Vanished Years (26 page)

For the time being our two new friends chat in Russian on the upper bunks, their legs swinging over the edge. The sozzled one’s feet are in smelly socks, with all the trimmings – bunions and giant hammer-head toes, which wiggle and stretch as he lays out a picnic above and offers us both an egg. He leans his head over the side of the bunk, his long hair trailing from his head, cheeks and lips flapping. David nearly pukes.

‘Do you want some of my lithium?’ I ask, trying to cheer him up.

‘Have you got any?’ He laughs half-heartedly, turning back to the wall, and I look out of the window. He may be having an attack but I am in heaven.

As the weight of the world is measured and debated in beautiful Russian on the top bunks, the train groans laboriously from the station through tunnels and sidings, on stilts at one moment, clattering above a shiny boulevard and diving underground at another, leaving the city behind. Buildings tower over the tracks, a collage of walls and windows under a jagged fringe of rooftops and chimneystacks. Life flashes by. An old woman washes plates. A man observes the train. A silhouette behind a curtain turns off a light. It is enchanting.

David rallies slightly and we decide to hit the restaurant car but when we open the pass door from our coach into the next, our way is blocked by the hippo attendant. It’s a Bond moment, and I half expect her to expose rows of metal teeth and sink them into David’s neck. We try to get past but she begins to shout in Russian. She shoves David quite hard in the chest.

‘Don’t you push me!’ he shrieks rather pathetically and she screams back, shoving him, bulldozing back into our carriage.

Our bald travelling companion’s head leans out from our berth, shouting over the noise of the train. ‘Lady say you must not go.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Is like that. You must go in half an hour.’ He disappears again.

The woman locks the pass door with a key hanging from a chain around her waist before squeezing past us and barrelling down the
narrow corridor to her lair at the end of the compartment. (I pass her little office later in the night and she is standing in a bra with the door open.)

I am now seriously worried that a full-blown panic attack is going to erupt from David at any moment, but actually the confrontation has cheered him up.

‘That was very Prisoner Cell Block H,’ is all he gasps, the colour returning to his cheeks.

‘I can’t believe she’s locked us in.’ I try the door. ‘Imagine if our carriage catches fire!’ Oops. David’s face twitches.

We weave our way back to the couchette and sit on our bunks. The two Russians have spread their picnics about them, and the smell of egg and coriander and feet makes quite a good eau de toilette. But now we’re both giggling, holding our hands over our noses, trying not to be seen or heard.

This is only the hors d’oeuvres. After lights out, the bald man grinds his teeth all night. He sounds like a whale calling his mate, while the sozzled one does death-rattle farts. As a result we both spend half the night in the corridor smoking and are still up when the flat white Russian dawn creeps over the plains. This is when we spy the attendant in her over-shoulder boulder-holder, also watching through her little window as the sun peeps over the horizon at another gruesome Russian day.

‘
Krasyeeva
,’ she says with a vulnerable smile, winking at the streaky sky.

Soon she is back proffering two elegant glasses of tea, with silver handles, on a tray. There is no trace on her big round cheese of a face of last night’s battle. That’s Russia for you. The fury comes and then it goes. (Another Chekhov masterclass.)

‘It’s probably poisoned,’ says David, sipping cheerfully.

‘Let’s hope so,’ I reply and we clink glasses between the beds. The train gives a wail of approval and we thunder on.

A kind of gallows humour engulfs us. Russia is simply too grim to take seriously. The policemen, the hotel staff, the stupid priests in
their fancy hats all looking murderous, stagger around as though they have all been dealt a blow on the head by a giant hammer. They are thick and cruel and cunning. Six generations of alcohol poisoning have taken their toll, and the place looks horrible too. The countryside is a devastated mess and during the last two days I have become almost hysterical, like Uncle Albert in
Mary Poppins
. I just can’t stop laughing.

From the station we drive to a small town two hours from Moscow to visit a needle drop-off centre in action. It is in fact an old caravan at the edge of a park in the middle of a dreary town unchanged since Soviet days. The trees are leafless and it is beginning to snow. Lenin still presides over the flat central square – a black fairy on a Christmas cake. It is a town that would drive anyone to drugs.

