Royals Read online

  ROYALS

  For Shana Feste,

  Audrey Millstein

  and Andrea Remanda,

  without whom…

  ALSO BY EMMA FORREST

  Fiction

  Thin Skin

  Namedropper

  Cherries in the Snow

  Non-fiction

  Damage Control (editor)

  Your Voice in My Head

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY EMMA FORREST

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  ‘Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.’

  – Sister Corita Kent

  CHAPTER 1

  Mum had black hair and red nails with half-moons, and the glamour of her extremities was highlighted by the fact that she rarely wore anything other than a tracksuit. She was decades ahead of the velour craze. She had me do her nails that morning because she was too nervous to do it herself and the moon (the part at the base of the nail where there is negative space) was both difficult to get right and highly important to her. If the moon was wrong, her day went wrong, like it dictated the pull of her tides. Right after I’d finished, I had to re-do them because she’d anxiously touched her hair, leaving slender trails of red on black, and pattern in the polish of her fingers where there should be only shine.

  I found it difficult, the way my mother was vibrating with excitement, as if we were witnessing the greatest love story of all time, when the poor bride was obviously marrying him because she didn’t have anywhere else to be.

  Mum had been baking a massive wedding cake for them, in parts, over the week, going through pans and tracksuits as her efforts intensified. It was like tuning in to one of her beloved mini-series, the way she spaced out the cliffhanger moments in the life of the wedding cake. When she asked me to help her, I gratefully did, ready to be made a fuss of again after so much focus on the bride-to-be. I designed the iced rosettes, alternating lilac between deep red roses. Mum looked at it and said, ‘You are so brilliant.’ She was also proud of my illustrations, my skill with the sewing machine, my skill with taking out the rubbish, the luxuriance of my hair, my gentleness with animals, my bread-toasting abilities, my ability to name Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands in the correct order and the temperature at which I drew baths.

  Now we stood before the cake, like five-year-olds admiring a tinsel tree. Even my two brothers were in the spirit, accidentally telling me it looked great, when usually all they ever said to me was: ‘Are you a sissy?’ or, if they wanted to be more inclusive, ‘Typical women.’ They got shoved at school for being yids and they shoved me for being a sissy and Mum for being a typical woman, rolling their eyes at her, exasperated at all she did for them, resentful when it took too long for her to do it. You don’t have to guess who they learned it from.

  But she was happy that day, as if she herself were the one getting married, re-married, maybe, since she had the vibrancy of a woman getting a fresh start. With all the excitement about the wedding, we never spoke out loud about her own marriage. Her sense of hope lasted not just for the ceremony, but through all the weeks of party preparation.

  ‘Go and get ready, darling,’ she said, ruffling my hair. (‘Your crowning glory!’)

  I remember every song in the Top 40 Countdown playing in my bedroom as I got dressed in a suit the shade of Indian ink – sartorially, I was trying to be the fun one at the wedding, while also respecting the occasion. Obviously, I’d made it myself, because I could only find suits in navy blue. Life is very disappointing when nothing gets close to the specific colours you have in your head. That’s why I started making clothes in the first place. To be less disappointed. My mum said I was far dourer than she’d imagined a gay son to be. Touched that she’d imagined having a gay son, I tried to smile more, but I was never very good at it. It falls outside my skill set.

  I’ve played back that day so many times, I’ve cut and spliced my memories so you start at the top and work down.

  It was no big surprise that Number 1 was Shakin’ Stevens singing ‘Green Door’. I was fascinated and appalled at a Welshman channelling Elvis, someone pretending to be someone else from another country and era, and people rewarding them for it. That happens in fashion, like when the 1970s channelled the 1930s, the trickle-down effect of the costumes for Bonnie and Clyde. Girls were still wearing the odd beret and long, A-line skirt around our estate.

