The cold was like vivid electrical burning: a transformative extreme. I’d never felt this kind of cold—the kind of cold that feels like a living force.
“Swim!” Suzanne commanded, striking out. “You need to generate heat! Or you’ll go into hypothermic shock!”
I started swimming, hard—finding it difficult to breathe as the cold pummeled my lungs, and crushed them into tiny pods. After thirty seconds of hard, desperate front crawl, I started to feel a warm, buzzy membrane forming over me—like I had the Ready Brek glow. I felt very, very high. Cathedral-high. Word-confuse high.
“Amazing, huh?” Suzanne said, looking over her shoulder at my clearly ecstatic face.
“I’m so high!” I said, perhaps unnecessarily, relaxing into breaststroke. The water felt like an ocean of warm lube.
“I know a former heroin addict who says swimming in cold water gets you as high as smack,” Suzanne said, flipping over, and staring up at the sky. A heron skimmed past.
“I’m on heron,” I said. In my heightened state, I was pretty sure it was the greatest joke ever made. Suzanne ignored it.
I paddled around the perimeter—next to the water lilies, and overhanging branches—whilst Suzanne did a showy backstroke up and down the center.
“You’re such a writer!” she called out, at one point. “Skulking around the margins, watching.”
“And you’re such a lead singer,” I called back. “Right in the middle, making everyone swim round you.”
“You know it, baby,” she said, powering past me.
“How do you know about . . . sport?” I asked, later, when we were lying in the meadow. We’d dried off, and dressed, and were lying in growing spring grass, listening to the birds.
It sounded like an idiot’s way of asking a question, but I was so relaxed from the swim, I appeared to have turned into a child.
“You know—physical activities?”
No one I knew walked up steep hills, or swam in cold ponds. Apart from festivals, the music industry conducted its business entirely indoors. Everyone lived the lives of indolent vampires.
“From school, babe,” Suzanne replied, pulling her fur coat around her, and lighting a cigarette. “Put a fat but competitive girl in a boarding school for five years, and she will leave as captain of the lacrosse, cross-country, and swimming teams. And be bisexual.”
“You went to boarding school?” I asked, amazed. I had never met anyone who went to boarding school. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if they still existed—I’d read about them in Enid Blyton novels, and had vaguely presumed they disappeared at the same time as golliwogs, “swarthy” gypsies, and lemonade in stone bottles.
Suzanne suddenly looked a bit shifty.
“Yeah, I went to boarding school,” she said, before turning over onto her belly, and glaring. “Look, you can’t tell anyone, okay? It would be really bad for business. I am not going to spend the next four years being asked by some chippy prick from Melody Maker if my parents had servants.”
“Did you have servants?”
“You don’t call them servants, babe,” she said, gently.
“You call them . . . slaves?”
“They’re staff! It’s a proper job!”
This was very weird. Before I became a writer, I had often thought about becoming a “domestic.” It seemed like one of the most viable jobs for a girl on a council-estate who believed she would look good in a mob cap. I would look in the copy of The Lady in the library, and read the small ads: “Hampshire family looking for cheerful, hardworking housekeeper, own room, £100 per week.”
I’d read Jane Eyre, nine times; becoming a governess for a sexy-but-repressed castle owner was totally on my “possible futures for a working-class girl” list. But Suzanne . . . Suzanne had been the kind of person who could employ me.
“What was it like?” I asked. “Did they have uniforms? Did they call you ‘Miss’? Did they bow? Did they live with you?”
Suzanne sighed.
“Look—you must never, ever tell anyone. I’m as serious as cancer. What I tell you does not go beyond us.”
And so Suzanne told me about what it’s like to grow up rich.
Her father traveled a lot, for work—“He’s in supermarkets,” she said, vaguely—and her mother was “madly obsessed with him: like, she couldn’t bear to be away from him. It was intense”—and so traveled with him. Inevitably, when Suzanne was eleven, they put her in a boarding school, “for stability.”
“Before then, I’d been in six schools in six years,” she said. “So it was kinda nice to see more than one year in the same place.”
