Waiting for Kate Bush (44 page)

“Do you suppose maybe the two of you could discuss the situation later?” I finally managed, in a voice so small I doubted the waiter could hear me. I’d have liked to have addressed him in that sarcastic way the Brits have when they’re getting in one another’s faces, as mate, but it was beyond me.

“What’s wrong with right now?” he demanded. The waiter hurried away, I hoped he’d gone for a huge saucepan with which to whack Tarquin over the head.

“Well,” I stammered, “we’re just about to … out of consideration for our fellow diners … this is neither the time nor the …” I couldn’t complete a thought.

“Neither the time nor the bloody place, mate? Well, you’re probably right. Why don’t the two of us step outside?”

“Sort him out,” someone said encouragingly from behind. I was afraid they were talking to me. I was nearly sure of it. I wanted to burst into tears. I wanted to evaporate. “I don’t think so,” I finally said, even more quietly than before, desperate to be heard by as few people as possible. “My starter will get cold.”

“It’s a bloody green salad, mate!”

Nicola’s eyes welled with tears. She looked away. Forget evaporating. I wanted to die. I didn’t deserve to live.

I dared make eye contact with Tarquin, and was surprised by the look on his face. It didn’t look so much like anger as pity. He shook his head. He left us.

Even in that uniquely excruciating moment, my sense of humour didn’t fail me. It occurred to me to ask Nicola, referring to her scallops, “So how’s yours?” But I dashed for the gents’ instead.

He was in there, sitting on the toilet with his face in his hands. His arm wasn’t really broken. Nor, I realised as he addressed me, was his jaw really wired shut. “Blimey, mate,” he said, more disappointedly than belligerently, “what does it bloody take to get you to stand up and be bloody counted?”

I just gaped at him.

“A geezer with a broken arm and a wired-together jaw comes over and challenges you in front of your bird and you don’t take him outside and beat him senseless? A broken bloody arm, mate! Jesus. What sort of fight is somebody with a broken arm going to put up?”

I kept gaping, terrified of what he might say next.

“It was a done deal, mate. I was trying to make it easy for you. How much easier could I have made it than to have one arm in a cast? Her mum and stepdad hired me. The idea was to help you with your self-esteem. You’d have flattened me, mate. You’d have flattened me after the Overeaters’ meeting at the pub that time. I was going to bloody let you!”

He leaned on the basin and shook his head in disgust. “Well that’s 500 quid not earned, isn’t it? If I go to her stepdad not black and blue, he won’t pay me a penny.”

He looked at me hopefully. “Do it now, mate. Here. A good one in the chin. Or the eye’s good as well. Give me a real shiner. Or break my nose.” He lifted his chin at me and closed his eyes. “Come on, mate. Do your worst. I need the dosh. It’ll be bloody Christmas before we turn around.”

I bolted. I got out of the gents’ and headed for the street without even looking back at my and Nicola’s table. And there she was, as I burst out of the place, just about to get into a cab, her cheeks streaked with tears.

B
ABOOSHKA was coming to London. It was in the
Telegraph, in
an article about how the producers of
Fab Lab
, having noted
Megastar
’s great, great success there, was trying to break their own show in America. They’d broadcast an episode and invited viewers aged 16–21 to write a 200-word essay about which of the singers was their favourite, the prize being a trip to London to meet their favourite before the climactic show of the series. My daughter, who, to her considerable credit, had written about the anarchic, atonal Evelyn, was one of the four winners, and the only Californian. In the face of the British viewing public having got fed up with Evelyn and voted him off
Fab Lab
the week before, Bab had switched her allegiance to … Cathy!

I phoned the production company and asked where the American contest winners would be put up. The girl on the phone said she wasn’t allowed to say. I phoned the
Telegraph
writer who’d written the story about the contest. I left two phone messages and sent an email with no response. I tried the phone again and got her. “That’s yesterday’s news,” she pointed out annoyedly, “and how would I know which bloody hotel?” She put the phone down on me without saying goodbye. I phoned the production company back and asked how I could get tickets to be part of the studio audience for the show my daughter would have been flown over to witness. The girl insisted there were no tickets.

