Waiting for Kate Bush (17 page)

From her reaction, you’d have thought I’d told her we’d henceforth eat nothing but kitty litter.

I conferred with her mother, admitting that I was worried by how very much our daughter had come to take for granted. I believed it horrifying that she wouldn’t even consider public transport. Her mother’s response was to buy her a car of her own the week she became eligible to drive. And I was the controlling one.

From when she was two and a half and I got my first place in San Francisco, I had always encouraged my daughter to think of where we lived together, even if it was for only two or three days a week, as Bab’s and Daddy’s house, and not just Daddy’s. Now she started leaving messages on my answering machine on Thursday nights advising, “I don’t want to come to your house tomorrow, Daddy.”

Beside myself, I consulted psychotherapists. None of them was quite able to explain my daughter’s great attachment to her mother, whose first priority, now she was free of the Swiss electronics millionaire, with a substantial chunk of his fortune in a new bank account bearing only her name, was to display herself in groovy San Francisco night-clubs. Her highest aspiration seemed to be being taken for a contemporary by much younger men.

My daughter spoke to the psychotherapists with the utmost reluctance. Before one appointment, she pretended, in the waiting area when she arrived late with Mommy, that she didn’t know me. It felt as though my heart was being ripped out without an anaesthetic.

Mommy hooked up with a smug-seeming insurance salesman with a post-ironic quiff who enjoyed taking her to groovy Eighties-themed night-clubs. My daughter, who’d grown accustomed to having Mommy to herself, wasn’t keen. In view of her longer and longer absences from … my house (one I’d moved to from San Francisco, considerable inconvenience be damned, largely so my daughter wouldn’t feel I was taking her away from her few school friends every weekend), I told her it hurt me seeing so much less of her than New Boyfriend. Her response was not to see or speak to me at all for three months.

I hid from the pain of our estrangement as far away as I could get, in London, and then went back and was reconciled with her. Indeed, her relationship with New Boyfriend had become so uncomfortable that she asked if she could move full time into … my house. By agreeing instantly, I later realised I was doing exactly what I’d so often accused Mommy of doing — enabling Bab simply to run away from a problem she didn’t want to be bothered with facing. But the pain of our estrangement, and then the elation of our rapprochement, had rendered me incapable of thinking clearly.

I blew it. I insisted that she regularly take her dirty laundry down to
the hamper – not actually wash it, mind you, but just take it down in anticipation of it being washed. She wasn’t living with Mommy now, but seeing a great deal of her. Every day after school, she’d stop by the boutique in which Mommy, absolutely without ambition, was working as a 48-year-old salesgirl, albeit one who, in a flattering light, might be mistaken for 36. Every day she’d try to talk Mommy into banishing her apparently philandering new boyfriend. Every day, Mommy would lie and say she’d think about it, and my daughter would arrive home in severe emotional disrepair, very often in tears. And every day I would do everything in my power to console her.

I phoned my ex-wife. Whereas she seemed disinclined to leave New Boyfriend, and whereas talking about it invariably upset my daughter terribly, I asked if she’d consider ceasing to talk about him with Bab. What temerity! Imagining that she was going to allow me to hold her accountable for anything! If our daughter was miserable, she informed me, it was because she found life so very difficult under … my roof.

I very nearly hit it. Every day I had to clean up, insofar as my daughter’s state of mind was concerned, after my ex-wife. And during all this, my daughter was telling my ex-wife how miserable she was with me?

I confronted Bab. She admitted she had indeed complained to Mommy about how … controlling I was. And, to my infinite regret, I now did indeed hit the ceiling, telling my daughter that yet again I felt hurt and betrayed.

There was no sign of her for days. It turned out that Mommy, that great believer in never actually trying to resolve a difficult situation you can simply run from, had given my daughter the keys to her parents’ house nearby, of which she’d enjoy full run, as they were at their other home, in Miami.

I finally spoke to her again eight days later after she called asking for her stuff. I’d put everything in plastic bin liners, which I now let her come to collect. No anaesthetic again. I told her that I’d loved her more reliably than anyone virtually from the moment of her conception, but that I couldn’t condone her abandoning our household yet again. If she moved out, it was the end. If she couldn’t resolve a conflict with the person who loved her most in the world, what hope was there for her?

