Waiting for Kate Bush, page 13
Wasn’t she entitled to relax a bit, she’d demand petulantly.
I got myself a little flat in San Francisco and drove up to collect Bab every Friday evening, and took her back to her mum’s and grandparents’ every Sunday night. The time I had with her was by far my happiest. But it wasn’t so happy for her. No matter how gentle and adoring I was, no matter how attentive, she always made it clear that she greatly disliked being deprived of her mother’s companionship even for 48 hours.
I challenged the divorce decree I’d passively accepted in the beginning because I wasn’t in any shape to put up a fight. Under the terms of the amended settlement, my wife had to drive my daughter half the time, and began bringing her down to San Francisco on Saturday mornings. At the sound of the bell ringing, I’d whoop exultantly, and run down the stairs three at a time. And when I reached the ground floor and flung open the door, my daughter, crying, would be hiding from me behind her mother — her mother who, when the going in our marriage got tough (at least half because of me, I admit now and admitted then), refused to consider couples counselling. But it isn’t just us, I said. We have a daughter to think about. Our splitting up is going to affect her for the rest of her life. Nope. My wife couldn’t be bothered.
And it was my wife to whom my daughter clung for dear life.
Fifteen years after the fact, the memory of that continues to hurt nearly more than I am able to express.
And it never went away. I’d hide my pain from Bab, and soon have her laughing again. We’d have wonderful times. I’d take her to the playground in the square between the big hotels at the summit of Nob Hill, a magical place, and push her endlessly on the swings. She’d gasp with laughter at the thought that I was pushing her so high that, if she wanted, she’d be able to jump off the swing right into the living room of a flat in one of the elegant old buildings that surrounded the square, and find out what they were having for dinner. I’d carry her on my shoulders all the way to North Beach, where, on a bustling Friday or Saturday night, we’d walk along Columbus Avenue watching the Italian chefs frantically cooking in their open kitchens, and smell the delicious smells. I’d remain for hours on the verge of tears of joy, only for my daughter to advise me, at a moment of peak exultation, “I want Mommy.”
A great man once sang, ungrammatically, “If you love somebody, set them free.” If I’d been a better man, maybe I’d have let my daughter have her way. What I did instead was let her see how much she hurt me, and try to point out all the ways in which Mommy let her down. Shame on me, and what an extremely high price I’d wind up paying.
My daughter reached school age. Every other Friday afternoon, I’d drive up to collect her from school, and every other Friday afternoon the look on her face would confirm what her mother had related she’d said, that she wished I were the kind of divorced daddy you were always hearing about, the kind who made plans with his kid and then didn’t show up. Every other Friday afternoon, another broken heart.
She was her mother’s daughter, extremely bright, but with an apparently congenital aversion to having to work very hard at anything. Trying to do for my daughter what I’d come passionately to wish someone had done for me at her age, I taught her things. I did what Kate’s brothers and dad did for her – taught her to write poems and songs, how to compose melodies and then harmonise them. I taught her to sketch. We spent huge amounts of time in the car travelling back and forth between my city and her mother’s, and I decided we should devote some of it to learning Spanish. Bab resented all of it.
Her mother, who had earlier taught her how to use a remote control device to change television channels, now taught her to have fake fingernails professionally affixed to her real ones, how to have highlights put in her hair, how to spend lots of time at the mall shopping for cute new outfits, and then, by example, how to walk out of another marriage, but not, as noted, before her Swiss electronic millionaire third husband (there’d been one before me, without children) could pay for her cosmetic surgery.
As my daughter fought her way through adolescence, lusting after boys who found her too fat to ask out, going through friends as some people go through paper towels, often finding herself without any, things got ever rockier between us. I tried to teach her some small sense of responsibility by requiring her not to leave mounds of dirty laundry on her bedroom floor. She hated me for it, and Mommy eagerly assured her that it was my nature to be tyrannically controlling. (Hadn’t I, during our marriage, always tried to ensure that we showed up for dinner with friends reasonably punctually, rather than the 45 minutes late that had long been her norm?)
