A Gambler Born and Bred 17

I stayed at Mum’s house for the next few days, knowing that if I was to keep hold of the money, I had to stay away from fruit-machines as much as I could.

Valerie called to say that she’d be visiting London to go to Notting Hill Carnival, which I found odd seeing that she was a typical racist Parisienne and didn’t like crowds, so I asked where she’d be staying.
That was when she told me about a man she’d met in St Tropez who lived in London and had invited her over for the carnival weekend.
She insisted that the man was interested in her younger sister, Marie-Laure, but I didn’t believe her for a minute. I cared little as to whether she was telling the truth.
We met over the weekend but it was clear that whichever spark we had together had fizzled almost without trace. She was happy to tell me all about this mystery man but my mind was elsewhere. She’d sucked any jealousy clean out of me and, besides, I was head over heels for Helen.

In my spare time, I tried going to the library to read and write but the pull to the machines was on me.
I played fruit-machines at the pubs; one laborious machine to the next until my fingers, back and brain could take no more.

All that mattered was that, on the Tuesday after the weekend, Helen would be back from her holiday and I could finally see her again.

I admit that part of my attraction to Helen was her obvious wealth, but something very special had passed between us during those few days in Antibes, even if they were drug-fuelled, and I was damned if I was going to let it end there.
During a phone call, I was made aware of Alex’s disapproval. She’d told me that Helen already had a boyfriend and that she’d recently come out of rehab for substance abuse. She had told Helen that she’d acted like a slut with me, but Helen had dismissed this as hidden jealousy. I was, Alex told me, the worst possible person to be chasing after her heart.
I called Helen on Tuesday evening and arranged to go to her house in Chelsea the next evening.

When I arrived, she greeted me at the door dressed in a smock covered in red paint.
Being on my best behaviour, I made no comparisons to bloodbaths and she showed me inside.
In the basement, which she’d turned into a makeshift artist’s studio, I found that we weren’t alone.
Josh, a well-dressed man which whom she’d been on a blind date arranged by mutual friends, seemed altogether nonplussed by my presence and made it quite clear that he disliked me. I remained the image of decorum but couldn’t help wishing him away.
I had some pot, so we went to the sitting-room and got stoned with some deliciously crisp white wine.
At about nine o’clock, Josh got the message and accepted defeat by leaving.
As Helen went to see him out, I sat and gawped at the walls covered in original oil paintings. There was even a Braque.
Helen came back and snuggled up next to me on the sofa. We talked for a while and then she got up to go to bed.

‘You can sleep on the sofa if you like,’ she told me, before pecking me goodnight on the cheek.

Without realising, I was already in love with her. Some might say that I was merely infatuated with her, that she was out of my league by sixteen divisions, but I was ambitious in those days. Nothing was beyond me.
I’d just turned the light off to go to sleep when Helen came down in her pyjamas.

‘Come upstairs,’ she said, holding out a hand to me.
That night, we made the most intensely rewarding love I’d ever experienced.
There were no hurried movements or awkward thoughts. As we kissed, Helen began to weep and I held her close.

‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I think this is the happiest I’ve ever been,’ she replied.
‘You took the words right out of my mouth.’

Her skin was soft as silk and tanned to an olive brown. The contours of her body I surveyed with eagle-eyed intention, kissing at intervals as if to mark my possession of her.
We made love for hours. Ejaculation was surplus to requirements.

The next day, Helen told me that she wanted to go to Goldsmiths to study fine art. I didn’t even know what fine art was and presumed it was traditional painting.
I could see from her work in the basement that she had an abundance of natural talent. The portrait of her grandfather I found especially haunting.
When she told me that she was interested in putting a film together as part of her portfolio, I asked if she’d like me to film for her with my 16mm camera. Her interview at Goldsmiths was in a week.

‘In Paris?’ she asked.
‘If that’s what you want, yeah,’ I replied.

After putting the Rover in her garage, we flew to Paris that evening.
As I still had money from the ecstacy deal, I took her to L’Hotel, a small, discreet hotel on the left bank made famous by Oscar Wilde, who decided to die there.
In the morning, I left Helen at the hotel to get authorisation to film from a tripod in a public place at the prefecture and then took her out to lunch at Pause Cafe in La Bastille.
In the afternoon, we called Alex and asked if she’d like to appear in the film, which Helen had already concocted. She agreed.
I took the metro to Kodak and bought three rolls of film and Helen went off to buy Alex’s costume.
In the evening, Helen took Alex and I to Bofinger for supper, where we talked over her idea.

It was a surreal story about a girl stuck in between life and death, hence the flimsy white dressing gown she’d bought from Galeries Lafayette earlier in the day.

The next morning, we ordered a taxi and picked Alex up to get to the Bois du Boulogne across town for eleven.
When she’d picked her spot, deep inside the woods, Alex was asked to run around in confusion and I filmed most of the proceedings without the use of the tripod.
Using the reflection of rainwater in marshland, Alex suddenly stopped in her tracks and then stepped into the water, holding her arms out with an expression of exaltation on her face when she saw that she existed in the water’s reflection. After three takes, Helen and I looked at each other and agreed that we’d got what we came for.

That afternoon, we made it to Kodak in the seizieme before they closed and were asked to pick up the films in two days.
We had fun during those two days, visiting galleries and bars, meeting up with friends and going out clubbing.

‘You’re the first boyfriend I’ve had who can pay his own way,’ Helen said. If only she knew.
I didn’t know what to say. ‘I work hard,’ I said, finally, ‘when I work.’

After picking up the film, we flew back to London and I stayed on for a few days to splice the material before returning to Paris.
The next week, she called to say that she’d been given a place at Goldsmiths and that she was coming to visit me.
This would have been great if I’d had somewhere for her to stay, but I hadn’t, so we went back to L’Hotel. The flat I was sharing was a hovel behind Tati, a huge clothing discount store frequented in the main by the Arab community.

The parties at Marbeuf had finished and Richard, my party partner, had engineered a deal with Le Palace for every Saturday, which didn’t interest me one bit. I’d be paid every week but that wasn’t the issue.
He’d cooled on the independent party scene that we’d built up and wanted to start his own chateau parties under the veil of charity, which interested me even less, so I went along with the Palace to buy time.
The parties were crap. You just couldn’t do what you wanted in a conventional club, especially when it was Paris’ biggest and best known venue. The owner had spotted our ascent and wanted to bring us back down to earth.
The bouncers harried and shoved our people and then the club’s management imposed one of their own DJs to play, which proved to be the final straw.
I was doing the visuals from high up on the mezzanine when, suddenly, the crowd dispersed from the dancefloor. The DJ had been put on to play shit Euro beats and confuse the people into buying a drink, which at sixty francs a pop, was no joke.
Packing up the projectors, I asked some friends to help me load them into the Rover and I was away from there in minutes and supping cocktails with Helen at the Casbah across town.

Sweet Power was over and I was out of a job, so I went back to London to stay with Helen.
She introduced me to her grandfather, who had tried to stop the Second World War as an eminent Japanese diplomat in talks with the president of the United States at the time when the Japanese military took over power and blew up Pearl Harbour. His mission for peace with Washington was dead and he was forced to flee America.
Seriously ill and residing at the Conrad Hotel under the supervision of a nurse at Chelsea Harbour, Helen visited most days and I often accompanied her.
He asked me to ghost write his memoirs, which I started but never finished. I also worked as his chauffeur, driving the Silver Shadow in the car park, picking up lawyers and accountants from various parts of town to meet the great man.