Waiting for Kate Bush (40 page)

The boys leered at me for an eternity before the FCUK T-shirt one finally turned back to Cyril and laughed, “Looks to me like you’re in this alone, mate, unless Gajendra fancies a bit of the action.” Gajendra had been inching away on hands and knees since Cyril’s intrusion. One of the girls snickered.

“Alone suits me right down to my toes, sonny,” Cyril told him, their eyes still locked. “And you’re not man enough to call me mate.”

They stayed like that for a couple of millennia, no one moving, nor even blinking, the Asian and spiky-haired ones waiting for their leader’s signal to pull Cyril down from behind, still no one moving, my heart trying to beat through my chest, my mouth the Gobi Desert, my palms a swamp.

“He’s a nutter,” the FCUK T-shirt one finally decreed. But he took a nearly imperceptibly small step backwards as he did so, and his doing so seemed to make both the Asian and spiky-haired one an inch shorter. One of the girls sighed. It was all over but the shouting.

“And a fucking meddler,” the spiky-haired one said, turning his back on Cyril, turning back towards the road.

“You had your chance, sonny,” Cyril, still motionless, told the FCUK T-shirt one, “and you didn’t take it. One more syllable out of any of you and I’ll embarrass you in front of your girlfriend and your mates.”

FCUK T-shirt wasn’t locking eyes now. Now he was giving Cyril the quickest, most furtive little glance. And one of the girls was whining, “God!” and then tsk-ing. I recognised it as the universal mating cry of the teenager trapped in an unfair world.

“Got much homework tonight?” Cyril asked FCUK T-shirt. FCUK T-shirt, confused, dared another glance, and then shrugged. “Well, now you’ve got a bit more, all three of you, you and your mates. You’re going to write a letter to Govinder or whatever his name is, a letter of apology. You’re going to tell him how sorry you are for having been complete wankers.”

“Bloody hell!” the spiky-haired one gasped, but not at a volume that anyone would have interpreted as representing genuine resistance. It was more along the lines of the girl’s whining.

The FCUK T-shirt boy looked on the verge of tears. Oh, how I would have adored to see him burst into them. But he held them back as he blurted at Cyril’s knees, “Me dad’s well hard.”

It was Cyril’s turn for snickering. “Is he? Well, I’m harder. We’re coming back here, me and my mate, in the next few days. If Govinder tells me he hasn’t got all three letters, you’re going to be three very sorry boys. Your old man can be Vinnie bloody Jones for all I care.”

The boys shuffled off with their heads down. The girls let them go. When they were around 20 feet up the road, FCUK T-shirt looked back at us. I knew he wanted to show Cyril his middle finger, or shout something, but in the end he realised it would only make him look more of a twat.

I
HAD never loved a man as I loved Cyril on the train home from Camberwell. Naturally, as soon as the danger was past, I got terribly brave, but managed not to say something I’d have hated myself for, managed not to claim that if the Asian or spiky-haired boy had tried anything, I’d have leapt right into the fray. Cyril made no reference to my having let him down. He referred to what
we
had done, to how
we
’d made a bloody good start on our business. I wanted to put my arms around him. I wanted him to have been my dad.

He dozed off before we got to Clapham Junction. I thought at first he was remarkably relaxed, but then realised how much energy it must have taken just to stand there unflinching under FCUK’s chin.

When he woke up, he confirmed my impression. “There’s no way on earth I could have handled them on my own,” he said, the fact of his having had to calculate those odds shaming me back to the womb. “If one of yours [here it felt as though he realised how he’d hurt me, and was trying to restore me to wholeness] had walloped me from behind, it would have been over, wouldn’t it? But it isn’t to do with anything real, like strength. It’s all to do with front.

“When it first started, everybody’s bloody adrenal gland was in overdrive. But there’s almost always somebody giving too much thought to the consequences, and when you do that – when you start trying to think how much it could cost you if you get a tooth loosened or a contact lens knocked out – your brain sends a signal to your adrenal gland saying, ‘Maybe this isn’t a good idea.’ The second that happens, your adrenal shuts off. You saw it! You saw that at a certain point I could have said anything to them. It was all over by that point. A human being can’t fight without a certain level of adrenaline in his bloodstream.

“What we call courage is in fact the ability to make your mind go blank when it wants to start calculating the seriousness of the danger you’re in.”

I felt giddy. It was as though the key to the door that kept all my self-loathing in was in reach. My voice trembled as I asked what the trick was.

