I'll Keep You Safe

by Peter May

  My turn to laugh. “Really? Most men want to undress me.”

  “Well, I can understand that,” he said solemnly. “Beauty should always be high visibility.”

  “Flatterer!”

  He grinned. “I love your accent.” His was pure London East End.

  “It’s what comes from being a Gaelic-speaker.”

  “Gaelic? Irish?”

  “Scottish. We’re both from the Isle of Lewis.”

  His eyes lit up. “Oh. My. God! My grandmother came from the Isle of Barra. She was a McNeil. We could be related.”

  I shook my head, still laughing. “I doubt it, Lee. There are about twenty-six thousand people in the Outer Hebrides. And anyway, Catholics on Barra, Protestants on Lewis. Oil and water.”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Bloody religion!” He nodded towards my iPod lying on the table. “What are you listening to?”

  “Pink. I’m Not Dead.”

  His face lit up. “I loooove Pink. I listen to that album all the time. ‘Stupid Girls.’ And, oh, ‘Fingers’! I mean, who else could write such a blatant song about masturbation and get away with it like that? It’s sooo sexy. I’d almost turn straight to spend a night with Pink.”

  I laughed. “I love ‘Mr. President,’” I said. “Not many pop stars with the courage to go political these days.”

  “Not like in the Sixties.” Lee clasped his hands. “Me? I was born in the wrong era. I’d have loved to have dressed the Sixties.” His eyes sparkled and he sighed. “And all that free love, without an AIDS virus in sight.”

  Ruairidh returned with the coffees. “What are you two laughing about?”

  “Oh just sex,” I said.

  “My eternal obsession.” Lee grinned. “After fashion, of course.” He glanced at his watch. “Speaking of which, you have samples to show me, you said.”

  “Yes.” I stood up, taking over, and lifted the rucksacks on to a couple of chairs. “We call them pattern blankets. It was Ruairidh’s idea. Basically to weave one sample into the next to give a sense, side by side, of the range of tones and colours and patterns available.”

  I pulled them out and draped them over all the available chairs I could draw around our table, and literally watched Lee Blunt’s jaw drop. He stood up and walked around the chairs, running the flat of his hands across the surface of the tweed, and then feeding it through his fingers. His eyes were burning with what I understood only later was raw inspiration.

  “I want this,” he said very quietly.

  “Which one?” Ruairidh said.

  “Not one, mate. All of them. Just like this. All woven together. Yards and yards of it. Bolts of the bloody stuff.” He turned shining eyes on me. “It’s perfect. Just what I’ve been looking for. All my bloody life, I think. I’m going to make it the centrepiece of my next collection.” He grinned then, turning his big wide infectious smile on Ruairidh. “And I’m going to build the whole show around the Highland Clearances. We Scots can all relate to that, right?” And I loved the way that suddenly he was Scottish.

  The next few months passed in a blur. Lee flew up to the islands and spent long hours with Ruairidh’s mother picking out the patterns and colours he wanted for the blankets. He and Ruairidh and I went off to the bar at the Doune Braes Hotel and got roaring drunk, laughing endlessly at his irreverent and often blood-curdlingly crude sense of humour. We really cemented our relationship with him that week.

  And then it was down to work. Making those blankets was no easy task. It was a complex business managing the transition from one set of warp and weft yarns to another, as the weave bled from one pattern into the next. Single-width Harris Tweed would use just over 600 threads because of the thickness of the wool. Ranish, with its finer threads, used more than 800. So it was a labour-intensive and time-consuming job. We had to employ additional weavers so that we would make the deadline Lee had set for us. He needed the cloth in time to prepare for his show at London Fashion Week in February.

  In January we got an invite from Lee to attend the show. Money was still tight. He hadn’t paid us yet, and we had devoted all our time and energies to fulfilling his order, subsidized by money from the sale of the Macfarlanes’ property in Stornoway. We got the bus down to London the following month, the day before the show. I had booked us into a student guest house in South Kensington for a little over £30 a night, and we intended to stay just the two nights.

