Waiting for Kate Bush (11 page)

I got so fed up that I closed it, sighing, without even marking my place, and leaned over to look out of my window. There was nothing to see. I made the mistake of turning toward the aisle. She was waiting for me, the big-nosed girl, with an expression that said,
Please don’t hurt me
. I pretended she hadn’t really registered, that I was looking all over the plane. But I hadn’t the heart for such heartlessness, and nodded at her in acknowledgement.

Her name was Indira. She was studying to become an orthodontist. “I reckon anybody who can straighten teeth will never starve in Britain.” Her own teeth were exemplarily straight and white. I supposed that orthodontia students were able to have their teeth bleached at a significant discount. Her moustache was faint, but not so faint that you didn’t
notice it right after the remarkable nose, and even before the wonderful teeth. She addressed me as
sir
. She seemed to be travelling alone.

I could feel a Diane Geller situation coming up. Back in junior high school, when I commonly summoned the nerve to invite pretty girls to dance, I never actually spoke to them as I shoved them gracelessly across the dance floor. If anything, poor Diane Geller was as Semitic as the girls I fancied were blonde (often artificially, but that made it even better for me), as short and thick as they were tall and slender, as eager as they were aloof, as dowdy as they were tawdry. And here she came cutting in on the surfer girl beauty I’d been studiously ignoring while shoving her around the dance floor, tapping her on the shoulder to indicate that she wanted to dance with me.

Surely every eye on the premises was fixed now on me and Diane Geller, and every mind attached to the eyes thinking,
They suit each other
. Oh, the unbearable shame.

A better person than I – a decent person, a person not destined to become a corpulent grotesque later in life – would have seen the song out. But not Leslie Herskovits. Eight bars after losing his surfer girl, Leslie Herskovits abruptly let go of poor Diane Geller’s hand, mumbled, “Excuse me,” and ran for the gym, there to be picked last for an impromptu game of basketball. The memory of all of which made me absolutely ravenous, of course.

I imagined Indira’s whole life. I imagined she’d never been asked out, much less made love to, and that she was on her way to Ibiza because she’d heard it was impossible not to get shagged there. It broke my heart, and it wasn’t my problem. Even we self-loathing grotesques have our standards.

Well, I was going to do better by her than I’d done by poor Diane Geller. I was going to be forthright. My message would be cruel, but my tone kind.

“Listen, darling,” I interrupted her. “There’s something I need to say to you right now, before we even converse any more. Attraction is a strange, inexplicable phenomenon. Who can say for sure why one person finds another attractive? Is it something inborn, or something learned? I don’t pretend to know. What I do know is that, although I find you personable and vivacious, and assume you’re very intelligent as well, and even though I appreciate your trying to intervene on my behalf when that moron tried to take my second seat, I just don’t think it very likely that I’ll ever come to fancy you.”

I’d actually done the right thing. It was exhilarating. And she was coping with it! All the fears we carry around within ourselves of others
not being able to deal with our candour? Maybe most of them are ill-founded! The look on her face hadn’t changed. There were no tears in her eyes.

“Oh, I don’t think I could ever fancy you either,” she said. “You’re far too old for me, for a start. And I’m actually going on holiday with my boyfriend, Ranjana. He’s our co-pilot, you see. I’m flying free.”

We waited for our luggage together, Indira and I. When her bag came, and she left with it, the blond idiot with the pierced eyebrow and his mate Chris came over. I expected the worst, and got it. “We don’t fancy yours much,” they said, and then roared with laughter. Everyone seemed to be looking at us. For a long moment, I considered whirling round and seeing if my ripping the stud out of his forehead might make the blond idiot a little less generous with his opinions, but of course I didn’t.

* * *

It occurred to me on the taxi ride to my hotel that, aside from the locals, I might be the only person on the island over 30, or anywhere near my size. It occurred to me I needn’t have come to Ibiza to feel alienated, but then remembered I’d come so I could tell Nicola without lying that I’d done so. I had told more than three lifetimes’ share of lies by the age of around 35, and was commonly caught out and humiliated. I tell the truth now not because I’m any more noble, but because I’ve come to realise you usually get caught anyway.

