The Prince of Notting Hill - Draft #3

The Prince of Notting Hill

Olivia Rousseau knew what it was to be alone. She could taste it in her morning’s breakfast and hear it in the door chime. Abandon prickled in her stomach and ruptured her vertebra piece and piece as she dressed in her school uniform. Her argyle knee socks and auburn curls were incendiary, igniting the fountains at Trafalgar during twilight. Mme. Rousseau presented Olivia at parties as though she were wrapped in silver ribbon. Olivia would stand very still and pose as her mother had disciplined her too.

Tonight she stood on the street, scraping her patent leather heel into the asphalt. Edouard’s townhouse looked as it had two years ago, when she saw it for the first time. White and five stories it stood alone behind molded rod iron gates. The houses around it seemed to shrink in submission to its grandiose presentation. Olivia stuck her hand through the gate and lifted the latch, tentatively pushing it open and slipping through. She closed it quietly. Stones, stacked upon one another, made a walkway to the heavy blue door. Lush vines had spread from the ground to his bedroom window. Eaves leafed over the windows on the second floor, rustling with the breeze. The door was unlocked. Olivia laughed humorlessly. Edouard had always been careless.

To reach the roof there were four staircases, one hundred steps, six wide landings, and one glass skylight to surpass. The journey to the sky passed through a mausoleum of antiques and artifacts that chronicled the life of a family that had hardly met. Black and white portraits of paunchy women and pock mocked men were framed in textured gold that matched the clean eggshell paint on the wall. The frozen family ties were relatable through vacant eyes. Edouard himself did not know who these photographs were of, but one man was pictured with a black bowler that had a striking similarity to a bowler he remembered his father wearing when he left for a function several years ago. Olivia had seen a black bowler for sale in a shop on King’s Road over the past weekend. She had thought of this photograph.

Each time Edouard climbed the stairs carefully, always taking note of the silver tea set that sat on the cherry-stained wooden table on the third landing. It was strange, he knew, but he wanted nothing more than to touch it. He wanted to smudge the shine, leaving his mark. He wanted to feel if the silver was cool or room temperature, but it was as if his mother’s gaze emanated from the set and if he touched it the pieces would shatter and fall. Instead he taught his friends how to unhinge the springs that held the skylight and pull the glass back so that it wouldn’t be scratched so that his mother would never know the difference. As Olivia ascended she remembered how special she felt when he had told her all of this. They had jumped the iron fence at Kew and as he undressed her against a sculpture he whispered that he had never believed in anything.

On the roof the garden was full with white and purple petals that exploded from manicured bushes, like a fire raging in snow. On holiday from university, glasses clinked as old friends, lovers, and ripe hangers-on celebrated one another’s homecoming. Pouring pints and dressed as an emcee Edouard moved swiftly amongst his guests. The university boys had engaged themselves in lurid conversations with the young girls that they wished to bed, gesticulating about Milton, the Pre-Raphaelites, and what was on at The National. The girls giggled and spilt a bit of champagne when they added their bits to the tête-à-tête. Ed smiled and hovered over his silver lighter before smiling at his tableaux and glancing towards the street. Olivia emerged, watching him suck in and hold the smoke. She stared silently at his cigarette smoldering orange. His eyes were dry and the twinkling lights from the roof illuminated his bloodshot pupils.

“Edouard, where’s the rest of your beer, mate?” It was Simon, a round boy who had heard of the party through a friend of a friend. Ed refocused his straying thoughts.
“In the chest next to the skylight.” He pointed to the open ice chest. He saw her standing by the chest helping herself to a Magner’s. She twisted the cap. She could see that he saw her and was watching her back in the dark. He leaned against the terrace with his elbows up on the stone rail, the cigarette hanging from his lips and a bottle of wine in his right hand. She waited but he continued to drink from the bottle, cavalier and dismissive. An old school friend rushed to her and began chattering away. Olivia turned her back to him.