She made her decision. Predictably, it was to take over her grandparents’ house, where there was no one to object to mounds of dirty laundry on her bedroom floor.

A couple of weeks passed in silence. I phoned to invite her to have
lunch with me. She declined. Then she stopped taking my calls. I left messages on her grandparents’ answering machine, but she didn’t return my calls. I went to London again, but arranged to fly back in time to attend her graduation from high school. She sent me an email saying not to bother because she wasn’t going to provide a ticket. I pointed out that this act of premeditated cruelty was something she would probably come to regret for the rest of her life. She didn’t listen. I didn’t witness my daughter’s graduation from high school. I can’t begin to describe how much that hurt.

I got over it to the point of being able to send her an email a couple of weeks after the fact assuring her I would adore her with my dying breath, as I’d adored her at her first. She ignored it. I left her phone messages. She didn’t return my calls. I sent more ignored emails. I returned to the UK, this time to stay. I liked the gloom. I liked that a London-based agency thought I looked enough like George Clooney to pay me.

I sent more emails — nothing heavy, but just descriptions of what I was doing. All ignored. I sent her a birthday card. Ignored. Her favourite restaurant in San Francisco had been a hip North China place called Firecracker, whose signature dish was called Firecracker chicken. Someone in the UK manufactured Firecracker chicken-flavoured crisps. Thinking it might bring a smile to her beautiful face, and maybe soften her heart a bit in the process, I sent her an empty packet. She ignored it.

Finally, after seven months, I heard from her. She curtly demanded to know what had become of the CD containing the installation software for her favourite computer game. Throughout her adolescence, I’d felt as though between the rock of alienating her even further and the hard place of not accepting the responsibility of getting in her face when she behaved shamefully. Should I do yet another Neville Chamberlain imitation, or risk extending her silence by telling her what I thought of her email?

I must have written 20 drafts of my eventual response, in which I told her that I felt very sorry for her, as one of two things would be true. Either she would, later in life, be overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and shame for the way she’d treated me and others who’d always been there for her, or, worse, she’d remain the person who’d sent me that spiteful email after months of cruel silence, after not allowing me at her high school graduation.

I received no response, and another 10 months passed in silence.

My sister, who’d always been sweet and generous with Bab, and
whom Bab had always liked, tried to get in touch, not on my behalf, but her own. My daughter wouldn’t respond to the messages my sister left at her college dormitory. Unlike me, my sister could stand the sound of my ex-wife’s voice, her former sister-in-law’s. But when my sister phoned to try to get my daughter’s direct number, my ex-wife, who hated me for being controlling, refused to divulge it. And more months passed without my so much as hearing the voice of the person I loved most in the world.

The first night my daughter came home from the hospital, I’d burst into tears as I held her in my arms and thought of all the cruelty and pain from which I’d be unable to protect her. I’d sworn to her and myself that if I did nothing else with my life, I would find a way to be a wonderful dad to her.

Every hour of every day, her silence reminded me how badly I’d failed in that which had mattered most to me in my lifetime, and every hour of every day, though of course you couldn’t see it with the naked eye, I got a little bit fatter, a little bit more repulsive.

I didn’t have to imagine what it was like to lose a child. I knew from the inside. But I wasn’t going to get into it with poor Mrs. Cavanaugh. We’d only wind up weeping all over one another.

She turned out to be no stranger to depression. During her own childhood, her mother had sometimes gone 72 hours virtually without speaking. She’d lie in bed staring in terror at the ceiling, hardly able to breathe. When either Mrs. Cavanaugh or one of her brothers asked what was wrong, she’d say, “Hurts too much,” through clenched teeth. I didn’t have to imagine that either. I knew from the inside what it was like not to have a single thought over a day’s course that didn’t hurt. But Mrs. Cavanaugh finally left me on the shore with the revelation that her mammy had eventually become unable to get out of bed even to use the toilet. They’d had to put her, at age 44, in diapers.

