Waiting for Kate Bush (19 page)

For a moment, it appeared as though he’d foil me and maintain a stiff upper lip, remain gracious and brave to the end. But then, when the vacuous blonde (what else?) presenter asked if he expected to miss his fellow contestants, he burst into angry tears. “After they’ve voted me off? No, I won’t miss the fuckers a bit!” It was a great, great moment in British pop history, and television history as well.

They had him on again briefly to apologise at the conclusion of the
following week’s programme. This time, as he explained that the pressure had got to him, and that he was in fact extremely grateful for the opportunity
blah blah, blah blah
, his tears seemed sad, rather than furious. But then, quite wonderfully, he lost his composure all over again after the vacuous blonde asked what he’d been doing – winning a karaoke contest in his local. Those who’d voted him off still stood to win a lucrative recording contract and a year’s stay in a luxury flat in St. John’s Wood, and he’d won a karaoke contest in a pub in Oldham. “It isn’t bloody fair, is it?” he howled. “I can sing better than all but two of the remaining boys, and I’m loads better looking than either of them! That’s got to count for something! It’s fucking
got
to!”

A part of me hoped that the next evening’s news would reveal he’d either topped himself or broken into and wreaked mayhem in the house in Hertfordshire where the surviving contestants were sequestered, but I had to be content with the most recent horror in the Middle East.

* * *

Kate’s heretofore unerring sense of what was commercial faltered. EMI wanted to release the buoyant ‘Babooshka’ as the first single from
Lionheart
, but she insisted on ‘Breathing’, in which she came out against the idea of a nuclear holocaust. BBC TV’s
Nationwide
invited her on to talk about the song, and showed most of the controversial video she’d made to promote it, which was rather more than could be said for those craven wusses at
Top Of The Pops
, which asked its viewers to be content with only the video’s beginning. On Radio One’s
Roundtable
, Ian Dury, Kid Jensen, and Anne Nightingale all agreed that nuclear holocaust wasn’t a very good thing at all, and that Kate’s song made a powerful case against it. (Years afterwards, Kate would perform ‘Breathing’ perhaps the least antic song ever written, at a concert benefiting Comic Relief. To add to the hilarity, the pedal of her piano stuck halfway through the song, resulting in her exploring tonalities she’d gone on stage with no intention of exploring.)

‘Breathing’ reached only number 16. ‘Babooshka’ made the Top 5. No one could have blamed EMI for saying, “Told you so,” but there is no evidence of their having done so, probably in significant part because the album that contained the two tracks proved to be the first number one by a British female solo artist (if only for a week, after which it was dislodged by Bowie’s
Scary Monsters)
.

For me,
Never For Ever
was only a very small improvement on
Lionheart
, solely on the basis of ‘Babooshka’, with its irresistible chorus, and ‘Army Dreamers’, which benefited from a pleasing acoustic guitar motif and wasn’t over-arranged, even though its centrepiece was an annoyingly coy lead vocal. ‘Violin’, with its balls-to-the-wall guitar solo, dude, contained more vocal mannerisms than Lene Lovich managed in her entire recording career. ‘Egypt’ similarly evoked a mental patients’ cabaret. If Kate actually stayed in her lower register for several bars in succession in ‘The Wedding List’, she more than made up for it with the munchkin backing vocals of ‘Blow Away (For Bill)’, which pretty much forfeited any chance the song had of being touching. ‘All We Ever Look For’, featuring a synthesiser pretending to be someone whistling, timpani (just, apparently, for eccentricity’s sake), and footsteps walking back and forth across the stereo landscape, recalled Brian Wilson at his least accessible.

* * *

The mountain of flesh and Cyril rang (they’d got my number from directory enquiries!), and invited me to lunch at their home. I told them I’d feel awkward, not having been invited by Nicola herself. They said I shouldn’t, as it would be only the three of us. Nicola was … away.

If anything, the mountain of flesh was even huger than the first time I’d visited, but also very much more welcoming. Her interactions with her poor husband reminded me of my own parents’ no less than before. “Cyril,” the mountain of flesh decreed as soon as he’d admitted me to the house, imploring me under his breath for a fag, “why don’t you go out in the garden and smoke a few fags or something?”

“Because I haven’t got any, love,” he finally managed, warily. “When did they stop being forbidden?”

