Waiting for Kate Bush (4 page)

“Tell us a bit about yourself,” Graham suddenly said to me, and I nearly choked on my sparkling mineral water. Boopsie’s smacking me hard between the shoulder blades had no effect other than to make my back smart. Everyone seemed to get fed up waiting for me to stop coughing. There was much impatient tapping of huge thick fingers on tabletops.

“I come from America,” I was finally able to tell them, “originally from Los Angeles, California, and later San Francisco.” I wondered if I should point out that nearly all Brits mispronounce Los Angeles, which doesn’t, in fact, rhyme with
ease
. I quickly abandoned the idea, as I did that of pointing out that “Californian,” in correct usage, is never an adjective, but only a noun. (I was a repatriated Californian. One wouldn’t speak in a Californian accent, if there were such a thing, but a California one.)

More impatient tapping.

“I love Kate Bush,” I blurted. “Being nearer to her, in fact, is one of the reasons I moved to this country.” Their looking at me blankly inspired more blurting. “I find much of her later music inexpressibly beautiful. In my darkest hours, in my moments of peak despair, it gives me reason to live. A world in which music of such beauty exists can’t be intolerable. That’s how I look at it.”

“Blimey,” Crinolyn said, shaking her head, smirking. I could have strangled her on the spot.

“We have a special bond, Kate and I,” I said.

“A nutter,” I heard Jez chuckle under his breath to Graham.

“No,” I said, turning toward him. “Not a nutter at all. I’m not saying she sends me secret messages. I’m not saying I get radio transmissions from her through the fillings in my molars. Nothing of the sort, in fact. I’m saying that Kate’s music communicates with those receptive to it in an exalted way I’m neither able to describe nor would want to if I could, for fear of somehow cheapening the experience.”

“Don’t he half talk posh?” Crinolyn quipped to Boopsie. And it had always been so. The more nervous I become, the more convoluted my syntax. And how I’d suffered for it at school!

“Very interesting,” Graham, clearly keen to move on to other concerns, sighed. “Does anyone else have strong feelings about our Kate?”

“She’s rather too antic for my taste, I’m afraid,” Hermione admitted, “too in love with her own cleverness and audacity, wildly overblown. I can’t understand why, when she has such a gorgeous lower register, she’s chosen to sing so often in the voice of nine-year-old who’s just inhaled helium. In most cases, I can’t see how it serves the song.”

The helium line got a chuckle out of a couple of them. It was pretty clear I wouldn’t be adding Hermione to my Christmas card list. She clearly hadn’t heard any of Kate’s albums after
The Dreaming
.

Heartened by her audience’s response, she kept going. “She has a lot to answer for, hasn’t she, having opened the door here and on the Continent for the extremely mannered likes of Toyah and Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen, who in turn inspired that whole American school of bleating new wave kewpie dolls. There wasn’t a single one I could bear, except maybe Cyndi Lauper.”

“I remember her,” Graham recalled triumphantly. “Fabulous was our Cyndi. If Kate opened the door for our Cyndi, then she won’t have me to apologise to.”

Of the quintet of geezers who had come boisterously into the pub during Hermione’s querulous soliloquy, one had a shaved head; two of the others had twisted tufts of their hair into spikes like those popularised by one of the young singers who’d beaten Jez; four had receding hairlines. One, he whose eyes were unusually close together, had only one eyebrow, extending from the outside corner of his right eye to the corresponding corner of his left. They called one another
you cunt
and
you wanker
and roared with manly laughter at their own wit. They were the sort who thought nothing of paying £50 for a replica of the football shirts worn by the team they supported, even though the shirt brazenly advertised a type of mobile phone they couldn’t afford, and even though the team they supported – no, the team with which they lived and died – was made up of paid mercenaries of the sort who’d always got the sort of girl who wouldn’t even have spoken to any of the five, except maybe to tell him to piss off, paid mercenaries who’d have snarled at the five’s children had the children somehow got close enough to their limousines to beg for an autograph. I prayed they wouldn’t notice us.

Hermione wasn’t nearly finished. “In a great many cases,” she said, “I feel there’s a thick layer of artifice separating Bush from her listener. Marc Bolan sang in ‘Spaceball Ricochet’ about getting hooked by authors who spoke to him like a friend. Not only does Kate not speak to her listener as a friend, much of the time she doesn’t even speak to him as Kate, but as a character Kate’s playing! One can well understand
why John Peel said he can’t take her seriously.”

