Waiting for Kate Bush (39 page)

“You
would
diminish me, wouldn’t you?” Dorothy asked her husband. You could see where the accusatory part of Stevie’s look came from. Clement sighed and tugged on his long lank ponytail and said, “Blimey, love. I’m only trying to make you feel better.”

“Well, you’re not bloody succeeding,” Dorothy said. “Of course, why should I find that surprising? Can’t even hold a bloody job, this one.”

“It’s the fame,” poor Clement told me and Cyril, actually sucking the tip of his ponytail now. “We never used to row, not before the press began hounding us, not before they began offering our youngsters money for stories about Stevie forgetting to flush and that.”

“We’ve rowed since the day we got back from our bloody honeymoon,” Dorothy snarled. “Blackpool he takes me to. Blackpool! Wanker.” It looked as though poor Clement might gnaw his ponytail off.

We got down to business, Clement and Dorothy, Cyril, and I. Effective immediately, they would start referring all of the dozens of calls per day they were now getting from gossiparasites to Cyril, who’d explain he’d been hired to deal with the press for them. He would then pick one at random to torment mercilessly.

“Is this a great, great day,” he asked as we headed back to the train, “or what? Thugging’s good fun – don’t get me wrong – but it hardly even rates comparison to malicious mischief.” He literally rubbed his little hands, his fists of stone, together with glee. “This is so much more creative. And you can actually make somebody loads more miserable than by just breaking their nose.”

He told me how it worked. The fundamental concept was that people were actually devastated more by things that befell innocent loved ones than themselves. Hence, we wouldn’t go after the unfortunate gossiparasite Cyril picked
per se
, but after his parents, siblings, and friends. “Some of your harder core types will also target somebody’s children,” Cyril explained with a shudder, “but that’s right out for me, right out.” He treated himself to a moment’s moral indignation.

“Say the poor rotter I pick has a brother who’s a plumber. What we’ll do is follow him round one day. We’ll go back to some of the people whose leaks he’s fixed and tell them we’re examiners from the Office of Plumbing Standards or some such bollocks, and that we’ve just come to make sure their work was done properly and that they were fairly charged. Most people feel overcharged by plumbers, and will be quite happy to let us in. While you distract them for a second, I’ll sabotage the work the brother’s done. Ultimately, the brother’s reputation will be rubbished.”

I wondered how long this process generally required. He took out a pair of reading glasses and a pocket diary, from which he ascertained that the last such job he’d undertaken had, from start to finish, taken just short of five months. He scowled when I pointed out that Clement and Dorothy and their younger children might not last two more weeks, and that he ought to return their money.

Signal problems somewhere down the line required us to stop. As we sat there, I felt worse and worse about spoiling Cyril’s fun. But then, reading over the shoulder of the guy beside me, I had an idea. The guy was reading an article with the headline
Another bullying-related suicide as Minister of Education holidays in Mallorca
. It suddenly occurred to me that parents of bullied children would almost certainly be happy to pay a few quid each month to prevent their kids being tormented to the point of self-destruction. What if Cyril puts his fists of stone to a noble use, the morally defensible one of intimidating bullies?

It was too wonderful! What decent parent wouldn’t be ecstatic to spend a few quid each week to ensure that his child wasn’t tormented to the point of abject hopelessness? Naturally, there would be those who’d object to Cyril, an adult, however tiny, beating up 14-year-olds,
but where were they when the 14-year-olds’ victims were hanging themselves, or jumping off the tops of buildings, or overdosing on their parents’ Cipramil?

Cyril wasn’t without misgivings. He had no idea of the horror of being bullied, as he’d only ever been a bully, albeit a casual one, and he was worried that other thugs would scorn him for roughing up minors. But he acknowledged that teenage suicide was a very sad thing, and that the market was probably as enormous as it was untapped.

“Why not start today?” I suggested, suddenly manic with enthusiasm. The guy to my left closed his newspaper and moved to the newly vacated seat to his own left. But I didn’t care. It was so wonderful to feel purposeful. So this was how others felt!

Cyril was sceptical, though. “Today? Don’t we have to get on the Internet or something first, do some research or something, make a few phone calls?”

