Читать книгу Sadie Frost - Crazy Days - Sadie Frost - Страница 9

Until 1967 home for Mary and David was the studio flat in Gloucester Avenue, and life returned to normal. Or as normal as it ever was for them. There was still no money but somehow they got by. Mary started to make clothes and David painted the room. Dylan and the Beatles were on the record player and Mary earned what she could by customising any old piece of cloth or furniture into the latest fashion. If David came home with a television set she would brighten it up by sticking glitter round the edges. She made sure they had trendy clothes and David walked about in the latest drainpipe cords, his hair styled like the lads in the Beatles, with Chelsea boots and neckerchiefs, usually covered in paint. He liked what he saw in the mirror, liked the fact that he looked harder than the southern jessies. He was stocky and pretty stout, but he walked tall as he strutted round the Slade, making both friends and enemies. There he met two like-minded artists, fellow northerners who had a business together customising furniture. Douglas Binder and Dudley Edwards were part of the über-hip London scene, and once David was in with them he was on his way. Binder and Edwards were already making pieces of furniture for Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon and the latest pop sensation, the Beatles.

David started to customise furniture himself, painting it with the rainbow effects and vivid colour combinations of the psychedelic art that groups like the Rolling Stones used on their album covers. One day he brought home a chest of drawers that he’d found in a junk shop and started to paint it outside in the street, while the strains of the Stones’ new blistering single, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ streamed out of the studio’s window above. He stripped off his shirt, rolled a joint and was resting a while, when he heard footsteps coming downstairs. It was Mary, with Sadie in her arms.

‘Can you have her out here? She’s driving me mad upstairs,’ she said, dumping Sadie next to him. He gave his daughter a quick kiss and Mary smiled at the two of them, rubbing her belly. She was pregnant again, due in a month, but despite her size was dressed in the latest fashion to hit the streets, an outrageously short skirt called the mini, popularised by the designer du jour, Mary Quant. She went back upstairs and David carried on with his work, keen to get the final touches on the drawers. Sadie played happily next to him and he couldn’t resist picking up his notepad and charcoals and drawing some quick sketches of the child. As he was finishing them, Sadie toddled over and stared at the drawings.

‘Daddy, I brought it to you,’ she said, looking straight at him with an intensity that seemed from another world.

He took this as a sign – like something magical. He scooped her up and whispered in her ear. ‘Yes, my angel, you did bring it to me. You – only you brought it to me. You brought me my art, you brought me everything, because you are a gift from God sent from Heaven to save me,’ he said to her, suddenly possessed by the absolute conviction of his own talent. He picked up the chest of drawers and dragged it across the road to the bottom of the stone steps that led up to the front door of one of the posh houses. He lit the spliff and went up to the front door and rang the bell. The door was opened by an unshaven young man, good-looking, dressed in the latest fashion.

‘Yeah?’ said the man, looking him up and down.

‘Hey, man, I’m David, I live over the road.’ He stuck out his hand for his neighbour to shake. ‘I know who you are, man. You’re David Bailey, the photographer.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘Well, I wondered if you wanted to buy this chest of drawers.’

Bailey looked past Vaughany and down at the drawer fronts, magnificently painted, but something else caught his eye. A grubby little child with a mop of black curls had appeared and was trying to climb on top of the chest. The child was wearing nothing but a pair of baggy red pants smeared with dirt and a string of beads round its neck. The little nose was covered in snot that was also smeared across her entire face and in places had become encrusted with the remnants of food.

‘Is that your little boy?’ said Bailey, smiling.

Vaughany smiled back and shook his head. ‘It’s mine, yeah, but it’s not a boy. That’s Sadie.’

‘Fuck me,’ said Bailey. ‘I seen her playin’ over there and always thought she was a boy.’

‘Tell you what,’ said Vaughany. ‘If you like the chest of drawers I’ll do you a deal if you take some photos of her.’

‘Done,’ Bailey said with a grin.

They shook hands on the deal and Dave Vaughan made his first sale – not to mention the fact that little Sadie Vaughan was about to be photographed by the man who would become one of the most famous photographers of all time. In the end, David Bailey didn’t actually take the chest of drawers from him but Dave was still bursting with pride to have agreed a sale to such a prominent man. He would soon make contact with Bailey’s circle of friends. Before long, his art and furniture were the must-have items among the cool London set, his work was being written about in trendy magazines and, to cap it all, he received a commission to paint Paul McCartney’s piano in his trademark motif, a haze of swirling psychedelia. He had money and a degree of success he could never have dreamed of. Soon he started selling his furniture in Lord John of Carnaby Street, the pinnacle of fashion, where they asked him to paint a huge mural above the shop window, an offer he gladly accepted. On the second day of the job Dave got a friend to help him and the two of them hung suspended in a painting cradle 30 feet above the street, lashing on colour and singing at the tops of their voices. Dave started to dance in time to the music coming from inside the shop, but something must have given because the cradle, dangling on ropes, dropped on one side and he slipped, and his mate Mick, a big, heavy bloke, fell on top of him as the whole cradle crashed down to the street below. People screamed and one of the sales staff ran out to help.

‘Fuck me, are you OK, man?’ said the shop assistant as he surveyed the wreckage. Dave was wedged in below Mick, who had squashed Dave’s head against the cradle, which had been the first thing to make impact with the ground.

‘Aaargh … fuck … uhh … fuck,’ said Dave, holding his head as someone pulled him upright.

‘We better get you to hospital, man,’ said the assistant and then called for an ambulance.

