Waiting for Kate Bush (13 page)

“There’ll be no additional charge, darling.” She apparently thought it sweet that I didn’t want her to get dressed and piss off the second I finished. She’d been lonely herself. She put her head on my shoulder without my asking for it. I’d had no idea when she was atop me how gorgeous her hair smelled.

We just lay there silently for several minutes. She rolled over on her side and supported her head on her hand. “This isn’t my business,
darling, and if you don’t want to talk about it, just say so, but I don’t understand about the grass.”

“I don’t understand it either. Most people want to forget the most humiliating moments of their lives. People like me find it incredibly exciting to relive them in an erotic context. I honestly don’t know why that would be.”

“Maybe you’re trying to restage the humiliating event to have a happy outcome or something. And what could be a happier outcome than the ultimate erotic pleasure?”

I turned to face her, to marvel at the intelligence I’d never dreamed she had.

“I went back for a year when I was 21,” she explained, “and read psychology at Roehampton University. I was thinking of trying to become a psychotherapist.” Much as Kate herself had as a teenager! And this a woman who’d have rimmed a drunken yobbo for 50 euros!

The world is such an inhospitable, stupidly unfair place. Everywhere you look, talented, clever, energetic people struggling to get by, and numbskulls running countries.

I asked if she’d come back to London with me. I’ve always fallen in love too fast, and was too old to stop. She said she was flattered, but that she’d come to adore the sunshine.

She had to get home. It turned out she’d had the Spanish club owner’s daughter, whose unusually understanding paternal grandmother looked after her when Nicola, as I continued to call her because it turned out to be her real name anyway, was out making a living. She gave me her email address, and we promised to stay in touch. I wasn’t sure I believed her about being called Nicola.

I could hardly sleep that night for the braying and bellowing and screaming and laughing and crying and gurgling and surprisingly loud projectile vomiting of the alcohol-, es-, hashish-, charlie-, and unprotected sex-abusing 18- to 30-year-olds a couple of blocks away. But it would have been unfair to blame my insomnia entirely on them. Thoughts of the wonderful cruel things Nicola had said to me would probably have kept me awake even if everyone else on the island had suddenly had his larynx removed. How I would have missed her already if she hadn’t been so eager to give me her email address.

I
T cost me an arm and a leg, but I couldn’t bear the thought of another day and night on Ibiza, and tried to buy a couple of seats on the first flight back to London on any airline that flew there. The chirpy young woman at the ticket counter affirmed that there were indeed a couple of seats unsold, but that they were at opposite ends of the plane. When I asked how she envisaged me fitting in only one seat, she looked confused, and then said, “Well, like anybody else I suppose, sir.” I didn’t appreciate her sarcasm. I booked only one seat and hoped, against hope, for the best.

God knows how, but I managed to squeeze into a single seat, between two 18- to 30-year-olds who winced in agony at every noise, and who for that very reason nearly didn’t survive takeoff. But as we ascended to our ultimate cruising altitude, they perked up enough to converse. After swearing me to secrecy, the one on my right, Denis, a much-tattooed marketing student from Exeter University, described the idea that was going to make him a millionaire. He was going to start a company, called Body Doubles, that would recruit kids to get tattoos for footballers and pop stars who had no room left on their own epidermises, but had much they hadn’t yet expressed. I thought it might be cumbersome to have to be perpetually accompanied, but Denis believed that no modern athlete or top recording artist lacked an entourage anyway. He expected that other students like himself would find getting proxy tattoos an easy and enjoyable way to make extra dosh, especially since they would get to do most of the things the stars themselves did.

This had been his fourth visit to Ibiza, and by far the one he’d most enjoyed. “I don’t think I’ve gone longer than five hours anytime in the whole week without throwing up,” he related proudly. If he’d thrown up rather more often than he’d been shagged, well, that hardly meant he’d had anything less than a crackin’, wicked time. He had indeed
heard of cirrhosis of the liver, but believed that one owed it to himself to enjoy life to the full. “We’ve all got to die of something, innit?” Anyway, he believed that receiving a liver transplant in middle age probably made one irresistible to women, and at exactly the time (around 37 or 38, in most cases, he thought) they would probably cease to regard one as a potential sexual partner. “Not all of them, mind you, but a certain kind, blondes in their early thirties? Absolutely.”

