Waiting for Kate Bush (36 page)

I
was pretty sure it was Nicola, and not Mrs. Cavanaugh, I needed as my girlfriend (and how very silly that word sounded applied to a 52-year-old grandmother), but absolutely positive that I wouldn’t be able to bear Mrs. Cavanaugh thinking ill of me. What I clearly had to do was make good on my promise to protect Cathy from her managers Harold and Nepenthe.

Of course, it wasn’t my way to try to do something important on my own, and I wracked my brain trying to think of someone to ask for help. Once every few months, I promise myself to try to make a friend, studies having shown that the isolated almost invariably die younger and in greater pain than those with social networks. But I never quite manage it. Even at this age, I am my mother’s son. My mother, ever dreading rejection, got into the habit of rejecting people before they could reject her, as she was always sure they would do, given time. She discredited every act of kindness or generosity as being fundamentally about its perpetrator’s need to see himself as a terrific guy. No one wasn’t too deeply flawed for my mother to risk their hurting her.

Throughout my childhood, she could always be counted on to point out that Kid A was probably phoning to ask if I could play because Kid B, whom he greatly preferred, was busy. Nobody could ever genuinely like me for myself, any more than anyone had ever genuinely liked her. My dad, of course, adored her, but where was the pleasure in being adored by someone so thoroughly contemptible?

Of course, given that, from the age of around 11, I tried to attach myself to sportier, better-looking, more confident Boys Who Could in hope that I’d look better by association, it was only fitting that I should doubt that my affection was reciprocated.

On top of the cynicism my mother had taught me, I also had my famous low boredom threshold to contend with. It’s occurred to me that if I were put in a room with Clement Freud, Oscar Wilde and John
Lennon, I’d probably be trying to think of an excuse to leave in 35 minutes. I scrupulously show voracious interest in others and then hate them for luxuriating in it. If they do manage to get in a word reciprocating my interest, I find a way to feel patronised. I am, and always have been, hard, hard work.

It eventually occurred to me that the only person I could call was Cyril, but the thought of his being my only friend paralysed me with depression until it was nearly too late to call.

It was actually Nicola who answered. She sounded pleased. The four-year-old in me wanted to ask, in a voice dripping sarcasm, why she wasn’t out with Tarquin. But it was past my four-year-old’s bedtime. I just very casually asked if she was all right, and, on hearing that she was, asked to speak to Cyril. She sounded a little disappointed, which I, of course, adored. I told her I’d try to phone in the next few days if I had time. I do some of my best work when knackered.

Cyril greeted me with unnerving enthusiasm. “Great to hear back from you, mate!” I wondered if he reciprocally regarded me as
his
only friend. I found the notion nauseous.

I got on-line after I’d spoken to him. Still smarting from what that unspeakable cow Hermione had said at the first Overeaters meeting I attended, I went to one of the countless dozens of sites that offered Kate’s complete lyrics, and reread the lot. They were indeed mostly hopelessly abstruse, just as Hermione had suggested, but it was no more fair to consider her lyrics apart from her music than it would have been to consider Van Gogh’s brush technique apart from his use of colour. It made me want to send Kate a bouquet of white roses with a note attached reading, “Nil
carborundum illigitium,”
Latin having been one of Cathy Bush’s best subjects at St. Joseph’s Convent Grammar School. So I did.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Megastar-on-tv.co.uk
had the latest news about the competition, such as that “our” Cathy having been promoted to the next round. There was a page on which visitors to the website could write comments. One visitor, whose sex I wasn’t able to ascertain from his or her screen name, had written, “I haven’t been able to stop crying long enough to type until just a minute ago. My mum used to sing me the song Cathy did tonight when I was tiny. I didn’t think anyone could ever sing it more beautifully. But Cathy did. That wasn’t a musical performance. That was a gift. Thank you, Cathy.”

The comments about the other young singers consisted almost entirely of comparisons of their relative fitness. It was heartening to see enormous fat boys lusted after, but I felt sure that as soon as they
stopped appearing on the competition each week and went back to their lives, they could expect only vicious ridicule.

