On the Phone
This picture was taken when I was 15. It sits propped against the wall on a corduroy covered bench at the end of my kitchen, alongside other stuff including a photo of me and Anita Pallenberg, and a portrait taken by Nigel Shafran in the 90’s. Whenever I pause and look at this photo, I can remember this exact moment in my life and how I was feeling. I was on the phone to my best friend Katie McEwen. I met Katie when I was 9 and she was 12. I had travelled to Scotland with my defacto godmother Penny Guinness. It was the summer we had returned from Morocco and my mother was in Sussex with my sister, looking for somewhere for us to live. The McEwen family were an upperclass Scottish family headed up by various brothers who all lived in the surrounding area; we were staying with the youngest and most glamorous of them called David. The day after we arrived, Penny drove me to Marchmont, the family seat just down the road. As we pulled up to a huge, slightly gloomy mansion, I caught a glimpse of an incredibly beautiful girl dressed in messy tweed, with pale skin and light brown hair that hadn’t been brushed for weeks. Her face was full of friendliness and I felt my heart open and lurch towards her. ‘Would you like to see my ferrets?’ she offered. And that was it. I adored her - and she adored me. She was like a friend, sister and mother all in one. She was the first person in my life to indulge me, it was a strange and wonderful new sensation. I started to visit regularly. Marchmont was a vast place, very haunted. There were a lot of children and we roamed about in a pack, occupying various outlying rooms in a wing. I used to sleep in the same single child’s bed as Katie, head to toe. She never questioned or mocked me for being afraid; one of the few times I had ever admitted to such a thing.
When Katie moved to London I would get the train from East Grinstead, then the bus down the King’s Rd to stay with her. These visits were a life line, a means of coping with the increasing unhappiness of my adolescence. And so were these telephone conversations. I remember that on this occasion we talked for nearly an hour. My mother and Stepfather had gone out for the evening and I had reconnected the wires that he disabled every time we were home alone so he could keep control of the bill. I’m holding the receiver like it is an instrument that will transport me to a better place. This photo was taken by a Canadian girl who boarded with us called Elisa Kaplan but I have no memory of her doing. I was engrossed with Katie, talking about life. I loved her so intensely and she was a steadiness in my emotional freefall, in spite of her own deep depressions from which I was unable to rescue her.