Concluding that poor Denis’s cirrhosis wasn’t of the liver, but of the cerebrum, I pretended to be asleep for a few minutes, during which I turned in the other direction.

Chloe, to my left, had also been to Ibiza for four consecutive holidays, and had come home pregnant the previous three. For that reason, her parents had tried to talk her into an alternative destination this time, but when she’d threatened to top herself, they’d reneged. She had found such threats very effective in getting what she wanted from her parents, but foresaw a time when she might actually have to jump off a building or something to retain credibility. She asked me to find out if Denis found her fit, as she found him. I thought they were well suited, but would never have been able to forgive myself if I’d heard they’d reproduced, and pretended once again to have fallen asleep.

Kate’s ‘Eat The Music’, from her
Red Shoes
album, began going through my head, and I wound up spending the balance of the flight thinking about my own history of eating.

I don’t know about Hannah Bush, but cleaning was my own mother’s idea of a good time. It wasn’t tricky or intimidating, and it made her feel in control. There was rarely a moment during my childhood when you couldn’t have performed surgery on any floor in the house.

Cooking was my mother’s idea of no fun at all, and we didn’t eat well. We had the same few meals over and over and over – one night fried fish (heated up by my mum in the oven, but very often not quite enough), a jacket potato, and frozen peas and carrots, the next meatloaf (with a hard-boiled egg in the middle), a jacket potato and frozen corn, the third baked chicken, a jacket potato, and frozen mixed vegetables, the fourth tuna noodle casserole with crumbled potato chips on top. Then the cycle would repeat. Never a sauce. Rarely a herb. (When my dad took to bringing pizzas home from a place near where he worked when I was around 12, I thought them absolute ambrosia. Oregano!) Rarely a fresh vegetable. Sometimes Jell-O with canned fruit suspended in the middle. We ate like federal prisoners.

The tragic thing was that she had real talent. Every couple of months she would make a
bolognese
sauce from scratch, and it would be
exquisite. The house would smell like Heaven. As I’ve mentioned, I loved sports from a very early age, but on days my mother made
bolognese
sauce from scratch, I could hardly be coaxed outside.

My dad was the world’s tidiest and least discriminating diner. Meatloaf with an egg inside? Yum! Inadequately heated frozen fish? Yum! Baked chicken without anything resembling a sauce? Rapture. He kept everything on his plate in neat little districts. While chewing, he would nudge his peas and carrots into perfect parallelograms. Order had to be maintained until the last forkful!

We finished every morsel. I could no more have left food on my plate than my dad could have let his corn kernels drift into the mashed potatoes, not when my parents had been teenagers in the Depression. My mother, whose family had been unable to afford adequate hot water, had been sent home from grade school for being dirty. We did not –
could
not! – waste food, however boring and flavourless, however full of it we might be.

After the dishes were done, we would congregate around the TV, and everyone’s palates would perk up at last, as my mother broke out the cookies. She baked well, though I could have done with far fewer sponge cakes, and had the most exquisite taste in supermarket cookies. Whether home-made or bought, they were invariably the most interesting, flavourful part of the meal by far, and we gorged on them, washing them down with cold milk while watching situation comedies about wonderful wholesome families with mothers who wore pearl necklaces to do the hoovering and didn’t habitually cut their husbands to shreds with their tongues in front of the children.

We’d go out for hamburgers every week or so to spare my mother the drudgery of turning on the oven and heating up frozen fish and frozen vegetables and baking a potato. A place called Woody’s Smorgasbord allowing you to put your own condiments on your grilled burger appealed hugely to my parents, former Depression teenagers forever on the lookout for a bargain. And when Woody’s introduced its special five-for-the-price-of-four Thursday nights, we were there every week. My dad and I each had to eat two, and I was only 10. But there was a job to do, and there could be no shirking. One didn’t eat for pleasure, or until full, but to maximise his savings.

