Waiting for Kate Bush (2 page)

W
HEN I first moved into Mrs. Cavanaugh’s boarding house nearly two years ago, I wasn’t yet morbidly obese, and thus little trouble. I got down to the dining room without a trace of assistance. I hadn’t realised definitively that there never would be a place for me out in the world, just as there never had been, not really, and I even managed the odd walk on a summer evening. But then I encountered Bharat and what he called his posse because the rap thugs he saw on MTV would have done.

There were five of them, and they were out for blood to avenge the beating of an Afghan waiter in Leeds the week before by a trio of Leeds United reserves. You might have imagined that they’d have targeted other white footballers, but they hadn’t the danglies. It was junior school students and old people Bharat and his mates victimised, the lame, the halt, the blind – and people like me, people who clearly wouldn’t give them much of a scrap. In this, of course, we were very much kindred spirits. It’s always been my custom to antagonise only those clearly even less ferocious than myself. But our kinship was lost on Bharat’s posse.

My destination was the Costcutter on the high street. I needed bickies. Over the course of a typical evening, I had by that time taken to eating a great, great many, as I had in childhood. The posse were obviously trying with all their might to look menacing, but it wasn’t working very well, and when they didn’t call me a disgusting fat cunt as I waddled past them, but just snickered tentatively, I presumed I was in no danger. But my ignoring the snickering apparently confirmed my passivity, and the two nearest the door stepped in front of it with their thin brown arms folded across their chests. “Where do you suppose you’re going?” the one with the wispy moustache challenged me in a
voice too high-pitched for effective challenging.

“Muslims only, this store,” his companion asserted, lisping slightly, “or at least Asians.”

If I’d told them to fuck off, they probably would have. But I did some quick computations and decided I’d be able to live with myself if I backed down on the basis of their being so numerous. I shrugged and turned to waddle back down the hill.

My shrugging emboldened them. “This,” the one I would later learn was Bharat announced, “is for that waiter bloke in Leeds.” He kicked me between the legs, but not very well, and I hardly felt a thing. But then one of the others hit me in the back of the neck with a brick. I dropped to my knees and the lot of them were all over me, punching and scratching and kicking, whooping excitedly. One of them got his thumb under my sunglasses and into my right eye, and it hurt terribly. A couple of them proved better kickers than Bharat himself. I pitched face forward onto the pavement. I got kicked in the right cheek, and stomped upon. They spat on me. One of them put his knee in the middle of my back and tried to pull out a handful of my hair. Another demanded, “When are you going to call somebody a Paki again?” My telling them I’d never called anyone a Paki in the first place only made them more furious.

“There’s only one thing we hate more than racists,” one of them revealed, “and that’s white bastards that pretend they’re not.” And then I lost consciousness.

I’m exaggerating slightly. None of them actually touched me. But I could see in their eyes what they would have liked to have done.

After that, I stopped going out, and eventually, as I got fatter and fatter, stopped even going down to eat with the others. I had to order the gift I sent Kate Bush every week out of a catalogue, or on-line, and felt terrible about it. I felt sure Kate would begin to notice that my choices had come to lack the personal touch that had characterised my earlier ones, but she was gracious enough not to complain. Of course, I’d never heard from her about the earlier gifts either. Sometimes I wondered if I were shipping them to the right address.

Mrs. Cavanaugh came up to warn me not to bother to ask that my board be reduced because I was eating so much less, as she’d have let my quarters to someone prepared to pay full room and board if she’d known my intentions. As though she were likely to find a more fervent fellow Kate Bush fan than I! I’d intended originally to live in London, saving myself long, expensive journeys to gigs on crowded trains full of commuters who’d glance at me in a way that made me painfully
self-conscious. But then I discovered in one of the nine electronic Kate Bush newsletters to which I subscribed that Mrs. Cavanaugh’s boarding house, a stone’s throw from Kate’s native Bexley, welcomed quiet, mature, non-smoking Kate Bush fans, and I could as easily have lived elsewhere as I could have made my living as a Baby Spice lookalike.

The afternoon Mrs. Cavanaugh and I met, we chatted happily for nearly three hours about Kate and what she meant to both of us. I hadn’t met anyone with more interesting insights into Kate’s life and work since the last big English Katemas, in 1999. And she promised that one of her two existing boarders, Mr. Chumaraswamy, loved Kate even more than she herself did, and she’d named the two younger of her three children Gilmour (after the Pink Floyd guitarist, Kate’s crucial early benefactor) and Catherine, Kate’s full Christian name. She predicted that I would find Mr. Chumaraswamy’s theory about why Kate spelled her name with a K rather than the C from Catherine extremely interesting. I was so keen to move in that I left the Vauxhall bed-and-breakfast for which I had paid to the end of the week three days early.

When I admitted to Mrs. Cavanaugh that I’d stopped coming down to meals not because I wasn’t hungry – I was absolutely ravenous at all times – but because I could no longer get through my door, her tone changed. “I’m not sure I understand, love,” she finally admitted with the utmost gentleness. “Why not?”

“Well, just look at me,” I blurted. “I can just barely get out of bed to use the toilet anymore. By the time I get into the loo, I’m huffing and puffing so hard I think my lungs might explode. I’ve seen people like me on television. The fire brigade has to come to get them down out of their bedrooms. They have to use a special crane.”

Confusion and kindness swirled in her gorgeous hazel eyes, so near, I’d always imagined, to the colour of Kate’s own. She shook her head sadly. She made a soft clucking sound and wondered, in an accent very much thicker than her customary one, “Is it winding the widow Cavanaugh up you’re doing, love?”

I began to cry, almost imperceptibly at first, or so I hoped. The widow Cavanaugh probably wasn’t 50 yet. “If only it
were
a windup,” I said. If only. The floodgates shattered. I sobbed. When she held me, I sobbed even harder. By the time I finally stopped, her jumper was drenched.