In all this gloom – the place, the sky, the people on the street – the faces of today’s activists literally shine with radiance. They are two young men running a needle drop-off caravan. They look exhausted in their dirty white coats, but their eyes blaze. They drive to a different location every day, awaited in the usual place at the usual time – normally a discreet corner in the local park – by the faithful, their congregation, the poor junkies of Russia, who brave the elements in worn-out clothes under the naked trees, with their bags of used needles and their nerves in shreds.

Today a long line of strangely respectable folk wait obediently to climb on board. Some of them are skinheads and Goths and geeks, the characters one might imagine being there, but others are simple housewives and middle-aged men, conventional and polite. They stand in the falling snow and come to the caravan one at a time, into a kind of waiting room where some forms are filled out, then go through to the other section where they give up their old needles and are given new ones. It is a heartbreaking grind to watch, and as usual it feels sick to be there.

One lady comes on board with black hair and a bird face, wearing an old coat with a fake fur collar. She is sitting quite happily with the doctor when suddenly she begins to scream and jump up and down.
Everyone is shocked. The doctor tries to calm her down but she just screams more and now she is struggling out of her clothes. People leap in to help. It is a tiny space and it quickly turns into a scrum of arms and legs, and, in the middle of it all, this woman’s head, all veins and teeth and eyes as she screams. She has enormous strength for such a tiny thing and she elbows her way through the crowd, then pulls down her trousers and throws her coat on the floor. There is a moment of silence, then everyone starts to laugh. Including the lady herself. They become hysterical. Tears are now running down the woman’s cheeks. Is she laughing or crying? Who knows? The world is upside down. Someone shouts out of the bus to the line who are all looking up anxiously and they start to laugh as well.

‘What on earth is going on?’ I ask. ‘I nearly had a heart attack.’

The doctors are purple with laughing. One of them explains to Stephanie Powers in Russian, but she doesn’t find it the least bit amusing.

‘There was a cockroach in her clothes and it was crawling into her underwear,’ she says.

‘Oh I see. Yes. That is funny. It’s like the beginning of
Victor Victoria
.’

The little lady hugs the two doctors. The drama and the laughter have broken down an invisible wall and for a moment we are all normal people, unreserved, uncomplicated, and everyone hugs her and she hugs everyone. She gets her needles and leaves the caravan a star. Everyone in the line claps her on the back. She re-enacts some of the high points of the escapade to a couple of people and then totters off into the park, presumably to have a fix.

By the next afternoon it’s really snowing hard and we are all worried about our imminent escape. We still have a UN cocktail party to get through and more meetings with activists and NGOs. One of them is a stunning beauty of a girl who has started an information magazine for people living with HIV. She has HIV herself, although she appears to be the picture of effervescent health. She is tall and curvy
with thick dark hair falling over her neck and shoulders. We go out into the nearby park to take some pictures for her magazine. She is incredibly vivid and there is enormous warmth in her regard. She is clearly a ball-breaker and would be a seducer if she could be bothered, but, like many Russian ladies, one gets the impression that she has little sympathy for the male sex.

Women who have been sucked unknowingly into the world of Aids by their men look at us all in a new light. Our animal force is smoke and mirrors to them now, a terrible pantomime that crumbles as the virus takes its grip. This lady is made of sterner stuff than any man, although she is completely feminine. She talks about the difficulties of getting treatment. There is not much help from the health system. You have to bribe your way into hospital and sometimes even bribe your way out. More Kafka. She tells scandalous stories of corruption, particularly concerning the Ministry of Health. Everyone falls in love with her and she laughs it off.

As she is leaving, she asks me the question I have been asking myself. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What can you do?’

‘Not much. Talk about it. Write something.’

She laughs. Her eyes sparkle, slightly mocking, and she leaves to continue the fight while I fly home to New York.