* * *

Kate sang to benefit the families of the victims of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster and on behalf of the rainforests. She endorsed a campaign launched by the Vegetarian Society to expose the barbarity of the meat trade. She turned 30 as a shopgirl at Blazer’s boutique as part of an AIDS benefit. She managed a couple of songs for films – the propulsive, not very notable ‘Be Kind To My Mistakes’ for Nic Roeg’s
Castaway
and the exquisite, heartbreaking ‘This Woman’s Work’ for
She’s Having A Baby
, by the antiRoeg, John Hughes. Pearls before swine! Hearing the song, there were those who thought maybe she’d confused Hughes with Andrei Tarkovsky, an in-joke certain to be enjoyed only by cineastes, if by them.

Roeg, beloved by cineastes everywhere for a while there, was rumoured to have invited her to appear in
Castaway
as well. Whether her declination was based on the notorious Oliver Reed playing the male lead isn’t universally known, but the role went to Amanda Donohoe instead. She recorded duets with Peter Gabriel and Midge Ure, who years later would admit that the attraction wasn’t purely musical. Praising her sublimely touching performance on his song ‘Don’t Give Up’, Peter Gabriel gently observed that she sang very differently to the way she sang on her own stuff.

Ever interested in new sounds, Kate struck up friendships with the Irish uillean piper Davy Spillane and the violinist Nigel Kennedy, and conspired to get Trio Bulgarka, proponents of traditional Bulgarian folk music, to sing on her next album. The Kate Bush Club petulantly suspended publication of its newsletter in the face of having no clue when the album might be finished. And weren’t those the days, when a four-year wait between albums defied credulity?

* * *

Cyril was a few minutes late turning up the next morning. The mountain of flesh had been giving him a savage bollocking, and he hadn’t been able to bear to miss any of it. He said Nicola seemed a little discombobulated by the idea of me and Cyril seeing one another socially, but it was Tarquin I wanted to find out about as we walked to the train station.

Cyril thought he was a bender. I scoffed at the idea, but Cyril said I should trust him. “You don’t know British pub culture like I do, mate.
My nephew, my sister Louise’s boy, is cut from the same cloth. It used to be, a long time ago, decades, most of them were camp, at least in this country. They had longer fingernails than ordinary blokes, and coloured their hair with henna, and called themselves Quentin and Marcel. They wore boots with Cuban heels before The Beatles had got out of Liverpool. Then they were exactly the opposite of that, fantastically masculine, with really short hair and moustaches, and great huge muscles. Well, if I were a smarter man, I’d have been able to predict what was coming and make a fortune. What was coming – and what’s come – is that they’re certainly not camp anymore, but they’re not the opposite of camp either.

“They’re perfectly ordinary. They look just like everybody else. They go down the pub on Saturday afternoon to watch footie with each other. They’re ferociously proud of the England rugby World Cup victory, and own DVDs of it. They wear the same gear as anyone else. They’ve got wives and kids and Vauxhalls and mortgages.”

I couldn’t pretend I was getting it. “Their having wives and kids would seem to suggest they’re not gay at all,” I said. “How does that make sense?”

“Since when has fashion ever made sense? Those gigantic droopy trousers the young fellows wear, the ones they could hide whole families of asylum seekers in? How do those make any sense? How about flares? Do you remember flares, back in the flower power days? Did they make sense? And then punk came along, and wearing flares was suddenly like painting
I’m gormless
on your forehead with nail polish.

“Or food. Do you know how bland our diet used to be in this country? There was a time when it was considered quite exotic to eat bloody spaghetti bolognese! If you’d said you fancied Siamese food, people would have thought you were mad. And now what do three-quarters of the pubs in London serve? It’s easier to get a bowl of
pad thai
than a bloody sausage roll.”

We arrived in the Kings Road. I got out my A-to-Z and we found the address, in a road on which were parked only cars new enough to still gleam. “They’re doing all right for themselves, aren’t they?” Cyril marvelled. “Blimey.”

We were buzzed in. A small rotund girl who looked ready to audition to play Dahlia at her first Overeaters Anonymous meeting, with dyed black hair and rings through both of her nostrils, greeted us at the top of the stairs, if greeted is the right word, cigarette in hand, broad sneer on face. “Yes?” she demanded, as though we hadn’t already
identified ourselves over the intercom before she buzzed us in. We told her again who we were. “And you’re here for …”

“A confrontation with Harold and Nepenthe.”

Her face fell apart. “But that isn’t what you said downstairs!”

