Waiting for Kate Bush (46 page)

* * *

Kate told
Q
why she went silent after
The Red Shoes
. “There were a lot of things I wanted to look at in my life. I was exhausted on every level. There was part of me that didn’t want to work. I’d got to a point where it was something I didn’t feel good about. It was as if I was testing myself to see if I could write, but I didn’t like what I was writing. I thought, No, if you don’t want to do it, it will be rubbish. Basically, the batteries were completely run out and I needed to restimulate again.”

There was much excited talk of her contributing a song to the soundtrack of the Disney animated film
Dinosaur
. Such talk was doomed to extinction,
ta da dum!
It was thought that Disney had originally invited her to provide a song that would be heard at the film’s emotional turning point. Troubling data collected at test screenings suggested that audiences weren’t responding to her lyrics. And, in view of the fact that the film would eventually have to be translated into a
great many languages, maybe the best idea was to have no lyrics at all, but instead use her song as instrumental accompaniment. Whereupon she apparently decided to pack in the whole undertaking and get back to her gardening and mothering.

West of Germany and slightly below sea level, Dutch Katefans Mike, Anton, Justina, Arie, Jos, Angela, Ilja, Marleen, Els, Marion, Edwin, Martin, Martijn, Tony, Marcel, Barend and Kinky the Lovehound congregated to celebrate Kate’s 42nd birthday (Katemas!) by watching her videos and listening to her music together. In Osaka, celebrations of her birthday seemed more about MIDI karaoke. In Brisbane, Aussies celebrated the silver anniversary of ‘Wuthering Heights’ reaching number one Down Under by dancing to the music of All Yours Babooshka, a Kate Bush tribute band.

Stars In Their Eyes
contestant Louise Halliday brought with her to the 2001
Homeground
convention at Glastonbury the very cloak Kate had worn in the ‘Babooshka’ video decades before, and later sent her as a gift. Those allowed to touch the hallowed garment later reported that they no longer suffered from astigmatism or rheumatoid arthritis. I am, with the famous Victor Mature film
The Robe
in mind, making this up. Over and over, when we stop being snide for a moment, we get a picture of our heroine as kind and thoughtful, a person you either love, or don’t have the pleasure of knowing.

At her first live performance in 15 years, with Dave Gilmour at the Royal Festival Hall in mid-January, 2002, she sang (‘Comfortably Numb’) as evocatively as ever. She attended a special ceremony at the Royal Academy of Arts at which the Queen, as part of her Golden Jubilee celebration, handed out special prizes. Her Majesty seemed to have thought Kate and Mick Hucknall, beside whom she was standing, were a pair. (A cruel sense of humour, Her Maj’s.) When Her Majesty asked what they did, Hucknall made no mention of his own rabid skirt-chasing, but said they were singers and songwriters. Not offended, gracious to the end, Kate pronounced Her Majesty both lovely and radiant.

Lauding her for having “brought her own brand of rural gothic eccentricity right to the very heart of the mainstream,” the
Observer
placed her at the top of its list of Greatest Eccentrics In Music. She was thought to have given up both smoking and vegetarianism.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, which yearned to include their version of ‘Wuthering’ on their debut CD, claimed that Kate had forbidden them to record the song, even if classical guitarist Richard Durant produced it, even in the face of Radio 2’s purported eagerness
to play it, even though George Hincliffe had wryly transformed it into the sort of jazz one might hear in the bar of a provincial hotel with delusions of sophistication, with the audience encouraged to shout, “Heathcliff!” at various points.

She became a gay icon.
The Beautiful Bend
, a programme of unrelated playlets performed at London’s Central Space Theatre, ended with a Kate-inspired fashion show for which the all-male cast donned wigs and costumes based on some of her most famous ones. It came to light that Kate Devlin, a well-known American cabaret artist, had been performing a show based on Katesongs for years, and in fact had even won the purportedly prestigious Bistro Award for it in 1995. Kate declined to accept a lifetime Brit after learning she’d be expected to perform. When spotted in Harrod’s babywear section with her son Bertie, the presumed beneficiary of her shopping spree, though, she was only too pleased to sign an autograph. When Midge Ure introduced Fran Healey to her at the
Q
Awards, the Travis lead singer was too gobsmacked to converse.

At the end of May 2003, 16-year-old Jaclyn Bell finished in third place on
Stars In Their Eyes
. Kate sent her a platinum disc from 1978 and a handwritten note, reducing her to tears. Alison Goldfrapp joined the long list of female singers (including Bjork, Jewel, Toyah, and Dido [singers known by two names seemed to prefer Joni Mitchell]) who named Kate as a prime influence, and Tricky called her the modern Billie Holiday. But then Ruby Wax, the obnoxious American comedienne, identified ‘Wuthering’ as her favourite song, and Nicole Kidman revealed that she’d sung Katesongs with her band Divine Madness as a 17-year-old. In every life a little rain must fall.

No new album was announced, and no new album was announced, and no new album was announced, but her music continued to be heard. ‘Don’t Give Up’ played over the closing credits of the gory
The Bone Collector
. ‘This Woman’s Work’ was heard in an especially poignant episode of the American teen soap
Felicity
about date rape. And there were reasons to be hopeful. Stuart Elliot related that Kate had repudiated the gated reverb sound of the mid-Eighties and was letting him play his high-hat and cymbals again on her new stuff, having opted for a more naturalistic, jazzy style, and Peter Erskine, the noted American jazz drummer, reported that she’d had him playing congas. Former Peter Gabriel accompanist African drummer Manu Katche (previously heard on the infernal Tori’s
Boys For Pele)
got the call, Kate finally having a track she believed worthy of and suitable for his talents.

