Waiting for Kate Bush (21 page)

She was overcome by sobbing. The camera showed a succession of close-ups of the gobsmacked other contestants, the judges, poor Andrea’s friends and relatives. Her mum, in her wheelchair, was in such agony that she’d thrown her head back and was gasping to breathe. I could imagine that, in the control room, the director was already trying to envisage where he’d display the awards he’d win for this. It was great, great television.

Andrea regained the ability to speak, and addressed another of my favourite contestants, a short, spiky-haired girl from Somerset who was never seen in anything more feminine than combat trousers and T-shirts. “Chris, I know you fancy me. I’ve seen how you look at me. I’ve never done it with a girl. Until now, my religious beliefs would have made that impossible. But if you’ll vote for me, Chris, I’m yours to do with what you like. Chris,
please
. This means so much to me! This means everything!”

The sycophantic little Scots cheek merchant who was the show’s main presenter recovered his own power of speech, and told Andrea to wrap it up. She let out one last laceratingly plaintive
please
, and bowed her head. The blandly exquisite Genoa put her arm around her. Andrea put both arms around Genoa, buried her face in Louisa’s chest, and shook with sobs.

Those of us at home saw a great many commercials.

The show returned. There were seven contestants. When Genoa received her fourth vote, the one that propelled her to the next round,
she reached for Andrea to console her. But Andrea slapped her hand away. She addressed those into whose midst she would never be allowed to return now. “You bastards. You absolute bastards. Do you suppose that even one of you is singer enough to sweep the floor of my bloody dressing room?”

The little Scot took a tentative step toward her. She froze him with a look of the purest malice and turned back to her betrayers.

“If I live to be 100, I’ll find a way to hurt you as much as you’ve hurt me. I promise you.” And then a pair of security guards big enough to have moonlighted not only as bouncers at clubs, but as the clubs themselves, materialised to escort her away while I, misanthropic enough to have found a fellow human being’s meltdown terribly amusing, giggled until I gave myself hiccoughs.

I
THOUGHT I heard a giggle just outside my door, and wished I were 10 stone lighter so the floorboards wouldn’t creak if I tried to sneak over to it. Remarkably, they were fairly quiet anyway. I crawled very slowly, muffling my hiccoughs as I got nearer so whoever it was wouldn’t be able to tell I was approaching. I finally reached the door and got as quietly as I could to my feet. I worried that whoever it was would hear the pounding of my heart, but no one seemed to be scampering down the hall. I swung the door open.

It was a shaven-headed guy with an earring and a pierced eyebrow, sharp-featured, blue-eyed, early forties, hawkish, not someone whose pint you’d want to accidentally knock over, in a Ben Sherman sports shirt, pressed jeans, and immaculate Nike trainers. The top of a tattoo peeked out from above his collar.

I decided to pretend I was on my way to the loo. “Can I help at all?” I asked.

“I’m from … the council,” he said, lying transparently. “It’s my job to ensure that boarding houses … aren’t being used as havens for asylum seekers. Any around here, mate? If there are, you’d better tell me.”

Downstairs, Mr. Halibut poked his head out of his door. I saw no recourse but to invite my eavesdropper into my room. He seemed embarrassed by the idea, but finally shrugged and accepted. I asked if the council had provided him with any identification. He was so interested in everything in my room that he didn’t hear the question. He seemed to be trying not to fail to notice anything. I asked again. He furrowed his brow and reached for his wallet, only to think better of it.

I gently admitted my impression that he wasn’t from the council at all. I wouldn’t want to get anyone with a pierced eyebrow angry. But I apparently hadn’t been quite gentle enough. He glowered as though about to leap up and head-butt me. But then, to my infinite relief, he
broke into a big grin, an abashed one. “I’m a journo,” he admitted. “Well, a part-time journo, a moonlighter. I’m a builder mainly. But I do a bit of journalism after hours.”

It turned out he was a freelance contributor to
The News Of The World
, and had been since he’d happened to find himself in the same off-licence as Declan Worst and observed the supposedly recovering alcoholic former West Ham striker buying a gallon bottle of Stolichnaya. “They paid me £100 for that, and away I went.”

