Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

For thirty minutes the music swooped and soared, pipes and flutes and drums and haunting voices. Skinny, bloodied and dirty models tramped through the heather up and down the catwalk. Sometimes barefoot, other times in knee-high boots, bodies barely concealed beneath extravagant wraps and flowing capes.

While Lee had used a variety of other textures and textiles, leathers and laces, Ranish Tweed was centre stage. I was moved almost to tears by it, and when Lee emerged at the end of it all, to walk the length of the stage surrounded by his adoring models, I stood with the rest applauding until my hands hurt.

After the show everyone involved crowded into a pub in Shoreditch. The first reviews would appear in the later editions of the evening papers, and then tomorrow in the dailies, but everyone knew that it had been a triumph. It seemed that Ruairidh and I were as much the centre of attention as Lee, everyone plying us with champagne. Once or twice I caught Lee watching from afar and wondered if it was jealousy I saw in his eyes.

We were quite drunk, Ruairidh and I, when Lee took us outside, where the punk girl was waiting in the Merc. He opened the door for us to get in. ‘Just wanted to say my own special thank you,’ he said.

We drove to one of his homes, which was an apartment in an end terrace, semi-detached brick and stone house somewhere in Notting Hill.

He let us in by a stained-glass door at the front and led us upstairs to the apartment itself. ‘To be honest, I don’t spend much time here. It’s a place I crash when I want to be on my own, or to bring special friends.’

He waved us into a white leather settee and opened another bottle of champagne. Ruairidh seemed to have an endless capacity for it, but I didn’t know that I could drink any more. My head was already spinning. However, I had no desire to put a dampener on the occasion. It’s not often that I can say I had to force champagne down my throat, but I did that day.

Lee, for all that he had consumed, seemed quite sober. He sat down at a shiny, glass-topped table, and started cutting lines of coke through the reflections. ‘Join me,’ he said.

I glanced at Ruairidh. This really was not something I wanted to do. But I could see from his eyes that he didn’t want us to refuse.

Lee seemed oblivious. ‘I love this shit,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could get through these shows without it.’ He looked up, that infectious grin of his spread across his face. ‘And I love you guys. I couldn’t have done this without Ranish. It was just perfect.’ He took out and rolled up a £20 note and hoovered a line of coke into his right nostril. Then he passed the note to Ruairidh. ‘I’ll let you into a little secret.’ He leaned in, something intimate in his demeanour. ‘I’m to be the new head designer at Givenchy. They’re going to announce it next month.’

‘Wow! Congratulations,’ Ruairidh said, with less enthusiasm than perhaps Lee expected. I think he was distracted by the knowledge that he was expected to snort the next line of coke. I watched as he drew the white powder into his nostril, and nearly choked on it. As he handed me the £20 note I could see in his eyes that the elation had already kicked in.

I didn’t want to do it. But I knew it was what Lee wanted. A celebration of the news he had just broken. An intimation that we were special to him. And for the first and last time in my life I snorted cocaine. I felt it choking and burning in my nasal passages and throat, before suddenly I was floating on a cloud of euphoric self-esteem, and wanted to hug and hold this funny, buck-toothed, talented gay man and never let him go. Even though right then, in that moment of cocaine clarity, I understood for the first time that Lee Blunt was entirely and only about power, control and ego.

The reviews were peerless. Lee’s catwalk rendition of the Highland Clearances was the highlight of British Fashion Week. It received reams of coverage in the fashion pages of all the dailies, and photo features in the magazines and weekend supplements. Ranish Tweed went viral. Suddenly our phone never stopped ringing. Everyone wanted a piece of the cloth phenomenon that was Ranish.

Those Savile Row tailors who had been polite but lukewarm when I went cold-calling were now calling me, asking for appointments, flying up to the island to select their patterns and place their orders. Those contacts I had made in Japan were submitting orders, without a karaoke bar in sight.

It was more work than we could cope with. We were forced to take on half a dozen more weavers, and cut an exclusive deal with the mill at Shawbost to finish our product. And although I wasn’t happy about it, Mrs Macfarlane employed my old childhood friend Seonag Morrison to keep the accounts and run the office, which at that time was still in the front room of our house.

Seonag had graduated from a course in business and computer studies in Manchester, before getting herself married, and then pregnant. And with her kids just recently started school, she was now back on the job market. Relations between us had cooled off in our late teens, and I would have preferred someone else, but I couldn’t argue about her qualifications for the job.

In spite of the orders now rolling in, we continued to have a major cashflow problem, which wasn’t going to sort itself out until we started completing and delivering. It was Seonag who alerted us to the fact that although it was now nearly three months since we had supplied our tweed to Lee, he had still not paid. She had noticed the unpaid invoice and thought it was probably an oversight, so had issued a reminder. Still no payment. Then she had tried phoning Lee’s fledgling company in London, but nobody would take her call.

So Ruairidh called Lee on his mobile. He made no mention of the unpaid bill, but told him that we would be in London next week, and that maybe we could meet up for a drink. Lee suggested the pub in Shoreditch where we had all got drunk together after the show.

Ruairidh and I were both unaccountably nervous when we got the tube out east to keep our rendezvous with him. And before we went into the pub Ruairidh said to me, ‘Don’t you say anything about the money. Just keep him sweet. I’ll do the talking.’

Lee was with a group of friends. A black guy who we had met before and went by the odd moniker of Cornell Charles Stamoran. Cornell wore bumsters and a pork pie hat and was chatting to a couple of strangely theatrical young men who looked as if they had stepped straight from the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel. They had clearly been drinking for some time, and Lee greeted us with sloppy kisses, and over-enthusiastic hugs that nearly had all three of us on the floor. On the wave of a hand from Lee, Cornell ordered drinks for everyone.

Lee was loquacious, slurred words tumbling from his mouth so quickly they were tripping over each other on the way out, and I knew that he had been consuming much more than just alcohol.

‘Day after tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The Givenchy announcement. Off to Paris to sign the contracts and then a press conference. Gonna be amazing!’ He put his arms around me and very nearly crushed me. ‘Hear things are going great for you up there, darling. You so deserve it, you guys, so deserve it.’

Ruairidh sipped on his beer and said, ‘Yeah, lots of orders coming in. Which is great. But we’re still a young company, Lee, no capital behind us and a real cashflow problem. It would seriously help us out if you could settle up for the cloth we supplied for the show.’

Like a fist beyond your peripheral vision that you never saw coming, Lee’s mood changed. ‘What the fuck? You want fucking money from me? You want money? You’re kidding me, right? I put your fucking cloth in the limelight, I make it world-famous. And you want me to pay for it?’ He stabbed a finger into Ruairidh’s chest. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs to put on a runway show? Do you? Do you? No you fucking don’t. I have to beg, borrow and steal every fucking penny for it. Cos no other fucker’s going to pay.’ He waved his hand in the air, spittle gathering on his lips. ‘Not until I’m on the payroll at Givenchy. Every fucking farthing’s coming out of my own pocket.’