Edouard was a conundrum, to be sure. He was a vexation, a trustafarian, a child. At his core he was a charmer, a skill that he had learned from his father. His boyish fervor encased him in a sea of dewy eyes and tangerine perfume, pink lace and kitty heels. He had a house attendent and the key to his father’s liquor cabinent. He had a sister too, but after an Oxbridge rejection she had opted to spend the year at the flat in Paris. No one paid her any mind and the children were undoubtedly separated from one another in the way only blood relations can stray.

In the night Ed glittered in the hyacinths, smoking whilst the neighborhood boys mixed white grapes and bubbles on the roof. He had given them that champagne. Those grapes and those bubbles. The boys were his waxen moldings, his prodigies. They were his schoolmates who dined with him on the eager harem of girls behind flower stalls on Portobello Road, at Swiss Alps chalets, and on beaches in the south of France. But it was over now. Carnival was done and the streets were clean. The boys had gone to be freshers at university, or on a gap year. Edouard himself had had every intention of moving with the pack but had failed to do enough revision on his A-levels and could not commit to a route for his own Grand Tour. Ed had begun to sleep in the garden.

He stubbed his cig and inhaled the air, beginning to drift. The smell of roses and dogwood. Olivia. She was there, he knew – but he couldn’t look at her. He closed his eyes. He lived in the castle on the crescent with his father, who may or may not have been married to his mother, the bejeweled woman whose inheritance everyone knew. She bought tuna in oil and watched television under the stairs. He felt Olivia stare at him with her bright green eyes, quiet and ferocious, asking how he could have left her against the sculpture, naked and sweating. He drank and justified that she should have known and if she truly hadn’t known than if it hadn’t of been him it would have been someone else. Olivia smiled and danced with a group of girls, averting the pain and searing pull she felt towards him. His tie was loose and the present company blurred into movements and shadows. Perhaps her bright green eyes were simply that and his alcoholic stupor had merely born another nightmare.

He sparked the lighter. His raw thumb stung when he pressed it against the tinny metal rivets. It didn’t take. He did it again. His thumb blistered under pressure. Rubbing and flicking – there’s the flame. He heaved in, his lungs filled with smoke and toxins that detonated inside of him until his eyes rolled back and the whites were exposed. Eyes were everywhere – gaping and dilated as he fell into space and galaxies where there were no ticking clocks or locked iron gates. There was only slipping and sinking and the muffled sound of voices that rustled like the displaced cadence of Olivia’s voice saying his name. There were ghosts floating between waking worlds and the land of the dead as smoke curled further down the webs inside of him. Lights were violent, white, and crimson but the sky was black and these colors were only the remnants of synapses firing in his mind. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t swallow but he could see the air everywhere. Touching, not tasting – alone in the birth of self-awareness and the awakening of his body.

He drank the red wine in his grasp and tried to piece together the fractures of a beautiful face that loomed above him. Nothing burned at his fingers – the drugs were gone. He heard the sad singing of a man in pain and bells ringing like symbols crashed in the distance. His body shook with the rapture but he knew that God was dead. He’d simply had too much to drink. Olivia disappeared as he reached for the outline of her body against the fuzzy yellow roof lamps. Where was the singing? It was louder now, he was trying to listen. The noise was important; it was saying something that he needed to understand. He could nearly make it out in the chaos but he floundered because the syllables didn’t make sense and there was no one to translate. He burnt the flowers with the fag and went back to the party.

The city sparkled underneath him and the cabbies knew his address. The Prince of Notting Hill. The Prince trounced the town with his smile and his cigarettes. The town knew his address, but no one knew him. He told her that he wanted it that way. He led a band of boys that loved his image but hated his being and he was so aloof that one couldn’t help but feel that every time you saw him could be the last. He was hazy and everyday was one day closer to the hour when he would disappear from their lives forever. Olivia could sense the imminent seclusion, as a dog can smell the rain. Edouard was fading. She had come here tonight. She had drunk his liquor and wandered into his garden. His cigarette burned to its filter but he let it nick his fingers. She was savoring seconds and manipulating moments, reliving the one when they kissed in the grass as she twirled to a song she didn’t recognize. She could feel the breeze blow in from the west like it had that night and suddenly nothing felt as if it had ever been long ago.