“Well,” he said, “blank probably isn’t the best word. Minds don’t actually go blank. The trick is getting it busy with something other than the danger. What I did today with those little shitewallets was see if I could remember all the thanks and special thanks on Kate’s
The Dreaming
album. And I did.”

I found that hard to believe, and it showed. He smirked at me confidently and intoned, “Many thanks to: Graham Middleton, Jim Jones, Mike King, Steve Payne, Step Lang, Duncan McKay, Kay Hunter, Bob Parre and Brian Tench at Mayfair Studios, Nigel Barker and David Woolley at Air Studios, Chris Gibbons at Odyssey Studios and all at Advision and Abbey Road Studios. Special thanks to: Del Palmer, Jay, Paddy, Ma & Pa, Lisa, Hil, Andrew, Paul Hardiman, David Gilmour, Bill Whelan, Alan Murphy, Haydn and Dan-Dan the sushi man, Jon Kelly and to everyone who has helped to complete and inspire this album.”

“You can wipe that smirk off,” I told him affectionately. “You reversed Nigel Barker and David Woolley.”

“Bloody hell!” he fumed. “I did, didn’t I? I
always
do that! Bugger. But the really interesting thing is that it’s the one time she thanked Del before Ma and Pa.”

That was absurd, of course, but I thought his pride had been hurt quite enough, and managed somehow to hold my tongue.

* * *

For the Elton John/Bernie Taupin tribute album
Two Rooms
, Kate wryly chose examples of Taupin at his formidable worst. Hearing the tremulous little voice in which she sang ‘Rocket Man’, there were those who wondered why she hadn’t changed the lyrics – ‘Rocket Little Girl’, perhaps? – and others who found her musical invocation of the West Indies in the chorus a bit odd. ‘Candle In The Wind’ worked rather too hard at coming across celestial, but she sang the undeservingly ludicrous lyrics with the same tenderness she’d brought to ‘Don’t Give Up’.

Oh, Bernie. One would hope that a bloody astronaut would be “higher than a kite,” wouldn’t one? Taupin, master of metaphors! Am I alone in regarding the latter song’s central aspect as inherently ludicrous (an unsheltered candle would have its little hands full in a gentle breeze, let alone a wind, innit)? Poor Marilyn Monroe, barbiturate-addled head
case, known to have blithely menstruated all over her own furniture, known to have eagerly fellated all the slimiest studio bigwigs in Hollywood in her scuffling days, here celebrated for her grace and dignity.
Hello?
For me, “Your candle burned out long before your legend ever will [pick a tense, any tense!],” is like fingernails across a blackboard.

And now back to our book, in which we note that Australia adored ‘Rocket Man’, which proved Kate’s biggest hit there in decades. Julian Doyle, of ‘Cloudbusting’ video fame, directed a tasteful monochrome performance video of the song, featuring Kate pretending to play the ukulele (more about ukuleles later!) and a flickering candle, shown at one point in close-up, standing in for the recently deceased Al Murphy.

Sir Elton, not yet knighted, told an interviewer that ‘Don’t Give Up’ had helped him through the darkest days of his addiction to cocaine. The disproportionately popular English novelist Nick Hornby, who clearly hadn’t heard
This Woman’s Work
, pronounced Kate’s music “toxic enough to be burned”. A major, major British music magazine described hers as “a ditsy English convent girl voice”. Having released only the two Elton covers in the previous year, she was nominated for a Brit.

* * *

I arrived home from Camberwell feeling quite buoyant about what we’d accomplished, or what Cyril had, and got on the Internet to try to determine whether we would indeed be the United Kingdom’s first anti-bully vigilantes. It’s part of my nature to be very stalwart where no actual danger is involved. I had long ago promised myself to stand firm against Bill Gates and Microsoft even if the rest of the world capitulated. So it was Netscape I launched, rather than Internet Explorer. Even though it loads marginally faster, according to an anti-Microsoft screed I read in a magazine while waiting to have my teeth cleaned in San Francisco once, it wasn’t yet ready to browse when there was a great thumping on my door. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t home, as I’d reflexively switched on the TV on walking in the door.

It was Mr. Chumaraswamy, accompanied by a blazing-eyed big fellow in a turban and very long black beard, whom he introduced as Mohammed, and who had mastered the American petty gangster’s trick of turning a toothpick 360 degrees in his mouth with his tongue, and who, not encouragingly, declined to shake my proffered hand. He smelled of spices not common in the West. He was trying to hum ‘Violin’ from Kate’s
Never For Ever
album, a song not easily hummed.