  The evening we arrived Lee picked us up in a big black Merc driven by a punkish girl with a face full of metal who took us to an apartment somewhere in St. John’s Wood. “Pre-show party,” Lee said. He was sitting up front with the punk girl. “In case the post-show party is more like a wake. You never know with these fucking fashion critics.” He turned his back on us then, and getting conversation out of him during the rest of the drive was like getting blood from a stone. He seemed nervous and distracted and not at all like the crude and outrageous character we had got to know during his stay on the island.

  It was a rainy, miserable, dark winter’s night and the street, when we arrived, was packed full of shiny wet Audis and BMWs and Porsches. Taxis were arriving, and a constant stream of strange-looking people under umbrellas were running into an elegant apartment block through a portico’d entrance.

  “So,” I said, “I suppose everything’s all set for the show, then?”

  “Christ, no!” Lee turned and growled at me. “It’s all a fucking mess. Nothing’s finished. It’s going to be a goddamn fucking disaster.” He got out of the car, slamming the door behind him, and walked briskly up the drive towards the front door.

  The punk girl turned and grinned at us. “Don’t worry, he’s always like this the night before a show. He’ll pull it all together, he always does. Just go in,” she said. “And enjoy.”

  The apartment was on the second floor. We followed the noise up the stairs and wondered what the neighbours made of it. The door of the apartment stood wide, spilling light and music out into the landing. I followed Ruairidh in as he weaved his way through crowds of people who stood about on white carpets spilling red wine and cigarette ash. In amongst the smoke I smelled the distinctive musky reek of cannabis, with which I had become acquainted during my student days. But that was a long time ago. Ruairidh half-turned and pulled a face. This was definitely not our scene.

  A large sitting room with open-plan kitchen and tall windows looked out over the road below. A congregation of mostly young people sprawled on sofas and chairs or stood in animated groups shouting conversations above deafening music. I had never seen such an array of outlandish clothes all in one place outside of a theatre dressing room. A maelstrom of mannequins, a thrum of thespians. Hats and boots, frock coats and dresses, flares and bumsters, skirts and tops that left little to the imagination. There were men kissing men, women kissing women and, incongruously, even the occasional man and woman exchanging kisses.

  A group of people knelt around a glass-topped coffee table, cutting and accumulating lines of white powder that they took it in turns to snort through rolled-up fivers.

  Someone thrust glasses of red wine into our hands, and we looked around for Lee. But there was no sign of him. We found seats instead, and sat together sipping our wine and watching as the circus unfolded around us. We made those drinks last, feeling distinctly out of place, although in truth no one seemed to notice our existence. I don’t know how long we sat there. An hour, maybe more. But finally it was long enough for me. I pressed my lips to Ruairidh’s ear. “Let’s go.”

  He nodded. “We’d better tell Lee, though.”

  I thought he wouldn’t even notice if we were gone, but Ruairidh was anxious not to offend him. We pushed through a group of dancers in the kitchen area and out into the hallway. There was no sign of him anywhere. A couple of doors led off the hall and Ruairidh opened one of them.

  It revealed a bedroom awash with red light. A TV screen fixed to the ceiling above the bed was playing some kind of porn video that we couldn’t see from wh
ere we stood. But the soundtrack was explicit enough. A naked man on the bed was hunched over on his knees, an equally naked woman with enormous breasts thrusting her hips towards his bare buttocks, flesh slapping on flesh. She turned and moved back a little as the door opened, and I was shocked to see her very large erection swinging towards us. She smiled, and in a strangely masculine cadence said, “Hello, darlings. Join us.”

  Ruairidh almost stood on my feet as he backed out of the room, and although I wasn’t certain, I thought that the man bent over on the bed was Lee.

  The punk girl was still sitting in the car outside listening to music. I rapped on the window and she wound it down. “Can you take us back to South Kensington?”

  “Sorry, sweetheart. No can do. I’ve got to wait for Lee and take him to the venue. He’s going to be working on the show all night. But don’t worry, you can get a taxi. And Lee’s asked me to pick you up from your place at six tomorrow morning. So be ready.” She smiled and wound the window back up.

  We picked up a taxi a couple of streets away, and I was shocked when the fare came to almost as much as a night at our hotel. So much for economizing.

