Vanished Years

by Rupert Everett

  ‘Oh really?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Tell him what it’s called.’

  ‘Yeah. Creepy Crawly Productions,’ said Yaz.

  ‘See?’ marvelled Issie. ‘I could never do that.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m making three albums, and I’m producing them myself.’ Silence.

  ‘Through Creepy Crawly?’ I ventured. I knew how to play along.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Isabella.

  The two ladies looked at me intensely, parrots again, watching every muscle in my face to see how all this madness was hitting me. We were in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – the NHS version.

  ‘God, that’s fantastic! How great,’ I breezed enthusiastically, and the girls relaxed. Yaz stretched out in her chair, all arms and legs, blowing out a huge stream of smoke. Isabella’s hands, endlessly crawling, now searched for a bottle of scent, Fracas, and dabbed it on her neck as she listened incredulously.

  ‘Yeah, I got a fashion line as well. Creepy Crawly Couture, and then there’s Creepy Crawly Interiors. I’m putting the money aside for when I get out.’

  ‘Three albums!’ repeated Issie religiously.

  Now another man came in. He was small and tubby and dishevelled, with mad eyes and a Jack Nicholson grin.

  ‘Hug,’ warned Ray.

  ‘Fuck off, you pathetic retard!’ sneered this city slicker, throwing himself into a chair and fixing me with a wide-eyed grin of utter madness. ‘Rupert fucking Everett, I presume,’ he drawled. Issie and Yaz giggled flirtatiously and squirmed in their seats.

  ‘This is Patrick. He’s been here the longest,’ explained Isabella.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘How long?’ he boomed, slapping his thigh.

  They had all been given the same giggle pill, I concluded, because, with the exception of Ray, they seemed to be constantly on the verge of helpless laughter.

  ‘Very long.’

  They all screamed with joy.

  The girls made coffee, and passed sugar and milk around. Ray hugged me a few times, satiating my pathetic actor’s ego. Even the criminally insane responded to my animal magnetism.

  The sinking sun threw amber shafts across the old lino floor. Smoke billowed and swirled through its rays. I had fallen into an etching by Hogarth. Isabella sat carefully next to a shadow so that one side of her face was shrouded, its eye merely glinting through the fog, the other staring wildly. Soon I was forgotten. These lunatics were engrossed in one another, laughing and talking, smoking cigarettes back to back, as they began to debate some sore point previously scored in group – they were fascinated by one another’s dilemmas – but Isabella suddenly turned her gaze on me.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.’

  ‘How you feeling?’ asked Yaz with thinly disguised boredom.

  ‘They don’t know what to do with me, these people,’ said Issie, picking up an orange from the bowl on the floor and gesturing loftily at the room. ‘I don’t know what to do with myself. I find it hard to survive for the next five minutes. I feel like this fucking orange. A pancake in a wheelchair. A mouth on a seat. A broken record.’

  Nobody said a word.

  ‘A pancake?’ asked Patrick. ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘I know. But you don’t understand. There’s something worse than madness. I have lost intellectual curiosity. I don’t understand why no one will help me to die. I have succeeded in failing to kill myself.’

  More silence.

  ‘Jesus will help you,’ said Ray.

  ‘Oh Christ, here we go,’ snarled Patrick. ‘Do you want him to come in here and give you one?’ He mimicked Ray in an insulting baby voice.

  ‘Don’t, Patrick!’ warned Creepy Crawly.

  ‘You shouldn’t talk about Jesus like that,’ shouted Ray, standing up. The girls leant back in their chairs, watching and smoking.

  ‘You’re a fucking poof,’ snapped Patrick. ‘All poofs want Jesus to give them one. It’s a fact.’

  Ray lunged, knocking over a table covered in coffee cups, his great big flabby hands clasped around the various chins of his tormentor. The two girls watched, their bodies tense. In a minute they would fly squawking to the rafters, crashing around the room, and hurl themselves at the windows. Panic was in the air. Lightning might strike at any moment as all these dark clouds, bruised and electrified, converged on one another.