Even in my most ferocious depressions, even when my eyes and ears and nose and fingertips told me I was in my bedroom, but something greater than the sum of my senses told me I was in Hell, even when the sound of Kate Bush singing ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ could not ease the agony, I never peed myself.

I nearly laughed, as it occurred to me how the famous Monty Python sketch in which a succession of rich Yorkshiremen try to top one another’s claims of humble origins might be rewritten for depression sufferers. No more
You had a hole? Luxury!
Now
You felt you were in Hell, but were able to retain control of your bladder and bowels? You call that depressed?

A
FTER Mrs. Cavanaugh left, I spent half an hour looking through the mail-order catalogue I’d received the morning before. It offered some very good prices on digital cameras, and I wondered if I should order one for Kate. But I had no way of knowing if she was one of those easily flummoxed by digital technology. Having received no response to any of the 2,000 emails I’d sent her over the years, I couldn’t even be sure that she had a computer. It occurred to me that no one as keen to learn the ins and outs of the recording studio as she had been after
Lionheart
could be a Luddite, but I’d read that Kurt Cobain, said to be able to build an amplifier from scratch, had been so confused by the manual accompanying his video camera that he’d never figured out how to power it with its internal batteries, and had had to keep the camera plugged into the wall when he photographed his baby daughter. It might well be that Kate was implacably adventurous in the studio, but fervently technophobic out of it, and if that were the case, my gift might serve only to remind her of her own shortcomings, which, of course, was the last thing I wanted. In the end, I wound up ordering another pair of earrings for her.

Exhausted by my deliberations, I turned on the TV, and discovered with delight that
Megastar
, on which poor Jez from Overeaters had flirted briefly with fame, had been reincarnated as
Fab Lab
. It was early days, and the comically inept, self-deluded contestants hadn’t yet been banished from among those who could actually sing a bit, and who would be sequestered in a mansion full of hidden video cameras while they were instructed in the ways of the modern pop star by a succession of vaguely familiar Eighties has-beens trying to revive their own careers by being seen on television. Everyone was singing solely for the patronage of the four judges, not yet having to hope, as they would when the competition really got going, that the public would phone up to vote for them.

One of the judges, a record producer from Oop North, exuded endless delight in his own stupidity as he reduced a succession of terrified-looking girls to tears with his brusque dismissals. I got the awful impression he imagined himself candid, rather than brusque. The worst part was that all the judges seemed to be responding enthusiastically at random. They’d tell Genoa she was foolish to imagine she’d ever sing for anyone other than Butlin’s audiences, and she’d stagger from the room sobbing. Then, a moment later, they’d tell the foghorn-voiced Stevie, neither as attractive nor as good by any criterion I could make out, including looks, that they couldn’t remember ever hearing anything so marvellous.

After a while, a theme emerged: the evisceration of youth. This, unmistakably, was middle age getting its own back. Not one of the judges was younger than 40, and the brusque Northern cretin must have been within shouting range of 60. But the tables had been turned in a big way. The young singers’ smooth cheeks and thick, glossy hair, high, firm breasts, vitality, and courage were marched blindfolded before the stupid, smug, greying, talentless judges and, in most cases, cruelly humiliated, yawned at, stopped in mid-verse, jeered at, urged to piss off home to Wigan. Mum and Dad and their mates and classmates had all pleaded with them to audition, not to squander their remarkable God-given abilities? Well, it was simply too ridiculous for words! And how the judges played to the cameras as they fell all over one another, absolutely howling with derisive laughter. See what good your youth and beauty and talent do you now, Smoothcheeks? Ha!

I discovered I was simultaneously quite enjoying it, and hating myself for enjoying it. What a gamut of emotions it elicited. Here my heart broke for the broken-hearted might-have-been superstar, her meticulous Britney Spears impersonation savagely disparaged, weeping uncontrollably as she staggered from the audition room. And here, as the brusque Northern cretin and the smug, posh-accented record company executive beside him flared their nostrils in contempt, I wanted to get my hands round their wattled necks and squeeze until they breathed no more. It was a geek show for enlightened times, and I fell for it hard.