“She’s got
irie
chat as well, hasn’t she?” Boopsie whispered to Crinolyn.

But Hermione still wasn’t finished. “And what a frightful lyricist she is, if memory serves – vague, often solipsistic, nearly always abstruse …”

“Enough!” I could no longer keep myself from shouting. “For Christ’s sake, woman!” And there went any hope of the quartet of geezers not noticing us. They grinned mischievous, laddish grins at one another and headed over to gawk at us up close while guzzling pints of the latest watery American swill to be advertised mercilessly in the UK.

“If she lost eight stone, the blonde one would give Holly Vallance a run for her money, innit?” the one with the shaved head mused. It was as though he thought us monkeys, or deaf.

“Eight? You’re a cunt. I’d say at least 12,” a spiky-haired one asserted. “And since when did Holly Vallance become anybody’s standard of beauty? If she and the Appletons came into a pub from opposite sides, nobody would know Holly Vallance was bloody there.”

“It depends which Appleton you’re talking about,” the one with one eyebrow said. Guys like this, with blotchy, misshapen, frizzy-haired wives waiting for them at home – but not very attentively if there were a soap opera on – always had very strong opinions about the relative attractiveness of female celebrities, just as they’d had 20 years before when they sat together gnashing their teeth while the boys who’d go on to become paid football mercenaries chatted up the school’s most desirable girls.

Nicola, predictably, was absolutely trembling with shame, which didn’t go unnoticed by the one who was neither bald, spiky-haired, nor monobrowed, the real catch of the five. “Talk about your jiggling,” he marvelled. “There’s some world-class jiggling for you.”

Boopsie spoke up, but in a way guaranteed to fail, a way that presupposed there was even a trace of compassion among the five of them. “You’ve had your laugh. Now why don’t you leave us alone?”

“Who’s going to make us?” the taller of the spiky-haireds wondered, winning the admiration of the bald one. “You? Your two fat friends?” He looked pointedly first at Jez, who looked down at his own feet, and then at Graham, who shrugged and mumbled, “I have a heart condition.”

I knew this was coming. “Well, how about the normal one, then?” I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know he wasn’t referring to me. “How about
you, mate? You want to stick up for your disgusting friends? Cos if you do, I’ll wait for you in the car park.”

You can never leave the playground. No matter how old you get, it always finds you.

Crinolyn found the bottom of her second pint, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, belched, belched again, and addressed my antagonist. “How about if, instead of that, all five of you piss off before I bash your heads together until you won’t be identifiable except by dental records?”

“I’d like to see you try it,” my antagonist decreed defiantly, and very ill-advisedly.

Both the monobrow and the shaved head realised they’d just lost the moral high ground, though of course they wouldn’t have put it that way, and looked embarrassed. Nicola began to sob. “Well,” my antagonist challenged Crinolyn. “I’m waiting.”

“Jesus,” the shaved pate said, shaking his head, putting his hand over his eyes in embarrassment. “Let’s leave it there, Simon.”

“For fuck’s sake, you wanker,” the taller spiky-haired pointed out under his breath, “she’s a bint.”

It finally occurred to my antagonist to be embarrassed. He turned angrily back toward me. “Well, he isn’t, is he?” he blurted, looking as though about to take a swing. “A cunt maybe, but not a woman.” I pretended I didn’t hear him, and hated myself for it. But it wasn’t as though I’d arrived for the meeting exuding self-esteem.

“Let’s leave them alone,” the taller spiky-haired said, touching my antagonist’s elbow. “Let’s let them stuff their fat faces in peace.”

“If you’re not out of reach by the time I count 10,” Crinolyn said, “it’s dental records time.”

My antagonist struggled to think of something face-saving to say before he took his leave. His face was that of someone straining to move his bowels after three days of no fruit and insufficient water. Finally it came to him, or at least came back to him. “I’d like to see you try it.”

Crinolyn began getting to her feet, a process that threatened to last a while. His mates led my antagonist away before he could embarrass them further. I was relieved he was gone, of course, and infinitely ashamed of myself for having stood back while Crinolyn did the heavy lifting.