I accepted part of the blame for her girth. As I looked back, I saw with horror that I’d routinely used food as a medium of comfort over the years. She felt awful about having been rejected by yet another friend? Well, why don’t we see if a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone makes the pain a little more bearable? She felt awful because her mom’s greatest interest was in attracting the attention of much younger men at groovy night-clubs in San Francisco? Well, why didn’t we go and have dinner at her favourite Chinese restaurant?
I didn’t accept only the blame, though. I also accepted the responsibilities of trying to set a good example for her, and of facing up to the problem. I ate as though preparing for a famine, but worked out daily at the gym. She made plans to go with a gay classmate to a dance at her school. The afternoon before the dance, she burst into tears at the thought of being the only girl there who hadn’t been legitimately invited by a boy. It felt like a knife in my heart. I consoled her as best I could, but didn’t leave it there. Not wanting her to have to suffer in the same way again, I pointed out, with the utmost gentleness, that she was very beautiful (as indeed she was), but that a lot of boys weren’t seeing that because she was overweight. I’ll never forget the look of rage and shame and betrayal she gave me.
For a moment I was speechless. Then I delivered a message of hope. She was undeniably overweight, but the solution was very, very simple. She needed simply to eat less and exercise more.
Now there was only rage in her eyes. Undeniably overweight? Well, how was it that her friends (the two she cited were even more bloated than she) thought she looked just fine? And what if she didn’t like going to the gym? It was remarkable how disgusting and uncool she was able to make it sound. What if she didn’t like sitting around in a moth-eaten sweater caked in snot, reeking of cat urine?
Mommy wasn’t much help, of course. Mommy was Victoria Beckham skeletal without having set foot in a gym in around seven years, since I’d got her to go with me for maybe a week back in Los Angeles. (She’d enjoyed it for a short while because she looked really cute in her spandex leotard, and knew it.) If Mommy could be skinny without working out, why couldn’t my daughter?
What Mommy could do was teach her the importance of having her hair and nails professionally looked after at regular intervals, and how to put on make-up. My daughter is artistic, and was good with make-up. Her hair looked fabulous when she got back from the hairdresser. And if her fake nails made her feel more confident, then all the better. But compared to her bloatedness, none of it mattered much. The boys unanimously looked past her to her more lithe classmates. And my daughter suffered terribly.
* * *
In every city to which the Tour Of Life travelled, Kate bravely confronted the press, and proved rather less puckish, but also less churlish, than the acknowledged master of the rock star press conference, Bob Dylan. When Piccadilly Radio asked her how much money she’d made, she claimed to have no idea. One can picture Dylan replying, “£14,230.55.” They asked if she’d come to live in luxury, and she assured them she’d been living in the same flat for years. What would she take with her if consigned to a farmhouse on a bleak Yorkshire moor? Friends, cigarettes, tea, music, and two cats. Dylan, in his prime, would surely have included Anita Ekberg and a light bulb.
After the final performance of the British part of the tour, in Edinburgh, various stars of the show repaired to the pricey fish restaurant Cousteau’s, only to realise that over-zealous fans had followed their coach and were apparently intent on watching them eat through the window. Fearing they might freeze to death, kind Kate took them some wine and signed autographs. Back in London, there was a soiree at the Dial 9, with guests including The Tubes’ Fee Waybill and David Bowie’s PA.
The country simply couldn’t stop talking about her. The Daily Star speculated that Zoodle and Pyewacket were past lovers on whom she’d cast a spell. (Are you in there, Al?) Word got out that no heterosexual British male would want to miss her performance of ‘Wow’ on BBC-TV’s The Abba Special on the evening of Good Friday, The Daily Express promising nothing less than “wanton erotic gestures”. The Daily Mail’s editorial cartoonist depicted Margaret Thatcher, as Kate, inspiring Prime Minister Callaghan to gasp. She was indisputably iconic now.