He hadn’t produced anything quite as juicy – or as lucrative – since, but had found he enjoyed the work, and certainly preferred it to “rowing with the missus,” as he put it. “She takes it personally that I’d rather be down the pub getting bladdered with mates or beating up asylum seekers than watching programmes about the bloody property ladder with her! I’d have divorced her ages ago if it weren’t for our prenuptial agreement.”

It occurred to me that it might have been him who’d rung before and sounded as though auditioning for Python. And I was right. But he’d done all the sheepish grinning he intended to do, and now glared hawkishly at me as though to demand, “What of it?” Similarly, when I asked his name, he demanded, “Who wants to know?” as though there were more than two of us in the room.

He was interested in me only to the extent that I might be able to provide some saleable goss about Dahlia. When I said I couldn’t, he looked furious, and then grim. “Another evening down the drain then,” he mused bitterly, toying with the hoop in his eyebrow, making me a little squeamish. “Geezers on the Liz Hurley team are making a grand a week, some of them. And here I am stuck in the bloody fourth division.”

He seemed in no great hurry to leave. “Where am I going to go? By the time I get back to Plaistow, they’ll be taking last orders. You know what the bloody tube is like.”

I took pity on him. I had a couple of bottles of Budweiser downstairs in Mrs. Cavanaugh’s fridge. It wasn’t any more flavourful or robust in London than it had been back in California – it tasted like beer-flavoured soda pop wherever you drank it – but it reminded me of home. I asked if he fancied a pint. He told me he’d sooner drink bloody gnat’s urine, but apparently only because he felt culturally compelled to. Then he eagerly accepted my offer.

Swill though it was, the Budweiser made him more sociable, and I felt able to ask if doing the sort of work he did ever made him ashamed. He was incredulous. “Why should it? People need things built, don’t
they? Without us, people would still be living in bloody lean-to’s, like bloody savages, wouldn’t they?” It turned out he accepted the odd building job. I gently pointed out that it wasn’t building I was referring to, though, but moonlighting for
The News Of The World
. He was hardly less incredulous. “Why should it?” he demanded again. “People need celebrities, don’t they? Gives them something glamorous and interesting to identify with, doesn’t it? Reading about whose husband Liz Hurley’s stolen, or which billionaires she got to be her kid’s godfather during their lunch break helps people get through their afternoons at the factory, dunnit?

“And if you’re asking me to feel sympathy for the celebrities, save your breath, mate. Nobody forced them to have a hit record or be in a popular film or TV show, did they?”

I was reminded, too vividly, of how, in a tabloid I won’t dignify by identifying, one Helen Sanderson, a couple of years before, had offered her readers a shock-horror exclusive. Kate, she speculated, was probably unaware that the six-acre mansion in Berkshire in which she and her guitarist partner Danny McIntosh were hoping to raise what the headline called their “secret son” Bertie far from public scrutiny had been the scene 30 years before of the kidnapping of a 19-year-old boy who lived there with his family. Just the sort of thing parents wanted to hear! But of course no one had forced Kate to have hit records.

“But what about their loved ones,” I wondered. “Dahlia told us the worst part by far was her parents and siblings and friends being harassed.”

Plaistow belched emphatically, and then waxed sarky. “And I don’t suppose any of them had the suss to say, ‘Hang on. Maybe this isn’t a brilliant idea,’ right? Well, bollocks. Anybody who’s lived more than a fortnight in this country knows that the tabloid press will quite happily trample anything and anybody standing between it and higher circulation.” He belched again, more loudly. Budweiser may have no flavour, but no one can say it isn’t carbonated.

I asked if I’d be seeing a lot of him. He groaned and said he certainly hoped otherwise. “Dahlia’s strictly Page 12 stuff. If I don’t get reassigned soon to somebody a little hotter, I’m thinking of packing the whole thing in and going to work for some Albanian mates of mine who import prostitutes from Eastern Europe.”

It’s an awful thing having no sensitivity to irony, never knowing, without a lot of winking or the like, if someone’s winding you up.

* * *

In the wake of the success of ‘Babooshka’ as a single and
The Kick Inside
re-entering the album charts, scampish former Malcolm McLaren sidekick Fred Vermorel unleashed
Kate Bush: Princess Of Suburbia
, conceived, he’d reveal years later, as an absurdist novella written from the viewpoint of a pair of psychotic tabloid gossipmongers.

