Waiting for Kate Bush (16 page)

She sighed again, this time back to before her conception. “Can you imagine what it would be like for me to lose her?”

Vividly. At that point, I hadn’t heard my Babooshka’s voice in 18 months.

A
LMOST as though on cue, Babooshka put on a great deal of weight at exactly the moment her interest in boys blossomed. Almost simultaneously, her mother persuaded the Swiss electronics millionaire she’d married after me to pay for her to have a face-lift and her breasts enlarged. Having endured all the pain the surgeries entailed, she’d then bought a wardrobe to show off her new figure. When they’d go shopping together (and she rarely wasn’t going shopping), in her extremely skimpy Lycra shorts and extremely tight Lycra tanktop, teenage boys would make loud sounds of approval. Bab would be mortified with embarrassment. I would sympathise with her, and tell her I thought it was really insensitive of her mother, and Bab would hate me for it.

I’d adored her not merely from her first breath, but from the moment I learned she was growing inside her mother’s womb. Her birth transformed me. For a long while there, I not only didn’t loathe myself, but actually felt ever greater self-admiration, as Babooshka brought out kindness and patience and generosity I’d never dreamed I had in me.

And none of it was nearly enough. There was a Saturday afternoon when she was around two and a half that we spent together, just the two of us, because her mother was at the art gallery where she “worked,” if you’d call sitting at a desk doing crossword puzzles work. I was crazy with adoration for my daughter, and did everything I could think of to make her happy, but she sulked and pouted all afternoon in spite of what I did. When she saw her mother’s car turning the corner into our road, it was as though the sun had broken through the clouds. My daughter was transformed, radiant now with joy.

Her mother and I divorced. We’d come to be unable to bear one another. Trying to be responsible, I’d taken a legal word processing job that made the earlier one typing enrolment forms seem exhilarating in
comparison. I got up at 05.20 every morning so I could be at the bus stop at 06.20, and arrive at work in San Francisco, 50 miles to the south, at 08.30. After a very long day of being treated with naked condescension by smug young attorneys, I’d ride the bus nearly two hours in the opposite direction, and arrive home at around 19.30. Whereupon I’d almost invariably find my wife watching crap television (reruns of really excruciating late Sixties sitcoms, that sort of thing) and drinking with her parents, my in-laws, who’d as good as moved in with us. Knowing that I had around 180 minutes in which to have dinner, exercise, play with my daughter, and try to do some work that might, in some way, turn into a lifeline out of the professional nightmare I’d been living before I had to get to bed to be up at 05.20 the following morning to repeat the whole process, I’d ask my wife if she’d had time to make some dinner.

Wasn’t she entitled to relax a bit, she’d demand petulantly.

I got myself a little flat in San Francisco and drove up to collect Bab every Friday evening, and took her back to her mum’s and grandparents’ every Sunday night. The time I had with her was by far my happiest. But it wasn’t so happy for her. No matter how gentle and adoring I was, no matter how attentive, she always made it clear that she greatly disliked being deprived of her mother’s companionship even for 48 hours.

I challenged the divorce decree I’d passively accepted in the beginning because I wasn’t in any shape to put up a fight. Under the terms of the amended settlement, my wife had to drive my daughter half the time, and began bringing her down to San Francisco on Saturday mornings. At the sound of the bell ringing, I’d whoop exultantly, and run down the stairs three at a time. And when I reached the ground floor and flung open the door, my daughter, crying, would be hiding from me behind her mother — her mother who, when the going in our marriage got tough (at least half because of me, I admit now and admitted then), refused to consider couples counselling.
But it isn’t just us, I
said.
We have a daughter to think about. Our splitting up is going to affect her for the rest of her life
. Nope. My wife couldn’t be bothered.

And it was my wife to whom my daughter clung for dear life.

Fifteen years after the fact, the memory of that continues to hurt nearly more than I am able to express.

