The journey after lunch was much easier, even as we descended from dual carriageways to narrow country lanes. Gary and Brian, my Brighton friends, had given us directions to Dungeness, which was quite a bit further along the coast from them. ‘If you get lost, just follow the pylons to the nuclear power station,’ Gary said, and after we’d gone through Rye, which is a very chocolate-boxy Hovis-advert sort of place, that’s pretty much what we ended up doing.
The other thing that Gary said was ‘it’s really weird’, and he wasn’t wrong. There’s a big dyke – sorry ladies, but that really is the only word for it – running along the side of the road as you approach, which means you can’t see the sea, and then when we finally saw shingle by the side of the road, it turned out we were still nowhere near the water at all and what we’d taken to be a pebbly beach actually stretched for miles in every direction like the surface of an alien planet. We could see the nuclear power station on the horizon – two great grey blocks like fortresses, churning out god knows what – and then a line of other buildings was gradually revealed, spread out along the horizon like a string of beads. At first I thought they must be beach huts, but as we got closer – still inexplicably nowhere near the sea’s edge – they resolved themselves into the most ramshackle series of buildings you’ve ever seen. There were long, low, brick bungalows, wood-boarded shacks, whitewashed cottages, corrugated iron Nissen huts, one huge building that was completely cylindrical and even a couple of old-fashioned railway carriages stranded on the shingle with no tracks to carry them away, and curtains, chimneys and windowboxes which suggested their occupants weren’t going anywhere, even if they could. There was an actual railway too, an old-fashioned steam one, but that wasn’t the only thing that was odd about it. It was only after we had been keeping pace with the train for a second or two that I realised it wasn’t as far away as I’d assumed; it was just that both locomotive and carriages were about half the size they ought to be. The driver’s head and shoulders actually stuck out above the top of his cab, and the passengers were all crammed into Wendy House-scale carriages, sitting there with their knees half way up to their shoulders and their heads pressed up against the roof like everything was normal. And still we couldn’t actually see the sea, though the salt tang in the air and the sharp breeze blowing in told us it must be out there somewhere.
‘This place is pretty mental,’ commented Liam, and I had to agree.
We might have been driving back and forth for hours if I hadn’t spotted Brian and Gary sat on deckchairs outside a little black house set well back from the road. We stopped the car opposite it – there were no markings of any kind on the road, so it wasn’t clear whether or not we were actually allowed to park there – and crunched our way across pebbles to greet them and the figure sitting between them on a high-backed wooden chair which appeared to be made out of driftwood.
‘Hello, boys.’ I pecked Gary and Brian on the cheek, but Derek went for a full on-kiss on the mouth. ‘This place is amazing.’
‘I think so.’ Derek gave the same treatment to Liam, leaving him slightly startled, and settled back on his throne. He’s quite a bit older than us – probably closer to Brian’s age – but still very good-looking. Somehow all his features are overlarge – dark brow, wide nose and enormous mouth and ears – but they combine to give him a handsome cragginess that was accentuated by his deep tan. He was dressed in just a tiny pair of towelling shorts, and had obviously been wearing little more for the whole summer, because his wiry body was beautifully brown all over. Judging by the look Liam gave me, I may have spent a bit too long looking at it.
‘Have you just bought this place?’ I asked, turning round to see if I could spot the sea in the distance.
‘At the start of this month,’ he confirmed. ‘I have big plans. You’re standing in what is going to be my beautiful boundless garden.’
Good luck with that, I thought, looking down at the pebbles at my feet. The only plants to be seen were some things that looked like tatty cabbages, odd patches of wiry grass, and some admittedly very pretty yellow flowers on long stems with spikes coming off them.
‘And how are you two? Business OK?’ Brian, who had been a theatre designer in London, had given it up a few years ago to move to Brighton and open an antiques shop. It was doing reasonably well, but not well enough to support both of them yet, so Gary was still waiting and doing bar work. They were one of the very few Dilly love stories: Gary had worked the meat rack with me back in the day and, although everyone carefully avoided mentioning it nowadays, Brian had started off as one of his paying clients.
It turned out he had several pieces he thought would suit Derek’s new cottage which, we realised when he gave us the tour, was almost completely unfurnished: there was an enormous double bed in one of the front rooms and an easel and a few other bits and pieces in the one behind it that he was using as a studio, but otherwise the wood-panelled rooms were pretty much bare apart from a few odd bits and bobs he’d collected nearby: a string of cork fishing net floats hanging on one wall, a collection of sea-bleached driftwood stacked in a corner. It meant that your eyes were drawn instead to the windows, which, with their frames painted a bright egg-yolk yellow, turned the endless views of the shingle and the big sky beyond them into works of art.
