Waiting for Kate Bush (43 page)

I wondered whom, beside Mr. Chumaraswamy, she might be referring to, and was flabbergasted to realise it must be me. Her use of the word
wonderful
had put me off the scent.

It occurred to me that making me read this was her way of getting to see how desperately she needed me. If there’s one thing in the world nobody wants, it’s to be desperately needed.

She seemed to read my mind. “Don’t worry, love,” she said. “I’m past hoping we might have some sort of future together. Have been for ages.” There was no hopefulness in her eyes, no ambivalence in her tone. I loved her for their absence. I hoped Mr. Chumaraswamy would cherish her as she deserved. “Keep reading,” she said.

“‘I have mentioned my love of Kate Bush’s music. Perhaps it’s
greedy of me, but I have waited many years for the incomparable pleasure of a new album, and now must concede that I haven’t the patience to wait any longer, having already waited over a decade. It pains me beyond my meagre ability to express to say that I have come to regard Kate as spoiled and self-indulgent, denying so many of us such intense pleasure.

“‘I wish I could say I’m bored senseless. Senseless would be an improvement. I’m bored to the point of every breath I take hurting, every bloody thought I think.

“‘I could go on and on. Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me that I ought to append a list of the email addresses of all those editors whose combined staunch indifference is what brought me to this state. In fact, I even wrote the letter that I hoped someone would be willing to send them on my behalf.

“‘You won’t be hearing from Aibheann Cavanaugh anymore. You may recall that she has proposed numerous articles to you over the past several months, but you were too busy to take any notice – or too lazy and complacent to investigate the work of anyone not already a member of your old boys’ network. In the face of her inability to get persons such as yourself to take five minutes of their precious time to confirm that she might indeed have made a substantive contribution to your section, in the face of her boredom and mounting financial desperation, she has taken her own life. At least a few drops of her blood are on your hands.

“‘But I’m pretty sure that most of them would simply ignore the email, or, at most, write back
sorry not fr us
. And I can’t bear the thought of the bastards ignoring me in death just as they ignored me in life. All I can say is I hope they all get inoperable cancers, and that no amount of morphine relieves the pain.’”

I had to stop again, as I couldn’t believe my eyes. She glared at me wordlessly. “You can’t let the bastards beat you, Aibheann,” I finally blurted. “You just can’t.
Nil illegitimus carborundum!
If you kill yourself, the people who hurt you most probably won’t even notice. And those who love you will be unnecessarily devastated.”

“And would that include you, Mr. Herskovits?”

She had me over a barrel. I’d sworn to myself after breaking up with my wife never to tell another woman I loved her, but what if my refusal left Cathy without a mum? “Of course it does,” I said.

It looked almost as though she was contemplating smiling. “I’m not going to top myself,” she said. “There are entirely too many wonderful books I’ve not had time to read and too many restaurants where
I’ve not yet dined, and more being opened every week. And I love you too.”

When was the last time I’d felt nearly so foolish? Could I even think back that far? “Then why,” I demanded, burning with anger, “did you write all that, for Christ’s sake?”

“It’s therapeutic,” she said. “My psychotherapist at the NHS suggested it. She said I should write the angriest letter I could possibly write, and then not post it, or even let anyone read it. She said it’s a good way to deal with anger. And she was right.

“You don’t really imagine I’d wish cancer on anybody, do you? I mean, in moments of peak despair, I might, in the same way that sometimes even the most loving parents will try to imagine what deliberately hurting their children might be like.”

“It isn’t the same thing at all!” I snapped, literally trembling with rage now. “Not fucking at all! In the one case, you’ve got people who’ve hurt you with their indifference. On the other, you’ve got a complete innocent. How is that fucking anything
like
the same?” Poor Mr. Chumaraswamy, the soul of tolerance, pounded on his ceiling, my floor.

“I’ve never seen you so furious,” Mrs. Cavanaugh said with a smile that contradicted her observation.

“I dare say you’d be furious too if I made you read …”

That was as far as I got, as she stood up and took off her jumper, revealing herself to be wearing her black lace corset under it.

