Waiting for Kate Bush (20 page)

Once having caught his breath – which, considering how compressed his lungs were by the fat surrounding them, he did surprisingly quickly – Graham laid down the law to Dahlia’s sidekick about no name-calling. “We’re here to support each other,” he said, “not to cause each other more pain. The thin world does enough of that without any help from us.” Dahlia’s sidekick resumed looking morbidly sullen.

Dahlia began to continue her story, but Jez E. Bell suddenly blurted, “I know who she is. Just look at her! She’s one of The Condimettes!”

Even Crinolyn was impressed. Even I was. There’d been an 18-month stretch just before Y2K during which it seemed The Condimettes were never not at number one. They’d been huge in Europe too, and Asia, and Australia. (We Americans, who hadn’t liked Robbie Williams either, begrudged them a single hit, and then ignored them.) I remembered reading an article saying that a doll modelled after one of the five was the gift requested most by little British girls. They appeared in
adverts for everything from cosmetics to driving schools to soft drinks. They must have made £100 million pounds each.

“And I bloody hated it, almost from the first day,” Dahlia told us. “Oh, the dosh was lovely at first, but you get used to it very quickly. And you soon find out that you can’t go out to spend it, not without a mob of slobbering subhumans with cameras converging on you and shooting off their flashes in your face. And what they did to me wasn’t even the worst part. It was what they did to my family. My dad couldn’t go into the garden for a quiet fag (mum doesn’t let him smoke inside) without the telephoto lens boys going mad in the trees they’d been waiting in. One day I was going to take my niece Louisa into London for a day of fun. We took one step out of the door and the flashes blinded us. Louisa was so frightened she wet herself. She’s been too ashamed to come out of her bedroom ever since.

“They broke up my mum and dad’s marriage. One of the tabloids got photos of dad and his secretary on the beach in Blackpool while he was meant to be in the States on business. Another published photos of my sister and her best mate’s husband. There was no hiding from them. Nobody was safe. And it was all down to me. If I’d been content to stick with the karaoke contest circuit, or even on the West End stage, none of this would have happened.”

“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Crinolyn, the voice of working-class non-empathy said, looking to Boopsie and Graham for their approval. “Poor little rich girl, with your millions, with your half-dozen houses and your cars. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had your own bloody plane. Well, stop your moaning. It’s sickening.”

“Maybe you’d like to step outside and repeat that,” Dahlia’s sidekick challenged her, reaching into her handbag for a can of hairspray that she brandished like a hand grenade.

“How about if I repeat it to your mother, you hideous fat bitch?” Crinolyn said, laboriously climbing once more to her feet, finding it rather harder this time.

Graham gasped as he regained his own feet. “Crinolyn, what I said to Dahlia’s sidekick applies equally to you too. Name-calling is right out, for old members as well as new.” It seemed less Graham’s rebuke than her own breathlessness that made Crinolyn sit back down.

“You see,” Dahlia said, “this is exactly the problem. Everyone thinks if you’ve got dosh, you’ve got nothing to moan about. But that’s stupid. Does a rich person with inoperable cancer have anything to moan about?”

“Shut it!” Boopsie snapped, shocking everyone, including herself.
“My auntie died of breast cancer last year. I won’t have you making light of it.”

“I wasn’t making light of anything!” Dahlia protested. “I’m hardly in a position to make light of anything, am I?” She glanced around, hoping that someone – anyone! – had enjoyed her little joke at her own expense. I might have been the only one who got it. But she remained defiant.

“I won’t apologise for my misery,” she said. “If you lot want to believe that nobody with money has any reason to be miserable, be my guest. Just don’t come running to me when, after you become pop and film stars in your own right, and the tabloid press make your life a living hell, you discover the dosh is a small consolation.”

Nobody got that one either, not even her sidekick, still glowering at Crinolyn. It was clear to me, though, that she was a born entertainer.

“Sod it,” she decreed in disgust. “Let’s say I had no good reason to be miserable, but that I was anyway. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted the people I loved to be left alone. I had to do something unforgivable and get sacked. It seemed to me, and still seems to me, that our culture can forgive nearly anything over time, except two things – being fat and being old. I reckoned by the time I got even marginally old, my loved ones’ lives would be wrecked beyond any hope of repair, so getting fat seemed my only recourse.