Gnashing its corporate teeth, sulking unashamedly, EMI announced that she’d declined its producers’ invitation (ungrateful little cow!) to record the theme song for the forthcoming James Bond film Moonraker. It turned out she’d seen fit instead to record the theme for The Magician Of Lublin, warmly received at film festivals and avoided like the plague by British filmgoers.
The show headed for Europe. Kate’s throat felt crap, so four songs were cut from the programme in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Amsterdam. A doctor in the Swedish capital advised her to use her voice only on stage. Her training with Lindsey Kemp came in handy as she began communicating in mime. People started responding nonverbally, with their own impromptu sign language, as though she wasn’t just momentarily mute, but deaf as well. Sometimes people can be so adorable.
She got her voice back and the tour proceeded to Stuttgart, Munich (where the Circus Krone stage was nearly obscured by the thousands of red carnations the audience tossed onto it), Cologne, Paris (in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, where G.I. Gurdjieff himself had once been boffo), Mannheim, and Frankfurt before returning for three additional nights at the Hammersmith Odeon, one of them a benefit for Bill Duffield.
At that performance, it was Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley who came out in trench coats and trilbies for ‘Them Heavy People’ rather than Kate’s usual dancers Gary and Stuart. The audience was beside itself with delight, and somehow remained so even during Harley’s solo turn. In the end, as the three stars sang ‘Let It Be’ (and not, as those already fatally fed up with Paul McCartney’s vague ode to hopefulness might have preferred, ‘Gimme Dat Ding’) together, Harley got the audience to sing along as though at a football match and Kate wept.
* * *
One Sunday afternoon, I drove Babooshka and her gay male classmate and friends to the cinema on the understanding that the classmate’s mother would give them a lift home. Five minutes after the film ended, my daughter was on the phone to me. Classmate’s mother wasn’t answering her phone. I was right in the middle of something I needed to complete, and told her to try her friend’s mother again in a few minutes. Ninety seconds later, the phone rang again. Classmate’s mother still wasn’t answering, and they were getting bored just standing around. Then take the bus, I suggested. The bus was safe, inexpensive, air-conditioned, and only rarely had anyone on it. It came every 15 minutes.
From her reaction, you’d have thought I’d told her we’d henceforth eat nothing but kitty litter.
I conferred with her mother, admitting that I was worried by how very much our daughter had come to take for granted. I believed it horrifying that she wouldn’t even consider public transport. Her mother’s response was to buy her a car of her own the week she became eligible to drive. And I was the controlling one.
From when she was two and a half and I got my first place in San Francisco, I had always encouraged my daughter to think of where we lived together, even if it was for only two or three days a week, as Bab’s and Daddy’s house, and not just Daddy’s. Now she started leaving messages on my answering machine on Thursday nights advising, “I don’t want to come to your house tomorrow, Daddy.”
Beside myself, I consulted psychotherapists. None of them was quite able to explain my daughter’s great attachment to her mother, whose first priority, now she was free of the Swiss electronics millionaire, with a substantial chunk of his fortune in a new bank account bearing only her name, was to display herself in groovy San Francisco night-clubs. Her highest aspiration seemed to be being taken for a contemporary by much younger men.
My daughter spoke to the psychotherapists with the utmost reluctance. Before one appointment, she pretended, in the waiting area when she arrived late with Mommy, that she didn’t know me. It felt as though my heart was being ripped out without an anaesthetic.
Mommy hooked up with a smug-seeming insurance salesman with a post-ironic quiff who enjoyed taking her to groovy Eighties-themed night-clubs. My daughter, who’d grown accustomed to having Mommy to herself, wasn’t keen. In view of her longer and longer absences from … my house (one I’d moved to from San Francisco, considerable inconvenience be damned, largely so my daughter wouldn’t feel I was taking her away from her few school friends every weekend), I told her it hurt me seeing so much less of her than New Boyfriend. Her response was not to see or speak to me at all for three months.
I hid from the pain of our estrangement as far away as I could get, in London, and then went back and was reconciled with her. Indeed, her relationship with New Boyfriend had become so uncomfortable that she asked if she could move full time into … my house. By agreeing instantly, I later realised I was doing exactly what I’d so often accused Mommy of doing — enabling Bab simply to run away from a problem she didn’t want to be bothered with facing. But the pain of our estrangement, and then the elation of our rapprochement, had rendered me incapable of thinking clearly.