She ignored the question and rang a little bell on the little table beside her. What looked like a proper English butler, but was probably just a newly retired neighbour enacting a fantasy of submission, appeared. “Smithson,” she said, “you will roll my husband three cigarettes.”

“I’m afraid I’ve quit smoking, madam.”

“You’ve done nothing of the sort, Smithson. Three cigarettes. And we will have our starters now.”

Smithson, blushing, led the excited Cyril, who seemed unable to believe his good fortune, out of the room.

“You’re probably wondering why Smithson didn’t answer the door,” she correctly surmised. “What, and deny Cyril the exquisite
pleasure of trying to cadge a fag? But enough of Cyril. We were surprised not to have seen you around. It was our impression that you rather fancied Nicola, unseemly though it certainly was for you to do so, given the discrepancy in your ages.”

I mumbled the usual lies about having been busy. She demanded to know what I’d been busy doing. Attending to personal business, I told her. But still she came, wanting to know what sort of business. Watching
Fab Lab
and overeating, I thought. “I’m afraid I’m going to leave it at personal business,” I said, smiling, disliking her.

She sighed. Smithson tiptoed into the room with a trayful of food. “Not yet, Smithson,” she said. “Do send my husband back in.”

“Very well, madam,” Smithson sighed, hating her. “He’s only halfway through his second fag, though, madam. Shall I …”

“Now
, Smithson,” she interrupted him emasculatingly. “Just now!”

Poor Cyril reeked of his truncated pleasure, but I soon twigged that was the whole point. The mountain of flesh fanned the air in front of her and pulled a face. “What a vile, vile, vile habit! Honestly!”

“I’m sorry, darling,” Cyril began. “It’s a very difficult habit to …”

“Shut it, Cyril. And keep it shut!”

He shivered with humiliation and clasped his hands in front of him, head bowed. I felt right at home. “I won’t beat about the bush,” the mountain of flesh said, turning back to me. “I should like to start seeing rather a lot of you, your time-consuming personal business permitting, of course.”

“Well,” I improvised, “when Nicola gets back from wherever she is, I expect you and Cyril and I will indeed be seeing …”

“As of 48 hours ago, she’s at a fat farm,” the mountain of flesh interrupted, picking three large bonbons from a huge box beside her. “In California. It’s said to be the best in the world, with an incomparable rate of success, and its own jargon. I do know it’s costing Cyril a bloody fortune. She’ll be there several more weeks.

“But Nicola isn’t a part of this particular equation. It’s you and me I’m talking about. For whatever sordid little reason, you’re attracted to fat women. They don’t come any fatter than me. On her return, if this place is all it claims to be, Nicola will be only a fraction of her former size. Hence, it’s obviously me you want to have an affair with.”

Leering, she first pulled her top sheet down and then the hem of her dressing gown up, revealing herself to be wearing black nylons with lace tops. I thought I might faint. I hoped I would.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of me since we met,” she said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t fantasised about diving into me, as though
into a heated swimming pool. Because I simply won’t believe you.”

I was vaguely conscious of Cyril, where he stood, gasping. But I had to devote most of my attention to willing enough blood to my brain to keep me standing.

“I’m very flattered,” I finally began.

As you know already, it was hardly as though I hadn’t been yearned after in my time, inconceivable though that might have seemed to anyone who saw me that day, or who’d known me as a kid. Just before and during my tenure as the face of Marcel Flynn, I’d turn up at the dentist for my biannual cleaning and all the hygienists would suddenly remember they had appointments they wanted to confirm out in the reception area. Returning from the gents’ in a restaurant, I’d stop conversations in mid-word at tables where only women were seated.

At the ends of two job interviews (for soul-destroying temporary office jobs), my female prospective employers asked me to stand up and turn around for them. Having not been noticed at all when I yearned for it most, I had to admit that I sort of enjoyed being objectified, and believed I could understand why some women enjoyed being lap dancers. Indeed, when I found out how much Chippendales dancers could earn in tips, I actually rang them up to find out about auditioning, only to learn they wanted guys who could dance and had well-developed pectorals. Dreamboat though I seemed suddenly to have become, I was disqualified on both counts, unless, on the former, they counted the tentative foxtrot I’d done at junior high school sportsnites.

