Waiting for Kate Bush (10 page)

I couldn’t help but laugh, albeit without mirth. “And when do you suppose this began, Cathy?”

“I don’t think it said.”

“Probably within the past ten years, I would think, and more likely
within the past five. In any event, I can assure you I’ve never got royalties, not for anything, including the Marcel Flynn campaigns.”

She glowered at me. “Then what are you living on? You don’t seem to have a job.”

“As though that’s any of your business? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. My mum died.” I waited for her to tell me she was sorry to hear that. She was content to keep glowering. “She had Alzheimer’s Disease the last nine years of her life, and it was expensive to keep her, but there was still a bit left when she finally died. My sister and I each took half.”

“Blimey. Don’t you feel sort of … ashamed about that?”

“Ashamed? Why?”

“To be living off money your mum left. Instead of working.”

“What sort of job do you suppose someone my size could get?” I asked, not even trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. I didn’t feel obligated to mention that, until recently, I’d also made a few hundred quid a month as a George Clooney lookalike, turning up at Leicester Square premieres and launch parties in formal wear or Italian sportswear the agency provided and letting people infer what they chose to infer. If the agency that kept hiring me hadn’t noticed that I probably outweighed George by something like 4-1, it hadn’t been my responsibility to point it out to them.

For a split second, as she abandoned any thought of my taking the mickey, Cathy, the child with her mum in her eyes, couldn’t have looked more exactly like her mum. You’d have sworn she’d spent endless hours in front of a mirror watching a videotape of Mrs. Cavanaugh the day before when I spoke of needing the fire brigade and a crane to leave the house. Her voice became very gentle. “Yes, I suppose that bears thinking about.”

In fact, I’d originally intended to tell my sister to take both halves. In view of how much I’d grown to hate her, it hardly seemed fitting that I should take any of my mother’s money. Or if I did take it, I could put it into a trust fund for my daughter Babooshka. But then – and this was so me – I devised a way that I could indeed take it: by thinking of it as reparations. Hadn’t I suffered incalculably for my toxic upbringing, and hadn’t my mother been responsible for most of that toxicity?

All of which was much more than Cathy needed to know, or would be able to make sense of. No, I was lying to myself again. It was pretty obvious she’d be able to make sense of nearly anything the world threw at her. Except her own predicament.

* * *

With ‘Wuthering’ continuing to do very brisk business, Kate went on
Top Of The Pops
without being given adequate time to prepare, in a sheer black top, red trousers, and black stilettos that didn’t exactly say Cathy (Earnshaw, the character to whom the song gives voice). Shown a playback of her performance, she famously declared that it was like watching herself die.
Could they not see that, if she were going to do things properly, she would need time?

Well, they could, but could she, reciprocally, not understand that it was absolutely imperative that she make hay while the sun shone? Europe loved her song about Cathy and Heathcliff, and EMI jetted her one frantic morning to Verona, Italy, to lip-synch it for them. She walked out on stage. Through the photographers’ flashes, she saw a couple of hundred people, and who could have blamed her for mistaking it for her audience? But then the stage revolved 180 degrees, and there she was in a huge circular stadium with more people than she’d ever seen in any one place – and she’d been in Who and Bowie audiences – gaping at her adoringly. You’re not in Kansas anymore, gal, nor in The Rose Of Lee in Lewisham. She managed to mime her song, bowed, and, before she knew it, was back at Heathrow. It was all like some mad fairy tale!

The unmistakable one hit wonder’s album would eventually go as high as number three, and be certified double platinum. Even America would notice. “The chorus of ‘Feel It’ is more erotic,” the once-proud
Crawdaddy
lied, “than any of … Donna Summers’ pathetic panting.”

I refuse even to speculate why whale sounds bracketed the opening track, ‘Moving’, which served notice that, to get to whatever she was trying to express, we were going to have to learn not to be distracted by the fervent affectedness of her singing. And once having done so, good luck, as the lyrics, often glaringly horrid (“The stars that climb from her bowels/Those stars make towers on vowels”), were almost always incoherent. (You rarely know who’s speaking in a Katesong, or to whom, or for how long. Full lyrics have been included with all of her albums, but it’s no use knowing what the words are if you don’t know out of which characters’ mouths they’re meant to be coming, innit?)