  We were still half asleep when the punk girl came calling, and took us off on what would be one of the most bizarre, unlikely and seminal days of our lives.

  It was another miserable February morning, drizzle falling in the dark from a sky burned umber by the lights of the city. The chill of it seeped into our bones. We had no idea where we were going, but the punk girl sped us through the early-morning traffic heading east. Until we found ourselves cruising along shiny cobbled streets between crumbling brick warehouses.

  Finally, she drew up alongside a phalanx of cars and battered white vans in a cul-de-sac surrounded by dark, derelict buildings. Light spilled out from vast open doors and was shot through by streaks of fast-moving white. It was sleeting.

  The outside walls were slathered with posters advertising what it described as The highlight and absolute culmination of British Fashion Week. A billboard declared, Fashion Sensation Lee Blunt Re-animates the Highland Clearances in Haute Couture.

  It seemed to us the most unlikely venue. British Fashion Week, in our imagination at least, projected an image of class and glamour. It was hard to imagine the great and the good of British fashion dragging themselves out to warehouseland in the East End of London from between their silk sheets in Mayfair and Chelsea. But what did we know? This was the pulling power of Lee Blunt.

  The vast interior beyond the open doors was filled with the roar of space heaters fighting to exorcize years of cold and damp. Electricians were constructing a complex lighting rig around a raised catwalk strewn with rocks and heather and seaweed carefully placed along its length by an army of assistants. Where they had acquired heather at this time of year we knew not, but the seaweed was fresh, and the salty smell of it filled the place like the smell of the sea.

  The punk girl had told us in the car that many of the young people helping with the show were volunteers, fashion students hoping to learn something, or get themselves noticed. We noticed them now, setting out rows of folding tubular chairs along either side of the catwalk. Beyond the seating and the stage, as the lights came up, the rest of the warehouse receded into a darkness so profound that everything in the illuminated foreground seemed impossibly overlit, over-coloured and quite unreal.

  A technician crouched at the end of the runway, fixing a scale model of a nineteenth-century sailing ship to a pedestal. He stood to position a spotlight behind it, casting its shadow large against the far wall and the opening through which the models would come, as if emerging from the hold of the ship itself. Beyond that, the backstage area was screened off by stretched canvas. Everything seemed so unexpectedly makeshift.

  We followed the punk girl, picking our way through the debris that littered the concrete floor, and saw huge pools of black water reflecting light in the distance where the roof had let in rain. Up wooden steps and through hanging sheets on to an area of elevated staging beyond the canvas. And therein lay chaos.

  This was one giant dressing room. Naked and semi-naked girls with pale and dark skin and bones more prominent than breasts ran around from make-up to fitting and back again. In chairs set around a long scarred table littered with jars and brushes, make-up artists daubed dirt and blood on alabaster and ebony skin, painting beautiful faces, and then defacing them with scars and bruises.

  I turned to see Ruairidh gawping open-mouthed. I dug an elbow into his ribs. “Watch it!”

  He laughed and leaned in confidentially. “I’ve never been attracted to stick insects. Ever since I read about the female praying mantis eating her lover after sex.”

  I said, “Sounds like a fine idea to me.”

  A vast cutting table was strewn with Ranish Tweed. There were bolts of it unravelled and cut in short and long lengths. It hung down in folds on to a floor littered with offcuts. Rows of clothes racks hung with half-finished outfits. Jackets and tops and skirts and trousers. Lee, and a small group of trusted accomplices, were pinning them on the girls, cutting and sewing as they went, almost sculpting the clothes to their bodies.

  Lee’s cutting shears were like a wand in his hand as he shaped and cut with mesmeric speed, conjuring extraordinary outfits from virgin cloth, examining, re-cutting, re-pinning what his assistants had done.

  The models—I counted twenty of them—were blue with the cold, and stood around shivering but never complaining. This was a much-coveted gig, a stage on which only a select few would ever get to perform.