  A male orderly appeared out of nowhere and threw himself into the smog, and Nurse could be seen through the windows, cantering down the hallway. The two men were untangled from one another and thrown unceremoniously into their chairs. There was a frozen moment, as everyone caught their breath, and I thought I was going to faint or puke or both, but then the tea party sailed on as if nothing had happened. The girls cleared up the mess, chatting and hooting, and I felt as if I had aged twenty years.

  I walked Isabella back down the corridor towards her dorm. We kissed and I left, the years falling off as I approached the exit. I waved at Patrick through the window of the recreation room. He leered back. As I got to the hall I heard a stifled giggle from the other end of the corridor. I turned. Far away now, through endless shards of dusty light, Isabella and Yaz watched me from the door of their room, arms around each other’s waists. The sun shone through their hair, throwing weird amber haloes around their heads. They were saints illuminated by madness. Yaz whispered in Isabella’s ear. Issie looked at me and laughed; then they turned and went back into their room.

  All the hairs were standing up on my entire body. Even my pubes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Deserter

  You never know when it’s the last goodbye. For me and Isabella it was in the back of a Bombay taxi. I was taking the night flight to London after a harrowing freebie trip conjured up by Issie as the guests of Dulux Paints, India. Only she could have found such an incongruous bedfellow. It all looked simple enough. Some dinners, a press conference and the Dulux fashion show. There was wind of a consultancy post for Issie. That wind turned into a barely perceptible breeze as she left the fashion show halfway through, remarking that if we were going to have to sit through the whole of the Dulux colour chart in saris, we would not only be there all night but be dead in the morning from pneumonia. It was an outdoor event on a cold night.

  ‘Well, that would solve a lot of problems!’ I said and she guffawed. You could always joke about serious things with Issie.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to die of boredom,’ she said and off she stormed.

  The bigwigs of Dulux eyed us coldly as she squeezed past the decidedly B-list front row before clambering onto the catwalk, those feet she claimed would never walk again teetering on Manolos in a spirited trot towards the exit, leaving Kentaro, her wonderful assistant, and me to watch in horror as she nearly collided with a dancing troupe of nautch girls who were advancing down the runway towards her in all the colours of the Dulux rainbow.

  The trip was, of course, a disaster. We were late for every dinner and always left early. Issie rolled her eyes as the latest emulsion was discussed in depth. Another collapsed pipe dream that fuelled her constant fear of bankruptcy and the vivid fantasy she had of ending her life on the street. We argued one night at dinner about her sabotaging her mission and Issie stormed off to her room. I followed guiltily a few minutes later to find her sitting in the bath. Like the Queen during the war, she always bathed in six inches of water. It was one of her only economies. She looked like a pathetic little child sitting there as I apologised and we made up.

  ‘You do get rather huffy sometimes!’ I reasoned.

  ‘That’s what they used to call me at school. Huffy,’ she replied as tears rolled out of those huge eyes and she blew her nose noisily into a drenched Kleenex.

  But soon she was snorting with laughter, clambering into a gold McQueen dress, doing her lips and fixing a stuffed parrot onto her head, all at once, laughing drinking and smoking, just how she liked it. The wobbly caravan was back on the road, and she careered off into the night to a
party given by Francesca Thyssen, leaving me to deal with the lemon-lipped ladies of paint.

  Bombay was as hot as Delhi had been cold-hot but Huffy was on tremendous form. We commandeered one of those tiny beetle-like taxis and its driver’s eyes could be seen in the rear-view mirror in a look of muted shock. Isabella and Kentaro were quite a sight.

  ‘God. Look at those eyes! They’re giving me a hard-on!’ drawled Issie.

  ‘Oh thank you,’ the driver replied politely.

  It was so hot that we decided to cool down in a run-down Art Deco cinema where the new James Bond film was playing in Hindi. Issie was thrilled by the dark theatre, with its balconies and dilapidated frescoes, and the sea of upturned faces, all male, transfixed by Judi Dench.

  ‘All you can see is shiny hair and eyeballs! I love it!’ But she couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes, so we left Kentaro watching the film and sat in the foyer smoking and chatting.

  The strange thing was that for someone who was suicidal, she was constantly dazzled by life and the world was equally dazzled by her. I came back from the loo to find her holding forth in her frankly rude Indian accent to a group of giggling usherettes, handing out cigarettes and trying to persuade the girls that I was a big star.