That was the beauty of it, I explained, so enthusiastically that the newspaper man now relocated across the aisle. We needed only to find the nearest comprehensive school, hang fire until it let out, spot the school bullies, follow them, and lower the boom. Then we’d write down my email address for the parents of the kids we’d saved, and ask them to distribute it among the parents of other bullied kids.

“It’s actually quite a good idea,” the newspaper man surprised me by acknowledging as he returned to the seat beside me. I wasn’t accustomed to strangers on trains speaking to me, although, judging from the volume at which they hollered down their mobiles, it wasn’t because they didn’t want me to know the most intimate details of their lives. “I was a bit of a bully myself at school,” he said. “I’d have given anything I had or could nick from my parents if there’d been chaps like you two about at the time to show me the error of my ways.”

I hated having an American’s deficient sense of irony.

* * *

Kate declined to appear at record stores on behalf of
The Sensual World
, and gave rotten interviews, refusing to divulge anything about her life away from The Work, about which she waxed vague and gaseous. “I just wanted to try and find a female energy for myself [on this album],” she proclaimed. She was forever musing that she was, at last, beginning to Come To Terms With Herself.

She fell in with the company of self-styled alternative comedians known collectively as the Comic Strip, whose Dawn French had appeared in the ‘Experiment IV’ video, and whose Peter Richardson
had directed ‘The Sensual World’, and returned the compliments by scoring their
GLC – The Carnage Continues
, which imagined how Hollywood might have related the history of British socialism. Kate’s troublingly Madonna-esque bespoke new song ‘Ken’, which opened with a scream to rival Roger Daltrey’s on ‘Baba O’Riley’, archly celebrated the controversial future mayor of London. ‘The Confrontation’ musically supported Ken (as played by Robbie Coltrane’s version of Charles Bronson) butting heads with Margaret Thatcher (as played by Jennifer Saunders playing Brigitte Neilson). A couple of weeks later, Kate played the chocolate-addicted bride in Peter Richardson’s
Les Dogs
, an ironically Fellini-esque fusion of gallows humour and pathos, and, nearly everyone agreed, played her well.

None of the album’s singles received much play. It became clear that she’d grown too old for Radio 1’s smooth-cheeked listeners, who were thought to want to practise the latest dance crazes to catchy songs with lyrics they had some slender prayer of making sense of. While recording a duet with Midge Ure, who seemed to have an inflated conception of his own importance, Kate confessed that she was considering quitting music. The former Ultravox heart-throb, now losing his hair, chastened her, “You can’t, because if you quit, I quit, and if I quit somebody else who cares will quit.” She reverted with a vengeance to gardening. “It’s literally a very down-to-earth thing, isn’t it?” she asked one interviewer, apparently rhetorically.

EMI released a boxed set of everything she’d recorded for them to that point,
This Woman’s Work
, in a black box, suggesting that she was closing the door on the first part of her career. It wasn’t the colour of the package, though, but its price tag that made many fans see red. Twelve hundred of the faithful, who’d taken to convening in Glastonbury on her birthday (Katemas!) each year, nonetheless turned up at the Hammersmith Palais for the year-ending fan convention, at which Kate answered questions for 45 minutes and then warbled a wee ode of thanks to the tune of ‘My Lagan Love’ at the end. The adaptation confirmed that, when she chose to, she could indeed write coherent lyrics. The highlight for most, though, was her seeming to suggest that she fancied doing a few concerts.

Indeed, everything seemed to point to her performing live again. She’d bought two additional Fairlight IIIs, apparently to take on the road. Seemingly intent on getting in fighting trim, she was doing a lot of dancing, and working once more with Lindsey Kemp. She was said to have contacted
Muppets
man Jim Henson about his working up something for her. In the USA, one major promotions firm, thinking it
had the merchandising all sewn up, was already rubbing its hands in gleeful anticipation. And then, of course, nothing at all happened, unless you count her and Hannibal Records boss Joe Boyd, who’d helped put her in touch with Trio Bulgarka, accepting invitations to a formal luncheon hosted by the then-new Prime Minister John Major in honour of the president of Bulgaria. She didn’t suffer food poisoning, and a week later showed up on Del’s arm for the premiere of Ben Elton’s play
Silly Cow
. The paparazzi harassed the couple so mercilessly that our normally placid heroine – she too gentle even for sarcasm on the St. Joseph’s playground – kicked one in the bum. The gossip press take care of their own, and the next morning’s
Today
featured an unflattering photo of Kate and a slanderous appraisal of her appearance.

