Waiting for Kate Bush (41 page)

Not that Kate needed an awful lot of protection. She’d come, it was said (by no greasy tabloid, but
The Times
, whose interviewer admitted that Kate’s petiteness and self-containedness made her feel rather a thug), to bring her own tape recorder to interviews to ensure that she wasn’t misquoted. Not that she actually said much anymore. She would explain that she would talk about her music, but not about her life, as though the two were neatly separable, as though her life somehow didn’t inform her music.

One who’d ask her a few years hence, for instance, what specifically had inspired her to observe, in ‘And So Is Love’, that life and love are sad, would be informed that it was in fact Joseph Campbell’s observation, and not something she necessarily believed herself. She was gallingly opaque.

And it wasn’t as though the prospective interviewer got to consider her new music at leisure, but rather came to Abbey Road to hear it, and then was sent home without a cassette or test pressing, or even a lyric sheet, numbered lyric sheets having been distributed at the listening session, and then vigilantly reclaimed at the end. One wondered if Kate, in her old age, might have got a bit up herself after all.

And then another long silence, one to the absurdity of which Kate admitted to the man from the
Guardian
. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? The amount of time that’s gone into writing these songs is stupid really. They’re just songs, not some cathedral or something.

“Three years to make a record. The worst is that the stuff is often written very quickly – in a day, a day and a half. But once you get into the studio, it starts to take on a life of its own. I wouldn’t understand if I weren’t involved. I’d think it was outrageous.” She and the faithful Del were said no longer to be as one. Her mother died. In every life, some rain must fall, and a great deal seemed to be falling in Kate’s.

* * *

The thought of sitting down to a dinner served by Mrs. Cavanaugh across from Mr. Chumaraswamy nearly spoiled my appetite, so I headed, as I’d allowed my obesity to keep me doing for months, for the pub. It was exhilarating to realise that I could walk that far. But I’d hardly started my
kanom Bueong Youn
when my mobile rang. Cyril was on top of a 12-storey block of flats in Camberwell with the boy in the
FCUK T-shirt and his parents, all of them trying to talk the boy out of plunging to his death. I was to get over there immediately.

I found the scene exactly as Cyril had described, except he’d failed to mention the presence of half a dozen police, two television news crews, poor Plaistow and a couple of other journalists, the combat-trousered girls from school, the bully magnet Gajendra and a couple I took to be his parents, a vicar, Lady Victoria Hervey – who’d presumably followed the news crews, hoping to get into some of their footage, and now in fact was being interviewed, assuring the TV news correspondent that she thought teen suicide was very, very tragic. The boy’s Asian and spiky-haired partners in crime were there too.

At the sight of me, Cyril broke away from the vicar and the boy’s parents and hurried over, seething. “You got me in this mess,” he said. “Now you can bloody well get me out.”

He grabbed me by the arm and hustled me near to where FCUK sat on the precipice staring longingly at the street below while ignoring the police negotiator, who I apprehended immediately was taking entirely the wrong approach – reminding the kid that he had his whole life ahead of him. I’d have hoped that a police negotiator would have a confident, reassuring baritone, and maybe this one had in other circumstances, but as we got within hearing distance of him, he was speaking in a high-pitched Welsh-inflected singsong that I thought a lot more likely to induce a fatal plunge than discourage it.

“Jamie,” Cyril said to the kid, “look, mate. Look who’s here.”

Jamie glanced over at me, but didn’t find me interesting. “Who’s he?”

It was certainly heartening to know what an extremely delible impression I’d made. “My mate,” Cyril reminded him. “It was actually his idea to sort you out this afternoon.”

“I don’t remember anybody else being there,” Jamie said. “And I’m getting well fed up now. If somebody’s going to change my mind about this, they’d better fucking speak up.”

Gajendra, tenderhearted Gajendra, ran through the police. “Sir,” he implored Jamie, “please don’t do this.
Please!
I’m not angry. I’m not angry at all. Listen, I’ve been bullied mercilessly since my first day of infants school, my teacher at which advised my parents she’d never seen anybody bring out the tyrant in other children as I did.

“And you’re the best of everyone who’s ever tormented me – the best! You’ve forgotten more about petty sadism than the others will have learned by the time they leave school without so much as an O-level between them.
Please!”