This peripatetic childhood explains a lot about Suzanne—her habit of walking into a new room, full of strangers, and starting a conversation seemingly in midsentence. I guess that’s what it felt like, when she was young. Snatched away from one place, in midflow, and thrust into another one.
“I’ve always thought boarding schools are barbaric,” I tell her, as she laid half her fur coat across me, to stop my shivering. “People only think they’re normal, or desirable, because it’s a thing rich people do? If the working classes sent their children away to be raised by . . . institutions, social services would close them down in a week.”
“Well, I kinda liked it, to be honest,” Suzanne said. “I mean, I ran away quite a lot, because I was bored, but I was never lonely. I’d been very lonely before.”
She told me how, when her parents used to travel with her, they refused to alter their lifestyle, which involved a lot of opera.
“They’d leave me in the presidential suite of, like, the Hilton, with the chauffeur to keep an eye on me,” she said, staring at my feet, which were slightly blue with cold.
“Did he wear a chauffeur’s cap?”
“He wore a chauffeur’s cap.” Suzanne seemed quite amused by this question.
In the hotel, Suzanne would read, or watch old movies, whilst the chauffeur sat on a chair, bored out of his mind. I imagined her—a little girl, staring out of a huge, plate-glass window, down onto Tokyo, or Manhattan.
I thought of my childhood—insane, anxious, and riddled with terrible smells; but never lonely. Always someone to lie on top of, fight with, get in a bath with, climb a tree with. Always someone to look you in the eye, and react to you.
My father, in all his class-war rants—“They’re cunts, Johanna. Parasites!”—had never warned me that, one day, you might meet someone rich, and feel sorry for them.
“Don’t you feel sorry for me!” Suzanne yelled, when I did my sympathetic face. “I had a pool, I fucked an earl, and I had access to all my mother’s medication. There is nothing sweeter than being fifteen, and floating, on a lilo, in your own back garden, on Valium. I’d bring friends back, during summer holidays, and we’d all lie around getting high, or low, or however you’d describe it. I scuba dive, water-ski, and ride a horse, man. Fuck you. Don’t you dare fucking pity me!”
We lay there for a while, thinking about our different childhoods. In the end, Suzanne stood up.
“Come on,” she said, holding out a hand. “All this talk of my childhood makes me want to go to Daddy’s favorite restaurant.”
I mutely followed her out of the meadow, hair dripping onto my shoulders.
27
“Daddy’s favorite restaurant,” it turned out, was Scott’s, in Mayfair. We’d gone back to Suzanne’s to change—she lending me a glamorous silk dressing gown that she insisted would double, with the application of a belt, as a dress, and Suzanne putting on an electric blue dress, and her flat, red velvet shoes.
As we walked into Scott’s—the doorman nodding at Suzanne—I knew I had never been anywhere so posh before. I instantly felt like I was in the wrong place. Like my body was a clown car, and would collapse, with a series of honking sounds. The tablecloths were as cushiony as duvets, the flower arrangements like ones you’d see at weddings, and everyone there moved differently.
Posh people have a very distinct walk. It’s an upr
ight, confident stride—like they’re used to walking around castles. Like to walk from one side of the living room to the other would take several distinct steps; rather than it being a room so small you could sit on the sofa, and change channels on the TV using a stick. These people needed their legs. Maybe that was why their legs were so thin.
I think the food made them thin, as well. Rich people eat different food.
“I want something comforting,” Suzanne said, and ordered a lobster.
My understanding of comfort food had always been that it would be something creamy, and carby—a tub of mashed potato, or pasta. When the lobster arrived—the first I’d ever seen—it looked like an angry red spider holding maracas. Like something from Fantasia. I couldn’t see how it could possibly be comforting.
“Mmm, the taste of childhood,” Suzanne said, wielding what looked like some kind of podiatry tool, and ramming it up the beast’s hands.
