Waiting for Kate Bush (33 page)

“I made him up,” Dahlia, unable to bear not being the centre of attention, announced. And it worked, as everyone turned back to her.

“The reason nobody rang is because there wasn’t anybody to begin with. All the make-up artists I’ve ever worked with have been gay. And if they hadn’t been gay, they probably wouldn’t have fancied anybody our size.”

“Why, you absolute bitch,” Boopsie marvelled.

“Spare me, you cow,” Dahlia told her. “I did what I did with generous intentions, to shine a bit of light on a mate’s blackness. None of you gave her a lift home after these meetings. None of you has any idea of how hopeless she is. Well, I do have an idea, and I tried in the only way I could think of to throw her a lifeline.”

Her sidekick howled in embarrassment and pain, and I thought I knew why. Until this point, she’d been able to imagine that, after she’d scolded Dahlia and Dahlia had worn her hair shirt and they’d embraced and made up, the whole scenario she’d envisaged might finally pan out. But now all that was out of the question.

“Oh, I had a feeling you lot would turn on me at your first opportunity,” Dahlia said. “Don’t think I didn’t. As long as I can bring a bit of glamour and excitement to these bloody meetings, I’m everybody’s fair-haired girl. But let one little thing happen, and you all desert me in a heartbeat, don’t you?”

“I’m not deserting you,” Graham blurted.

“Nor am I,” Jez protested as well, even though he had a girlfriend, but Dahlia seemed to notice neither.

“Maybe you’ve noticed that I’m always the centre of attention,” she said. “Does that give you any bloody clues as to the state of my self-esteem? Does someone who feels OK about herself need to hog the spotlight all the time? Of course she doesn’t. Does someone who feels OK about herself discard and replace her whole bloody wardrobe every week? Not likely!

“And you probably suppose that because I’m reasonably well
known, I have my choice of blokes. I haven’t! It used to be that all I met were gold-diggers, blokes who wanted to spend their lives at the pub while I supported the both of us. And now it’s even worse –gold-digger chubby chasers.”

“Oh, shut it, will you?” Crinolyn said. “Do you not know how grateful most of us would be for any attention at all, from anybody?”

This was getting exciting now. The question wasn’t whether they’d come to blows, but who’d throw the first punch. For the first time in years and years, I remembered a fight I’d witnessed in junior high school involving two Mexican girls with huge Ronettes hair and eyeliner circling one another, hissing and snarling, calling one another
puta
, until one of them dived at the other. Each was able to grab a handful of the other’s hair, stiff with hairspray though it may have been, and to pull her head backwards. There was no evidence of the razor blades such girls were said to conceal in their hair. A pair of panting teachers intervened before an actual punch could be thrown. I’d have eagerly signed on to be either girl’s sex slave through age 25. Both clearly had enough testosterone for two. Exactly the kind of girl I needed!

I wasn’t sure whom I favoured here. The only thing about Crinolyn I liked was that she seemed to have a pretty good idea of who she was. She may have revelled in it to an extent I found unseemly, but at least she was in touch with her own obnoxiousness. The only thing I’d ever liked about Dahlia was her make-up on Goth day. If I were going to be unable to forgive myself for leaving poor Diane Geller alone in the middle of the dance floor at my junior high school sportsnite, how was I going to not mind Dahlia’s having made her poor sidekick feel just as lonely and hopeless?

The point was moot. Here, 22 minutes after the meeting was meant to have started, came Nicola, in such a way as to inflict instant amnesia on all who saw her. Sidekick’s beef with Dahlia? No one, I suspect, could remember a thing about it, not in the face of Nicola looking lovelier than anyone would have dared imagine she might.

She must have lost half of herself. She was still no sylph, but at the same time she might have been hard pressed to find work as a BBW. Her glorious cornsilk hair gleamed as never before. Her skin was even more lustrous. Was it possible that her eyes were even more beautiful? We all gasped at the sight of her. No reaction other than gasping was possible. She smirked shyly, not yet used to affecting anyone as she’d affected us. Mexican gang girls with testosterone enough for two?
What
Mexican gang girls?

Everyone got up, even the women. No other reaction was possible. That brought colour to her cheeks. Graham spoke for all of us when he said, “Blimey.”

