Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

I laughed. ‘I love ‘Mr President’,’ I said. ‘Not many pop stars with the courage to go political these days.’

‘Not like in the Sixties.’ Lee clasped his hands. ‘Me? I was born in the wrong era. I’d have loved to have dressed the Sixties.’ His eyes sparkled and he sighed. ‘And all that free love, without an AIDS virus in sight.’

Ruairidh returned with the coffees. ‘What are you two laughing about?’

‘Oh just sex,’ I said.

‘My eternal obsession.’ Lee grinned. ‘After fashion, of course.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Speaking of which, you have samples to show me, you said.’

‘Yes.’ I stood up, taking over, and lifted the rucksacks on to a couple of chairs. ‘We call them pattern blankets. It was Ruairidh’s idea. Basically to weave one sample into the next to give a sense, side by side, of the range of tones and colours and patterns available.’

I pulled them out and draped them over all the available chairs I could draw around our table, and literally watched Lee Blunt’s jaw drop. He stood up and walked around the chairs, running the flat of his hands across the surface of the tweed, and then feeding it through his fingers. His eyes were burning with what I understood only later was raw inspiration.

‘I want this,’ he said very quietly.

‘Which one?’ Ruairidh said.

‘Not one, mate. All of them. Just like this. All woven together. Yards and yards of it. Bolts of the bloody stuff.’ He turned shining eyes on me. ‘It’s perfect. Just what I’ve been looking for. All my bloody life, I think. I’m going to make it the centrepiece of my next collection.’ He grinned then, turning his big wide infectious smile on Ruairidh. ‘And I’m going to build the whole show around the Highland Clearances. We Scots can all relate to that, right?’ And I loved the way that suddenly he was Scottish.

The next few months passed in a blur. Lee flew up to the islands and spent long hours with Ruairidh’s mother picking out the patterns and colours he wanted for the blankets. He and Ruairidh and I went off to the bar at the Doune Braes Hotel and got roaring drunk, laughing endlessly at his irreverent and often blood-curdlingly crude sense of humour. We really cemented our relationship with him that week.

And then it was down to work. Making those blankets was no easy task. It was a complex business managing the transition from one set of warp and weft yarns to another, as the weave bled from one pattern into the next. Single-width Harris Tweed would use just over 600 threads because of the thickness of the wool. Ranish, with its finer threads, used more than 800. So it was a labour-intensive and time-consuming job. We had to employ additional weavers so that we would make the deadline Lee had set for us. He needed the cloth in time to prepare for his show at London Fashion Week in February.

In January we got an invite from Lee to attend the show. Money was still tight. He hadn’t paid us yet, and we had devoted all our time and energies to fulfilling his order, subsidized by money from the sale of the Macfarlanes’ property in Stornoway. We got the bus down to London the following month, the day before the show. I had booked us into a student guest house in South Kensington for a little over £30 a night, and we intended to stay just the two nights.

The evening we arrived Lee picked us up in a big black Merc driven by a punkish girl with a face full of metal who took us to an apartment somewhere in St John’s Wood. ‘Pre-show party,’ Lee said. He was sitting up front with the punk girl. ‘In case the post-show party is more like a wake. You never know with these fucking fashion critics.’ He turned his back on us then, and getting conversation out of him during the rest of the drive was like getting blood from a stone. He seemed nervous and distracted and not at all like the crude and outrageous character we had got to know during his stay on the island.

It was a rainy, miserable, dark winter’s night and the street, when we arrived, was packed full of shiny wet Audis and BMWs and Porsches. Taxis were arriving, and a constant stream of strange-looking people under umbrellas were running into an elegant apartment block through a portico’d entrance.

‘So,’ I said, ‘I suppose everything’s all set for the show, then?’

‘Christ, no!’ Lee turned and growled at me. ‘It’s all a fucking mess. Nothing’s finished. It’s going to be a goddamn fucking disaster.’ He got out of the car, slamming the door behind him, and walked briskly up the drive towards the front door.

The punk girl turned and grinned at us. ‘Don’t worry, he’s always like this the night before a show. He’ll pull it all together, he always does. Just go in,’ she said. ‘And enjoy.’

The apartment was on the second floor. We followed the noise up the stairs and wondered what the neighbours made of it. The door of the apartment stood wide, spilling light and music out into the landing. I followed Ruairidh in as he weaved his way through crowds of people who stood about on white carpets spilling red wine and cigarette ash. In amongst the smoke I smelled the distinctive musky reek of cannabis, with which I had become acquainted during my student days. But that was a long time ago. Ruairidh half-turned and pulled a face. This was definitely not our scene.

A large sitting room with open-plan kitchen and tall windows looked out over the road below. A congregation of mostly young people sprawled on sofas and chairs or stood in animated groups shouting conversations above deafening music. I had never seen such an array of outlandish clothes all in one place outside of a theatre dressing room. A maelstrom of mannequins, a thrum of thespians. Hats and boots, frock coats and dresses, flares and bumsters, skirts and tops that left little to the imagination. There were men kissing men, women kissing women and, incongruously, even the occasional man and woman exchanging kisses.

A group of people knelt around a glass-topped coffee table, cutting and accumulating lines of white powder that they took it in turns to snort through rolled-up fivers.

Someone thrust glasses of red wine into our hands, and we looked around for Lee. But there was no sign of him. We found seats instead, and sat together sipping our wine and watching as the circus unfolded around us. We made those drinks last, feeling distinctly out of place, although in truth no one seemed to notice our existence. I don’t know how long we sat there. An hour, maybe more. But finally it was long enough for me. I pressed my lips to Ruairidh’s ear. ‘Let’s go.’

He nodded. ‘We’d better tell Lee, though.’

I thought he wouldn’t even notice if we were gone, but Ruairidh was anxious not to offend him. We pushed through a group of dancers in the kitchen area and out into the hallway. There was no sign of him anywhere. A couple of doors led off the hall and Ruairidh opened one of them.

It revealed a bedroom awash with red light. A TV screen fixed to the ceiling above the bed was playing some kind of porn video that we couldn’t see from where we stood. But the soundtrack was explicit enough. A naked man on the bed was hunched over on his knees, an equally naked woman with enormous breasts thrusting her hips towards his bare buttocks, flesh slapping on flesh. She turned and moved back a little as the door opened, and I was shocked to see her very large erection swinging towards us. She smiled, and in a strangely masculine cadence said, ‘Hello, darlings. Join us.’

Ruairidh almost stood on my feet as he backed out of the room, and although I wasn’t certain, I thought that the man bent over on the bed was Lee.

The punk girl was still sitting in the car outside listening to music. I rapped on the window and she wound it down. ‘Can you take us back to South Kensington?’