‘Army Dreamers’, thematically reminiscent of’ Oliver’s Army’, Elvis Costello’s far superior hit of the previous year, became the album’s third single, with ‘Passing Thru The Air’, one of the songs Kate had worked on in Dave Gilmour’s home studio years before, on the B-side. Mick Jagger, for whose expressively off-key singing on ‘Little Red Rooster’ Kate had by now graciously expressed great admiration, churlishly condemned it on
Roundtable
as not his kind of music, but acknowledged that Kate was very nice. Patronising bastard.

Not that the critics were wetting themselves praising the album. One, while acknowledging (incredibly!) that Kate’s melodic gift rivalled McCartney’s, dismissed the album as “perfection in a vacuum”. Elsewhere,
Sounds’
Tony Mitchell, later to move to the fetish-oriented
Skin Two
, sniffed, “It’s MOR, it’s show business, it’s dishonest,” in spite of the fact that it couldn’t have been less MOR on a bet. (Did he honestly believe this stuff to make few demands of its listeners?
Hello?
) Kate returned to the provinces for the first time since her concert tour for interviews and in-store appearances in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester (where she was thought to kiss over 600 fans), and Birmingham. Back in London, she arrived at her in-store appearance in Oxford Street to find a queue of fans extending halfway to Selfridge’s.

The drummer Charlie Morgan gently pointed out that she was now overusing the adjective
phenomenal
, as she’d earlier overused
amazing
, and she was mortified. Years later, it would be
incredible
she’d seem to use in every third sentence. Whatever her word of the moment, she didn’t much enjoy the process of being interviewed. Following McCartney’s lead (the interview included with his initial solo album was with himself), she told the fictitious Zwort Finkle, “I find it very difficult to express myself in interviews. Often people have so many preconceptions that I spend most of the interview trying to defend myself from the image created by the media eight years ago. Sometimes I find myself saying things to please them or just to give an answer. Sometimes I just burble complete rubbish, and sometimes I feel like a trapped animal. Quite often I go over an interview in my head afterwards and realise I’ve said something quite contrary to what I believe.”

* * *

Having found, in the harsh light of day, that the mountain of flesh’s assurances weren’t enough for me, I rang Cyril. My natural inclination, until my daughter was born, had been to care about no one but myself, and after she ceased to speak to me, I went back to it. But I found myself wondering if he was really all right in the face of the mountain of flesh’s cruelty.

Smithson the butler answered. “And whom shall I say is calling?” he asked when I requested Cyril. “‘Who,’” I reflexively corrected him. Not only a butler, but one who, in trying too hard to speak a butler’s impeccable English, spoke it peccably!

“I beg your pardon,” he said, censoriously. I explained that
whom
was the accusative form, that it needed to be the object of a verb or preposition, as it was not in the sentence
Who shall I say is calling?

“Listen, mate,” he said after a thoughtful silence, during which he seemed to have decided that he could speak to me candidly, “Fucking him or fucking her, all right? Just tell me which one you bloody want.” I simultaneously liked that he felt he could address me as himself, and was devalued by it.

Cyril sounded not merely all right, but positively chirpy. He wasn’t content to assure me of his well-being, but insisted we meet for a kebab or a drink. I found the prospect slightly unnerving, though. I can’t bear people smoking around me, and out of the mountain of flesh’s sight, he would surely be a little chimney. Nor could I imagine what we’d say to one another for as long as it took to eat a kebab, since our previous conversations had consisted almost entirely of his trying to blag a fag and my reminding him I don’t smoke. I told him I was awfully busy. I reminded him that getting around wasn’t as straightforward for me as it was for people with normal proportions. “Bollocks,” he whooped happily. “We’re meeting and that’s all there bloody is to it.”

I’d once smoked myself. I’d worked as a teenager clearing dirty dishes from restaurant tables. The waitresses I assisted always had cigarettes burning in ashtrays in the kitchen, and I loathed the smell. But then, when I went to university, I realised that no one was paying much attention, and that this was a perfect opportunity for me to cultivate a vaguely reckless, dangerous image out of the view of classmates who’d either seen me or heard about me being fed grass.