Her new stuff. It had a wonderful ring to it, but we’d all been disappointed too many times before.

* * *

I didn’t go home to Mrs. Cavanaugh’s from Teddington. I went instead to the train station, and headed up to Camberwell. I was in a kind of emotional shock, I suppose, and felt no pain. I watched my fellow travellers waiting for the train. They were neither more nor less interesting to me than usual. A middle-aged guy in a suit and loosened tie wearily massaged his own forehead as he mumbled excuses into his mobile. I supposed that he’d had something planned with his wife, but had been detained at work. Two teenage girls looked self-conscious. A guy in an untucked sport shirt picked up an
Evening Standard
left on a bench and read about sport. The train was a few minutes late, but did anyone expect anything different?

It occurred to me that I should ring Plaistow and ask if he was interested in an exclusive. I thought he might be able to interest someone on the basis of my having been the face of Marcel Flynn. But there wasn’t time. I prepared to leap to my death unobserved.

When my congenital cowardice kicked in and I wound up dawdling forever on the precipice, though, someone apparently saw me from the block of flats across the road, and in a while Constables Chiang and Murray materialised, and then the kid with the digital video camera. But in the end I managed it.

It was a lot easier than I’d have guessed. This time the part of me that had always wanted to fling all of me from heights got to. One didn’t see a lot of black cabs in Camberwell, but I nearly managed to land on top of one. As it was, I just hit its roof with my hand a fraction of a second before I landed, as I’d hoped I would, head first. Though the police and an ambulance were summoned, I was dead on impact.

* * *

I suspect that if people knew that, much as Jamie surmised, suicide isn’t held against anyone in the big scheme of things, a lot more people would resort to it. Doctors would almost surely start advertising their services to the suicidal in the same way American lawyers began advertising their own in the early Eighties, and the physician-assisted suicide boom would quickly come to dwarf the Internet boom of the late Nineties. But I’m surely not the first resident of Heaven to wish he’d known in life what he came to realise in death.

Being omniscient, I knew just how everyone I’d left behind felt
about my death. I think I was most surprised by the reaction of my daughter’s mother, so distraught for a couple of days that she had to have sedatives prescribed. I was also touched by how much my departure seemed to upset Cathy. I’d have felt awful about raining on the parade of her being named one of the two co-winners of
Megastar
. After 1,200,000 viewers voted, she and poor Claude were within 100 votes of one another. There’s talk at their record company of their recording together. Nepenthe and Harold believe they’ll be the most successful British recording duo since Elton John and Kiki Dee.

I think I was most disappointed by the reaction of my fellow overeaters. When, at the first OA meeting after my fatal plunge, Graham announced what had become of me, there wasn’t a wet eye in the house, but of course that might have had something to do with Nicola’s having got too thin to bother with them. Bolshie Crinolyn wasn’t even sure who I was, and neither was Jez. It’s humiliating having made such a faint impression on people. “I always reckoned he was taking the piss,” Boopsie admitted, and most of them seemed to concur. “And he wasn’t the most outgoing chap I’ve ever met,” Jez contributed, “especially for a Yank. Most of the Yanks I know are loads friendlier.” When they congregated in the bar afterwards, it didn’t occur to a single one of them to propose a toast to my memory.

Mrs. Cavanaugh took the news very hard, and I feel awful about that. She took to her bed after word reached her, and barely left it for 72 hours, though she was pretty much sleepless. She didn’t tell Mr. Chumaraswamy what was wrong, and he felt useless as a result. When finally she was able to talk, she told him she’d felt that in different circumstances she could have come to adore me. Beneath the fierce self-loathing and even fiercer loathing of the rest of humanity, she said, she’d sensed real gentleness. It was almost as though she were quoting me, talking about my mother. (I’d always said that there was only one person on earth she was harder on than herself, and that was everyone else. Not strictly grammatical perhaps, but I think you see what I mean. In any event, I was duly mortified to realise I’d been even more my mother revisited than I’d imagined.)

When my sister greeted me at the front door of our family home on the afternoon of my uncle’s suicide, I demanded “So?” and proceeded to feel ashamed of having done so for the next 40 years. When my daughter learned of my fatal plunge, she responded identically. What goes around comes around.

I suspect that she will come, in time, to feel as ashamed as I did. (Indeed, I hope she does, for if she doesn’t, it will mean she’s remained
a callous little brat.) But I won’t know for sure. It turns out that one remains omniscient about the affairs of the world left behind for no longer than eight weeks, and often for as few as six. It’s a small price to pay for the all-pervasive euphoria I’m told one begins to feel as soon as the omniscience wears off.

Jamie, the bully in the FCUK T-shirt, is here. It turns out he leapt off the top of a block of flats about half a mile from the one on which I’d met him after it got around Prang Hill School that he and Gajendra, his whipping boy, were gay sadomasochistic lovers. They apparently got the idea from the school’s geography master. And here I’d spent years ridiculing anyone who opposed hiring gay instructors.