Royals by Emma Forrest

Author:Emma Forrest
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408895207
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-09-23T09:55:59+00:00

CHAPTER 11

They were short-staffed at her shop, so Jasmine was unavailable for a few days. When I couldn’t stand home any more, I asked if I could come meet her at work. She gave me the address.

Outside Marble Arch Tube, evangelical Christians were calling through megaphones. ‘Sin!’ they shouted, like they were hawking it at a discounted summer rate. I wanted to make them an offer. Saudi men in neon shorts were trailed by women in black niqabs. Occasionally, they’d cross paths with a Hassidic man in his glossy curls and fur-covered U.F.O hat (as fabulous as anything Grace Jones would wear), while his wife bore the sadness of her lifeless wig and worn-down loafers. These couples were the purest interpretation of birds in the wild, the males strutting peacocks, the females muted. It bothered me. I wondered if, to balance, the men had grey, sad, underwear and the women’s lingerie was pastel fancies.

Jehovah’s Witnesses stood silently beside their piles of Watchtower magazines. The religious groups were too close to each other, unconnected but touching tendrils. I wanted them separated, like a child with autism separating her peas from her mash from her chicken. Perhaps I was just envious that they had a belief system (the child with autism as much as the religious extremists).

I passed a tatty souvenir shop and then another as I followed the numbers to Jasmine’s shop. A pigeon walked alongside me from the first shop to the second, like a decorous suitor.

When I got to the third tourist shop, with its ‘My brother went to London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ T-shirts, toy double-decker buses, miniature replicas of Big Ben, Diana and Charles mugs – I went in to ask for help because, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t find her store. There must be, I assumed, a Little Marble Arch or a Marble Arch Place. I’d written it down wrong. When I saw Jasmine behind the till, I assumed she was a mirage. But then she spoke. ‘Hi, darling!’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m at work.’

I tried to orient myself. When I thought I was looking at bad pun T-shirts, was I actually looking at the new Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood collection and not realising it? But then a German toddler ran over my foot with a motorised Margaret Thatcher, and the pain brought the room into focus.

‘This is the shop?’

‘Yes. I told you your clothes wouldn’t fit in here.’

‘And rightly so.’

‘And I told you I wasn’t a snob. You should have believed me.’

Yes, I nodded, speechless, as she went to help a tourist. (I couldn’t describe them as customers. What was the custom? I’ve bought from souvenir shops since then, in other countries. But in your own country, the idea of in any way interacting with national-themed kitsch, be it as buyer or seller, was something I couldn’t wrap my head around.)

The German mother of the toddler bought bobbleheads of the Queen and Queen Mother and then, as she handed her

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