Waiting for Kate Bush (12 page)

I headed into the thick of the mayhem outside, and by the time I’d got 20 steps from the door had been handed 20 flyers telling me about the low booze prices and sex-starved nymphets awaitingme at various local bars and clubs. I’d have been handed many more if those handing them out hadn’t abruptly turned away at the sight of me, repulsed by either my girth or my age. But the mini-skirted, knee-high-booted reps-gone-wrong who stood in the doorway of every bar and club in Sant Antoni couldn’t have found me more attractive, waving at me like shipwreck victims at a rescue helicopter. I hadn’t felt so popular since my Marcel Flynn days.

I hadn’t come to Ibiza to feel popular.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. As I passed a bar called
Tu Madre La Puta
, I overheard a trio of bare-chested young Scots with Sir Alex Ferguson tattoos advising the girl in front of it that they’d come in only if she gave each of them a rim job. Without a moment’s hesitation, she knelt on her pile of flyers before the least repulsive of the three, and reached for his zip.

As I rounded the corner into Del Progres, I was set upon by a mob of swarthy little Hawaiian-shirted men with shifty eyes and pencil moustaches, Iberian wide boys who addressed me as
jefe
and
amigo
, and one another as
puto
. “Lowest prices on es on the island,
jefe,”
hissed one, apparently referring to ecstasy. “When my hashish is gone,
amigo
, it’s gone,” predicted another, “and at these prices, it’s going to be gone soon.” A third wondered, “Charlie, jefe?” I wasn’t quite sure what he was asking, and so just gave him the curt smile I had developed back in London for vendors of
The Big Issue
. I hoped he hadn’t mistaken me for a mate. If he had, wouldn’t he wrongly accuse his mate of having given him the cold shoulder?

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. “Fake Louis Vuitton handbag for
la mujer, amigo?”
offered a little local with a gold incisor and a glass eye. “Can’t tell it from the real thing. Guaranteed. She love you for it,
amigo.”
I had the feeling that if I didn’t at least appear to consider the offer, I might get knocked over the head.

Sifting through the guy’s wares, I nearly fainted to discover that they included the
Earthrise
videotape from 1992, featuring not only Kate and Peter Gabriel singing ‘Don’t Give Up’ in superimposition, rather than
hugging one another in front of a solar eclipse as in the far more familiar, far less collectible, version, but also Kate’s brief appearance in
Spirit Of The Forest
, along with other stars as diverse as Debbie Harry, Lenny Kravitz (with whom she would at no point be linked romantically), and LL Cool J. I’d been trying to get my hands on it for over a decade. The guy wanted 50 euros, and was flabbergasted when I handed them over without a trace of hesitation. He claimed he’d meant to say 75. I said 50 was all I’d pay, and that he should throw in a fake Louis Vuitton handbag. He did, eagerly. I thought maybe Kate would enjoy having it.

I put the precious tape into my shoulder bag and turned into Del Progres proper. Finding a place to step on which someone hadn’t vomited, or wasn’t lying unconscious drooling out of the side of his mouth, was no easy undertaking, and every couple of seconds a drunken young reveller, stumbling over one of those already passed out, hurtled by at an alarming rate. It was rather like walking across a firing range.

A crowd of hooting drunken British youth had formed around a girl with bare breasts, though mere bare breasts hardly seemed enough to attract a crowd in this nightmarish place. Then I realised she must be lactating, as she was squirting milk into her admirers’ mouths. I shuddered with revulsion. A wobbly young lout with the emblem of Blackburn Rovers tattooed on his forehead accosted me. “What’s the matter, mate? You a poof or summat?” But our confrontation was short-lived, as he proceeded to lose consciousness and pitch face forward into what I hoped was a pile of dog poop, but was probably human. “This,” another lout felt called upon to advise me, “is the most fun I’ve ever had.”

I spotted a
botega
window against which no one was throwing up or peeing, and went to collect myself against it. A large group of bare-chested buffoons suddenly began to swarm like excited honey bees to my left. I drew closer to investigate. The strongest, best-looking boys, those likely to protect their young with the greatest ferocity, had pushed themselves to the centre of the swarm, and were flexing their pectorals and lats and biceps, flashing their dazzling white smiles, frantically preening. Their fleshier, less gorgeous brothers had to be content with trying to suck in their guts, and saw that it wasn’t Pamela Anderson in their midst, or Holly Valance, or Danii Minogue, but a small, dark-haired woman.

