I would like for us to do now is to take a moment to reflect on our blessings, and perhaps we could go around the table and everyone could raise a toast to someone or something that is really meaningful to them.’
The woman speaking is a towering blonde, a former model turned fashion designer, an Americanized European.
For God’s sake, I think, refilling my glass so that there will be enough wine for me to toast every sodding blessing around the table. They toast and I drink. They toast and I drink. Again and again.
Now it is my turn and they are all looking at me and I have no idea what to say.
‘This is deeply embarrassing for me because I am British.’ I pause, allowing everyone to laugh at my dry British wit. ‘But I would like to raise a toast,’ I say. ‘To sisters.’
They all cheer and raise their glasses high above their heads before drinking enthusiastically. Maranda, who is sitting next to me, clinks her glass against mine a second time, a private salutation, one meant only for us.
‘To sisters,’ she says.
After our father’s death Maranda and I saw each other a couple of times. She would come to London for a premiere or work-related event. We would hang out for a few hours, get drunk, make promises to see each other more, to be in contact more, promises that we did not keep.
Maranda had become so folded up in the mayhem of Candy’s death, my father’s behaviour, all the chaos, sadness and hardship, that I forgot she was my sister too.
And now here we are again, meeting in the dislocated way that we always do, a random fancy event, where I get drunk and do something embarrassing (like the film party where I tried to kiss the actor John Hamm at 2 a.m.), this time a dinner to celebrate the launch of a range of weird floaty black clothing designed by one of Maranda’s friends.
‘I’m writing a book, actually, it’s a sort of autobiographical thing,’ I say between mouthfuls of chocolate mousse.
‘That’s amazing!’ replies Maranda.
‘I’m planning a writing trip for spring next year. I need to get away so I can concentrate. It’s so hard, with work and the kids and everything.’
‘Come and stay with me in Los Angeles,’ says Maranda immediately.
‘That would be great – I would love that,’ I reply, not knowing if I mean the words I am saying, but knowing that they are the right ones to say.
Over the next couple of months Maranda emails me.
‘When are you coming to LA? Have you booked your flights?’
‘I just need to sort a few things out!’
What I don’t say is that I have also been in touch with the spa editor of the magazine and that we are discussing a trip to Nepal, eight days of trekking in the mountains, with my very own guide and yoga instructor, staying with local families, the final few days in a luxury lodge where, apparently, the air is so clear that the stars and dense galaxies that light the night sky look as though they are within touching distance. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime trip; I just have to pay for the flights and write a short piece for the magazine. I can only do one major trip away from my family a year, and this year it will be Nepal. I can do LA any time, I reason. But to walk in the Himalayas with my own guide and yoga teacher, to touch the stars …
I have selected my flights and am still answering Maranda’s emails with a jaunty ‘just sorting everything out!’
In the middle of January, two weeks before I am due to go to Nepal, the boutique travel company organizing the trip emails me with final confirmations. The email lists all the vaccinations that are required: yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria tablets, various other terrifying-sounding diseases. The breezy tone assumes that as a seasoned adventure traveller I will have had most of these jabs already.
I am not an adventurous traveller. I find holidays scary. Terrible things happen to me on holiday. I have never been vaccinated against a tropical disease.
I realize that I am more scared of spending a week with my sister than I am of going to Nepal. I realize this is both mad and a mistake. The trip to Nepal isn’t the trip of a lifetime. The trip to Los Angeles might be.
I cancel the Himalayas trip, pissing everyone off, and book last-minute tickets to Los Angeles. I feel huge relief when I do this, like a balloon that has been let go and is gently floating into uncharted places.
It’s the longest flight I have ever taken. I am wild with nerves. Connecting with a living lost sister suddenly seems so much harder than all the things I have done in search of a dead one.
Maranda and her daughter Biba are waiting for me in the arrivals hall of LAX looking excited. And the first thing I notice, the first surprise, is Biba. I haven’t seen her since she was a baby and now that she is grown she looks so much like Hebe. They are the same age and they look more like sisters than me and Maranda. It amazes me that the universe could play such a clever trick, so that I will love her immediately.