“You know how some stars put ludicrous demands in their contracts, like Jennifer Lopez? No one’s allowed to refer to steatopygia in her hearing. And she specifies a maximum circumference for the caviar in her dressing room. If any egg is found to exceed that maximum, she’s legally entitled to cancel her performance. Well, I didn’t go mad like that, but I demanded that my dressing room be stocked with chocolate gateaux and this special ice cream the Americans had formulated just for prisoners of war on the verge of starving to death. Ounce for ounce, it’s the most calorific substance known to man.”

The front of poor Jez’s shirt was getting wet. “What flavours are on offer?” he wondered, salivating prolifically.

“They only do vanilla, which does get a bit boring. But I’d have a roadie melt a couple of boxfuls of Godiva chocolate to pour over it as a sauce.”

For a short, exquisite moment, we were all of one mind, lowing rapturously for that which Dahlia described. Someone walking past might have thought we were Buddhists.

“As you can imagine,” Dahlia continued, “I began putting on loads of weight. At first our managers tried to pretend it wasn’t happening,
and the press went along. I was on the cover of
Loaded
looking like I’d actually lost weight. What they’d done was put my face on somebody else’s body. You can do quite amazing things in Adobe Photoshop if you know your stuff.

“When we were on
Top Of The Pops
, they hid me behind three male dancers. It was ages before anyone twigged. The irony being that it was the tabloid press that wound up being my salvation.
The News Of The World
got photos of me sunbathing nude in my back garden. You might have seen them. They put them on the cover with the caption
Disgusting Horrible Beached Whale Sighted in Islington
.

“I didn’t leave it at that. I secretly hired a PR firm to try to get me slagged. It was exactly opposite to what they normally do, and they quite enjoyed it. I became the butt of jokes in the routines of stand-up comedians and chat-show hosts. There was a whole website of jokes that began, ‘If Dahlia of The Condimettes was any fatter …

“But I hadn’t accounted for public support. Our management changed a few words in its boilerplate press release about clients who’d been exposed as alcoholics or substance abusers or paedophiles. You know, the usual bollocks about how, with the right treatment, they hoped I’d be able to get my life back on track and rejoin the group,
blah blah blah
. But the public, who according to all reports, will soon be as obese as America’s, weren’t having it. Our management were … what’s that word again?”

“Inundated,” her sidekick, still glowering, contributed.

“Right. Our management were inundated with letters of support, letters threatening never to spend another penny on Condimettes product if I got sacked. The papers were full of it for a few days. It was either me or Ulrika Johnsson and that TV bloke who she said had raped her. Didn’t anyone see it?”

“I think I may have,” Jez claimed, but I got the impression he’d come to fancy Dahlia, as we all had by that time, and was trying to curry favour.

“I had to throw caution to the wind,” she continued. “I pretty nearly doubled my calorific intake. From the moment I woke up in the morning to when I had to go on stage, I’d be forcing chocolates down my throat. I passed 16 stone like it was standing still.

“It nearly killed me, but it worked. The PR firm did a deal with an inventor of computer viruses. The virus sent multiple emails to every address in a person’s address book with the subject line Don’t Let The Condimettes Sack Dahlia! It took a few days, but finally it created the backlash effect we’d hoped for. They got in the girl I’d originally
replaced. She’d put her children up for adoption in South America, and they’d all been taken.

“But I couldn’t stop eating. My loved ones’ lives were going to take years to repair, if they could be repaired at all, and that was terribly upsetting, and I’d come to associate the feeling of being full almost to the point of throwing up with accomplishment. I discovered I couldn’t stop eating.” A single, perfect tear sneaked as though on cue from her eye. “Which is why I’m here.”

Show a group of nine-year-old American girls a photograph of an adorable kitten and they will all sigh “aww” in unison. The women of Overeaters Anonymous now impersonated those American girls, as they got up and converged on Dahlia, covering her with love.

Her sidekick, ignored, tried to pretend she didn’t notice. I imagined she did a lot of that. I am cowardly and cruel, venal and vain, mean and misanthropic, with more to be ashamed of than I will ever be able to catalogue. I behaved shamefully towards my parents and have been abandoned by the one person in the world whose love I want most. But I didn’t pretend I didn’t notice Dahlia’s sidekick’s discomfort.

I tried to strike up a conversation. “That thing you’re not allowed to mention around Jennifer Lopez – steatopygia? What is it, do you suppose?”

