Waiting for Kate Bush (32 page)

With considerable trepidation, I asked if she’d look through my catalogues with me and help me pick out a gift for Kate. She wondered why I was sending a gift, since it was well past Kate’s birthday. I’d seen the confusion and concern in enough fellow Katefans’ eyes when I told them how much I spent sending her things. I knew full well that not everyone feels as I do, and tried to change the subject. I admitted to having heretofore sent only a couple of birthday bouquets. I made no mention of the 2,000 emails.

I knew people who would have described us as dating, but outside my bedroom, we saw one another only as boarding house proprietress and guest, and in a way that suited me perfectly. However much I loved our erotic relationship, the part of me that insisted, in spite of my grotesqueness, that I allow myself to be seen only with women Boys Who Could would envy wasn’t so sure the widow Cavanaugh looked right on my arm. She was over 50, and it was no consolation at all that she was less far over it than I. I thought of how, when 45-year-old Hugh M. Hefner first began courting one of his succession of huge-breasted young brunettes, she, aghast, informed him that she’d never been out with anyone older than 24. “Me neither,” he is said to have
replied. The part of me that needed other, better men to envy me would never be older than 14.

* * *

After
The Dreaming
, Kate wasn’t seen for a long while, and the
Daily Mail
asked its readers to believe that months of being stuck in the recording studio gobbling chocolate and junk food had caused her to balloon up to 18 stone. She moved into the country, or at least to Eltham, south-east of London, next door to bigger brother Jay and his family, and situated her piano so she could watch the clouds rolling up through the valley towards her as she composed. She resumed dancing, coming back into town to help launch Sky, the UK’s first satellite TV channel. By the dawn of 1984, the new studio was ready, and she began work on what nearly everyone but me (I prefer
The Red Shoes)
and Mr. Halibut downstairs agrees was her best album,
The Hounds Of Love
, with engineer Haydn Bendall, imported from Abbey Road.

Working at home suited her a treat. If she wanted to discuss something, she could do it around the kitchen table. If she wanted to get away from it all, she could walk her dogs Bonnie and Clyde in the garden. Bendall would later describe her remarkable transformation between control room and vocal booth. In the one, she’d be small and thoughtful. Then she’d step into the other and unleash a big, powerful voice you wouldn’t have dreamed three minutes earlier could come out of her.

Not having to keep her eye on the clock, no longer charged by the hour, she was free to be as obsessive as she liked about implementing her vision, whatever her vision might come to be. Bendall was surprised by how open she was to the ideas of others. Three years and more after
The Dreaming
, Kate’s fifth album,
Hounds Of Love
, was finally ready.

After convincing her that there would be lots of resistance at radio stations to the title ‘Deal With God’, EMI persuaded her to rename the album’s opening track ‘Running Up That Hill’. God only knows what she’d have been without them. She appeared on
Top Of The Pops
for the first time in seven years with much percussive accompaniment, and ‘Running’ got to number three, her biggest success since ‘Wuthering Heights’. At long, long last, she betrayed a wee trace of the diva, bringing her own make-up person, Teena Earnshaw (Catherine’s niece, later to win an Oscar for her work on
Titanic
, and just joking about Catherine’s niece), rather than using the BBC’s.
Kate Bush Diva Shock Horror!

At the gigantic launch party for the album, at the London Laserium, the Paul Newman-eyed Del was unmistakably Kate’s date, this after their having been a romantic pair for seven years. Naturally, the
tabloids found a way to make them suffer for their new candour, inducing another bassist who’d played on the album to slag Del, or at least pretending that he’d done so.

The first thing that struck me listening to the famous opening track, ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ was that Kate had finally stopped shooting herself in the foot insofar as arrangements were concerned – the loping rhythm that established itself immediately never relented, setting a wonderful precedent for the rest of the songs on what at the time was thought of as Side 1. It was also glorious to hear her singing in a proper adult register, though I, for one, could easily have done without the silly decorative background singing. (I have always believed that the singer wanted God to swap her circumstances with those of the antagonist to whom she was singing, but a major, major music magazine has gone on record as believing that she actually hoped to trade places with God. Behold the annoying ambiguousness of English pronouns! Behold that Kate’s lyrics were nearly as confusing as ever.)

