Waiting for Kate Bush (18 page)

* * *

By the autumn following her concert tour, Kate was sufficiently recovered to perform with Cliff Richard at the London Symphony Orchestra’s 75th anniversary celebration at the Albert Hall. She wore her white dress from the ‘Wuthering Heights Indoors’ video, the panelled full-length white terylene one, with a chiffon underlay, and
performed ‘Symphony In Blue’, ‘Blow Away’, and ‘Them Heavy People’.

She became ever better chums with Gabriel, who introduced her to drum machines and sampling, and appeared in her Christmas special for BBC-TV. She didn’t fail to notice the remarkable way Gabriel’s engineer Hugh Padgham had recorded Phil Collins’ drums, and would soon use a similar combination of open-miking, gated reverb and warm distortion on her own stuff, to excellent effect. Determined to find the drum machine as rich a source of inspiration as Peter had done, she resolved to write a song a night with it. After fretting for a while that it might drive her mad, she learned to start hearing musical clues in the relentless beats, and soon had 20 songs dashed off.

EMI pointedly wondered if she might like to put them on an album. She would, provided she be allowed to produce it herself, with the help of engineer Jon Kelly. Abbey Road heaved with the flowers with which EMI filled its small, intimate Studio 3 to try to keep her creative. She was said to have gone through much chocolate and Courvoisier, and to smoke John Player Specials like a bloody chimney.

She mostly used the musicians who’d backed her on stage, along with the celebrated piano player Max Middleton, who wore a succession of peculiar hats for the occasion. Paddy, of course, played a great many very exotic instruments. She spent a week each on ‘Breathing’ and ‘Babooshka’, not in the ivory tower of the control room, but singing live right along with her accompanists each time, trying to inspire her accompanists. It was said that the staff of the Abbey Road canteen were outraged to the verge of mutiny by the amount of EMI crockery Kate smashed trying to get just the right smashing-crockery sound for the song’s end. But when the recording was done, she sent everyone in sight Belgian chocolates. How could one not love this girl?

* * *

Duncan paid me a surprise visit just before
Fab Lab
was over. “Know what I quite like about it?” he asked. “That the judges don’t pull their punches. When somebody’s crap, they say so.” All my life I’ve had the feeling of living on a planet slightly different to that on which the rest of humanity lives. It makes me lonely. And hungry, of course.

“I wanted to apologise again for Gilmour,” he said. “Even when they were little, he always saw himself very much as Cathy’s protector.”

I nodded my acknowledgement, but wasn’t delighted with the implication that Cathy needed protecting from me. Duncan turned towards the TV, on which an Asian boy with very large eyes was
trotting out all of Sir Elton’s most familiar vocal mannerisms. “Blimey,” Duncan marvelled. The judges were absolutely beside themselves. “I will absolutely stake my reputation on your becoming a huge, huge star,” the radio personality judge gasped. There were tears in the corners of the Northern cretin’s eyes. “Brilliant,” he whispered, loath to let them spill out, “absolutely brilliant.”

The smug record company executive with the posh accent rolled his eyes. “Pedestrian,” he yawned. “Maybe slightly below pedestrian, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

The fourth judge, the lone woman, usually by far the gentlest, said she’d known straight away the boy had been imitating George Michael, but didn’t think he’d done so very successfully, and off he went, his bottom lip quivering. He got outside, to where the show’s Scottish presenter, whom we were clearly supposed to perceive as irresistibly scampish, was waiting for him, and absolutely detonated with grief. “My dad’s got cancer,” he wailed, “and my mum’s a seamstress, but she’s got arthritis in both her hands and can barely manage the work anymore! I was going to support them and my nan and four little sisters!” The Scottish scamp looked mortified. It was one thing to comfort some little narcissist who’d lost nothing more than her dreams of universal adoration in spite of her breasts being too small and her hips too big, but this — did their contracts compel them to deal with something like this? The kid actually collapsed to his knees, pounding the floor in agony. It was wonderful television.

“Poor little sod,” Duncan sniffled, and then he was in tears of his own.

In comparison to most of those I’d been around in the past half hour, both live and on screen, I was Mr. Cheerful. What a very weird feeling.