The floodgate thus opened, everyone showered her with questions. Exactly how much weight had she lost? How long had it taken? Which diet was responsible? Did she fancy a drink after the meeting? Did she fancy dinner later in the week? Would she be Graham’s bride?

Oh, the glance she shot me, the glance. Are you noticing this, it asked? Was I drawing breath?

There was some talk of her not being allowed to stay at the meeting. In the view of some, she was too slim now. Someone else pointed out that it hardly made sense to evict Nicola while allowing me to remain. I didn’t pretend to understand that. Graham suggested that Nicola be allowed to stay as living proof of what any of us could accomplish if we were sufficiently single-minded, sufficiently determined. “Sod that,” Crinolyn snorted. “I’m not going to put myself under that sort of pressure.”

Graham finally declared the meeting finished. Dahlia, apparently hoping not to have to confront her sidekick one-on-one, was out of the roomlike a shot. Several people swarmed around Nicola. She told them she’d meet them downstairs. I was rearranging the contents of my shoulder bag in hopes of being alone with her, but her sidekick apparently seemed intent on ensuring that Dahlia’s car was no longer in the car park before she ventured downstairs, and stood at the window forever. “Bitch,” she said as Dahlia pulled out into the high street. And then Nicola and I were finally alone.

I treated myself to a long look at her. “Do you see something you like?” she said. The old Nicola wouldn’t have had a tenth the confidence necessary to ask that. I found it inexpressibly sexy.

She said her new look was all for me. I thought she was taking the piss, but there was no sign of that. It was I who finally looked away. It occurred to me that it might not even be Nicola. Nicola could never have returned anyone’s gaze so steadily. My mouth was dry and my palms damp. I could barely swallow.

“I understand you went to Ibiza right after we went out,” she said. “I was absolutely gutted that you didn’t ring me again.”

I could hardly believe my ears. I told her I hadn’t rung because she’d seemed very much more interested in Tarquin from the pub than in me. She said she was only pretending to be interested to try to make me feel competitive. Her biological father had once told her that men stay interested only in women they have to fight for. In fact, she couldn’t
have been less interested in Tarquin at the pub, who’d been a rotten conversationalist, without lovely manners. “If you’d asked him what a person does in a conversation,” she said, “I’m almost sure he’d have said speak and wait to speak again.” And he was too young for her. She’d always pictured herself with an older bloke.

It’s a good thing I didn’t have to stand up quickly. I’d have had to worry that she’d notice the enormous bulge in my trousers. It occurred to me that she’d be the most beautiful woman I’d been seen with since the Seventies. Which wasn’t to deny she still needed to lose a few pounds. She stood up. “Everyone’s waiting for me downstairs,” she said.

“I just have to rearrange the contents of my shoulder bag,” I said, sounding a complete twat even to myself. She arched an eyebrow at me. I think she’d had them tweezed, and by someone who knew what she was doing.

“You must have some very complicated stuff in there,” she said, laughing lightly. “You’ve been rearranging it since the meeting finished.” Her teasing only made the problem worse. I told her not to wait for me, and promised I’d call.

I sat there at some length while the blood resumed flowing to other parts of my body as well, and thought what a shame it was that one couldn’t have a sort of savings account in which to store his unrequited tumescence for future use. But of course since the introduction of Viagra, why would anyone bother?

* * *

“There’s something uncomfortably archaic,” noted the estimable Ira Robbins, writing about
Hounds Of Love
, “about a pop album that seems so anxious to be thought of as Art. Bush possesses undeniable talent, craft and intelligence, and is capable of occasional excellence, but it’s sometimes hard to take her as seriously as she takes herself.” In
Sounds
, Richard Cook admitted, “Most of her records smell of tarot cards, kitchen curtains, and lavender pillows to me. But bits of
Hounds Of Love
make something mischievous or even demonic come out of her throat, and ‘The Big Sky’ is a moment of real mad bravado. It starts like it’s going to be one of the digital warrior dances Bush puts together when she wants to be uptempo and then a whole planet seems to be swirling around her voice. The best and most threatening thing that this bizarre talent has ever done.” Mark Peel of
Stereo Review
noted that, “compared with her brilliant but difficult 1982 release,
The Dreaming
, it’s positively tranquil.” Tom Doyle observed, “This, musically and lyrically, is surely
some of the most obtuse pop music to have graced a chart rundown.”