And it never went away. I’d hide my pain from Bab, and soon have her laughing again. We’d have wonderful times. I’d take her to the playground in the square between the big hotels at the summit of Nob Hill, a magical place, and push her endlessly on the swings. She’d gasp
with laughter at the thought that I was pushing her so high that, if she wanted, she’d be able to jump off the swing right into the living room of a flat in one of the elegant old buildings that surrounded the square, and find out what they were having for dinner. I’d carry her on my shoulders all the way to North Beach, where, on a bustling Friday or Saturday night, we’d walk along Columbus Avenue watching the Italian chefs frantically cooking in their open kitchens, and smell the delicious smells. I’d remain for hours on the verge of tears of joy, only for my daughter to advise me, at a moment of peak exultation, “I want Mommy.”

A great man once sang, ungrammatically, “If you love somebody, set them free.” If I’d been a better man, maybe I’d have let my daughter have her way. What I did instead was let her see how much she hurt me, and try to point out all the ways in which Mommy let her down. Shame on me, and what an extremely high price I’d wind up paying.

My daughter reached school age. Every other Friday afternoon, I’d drive up to collect her from school, and every other Friday afternoon the look on her face would confirm what her mother had related she’d said, that she wished I were the kind of divorced daddy you were always hearing about, the kind who made plans with his kid and then didn’t show up. Every other Friday afternoon, another broken heart.

She was her mother’s daughter, extremely bright, but with an apparently congenital aversion to having to work very hard at anything. Trying to do for my daughter what I’d come passionately to wish someone had done for me at her age, I taught her things. I did what Kate’s brothers and dad did for her – taught her to write poems and songs, how to compose melodies and then harmonise them. I taught her to sketch. We spent huge amounts of time in the car travelling back and forth between my city and her mother’s, and I decided we should devote some of it to learning Spanish. Bab resented all of it.

Her mother, who had earlier taught her how to use a remote control device to change television channels, now taught her to have fake fingernails professionally affixed to her real ones, how to have highlights put in her hair, how to spend lots of time at the mall shopping for cute new outfits, and then, by example, how to walk out of another marriage, but not, as noted, before her Swiss electronic millionaire third husband (there’d been one before me, without children) could pay for her cosmetic surgery.

As my daughter fought her way through adolescence, lusting after boys who found her too fat to ask out, going through friends as some people go through paper towels, often finding herself without any,
things got ever rockier between us. I tried to teach her some small sense of responsibility by requiring her not to leave mounds of dirty laundry on her bedroom floor. She hated me for it, and Mommy eagerly assured her that it was my nature to be tyrannically controlling. (Hadn’t I, during our marriage, always tried to ensure that we showed up for dinner with friends reasonably punctually, rather than the 45 minutes late that had long been her norm?)

I accepted part of the blame for her girth. As I looked back, I saw with horror that I’d routinely used food as a medium of comfort over the years. She felt awful about having been rejected by yet another friend? Well, why don’t we see if a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone makes the pain a little more bearable? She felt awful because her mom’s greatest interest was in attracting the attention of much younger men at groovy night-clubs in San Francisco? Well, why didn’t we go and have dinner at her favourite Chinese restaurant?

I didn’t accept only the blame, though. I also accepted the responsibilities of trying to set a good example for her, and of facing up to the problem. I ate as though preparing for a famine, but worked out daily at the gym. She made plans to go with a gay classmate to a dance at her school. The afternoon before the dance, she burst into tears at the thought of being the only girl there who hadn’t been legitimately invited by a boy. It felt like a knife in my heart. I consoled her as best I could, but didn’t leave it there. Not wanting her to have to suffer in the same way again, I pointed out, with the utmost gentleness, that she was very beautiful (as indeed she was), but that a lot of boys weren’t seeing that because she was overweight. I’ll never forget the look of rage and shame and betrayal she gave me.

For a moment I was speechless. Then I delivered a message of hope. She was undeniably overweight, but the solution was very, very simple. She needed simply to eat less and exercise more.

Now there was only rage in her eyes. Undeniably overweight? Well, how was it that her friends (the two she cited were even more bloated than she) thought she looked just fine? And what if she didn’t like going to the gym? It was remarkable how disgusting and uncool she was able to make it sound. What if she didn’t like sitting around in a moth-eaten sweater caked in snot, reeking of cat urine?

Mommy wasn’t much help, of course. Mommy was Victoria Beckham skeletal without having set foot in a gym in around seven years, since I’d got her to go with me for maybe a week back in Los Angeles. (She’d enjoyed it for a short while because she looked really cute in her spandex leotard, and knew it.) If Mommy could be skinny
without working out, why couldn’t my daughter?