My ordering had been troublesome—there are so many things I don’t know how to pronounce. The menu seemed to double as some manner of Class Sieve—designed to filter out people who didn’t know how to say “tartare,” “carpaccio,” “foccacia,” “Bearnaise,” “turbot,” or “bisque” to a waiter. In addition, the numbers next to each dish were so high, I couldn’t work out what they meant. For instance, the number “24” was next to the turbot. Did that mean you got twenty-four turbots? I have a strong work ethic when it comes to eating a lot of food—ignoring when I’m full is one of my speciality skills—but even I didn’t think I could eat twenty-four turbots. When I realized the “24” referred to how many pounds it cost, I spiraled into terror.
“Suzanne, I’m not that hungry. I’ll just have the bread.”
The bread was a mere “2.” Two pounds! For bread! I made bread! I knew a couple of slices cost no more than a penny to make! Was this magic bread?
By that point, however, Suzanne had airily ordered a bottle of Chablis, and as I could think of no way of explaining to her that this was a meal I could not afford to go halves on, I sadly resigned myself to ending the meal writing a check that would, eventually, bounce, and cost me a £20 fine. I ate the bread as slowly as possible, in order to try and enjoy the world’s most expensive side order. And when the wine waiter poured the Chablis, I did not demure from drinking my half—as I was paying for it, albeit against my will.
“Oh, that is beautiful,” Suzanne said, taking the first sip, and appreciatively smudging the condensation on the side of the glass with her finger. “You like Chablis?”
“Yeah?” I said. In truth, it tasted bitter, to me; my drinking revolved around sugary, kiddy booze . . . peach schnapps, cider and black currant, whisky and Coke. They were delicious drinks, that kept you peppy.
Wine, I soon discovered—and with little more to mop it up than bread—was a more druggy experience. It was like being coshed—half of your brain closed down halfway through the first glass. It made you feel quite . . . stupid. It was like a bottle of stupid. The first time I laughed, drunk on wine, it was an odd, horse bray that I’d never made before—a sound other drunk people in the room were making too. I whinnied. I wine-ied.
Oh my God, I thought, as the waiter topped up my glass, and I eagerly drank it. “I’m Pinocchio. I’m on Pleasure Island. I’m turning into a donkey.”
As it turned out, being a wine donkey is quite enjoyable. It makes you liquid, and fuzzy—within twenty minutes, I was holding Suzanne’s hand, and telling her how amazing she was. I was full of hot love. The wine had set it alight. The wine had made me want to say everything I had ever thought. It filled my mouth with words.
“You’re like . . . the eye of the hurricane,” I told her, stroking her fingers as she beamed at me, delightedly. “You rearrange everything in the room, just by walking into it.”
“I know, baby,” she said, delightedly. “And you do, too. This is why I adore you. You inspire me, you know that? You are my muse. This album reeks of you. You know who I wrote it for? You. Every time I got stuck, I’d just write something I could imagine you dancing to. My muse.”
It was okay to hold hands with Suzanne in a restaurant, because the wine narrows your peripheral vision; you can’t really see anyone else. It’s like entering a private booth. It was like looking at her down the wrong end of a telescope . . . all I could see was her face. The rest of the world had floated far, far away. Every so often, I was aware of the wine waiter topping up my glass, and my hand reaching out for it, but Suzanne and I were swimming around in our little wine tank, separated from everyone else by the cold glass of the bottle.
As the second bottle of wine arrived—which I didn’t remember us ordering, but, clearly, we had—I got up, very carefully, and asked the waiter, in my best and most stable voice, “Where are the lavatories?” Because I had read in Jilly Cooper’s Class that this is what the upper classes call the toilet, and that saying “toilet” would probably get you thrown out of a restaurant such as this.
Sitting on the lavatory—which felt exactly like a toilet, to be honest—I rested my face on my knees.
“I am so drunk,” I told me.
“I know,” I replied. “I can tell from the way you have put your head on my knees.”
“This place is so posh,” I whispered, to me, “that I am surprised they do not have tablecloths on the toilet. Lavatory.”
And then I laughed at me, for a bit, because my humor was so strong.
As I sat there, swaying from side to side, I heard something that caught my ear. My name. Someone was saying my name.