The inevitable happened. I got tubby. Ordinary beige jeans (my mother refused to allow me to wear the blue jeans that were the virtual uniform at my school) ceased to fit. I needed a size called husky.

But my school lunches! Oh, I ate like a king. For other boys, a single slice of some horrid grey lunchmeat between two slices of white bread.
But for Leslie Herskovits, great huge thick fantastic sandwiches with bologna from an actual delicatessen, a thin slice of last night’s meatloaf (on its own it couldn’t have been less flavourful, but juxtaposed with the actual delicatessen bologna, it was absolute ambrosia), and lettuce, all between two slices of actual bakery rye. My classmates could hardly believe their eyes.

But I wasn’t only … husky, of course. I was also the only boy on the playground in tastefully juxtaposed beige jeans and brown shoes, rather than the inevitable blue jeans and black shoes, and was reflexively passive. And oh, the fun my classmates had with me. At lunch, pretending to imagine that I might try to snatch their sandwiches – two slices of packaged white bread with a single slice of horrid grey lunchmeat between them – no one would sit within 10 feet of me.

All these decades later, I am, in most ways, the same person I was then, the same lonely, alienated little fatso.

It could have been worse. I realise that. I didn’t change my eating habits. My mother continued to cook like someone who hated cooking, and we continued to fill up on cookies. But by the time I reached 10, and playing sports (ineptly!) at every opportunity, I’d somehow got quite slim. The horror that was junior high school was only a couple of years away. There I noted what life was like for those flabby boys who had something entirely too much like tits.

It could have been very much worse for me. And it was quite bad enough.

As we began our descent, I found myself wondering if Kate was likely to have eaten boxty (that is, potato griddle) cakes, an Irish favourite, as a child, as I assume her mum Hannah had eaten them back in her native County Waterford. I pictured Hannah teaching Kate the agelong Irish doggerel about them, namely

I wondered if champ, that quintessential Irish favourite, made of the humblest ingredients (potatoes, scallions, milk, salt, and lots of butter) were a big Bush favourite. I wondered if the Bushes had nibbled on treacle bread when they sat around singing ribald Victorian sea shanties on warm spring evenings, as my own family had sat around stuffing itself with cookies as we watched situation comedies that depicted American family life as something very different from our own.

And then we were back at Gatwick.

* * *

Delighted with the brisk sales of Kate’s debut album, EMI threw her a champagne reception in Paris. When the record kept flying out of the shops, they not only threw her a big party at St. Katherine’s Dock, in the shadow of Tower Bridge, but also chipped in on an expensive Steinway piano for her rehearsal room. They carped about Jay, who’d given them stick for plastering her erect right nipple all over the fronts of buses, continuing as her manager, and wondered, pointedly, if, when she finished her champagne, she would like to get right to work on her
next
album.
Would you mind terribly catching your breath some other time, love?

They wanted to release ‘Them Heavy People’, even though it found her revelling, as no British pop singer had ever dared to, in her discovery of Gurdjieff, as the follow-up to ‘Wuthering’, but she thought it would reinforce the popular misconception of her as a novelty act, and didn’t have to weep this time to get them to release ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ instead. It proved another jolly good choice, reaching number six. In years to come, it would prove her most-recorded song, with everyone from Dusty Springfield to Natalie Cole trying their luck.

She flew to Tokyo to perform ‘Moving’ at Budokan. It quickly went to number one in the Japanese charts. She made a TV advert for Seiko watches and flew home, telling the press the little white lie that on her forthcoming second album she would be rather more a rock singer. She discovered that she was now unable to walk through an airport without people stopping her to say how much they loved her. She came from a loving home, and was never observed being less than gracious and accommodating.

Sounds
dispatched a writer to puncture the myth of her being cordial all the time. She was unfalteringly cordial to and around him, and he had no choice but to report that it was no myth. The noted rock photographer Barry Plummer shot her atop the lion-skin rug in which she used to stash change at her family home. It struck many as an odd choice for a new vegetarian. EMI wondered if she might like to get to work on her second album. If she liked, she could record in the south of France, and think of it as a working holiday.