The Prince of Notting Hill - Stories and Reflections

The Prince of Notting Hill

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 maid and the tightest security system in the neighborhood. 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. The clock ticked above the stove. There was still milk in the crate, a nutri-grain bar left on the countertop. It was one thirty in the afternoon, and he didn’t have work tonight. The boys were out at seven.

In the night Ed glittered in the hyacinths, smoking whilst the 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. Jean was at uni, Nick was on his gap year. Ed was in the garden.

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 – Olivia. 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. They knew his address, but no one knew him. He told me that he wanted it that way. He led a band of boys that loved him but hated him too 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. The boys could sense the imminent seclusion, as a dog can smell the rain. Edouard was fading.

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. If there were plans they changed and alcohol-fused dreams were shattered by the brisk snap of the morning after – there was Olivia. There she was on the stone, staring at the roof. It was so easy but there had been so man and the Prince couldn’t justify why she would be any different.

His mind was a consistent run-around. The boys fed him booze and women but he was alone in the drugs, and to this nobody cared. I would just watch him from the distance, wondering what it was that was buzzing inside of him. The connection in the disconnection, the money in the safe. He was protected under a name but that excuse had been worn by his nineteenth birthday. People looked for him, for they had heard of him and once on holiday in France 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 black 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 was a job unfinished and the royal court had staged a mutiny. The Prince was at their peril, the power dynamic had shifted and he was in the back with the empty pints and the kitchen orders. 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.

Edouard 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 detonating 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 self inflicted destruction. 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 that had snaked into 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 crashed like symbols 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. 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.

Olivia-the necklace-the drugs in the castle-it was happening. And he could have gone back to the garden but it was a long way down and her raven eyes in the black hair with the blue night was 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 nineteen 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. Those were the girls who were already to fucked up to know the difference. The Prince was the host, he had the first pick. He 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. 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. Even though the proceedings are no different than they were last Friday, and the one before that… for five years.

“Ed!”

“Eddie!”

“Edouard!”

“Ed!”

“Edouard Renee!”

Silence.

The night was silent. The house was silent. The roof was empty. The boys had gone. The raven held out a glass of water, to which he sipped – quiet like a child.

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

A flicker in his mind. It was morning and he awake in his lofted bed, alone.

Olivia

Olivia 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 red waves formulated her mother’s only fantasy. She presented Olivia at parties as though she were wrapped in silver ribbon with sparkles. Oli would stand very still and pose in the way that she had been shown. Oli was a belle, and every Friday Edouard held a ball. Tonight his garden looked the same as it had two years ago when she saw it for the first time. She stared silently at the orange smoldering of his cigarette. The garden was full with white and purple petals that exploded from manicured bushes, like a fire raging in snow. She watched him suck in and hold the smoke. His eyes were dry and the twinkling lights from the roof illuminated his bloodshot pupils. He saw her. She could see that he saw her and was watching her back in the dark.

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 dissipate. She was savoring seconds and manipulating moments, reliving the one when they kissed in the grass. 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. There was a party on the roof with the boys from school. Laura and Tash were up there and she knew that she should find her way back up the ladder. Edouard watched but he would not speak. She was here and if she was here than she was telling him that she was in love in the only way that she could. He still had her necklace with the gold pony charm. It was the only token that she had to offer after she had given herself and tonight he wouldn’t even feign a conversation. Isolated and frozen she was falling, sinking, dying in her black taffeta dress – alone in the way that she had arrived.

Edouard [sensory]

Edouard 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 detonating 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 self inflicted destruction. 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 that had snaked into 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. 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.

The Hallway

To reach the roof there were four staircases, one hundred steps, six wide landings, and one glass skylight to surpass. Edouard’s 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 tired men were framed in textured gold that matched the clean eggshell paint on the wall. The frozen bloodlines were relatable through the identical vacant eyes that did not have enough life in them to die. Edouard 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.

Edouard climbed the stairs carefully, always taking note of the silver tea set that sat on the dark 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 into the pool of disappointment that he had come to embody for her. 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 and that his mother would never know the difference.