Vanished Years by Rupert Everett Page B

regular treasure troves, vocal collages, replete with all the submerged twangs of north London, the British rag trade, red-brick universities and the Rank charm school, all frosted over with the hilarious compromise an English speaker arrives at with the American dialect.
    Now I am standing with Madonna at the end of a jetty at Battery Park, on the eastern tip of Manhattan. Harvey is with us. A thousand paparazzi are crammed on another jetty, a giant porcupine bristling lenses and booms. A thin channel of water divides us from them, the colour of weak tea, slapping against the concrete bollards and jumping up at all those other half-submerged skeletons of ancient wooden piers, which for some reason have never been removed and stick up out of the water like black rotting teeth up and down the Hudson. (These teeth, incidentally, once supported the vast collapsing hangars appropriated by the queen world for crucifixions and cluster fucks. But that faraway Sodom was sucked beneath the waves of Reaganite America. It seems strangely innocent compared with tonight.)
    There is a strong breeze, metallic and rancid. It is a beautiful evening at the end of another blistering summer day. Everything, the people, the buildings, the trees even, are visibly relieved that it is over, and there is always a huge collective sigh of relief, a lazy groan that comes with dusk over Manhattan in July. The sky and the sea are milky blue. A giant American sun hangs low over the horizon under a broken ceiling of fluffy clouds that stretch towards the Wild West and the rest of the interior. The sun’s rays hurtle down this tunnel between the measurable and the immeasurable, spilling like blood over the marble sea, and turning the clouds into little rashers of pink and grey bacon disappearing into infinity.
    Behind us the Manhattan skyline curves into the distance – a gigantic fortress in a blur of exhaust, its billion windows glinting in the setting sun, its Twin Towers flying high above the ramparts. Littlered lights blink on pins at their summits, a weird, innocent warning to any low-flying planes in the vicinity. The city is strangely silent. The mad traffic within is only a murmur from the end of this jetty as I stand holding hands with the world’s undisputed Most Famous Woman. Before us the Long Island Sound stretches out towards Liberty, Brooklyn and, somewhere out there, Old Europe. Liberty is little more than a red dwarf with cataracts in the setting sun. She has been reduced! The scale of the modern skyline has cut off her balls.
    A speedboat carrying Tina, Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson ploughs across the Sound towards her like a comet with a swirling tail of phosphorescence. (Natasha, the Towers – gone, and that’s what’s so spooky about this story.) They are on their way to the party, which is taking place at Liberty’s sandalled feet. Standing there with Madonna, who is on crutches (she pulled a muscle doing the splits), looking out at all this, I am completely unaware that I have got about as far as I will ever go. And that the whole world is about to collapse.
    Harvey is extremely courteous. Madonna leans on my arm. She needs me tonight just to get from A to B. I am her ‘
ami nécessaire
’ and if I’m developing skin cancer from too much basking in her reflected glory, I don’t care. (None of those scorched by the nuclear waste that stars exude wears enough protection.) Our film, which in a few short months will tear my career to shreds, is still in that ideal phase, made but not seen, and if our friendship is approaching its sell-by date we don’t know it yet. Or at least I don’t. (She probably sets a time limit on everything, including orgasm.) For the time being the world is fascinated by us and so are we. Tina is even thinking of putting us on the first cover of
Talk
. (She doesn’t in the end.)
    Has it all gone to my head? Or do I still feel out of place? Both. It’s a befuddled drunken feeling. We climb