Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

‘Sorry, sweetheart. No can do. I’ve got to wait for Lee and take him to the venue. He’s going to be working on the show all night. But don’t worry, you can get a taxi. And Lee’s asked me to pick you up from your place at six tomorrow morning. So be ready.’ She smiled and wound the window back up.

We picked up a taxi a couple of streets away, and I was shocked when the fare came to almost as much as a night at our hotel. So much for economizing.

We were still half asleep when the punk girl came calling, and took us off on what would be one of the most bizarre, unlikely and seminal days of our lives.

It was another miserable February morning, drizzle falling in the dark from a sky burned umber by the lights of the city. The chill of it seeped into our bones. We had no idea where we were going, but the punk girl sped us through the early-morning traffic heading east. Until we found ourselves cruising along shiny cobbled streets between crumbling brick warehouses.

Finally, she drew up alongside a phalanx of cars and battered white vans in a cul-de-sac surrounded by dark, derelict buildings. Light spilled out from vast open doors and was shot through by streaks of fast-moving white. It was sleeting.

The outside walls were slathered with posters advertising what it described as The highlight and absolute culmination of British Fashion Week . A billboard declared, Fashion Sensation Lee Blunt Re-animates the Highland Clearances in Haute Couture .

It seemed to us the most unlikely venue. British Fashion Week, in our imagination at least, projected an image of class and glamour. It was hard to imagine the great and the good of British fashion dragging themselves out to warehouseland in the East End of London from between their silk sheets in Mayfair and Chelsea. But what did we know? This was the pulling power of Lee Blunt.

The vast interior beyond the open doors was filled with the roar of space heaters fighting to exorcize years of cold and damp. Electricians were constructing a complex lighting rig around a raised catwalk strewn with rocks and heather and seaweed carefully placed along its length by an army of assistants. Where they had acquired heather at this time of year we knew not, but the seaweed was fresh, and the salty smell of it filled the place like the smell of the sea.

The punk girl had told us in the car that many of the young people helping with the show were volunteers, fashion students hoping to learn something, or get themselves noticed. We noticed them now, setting out rows of folding tubular chairs along either side of the catwalk. Beyond the seating and the stage, as the lights came up, the rest of the warehouse receded into a darkness so profound that everything in the illuminated foreground seemed impossibly overlit, over-coloured and quite unreal.

A technician crouched at the end of the runway, fixing a scale model of a nineteenth-century sailing ship to a pedestal. He stood to position a spotlight behind it, casting its shadow large against the far wall and the opening through which the models would come, as if emerging from the hold of the ship itself. Beyond that, the backstage area was screened off by stretched canvas. Everything seemed so unexpectedly makeshift.

We followed the punk girl, picking our way through the debris that littered the concrete floor, and saw huge pools of black water reflecting light in the distance where the roof had let in rain. Up wooden steps and through hanging sheets on to an area of elevated staging beyond the canvas. And therein lay chaos.

This was one giant dressing room. Naked and semi-naked girls with pale and dark skin and bones more prominent than breasts ran around from make-up to fitting and back again. In chairs set around a long scarred table littered with jars and brushes, make-up artists daubed dirt and blood on alabaster and ebony skin, painting beautiful faces, and then defacing them with scars and bruises.

I turned to see Ruairidh gawping open-mouthed. I dug an elbow into his ribs. ‘Watch it!’

He laughed and leaned in confidentially. ‘I’ve never been attracted to stick insects. Ever since I read about the female praying mantis eating her lover after sex.’

I said, ‘Sounds like a fine idea to me.’

A vast cutting table was strewn with Ranish Tweed. There were bolts of it unravelled and cut in short and long lengths. It hung down in folds on to a floor littered with offcuts. Rows of clothes racks hung with half-finished outfits. Jackets and tops and skirts and trousers. Lee, and a small group of trusted accomplices, were pinning them on the girls, cutting and sewing as they went, almost sculpting the clothes to their bodies.

Lee’s cutting shears were like a wand in his hand as he shaped and cut with mesmeric speed, conjuring extraordinary outfits from virgin cloth, examining, re-cutting, re-pinning what his assistants had done

The models — I counted twenty of them — were blue with the cold, and stood around shivering but never complaining. This was a much-coveted gig, a stage on which only a select few would ever get to perform.

Lee spotted us, and abandoned his shears for a moment, opening his arms to hug and kiss us both, and announcing to the world, ‘Everyone! These are the geniuses who made the cloth you are wearing.’ And all the girls crowded around to fuss and kiss and hug and congratulate. Famous faces from the covers of Vogue and Elle, Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar , naked and unabashed. And I wondered if the flush on Ruairidh’s cheeks was from pleasure or embarrassment. I decided it was probably a mix of the two.

Lee’s face glowed with excitement, shining with perspiration. His eyes on fire. It was the first time I had seen him so alive. An extraordinary talent wholly in its element. He turned towards racks of boots and shoes behind him. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Specially commissioned for the Clearances.’ For that’s what he was calling the show.

They were stunning. Amazing creations that blended leather and Ranish Tweed in startling designs. It made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I found Lee watching me with wide, expectant eyes.

‘Well?’

‘Lee, they are fabulous,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

His grin was infectious. ‘Wait till you see them in the shops.’

‘So,’ Ruairidh said, ‘the show’s still going to be a goddamn fucking disaster?’

Lee threw his head back and roared with laughter. ‘Of course it is. I’ve built my whole reputation on disaster. I wouldn’t want to let anyone down now.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But go, go, go. I’ve reserved you seats at the front. We’ll be starting soon.’

My turn to look at my watch. ‘Lee, it’s not even eight-thirty.’

He grinned wickedly. ‘We start at nine. I like to get the bastards out of their beds. And they always do for a Lee Blunt show.’ He crinkled his face with pleasure. ‘Lets them know who’s the one with power here.’

To our astonishment, when we stepped back out into the warehouse, the seats around the runway were very nearly full. The great and the good had, indeed, dragged themselves from their beds at an ungodly hour for Lee. A buzz of anticipation rose like smoke from amongst the baggy-eyed, powdered and painted faces crowded all around the stage. Seats at the front, in prime position, had our names on them, and we were aware of all the curious glances turning in our direction as we took our places. A flurry of flashes from the bank of photographers beyond the runway nearly blinded us, before we realized that we were the focus of their lenses.

Suddenly everything went black. Then the distant strains of bagpipes bled into the dramatic opening of a Capercaillie song, ‘Waiting for the Wheel to Turn’. A song all about the Highland Clearances. Three models staggered on to the catwalk, linked by paper chains and driven on by a bare-chested man cracking a whip. The clothes they wore were fantastical creations of Ranish and leather and lace, torn trousers and baggy tops slashed open to reveal breasts and blood.