And that was what we were here for. ‘I wish my ashes to be taken to my friend Derek Jarman, for him to use as he sees fit in the creation of his art,’ had been the surprising final wish in Clarrie’s letter. Surprising, that was, to everyone but Derek: he had taken it entirely in his stride when I phoned him at his London flat to read it out to him. ‘Yes. Let me think about it. I’ll be in touch,’ he had said. A few days later, during which I sorted out the more practical details of the grand plan, like finding someone who would actually cremate Clarrie’s body, he had called back and invited – actually, more like commanded – me to deliver her ashes to his new home on midsummer’s day and invite everyone I could think of for a ceremony that he refused to give away any details of.
Now we were here we at least started to get a few clues. Derek commanded Liam and Gary to manhandle the easel awkwardly out through the cottage and put it up in his so-called garden outside. Brian was dispatched to his car to fetch an old wind-up gramophone – one of the ones with the big horn on them – which he set up on a peeling tea-chest that looked as if it had been retrieved from the sea. ‘And our ash-bearer must be suitably clad,’ Derek announced, beckoning me back into the cottage with him. We went through to his studio, where he opened a chest and pulled out a long golden cloak and passed it to me. ‘It was made for Prospero,’ he confided. ‘I’m thinking of inscribing a bit of the Tempest on the side of the cottage: “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground.” Or I might go with John Donne instead.’
I’d seen Derek’s film of the Tempest; organised a screening of it for the Poly Film Club actually. It had Christopher Biggins in it. ‘This is beautiful,’ I said, weighing the shimmering material in my hands. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Certain,’ he said with a smile. ‘Hurry up and get into it. I can hear our other guests starting to arrive.’
It really was the most extraordinary garment. It was hard not to feel like a wizard or king as the golden cloth cascaded down my body and pooled around my feet. It was also hard not to feel like a bit of a pillock as I shuffled out of the cottage door to greet the new arrivals. I’d brought a shirt and some proper trousers to change into for the ceremony if needed, but this felt a bit OTT.
‘Bloody hell. Who are you meant to be?’ asked Liam, his eyebrows somewhere up around his hairline.
‘Prospero, I think,’ I muttered. I was actually glinting in the midsummer sun.
Ivan had arrived, and Olly and Lee too, so they all had a good laugh at the state of me as well, although I’d seen Olly wearing far worse (and far less) on stage before now. They too had had their instructions: they had stopped off at a farm on the way down and bought two big plastic barrels of Sussex cider, which we helped them haul across to the front of the house – at least, Liam did; I wasn’t really dressed for it now, and carried a great wobbling plastic stack of cups instead, while trying not to step on my robes. There was a large bottle of Ribena, too. ‘Are we drinking cider and black?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Nope,’ said Olly, and reached back into the carrier bag to produce a couple of bottles of Pernod. ‘We thought we should drink Clarrie’s health the way she would have liked it.’ Pernod and black was Clarrie’s tipple: she always had a glass of it going behind the bar of the Up Your Bum, and more often than not it had been one of us buying it. I found my eyes were watering.
‘Hey, come on King Midas, none of that’ said Lee, pulling me in for a bear hug. He was a Scouser, arrived on the Dilly not long after me and got out not long after, I think, although he was always a bit vague about what exactly he’d been up to since then. ‘I don’t suppose Degsy’s gonna have ice in there, is he?’
‘I doubt it.’ I hadn’t seen a fridge in the cottage’s tiny kitchen, let alone a freezer.
‘Straight it is then. About the only thing around here that is.’ We looked around at the men gathered around Prospect Cottage (and it was exclusively men; Eve had an audition for a film and had sent her heartfelt apologies). There were a couple of handlebar moustaches on display, several gym-toned torsos in carefully chosen t-shirts, and me in my golden frock: I had a feeling Derek’s new neighbours were in for a bit of a surprise.
By five o’clock there were a couple of dozen of us gathered, and Derek decided it was time to kick things off. He had changed too, into a set of paint-spattered overalls that were considerably more sensible than what he had made me wear, and once he had arranged everyone how he wanted them – standing in two lines either side of the easel set up outside the cottage’s front door – he summoned Lee, Olly and a slightly nervous looking Liam inside. I gave him a brave smile as he disappeared into the interior, but that was all the support I could offer. My instructions were to stand at the edge of the road in my gold cloak holding the urn full of Clarrie’s ashes, and process forward (Derek was very firm about processing and not just walking) when he gave the signal.