“If we’d told you the truth downstairs, you probably wouldn’t have buzzed us in,” Cyril said.

Oh, she was in a woeful state, desperate to hold back her tears, consumed by panic. “But that isn’t fair!” she said, sounding no older than nine. “You didn’t tell me the truth.”

Cyril, not the most compassionate man in London, only shrugged.

“I could lose my job for this.”

Cyril shrugged again and took a step towards the hall. “Could do, I suppose. Where exactly are they?”

“Please,” the girl pleaded, throwing herself in his path, “please don’t! They’ll sack me for sure! I could never get another job as wicked as this.” She turned back towards me. The tears came – oh, did they! “I’ve only been here today and yesterday. I don’t know all the tricks yet. Please!”

Well, she had me on her side at least, but then the point became moot as Harold poked his head out of his office and demanded, “What’s all that row?” It took him a second to remember who I was, and to realise he was highly unlikely to enjoy our visit, and to jump back in his office and loudly lock the door behind him.

Nepenthe popped out of her office, just across the hall from Harold’s, looking quite capable of biting someone’s ears off, and demanded, “Well, what do you want?” What I wanted at the moment of her asking was to run back to the tube station and board the first train that would take us away. But I couldn’t very well say that. “A brief confrontation, if you can spare a moment,” I said, aghast at my wimpiness. I hoped Cyril might add something threatening, but if his grin had been any broader, his face would have split open, with dire consequences for the pristine-looking carpeting. “She’s a corker, isn’t she?” he asked me out of the side of his mouth. Stupid me! It hadn’t occurred to me that Nepenthe’s imperiousness might neutralise Cyril.

Nepenthe sighed for the last row in the theatre and gestured for us to come to her. Cyril fairly skipped. “Get up off your knees, Desdemona,” she called to the little Gothette. “Have a little bloody dignity, will you?”

Her office was breathtaking, all glossy deep reds and chrome, with a remarkable view out the window of London, as seen from the top of the BT Tower. I gathered, since we were a couple of hundred yards off
the Kings Road, and on the second floor, that some digital hocus-pocus was involved. One wall was full of gold and platinum discs, another of very arty, beautifully framed photographs of a naked Cathy looking, in her emaciation, rather like a praying mantis. I averted my eyes in embarrassment. “Blimey,” observed Cyril as he lowered himself into one of the red leather chairs facing her desk, and Nepenthe’s lip curled in satisfied disdain.

“You’ve obviously been at this longer than Mr. Herskovits here told me,” Cyril said. “Whose gold discs?”

“They’re decorative,” she explained impatiently. “Intended solely to mislead visitors. The music business is all about creating illusions. Tell me what you want.” She turned towards the view, which had morphed into that from the top of the Bank of America building in San Francisco. Many years before, I’d dined in the restaurant up there. The food had been crap, of course, but what a view!

“We’re concerned about Cathy,” Cyril said. “She looked even skinnier on TV last night than last week. We’re here to see that she eats.”

“And you expected she’d be here? How colossally naive of you. We have her in seclusion, accessible only to certain key journalists and tastemakers. As of this morning, she’s refusing food until they replace the former assistant to Shania Twain’s make-up artist with a less sadistic judge. It’s the pop music story of the century so far. The journos are absolutely mad for it. We’re on the front page of tomorrow’s
Telegraph.”

“I imagine you’re aware of the grave danger not eating poses for someone as frail as Cathy,” I said, feeling that we’d already had this conversation.

“Fully aware,” she agreed with infuriating blitheness.

“She isn’t going to be worth much to you dead, I reckon,” Cyril attempted.

“Oh, but you’re mistaken, dear fellow. The first thing we did was put her into the studio, and get two albums in the can. If her debut album is posthumous, it’ll almost certainly sell up to three times as many as it would if she were still alive. We’re positioning her as a sort of anorexic Eva Cassidy.”

“But you’ll be losing a fortune not getting her in front of live concert audiences,” Cyril attempted.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one,” Nepenthe yawned, smugness oozing from every pore. “Pop music audiences today don’t care if performers are actually singing. Nearly everyone mimes to pre-recorded vocal tracks. We can put a laser simulation of Cathy out
on tour. In fact, she’ll be able to play multiple venues at once, even multiple countries. The technology’s expensive, but gets less so every day.”