Our meeting proper finally got underway. It wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for. As we stood up and introduced ourselves, the rest had to say, “Hello, Graham,” for instance, as though we hadn’t already had drinks
and repelled bellicose yobbos together, which I thought quite twee. Graham spent most of his time unapologetically telling us about new recipes he’d discovered during the past week, never alluding to the effect of eating all the luscious dishes he described so lovingly. Nicola looked as though she were being tortured, which, in some key ways, she certainly was. Boopsie admitted that she needed to stay enormous to keep modelling for BHS, and everyone hated her for it. It occurred to me to ask if she thought BHS would make her redundant if she got supermodel slim, but I kept my lip buttoned. Crinolyn mentioned her weight only in relation to how difficult it made for her to catch her three defiant teenagers.

When I found out that addressing the group was strictly voluntary, I declined. Before we adjourned, I had to take everybody’s phone number and give them all mine. According to Graham, mutual support was the name of the game. We were all to feel free to phone one another at any time should we be struck by the urge to overeat. “But bother me when
East Enders
is on, or I’m having a row with one of my kids,” Crinolyn said, “and you’ll regret it big time.”

O
NCE home, I was too excited about the idea of Nicola’s losing a lot of weight and becoming my girlfriend to eat. I put off calling her and put off calling her and put off phoning her. I felt 15 again. When I finally managed it, someone patently not she answered, but I nervously blurted, “Nicola?” nonetheless.

“No, her mum. Isn’t it a bit late to be ringing?” It occurred to me that her mum probably wasn’t much older than I, and that I ought to hang up. But I just sat there mortified into silence. “Shall I see if she’s still up?” her mum wondered helpfully, her tone becoming rather gentler. I didn’t say no. The next thing I knew, I was on the phone with a sleepy-sounding Nicola, marvelling at how it’s possible to hear some people blushing over the phone. All that noisy blood rushing to her face!

She didn’t remember me at first. “You know,” I insisted, “from the Overeaters group.”

“Oh,” she wondered uncertainly, “the slim one who looks like that film star?” I wouldn’t have guessed that she had it in her to tease so cruelly, but my exhilaration at her remembering me trumped all else. “The one Crinolyn was having a go at?”

I invited her to dinner. She actually gasped with embarrassment. I felt almost as though I had the upper hand, which I recognised as a mixed blessing. At all previous times in my life that women (or men!) had allowed me the upper hand, I almost invariably came to disdain them for it, and treated them awfully. Who but one worthy of the worst imaginable treatment would even dream of granting me the upper hand?

“I don’t eat dinner,” she finally managed.

“Then we’ll go for a drink and a chat,” I said decisively, feeling as though I was impersonating someone. She was too embarrassed to resist.

I offered Gilmour and Duncan money to drive me over to collect
her. Gilmour was going with his friends to leer at pole dancers, though, and Duncan claimed his van was in the garage. I assumed it hadn’t been up to the task of transporting me, and was ravaged by guilt. Gilmour wondered why I didn’t take a fucking cab like anyone else. It occurred to me that he would probably always be thick. It’s not something one easily gets over.

I rang for a minicab, asking that they send the biggest one available. I have no idea how I managed to get in, but I got in. I suspect, in addition to The Knowledge, drivers are required to undergo sensitivity training. The guy didn’t bat an eye at the sight of me. He didn’t even offer any suggestions as to how I should position myself in the passenger compartment to keep from toppling his vehicle.

Nicola lived in Coldblow, in a road lined with trees and Citroëns. I wondered if one of her neighbours was a dealer who offered everyone in the neighbourhood an irresistible discount. There were, to be honest, a couple of Fiats too.

A tiny, normally proportioned, fastidious man whose bulky blue cableknit jumper was precisely the colour of his socks answered the door. He had awful teeth and the slightly off-balance look of one trying to conceal a bald spot with hair allowed to grow long on one side of the head, and then carefully combed over to the other. “Well, you’re not at all what I expected,” he marvelled. He offered me his hand, giggled nervously, and wondered under his breath if I had a fag. Before I could answer, a huge voice demanded from the lounge, “Are you going to have the simple courtesy to invite him in, Cyril, or leave him out there to freeze?” It wasn’t nearly as cold as all that.