Waiting for Kate Bush (6 page)

The next year, we moved out of the San Fernando Valley, and near to what would later come to be known as LAX, Los Angeles International Airport. We boys played a game called tetherball, which involved trying to hit a ball tethered to a metal pole harder than your opponent was trying to hit it in the opposite direction. I have always adored baseball, basketball, and football, and always detested tetherball, for which I had even less aptitude than for basketball. But one day I was on the verge of actually beating someone at it when the bell summoning us back to class rang and one of my classmates, little Kirk Something-or-Other, grabbed the ball and hollered, “Game over!” I screamed at him. There was terror in his not-piggy eyes, but only for the blink of one of them, as he remembered me as the boy who always backed down and screamed back at me, louder. I walked away, cowed and sheepish, while a little crowd of girls hooted at me for not daring to stand up even to the smallest boy in the class. Like my mother, I’d come to believe anyone who’d stand up for himself as someone to whom I ought to defer.

How I loathed myself that day, and how I would continue to forever after, as I began to reek of cowardice. Bullies could smell me from the width of the playground away. I reckoned, in my abject stupidity, that it was better to avoid fights than risk being made to cry in front of girls. That I might get to an antagonist’s nose first never even occurred to me. The more I allowed myself to be bullied (I see now that even ineffectual self-defence would have been infinitely preferable to no defence at all, and would have made the whole question come up less often), the more I was bullied, and the more I hated myself.

A couple of weeks after I started high school, a year or two before the growth spurt that made no genetic sense in view of no one in my
family being much over five eight, I had the look of prey about me. My second day, in Physical Education, I caught the eye of a guy who had the look of a predator about him, a greasy-haired auto shop tough who hardly even bothered concealing the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket, even though it was illegal to smoke at school. You wanted someone who exuded danger? This was your man! A lot someone like this guy cared about being expelled from school when there were hundreds of garages in the vicinity that would be delighted to employ a mechanic of his gifts.

He’d been looking for someone at whom to throw a handful of grass cuttings, and I seemed a prime candidate. Normally, I’d have pretended I hadn’t noticed, but my brain wasn’t working very well that afternoon, and I instead responded in kind. Oh, the look of delight that spread across his face as he gathered up a bigger handful of grass cuttings. I saw the writing on the wall, and retreated, but not so quickly as to preclude his catching me, as not allowing myself to be caught, even by someone who’d probably have fallen to the ground gasping for nicotine if I’d just kept running long enough, wasn’t part of my job description. He tried to feed me the grass, but succeeded only in rubbing it in my face.

If I had it to do over again, I’d have taken a bite out of his hand, and then kicked him as hard as I could in the trachea while he writhed in pain. But of course, I don’t have it to do over again, and am ashamed of myself for what I didn’t do.

Later, there were twins, the Irvings, Robert and Richard. I hoped we could become friends, but was cheeky with them because I didn’t know a better way to interact with people. I either said nothing to people at that age, or gently taunted them. One morning in Physical Education, while playing basketball, Robert suddenly decided he’d had enough of my rapier-like wit, and came at me with his fists. Even at the time I knew he was hopeless. He wasn’t hurting me at all, and he was giving it everything he had. So did I wait for him to wear himself out and then throw a punch or two of my own? Of course not. What I did was appease him while the other boys, disgruntled at the realisation that there’d be no bloodshed, stood around us jeering.

In my early twenties, I became linked, to my limitless astonishment, with a blonde universal object of desire, the Cameron Diaz of one generation before the real one, Michelle Pfeiffer crossed with Catherine Deneuve. The world saw her on my arm and thought I must have something major on the ball. But my DNA hadn’t changed, and neither had my upbringing.

We played a lot of pinball, mostly at the bowling alley on the corner
of Santa Monica and La Cienega Boulevards that later became a famous roller disco, and later still the place where film stars bought their furniture. One night, while it was my turn, a drunk-sounding male voice asked from behind if we could spare any change for a drink. Without turning around, I said, “Shove off.” The universal object of desire gave him a couple of quarters. Our supplicant, no authority on gender issues, snarled, “Lady, you’re a better son-of-a-bitch than your old man.” I tensed. I knew that I should wheel around and flatten him. But he sensed that I was considering it, and snarled something about how, if I turned to face him, he’d kill me. I stayed where I was. It’s over 30 years later, and I’m still ashamed.