She would later describe the
Running Up That Hill
video, choreographed by Dyane Grey-Cullert, performed with Michael Hervieu, as her goodbye to dance. There were those who saw it more as a tip of her hat to (or a rather brazen imitation of) the fervent dance sequence in John Sayles’ 1983 film
Lianna
, about an unhappily married woman’s realisation of her own lesbianism.

A production team headed by director Julian Doyle spent four days on Uffington’s White Horse Hill making the silly video for ‘Cloud-busting’ – and feeling, though there was no one around, that someone was watching them. Someone pointed out the hill’s proximity to Waylands Smithy, where, according to legend, a ghostly blacksmith waits to shoe travellers’ horses, and the press was duly amused. In the short film, the psychoanalyst Dr. Wilhelm Reich, played by Donald Sutherland, is arrested by jealous evil bureaucrats in shiny shoes for inventing a rain-inducing machine. After the arrest, his son Peter, played by the not-remotely-boyish Kate, returns to the machine and makes it rain. A heartening triumph of the virtuous and inventive over petty bureaucratic short-sightedness! It was later shown in cinemas with
Back To The Future
.

* * *

It wasn’t only the other Overeaters competing for Nicola’s attention downstairs. There were normal people in the mix as well. I didn’t know if she expected me to try to elbow my way through them. The expectant look she gave me suggested she might have done, but I’ve always been crap in crowds, and held back. She shrugged back at me and made her way toward the door like Madonna through
paparazzi
.

Tarquin was waiting for her. She’d only been winding me up about picturing herself with an older bloke! She turned back to me, gave me the same mischievous smile I’d seen upstairs, and exited the pub, while Tarquin gave me a look that said, “In your fucking dreams, mate.” I gave them plenty of time to get in his car and drive off, and then (and only then) got angry enough to beat him like a rug.

I considered returning to Ibiza, but settled for phoning Nicola when I got home. She didn’t answer her mobile, and I wasn’t about to leave a message that she could ignore. I phoned her landline. Cyril answered, dreamily. He explained that he was in the midst of a vicious browbeating from the mountain of flesh, and asked if he could ring back. “Put that phone down this instant and get over here!” I heard the mountain of flesh bellow at him from across the room. He moaned with pleasure.
I didn’t want him to leave a message for Nicola, and let him think I’d been phoning him. I said he could indeed phone back, though of course I hoped he wouldn’t.

At dinner, Mrs. Cavanaugh was even colder to me than normal, but unusually solicitous with Mr. Chumaraswamy. Did he find the gravy too salty? She’d started with a different brand of chicken stock this time. How about the potatoes? Was he sure he had enough? Was there anything he especially fancied for later in the week? If so, he should tell her, and she’d make a point of making it. He had to admit he’d had a craving for lamb
biryani
. She laughed and said it had never occurred to her to attempt it before, but she’d have a go. But if she were trying to make me jealous, it wasn’t working. I could think only of Nicola.

Thank God for
Fab Lab
, which I could count on to divert me for an hour. I’d come, over the previous few weeks, to feel great fondness for Huw, the big Welsh lummox. While most of the other contestants had been grooming themselves for careers as musicians or pop stars from their mid-teens, Huw, a guileless-seeming plumber from Swansea, had been singing only since the night a few months before when some mates had persuaded him to enter a karaoke contest at their local. He sang the Welsh national anthem, Tom Jones’s ‘Delilah’. At the end, he was said to have been gobsmacked when, instead of jeering him as they’d jeered one another, his mates had jumped to their feet, along with everyone else in the pub, to applaud. He then entered a succession of talent shows, apparently expecting to be exposed at every one as talentless, but had won every one. He was one of seven (from over 60) who auditioned in Cardiff for
Fab Lab
to be invited to the second round of competition, in London. Now he wasn’t just the only Welsh contestant left, but one of only five from anywhere.

It hadn’t been easy for him. At the start, seeming to expect no more than he’d expected in the original karaoke competition, he’d simply gone out and bellowed. The celebrity judges had reacted approximately as they might have to the discovery that Joseph Stalin had been reincarnated and brought before them. They’d told him he hadn’t had a prayer of making it as a pop singer if he relied solely on the power of his voice, as he was seemingly inclined to. But the public apparently adored him, and voted him through to the next round.