It was Indira from the plane, smiling shyly, looking mostly at the ground between her feet, clearly embarrassed by the preening she’d inspired, but clearly enjoying it too.

She noticed me and waved. I thought those who hoped to mate with her might tear me to pieces for it, but she managed to push her way through them to me. We were backed up together against the
botega
. Testosterone perfumed the humid night air. I knelt so she could shout into my ear. She had to shout to be heard over the braying and bellowing of the mob.

“Ibiza’s jolly good fun, isn’t it, sir?”

“If you enjoy this sort of thing,” I said. “Where did they all come from?”

“Dunno,” she said. “It’s been like this since I stepped out of the hotel.”

“But what about your fiancé, the co-pilot?”

The most overheated of her suitors had dropped his shorts and pants and was now pole dancing polelessly in front of her, stiffening while the others chanted, “Wood! Wood! Wood!” and trying to clap in time.

“He was knackered,” Indira explained, “and fancied a nap. And what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, will it?” In all the world there are few things more unnerving than an ugly woman attempting coquettishness.

A topless girl with enormous bovine breasts stared at me in what I mistook for horror for a long, tense moment, and then threw up on my trainers. “Why don’t you fucking move then, Jimmy?” her severely sunburned mate demanded in the thickest Glaswegian accent I’d ever been able to understand.

Move was exactly what I did, as hurriedly as my girth would permit. By the time I turned into my hotel’s street, I was drenched with sweat and gasping. The bar was still serving, but there was no one in it to serve. No, I was mistaken. There was a girl – no, a woman, definitely a woman — in her mid-thirties, almond brown from the sun, artificially blonde, hoop-earringed, and heading my way, cigarette in hand. “Buy a girl a G&T?” she asked in a Home Counties accent, revealing that she had more teeth than space for them.

“If you put out your fag,” I said.

“Health fanatic?”

Not by a long chalk. I just can’t abide the smell, or the stupidity. It says right on the pack Smoking Kills. I know there are those whose response to that is, “Well, something’s going to at the end of the day, so why not enjoy yourself until it happens?” Such people apparently haven’t watched anybody die of lung cancer, as I have (in a very compressed way, on television). And where’s the pleasure in waking up in the morning feeling as though you are being stabbed in the chest?

“Allergic to the smoke,” I said. It’s easier. I’m not sure it’s even possible to be allergic to cigarette smoke in the same way it is to be allergic to pollen or cats, for instance, but people usually don’t question you. She shrugged and stubbed her cigarette out in an ashtray on another table.

She had smoker’s breath, inevitably, but was pleasingly candid. She pretended to be interested in me, but one of the few things I’ve figured out for myself over the course of my adulthood is that nearly everyone is much happier talking about him or herself than hearing about me, and she was no exception. She’d first come to Ibiza nine years before, on holiday, at age 19. I reckoned it was the sun and cigarettes that made her look a lot older than she really was, or at least admitted to. The contrast of dark brown skin and pale blonde hair was striking from a distance, but up close, you could see she was already quite leathery. She’d enjoyed herself so much on her first visit that she signed on to become a rep for one of the many British companies that flew young people over, sheltered them, kept them drunk, and flew them home, all for a relative pittance. Her affection for the island was such that she didn’t resign even after discovering that her unwritten job description included fellating various senior male staff when they flew over from Britain to ensure everything was running smoothly. She became the mistress of a club owner who she reckoned I must have met, as he’d long since lost the club and taken to peddling fake Louis Vuitton bags and charlie in Del Progres. At 24, she found herself too old to get another rep job, and turned in desperation to prostitution.

Did I fancy a shag?

I found her leathery skin and longing glances at the ashtray in which she’d stubbed out her cigarette distasteful, but fancied continuing our conversation a bit first. I could tell she thought I was winding her up. When she realised I wasn’t, she got a little misty for a moment.