Mr. Chumaraswamy dabbed at himself frantically with his handkerchief as he came in and sat down unbidden on my bed. “We’ve always
enjoyed a cordial relationship, have we not, Mr. Herskovits?” he asked me.

“Wonderfully cordial,” I agreed.

“I’ve gone out of my way to be considerate, have I not? And on those occasions when you have been otherwise, have I not gone out of my way to be tolerant?”

“Cut to the fucking chase, gov,” Mohammed suggested, in an accent that bore not the slightest trace of anywhere exotic.

“I have two requests – well, demands. They are quite non-negotiable, I’m afraid.” I’d never seen anyone sweat so prolifically. “First,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut, as though straining to move his bowels, but in fact struggling to remember the exact wording of the short speech he’d prepared, presumably with Mohammed’s help, “you will keep your fucking hands off my bird, Mrs. Cavanaugh. Second, you will immediately suspend your nascent anti-bullying operation.”

“Or he’ll pull your fucking esophagus out through your fucking jacksie,” Mohammed was delighted to finally be able to contribute, gold incisors flashing.

I could certainly understand the Mrs. Cavanaugh part, and actually found it rather charming that he would refer to her as his bird. How Swinging London! It was the second part that confused me.

“How on earth could you know anything about …”

Mohammed interrupted. “It don’t fucking matter, does it, mush? You’ll do like the gov says, or I’ll hurt you.”

Mr. Chumaraswamy, still dabbing feverishly, grimaced with embarrassment. “I’m sorry to have had to bring … my associate along,” he said, “but I couldn’t take a chance of your not listening.

“As for your question about how I know about your activities this morning, word travels quickly in the anti-bullying community. As luck, or your lack of it, would have it, I and my associates had intended to add Prang Hill to our list of client schools at the beginning of next month.”

Mohammed, pretty sure by now that I wasn’t going to offer any resistance, sat down at my computer. “Netscape?” he marvelled unhappily. “Who uses fucking Netscape anymore? Blimey.” I admitted to Mr. Chumaraswamy that I didn’t understand quite what was going on.

“Anti-bullying happens to be one of the fastest-growing grey market service industries in this country at the moment,” he said, “its growth obviously having to do with the government’s tacit encouragement. Native Brits have pretty much cornered the market in the Northeast. A Scots-Welsh cartel control Manchester and Liverpool. The Pakistanis
effectively own the Midlands, just as Eastern Europeans, mostly Albanians, dominate in the Southeast outside London. London itself remains pretty much up for grabs, with different groups seeming to have got the upper hand every week.”

“Blimey,” Mohammed muttered. He seemed to have found himself a site specialising in women with grotesquely huge breasts. “How does she fucking stand up?”

I admitted my confusion. If anti-bullying vigilantism were proliferating to the extent Mr. Chumaraswamy suggested, why did every other day’s newspaper carry accounts of another despondent young bully magnet’s suicide?

“Oh, my dear, dear fellow,” Mr. Chumaraswamy said sadly, as though he’d just realised he was addressing someone of severely diminished mental capacity, “surely you can understand that it’s very much in our interests to encourage the press to print such accounts. Having to turn a blind eye to especially vicious persecution of an especially fragile-seeming child isn’t something that any of us feels good about, I assure you. Indeed, I have personally found it difficult to get to sleep, even after a vigorous visit from Mrs. Cavanaugh, on numerous occasions over the past several months. But this is the high price we in the industry have reconciled ourselves to having to pay.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Mohammed said, pushing back from my table, clasping his hands behind his turban, savouring an image of an extraordinary blonde whose breasts filled my browser window. “Survival of the fittest, innit?”

“Now it could be,” Mr. Chumaraswamy continued, “that your impulse to try to protect the bullied was quite spontaneous, and possibly even noble. But I simply can’t – and won’t – abide freelancers. There’s too much at stake, fortunes to be gained or lost. My two children from my first marriage are studying computer science at universities in America. As I’m sure you’ve read, that’s a very expensive proposition.”

* * *

The Internet boomed, with countless hundreds of thousands more people getting on-line each month. A great many of them launched sites expressing their adoration of Kate. Some, to the later delight of biographers, attempted to compile every article ever written about her, often peppering them with editorial asides along the lines of “These music journalists are always so astoundingly preoccupied with making sure they’re coming off as cynical and hip and ‘cool’ in their readers’ eyes that they don’t even have the minimal courage to consider the
wonder of the natural world – as though love and Nature were only fads of the Sixties, now somehow ‘out of date’! Smug, patronizsing, supercilious jerk.” Not just protective, your typical Katefan, but fiercely so!