  ‘You must have seen Another Country? No? Well, you’ve got to see it!’

  Of course all they could see was her, a veiled black widow belching smoke from a red gash. She may have loved the glittering salons of the rich and the gowns of her monstrous protégées, but she was just as happy, or unhappy, in the crumbling Victorian railway station that afternoon where we rested on a bench, listening to the announcements and watching thousands of Indians late for their trains. But then she looked at her feet, which was always a bad sign, a prelude to the fugues of despair.

  ‘The doctors say I’m never going to walk again. They’ve never seen anything like it,’ she announced dramatically for the thousandth time.

  ‘But Issie,’ I replied, ‘we’ve just pretended we were local girls running for a train to the suburbs!’

  ‘Yes, but that was acting!’

  ‘No, darling, this is acting!’

  She looked at me and took my hands. She knew I would never understand. There is an unbridgeable gap between the depressed and the rest of the world. There was no explaining although Isabella had a brilliant turn of phrase to describe her state.

  ‘Look, Rupey, there’s all this movement around us but I’m just a mouth on a seat.’

  I laughed and groaned inwardly. ‘Issie, you’re not just a mouth on a seat! We’re having a good time. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what to do with you.’

  ‘Nobody does. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know how to survive the next five minutes. I feel like a ghost. A pancake in a wheelchair.’

  ‘But you’re not in a wheelchair!’ I reasoned.

  She ignored me. ‘I’m a broken record.’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’

  She had a Kleenex in her hands. I knew what was coming next.

  ‘Rupey, see this Kleenex. That’s me.’ She threw it to the ground and it bounced off in the breeze. ‘See? Nothing! Just a Kleenex!’

  She surveyed me, sombre, face to one side, big eyes, a parrot again. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and she enjoyed the confusion.

  That evening was the last night of the freebie. I was leaving at midnight and the next day she would be back on the high seas, sailing on to the next port, a friend’s family in Gujerat, and then who knew. She was driving herself towards the homelessness she feared so much. We sat in the hotel, looking out of a huge window at the new India under construction in front of us. Skyscrapers bathed in tungsten were being built late into the night by half-naked untouchables. The old India was gone. Soon it would be a giant shopping mall.

  For some reason I had a book of war poems with me. Issie loved them. She identified with their stories of doomed youth and death in the trenches. I read one called ‘The Deserter’ by Gilbert Frankau:

  ‘I’m sorry I done it, Major.’

  We bandaged the livid face;

  And led him out, ere the wan sun rose,

  To die his death of disgrace.

  The bolt-heads locked to the cartridge;

  The rifles steadied to rest,

  As cold stock nestled at colder cheek

  And foresight lined on the breast.

  ‘Fire!’ called the Sergeant-Major.

  The muzzles flamed as he spoke:

  And the shameless soul of a nameless man

  Went up in the cordite smoke.

  We were silent for a while as the full impact of the poem fell on us like a thick fog. Isabella was shell-shocked from a life in the trenches of fashion. She had tried to desert, but for her the firing squad was the rest of us trying to keep her alive. And I was deserting her. Somewhere I knew that I couldn’t face her for much longer. It was too depressing to watch her doggedly elbow her way towards her doom.

  So there we were in the taxi to the airport.

  ‘I hate saying goodbye. I always feel I’m being abandoned,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got Kentaro,’ I reasoned. He stood beside her, bearded in a miniskirt.

  We hugged, and I watched her waving through the back window of the cab until they had disappeared into the Indian night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Last Day of Hats

  Isabella’s funeral took place in Gloucester Cathedral where she had been married only a few years earlier. Outside the cathedral André Leon Talley stood in a gigantic billowing cape that flapped as the wind got underneath it and soared into the air, almost lifting poor André from the ground as he perused himself in the wing mirror of his people carrier.

  The coffin arrived in a horse-drawn hearse. The black horses wore black plumes between their ears and were encrusted with diamonds fixed on at the very last minute by Philip Treacy and a team of mourners. The coffin itself was made of wicker and looked like a giant picnic basket. On top of it lay Isabella’s favourite hat, a death ship with black sails and feather flags attached to the tops of its masts. In the choir of the cathedral, the coffin was placed on a velvet dais. These feathers blew in some imperceptible draught, giving the boat a ghostly feeling of movement, as though it was actually crashing through the foam of lilies upon which it sat, with Isabella aboard, towards the other shore, the undiscovered bourne where hopefully God wouldn’t give her such a hard time as the Sunday Times and the rest of us had.