I had another idea. I did some research on the Internet and determined that it was the notorious Niraj Ganapathy, normally in the business of brokering the sale of bimbos’ stories of their nights of sin with married MPs and BBC news readers, who handled Sir Ivor Praiseworthy’s public relations. I phoned Ganapathy’s office and asked to speak to one of his lieutenants, which I neglected to pronounce Britishly. The girl who answered the phone demanded, “Lieutenants? What are you on about?” She
did
pronounce it the British way, as though the first
syllable ends in an f. I told her the whole story of my estrangement from my daughter, and how I hoped we might be reunited at the set of
Fab Lab
, which I would need Sir Ivor’s help to attend. She passed me without comment up the food chain. I recited my whole tale of woe a second time for a guy, Sandeep, with the eager phone manner of an estate agent. He interrupted me to put me on hold so often that I despaired of his understanding what I was asking for. And he didn’t. When I finally finished, he asked, “So what is it that you hope NGPR to do for you?” Niraj Ganapathy Public Relations, I surmised.

“Convey to Sir Ivor that I need tickets to the finals of
Fab Lab.”
Again he put me on hold.

“Listen,” I said, trying not to sigh in exasperation when he finally returned. “Think of how you could pitch this to the press. One loving dad, whose son is a contestant, helping reunite another loving dad with his daughter. Imagine how the British public will love him for this.”

“They already
do
love him,” he pointed out scoldingly. I acknowledged that of course he was right, and he, patronising me with all his might, said he’d run it by Niraj and get back to me. I expected he was the sort who was only pretending to be able to get Niraj’s attention at will, but a secretary phoned 35 minutes later to advise me to expect a call from one of Ganapathy’s top personal assistants in two hours’ time.

She rang in a few minutes short of three. Once more I recited
One Loving Dad Helping Another
, which I liked to imagine had become slightly more poignant with every retelling. “I think Arohi may like that,” she said. “I honestly do.” I had no idea whom she was talking about, and admitted it. There was a hint of censure in her voice as she explained that Arohi was her boss, and one of Niraj’s top aides. She would phone me within the hour.

She phoned me within five minutes. An assistant actually made the call to ensure that I was available to speak. Apparently Arohi hadn’t a moment to squander. She came on the line sounding breathless, but with no idea who I was. I was a few sentences into my spiel when she impatiently stopped me. “Niraj may fancy that,” she marvelled. I was to stay right by the phone. Niraj himself would be with me in the next five minutes.

I amused myself in the meantime by bookmarking several web pages depicting items I hoped Kate might enjoy receiving as gifts. I was almost sure she’d like the machine that generated bubbles in time to whatever music you played into it. Finally, around 82 minutes after the fact, the phone rang. Once again, an assistant made me promise that I was indeed available. I held and held and held, and then held a few
minutes more. Just as I was about to conclude that Niraj had decided on the spur of the moment to go on holiday, he came on the line, sounding as though about to audition to play an East End barrow boy on the West End stage, demanding, “You’re the daughter geezer, right?” I confirmed it. “So what have you got in mind, mate? I don’t have all afternoon, do I?” It was a few minutes before ten at night. I gave him the spiel, which I had pretty well memorised by now.

“Bit corny, that, innit?” he yawned down the phone. “Might work, though. Let me mention it to Himself.”

Mrs. Cavanaugh came up while I recovered from my exertions, but not to see if I were feeling virile again. Indeed, she was as distraught as I’d seen her since Cathy’s non-suicide. It seemed, in the face of dwindling ratings, that the producers of
Fab Lab
and
Megastar
had decided to merge their two shows. Cathy wouldn’t be competing now against only the cream of Britain’s young bulimics, anorexics, harelips, clubfoots, and blind and deaf, but against the cream of
Fab Lab
too. “By what possible feckin’ measure is that fair?” Mrs. Cavanaugh demanded, nibbling a cuticle in agitation. “Just when it begins to look as though she might win the race, they reposition the feckin’ finish line!” I pointed out that, with the wonderful anarchic Evelyn long since voted off, the cream of
Fab Lab
hadn’t a prayer against th
e Lame, Halt, and Blind
kids.

