The Gilded Ones
BROOKE FIEldhouse
Copyright © 2018 Brooke Fieldhouse
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Fred & Fanny, for the title.
‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Prologue
The car in front is a Porsche Targa 911, colour red. I’m not sure what I’m driving.
I’m alone in my vehicle but I can see two heads in the Targa. The driver; bobbed hair, female – definitely female, I can see that as she turns to the right to speak to her passenger. Her mouth doesn’t move because he – if it is a he – is doing the talking. I can’t be sure… but I think she’s smiling. Her lips part, nose upturns, tiny chin tilts.
Her profile vanishes and his appears – yes definitely a ‘his’; rounded chin, overbite and pout to top lip; a beaky nose. The sun in front of us is strong and it’s like watching a pair of Edwardian seaside silhouettes which have come to life.
We’re climbing, and it feels like morning. The road is clear and wet, but everywhere else is coated with snow; a solid wall of it on my right, and to the left a rampart of white. She’s driving fast and I’m doing well to keep up, but I have a strange feeling that I’m late for something.
Every time we pass under a bridge there’s a whooshing from above, a drumming from below, and the sucking of rubber on tarmac. Ahead the road appears to be blocked by towering rock, but into a tunnel we shoot, swallowed by pouting lips of polished concrete. Whoosh becomes hiss. The drumming turns from paradiddle to tom-tom, and I can see the two heads in front of me high-keyed by the sodium lights on the sides of the tunnel.
For a few magical moments it’s as if the Edwardian silhouettes have been endowed with extra life in the form of a third dimension. I can see that her bob is brunette, can pick out the pin-pricking of his close-cropped sandy hair, and as our cars flash past the lights I can see flesh shining on foreheads, and on cheeks. Then out we pop, back into limitless Alpine space, and once again the heads return to the two-dimensional world of chattering black paper cut-outs.
I can see distant mountains, scree coated with blanched scrub, cuckoo-clock houses piled formlessly on the slopes. We bend to the right, left, right again. The same cuckoo clocks appear first on one side, then on the other as we climb the slalom. How clever I seem to be at keeping a constant distance from the Targa! It’s as if I’m being pulled along, but as we descend I’m getting nearer and in the valley bottom, the Targa stops in a scrubbed conurbation of cuckoo clocks. The sun is on our left and I can see her eyes in the rear mirror. They’re a lovely pale blue. I can watch her reading the signpost and I know that if she turns left or right I will lose her for ever. But on she goes, straight on.
We’re climbing again and the Targa is pulling away from me. I can see his hand waving between the two seats, see her eyes scintillating as she accelerates up into the mountains. Another whoosh as we go under a bridge and the road turns sharply to the left. The bend seems to go on for ever and when the road straightens up, the car in front has vanished. I know it’s gone because I can see the road for miles ahead.
I stop my car, reverse into a lay-by and before I even pull on the handbrake I can see what’s happened. Instead of a steel barrier at the roadside there’s a line of small white-painted concrete bollards. Two are missing.
I open my door and how cold the air outside is! It’s as if I’ve awakened from sleep and I notice I’m wearing little more than chinos and a cheesecloth shirt. I bang the door, pad across asphalt onto snow-covered scree. I can’t see over the edge so I need to shuffle further down the slope to get a view of what’s happened.
I look up the road, and back across an expanse of white towards the last bridge. There’s nobody. There’s been nobody the whole time I’ve been following the Targa, and I can feel that chill of the spleen, the tingling of the buttocks, and I know I must push myself just that bit further so I can look over the edge.
I hear the chock of the scree as I wade down… feel the squeak of tightly packed snow. Once or twice I’m forced to bend, and my fingers touch the cold wetness, but it doesn’t seem to hurt. I notice – quite ridiculously – that I’m wearing nothing on my feet other than beige espadrilles.
When I see the missing car, I’m surprised it’s still facing the way we were travelling. It’s upside down and its dark bronze underbelly is full of black geometric crevices. It looks longer than it did when it was on the road and it casts a blue shadow across the bed of snow where it’s come to rest.
There’s a figure standing by the driver’s door, a splash of colour; head and shoulders visible in the sunlight… No sign of the man but there’s no smoke, no fire, and had there been no evidence of life I would have driven back to the village for help. What I’m going to do is climb down and comfort the lady. If the man is alive then perhaps I can help him too.
The descent takes much longer than I thought. Every so often I stop to get my breath and to listen for traffic on the road above, but there isn’t any. Down here everything seems much bigger than it did from the lay-by. What looked like moss or scrub with a drizzle of ice crystals are really fifty-foot-high trees, and there are ravines you could get lost in. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to get back.