  Isabella’s girlfriends, dressed to the nines for the send-off, veiled, corseted and gloved in black, marvellously framed by the ancient pews of the choir, were like medieval princesses or the phantom ladies of the barge that appeared on Windermere to transport King Arthur to Avalon. A boy sang Purcell’s ‘When I Am Laid In Earth’, accompanied by the organ. His voice echoed through the church. ‘Remember me,’ he implored as the coffin was carried out and it sounded as if she was calling us from space.

  The effect of it all, the sadness, the faded grandeur, the society beauties, the death boat and the music, turned the funeral into one of the great moments. It was the end of something. For a brief spellbinding moment, Isabella’s aesthetic came alive and was complete. Someone should have shot it for Vogue.

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Nude Sunday in Berlin

  Isabella’s ghost is like the image that an electric bulb – too closely scrutinised – brands across the optic nerve. One closes one’s eyes or turns out the light and it appears multiplied. For a while it is inescapable, but tonight – quite suddenly – she has gone.

  It is a snowy night in Berlin. I am sitting in the dark, looking out as a gathering storm flutters then swirls and finally tumbles in silence across the large window. A rented room, a cheap hotel, a foreign tongue (or two) – and the past simply falls away.

  My room is large and high, with moulded ceilings and old lumpy wallpaper, calcified by endless coats of paint – the latest one be
ing a kind of half-hearted emerald green. Carved rudely into the side of this quite handsome room is a tiny bathroom with walls of cracked white tiles, a hipbath and an ashtray fixed to the wall by the loo. Sitting on that loo smoking a cigarette is one of life’s guilty pleasures, watching the dust particles float past the open door, through which can be seen, dominating the bedroom, an ugly old bed like a gigantic wooden tomb. At its head the curved walnut gravestone lacks only the name of its dead occupant (me) engraved across the middle. At its foot the wooden board is high as a garden fence. Attached to either side are matching night tables, small towers with cupboards, shelves and tiny drawers (for storing false teeth and curlers) and a little swivelling mirror on the top.

  Of the same overweight family as this bed are an ungainly armoire and a clumpy chest of drawers, all vast and ugly, in two tones of walnut – in short, an early twentieth-century suite of luxury bedroom furniture and the last will and testament of some solid, dowdy, middle-class couple who died on it years ago. One can imagine seeing it in the windows of Landauer’s department store – described by Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin novels, or winking in the background of all those baffling bits of film leading up to the war where jerky sped-up shoppers are stopped by Hitler Youth with leaflets from entering the soot-caked doors of shops owned by Jews. Somehow, miraculously, these relics are still here. They have withstood all the clean-outs, the conversions, the direct hits and the derelict decades endured by this room. The proprietor of this wonky place has shown me pictures of these barges and their moorings – taken here – dated 1927.

  Double sets of windows run along one side of the entire room. There’s a dusty no man’s land in between them, a cemetery for bluebottles. They lie flat on their backs, legs in the air, knocked senseless and then dead from endlessly crashing against the panes. I watch them in my daydreams (my time in this hotel room has a different rhythm from the rest of my chaotic life; I can sit here for hours, watching the dust, listening to the various creaks and contractions, the gurgles of the old pipes, the shrill banter of the chambermaids hoovering next door), and it occurs to me that we have more in common than I had hitherto imagined – me and the dead bluebottles, and even the ghosts of the ugly bed for that matter – because in our way we have all been knocked senseless, banging our heads against life’s invisible and incomprehensible walls. But remarque – as the French say: at least the flies have a magnificent glass casket worthy of Lenin or Snow White. Their winding sheets are the smog-stained net curtains that hang from the old metal rails in the ceiling and sound like toy trains when they are drawn. They billow theatrically when the windows are open and convert the daylight into a chalky gloom, a big white mist before which we are all – the living and the dead – fleeting black shadows passing for the night, check-out time negotiable in some cases.