* * *

Cyril and I had a long lunch. I was astonished by Cyril’s appetite. He actually ate more than I, and washed it down with two pints to my glass of fizzy water with lemon. I asked him about having been a bully. He said the other bullies at his school hadn’t wanted him in their clique. They thought they’d look funny coming down the street five abreast, four of them biggish and him a head shorter than the next smallest. He’d suggested it might work if he were in the middle, with two bigger lads to each side, as Roger Daltrey had been effectively flanked by the much taller John Entwistle on one side and Pete Townshend on the other in his favourite band, The Who. But the other bullies were fans of such prog-rock titans as Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Genesis (originally featuring Kate’s future collaborator Peter Gabriel) and told him to fuck off. One of them had gone on to own a very successful chain of hair salons.

By and by, we got a bus down to Camberwell and asked a local for directions to the nearest comprehensive, which turned out to be the Prang Hill School for Boys, a misnomer. The school had been coeducational since 1989, but had been unable to afford to have its stationery and the sign above its portal changed. “Bloody Labour’s got all the money in the world to invade bloody Iraq,” the caretaker who was our source of information groused, “but if a school wants to change its name, it’s bloody out of luck, innit?”

I asked him when this particular one would let out. He looked at his wristwatch and said, “Any minute. It’s meant to last until half-three, but the teachers reckon they’re only getting paid up until a few minutes gone two, so they set the little buggers free whenever the urge strikes.”

I hurried over to a North African crafts shop across the road and bought Kate a necklace I hoped she’d like even though I generally withhold my custom from shops that have signs on their front doors reading
Maximum two children allowed in at any time
. I believe it hurts children’s feelings unnecessarily.

Not ten minutes later, the doors of the school flew open and Britain’s troubling future burst through them whooping and dribbling and sniffling and shuffling and strutting and, in the cases of those Cyril and I had come to help, cowering.

We didn’t have to wait long before a trio of very likely suspects swaggered into view, kicking a chubby Asian boy ahead of them like some huge, whimpering football, to the limitless amusement of their gum-chewing, mobile-brandishing girlfriends, with their precipitously low-slung combat trousers and blonde highlights.

“You’re bloody useless, aren’t you, Gajendra?” the darkest of the boys, an Asian himself, demanded.

“Yes, sir. I probably am,” the kid whimpered.

“Tell us exactly how useless,” the boy in the FCUK T-shirt demanded, making his girlfriend laugh.

“Oh, very useless indeed, sir,” Gajendra whimpered. His hands were in constant motion, hovering an inch or two above his body, as he tried to anticipate where they would kick him next.

“Art! What a wanky thing to be good at!” the third boy, the one who seemed to have copied the coiffure of Evelyn on
Fab Lab
, proclaimed.

“Fuck off,” the FCUK T-shirt one, clearly dominant, upbraided his friend. “It’s marvellous that Gajendra’s so good at drawing. He’s going to do us a picture now, in fact. The three of us. Like on a fucking movie poster, all heroic, with the girls clinging to us.” Here he knelt to speak right into poor Gajendra’s face. “And if we don’t fancy your drawing, mate, can you guess what we’re going to do with it?”

“Make him eat it?” Cyril wondered as he stepped up to them.

They looked at one another, not sure how to respond. “No,” the FCUK T-shirt one finally said, sneering, “Stick it up his jacksie.”

“Bit vehement, don’t you reckon?” Cyril asked, glaring up at the kid at a 30-degree angle. “Who appointed you school art critic anyway?”

The kid’s Asian friend and spiky-haired friend stepped to either side of Cyril and a bit behind him, each of the boys now 120 degrees from the next. Cyril did the absolute worst thing he could have done. He looked over at me. I don’t know how I’d managed it, but I’d never
even considered the possibility that I’d be involved in our new venture in anything but a consulting capacity. At that moment, as the three boys turned towards me too, it seemed the stupidest mistake I’d ever made. I was paralysed. I wouldn’t have been able to speak even if I’d been able to think of anything to say. I was 14 again, and there wasn’t anything about it that felt good.