  Number 2 was ‘Happy Birthday’ by Stevie Wonder. I loved how Stevie moved his head as he played, his brain visibly connected to his fingers, the multicoloured beads dancing in his hair like drunk guests at a wedding. Hearing people arriving in the street outside, I tried to decide if there was a pattern to Stevie’s hair beads, or if they were randomly placed.

  ‘You look beautiful!’ I heard my mum say, in a tone she used when someone looked hideous.

  ‘So do you!’

  It was Mrs Leansky from next door. That Jewish voice; I don’t know how I knew it was Jewish, I just did. Like knowing that Superman is Clark Kent even though he behaves differently. Our neighbourhood was sprinkled with Yiddish accents bestowed through generations, increasingly faint, maybe only noticeable to the owner, like a T-shirt that used to be red and had become pink.

  Number 3 in that week’s charts was ‘Hooked on Classics’. Fuck that.

  Number 4 was ‘Chant No. 1’ by Spandau Ballet. Fuck that: number two.

  As the guests gathered, I listened carefully for his voice. He’d often make his entrance by saying, ‘Oh, let me get that chair for you!’ Or, ‘After you, ladies.’ The more effusive he was with gentlemanly manners aimed at acquaintances or neighbours, the worse it tended to turn when they were gone. But he’d been lovely the whole week she’d been baking. He’d dip a cheeky finger in the batter or have a cheeky pinch of her bottom as she bent to get the dishwashing liquid. Cheeky. Not like someone of whom anyone should be afraid. There seemed to be an unsaid agreement that he’d behave himself that day, because it was such a special day. But how many of us have at some point rued that something challenging should happen ‘today of all days’? And the universe says: ‘Yes. Today’s the day.’ You cannot plead. It will not reschedule. It is the universe.

  Number 5 was ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials. Yes! I laid on my bed looking at the two-tone sky, wondering if they’d let me in their gang, feeling pretty sure they wouldn’t.

  Kate Bush was Number 19, and I was very, very scared of her. If I saw her, I would walk backwards, like you’re meant to do if menaced by a shark, but Siouxsie Sioux was Number 23 and she was even scarier to the teenage me. I secretly adored them both and believed they wouldn’t like me back.

  Kate was a teenager, like I was. Looking back, I’m aware just how strongly teenagers avoided me, but I pictured her dancing towards my room, her arms swooping in forwards/backwards circles, a swimmer in the sky. My dad made lewd comments about her leotards in front of my mum, I thought to put her down, perhaps like, why wasn’t she, at forty-three, wearing a leotard as she served us our bananas and custard each evening? He said Siouxsie Sioux was a waste of a good-looking woman; he might give her the time of day without the witch make-up. As if she wer
e waiting for him, a Whitechapel cab driver, to decide whether or not to give her the time of day.

  I only narrated my reaction to the chart countdown with my inside voice, which is to say: the voice inside my head. It’s where I practised anger, hoping I might one day be permitted to project it outwardly. I wanted to breathe fire but instead I cut fabric quite angrily and probably sewed it a little faster than was sensible. I wanted to scream, but it came out as phlegm.

  Mum treated Dad like he was in the Top 40, and so did my brothers. It bothered him that I didn’t. Even if he hadn’t been how he was, even if he could have controlled himself, I could never imagine worshipping him, because he didn’t glitter. He absorbed light, like a black hole. His hair was dyed black, like Mum’s, but his eyes really were black. In old photos they read as brown. But, by the weekend of the wedding, the iris was near indistinguishable from the pupil.

  I imagine that’s how they’d been together so long: Mum glittered and he didn’t. Not that she knew it. Might have known it once, for a summer, as a teen, but now the memory was long gone, the Yiddish accent that had finally washed out. So she stayed with him and felt grateful. I’d decided that when I made it, I’d buy her a ring with diamonds all along the inside, so she’d know what I thought of her. Jewellery, like clothes, like accessories, like all fashion, is an expression of a feeling that you’re having a hard time putting into words.