By the time I got up to my hotel, my clothing was sticking to my skin. The lobby was full of blazing red British young people in shorts and the agonised expressions of hangover sufferers, although in some cases it might well have been sexually transmitted infections making them so miserable. “I’ll never raise another pint to my lips,” a tall, skinny ginger-haired boyo moaned in the cadence of Cardiff. “And you can quote me.”

I went out and found a tapas restaurant, where I ordered
aceitunas aliñadas, alcachofas a la vinagreta, canelon de atun, tostadas de pisto, tortilla española, patatas ali-oli, ternera asada, plato combinado, jamon iberico, salpicon de marisco, salmon ahumado, ensalada rusa, pimientos asados, patatas bravas, pincho de pollo, champiñones a la plancha, pincho de solomillo, queso de cabra, croquetas de pollo, calamares a la plancha, gambas al ajillo, pulpo a la plancha, patatas a la importancia, salmon a la pimienta, raxo adobado, mejillones a la marinera, chorizo y morcilla, almejas en salsa verde
, and
vieiras a la plancha
. I’d have ordered something else, but that’s all they had on the menu, and only celebrities can order off the menu.

The
pulpo
and
chorizo
were so delicious I had a second portion of each, and then wasn’t only unable to eat anything more, but probably in greater pain than the hungover kids in the hotel lobby. But of course I deserved to suffer, if not to be gaped at as a quartet of waiters were doing. “Lo
siento,”
one of them apologised. “But it is such pleasure for us to see a British person enjoying our cuisine. Most of your young compatriots come in wanting only chips and lager. It is like spitting in the face of the chef’s mother. Sometimes we want to cut their hearts out and stew them until tender in the chef’s special tomato sauce.”

I suppose I looked aghast. The waiter laughed. “We would not serve such a dish to you,
señor
. We reserve this dish for those of your young compatriots who dare to order real Spanish cuisine.” I didn’t bother telling him I wasn’t a Brit.

By the time I got back to my hotel, the hungover young people were beginning to perk up with the help of cold
cerveza
. A couple of them managed to get in the lift with me, and were kind enough not to remark on how little space I left them. I went to my room and had a fitful
siesta
. The melody of Mr. Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ kept running through my mind. I wondered if it had been that to which Diane Geller and I were dancing when I abandoned her so cruelly. Teenagers in those days would occasionally be caught dead listening to music their parents liked, or even dancing to it. I made myself throw up and was able to sleep.

The street outside the hotel was already an Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life when I woke. Bare-breasted girls whose DNA doomed them to a premature capitulation to gravity, and who thus would have been well advised to keep their tops on, were being chatted up by slobbering boys who three or four pints earlier wouldn’t have had the cheek to chat up any girl, even one with floppy tits. The more attractive boys and girls had found one another, as they always manage to, and had their tongues down one another’s throats, though a few removed them occasionally to vomit. There were boys bellowing football songs, and other boys peeing in such numbers against the walls of nightclubs charging £40 cover, but which included one very watered down drink, that the bouncers didn’t even try to stop them. There were couples shagging in the doorways of closed shops. There were drunken girls menstruating unashamedly like Marilyn Monroe in the street while crowds of boys made animal noises of encouragement. There were sunburn victims writhing in agony on the pavements, and friends trying to cool them off by pouring beer that had cost £6 a bottle on them. The sizzling sound of the cold beer against the inflamed skin
was enough to make one vomit. It was in all ways every bit as awful as I’d expected, and slightly worse, and just what I deserved.

I wiped my mouth on the lank blond hair of a boy who reminded me of Chris from the aeroplane, and headed, as my genes compelled, for the same restaurant where I’d had lunch. I lived as a boy with my parents in Los Angeles, a very large city on the west coast of America. It is not known as a restaurant city in the same way that San Francisco is, but even then it had a few million residents, and thus a great, great many restaurants. And from the time I was around five until I left home at 19, my parents only ever ate at one, the Chatam on Westwood Blvd. in West Los Angeles. Never mind that it couldn’t have been more mediocre. They’d gone there in 1951 or something, and neither felt overcharged nor been poisoned, so it was there that they went forever after, content with the very low level of pleasure they’d been taught in childhood was their due.