About five years after that, long after the universal object of desire had packed me in, I had a moment. I was leaving a drug store on Sunset Blvd. where Fairfax crossed it. As I pushed open the glass door to the parking lot, a voice behind me said, “Faggot.” I surmised that its owner thought I should have held the door open for him. I ignored it and kept walking toward my car with him right behind, my passivity emboldening him. “Is that what you are?” he demanded, “a faggot?”

I don’t know what came over me. I stopped, spun on my heel, and confronted him. He wasn’t exactly Lennox Lewis, but he wasn’t a pipsqueak either. “Listen,” I snapped, enlightened enough even in those days to dislike the way the lexicon of homophobia felt in my mouth, but too angry to care, “maybe
you’re
the faggot, expecting somebody to hold doors open for you.”

His mouth dropped open. Looking chastened, he hurried past, giving me a wide berth. He looked back at me nervously as he reached his car. I wondered if there was someone standing behind me, but I was alone.

He didn’t know how lucky he was. If he hadn’t scarpered, all those decades’ repressed rage would have come out of me. I’d almost certainly have kicked his head in.

Whatever it was that had come over me never came over me again. Five years later, I holidayed in London during a heat wave. My girlfriend and I went to Hyde Park, and sat by the Serpentine in some deck chairs that seemed to have been provided for the public’s use, I in my stylish new Star of David drop earring. A swarthy little man came over and demanded money for our use of the chairs. I told him I hadn’t realised they weren’t free, and thus wouldn’t pay him, although we would certainly quit them. He called me a fucking Jew. I, shocked, told him to fuck off. He spat on me. And I, intimidated by the wild hatred in his eyes, let him. I thought about how his family had probably been tyrannised by Zionists. It didn’t make me feel
better. I could hardly have felt worse.

I could go on like this all night, but I’ll leave it at recounting the worst time, the time that makes me want to eat gallons of ice cream or cry or both. My daughter Babooshka wasn’t cheerleader material, wasn’t an effervescent, lithe little blonde with no sense of irony. When she began her own high school career, she tried out instead to be the school’s mascot, which involved her dressing up as a puma, complete with a huge, hot, heavy rubber head, and dancing around on the sidelines, putting herself at risk for heat stroke, at football and basketball games. After it was determined that she was alone in applying for it, she was given the job.

I had to collect her one Saturday from a football game against her school’s archrivals, played on the archrivals’ ground. Passions ran high. The other school’s team ate my daughter’s team’s lunch. Afterwards, she decided not to change out of her infernal puma outfit before we walked back to the car park. I don’t know what I was thinking when I acceded. I was vaguely aware of there being three people behind us, one of them extremely tall, and of there being tension in the air. I say vaguely because the part of me that would have pretended I wasn’t having grass clippings rubbed in my face my second day at Santa Monica High School was at the controls, and wanted to maintain what politicians would later call plausible deniability. (A much smaller, if absolutely genuine, part of me didn’t want to take a chance of doing the wrong thing. One is on very, very thin ice when intervening on a teenager’s behalf. However lovingly or reasonably one may do so, it’s always with the understanding that the teenager might be mortified with embarrassment by the intervention.)

When we reached my car, my daughter said they’d been giving her little shoves from behind. I told her she should have said something. And if she had, would I have taken on all three of them, one of whom could have rested his chin atop my head? I was beside myself with self-loathing for even thinking to ask myself that question.

The next evening over dinner, I recounted the episode to my girlfriend, and suggested that my daughter would surely have been mortified with embarrassment if I’d made a scene. “No,” my daughter said, without malice. “I’d have been proud.” Those words rank right alongside the universal blonde object of desire’s telling me, “I’m not in love with you anymore,” as the most excruciating I’ve ever heard, or ever will hear.