  Even today, the feeling I have most often is what I call a funk. Funks have bedevilled me my entire life, so much so that I made an acronym: ‘Feeling Unsure, Not Knowing’. It’s the hardest feeling. The teenage me, sequestered in my room that summer, said: ‘People probably don’t like me. But some might. But I don’t know if they’re the ones I want to like me. I kind of hate myself. But I also think I’m amazing. I’m so lovable but I don’t think anyone will ever love me but I don’t know that I want to get that close, anyway. I just want to run and keep on running and never look back. But I want to take my mum with me. My body is disgusting to me. But just touching my body, I feel turned on. Feeling it is amazing. Seeing it is repulsive. Someone’s getting married when they shouldn’t but they don’t have a better plan. The wedding is about to begin and I am in a funk.’

  I remember I went downstairs trying to prep myself for the amount of people who’d have gathered. The cake was the centrepiece, of course, and the guests were suitably impressed. Fourteen of them looked hideous and three of them looked amazing. That’s generally the quota in really any situation of hideous to amazing, whether you were in the library, the Tube, the cinema. I’ve always found it accurate and still do.

  There were scones and sausage rolls to feed eighty, everyone from our street and the streets around us.

  I remember my mum was not wearing a tracksuit. Instead she had on a jumpsuit. I was a bit affronted at having to see quite so much of her, and jumpsuits are disingenuous beasts; they pretend they’re covering you when they actually reveal just about everything, like someone who says, ‘I don’t like to gossip!’ But her body looked great, younger than I’d known it to, and her hair looked older than it ever had; usually it was set like the queen’s but today it was more Queen Mother. It was a look. ‘You look lovely, Mum. Really lovely.’ And that was important. But second to the bride.

  Everybody squeezed their hands in anticipation, these neighbours, some of whom I knew well, some of whom I’d wave to most days, some I’d never spoken to before. They were squeezing my hand and pinching themselves and trying to hold it together. Some hadn’t cried in years, maybe decades, certainly not in public, in front of their neighbours, and here they were, welling up and she hadn’t even come out yet.

  When she came out, I gasped, so did Mum. I mean: that look she gives. You know the one. It’s a cousin of The Look that Lauren Bacall became famous for because she was discovered at nineteen and trembling so hard she couldn’t look at the camera straight on, had to look up at it, her chin pressed down. Well, here was our girl, also nineteen, and she was looking down too, then up through her lashes.

  Walking up the aisle, I wanted her to see me smile, to let her know I could see how shy she was, but that I believed in her. I wanted to reach out and steady her. But the TV screen was between us.

  My mother held her breath. I could smell the cake in the kitchen, pungent with spice from her mother’s mother’s old-world recipe. I could see each step and with each step my heart skipped a beat.

  Nobody cared what he looked like, but he looked all right. I mean. You could tell they weren’t attracted to each other and I say that as someone who gets crushes of such intensity I can’t get to sleep when they descend on me, and they do feel that way, like a descent. I hate having crushes because my designs fall apart, lose their intensity and focus. But I’d also never had sex. I had a horrible, horrible feeling she hadn’t, tiptoeing up that long aisle. I tried to unthink it. It took reaching middle age to say, with shock, ‘Nineteen? She was nineteen when they made her do that? No wonder she got so fucked up.’

  But on that day, as it unfolded with the precision of an accordion-pleated skirt, I leaned into my mother, who kissed the side of my head, overjoyed, like every other immigrant mama with false memories of Little England.

  CHAPTER 2

  Afterwards there was a huge party in the street. A lot of our neighbours were sitting down on folding chairs because they were too excited or too old or, in one case, too fat to stand up. Seated good cheer has always been a challenge for me. It’s why I reacted so poorly to the Sooty and Sweep show my parents paid good money for me to see, then, not learning their lesson, taking me to see Rod Hull and Emu. The puppets filled me with ennui. Being trapped in my seat doubled the sorrow. I can fake the funk better if I’m standing up.