Kate Bush is known to have been a vegetarian from an early age, but thought to have taken to eating fish sometime after the release of
The Red Shoes
. She has, over the years, endorsed several organisations seeking to end barbaric treatment of animals, but has resisted the temptation to introduce her own line of frozen vegetarian ready-meals. I for one would fill my freezer with them without hesitation. But it, like
The Red Shoes’
follow-up, is apparently not to be.

Years after the Chatam restaurant went under, a victim of changing tastes, and was supplanted by a restaurant whose menu wasn’t printed entirely in Olde English script to suggest its elegance, my parents’ tendency to stick with the tried, true, and not very good got them in trouble when they decided to get a professional in to landscape their back yard. He was known to drink, and to disappear for weeks at a time while one’s back yard remained uninhabitable, but he’d done the Andresens’, across the road, and the Jendens’, a few doors up from the Andresens’. According to my mother, he was the only landscape designer in the city. When she told me this, I went through my usual repertoire of gestures of disdainful incredulity. I suggested, in my familiar cuttingly sarcastic way (learned from the best – her!) that in a city whose population had grown to three and a half million, he quite possibly
wasn’t
the only landscape designer. She got that weary, hurt look that I was to see more and more in her early seventies, when I realised with increasing clarity how she’d poisoned me as she became ever more abusive, and said, “Well, he did the Andresens’ and the Jendens’, and I didn’t want to do a lot of looking around.” Meaning that, as ever, she chose the devil she knew.

And got exactly what one might have predicted. The guy dug up their back yard, planted a few trees and some ground cover, and disappeared for the better part of a month, not returning my parents’ ever-more-plaintive phone calls, in which, far from threatening to take him to court or something, they appealed to him, like children to an unyielding father, from a position of absolute weakness and supplication.

I was visiting them one Saturday afternoon when he and a couple of his illegal immigrant crew, whom he almost certainly paid far less than the minimum wage, actually materialised in the back yard, and hurried out to confront him. Very far from apologetic, he was openly defiant. Had he promised my parents that he would finish by such-and-such a date? No, he hadn’t. Therefore, he wondered if they could stop leaving messages on his goddamn phone machine.

We stood there glaring at each other, and then I grabbed his ponytail with one hand and awarded him a smart uppercut to the chin with the other, sending him sprawling backwards. His jaw broken, he moaned for the Mexicans to help him, but for the minimum wage he was paying them, did he really expect them to take on a force of nature like me? I kicked him in the ribs, feeling a couple cave in. He whimpered for me to stop. I brought my foot down hard on his abdomen. There was no air left in him. I spat on him. I told him if he didn’t show my parents the respect they deserved, I’d find him, wherever he tried to hide, and beat him so badly he’d hardly be recognisable as human.

I wish.

What I really did was tell him – not plaintively, but glaring right back at him – that I really hoped he’d be able to find a way to finish the work soon. And then I turned on my heel and walked back into the house.

Remembering all of which made my blood sugar level drop so precipitously that when I got to the restaurant, I frantically ordered everything I’d had for lunch, except the
almejas en salsa verde
, which I hadn’t much liked the look of, and then a couple of
raciones
as well. I was the only non-local in the place. The waiters beamed at me almost adoringly enough to make up for my childhood. The food was delicious, but I hardly tasted it. What I tasted was the pain of having let my parents down, and having humiliated Diane Geller.

A quartet of young British idiots came in, loudly. They were led to a table and offered menus, on which they gave up quickly. “ ’Ere, Ramon,” their spokesperson demanded slurredly, “can we just get some fucking chips and sausages? And I’m talking proper sausages, not bloody spicy wog ones. And make it quick, all right, mate? We want to have time for a proper dessert. We’re having crumpet.”

His three pals absolutely shrieked with amusement. Crumpet! Oh, what a sidesplitter!

They did the nearly impossible – ruined my appetite. I wasn’t yet two-thirds of the way through my
chorizo
. My waiter looked brokenhearted.