* * *

While the faithful yearned in vain for a new album, Kate accepted the gigantic international advertising agency Chiat-Day’s invitation to compose music for the new Fruitopia line of fruit drinks with which their client Coca-Cola hoped to muscle in on America’s $2 billion a year “alternative non-carbonated beverages” market. Having commissioned expensive research suggesting that the target consumer sought refreshment not only for his body, but for his mind and spirit as well, Coke was said to be prepared to spend $30 million to try to get Americans to turn away from Snapple. Kate did 10 snippets of music that weren’t heard in the UK, where the Cocteau Twins got the nod after she presumably asked for too much more of what remained of the $30 million.

Her music wasn’t anything any competent composer with some small rhythmic and melodic imagination couldn’t have cranked out in 48 hours. Some scurrilous curmudgeon (not Charles Shaar Murray this time) pointed out that hundreds of times as many Americans were likely to hear ‘Iced Tea Inner Light’ (I’m not making this up) than had
heard all of her albums combined. Another noted that Fruitopia came in bottles “covered with silly pseudo-environmentalist verbiage, faux peace ‘n’ love bollocks, and a pretty poor imitation of Peter Max’s [painting style].” Kate presumably suffered acute embarrassment all the way to the bank.

An American music critic explained that “in this country, Bush’s florid vocal eccentricity – undulating gulps and shrieks of meandering melody – have consigned her to the rank of oddball, English Division.” Meanwhile, a British writer referred to her as “the Pre-Raphaelite nymph with Minnie Mouse’s soprano.” If Kate were perturbed, she kept it quiet.

Davy Spillane, who’d played on the
Hounds Of Love
, released his album
A Place Among The Stars
in mid-1994, but without Kate’s version of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’ (I’m not making this up), which he explained didn’t fit the mood of the balance of the album. A decade later, it would remain possible to download via the Internet an MP3 version of the song seemingly recorded through the pickup of a cheap Korean electric guitar.

She managed to endure only a few minutes of the 1994 fan convention, but was the perfect guest at the People’s Banquet, a Whitehall do to celebrate Her Majesty’s having been married for 50 years to her tactless Greek husband, and sat with her old china, former PM John Major, cricketer Mike Atherton, and ballerina Darcy Bussell, with whom one imagines she found it rather easier to chat than with poor Mike. The old-fashioned American soul crooner Maxwell recorded a version of her ‘This Woman’s Work’ in his beautiful falsetto.

In the
Irish Times
, that condescending git Mick Moroney observed of Kate’s contribution to Donal Lunny’s
Common Ground – Voices Of Modern Irish Music
compilation, on which she was featured alongside Elvis Costello, the Finn brothers, and a couple of U2, “The biggest chuckle is Kate Bush’s Darby O’Gill-accented ‘Mna na h-Eireann’, histrionically dragging swatches of O’Riada orchestration along behind her, but with a whipping knife edge of emotion which makes it all worthwhile.” A whipping knife edge of emotion, Mick? The Irish
Hot Press
suggested that Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Raglan Road’ stole the show.

* * *

Sandeep finally phoned to say that Sir Ivor was concerned about my daughter having flown over to support Cathy. But he thought my daughter switching allegiance to Sir Ivor’s son Claude would probably produce the ticket for which I yearned. I pointed out that, since we
weren’t even in touch, I was hardly in a position to try to influence my daughter one way or the other. Whereupon, suddenly sounding bored with me, he pointed out that 150 tickets would be distributed free to ordinary punters on the day on a first-come/first-served basis, suggested I get there very early, and put the phone down on me.

And thus it came to pass that at a few minutes gone one in the morning before the day the final was to be shot, I became approximately the 50th person to queue outside Teddington Studios, the first over 50, and the first and probably last member of the obscenely obese.

The two teenagers from Surbiton in front of me, Sally and Deborah, were friendly enough for little Brits. The one who showed up a few minutes later, a Goth from Fulwell, couldn’t have been more sullen. Or maybe her sullenness was part of her attire. When, at a few minutes before four, I asked if she’d save my place while I used the toilet, she looked at me as though I’d just introduced myself as the inventor of menstrual cramping. “Where are these toilets you intend to use?” Sally wondered groggily from her sleeping bag. This elicited something resembling a snicker from the little Goth, who finally spoke, to tell me there were no loos available. “You didn’t really not bring plastic bags, did you?” Sally asked incredulously.