Duncan got worse before he got better. I put my arms around him. He startled me with how enthusiastically he responded in kind. It turned out not to have to do with Cathy. “I split up with my partner on Monday,” he sniffled. “Nearly three years together. And we had a kid. I can’t tell you how much we
¹
d been through together, her and me, and now it ends like this.” He shook his head and resumed crying. A fat girl was screeching Toni Braxton’s ‘Unbreak My Heart’ at the four judges, who were trying to top one another’s comically pained expressions. I reluctantly switched off the TV.

“We met at Addictions Anonymous. Mine was gambling, hers sex. Don’t laugh. I didn’t know before then that you can be addicted to sex or gambling, but you can. Do you suppose I’d be moving back in with my Mammy at my age if I hadn’t spent every spare minute at
William Hill betting on football or whether the bloody sun would shine the next day? We became each other’s strength.

“She relapsed a couple of times, once with her ex-husband, of all people, and once with Gilmour. That took some getting over. Her ex-husband who used to beat her up, mind you. But we got through it. And as I say, we had Jennifer. She’s autistic. Incredibly clever-you can tell – but they say we may never hear her voice. And we got through that as well.

“Then a few months ago, something happened. Me and Gemma went out and left this young bloke, the younger brother of Gemma’s best mate from work, to look after Jennifer. Nice-looking young fellow, and not the sort of teenager who can never quite manage eye contact. Really confident – looked you right in the eye. Shook your hand so you knew you were shaking hands with somebody. What’s that word? Charisma, charismatic. The sort of guy that back at school all the boys would have wanted to be mates with, and all the girls fancied.”

He refolded his handkerchief. I thought he’d have been happy to have the TV on, so it could distract him. I wasn’t so sure that wouldn’t have been a good idea.

He sighed and pulled the corners of his handkerchief. “He needed a lift home. A cab might have cost me 20 quid. So I offered to drive him.” Another sigh. “I’d never felt anything like that for another bloke. Back in school, if somebody was a poof, I was always the first to give him a hard time. I’m not proud of that, but there was a lot we didn’t know back then, and there you are.

“I pulled over. We chatted, not about anything especially sexy. We talked about football, for Christ’s sake. He just had this really appealing, charming way about him. Jamie his name was. I leaned over and held him, just held him. He put his arms round me. I kissed him. Got my tongue in. It wasn’t like I was forcing him. It wasn’t like he wasn’t kissing me back. Oh, bugger!”

He was in pain. We both were. Why on earth was he telling me all this? The only thing clear was that he had to get it all out.

“I was beside myself with confusion. He was all I could think about the next three days. Even Gilmour, who’s got his own problems, his anger issues and that, noticed something was wrong. I told him me and Gemma were rowing.

“I tried to get Jamie on his mobile. He didn’t return my calls. I sent him a text message saying I had to see him. Then I heard back from him. If I didn’t give him such-and-such number of quid per week, he
was going to tell his dad. He had the text message from me as proof.

“It turned out he was only 17. He hadn’t managed to mention that before, and I’d been too stupid to ask. He looked 20, not that I’m any great judge. You know what they say about a man having only enough blood to work his brain or his cock, but not both at once? Well, I was living proof. And I’d thought I’d been a wreck before!

“For three weeks I paid him. But then me and Gilmour had two really slow weeks on the trot, and I had to choose between him and my gambling debt. My gambling debt’s to a couple of thugs who’d be just as happy to dislocate my shoulders as get their money. So he rang Gemma and told her the lot. She was livid. She said it wasn’t that I’d had somebody else, or even that the somebody else was an underaged boy. It wasn’t even that I was spending money she owed for Jennifer’s being looked after during the week, when we were both working. It was that I’d lied to her. That’s what she said hurt worse than anything.”

His voice had become a monotone. He wasn’t talking to me anymore, but to the picture-less television screen. “So she packed me in. Said it could never be the same.”

Ibiza seemed six months ago. I wanted so much to surrender to my exhaustion. But there was more on poor Duncan’s mind, and he reverted to his thousand-metre stare and monotone to tell me what it was.

“What I told you about the babysitter? It was all true. But that isn’t why Gems left me. In fact, she quite enjoyed the idea of a threesome. She packed me in because I hit her.”

He sat there shaking his head and sighing. “No. I’m lying about that too. I never laid a finger on her. Never even came close. Which is quite odd, isn’t it? When I was a sprog, it seemed my da must have walloped me 20 times a day. I was forever black and blue. He said if I didn’t tell my teachers I’d stumbled on the stairs, I’d get worse. I think some of them must have suspected, but they couldn’t be bothered with it.

