Vanished Years (30 page)

I got up and walked into the hospital. Two wide corridors stretched in each direction, with custard walls and old pink lino. A large stone staircase wrapped around a central hall, and behind a desk a large moody nurse read
Heat
magazine.

‘I’m looking for the John Carruthers Ward.’ My weedy public-school voice echoed through the asylum.

‘This way. I’ll show you,’ said a voice from above. It was Posh, leaning over the balustrade.

The gigantic lady looked at her sceptically. ‘You should be back in your ward.’ Her voice echoed up the stairwell.

‘Relax. I’m here, innit,’ said Posh.

The nurse grunted and went back to her magazine. ‘Follow her,’ she instructed and continued reading.

‘Who you here for?’ asked Posh without looking round, in a thrilling adenoidal twang.

‘I’m looking for my friend Isabella.’

‘Oh yeah? Well, you’ve come to the right place.’

We climbed three floors and I followed her through some swing doors into another dirty corridor. On either side large windows revealed grim dormitories of two or three beds, lockers and a sink. A vague smell of lunch, cabbage and mince, hung in the air. Posh walked me to another Checkpoint Charlie and peeled off without a word. I didn’t need to ask the new nurse for directions, because at that moment Isabella appeared at the end of the corridor on crutches.

‘Oh my God, I don’t believe it. Rupey, what are you doing here?’ she shrieked.

‘I’m checking in. Been feeling a bit edgy recently.’

‘God, well, you’ve come to the right place, hasn’t he, nurse? We’re all very edgy here.’

She limped slowly towards me, dressed as an extra from Les Mis. Her hair was dyed black and cut short. She was hatless for once and her eyes were, finally, smashed plates. She loved the effect it was having on me and laughter gurgled up from inside her as we hugged.

‘I’m dying for a fag. Do you want one?’

‘Not really.’

‘Good. Let’s go to the smoking room then.’

She swung down the corridor past a table where a large clammy young man sat.

‘Give me a hug,’ he said in a dreary monotone.

‘Oh God!’ Isabella rolled her eyes. ‘You’d better do it. He goes ballistic otherwise. Only once, OK? Rupey’s a film star and he has to hug people all day.’

He humbly nodded and then clung to me for what seemed like an eternity. Isabella began to laugh.

‘OK, that’s enough, you two,’ she said and tried to prise us apart but the boy held on tight.

‘Oh God!’ giggled Isabella. ‘Nurse! Ray won’t let go of Rupey.’

‘Yes I will,’ said Ray sheepishly as the nurse strode purposefully towards us from her post. She looked fairly steely and even I shrank back. Maybe she would hose us down, but no such luck.

‘Be good, now, Ray,’ she reasoned, instead. ‘I’m sure they’ll let you go with them, if you Be-Have. Won’t you, Isabella?’

‘God, yuh.’ For the first time I could see the head girl in her. ‘Come on, Ray,’ she said. We limped on with our new friend shuffling behind.

‘Can I have another hug?’

Issie turned and looked at me, eyes glittering with merriment. ‘Darling, I know. It’s Bedlam.’

I don’t know what they had filled her up with but she was like the Merry Widow that afternoon, jangly and intense, a mad grinning puppet.

We settled down in a room with a few armchairs and a TV. On the floor was a gigantic ashtray full of cigarette ends next to a bowl of fruit. Isabella quickly lit up.

‘Rupey, could you get me some drugs?’ she asked gaily, through a cloud of smoke.

‘Not really. Why?’

‘I’ve got to kill myself before the end of this week.’ She might have been talking about a planned visit to Peter Jones.

‘Couldn’t you hold off for a bit?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think so, no. And as you see, one can’t even throw oneself out of the windows here.’

They were covered with chickenwire. She honked with laughter, watching my confusion like a parrot, her face cocked to one side, making strange clicking noises through her nostrils.

‘Would you like a coffee? Only Ness, I’m afraid.’

Posh stalked in and sat down. She handed Issie two packets of cigarettes.

‘God, thanks. I’m just making some coffee. Want some?’

‘Could you pay me now? I’m right out of cash,’ demanded Posh.

Isabella seemed mesmerised by this ice queen, now decked out in après-ski with a headband and gigantic dark glasses covered in fingerprints. Issie’s nervous hands were like two sand crabs with black claws, crawling from their holes. They scuttled through her bag and
extracted a fifty-pound note, which Posh immediately snatched and snapped into her own purse.

‘I haven’t got any change,’ she said, meeting Isabella’s adoring gaze with a challenging glare. Isabella looked wistfully for a moment as another fifty disappeared. Then she laughed. The one she did when she caught someone out. The quacks of a duck taking off. Wha-wha-wha!

‘This is Yaz. Wha-wha-wha.’ We shook hands. ‘Yaz is my assistant. Aren’t you, darling?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I saw you in the park,’ I said.

‘I saw you.’

‘It’s good that you can come and go like that.’

‘She can’t!’ accused Yaz flatly, pointing at Isabella like a robot.

‘I’m the worst case they’ve ever had, Rupey,’ nodded Isabella modestly.

‘She can go out because she’s not that mad. She’s really together, aren’t you, Yaz?’

‘Oh yeah,’ replied Yaz lazily, and they giggled like evil schoolgirls, lighting up new cigarettes from the stumps of their burning butts.

‘She’s got her own company and everything,’ continued Issie, as smoke belched from their collective funnels.

‘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.

Y
ou 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.