*  *  *

All of which might seem to have little to do with the first known antecedent of the worst president in American history, Reynold Bush, having left the north-east Essex village of Messing for greener pastures across the deep blue sea in 1631. Kate Bush’s first known ancestor, descended from Saxons, was first officially sighted in nearby Pebmarsh in 1769. Draw your own conclusions. Her great-great-grandfather Henry is known to have been a nasty piece of work who died of injuries sustained when he plummeted drunkenly into a ditch. When an agricultural depression closed both the silk mill and the straw plaiting plant that had been their area’s most prolific employers, Henry’s farm foreman son John and wife Martha moved down to South Ockenden, noted for its red brick Wesleyan chapel.

Kate’s grandfather Joe, an abattoir worker, was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for his conscientious objection to the Great War. He later worked as a milkman, and then as a deliveryman for a local hardware business, and came to adore the daughter of the village’s most noted daredevil and amateur barber. The quiet, aloof couple’s son, called Jackie, won a scholarship to a grammar school, and then went on to medical school, from which he graduated in 1943. He married Hannah Daly, three years his senior, a County Waterford Irish farmer’s daughter turned Epsom nurse, became a GP in Bexley, and bought East Wickham Farm.

‘Twas there that his sons Jay and Paddy and daughter Cathy enjoyed idyllic childhoods in a beautiful 350-year-old wooden farmhouse with a swimming pool where once there had been a brick pond, oak beams salvaged from scrapped man-o’-war ships consigned, in their old age, to the Woolwich dockyard, and rooms nearly beyond counting, all of them well ordered except for the two younger kids’. Cathy occasionally sneaked into Paddy’s room to try her hand at the collection of accordions and concertinas he played when the family sang Irish folk songs and ribald Victorian sea shanties together. Years later he became a member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Around the time Cathy heard The Rolling Stones’ ‘Little Red Rooster’ in her parents’ car on the way home from the shops, and was struck by Mick Jagger’s singing somehow being more expressive for its seeming indifference to pitch, her family emigrated briefly to Australia, where Paddy is thought to have communed with an emu. But the family soon returned to what future biographer and antagonist Fred Vermorel would characterise as their “rustic sprawl in the heart of inch-pinching suburbia”. In the barn loft illuminated by a small oval window, Cathy and her mates sneaked fags and listened to Dave
Edmunds, of all people. Kate’s den was like a secret room, entered first through what looked like a cupboard door in the upstairs corridor and then through another door across a narrow passage. Adults could enter by invitation only. In the course of helping to clear the room for habitation, a friend had found a big glass bottle with a stopper. Cathy, sure that evil spirits would come out, implored her not to open it, as one might have expected from a girl whose idea of fun was visiting nearby Plumstead Cemetery with school friends.

The den’s floors came over time to be littered with cushions, records, books, magazines, and Incredible String Band, Dylan, Beatles, and T. Rex record sleeves, the walls to be covered with her poems and drawings, several of the latter inspired by Jay’s poem “The Devil’s Mouth”. She was fond of hamsters, cats and a rabbit called Took, named after Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex bongo player, but less so of her purpose-built Tudor-style Wendy house at the bottom of the garden, though Took is thought to have enjoyed hiding beneath it.

One evening in the Sixties, she and a chum from school agreed it might be fun to frighten Took into the open by jumping up and down, little realising that he was not only inside with them, but under foot. The school chum, landing atop him, broke his leg, requiring an emergency visit to the vet. But if the school chum expected to be called an imbecile, she’d come to the wrong place. The Bushes were too kind for that.

In between playing Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert, the genial, balding, ginger side-whiskered Dr. Bush accompanied Kate on piano when she practised violin pieces for school, where every student was compelled to learn an instrument. After he showed her a C-major scale, she twigged that what worked in one key would work in others as well, and soon had chords sussed. She took to grinning and bearing it while practising her violin, yearning for the moment when she could consign the infernal thing to its case and improvise happily on piano. And when she tired of the piano, she retired to one of the farm’s outbuildings, formerly a Victorian wash-house, where she played the ancient church harmonium that had been home to countless generations of mice, and which a new, spiteful generation of them would soon gnaw to splinters.