  I don’t like roller coasters or fashion shows. I’d already decided that, when I got my own atelier, I’d have my models going about their lives – walking the dog, shopping for Babybel cheese, in line at the cinema – and journalists could just catch up with them. It would be a kind of treasure hunt. And it would mean the critics couldn’t gather together and make a group decision. I followed their writing as closely as I followed designers’ work. Sometimes I found it superior to the clothes themselves. But, even as a teen, I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of it.

  Marsha, the older auntie, was adorable, and looked like a walking mushroom: her shape, her skin, her earthiness. Edna, her younger sister, had thick glasses that made her look like a creature that covets mushrooms and, indeed, she clung to her sister like her shadow, matching her footsteps around the party. They had thick Yiddish accents, but Edna’s glasses seemed to make her accent thicker, too, as if the glass had refracted her vowels.

  ‘What did you think of the frock?’ she asked me.

  ‘Well…’

  ‘I knew you’d have a strong opinion.’

  ‘I noticed that—’

  ‘So what’s your professional response?’

  ‘I’m not a professional…’

  ‘Yet,’ said Mum.

  ‘…But I’d personally have done a cleaner line. What’s so lovely about Diana’s face is those round eyes and her Roman nose. The circle of blonde hair with the long neck. But since they didn’t do clean shapes, I’d have gone even further with the ruffles.’

  The Jews I knew don’t listen; they wait, trying to get their turn to talk, and their turn was never soon enough.

  ‘You’d have done a better job, I suppose?’

  ‘I’d have done a different job,’ I said evenly, though, obviously, my version would have been better.

  I pulled out my notebook and showed them some alternative dress designs I’d sketched during the ceremony.

  ‘He’s really very good,’ Marsha said to my mum.

  ‘I know,’ she beamed. ‘I told you.’

  And she had; she’d told everyone. When they saw us walking together, I sometimes noted they’d cross the street, I thought so they wouldn’t have to hear my mum say how wonderful I was.

  I wa
sn’t sure that I wanted all these middle-aged Jewish ladies to love my work. But then I looked at the ones who’d made it: the Emanuels. Calvin Klein. Ralph Lauren. Zandra Rhodes. They’d all come from backgrounds like mine. But none of them talked about it. They just changed their names and got to work.

  My mum liked the Emanuels the most because she was hung up on the romance of a couple designing together. It made no sense to me. She liked pink-haired Zandra (my favourite) like she was a fascinating new girl at school she was too afraid to talk to but watched constantly from afar. She’d never wear her clothes, but she loved looking at photos of people wearing them.

  ‘I thought her hair was perfect,’ said Marsha, and my mum agreed.

  ‘I’d have done it shorter or longer.’

  They looked at me like I’d said something really shocking and both moved away from me.

  Union Jacks were hung from one end of the street to the other. We had plates and mugs and we were serving lemonade from them because it was too warm for tea, but we wanted to use them. That moment when Diana’s enamel face, blushing hot with tea, was near yours.

  Edna came back to me. ‘You’re not one of those anti-royalists are you?’

  ‘No! Of course not! All I said was, I’d have done her hair differently.’

  She whistled through her dentures. ‘Don’t rock the boat. You’re lucky enough to be in a country that accepts us.’ And then she ate a sausage roll, as if to press home her point.

  It made sense to me, when I heard them talk like that, that the corset business was where my family had made what little money we had. What I mean is: bones, pressing against flesh, so when you said it felt like your heart was in your throat, you meant it. The business had been in Bethnal Green since the late 1880s, my dad’s side. That it existed, still, in the same place, was quite amazing. My mother was forever pushing me to go visit Edna and Marsha there. She thought I might even be able to work there since I was… not pursuing girlfriends. I avoided, like the plague, every offer to visit the corset shop. You might as well have asked me if I wanted to visit a shtetl.