“You’re joking!” I thundered, prompting more tapping from poor Mr. Chumaraswamy. But there was at least one part of me that got the joke in a big way.

“I’ve always wondered,” she said, managing coquettishness at 52 again, “what shagging you would be like if you were traditionally masculine for a change, instead of passive.”

A part of me wanted to evict her from my room to spite her, but it was the other part that won, the action film part, the part that wanted to make her whimper for surrender, whimper with delight.

I remembered how much fun virility could be.

A
N Australian newspaper – not the one that suggested that she owed it to her fans to pose proudly with the baby son Bertie she’d had with Danny McIntosh in either
Hello
or
OK!
(the choice was entirely her own!) – estimated that the £55 million she’d earned over the course of her career made Kate the second richest British pop chanteuse, after only Annie Lennox. Her wealth clearly hadn’t gone to her head. On meeting her, Don Black, who wrote the book and lyrics for the West End production of
Sunset Boulevard
, was gobsmacked to learn that she’d only ever attended one West End musical,
Godspell
, decades before. Accustomed to yawning megastars who’d been to absolutely everything, and got pretty jaded in the process, he was delighted in her childlike delight in the show.

She, Danny, and Bertie were said to divide their time between a six-acre mansion on a small river island in Berkshire, a vast Victorian mansion in Greenwich on a main road, but surrounded on three sides by impenetrable woodland, and a riverside penthouse in Battersea, with the loyal Paddy and his collection of musical exotica next door. Bertie was said by his proud mum to do a remarkable Elvis imitation. A good Elvis impersonator is rarely out of work.

The Belfast singer/songwriter Brian Kennedy ratified Black’s impression of Kate as down-to-earth and generous. As a kid, he’d been transported by ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, and sworn, if he ever got to make a record of his own, that he’d send her a copy, with a note of appreciation. On receiving his
The Great War Of Words
, she wrote back to express her great pleasure and even invited him to dinner. She not only answered the door barefoot, but also, when he and she and Del and Stuart Elliot went out for a Chinese, introduced him to crispy seaweed.

Good old Bob Mercer, who’d signed her to her original sponsorship deal with EMI, asserted that there were only two kinds of people –
those who loved her, and those who hadn’t met her. Sweet as everyone agreed she was, though, she seemed very much to be treading water creatively. With George Martin producing, she recorded a version of ‘The Man I Love’ for the
Glory Of Gershwin
album, with the gout-afflicted harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, whom she treated with great tenderness. She was said, over and over again, to be about to contribute a song to a Nick Drake tribute album that never materialised. She leapt out of a cake in a flesh-coloured body stocking at Rolf Harris’s 70th birthday party. I’m only joking. But she did attend it, and was photographed smiling at the birthday boy in a way that we would all like to be smiled at.

She was thought to have been observed in Harrod’s with Enya, of all people, shopping for Joanna Lumley’s OBE party. On another occasion, she was seen looking at Art Deco-style furniture with great interest. She was said to be producing two tracks for the master Celtic harpist Alan Stivell, for whom big brother Jay was writing lyrics. ’Twas said that she could teach the British intelligence, uh, community a thing or two about keeping a secret. She declined to produce Erasure.

The irrepressible Fred Vermorel presented a lecture at London’s Royal College of Art entitled
What I Did To Kate Bush
in which he revealed that he’d been inspired by Woody Allen’s
Stardust Memories
to go to her house without her knowing it and climb her drainpipe. Exactly the sort of thing a woman considering children wants to contemplate!

The local council asked her to open the restored Brontë Bridge (the first having been washed away by floods in March 1990) spanning the narrow stream in Haworth Moor. When she declined, they got Tori Amos instead.

I’m joking, and the truest things are said in jest. There were those who believed that La Amos wasn’t only the beneficiary of an unprecedentedly clever niche marketing campaign, but that the campaign had been suggested by market researchers’ analysis of Kate, to the American cover of whose
Kick Inside
the cover of Amos’s
Little Earthquakes
bore an unignorable resemblance. Would you like it if Kate toured more often, they’d been asked.
Oh, yes!
How about the lyrics being a little less confusing?
Oh, yes, please!
Well, meet Tori Amos.