“It wasn’t all bad, I suppose. It made me fearless at school. I reckoned there was nothing the hard lads could do to me that my dad hadn’t done already. I was a crap fighter, but I wasn’t afraid of anybody. I was respected for that.

“Mammy finally divorced my dad just before I turned 15. Gilmour was a little chap, of course. Da had been walloping Mammy for years. She began walloping back when I was around 12, but he was much bigger, and he’d done a bit of amateur boxing as a lad. It wasn’t until she started carrying a paring knife with her at all times that he finally laid off a bit. I was there the first time she stuck him. Got him a good
one between the ribs. You should have seen the look on the bastard’s face. I wish I’d had a camera, but I was lucky just to get something to eat. He gambled too. Maybe it’s a genetic thing. Maybe it’s in my bloody DNA.

“So I grew up thinking might makes right. Well, not really thinking it, not sitting down with my chin in my hands like that famous statue and saying, ‘Hmm, yeah.’ More accepting it as the way things naturally were. So I’d have expected myself, when me and Gems got together, to use my fists on her. Never, though. Not once. I’d have felt a complete coward.

“I wish it had worked in the other direction. In her house, her dad used his tongue instead of his fists. I’d spend five minutes around him and Gems’ mum and want to run screaming out of the house. You’d never met a more sarcastic bastard. I don’t think I was ever round their place that Gems’ mum didn’t wind up in tears. And Gemma inherited her dad’s abilities. By the time she’d finish with me, I’d be in tears, near enough. And I still never laid a finger on her.

“It was that I’d lied to her, like I said in the first place.”

We talked about how Gemma’s early life had, in at least one key way, been exactly like my own, with one parent habitually slicing the other up with his tongue. I told him I thought he should be very proud, given what he’d witnessed as a child, of not having abused his wife. I even managed to tell him I’d have given anything to be able, as he was, to say I hadn’t backed down from fights in school. I told him how I’d spent my early life feeling deeply ashamed of myself in that regard. I even told him about the aftermath of the football game at Montgomery High School. I’d never told anyone before. My voice broke. And then the dam. It was my turn for tears.

He didn’t put his arms around me, and I was grateful. Years ago, the girlfriend who succeeded my wife accompanied me to a session with a couples counsellor. When I burst into tears about something, my girlfriend reflexively threw her arms around me. When the smoke cleared, the counsellor asked her to consider what she’d done. In a way, she acknowledged, it’s compassionate to throw your arms around someone in pain, but in another way, can’t it be seen as an unwitting attempt to contain them for one’s own benefit? When they put their arms around someone at a moment like that, people almost invariably say, “There, there. Don’t cry.” But why, beside sparing one’s self the discomfort of seeing another in terrible pain, should that be? Crying’s an incomparable release. Crying’s cleansing. It may well be that telling someone who’s just burst into tears not to cry is even worse than patronising
them by telling them to cry, to go ahead and let it all out. What colossal arrogance for anyone to imagine that it’s ever his place to “allow” another his tears!

Duncan didn’t put his arms around me, didn’t feel called upon to give his permission verbally for me to cry, didn’t tell me not to cry. He put his hand lightly on my leg, patted it almost imperceptibly, as though to say simply, I’m here.

I
KEPT my mind off Nicola by becoming ever more addicted to
Fab Lab
, tuning in twice a week hoping to see the young singers I loathed being reduced to tears by either the judges’ ever harsher pronouncements or the public’s antipathy. At the end of every edition of the programme, three contestants who’d received the fewest votes of support from the viewing public were marched first before the four judges, who picked one to spare from banishment. Then those for whom the public had voted would decide which of the remaining two to spare. All of this was accompanied by music portentous enough to have been composed for a film about the siege of Leningrad, or for
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

By the time a contestant faced his peers, he was usually shaking visibly, and often glistening with sweat. The little speech they gave to their fellow singers was always the same. “I did the best I could with my song, and all I ask is that you vote from the heart.” As opposed, I guessed, to the gall bladder, kidneys, or cerebrum. I particularly enjoyed the banishment of the self-infatuated little male model type from Oldham who’d tried to demonstrate his versatility by performing an old Elton John number with much batting of his long eyelashes and the odd wildly incongruous hip hop hand gesture. He reminded me of a boy in my junior high school who, in signing my yearbook, had got my name wrong. A boy that popular could hardly be expected to remember all the wallflowers’ names, could he?