The other surprise, which I keep secret at first, because it feels like something illicit, is how much Maranda reminds me of Dad. I notice it straightaway, as we drive from the airport to Palm Springs (where Maranda has a styling job the next day). The way she drives, her legs slightly apart, energetic and muscular, going too fast, overtaking while talking, the music too loud. The way she sits in the driver’s seat is the way he sat in a driver’s seat. It does not end there. Maranda’s house in Silverlake has a basement that she has converted into a hairdressing salon, and walking into it feels like walking into my father’s basement salon in Knightsbridge. She has his pictures, his brushes, all the things she took when she came to London after he died. It is like stepping into the shimmering space between past and present. And when we go walking in the hills around Los Angeles, me always following in her wake, I realize that her body is my father’s body, she has his shoulders, his neck, his neat bottom, his calf muscles, big and strong like bunched fists. Walking around the Silverlake Wholefoods with Maranda and Biba I have this feeling of reconnection with my father again, watching her fill a paper bag with big chocolate-covered nuts, taking two more from the dispenser and popping one into Biba’s mouth, one into her own. Listening to her stories, listening to the way she takes the truth and weaves it into something crazy and exciting, that’s him too.
‘I had over one hundred thousand dollars. I’d been working like hell to save for years, so I could open a salon, and he stole it all from me. This guy that I was in love with, and I don’t think he even liked me. I couldn’t get the money back from him, I couldn’t go back to Stockholm like a failure, so I played backgammon for money with the guys on Miami Beach. I hustled. Here is the tattoo I got for that time.’
A pair of dice, two sixes, on the soft skin of her inner arm.
I listen to all her wild stories, open-mouthed, loving hearing them, not caring that there might be a gap between reality and exaggeration. That gap doesn’t matter to the daughters of Gavin Hodge, that gap is where the magic is.
Maranda made enough money in Miami to come to LA, made contacts, worked hard, and now she is one of the most successful session hairdressers in the city. She bought her beautiful house, with its garden full of palm trees and succulents, a Balinese day bed and a hot tub. She has never depended on anyone else, never been given a penny. ‘Work Bitch’ by Britney Spears is one of her favourite songs, played at top volume in her massive Mercedes SUV as we drive to hot yoga.
On the Friday before I am due to return to London we spend an afternoon at the twenty-four-hour Wi Spa in Koreatown. Maranda, Biba and I plunge into pools that are, by turn, hot, unbearably hot, cold and unbearably cold. We are naked, all three of us, our skin pink and sleek, as we walk from pool to pool. We chat, submerged from the chin down, like hippos at a watering hole. W
e observe the nakedness of the other women, the various shaped breasts, the tattoos, the abundance or scarcity of pubic hair. We sweat in the steam room, the steam hissing out of unseen vents; and afterwards Maranda and I lie on marble slabs, naked, while middle-aged Korean women in black underwear scrub us with soap and mitts, under our breasts, in our armpits, between our toes, so that not a scrap of old skin remains. Biba stands by my marble slab and watches as the grey strings of dead skin peel off my pale British body to be swept on to the floor. There is a lot of dead skin, enough to fill a couple of big cups.
‘What’s that stuff?’ asks Biba.
‘It’s all my old skin. I’ll be a kilo lighter after this!’ I say.
‘But why do you have so much? My mom doesn’t have so much.’
‘In England we don’t have Korean spas, so we don’t get the chance to be this clean,’ I reply.
Maranda believes in cleanliness. She tells me that the awfulness of living with us in Battersea, the dirt and grime, the casual degradation of our flat, brought out her OCD. She cleans her kitchen surfaces with anti-bacterial wipes many times a day.
In some ways Maranda is like my father and in some ways she is like me, grappling with the past. But mostly she is herself.
Afterwards we pat ourselves dry with many towels, put on the baggy shorts and yellow T-shirts that were provided on arrival and leave the women-only area for the communal hall. This is a large, high-ceilinged space with a heated floor and beige marble tiles where people loll on mats, read, chat, nap, watch their devices with headphones in. Maranda finds some mats and an empty corner and produces the face masks she has purchased for us: damp, slithery sheets of thick tissue which have been infused with moisturizer, serums and peptides to make skin more youthful looking. There are holes for the nose, mouth and eyes, and the masks have to be smoothed on to the face so the wearer looks like an Egyptian mummy or a burns victim or someone recovering from a serious cosmetic procedure. Maranda squeezes some extra serum from the packets into my palm.
The Consequences of Love Page 21