‘Come on, come on,’ I muttered to myself as a battered van passed by, slowing down so the driver could have a good look at me.
Suddenly there was a flash of light from the cottage doorway, and Liam emerged carrying a large mirror in his arms. Lee and Olly were behind him, both carrying objects that were too small and far away to see, and Derek brought up the rear holding a big canvas which he carried reverently over and placed on the easel, the others taking up positions on either side of it. Derek’s voice rang out fruitily across the shingle: ‘Brothers and lovers, we are gathered here to celebrate our friend Clarrie, and to see her ascend to become the work of art we always knew her to be. Let our ash-bearer come forward’ – and he summoned me with a solemn wave of his arm.
I was horribly aware of all the eyes on me as I crunched my way slowly over the loose pebbles. I was pretty sure the top of the urn was screwed on tight, but if I stumbled or tripped over the trailing cloak there was a strong possibility of Clarrie just descending to become a mess on the ground instead.
Thankfully, I made it to the front safely, and held out the urn, but instead of taking it Derek turned and summoned Olly forward. I realised what he was holding was a pot of paint. ‘Blue,’ announced Derek, taking it from him, ‘the purest blue, International Klein Blue, IKB.’ He produced a tool from his pocket and levered the lid off the pot, holding it out so that we could all see the brilliance of the liquid inside. ‘Blue, most precious of colours, reserved for the Virgin. And as she waited on my Virgin Queen, no virgin, but all queen, for Claribel. Oh Blue, come forth, oh Blue, arise, oh Blue, Ascend, oh Blue, come in.’ And with that he knelt and poured the contents of the pot into a metal paint kettle he had placed at the foot of the easel, and then motioned that I should kneel beside him and empty Clarrie’s ashes into it too.
‘In there?’ I whispered, just to make sure, and he nodded. The lid of the urn was very tight and it took me a moment to wrestle it off. The ashes poured out in a fine stream, down into the paint, just a few grey wisps carried sideways by the summer breeze across the shingle. Let them fertilise the dream garden then; I figured Clarrie would probably approve. She always liked a flower.
Derek plucked a wooden paddle from one of the pockets of his overalls and began to stir the mix in his cauldron. From my privileged position I could watch the grey cloud spiral into the blue. It was beautiful. The whole thing was beautiful. It might sound strange or even silly written down but at the time it was really moving and felt perfect as a way of saying goodbye to someone we had all loved. I looked over at Ivan and saw he had tears streaming down his face – I suspect for his Paolo as much as for Clarrie – and a couple of the other guys were crying as well, and I realised the prickling in my own eyes wasn’t just from screwing them up against the bright sunlight.
When the mixture in the paint kettle had darkened to the colour of a cloudless night sky, Derek stood up and indicated that I should withdraw and stand beside Lee, making an opposite pair to Olly and Liam, my cloak and his mirror reflecting the summer sun and making pools of light dance across the bodies and faces of the congregation. As Derek began to slather the paint on to the canvas I sneaked a sideways glance at what Lee was holding. It was a pot of honey, stamped with the name of the same farm the cider had come from. ‘What’s that for?’ I risked whispering, once I was sure Derek was completely absorbed in his work.
‘Search me; something to do with ancient Egyptians,’ he hissed back. Which didn’t leave me much the wiser.
When the canvas was covered thickly and already drying in the hot sun, Derek stood back and pulled yet another tool from his boiler suit’s capacious pockets. This one was a knife – an ordinary kitchen one by the look of it – and for a second I thought he was going to stab it through the canvas, but instead he used its point to scrape lines through the still-wet paint. It took me a moment from my oblique angle to realise he was writing letters: I moved slightly forward, the cloak disguising my shuffling feet, in order to see them better.
GOD
OK; not what I was expecting.
SAVE
Surely not?
OUR
And then it was suddenly obvious.
QUEEN
And then, slightly ridiculously but rather marvellously, with our paint-spattered priest conducting us with kitchen knife and paintbrush, drops of Clarrie and International Klein Blue flying off to spatter the stones around him, twenty-five or so men joined in with a rich baritone chorus of the national anthem, and I remembered my friend and mentor on another sunny afternoon at Pride years ago, tiara shining on her head as she waved a gloved hand at the crowds and soaked up the abuse along with the acclaim; letting every bit of it make her stronger.
Send her victorious
Happy and glorious
And I was crying again, but there were tears of happiness mixed in there too as I said a final goodbye.
Long to reign over us
God save our queen!