I blew it. I insisted that she regularly take her dirty laundry down to the hamper – not actually wash it, mind you, but just take it down in anticipation of it being washed. She wasn’t living with Mommy now, but seeing a great deal of her. Every day after school, she’d stop by the boutique in which Mommy, absolutely without ambition, was working as a 48-year-old salesgirl, albeit one who, in a flattering light, might be mistaken for 36. Every day she’d try to talk Mommy into banishing her apparently philandering new boyfriend. Every day, Mommy would lie and say she’d think about it, and my daughter would arrive home in severe emotional disrepair, very often in tears. And every day I would do everything in my power to console her.
I phoned my ex-wife. Whereas she seemed disinclined to leave New Boyfriend, and whereas talking about it invariably upset my daughter terribly, I asked if she’d consider ceasing to talk about him with Bab. What temerity! Imagining that she was going to allow me to hold her accountable for anything! If our daughter was miserable, she informed me, it was because she found life so very difficult under … my roof.
I very nearly hit it. Every day I had to clean up, insofar as my daughter’s state of mind was concerned, after my ex-wife. And during all this, my daughter was telling my ex-wife how miserable she was with me?
I confronted Bab. She admitted she had indeed complained to Mommy about how … controlling I was. And, to my infinite regret, I now did indeed hit the ceiling, telling my daughter that yet again I felt hurt and betrayed.
There was no sign of her for days. It turned out that Mommy, that great believer in never actually trying to resolve a difficult situation you can simply run from, had given my daughter the keys to her parents’ house nearby, of which she’d enjoy full run, as they were at their other home, in Miami.
I finally spoke to her again eight days later after she called asking for her stuff. I’d put everything in plastic bin liners, which I now let her come to collect. No anaesthetic again. I told her that I’d loved her more reliably than anyone virtually from the moment of her conception, but that I couldn’t condone her abandoning our household yet again. If she moved out, it was the end. If she couldn’t resolve a conflict with the person who loved her most in the world, what hope was there for her?
She made her decision. Predictably, it was to take over her grandparents’ house, where there was no one to object to mounds of dirty laundry on her bedroom floor.
A couple of weeks passed in silence. I phoned to invite her to have lunch with me. She declined. Then she stopped taking my calls. I left messages on her grandparents’ answering machine, but she didn’t return my calls. I went to London again, but arranged to fly back in time to attend her graduation from high school. She sent me an email saying not to bother because she wasn’t going to provide a ticket. I pointed out that this act of premeditated cruelty was something she would probably come to regret for the rest of her life. She didn’t listen. I didn’t witness my daughter’s graduation from high school. I can’t begin to describe how much that hurt.
I got over it to the point of being able to send her an email a couple of weeks after the fact assuring her I would adore her with my dying breath, as I’d adored her at her first. She ignored it. I left her phone messages. She didn’t return my calls. I sent more ignored emails. I returned to the UK, this time to stay. I liked the gloom. I liked that a London-based agency thought I looked enough like George Clooney to pay me.
I sent more emails — nothing heavy, but just descriptions of what I was doing. All ignored. I sent her a birthday card. Ignored. Her favourite restaurant in San Francisco had been a hip North China place called Firecracker, whose signature dish was called Firecracker chicken. Someone in the UK manufactured Firecracker chicken-flavoured crisps. Thinking it might bring a smile to her beautiful face, and maybe soften her heart a bit in the process, I sent her an empty packet. She ignored it.
Finally, after seven months, I heard from her. She curtly demanded to know what had become of the CD containing the installation software for her favourite computer game. Throughout her adolescence, I’d felt as though between the rock of alienating her even further and the hard place of not accepting the responsibility of getting in her face when she behaved shamefully. Should I do yet another Neville Chamberlain imitation, or risk extending her silence by telling her what I thought of her email?