Perhaps when I reach the crash site there will be a first-aid kit, bottled water, blankets, maybe even a picnic basket. I keep losing sight of the car and every so often I hear the gentle susurrations of a partly frozen stream. My espadrilles are soaking.
; At last I’m standing looking at the passenger side of the car and I’m sorry to have to report that the man is dead. There’s a narrow trail of blood beneath the beaky nose – except now it’s above the beaky nose because everything is upside down. I know he’s dead because being inverted is clearly of no discomfort to him. No sagging jowls, no swollen eyes, or purple ears. Gravity is no longer of importance to this body and for the first time I see him as a fully three-dimensional presence. There’s sunlight modelling his chin, and the dome-like head with its millimetre-long sandy hair. He reminds me of a giant foetus suspended in liquid, and most definitely one in a jar, not in the womb. Thank God, she’s alive.
There’s no sound, only that hiss, the one which quantum physicists claim is the fizz after the Big Bang. The engine must be switched off and she’s standing by the open driver’s door, motionless, her bobbed hair immaculate. The air is still and there’s a feeling of perfection as if I’m looking at an advert for motoring in Switzerland – except the car happens to be upside down. The sooner I get to her the better.
‘Are you all right?’
Her reply puzzles me.
‘I’m Freia… It’s spelled the German way.’
The voice is not what I’d expected. It’s deep and seems to rise from the valley bottom. I catch sight of her cotton top, pink with white Aztec pattern.
‘Hold on, I’m coming.’
I pull myself across to her side, my hands resting on the underneath of the car, dark metal warmed by sun and recent internal combustion. She’s wearing skinny scarlet jeans, and the mountains behind her look like fresh oyster shells stacked on some vast fishmonger’s stall.
On her feet are shiny mink-hued ballet pumps, en pointe. I stare at the tips of the pumps and cover my mouth with both my hands. My spleen drops past zero, through the valley bottom and into the void. I look at her eyes, no longer scintillating as they did when she read the signpost. The figure is suspended invisibly and diabolically, one foot above the snow-covered ground.
One
The head in front of me was resting. Tilted back on the train seat headrest, ears plugged with pearl-like speakers, eyes closed, hands at prayer. Between the palms was a silver Walkman.
The young man looked like how I wanted to be. Last night’s dream had zapped me. What I needed was at least a morning to recover, and here I was on the 0730hrs on my way to a job interview. That’s the way it is these days, you don’t wait for promotion, or to get headhunted. You play the field, you move on.
It was time I did. I had to get away from Geoff.
‘Pulse… What you need is a nice young lady. You’re what… thirty-five? How can you be so selfish still living on your own? There’s no substitute for family life.’
Mrs Geoff was pregnant and there was a two-year old. After these ‘lectures’ I was often forced to stand and watch him flirt with the prettier girls on my design team, and later that year, after he and my team leader Ros had been on a business trip which involved a hotel stay, she came to speak to me.
‘Pulse, you know I’m more than capable of taking care of myself but can we do anything about that arsehole?’
I advised her not to rock the boat by taking the subject any further.
I looked again at the boy opposite… a bit more than half my age. His hair was fashionably short at the back and sides and billowing at the front like an amber plume of smoke. The traces of henna reminded me of my own hair experiments of not long ago.
‘Is Pulse there?’ a client had asked.
‘Ye-es, he’s inside,’ replied a colleague.
‘Ooooh, all those mirrors… he’s probably checking his hair colour!’
I decided it was high time to call time on that little experiment.
The boy opposite me opened his eyes… Seemed to come to life as the sound – like pins being dropped onto glass and coming from his speakers – ceased. He reached into his shoulder bag for another audio cassette, and with the efficiency of an ATC cadet reloading an auto rifle he snapped out the old one, clicked in the new. The pins-on-glass serenade was replaced with another, this time rather akin to number 8 screws being dropped onto a metal tray. Like me he hadn’t graduated to CDs. But he probably couldn’t afford it, whereas with me the reason was… I had to admit it, that I had begun to resist change.
I leaned forward to peer at the 105mm x 70mm clear plastic box with its slot-in paper cover design. I still hadn’t recovered from the move away from 12” vinyl. It was a design of flowers – carnations mainly. In the top right was a colour code bar – the sort of printing convention found at the edge of colour magazines. There was a tab of squares; pink, green, magenta, and at the bottom a half square of yellow. Oddly enough I knew what the flowers were all about. A painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, and I knew that because at art college we’d all had to do a little talk on an artist and – for some weird reason – I’d chosen him. Suddenly the boy opened his eyes, saw me looking.