The title track, which evoked the first album’s ‘Oh To Be In Love’ in its wariness of romance, was no less propulsive than ‘Running’, and hugely enjoyable. There were those who imagined the bombastic ‘The Big Sky’, in which she unleashed a couple of wonderful screams of the sort David Lee Roth would spend his career aspiring to in vain, to be an expression of her disdain for EMI’s discomfort with
The Dreaming
. If so, leave it to Kate to bewail someone’s failure to understand her in a song that defies comprehension. If not, forget I said that.

That she remained as … uncompromising as any pop recording artist extant was made clear by the opening line of ‘Cloudbusting’: “I still dream of Orgonon”. How could anyone who didn’t recognise that as the name of Wilhelm Reich’s laboratory and research centre have been anything but confused? I puzzled then and continue to puzzle to this day at the line “Your son’s coming out” at the end. If she hadn’t been trying for a pun regarding Peter Reich’s sexuality, why not “The sun’s coming out?” In any event, I liked the insistent cellos.

The Ninth Wave
suite of songs, about drowning, or a dream of drowning, or something, had moments of remarkable beauty. After ‘I Dream Of Sheep’, half again as gorgeous as even ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, though, it was mostly dauntingly confusing. I have tried many times over the decades to surrender myself to it, and my confusion always slightly exceeds my pleasure. The failure may well be my own, rather than Kate’s.

* * *

I went to another Overeaters meeting. It looked in the early stages as though it wouldn’t be worth the time. Dahlia wasn’t there, and Jez was moaning about his girlfriend moaning that they couldn’t afford to go anywhere very interesting on holiday since his record company had fired him. He didn’t fit in an ordinary coach seat. The only flights on which he could afford two adjoining seats were to places his girlfriend was fed up with. “She says she’d sooner stay home than go to Malaga again,” he said. “Well, I’m bloody sorry, but I happen to like Malaga.” Even Boopsie, normally fascinated by anything anyone said, was yawning.

“What do we think of the Maddox diet?” Crinolyn wondered. Nobody knew what she was talking about. It was apparently the latest fad diet to be embraced by Hollywood stars. It was like the Atkins diet, except it didn’t eliminate just carbohydrates from the diet, but protein as well. You could eat all the fat you liked. Crinolyn understood Geri Halliwell to have lost half a stone in two weeks.

“Just think,” Boopsie said dreamily, “getting to eat as much ice cream or cheese as you like, and washing it down with cream.”

“I think you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Graham the moderator laughed. “I think the idea is that after a couple of days you’d get thoroughly fed up with ice cream, and stop eating it. Which, if that’s all you’re allowed, means that you’d pretty much stop eating, full stop. Of course, how many of us could stick to that for more than a few hours?”

“If Geri bleedin’ Halliwell can do it,” Crinolyn demanded, “why can’t we?”

“Geri Halliwell can do it because she’s a glamorous celebrity,” Graham theorised. “She’s always got something going. It’s easy not to eat when you’re rushing from photo shoot to magazine interview to party to ship christening.”

“What ship has Geri ever christened?” Crinolyn demanded. “You’re just talking rubbish now. You’re just making it up as you go along.”

Then Dahlia turned up, looking this week as though on her way to work as an investment banker, that smart, that conservative. As usual, all else was shoved aside while she told us about her week, during which her weight had remained stable and she’d gone out with a Renault dealer from Surbiton who’d confessed he hadn’t dated a woman weighing less than 15 stone in his entire adulthood. Dahlia wasn’t so sure that anything would come of it. She’d told him she’d see him again on Wednesday night, but was seriously considering cancelling. He was fit enough, she supposed, but not very funny. She was one of those who considered a sparkling sense of humour not less indispensable than a taut little bum.

All of which had Crinolyn, who was probably grateful if she saw her husband sober two days in seven, rolling her eyes in disgust.

But she wasn’t the only one not enjoying listening to Dahlia. Neither was her still-nameless sidekick, whose folded arms and glower suggested a level of disgruntlement far beyond Crinolyn’s. Dahlia might have been a self-infatuated boor, but not entirely oblivious to what was going on around her. She interrupted her description of what she and the Renault dealer had ordered at dinner to ask her sidekick what was the matter.