We are all going in opposite directions. It’s a strange airport, Moscow, and it hasn’t changed since the night my dog and I arrived back in 1990. The same brown marble is bathed in the same green light. There are still the same long lines getting in and getting out. It’s difficult to do either. Being a part of a UN delegation, we are swept through on a magic carpet, no check-in, no customs, straight through to the diplomatic lounge, where an African king is already enthroned, surrounded by wives and courtiers, all swathed in shawls and turbans. Together we accept canapés and champagne from government lackeys, while officials look at our tickets and bring us our boarding cards.

Mariangela is going back to Geneva. David is going to Berlin. We will never see Mariangela again, and our goodbye already feels like a memory. We both know this is my last trip.

‘You were great,’ she says.

‘I was a handful,’ I reply.

‘You’re always a handful. Call me when you come to Geneva,’ Mariangela says and walks off, waving.

My flight is late at night and I sit in the airport wondering about the trip. I never want to come back to Russia, but I do write something, a long explanation of what I have seen and what I understand about Aids, for a magazine in Moscow. I send it – translated – but it is never published.

I
had locked myself in the loo at Charles Finch’s pre-Bafta party at Annabelle’s the other night, for a bit of a rest, when I overheard the following conversation.

‘Five books, two films and a documentary are being made about the life and times of Isabella Blow,’ said a voice.

‘They’re going to be slim volumes,’ sneered another.

‘But she discovered Alexander McQueen!’

‘Alexander McQueen discovered himself.’

‘I thought the housekeeper did.’ Shrieks. ‘Well, she had an eye. You can’t deny that.’

‘Yes. Like a smashed plate.’

A door swung open with the noise of the party, and the voices trailed off.

I sat there for a few minutes, wondering what Isabella would have made of the conversation. Would she laugh or be hurt, or would she conclude, like Oscar Wilde, that it was better to be talked about than not to be mentioned at all?

It has been nearly three years since Isabella died, and no matter
how slim the volumes, how short the films, people are still talking about her and trying to unlock her riddle.

One thing is certain. Despite the energy, the humour and the eye like a smashed plate, she probably didn’t achieve much during her short sentence in earthly shackles. In fact, she managed to fuck up every opportunity she ever had, burn every bridge, test every friendship to its hilt, and perhaps it was for this that she was remarkable. Despite these considerable drawbacks she still managed to inspire unfaltering devotion from all the friends she occasionally needled (rather than stabbed) in the back, and she lit up every room she entered, whether it was the emergency room or the ballroom. Her tragedy was, quite simply, to be born in the right place at the wrong time. During her twenty years as a soldier of fashion, the landscape of that world completely changed. Isabella charged on regardless, dressed as a damsel in distress, Milady de Winter, largely written off by the pretentious rag-trade freaks that so lavishly praised her, post mortem. Fashion was no longer, as Wilde brilliantly put it, what one wore oneself. It was what other people wore. Isabella never grasped this, and for the last few years of her life she was haunted by a terrible feeling of failure.

‘I even managed to fail at suicide,’ she said wryly one day in hospital.

Depression and madness are incomprehensible to the uninflicted. ‘Just snap out of it,’ the rest of us said. We were never forgiven. Suicide was our ultimate punishment.

I came out of the loo and decided to walk home. By now I was allergic to the endless awards ceremonies with their deathless pre-parties and after-parties. There was no glamour left, no fabulous monsters, no Isabellas, actually, in the glare of success. Outside I buried myself in my coat and might have been a ghost as I left the club, unnoticed by the paparazzi, all huddled against the spitting February rain, and walked across Mayfair, past the empty temples of fashion, their faceless mannequins in ridiculous shoes staring blindly out at the glittering streets.

An arctic wind bounced down Regent Street, fanning the rain into pretty rainbows around the street lights and whirlpools around the drains. The whole evening, from the candlelit stars at the awards dinner, through the overheard conversation in the bog, to the dark shuttered cathedral of Abercrombie & Fitch, conjured up winterish thoughts. Many phantoms moaned beside me as I crossed the road into Soho, all forgotten and painted over, refaced and bricked up, from Caroline Lamb to Isabella Blow.