Jamie turned towards him. “I appreciate your kindness, mate. I do,
honestly. But you were a contemptible little wankbag this afternoon, and your opinion doesn’t mean anything more to me now. Piss off back to Mummy and Daddy, or whatever you lot call them. Let me do what I must.”

I assume the vicar had tried before. Now he tried again. He invoked Jesus’s infinite compassion and forgiveness, and reminded Jamie that, since life was God’s alone to take, he’d forfeit his chance to go to Heaven by leaping. “I have to admit I don’t follow that,” Jamie told the vicar. “If Jesus is so forgiving, why can’t I be forgiven for jumping?” His two sidekicks’ snickering made him smile, but not for very long. He turned once more to the abyss.

I had an idea. I breathlessly related it to Cyril. “How am I going to remember all that?” he protested when I finished, but we both knew there was no time to lose. Needs must.

“Before you jump, mate,” he told Jamie, “I just want you to know that the whole time we were glaring at each other this afternoon, I was fucking terrified, pissing myself, in fact. It was only the catheter kept you from seeing. If you’d actually raised a hand to me, I’d have fainted.”

He had the boy’s attention. “How did I keep from bursting into tears and running away? Well, I was cheating, wasn’t I? See, when I was in the Territorial Army, they taught us a special technique for raising our own testosterone levels. But I couldn’t have kept it up there for five more seconds, mate. And then it would have been clear to all that you were the better man, the far better one.

“Do you fancy hip hop, mate? I’m going to guess that you do. So you’ll know what I mean when I say:
You da man.”

Jamie looked at him as he’d not looked at anyone else. You could tell he wanted it to be true. Cyril looked at me. I hoped he could see the encouragement in my eyes. I didn’t dare be more overt than that.

“Why was I so terrified?” Cyril continued, making this part up for himself. “Because anybody can see you’re nuff hard. Being a wankbag at Prang Hill School must be about the worst idea a kid could have with hard geezers like you on the pitch.”

“It is!” Gajendra affirmed frantically from behind us. “Every day I kick myself for being so stupid!”

“Everybody admires you, mate,” Cyril said. “Everybody. Other boys. All the girls. The teachers. The lot. How could they not admire somebody as hard as you?”

“If we was to have a punch-up, you and me,” Jamie ventured, “you’d probably wind up in the fucking hospital.” And at that moment I knew his life was saved, although his mum nearly threw a spanner in
the works, bleating, “I will not have that language in my home, James, and I won’t have it up here either!”

Jamie’s Asian mate got the idea. “It’s an honour being the right-hand man of somebody as hard as you, James.”

“I’m his right-hand man, you wanker,” the spiky one protested. “You’re his left.”

But it didn’t matter in the slightest. It was only a matter of time now before Jamie swung his legs back over the wall.

“Jamie’s hard!” it occurred to me to begin to chant. “Jamie’s hard!” I could have wound up feeling a perfect prat, but soon everyone was chanting along with me, even Lady Victoria Hervey. And here came Jamie’s legs. And here a couple of coppers to pull him far clear of the precipice and handcuff him. “What are you bloody doing?” he whimpered.

“Public endangerment, innit,” the cop in charge informed him. “What if you’d slipped off the wall and fallen on somebody?”

For about a millisecond, it looked as though Asian and Spiky might try to overwhelm the cops. But it fell to me, Jamie’s new benefactor, to put the best face on the situation. “How many of the other hard boys at Prang Hill will be able to say they’ve been nicked by the Old Bill?”

“Wicked!” exulted Asian.

“Jamie’s hard,” Spiky reminded him, shaking his head admiringly as the cops led their leader towards the stairs.

I expected Cyril to bite my ears off, but he was gentle with me. “Next time you have a brilliant idea,” he said, putting his hand avuncularly on my shoulder even though he was probably ten years my junior, “why not take it to one of your other mates?” He had no way of knowing, of course, that I hadn’t any other mates, unless I counted Plaistow, which would have been rather a stretch.

And now here came Jamie’s parents, his mum crying softly into a facial tissue, his dad glowering. “ ’Ere,” the latter said, “it isn’t that we don’t understand what you lot were trying to do, and it isn’t that we don’t agree it’s a good thing.”

“We’ve tried in every way we know to stop his being a sadistic little monster,” his mum sniffled. “We got him a PlayStation. We bought him an electric guitar. We bought him the Harry Potter books after hearing that even kids who don’t fancy other books love them.”