‘New Order…’
I assumed it was an expression for newly arrived stock and that he must be an assistant in a record store. I nodded. He closed his eyes.
But there was a flaw in my plan for today. Why was I sitting here on Southern Railways inhaling that unrefined gas-blood-latrine stench from the defective air conditioning, when I could have been enjoying the mature fustiness of the London Underground? The answer was that my possible future employers were located in a town on the South coast. The commute – even if weekly – would be hell. Sooner, rather than later I would be forced to break the sanctuary of my beloved London W4.
Two
The forecast had said it was going to be ‘a scorcher’. June 20th 1984, the hottest day of the year so far, and just the day for a trip to the seaside. But I had this nagging feeling I was heading in the wrong direction – oh, not the geography, I knew the address, I mean in life.
There’s something about a seaside town. I don’t just mean the breeze you breathe when you come out of the railway station, nor the sight and sound of gulls. People say ‘oohh, it’s only half a town’, but that’s just it, that’s the frisson. You walk… walk towards the sea. The logical lobe of your brain tells you that when you reach those peeling aqua-painted iron railings you must stop, but the wild imaginative other half of your grey matter wants you to go on, out to sea and up into never-ending space.
I had loads of time before the interview so I didn’t need to walk fast but I couldn’t help it. Suited, booted, and clutching my brown leather attaché case I could feel myself pumping asphalt which was already as sticky as the surface of sucked rock candy and by the end of the day would be as soft as chewing gum.
The buildings on either side of the street had been painted the craziest colours – no planning permission restrictions here, just chromatic anarchy. Houses near the station were small, so all those stately stucco terraces I’d seen pictures of would have to be nearer the sea. The footpath below me began to slope down, and at the rate I was moving I would arrive at the interview looking as if I’d just stepped out of the spa pump-room Turkish bath.
At last, there it was, the English Channel; big, wet and, considering the atmospheric gusts, surprisingly flat. I was no stranger to the coast but I’d come from the industrial North, a far cry from southern towns of pleasure. I could feel my hair lifting as a breath of ocean-cooled wind made the tiny drops of sweat on my forehead feel like ice.
I sailed on past shops with bow fronts, past pub signs swinging in the flurry, past houses close-boarded, houses clad in shiplap, clapboard, clap-your-hands, bitumened – betch-yer-life… Gawd’struth, s’welp me, shiver-me-timbers I couldn’t live here. The pace of it would give me a heart attack. I needed the dead air of London, the never-moving traffic, the miasma of carbon monoxide, and the moribund stench of buddleia in a neglected West London garden.
I walked down the Old Steine, past the pavilion, nosed my way through The Lanes – tw
ee-er than Camden Market and only half as interesting. Soon I found myself in a less salubrious area – not far from the old workhouse, and for the first time it dawned on me that this town had a history which was not exclusively dedicated to pleasure. Just like in my Northern hometown there was unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and something else; a high proportion of AIDS, something new and which seemed to be capable of affecting everybody, not just gay men.
The address I’d been given for Promo Designs led me down a narrow alleyway between a dark doorway and one of thirty tattoo emporiums I’d passed since arriving at the railway station. Aberdeen Steak Houses, Airports, Aeroface, Promo’s client list was impressive so I was taken aback by its choice of location. The gap between the buildings was sufficiently wide to accommodate me and a dark maroon Volvo which slid past and turned right into a yard in front of me. This was it, The Old Bottle Works.
The image of the dark doorway with its coloured plastic ribbons had released a rather bossy moralistic genie from my brain, and as I tapped my way across the cobbles I wondered how many alcoholics this place had fuelled, how may lives ruined.
I threaded my way through the parked cars; Saabs, Citroen 2CVs, and a surprising number of bicycles. No lift, so up a chequer plate metal stair, through an open wooden door with a hundred coats of paint on it, across hairy smelly matting, and into an over-lit lobby where I fingered a cream plastic intercom.
‘It’s…’ There was a click – which reminded me of the boy on the train with his cassettes.
The firm where I was working at the moment was big – two hundred and fifty of us – but it was in conventional-type offices. You mixed with the people you shared a room with, you saw the walls of the corridors, its ceilings, the boardroom, but you never saw everybody at once. The space I found myself stepping into this morning was like nothing I’d seen before… Three thousand square feet of open plan, a hectic flush of activity, and so much so that I barely noticed the slim cast-iron stanchions holding up the white-painted low-vaulted ceiling.
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