All that said, the melodies of several choruses – ‘Strange Phenomena’ and the West Indian-inflected ‘Kite’ – were so swoon-inducingly pretty that you could forgive her anything.

It’s troubling to imagine why she scrupulously avoided sounding nine years old only in ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’. Glaringly badly written in places, it won you over in the end with the
inexpressible beauty of Kate’s singing. Why, oh, why, did she not sing like this more often?

The chorus of the coy, delightful ‘Them Heavy People’, played in large part as a sort of West End stage reggae, wasn’t only melodic, but used highly unusual intervals without appearing to be trying too hard –a very good trick indeed. But A. Powell should have forbidden her to sing the title song in that key, as you quickly lost sight of everything but how stratospherically high she’d got. Smacked of exhibitionism.

Elsewhere, as in ‘Feel It’, ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’ and ‘Room For The Life’, in which poor Ian Bairnson was allowed a very, very brief Brian May impression, her melodic gifts were apparently down in Oxford Street getting sarnies.

In ‘Oh To Be In Love’, the earliest of her songs (along with ‘Wuthering’, of course) to look as cynically at romantic love as anyone had looked at it since Felice and Bordeleuax Bryant wrote ‘Love Hurts’ for the Everly Brothers, she introduced her trademark trick of seeming to be taking the piss out of herself when she dropped for a moment into her lower register. The word “baby,” as a term of address, had never been sung less convincingly (or was it more mockingly?) in Western pop than in ‘James And The Cold Gun’, which, had it been a performance on the West End stage, would rightly have been vilified as merciless scenery-chewing.

Listening to the album in the 21st century, it’s nearly impossible not to be reminded by ‘The Saxophone Song’ of Lisa Simpson’s far superior ‘Sax Man’. And the naff close-miked drums throughout made very clear that if Hugh Padgham hadn’t come along with gated reverb and ambient miking a few years hence, someone else would surely have had to.

* * *

I’ve tried to atone for my sins against poor Mary Priscilla Enser, but have never gone quite so far as my best friend from my modelling days, who, at any party, would seek out the most ill-at-ease looking person on the premises and devote the balance of the evening to making him or her feel pretty and witty and charming. While recognising that the beneficiaries of his altruistic displays were undoubtedly hugely grateful for them, I thought there was something distasteful (I would, wouldn’t I?) about how he was using them as a medium for the expression of his own wonderfulness.
I have no real interest in you, and would much prefer to spend my time trying to pull the prettiest girl here, but behold my selflessness
.

My atonement took the form of urging Babooshka (had their been
even the tiniest chance that I would come, on the spur of the moment one day, to call her by another nickname?), when she was herself in the fourth and fifth grades, to do far better than I’d done. If you stick up for people who are being picked on, I told her, not only are they going to love you for it, but those doing the picking will as well, though it might take them a while to admit it. Even kids, with their rapacious sadism, respect those who go against the flow. The easiest thing in the world (I knew from experience!) is to be one of a mob tormenting somebody. But even those doing the tormenting will recognise your courage.

It didn’t work, largely, to hear her tell it, because she was often the one being ganged up on. Oh, how I loved hearing that.

Hoping to build up some credit for her, I volunteered to help tutor kids in her class, and offered after-school acting lessons. I spent a lot of time at her school. The clothes and slang and haircuts were a bit different from my own, 37 years earlier, but the sadism was exactly the same. The two most passive – and thus most eagerly tormented – boys in her class were, respectively, its brightest and most imaginative on the one hand, and its handsomest on the other. Their brightness and gorgeousness did them no good whatsoever. If it wasn’t the long-eyelashed little hip hop fashionplate who spent most of his time in class drawing pictures of motorcycles, it was the severely damaged son of an abusive alcoholic biker (so I was told) who was forever humiliating them in front of their classmates.

The teacher allowed me to address the class on the subject of courage. (Yes, yes, I know. Like getting an albino to address it on the joys of tanning.) I pointed out to them that it took lots more courage to stick up for someone on whom lots of others were picking than to join the latter group. They all looked at me soulfully, all except Jack the little hip hop fashionplate and Karl Biker’s-Boy, the compulsive actor-out.

