Carnival of Light || Paul McCartney/Beatles

12. On The Road to Find UFOs in Staffordshire

Carnival of Light

12.

I ended up having a wild night out with Robert Fraser, one which continued on until well past dawn the next morning thanks to copious amounts of cocaine. It left me feeling horribly depressed the next day, as if I'd used up all my happy feelings in a short, condensed period of time.

It was a very expensive night out for me. By the end of the evening — or morning — I'd written a cheque to Robert for £1,500, which he promised to get back to me by the end of the week. At the time I'd hardly thought about it, but the next day, waking up depressed on a come down, I was outraged.

I rang up Matthew in Scotland and told him what happened, cocaine and all.

"Oh, it's marvellous stuff at the time, but it makes you feel barmy the next day," Matthew agreed.

And then when I told him about the money I'd given Fraser, Matthew laughed so hard he had to put the telephone down for a moment.

"Oh, darling, no, you cannot lend Robert money! You'll never see it again," he sounded so amused!

"What do you mean?" I demanded.

"That's just what he's like, my darling. He's a total shark, but a wonderful pal," he laughed gaily.

I should have told Matthew what Fraser said to me about not having "enough to hold on to" – that would have stopped him laughing.

What did not enough to hold onto even mean? I was tall and slender, not necessarily overly busty but not an androgynous Twiggy type either. Graceful had been how my poetically-inclined Oxford boyfriend Edward described my body. Why was I even thinking about this? It didn't matter that I wasn't Paul's type. Bloody Robert Fraser, he was such a bastard.

***

Tara and Nicki used to have this ritual with Brian and Anita that sounded absolutely bonkers the first time I heard about it. If it was likely to be a clear night or a full moon, they'd all four pile into Brian's Rolls Royce, and drive out to Staffordshire, where they would drop acid and lay out on a hillside looking for UFOs. This was about as Brian and Anita as you could get.

Tara rang me up a couple of days after my expensive evening out with Fraser, which I was still very cross about. I was in the middle of a rather prolific two-day writing session as I drafted the first chapter of my novel. Over two days I'd only stood up from my desk to get more cigarettes and go to bed for a few hours. It was the most motivated I could ever remember being, and I only begrudgingly stopped to take Tara's call.

"Bea Bea!" he trilled down the telephone line. "We're going UFO hunting tonight, darling, what do you say?"

I laughed incredulously as he explained, and it did sound like a glorious and bizarre idea that was too mad to pass up rather than too mad to take part in. So I agreed to meet them for dinner and delayed getting ready as long as possible to make the most of this burst of creativity.

I had a bath and dressed in what seemed like the most obvious choice for dinner followed by a night of tripping in the countryside, a chartreuse silk dress from Granny Takes a Trip and brown leather knee-high boots from Harrods. I filled my bag with cigarettes and a lump of grass, then flagged down a cab to take me to Chelsea.

I was thirty minutes later than I said I'd be, and was shown to a table at the back of the restaurant, where we would almost certainly be left unseen. I could see Brian and Anita's matching blonde heads – apparently they used the same shade of bleach – and Tara beside them. They weren't alone, and it was suddenly apparent why they'd gotten a table with some privacy. Paul was with them, his face animated as he spoke to Brian.