“He read one paragraph of the first one,” his dad said. “couldn’t be arsed. Told us he found it more fun tormenting his passive classmates, didn’t he, Lois?”

“He did,” his mum agreed. “And don’t think that wasn’t like a knife
in our hearts. We don’t have a cruel household. We haven’t even eaten red meat since the whole mad cow palaver. The occasional chicken, but only if it’s free range. And fish, of course.”

“But you can’t just snatch it away from him, the sadism,” his dad said, “not any more than you could snatch Jesus away from the vicar.”

“It’s how he defines himself, being monstrous,” his mum said, becoming more irate with each new syllable. “It’s what makes him feel OK about himself, isn’t it? Does it ever occur to meddlers like you lot that a bully might be as fragile deep down as any other teenager?”

I introduced Cyril to Plaistow. It seemed silly that my two best friends didn’t know one another. It turned out they both supported Fulham and hated Arsenal. For the millionth time in my life, I felt insufficiently masculine in the face of such revelations. Plaistow hadn’t actually boxed, but had enjoyed the
Rocky
series of films, at least through
III
. He believed Sylvester Stallone had at least one more great film in him.

His work hadn’t been going brilliantly. As he saw it, there were now too many people trying to unearth too little celebrity filth. The problem with
Fab Lab
and
Megastar
was that the contestants were in most cases too young to have very many skeletons in their closets. The exception was Vijay, recently voted out of
Fab Lab
, who’d been revealed to be 33, and to look 19 only as a result of extensive cosmetic surgery. The scoop, alas, had been someone else’s.

Plaistow had been poking around on the edges of the anti-bully vigilantism movement for several weeks, but didn’t dare delve deeper for fear of getting on the wrong side of the Albanians. They were said to kidnap one bully at random from every school they came to control, and to ship him blindfolded and gagged back to the old country, from which they would compel him to write ever more plaintive letters to his family and friends back in the Southeast outside London. Bullying in the areas they controlled had virtually disappeared. It wasn’t uncommon in Albanian-controlled areas to see former bullies polishing the shoes of those they’d once tormented with the sleeves of their own Tommy Hilfiger and other hooded sweatshirts.

Plaistow admitted he wished Jamie had jumped, as he’d been able to conduct interviews with both his parents, his Asian mate, and his girlfriend while the police and vicar tried to talk him off the precipice. “His girlfriend said he’s actually quite soft-hearted when you get to know him. Fancies animals and that. Is lovely to her mum. Gives her a lot of the jewellery he makes his victims nick from their own mums.”

F
INALLY, in 1993, there was another album,
The Red Shoes
, which, according to the faithful Del, she’d originally intended to record quickly and then take out on the road! At the same time as she was having someone rig up a remote control device that would enable her to work in complete seclusion, without even the faithful Del, she was also successfully inviting the contributions of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Prince, the comedian Lenny Henry, and three Bulgarian woman folk singers in their sixties, the Trio Bulgarka. ‘Rubberband Girl’, the unnervingly Madonna-esque opening track, led one to think she’d made a party album. But then it was back to business as usual, to melancholy ruminations on the trauma of being alive, and we loved her for it. And if the stalwart Del noticed Kate and the guitarist Danny McIntosh glancing at one another during the recording of his bits in a way suggesting that Danny would one day supplant Del as Kate’s leading man, he didn’t let on to any of the tabloids.

‘Rubberband Girl’, with its weird background voices and Kate’s rubberband imitation at the end, must have made a lot of people think there’d been a frightful mistake at EMI’s manufacturing facility. But it wasn’t nearly as much a bucketful of ice water in the face as ‘Why Should I Love You’, on which Kate sounded as though making a cameo on a Prince album. I loved it, especially Prince’s little organ riff. ‘Big Stripey Lie’, on which she played distortorama guitar just like ringin’ a bell, seemed no less an homage to David Byrne’s work with Brian Eno than the infectiously exultant, utterly incomprehensible ‘Eat The Music’ was to the music of Madagascar. I hadn’t a clue what she was on about, and didn’t care in the slightest. The energisingly manic title track made me chuckle. (All anyone who wanted to stop dancing needed to do was put on one of Kate’s albums before
Hounds Of Love)
‘Constellation Of The Heart’, which took the remarkable step of explicitly repudiating the hopelessness of other songs, featured wonderful funky guitar work from
future lover Danny McIntosh and a hilarious dialogue with the background singers.