“Dolly Wilde,” a woman was saying. “Did you see her? At the table by the window? She’s here.”
“Ah, this is a moment,” I told myself, quietly. “You are famous! You are being recognized in posh restaurants! Someone is admiring your work in The Face! You are the famous writer, Dolly Wilde.”
And I sat there, enjoying being famous. All my years of work, now paying off. My words had made me known. I smiled at me. It was a lovely thirty seconds.
“Well done, me,” I said, and patted my legs, in a celebratory manner.
“Do you think she knows?” one of the women was saying.
“God knows,” the other replied. “Has Jockie seen it?”
“No—but Work Phil has. He says it’s just . . . I mean, he didn’t know what to do. All the other guys were laughing, but it’s such a weird thing to do? Why would you invite your mates round and put that on??”
I didn’t like this. What were they talking about?
“What do men do in those situations? Are they all sitting there with stiffies?”
“Apparently it’s quite a common thing. With normal porn, anyway. Did you hear the worst bit?”
“Do I want to?”
“It’s awful. Apparently she just keeps saying ‘Fuck me harder,’ but in a Birmingham accent. I mean, it’s just not a very pornographic accent.”
The other woman laughed, and then, over the sound of them washing their hands, I heard them try a variety of frankly offensive Midlands accents, whilst saying pornographic things: “Tek me up my Bull Ring, babba!” and laughing more. They’re drunk, I thought, disparagingly, with my melting face pressed against the cool glass wall tiles. They cannot tell the difference between a Wolverhampton accent, and a Birmingham one.
Then, as they left: “She’s not the only one. Apparently, he’s building up quite a collection. Did you hear about Sara? Jerry’s so fucked-up.”
“So fucked-up.”
And the door slammed closed.
I sat there for a while, digesting all of this. I tried very hard—so hard: like my life depended on it—to think of anything else this exchange could have meant, but I kept circling back, in tighter, and more painfully certain circles, to just one, single conclusion: Jerry Sharp had been showing his video of me having sex to his mates.
When I got back to our table, Suzanne was in the middle of a contretemps with the people next to us.
“We don’t mind smoking,” they were
saying. “We smoke ourselves!” They gestured to their ashtray. “But you delightful ladies are smoking so much, we can’t actually taste our food, hahaha!”
I looked at our ashtray. It was kind of appalling. A mountain of butts with three almost entirely unsmoked cigarettes thrust in, at the top—looking like those GIs planting the flag at Iwo Jima.
“I got the bill, babe,” Suzanne said. “Well, Daddy did. I put it on his tab. Let’s drink to Daddy.” She raised her glass—and then looked at me. “Oh my God—what’s up?”
I could tell my face looked strange—my jaw was sticking out, because it felt like there were tendons that connected it to my eyes, and, if I kept the tendons taut, I wouldn’t cry.
“Just got some bad news,” I said, gesturing to the toilet.
“Oh my God—you’re pregnant!” Suzanne said.
“No! No. Well, pregnant—with horror. Can we leave?” I said. My jaw was aching, from the thrusting.
We reclaimed our coats from the concierge, in a drunken fumble of putting the wrong arms in the wrong sleeves, as he patiently held them up.
“Thank God you don’t have to help us into our trousers!” Suzanne said, at one point, after nearly punching him in the chest with a wildly flailing hand. He merely rolled his eyes.
When we got out into the street, Suzanne grabbed my lapels, and said: “What?”
I told her. It took some time, as I was crying so hard I had hiccups, and the words were all chopped up, like babies’ spaghetti.
“Oh my baby,” Suzanne said, hugging me close to her, when I finished. “Oh my baby. It’s okay. You can cry. You can cry.”
She squeezed me hard. I fought my way out of the hug.
“No!” I said. “I’m not sad!”
Suzanne looked at me, in surprise.
“What?”
“I’m not sad! I’m not sad.”
Because what I was feeling was something I’d never felt before. In all my nineteen years, whenever anything had gone wrong, or been bad, I had been sad, or I had crushed my feelings, or I had tried to put a brave face on them, as Judy Garland would, in a musical.