This was a girl with no sense of proportion. She gave me the same look she’d given Crinolyn earlier, while brandishing her hairspray. “I don’t fucking know, do I?” she snarled. “Why don’t you invest in a fucking dictionary?”

Everyone went on about his or her own problems a lot less extensively than the earlier meeting I’d attended. I got the impression everyone was anxious to buy Dahlia a drink. I felt very much a fifth wheel, as I suspect I have from the moment of my first breath, and demurred.
Fab Lab
would be on soon, and how would it feel if I left it unwatched?

* * *

That evening’s edition of
Fab Lab
was the most enjoyable I’d seen so far. I’d somehow failed to see any of the earlier performances by the contestant Evelyn, who immediately became my favourite. Several contestants’ hair stuck out at odd angles, but you got the impression they’d spent ages getting it to do so. Evelyn, on the other hand, seemed to have done his best to get his hair to lie down in an orderly way – and failed dismally. The others had either been graceful to start with, or had been attentive when the guy celebrated for having choreographed such top acts as Wicked Fytt dropped by the Lab to show them how to
move when they sang. All four of Ev’s limbs seemed to be moving in time to a different drummer. Except for the big Welsh boyo who roared and the Nigerian-surnamed girl who seemed to imagine that she sounded like Aretha Franklin, all the others crooned. Ev croaked and rasped and gurgled and, at the least appropriate moments possible, bellowed. He was Sid Vicious reincarnate, except without the fatal stupidity, and absolutely criticism-proof.

After each of the others performed, the judges would analyse their performances in detail, objecting to this flat note, to that hand gesture repeated once too often, to the other lyrical nuance left unexpressed. After Ev regained his feet, none of them could do anything but giggle. “I don’t know if it’s music,” one of them said, speaking for me, “but I do know I was entertained.”

At the programme’s end, Ev proved one of the public’s favourites. It was enough to restore one’s faith in a British public that had first rallied behind Dahlia and then capriciously discarded her like laddered tights: every time I’d watched, the nasal Aretha wannabe had been among the bottom three, only to be reprieved by her fellow contestants. Once again she had to be thrown a line, this time by the judges. Now it would be one of two other girls who was sent packing, either the tearful, blandly exquisite Genoa, whose boyfriend played rugby, or the terrified-seeming Andrea from Leeds, who was nearly as gorgeous as Genoa until she opened her mouth and exposed the dental equivalent of Evelyn’s singing. This time the judges were the ones who reprieved the nasal Aretha wannabe. It was very much of a piece with the analyses they delivered after each performance. They seemed to decide which performances to praise – except the sublime Evelyn’s – strictly at random.

Someone rang on my mobile during a commercial break. It wasn’t someone whose number I had programmed in, which is to say it wasn’t Nicola. Hers was my only number. Nor did I recognise the voice, which seemed that of a man trying to sound like a woman, or practising to audition for a Monty Python reunion. “Les Herskovits?” he or she asked. I confirmed it. “You’re a mate of the former Condimette who now calls herself Dahlia, or at least a member of the overeaters group she just joined?” When I asked who wanted to know, he or she put the phone down on me.

In any event, the other
Fab Lab
contestants would now have to choose between Genoa and Andrea, but only, of course, after each of the potentially condemned addressed them. “I did the best I could with my song,” Genoa intoned solemnly, “and hope you’ll vote with your
hearts.” It occurred to me that, her gorgeousness notwithstanding, I might not have longed to impregnate her even before the anti-depressants knocked my libido unconscious.

But I didn’t think long about Genoa because Andrea was now flying in the face of tradition. Tears raced one another down her cheeks. “All I’ve ever wanted, ever since I was just little,” she said, “was to be a famous singer, and not for me. For my mum. She had a promising career started before her accident.

“I know some of us have had a bit of aggro. I apologise for that. It was probably my fault. I think you know what a perfectionist I am.” She swiped the tears from her face. “If you’ll vote me through to the next round, I’ll do anything you ask. Do with me what you will. I’m pretty, aren’t I? I mean, I know my bum could be a little narrower, and that I need orthodontia. My dad’s a labourer. My mum’s disabled. We didn’t have money for that sort of thing. But they did their best for me. They couldn’t pay for me to have my teeth straightened, but I never doubted their love.”