I formed a club, The Kindness Club, and offered membership to everyone in class who’d be brave enough to stick up for somebody being tormented by lots of others. I unveiled the certificate of membership I’d designed. They all thought both the idea and the certificate way cool. When even Jack openly aspired to membership, I was giddy with delight.

The next week, Jack demanded induction on the basis of having stopped a fistfight on the playground. His teacher took me aside and informed me that, while Jack had indeed stopped it, he’d also started it, apparently so he could stop it. And he’d taken his time about it. Karl
continued not to want to know, and to spend every available moment assaulting Will, the handsome boy.

The following Friday afternoon, when I arrived to collect her after school, I learned that my daughter had had an especially rough week. Jack had passed up no opportunity to tell her that he thought the Kindness Club really stupid. And when she didn’t tell him to fuck off, but instead took exactly the route I’d have taken at her age, the passive one, he’d become ever more vicious.

There is nothing new under the sun.

I
ACHED to ring Nicola, but knew I couldn’t. What I had to do now was pretend I didn’t want her. Or was it? Would she interpret my silence as indifference, as I hoped, or as resignation, which would have been fatal? I had an idea. I’d send her a text message saying I’d ring her as soon as I got home from Ibiza. Assuming she knew that Ibiza was where rich men went with their lovers, she’d be consumed by jealousy. We’d see how she enjoyed the taste of her own medicine.

Naturally, I wouldn’t actually go to Ibiza, which sounded like my idea of Hell – a place where armies of drunken little Brits in their early twenties staggered around trying to shag, but more often succeeding only in vomiting on, one another, to the accompaniment of one of the sorts of music I hate most, that in which the bass drum, playing four to the bar, is actually very much louder than the vocalist.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!

Or maybe I would go. Wouldn’t it do me a world of good being surrounded by physically perfect young specimens who’d drunk themselves into a state of candour as vicious as children’s? If I dared to waddle among them, they would no doubt jeer so loudly as to be heard on the Spanish mainland. I would buy a local handicrafts gift for Kate. It was just what I needed.

I got on-line, and found the website of a company that, if I departed later that afternoon, would fly me back and forth to the island for hardly more than British Rail charged for a return ticket to Birmingham. At those prices, I felt confident that the plane would be full of randy eighteens-to-thirties who’d titter brazenly at the sight of me taking up the two seats I knew I’d require, and then, after they’d had a few drinks, jeer openly. I sent Nicola the terse text message I’d had in mind on the train to Gatwick. She didn’t respond, and I dared to imagine her being too overcome by jealousy for the job.

There were a lot of kids on standby apparently. Once everyone had
taken his assigned seat (or, in my case, pair of seats), the riff-raff were admitted to the plane. A large blond kid with tattoos enough for himself and three mates and a pierced eyebrow, a haircut like that which David Beckham had sported for approximately 48 hours in 2001, and the manner of a moron, stopped beside me and asked in perfect Mockney of the seat beside me, “ ’Ere, is that one free?” I told him it wasn’t.

“Looks free to me, innit? Who’s sitting in it, then?” I wouldn’t have imagined him capable of satire, but there you are.

“Both seats are mine. For obvious reasons.”

“What a wanker!” he marvelled, “just throwing your money away.” He called across the plane to a similarly cretinous-looking mate, climbing over someone to an unoccupied seat he’d spotted. “ ’Ere, Chris. Fancy this. Bloke’s bought two seats, and there’s only one of him!”

“Maybe he likes a bit of room to stretch out in?” the girl with a large nose just across the aisle from me offered.

My moron gaped at her forever. Then, as he determined that he probably wouldn’t try to shag someone so nasally overendowed even at the end of a long night’s drinking, his lip curled in disdain. “Who fucking asked you, you minger?”

An air hostess, sighing, arrived to escort him to a seat several rows forward. My moron glared back gloatingly at my defender as he followed her. It’s been my observation that such people nearly always imagine themselves to be in a position to gloat. Afraid that my defender might try to chat with me, I buried myself in the Martin Amis paperback I’d bought at the airport. As usual, I didn’t much enjoy it, even though there could be no denying his ability to write gorgeous, gorgeous English, and felt guilty about it. The failing was surely mine, rather than Martin’s.