I felt her pain. From the age of 15 until the time the girl who’d become my first girlfriend agreed to go out with me, I was myself a sidekick. Daring to imagine that one of their admirers might notice me, I insinuated myself into the entourages of a succession of good-looking, athletic, confident classmates – hating both myself for having done so and them for having things I hadn’t, and perhaps never would have. But I didn’t come to be perceived as attractive by association. The most that ever happened was that a girl would ask me, almost invariably without addressing me by name, to convey some important message to my more desirable friend. In junior high school, this was nearly enough, as being spoken to extracurricularly by a pretty girl in any circumstances was profoundly thrilling.
So this
, I used to marvel,
is how it feels to be normal!

I wasn’t much of a sycophant in my heart. Watching those on the periphery of whose entourages I clung playing football on Friday nights, I wished fervently they’d commit some horrific catastrophic blunder, or, alternatively, be injured. Of course, the one without the other wouldn’t have been of much use. Girls seemed to find boys who’d suffered painful injuries while fighting for the glory of the school fantastically sexy.

Justice may be blind, but poetic justice is a myth. At my 20th year class reunion, I should have found that the better-looking classmates whose favour I once grovelled to curry were fat and bald and divorced and alcoholic, stuck in jobs they hated, unable to understand their children, who hated them, while I was slim and successful, with a Michelle Pfeiffer lookalike on my arm. Poetic justice is a myth perpetrated by the same people, I suspect, who brought us religion, and used for the same purpose – to keep the have-nots from lynching the haves, or at least torching their Lexuses. The boys whose favour I’d curried all seemed reasonably content, and had lost none of their winning confidence, while I have hardly known a month’s contentment in this life, and am grotesquely obese.

Looking through my yearbooks after the event, it occurred to me that I was in most cases actually better-looking than they were at the time, and in all cases substantially cleverer, funnier, and more creative. It’s all about confidence, innit?

Behold my cravenness. I feel nearly as ashamed of insinuating myself into the entourages of better-looking classmates as I do for having failed to greet my grandmother the last time I saw her.

“T
HE matter?” Dahlia’s sidekick pretended to wonder. “You want to know what’s the matter? Nothing at all. Not a thing. Just because I thought I could count on you, and found out otherwise this week, well, that doesn’t mean anything’s the matter. Just because I was a bloody fool to imagine we were really mates, a big – very big! –starlike you and ordinary little me from Neasden.”

To her small credit, Dahlia looked mortified. “Oh, I was meant to ring this week, wasn’t I? Oh, I’m so, so, so sorry. It was just a mad week. I hardly had a moment to …”

“Sod your mad week,” her sidekick snarled resonantly. “That’s bollocks. I know how long it takes to make a bloody phone call. Forty-five bloody seconds.”

Graham mused, “I wonder if the two of you might be willing to save this conversation until after …”

“Shut it,” Crinolyn advised him, in a way that invited no debate. “I want to hear what she’s got to say.”

It was as though Dahlia’s sidekick was only now realising that the rest of the group was there. She flushed briefly with embarrassment, but then seemed to decide that she liked the idea of witnesses. “Two meetings ago,” she told us, glaring at Dahlia, “she told me she had a bloke for me, a make-up artist from one of the shows she’s been in. Well fit, she said, and not even gay. I’ve had too many mates set me up with blokes who took one look at me and suddenly remember urgent business at home to get my hopes up, but she was sure he’d fancy me. She said she’d described me, and that he’d seemed well keen.

“A week went by. At the end of the last meeting, I mentioned it to her. I made it sound like I’d just happened to remember, when in fact I’d been thinking about little else all week. She said oh, yes, and that she’d definitely give the bloke my mobile number this week. But she was too bloody busy.”

I knew it was going to happen, and it did. The anger under which she was trying to hide her pain got dissipated, and she burst into tears. “It’s always the likes of her, the pretty ones, the ones all the blokes fancy, who can’t quite find the time. And the ones like me, the ones nobody notices, the ones blokes leave standing out there alone on the middle of the bloody dance floor, who spend the week waiting for the bloody phone to ring. And it never bloody fucking does.” As she convulsed with sobs, Crinolyn, making clucking sounds of compassion, put her huge thick white arms around her.