  Lee spotted us, and abandoned his shears for a moment, opening his arms to hug and kiss us both, and announcing to the world, “Everyone! These are the geniuses who made the cloth you are wearing.” And all the girls crowded around to fuss and kiss and hug and congratulate. Famous faces from the covers of Vogue and Elle, Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar, naked and unabashed. And I wondered if the flush on Ruairidh’s cheeks was from pleasure or embarrassment. I decided it was probably a mix of the two.

  Lee’s face glowed with excitement, shining with perspiration. His eyes on fire. It was the first time I had seen him so alive. An extraordinary talent wholly in its element. He turned towards racks of boots and shoes behind him. “Look,” he said. “Specially commissioned for the Clearances.” For that’s what he was calling the show.

  They were stunning. Amazing creations that blended leather and Ranish Tweed in startling designs. It made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I found Lee watching me with wide, expectant eyes.

  “Well?”

  “Lee, they are fabulous,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  His grin was infectious. “Wait till you see them in the shops.”

  “So,” Ruairidh said, “the show’s still going to be a goddamn fucking disaster?”

  Lee threw his head back and roared with laughter. “Of course it is. I’ve built my whole reputation on disaster. I wouldn’t want to let anyone down now.” He glanced at his watch. “But go, go, go. I’ve reserved you seats at the front. We’ll be starting soon.”

  My turn to look at my watch. “Lee, it’s not even eight-thirty.”

  He grinned wickedly. “We start at nine. I like to get the bastards out of their beds. And they always do for a Lee Blunt show.” He crinkled his face with pleasure. “Lets them know who’s the one with power here.”

  To our astonishment, when we stepped back out into the warehouse, the seats around the runway were very nearly full. The great and the good had, indeed, dragged themselves from their beds at an ungodly hour for Lee. A buzz of anticipation rose like smoke from amongst the baggy-eyed, powdered and painted faces crowded all around the stage. Seats at the front, in prime position, had our names on them, and we were aware of all the curious glances turning in our direction as we took our places. A flurry of flashes from the bank of photographers beyond the runway nearly blinded us, before we realized that we were the focus of their lenses.

  Suddenly
everything went black. Then the distant strains of bagpipes bled into the dramatic opening of a Capercaillie song, “Waiting for the Wheel to Turn.” A song all about the Highland Clearances. Three models staggered on to the catwalk, linked by paper chains and driven on by a bare-chested man cracking a whip. The clothes they wore were fantastical creations of Ranish and leather and lace, torn trousers and baggy tops slashed open to reveal breasts and blood.

  For thirty minutes the music swooped and soared, pipes and flutes and drums and haunting voices. Skinny, bloodied and dirty models tramped through the heather up and down the catwalk. Sometimes barefoot, other times in knee-high boots, bodies barely concealed beneath extravagant wraps and flowing capes.

  While Lee had used a variety of other textures and textiles, leathers and laces, Ranish Tweed was centre stage. I was moved almost to tears by it, and when Lee emerged at the end of it all, to walk the length of the stage surrounded by his adoring models, I stood with the rest applauding until my hands hurt.

  After the show everyone involved crowded into a pub in Shoreditch. The first reviews would appear in the later editions of the evening papers, and then tomorrow in the dailies, but everyone knew that it had been a triumph. It seemed that Ruairidh and I were as much the centre of attention as Lee, everyone plying us with champagne. Once or twice I caught Lee watching from afar and wondered if it was jealousy I saw in his eyes.

  We were quite drunk, Ruairidh and I, when Lee took us outside, where the punk girl was waiting in the Merc. He opened the door for us to get in. “Just wanted to say my own special thank you,” he said.

  We drove to one of his homes, which was an apartment in an end terrace, semi-detached brick and stone house somewhere in Notting Hill.

  He let us in by a stained-glass door at the front and led us upstairs to the apartment itself. “To be honest, I don’t spend much time here. It’s a place I crash when I want to be on my own, or to bring special friends.”

  He waved us into a white leather settee and opened another bottle of champagne. Ruairidh seemed to have an endless capacity for it, but I didn’t know that I could drink any more. My head was already spinning. However, I had no desire to put a dampener on the occasion. It’s not often that I can say I had to force champagne down my throat, but I did that day.