At whose first gigs in the UK,
Vox
asked members of the audience what they thought. What they thought, by and large, was that, because Kate showed no inclination to tour ever again, Tori would have to do.

The Brontë Society, which had been ungracious to the point of hostility in the decade following the success of ‘Wuthering Heights’,
changed its tune, and in its journal devoted a whole article to the song, which it acknowledged “captured the imperious Cathy … and her sense of abandonment and utter loneliness”. Sinéad O’Connor didn’t repudiate the awful things she’d said about the Pope, but did admit to feeling inadequate when Peter Gabriel invited her to sing Kate’s part on ‘Don’t Give Up’, as he’d earlier recruited Tracy Chapman, at an Amnesty International benefit in Chile. She blithely informed a major, major British music magazine, “I’ve got to admire her because Peter Gabriel tried to shag her and she wasn’t having any. She’s the only woman on Earth who ever resisted him, including me.”

* * *

Nicola phoned, furious at me for not calling, and at herself for having called to tell me that my not calling made her furious. I told her I’d been intending to call, but had been very busy. She said bollocks. She said she knew I was just trying to get her to want me. What really infuriated her was that it was working. I might be interested to know she’d lost another nine pounds and was looking sensational. Lechers pretending to be photographers had started slipping her business cards as she waited for buses – or telling her that no one as attractive as she should have to ride the bus. If I knew what was good for me, I’d take her to dinner.

I reflected on how much less discomfited I was by great beauty than I’d been as a younger man, when I’d hardly been able to sit still in the same room at first with my universal object of desire. By my forties, though, all this had finished. I decided that it wasn’t because of diminished sex drive, but because I’d got some perspective, had come to realise that the gorgeous were living on borrowed time, that they were walking time bombs. Deep inside their every cell, their DNA was conspiring to pull them back down with the rest of us.

If anything, Nicola had understated the case. She was now officially ravishing, now officially the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous woman I’d ever have been seen with. When we entered the chic trattoria in Sidcup where she’d suggested we dine, it was as though the world lost its audio feed for a second. No one was even able to inhale. But I was surprised to find myself embarrassed, rather than exhilarated.

Nicola wasn’t enjoying it so much herself. “Bloody hell,” she said, hiding first behind her menu and then the wine list. “I can’t get used to this,” she said. “I feel as though everybody’s mistaking me for somebody else. I feel as though someone at any minute is going to expose me as an impostor. Or maybe somebody who remembers me from school will
leap up and say, ‘What’s all the palaver? It’s just Nic the Stick.’” I was shocked to learn that until mid-adolescence, she’d been skinny.

She told me about her new workout regimen. I told her about persuading Jamie in the FCUK T-shirt not to jump off the top of the block of flats. She told me about having attempted suicide herself when she was 16. She said she hadn’t really wanted to die, but was just calling out for help in the most dramatic way she could think of. I told her that sort of thing was common among adolescents. She was a lot more beautiful than Mrs. Cavanaugh, but not nearly as much fun to talk to. We left the subject of Tarquin unaddressed until after our starters were delivered.

I asked if she was still seeing him. Instead of answering, she told me how fiercely jealous he was. He’d apparently gone mad with jealousy only the previous week just watching her walk past a trio of bricklayers who paused from their labours to watch her admiringly, and had taken all three on at once. They’d broken his right arm in two places, and he was right-handed. They’d also broken his jaw.

And here he was now, having butted the waiter aside, looming over us, glowering. “Maybe,” he told Nicola through clenched teeth, “you’d like to tell me what you’re doing with … him.” At first he seemed to be doing a bad Clint Eastwood impression, but then I realised his jaw was probably wired shut. Various friends had covered the cast that enclosed his arm with clever notations about his injuries making it difficult for him to masturbate.

Nicola looked at me helplessly. The restaurant was silent again. It occurred to me to use one of the knives on the table in front of me on him, but none of them looked nearly sharp enough for the job. It occurred to me to pretend to need to visit the gents’, but that was too craven even for me. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know I had to say something.