He could have loved her. Olivia. He could have loved any of them, but his father couldn’t love so he couldn’t love, and the world turned in the way it always did. The women would come and the arrangements would be made but there were no plans to speak of. She had wanted plans. If there were plans they changed and alcohol-infused dreams were broken by the brisk snap of the morning after – there was Olivia. There she was on the molded stone, staring at the sky. It was so easy but there had been so many of them and the Prince couldn’t justify why she would be any different. The boys fed him booze and women but he was alone in the drugs, and to this end nobody cared.

Olivia lay back on the stone balcony, her shoe dangling against the side of the house. How far would she fall if she rolled herself off roof and into the night? Only to the street? Or would it be beneath the ground? She could continue to fall, tunneling her way deep beneath the yellow street lamps and into the ground, finding some solace at last. He could chase her there. She wanted to know what it was that was buzzing inside of him. The connection in the disconnection, the money in the safe. Where were those answers and why hadn’t he stopped when she said “no”? She had said no but she wanted to feel his hands and mouth on her on the wet summer grass because she had never felt anything. When he pushed on it made her feel alive. She gave him her necklace.

He was protected under a name but that excuse had been worn by his seventeenth birthday. She was protected under nothing and as her mother drove her to the clinic she wondered if the moment and euphoria could have really of been worth it. He was wanted and people looked for him to tell his thrills, sell them his pills, cocaine, and tranquilizers. Once on holiday in France his cousins had tried to chase him down for a hit of their own. He had hidden between booths on the Promenade, wishing to be free of his captors.

Olivia. How long ago had it been Olivia, with the public school boys in the sunshine, her hair in the wind. She had expected the best but he had showed her the worst and he still had her necklace under his pillow. Another girl had found it one night and the charm’s silhouetted shape swayed in the moonlight next to the window where she stood. There were boys that he had molded in his image but it they had moved on. The Prince was at their peril, the power dynamic had shifted and now he was in the back with the empty pints and the kitchen orders on weeknights. Bar back was the worst but his father might be in when he came back, and the day was coming when he wouldn’t be afraid of himself anymore.

Olivia-the necklace-the drugs in the castle-it was happening. Edouard watched but he would not speak. Olivia was here and if she was here than she was telling him that she was in love and he was forgiven in the only way that she could. He needed to give her the pony charmed necklace back. It was the only token that she had to offer after she had given herself and tonight he wouldn’t even feign a conversation. He could have come down in the garden but the high had twisted his routes until he was infinitely lost and her emerald eyes against the blue night were too much. If he could have that touch from anyone again – not hers, it didn’t have to be hers – but a touch from a hand he knew, a graze he recognized, an afternoon in the grass. Where was everything and when did it go? He was seventeen but it was over. His father was off with the women he had never met, his mother kept calling her daughter though the phone went straight to voicemail.

He popped the next bottle and cheered with the boys. The chosen girls had been selected for the evening like a batch of cherries. They toasted their men before the streets that knew their stories. The St. Paul’s and Morehouse girls all divvied up and equally matched. The Prince was the host, he had the first pick, but he only wanted her, so sweet on the ledge, with the arms that would hold him until this episode was over. His heart had stopped, his eyes glazed. His fingers loosened their grip, his whole body consumed in the disarray of the moment and splayed on the ground. How do you bridge the time that’s past when the next moment could make all the difference? When you stretch but you can’t breathe, the air thick in your head and your bones are old though your skin is smooth.

“Ed!”
“Eddie!”
“Edouard!”
“Ed!”
“Call 999!”

Flashing lights and chaos, feet scuffling through the sky window, scratching the glass and scurrying down the stairs. Bottles rolled and clinked against one another like broken wind chimes barely audible in the wind. Pulse. Check. Breathing. Check. Just a bit much, the cops chuckled. They left brown, dirty footsteps on the white carpet. Then nothing. The night was silent. The house was silent. The roof was empty. The boys had fled. Olivia held out a glass of water, to which he sipped and let his head loll in her lap.

“You’re all right Eddie. You’re still here. I’m still here.”

A flicker in his mind. It was morning and he awoke in his lofted bed, alone. She had left before the sun rose. Isolated and frozen she was falling, sinking, dying in her black taffeta dress – alone in the way that she had arrived.