She began bringing my meals up to me. She told me she intended gradually to reduce my portion size so that I’d be able to attend a meeting of Overeaters Anonymous. Her late elder brother had been an
alcoholic, and AA had saved his life (only for lung cancer to snatch it away from behind when he was 51, six years sober, and not looking). She was a great believer in 12-step programmes.

I didn’t want to go. I made a joke of it. How, I wondered, do they propose to get enough of us through the door to constitute a meeting? She didn’t laugh. She gave me the same gorgeous kind confused look as the night I confessed to needing the fire brigade with a crane to get downstairs. “They’ll find a way,” she said with the utmost gentleness. “They’re experts in these matters.”

The next four days when she brought my meals up, she took care to point out how small the portions were. “We want you slim enough to be able to attend the OA meeting.” I implored her to be reasonable. It was inconceivable that in 96 hours I’d be able to fit through the door, or down the stairs. Her house was in jeopardy if I even tried. But she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

She served me an early supper on the night of the meeting. I’d have killed for an orange-flavoured KitKat by that time. Her sons Duncan, born six years before the release of ‘Wuthering Heights’, and Gilmour arrived to transport me. I supposed they’d hired a lorry. I’d met Duncan, an architectural reclaimer, before. He had some of the best teeth I’d ever seen in a Briton. I found out later he’d lost the originals in a car crash, and had them replaced with his insurance settlement. He wasn’t one to look you in the eye very often. His brother, 12 years his junior, made rather less than a Herculean effort to hide his annoyance at having to help get me out of the house.

Their mum had helped me get dressed. It had taken a very long time. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, worrying that at any second it might splinter beneath me, when the brothers turned up. We all shook hands. The prematurely balding Duncan didn’t look me in the eye, and had a handshake better suited to a stockbroker than one who made his living removing fireplaces and cast iron bathtubs from derelict Victorian properties. Gilmour, prolifically pierced and tattooed, asked if I was all right, but generically, and made no secret of his displeasure when I wondered, “So how do you propose we do this?”

“How about if you just walk down the bloody stairs?” he said, pointedly. In the corner of my eye, Mrs. Cavanaugh shot him a look that made him sigh in resignation.

The three of them descended the stairs ahead of me backwards, their six hands at the ready. I could never have forgiven myself if I’d stumbled and crushed them all to death, and was very deliberate. My fellow boarders materialised to wonder what the fuss was all about. By the
time I reached the bottom of the stairs, I was gasping for oxygen and as damp as Djakarta under my clothes, but too elated to mind.

They hadn’t hired a lorry, but come in Duncan’s transit van. I told them I’d never get in. Gilmour rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath. His mum glared at him. “Suppose we just have a go,” Duncan suggested gently. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the van had wound up on its side. Miraculously, it remained upright. I was even able to sit in the front, beside Duncan.

I was appalled to discover that it wasn’t a Kate cassette he nudged into his deck, but something by one of those comic book heavy metal bands with a name designed to appeal to 15-year-old boys homicidally furious because their hormones were simultaneously screaming at them to reproduce and making them so hideous with acne that no girl would come near them. Between songs, I learned that we were listening to The Mutilators’
Hounslow Chainsaw Massacre
. After the next song ended, I asked if we could listen instead to Kate.

“Of course we can,
me ould segotia,”
Gilmour assured me from the cargo area. “Over my lifeless fucking body. Or maybe we could have a bit of Tori Amos.”

I think he knew he’d said the cruellest thing one could say to a Kate Bush fan. Even John(ny Rotten) Lydon apparently agreed.

A couple of years before, Lydon, accompanied not only by his long-suffering bride, but also by a bewildered-looking old gentleman who might have been his dad, and a minder, turned up at some
Q
magazine awards show on a ragman’s cart. He’d filled out over the years, but had retained all his original animosity for that which sprang from his own follicles. What could you say of a fellow whose hair looked more ridiculous at 46 than it had at 21? That he was trying too hard?

Well, that description wouldn’t have suited Lydon, whom I’d thought one of the great wits in his Sex Pistols days, but who hadn’t troubled himself to update his act in over 25 years. When it was announced that he’d won an award for inspiring others, he went up on stage to snarl and vituperate exactly as he might have in 1979. He used very naughty words as he declared himself the personification of the English working class. I felt sure that he’d expel gas loudly, orally, if not rectally, and was relieved to be mistaken. And then, after begrudgingly thanking the entourage with which he’d arrived and half-heartedly trying to give his award away (this in front of Liam Gallagher, the king of ungraciousness, a man who’d once threatened to give himself an enema with his Brit award statuette), he acknowledged Kate Bush. He called her music fucking brilliant, and was applauded for it.

Seemingly trying to recycle one of the tiredest riffs in the
Wayne’s World
lexicon, seemingly referring to Kate’s infamous reluctance to confer a new album on those of us who adore her, he asserted, “We
are
worthy,” and the massed celebs tittered obligingly. Later the two of them were photographed together, Kate looking radiant with pleasure, Lydon as though trying with all his might to disguise his own. And what better way to keep it under wraps, when the press converged on them, than to launch into an attack on “Torrid Aimless,” whom he sneeringly characterised as a brazen imitator. For those of us who adore her – and apparently Lydon is one of us – there is only The One True Kate.

Better The Mutilators than Amos, I thought as the Cavanaugh brothers and I continued on our way, and best silence. But of course we live in a world in which better is almost always the most for which we can reasonably hope.

A
S we pulled into the car park of the pub in which the meeting was to be held, I began to sweat again, this time from apprehension. I told the brothers that if they didn’t make me go through with it, I’d pay for them to drink all night.