“It gets so lonely here sometimes, with nobody to talk to. The locals won’t chat to me because of how I make my living, and the Brits are either too drunk to make sense or too hungover to want to. And I feel about 100 years older than most of them. Are you sure I can’t finish my fag?”

It wasn’t easy for a tart on Ibiza. The British boys had the British girls to shag, at no charge. The locals seemed to prefer 16-year-olds who looked 14. If I didn’t change my mind, I was going to be her first trick in the past 10 days.

It was shameful, but I felt that gave me a bit of leverage. I asked if she’d tell me that her name, undisclosed to this point, was Nicola.
“Why not?” she shrugged. I asked if she’d be willing to ridicule me before the actual act, and there it got dicey. She asked why I’d fancy such a thing, and what she was meant to ridicule me about. I answered her first question first. “Isn’t that obvious?”

She looked wary, which in turn made me worry that she might bolt at any second. “That you’re a bit of an … older bloke?”

“Well, you can use that as well, but just look at me. My weight, Nicola! My weight!”

“Oh,” she said, rather less decisively than I’d have hoped, “of course.”

“I mean, aren’t you worried that if we shag with me on top, I’ll crush you to death?”

She looked at me for a long moment, and sipped her drink, took a deep breath, and said, “You’re mad if you think I’m going to let somebody your size get on top of me, mate.”

Wood!

As for the ridiculing part, I admitted I didn’t know why the thought of her re-creating some of the most awful moments of my life — and I was getting an idea! — aroused me. It just did. Maybe there was something wrong with my DNA. God knows there was.

I told her I’d need 20 minutes to have a bath. She looked at me with something resembling fondness, and addressed me with it as well. “You don’t need to bathe for a tart, darling, and at the end of the day, that’s all I am.”

I explained that, tart or no, I couldn’t bear the thought of not smelling fresh with a woman. My mother had been sent home from grade school for her woeful hygiene in the days when her family couldn’t afford hot water, and I’d have been betraying her memory, even though she remained alive, by not bathing. But there was a less noble part of the equation too. While I bathed, I hoped that Nicola might be able to find a couple of handfuls of grass cuttings somewhere.

That changed her tune. “I don’t know what you have in mind, darling, but it’s definitely going to cost you a bit extra. Christ knows where I’m going to find bloody grass clippings. You sure sand won’t do the trick?”

I told her I was more than happy to pay whatever she thought fair. We parted.

I remained excited throughout my bath. Indeed, thinking about the grass she’d come back with, and the awful things she’d call me while she made me eat it, it was all I could do to keep from manipulating myself into no longer requiring her services.

She was longer than I’d expected. A drunken boy had asked her to rim him, and she’d got him to agree to pay 50 euros for it. He’d passed out before he’d counted out 30 of them. She’d taken them for her time, and then the rest of what he had on him.

She took off her clothes in a couple of smooth, effortless motions. It wasn’t the sight of her naked, but that of a couple of handfuls of grass cuttings on the bureau that had me shivering with excitement. I asked her to put her shoes back on. She complied and looked at me expectantly. “I suppose,” I said, “that you find the idea of physical intimacy with me inexpressibly disgusting.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I suppose I do.”

I waited. But so did she.

“I reckon you find my obesity nothing short of obscene,” I suggested.

“Obscene,” she agreed. This wasn’t going at all according to plan.

“And you’re probably thinking that I could bathe for twice as long as I did without getting the glutton pig stench off me.”

“Twice as long,” she said, finally demonstrating a little initiative, but frankly, not nearly enough.

I could hear the desperation in my own voice. “And to demonstrate your contempt, you’re probably going to make me eat those grass cuttings.”

“Eat them? Oh, right. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” She sighed as she turned to the bureau, but I was too excited now to care. I got down on hands and knees. I offered her my face.

“Eat it, you disgusting fat pig,” she said, which was obviously really good, but she just left her hand there, as though expecting me to eat from it voluntarily, like a tame stag in Richmond Park or something. I had to put my face in her hand and rub against it before she got the idea. But when she finally got it, oh, what heaven on earth! “You disgusting fat grass-eating pig,” she said. “You obscenely obese glutton pig stench!”

Oh, how I adored it — and her, for making it possible. After I finished, I told her I’d pay for her time if she’d just lie beside me.