What Mommy could do was teach her the importance of having her hair and nails professionally looked after at regular intervals, and how to put on make-up. My daughter is artistic, and was good with make-up. Her hair looked fabulous when she got back from the hairdresser. And if her fake nails made her feel more confident, then all the better. But compared to her bloatedness, none of it mattered much. The boys unanimously looked past her to her more lithe classmates. And my daughter suffered terribly.

* * *

In every city to which the
Tour Of Life
travelled, Kate bravely confronted the press, and proved rather less puckish, but also less churlish, than the acknowledged master of the rock star press conference, Bob Dylan. When Piccadilly Radio asked her how much money she’d made, she claimed to have no idea. One can picture Dylan replying, “£14,230.55.” They asked if she’d come to live in luxury, and she assured them she’d been living in the same flat for years. What would she take with her if consigned to a farmhouse on a bleak Yorkshire moor? Friends, cigarettes, tea, music, and two cats. Dylan, in his prime, would surely have included Anita Ekberg and a light bulb.

After the final performance of the British part of the tour, in Edinburgh, various stars of the show repaired to the pricey fish restaurant Cousteau’s, only to realise that over-zealous fans had followed their coach and were apparently intent on watching them eat through the window. Fearing they might freeze to death, kind Kate took them some wine and signed autographs. Back in London, there was a soiree at the Dial 9, with guests including The Tubes’ Fee Waybill and David Bowie’s PA.

The country simply couldn’t stop talking about her. The
Daily Star
speculated that Zoodle and Pyewacket were past lovers on whom she’d cast a spell. (Are you in there, Al?) Word got out that no heterosexual British male would want to miss her performance of ‘Wow’ on BBC-TV’s
The Abba Special
on the evening of Good Friday,
The Daily Express
promising nothing less than “wanton erotic gestures”. The
Daily Mail’s
editorial cartoonist depicted Margaret Thatcher, as Kate, inspiring Prime Minister Callaghan to gasp. She was indisputably iconic now.

Gnashing its corporate teeth, sulking unashamedly, EMI announced that she’d declined its producers’ invitation (ungrateful little cow!) to record the theme song for the forthcoming James Bond film
Moonraker
.
It turned out she’d seen fit instead to record the theme for
The Magician Of Lublin
, warmly received at film festivals and avoided like the plague by British filmgoers.

The show headed for Europe. Kate’s throat felt crap, so four songs were cut from the programme in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Amsterdam. A doctor in the Swedish capital advised her to use her voice only on stage. Her training with Lindsey Kemp came in handy as she began communicating in mime. People started responding nonverbally, with their own impromptu sign language, as though she wasn’t just momentarily mute, but deaf as well. Sometimes people can be so adorable.

She got her voice back and the tour proceeded to Stuttgart, Munich (where the Circus Krone stage was nearly obscured by the thousands of red carnations the audience tossed onto it), Cologne, Paris (in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, where G.I. Gurdjieff himself had once been boffo), Mannheim, and Frankfurt before returning for three additional nights at the Hammersmith Odeon, one of them a benefit for Bill Duffield.

At that performance, it was Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley who came out in trench coats and trilbies for ‘Them Heavy People’ rather than Kate’s usual dancers Gary and Stuart. The audience was beside itself with delight, and somehow remained so even during Harley’s solo turn. In the end, as the three stars sang ‘Let It Be’ (and not, as those already fatally fed up with Paul McCartney’s vague ode to hopefulness might have preferred, ‘Gimme Dat Ding’) together, Harley got the audience to sing along as though at a football match and Kate wept.

* * *

One Sunday afternoon, I drove Babooshka and her gay male classmate and friends to the cinema on the understanding that the classmate’s mother would give them a lift home. Five minutes after the film ended, my daughter was on the phone to me. Classmate’s mother wasn’t answering her phone. I was right in the middle of something I needed to complete, and told her to try her friend’s mother again in a few minutes. Ninety seconds later, the phone rang again. Classmate’s mother still wasn’t answering, and they were getting bored just standing around. Then take the bus, I suggested. The bus was safe, inexpensive, air-conditioned, and only rarely had anyone on it. It came every 15 minutes.