‘Fuck off,’ said Dave, ignoring the searing pain in his temples. He ran his hands over his head, and, apart from a couple of grazes and a pounding headache, he appeared to be intact. He had an aversion to hospitals and would rather chill out with a joint, so he sat and had a smoke as he waited for some of his mates to turn up and take him home. Unfortunately, his mates had another idea and took him to a party, where they dumped him in an armchair in the corner.

‘Drink that,’ said one of them, giving him a shot glass. After 15 minutes Dave was unable to move, his entire body splitting into millions of particles and floating out into space. His mates sat and laughed at him.

‘What’ve you fuckin’ done to me?’ Dave asked, holding on to the chair for his life.

‘LSD, man,’ said one of them. ‘We thought you needed a good trip.’

Dave would have got up and knocked them out but he couldn’t move. For two days and nights the nightmare continued and when he finally got home, Mary was hysterical with worry.

‘Where the fuck have you been? Lord John told me you’d had a fall and hurt your head,’ she shouted as he collapsed into bed, a shell of his former self. ‘I checked all the hospitals.’

‘I didn’t go to hospital.’

‘But what about your head?’

‘What about it? It’s bloody fine, woman.’

It wasn’t fine, though. After the bang to the head and the LSD, Dave fell into a slough of depression. Everywhere he went he saw the acid trip repeating itself. His happiness at his newfound success was replaced with aggression and paranoia. It was as if something had gone pop in his head. Work fell away and even the once-friendly David Bailey stopped inviting him in for a drink after he had started a fight with one of the photographer’s influential friends. Slowly, the work and the money dried up. All Dave had was his precious Sadie, and now he would just sit at home and brood.

‘Fuck you all. You’re all conspirators against me,’ he said to himself one day, grabbing a tin of red paint in one hand and scooping Sadie up with the other. He went off up Primrose Hill, to the iron bridge over the railway line that headed north. He didn’t care that it was late and that Sadie was dressed only in her pants. When he was with his little girl, everything was all right. While he painted the bridge red, with big, violent swipes of his brush, Sadie picked the pants out of her bum and toddled off to play in the dirt. He didn’t stop until the entire bridge was painted, and then lit up the spliff that was behind his ear, standing back to admire his handiwork. It was ten at night and he knew that he should have taken Sadie home to bed. He felt momentarily responsible before picking her up and taking her off again.

‘Fuck the lot of you,’ he said under his breath. ‘Fuck the world.’

He kissed Sadie’s dirty face and whispered in her ear, ‘You don’t have to do anything they want you to do. You don’t have to conform. You just gotta be what the fuck you want to be.’

A ‘black Maria’ crawled to a stop at the end of the road. The officers inside the police van appeared to be admiring his artistry and then the doors opened. David didn’t stop to hear what they were saying; he ran with Sadie in his arms.

‘Oi, you!’ they shouted, but he didn’t slow down, dashing through the streets, away from the law.

A month later, on 12 May 1967, Mary gave birth again at the Whittington Hospital, to a little girl called Sunshine. She seemed to Mary to be a little blonde cherub, not at all like the impish, dark Sadie, but still the perfect finishing touch to their little family. But David was becoming increasingly erratic, no money was coming in and things were again at breaking point, especially with another mouth to feed. Besides, Vaughany was always getting arrested, particularly after his recent spate of red painting. It wasn’t just the bridge: it was the houses of certain people that he disliked. He’d taken to breaking in and painting their entire place red. Soon the couple got an eviction order for non-payment of rent on Gloucester Avenue and they had to move out in the middle of the night with everything they owned. They went to stay with a friend of Dave’s called Pete Blackman, who was in both a reggae and a steel-and-skin band. The Blackmans had two kids of their own and only a small flat. Things were not ideal.

‘Fuck all this living in a tiny room. Let’s just piss off out of here,’ said Dave one afternoon as they lay on the single bed in the Blackmans’ spare room. Beside him Mary struggled to get Sunshine into bed and pacify Sadie. She kissed them both and repeated the rhyme she told them every night like a mantra to keep them safe: ‘Night-night, Sadie. Night-night, Sunny. Night-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.’ But, as she tucked the blanket in tight around them, Mary sensed trouble in David’s words.

‘Piss off to where? We haven’t got any money,’ she replied.

‘Formentera. Ibiza,’ said Vaughany, putting Dylan on the record player before stretching out on the bed again. ‘Sun, sea, sand and sex. The scene is supposed to be fuckin’ great.’

‘But how? It costs money to get there.’

All the while, Sadie was wide awake, staring at her parents and repeating the night-time mantra they were so fond of.

‘Night-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!’ she said with an impish smile. Mary tried to shush her but Sadie just carried on. ‘Night-night, sleep tight…’

Dave stroked his daughter’s hair and stared ruefully at the wall.

‘Fuck it all, we don’t need anything. Fuck society. Why should we live according to rules imposed by them? We’ll sell everything we own and just go.’

‘Go in what, Dave? We’ve got nothing,’ said Mary, sensing that he was building up to one of his moneymaking plans that usually ended in disaster.

‘You don’t have to worry about that. You just start getting the kids packed and ready to go.’

Vaughany never disappointed when it came to surprises and a few weeks later, having spent the proceeds of the sale of all their worldly possessions, he turned up outside the flat in a rusty old single-decker bus. ‘Let’s go and drop out, love,’ he said as he leaned out of the window. As usual, Mary had no choice but to swallow whatever words she’d prepared and just smile.