“You may excuse yourself, Cyril,” the mountain of flesh snapped at her husband, who bolted without further encouragement.

“He’s headed for the loo,” the mountain of flesh sighed, “for some feverish self-stimulation. This was all for him, you know.”

I knew no such thing.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Herskovits. You’re attractive enough, I suppose, in a sort of vulgar, film starrish way, but I’m a one-man woman, and Cyril’s that man. Since I got like this, conventional coitus has been pretty much out of the question. For him, my trying to pull someone right under his nose is the next best thing, bless him.”

It was confusion I was woozy with now, and not revulsion. She sussed that as well. “He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I mean, I really do dislike smoking, and really do wish he wouldn’t, but the disdain and sarcasm and harshness? All for him. He asks for them. When we first started, I thought it was … perverse, I suppose, treating
someone you loved like that. But isn’t real love giving the other person what delights him most?”

* * *

Chastened, but enlightened too, maybe a slightly better man for the experience, I proceeded to my second meeting of Overeaters Anonymous. All the originals except Nicola were there, the hostile ones no less hostile than the first time, along with a pair of notable new additions. The more enormous was the more notable. She’d made herself up to look newly exhumed, with very pale pancake make-up, dark purple lips, and violet eye shadow. Her opaque contact lenses were the colour of milk. She wore as much eyeliner as the Mexican gang girls of my youth, but hadn’t been content merely to outline her eyes with it. She’d also used it to draw upside-down crosses on the outside corner of each eye. She’d braided her long hair, and then tied multiple long pieces of fluorescent pink yarn to each braid. Her clothing combined filmy black see-thru bits with PVC with black fishnet. It looked as though she’d slashed her stockings with a razor before putting them on. The shoes Boris Karloff wore as Frankenstein’s monster were dainty and feminine compared to her boots, with their seven-inch crepe platforms.

She wasn’t going to have to change for Halloween. In her sort of desperate, please-notice-me way, she was magnificent.

Her sidekick was far less so. She’d dyed her hair jet black, lavishly outlined her eyes, and was wearing rings not just in both nostrils, but at the outside corners of both eyebrows as well. She’d skipped the pale foundation make-up, though, and thus looked the very picture of robust good health compared to her chum. She might have bought her clothing, all black though it was, at British Home Stores.

But the main difference was in how they carried themselves. The more striking one’s body language said she was quite happy to be the centre of attention. Her sidekick’s was that of a lifelong wallflower, one quite accustomed to being ignored while pairs of blokes chatted up her more notable friend. I wanted to go over and embrace her, but the look in her eyes when they briefly engaged my own said I ought not to.

It turned out this was their first meeting, and for their attendance to have been the idea of the more striking one, who called herself Dahlia, and weighed 15 stone even though she wasn’t quite five feet tall. Her major weakness was melted butter apparently, into which she loved to dip everything she ate.

She introduced herself quite volubly. At 13, she’d shown remarkable
gymnastic ability, and there’d been talk of sending her to Eastern Europe to train with a top coach. But then she broke her collarbone and discovered that she liked dancing even more than gymnastics, and singing better than either. By 14, she was winning every karaoke contest staged in Lewisham/Southwark/Greenwich, and by 15 was singing and dancing in the chorus of a West End show, earning more than her butcher father. After an aide to one of the hottest managers in pop saw her in the show, she found herself shortlisted for the mixed group of five the manager was putting together. Of the nine girls competing for three slots, she finished fourth, but no sooner had she talked the West End show into taking her back than one of the three girls chosen for the group was discovered to have a child, and was sacked.

“I was actually stupid enough to be over the moon about it,” she said, twisting a strand of fluorescent pink yarn around a finger. “If I’d known what lay in store for me, I’d have run out and had a sprog or two of my own.”

Crinolyn, the bolshy mum of teens, wasn’t much amused by this. Dahlia’s sidekick, whose name and weight we still didn’t know, and would wind up never knowing, noticed, and turned out to be more aggressive than her defeated expression might have suggested. “What’s your fucking problem, you great fat cow?” she asked Crinolyn. Whereupon both of them got to their feet as quickly as women of such immensity can, and began lumbering menacingly toward one another, only for heroic Graham, our leader, to waddle between them.