Waiting for Kate Bush, page 19
According to the dossier Cyril had been supplied, Ibrahim lived with his pregnant wife and their six-month-old son in Harlow – not far, I dared imagine, from where Kate had recorded her original demos at David Gilmour’s home studio! “I don’t like having to give somebody a walloping in front of’ er indoors,” Cyril said, “but the really awful ones are when you have to do it in front of his kids as well. Tears your heart out when they start hitting you with their tiny fists and yelling, ‘Stop hurting my daddy.’ At least with this bloke, his daughter’s going to be too young to know what’s going on.” I had to marvel at his professionalism, even as I was appalled by it. I considered upping my offer, but worried that he’d be grievously insulted.
Ibrahim’s young wife answered the door. She looked around 45, and probably wasn’t 30 yet. Ibrahim was feeding Poppy. She’d tell him he had visitors. It occurred to me to try to knock Cyril unconscious.
When I was getting in lots of fistfights, I lived in a tract that had been put up in around 72 hours on the site of what had recently been a plum farm. It was a long way for my dad to drive to work, but the only house my parents could afford, and that with substantial help from the Federal Housing Authority. It was in front of that house that, after hitting my next-door neighbour in the trachea, I came closer to winning a fight than I ever had before, or ever would again.
When we moved very much nearer my dad’s work, near Los Angeles International Airport, the cowardliness to which my DNA seemed to dispose me kicked in, and I got in fewer and fewer fights. But I still used my fists.
One day when I was about eight, I had a dispute with a classmate who lived in the block of flats next door to our own. It occurred to me to keep my great disgruntlement under wraps. We walked home together. Perhaps 100 yards short of his front door, I told him I’d been given a really wicked (English teenagers of the Nineties didn’t invent the use of wicked as a term of praise) Indian arrowhead I wanted him to see. We were both interested, I for about a fortnight, in Indian arrowheads. I asked him to hold out his hands and close his eyes. When he did so, I socked him in the nose with all my might. He ran home in tears, bleeding all over himself. The memory of which fills me with shame, and makes me want to punish myself with food.
I realised, as we waited for Ibrahim to finish with his daughter, that the years had made me much less confident in some ways. Even if I somehow got Cyril to close his eyes, and hit him with my best shot, wasn’t there a chance, given his background as a prize-fighter, that he’d get up off the pavement and retaliate so enthusiastically with his fists of stone that I’d be recognisable by the time he was finished with me only by my dental records?
I was going to let it happen.
The Ibrahim who arrived finally at the door bore little resemblance to the one I was accustomed to seeing on Fab Lab. On Fab Lab, his fantastically dishevelled hair was a source of endless amusement for the cheeky little Scots presenter. Today, it couldn’t have been tidier. He was without the stubble I was used to seeing him with on TV. And he wasn’t smiling. He was extremely not smiling.
“Who are you and what do you want?” he demanded, rather less graciously than I’d have expected. “I’ve got emails from fans to answer. I’ve got a daughter to finish feeding and a missus to get another bollocking from even though I don’t deserve it.”
“I’m afraid you’ve been naughty, mate,” Cyril told him, slipping his little foot inside the door. “You helped vote a sort of friend of ours out of the Fab Lab.”
“What? Andrea, do you mean? She was crap. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Now piss off.” Trying to close the door on us, he discovered that Cyril’s foot was in the way. “Move your fucking foot, you little pygmy git,” he suggested thoughtfully, “or I’ll fucking break you in half.”
Cyril was the absolute picture of nonchalance. “Well, actually, mate,” he said, “I don’t expect you will.” He lit a cigarette. “I was the Territorial Army’s bantamweight champion one year. My overall record as an amateur was 22-0, and 15 of those were knockouts.” I expected he was going to get to the fists of stone part, but Ibrahim didn’t give him a chance, sending him sprawling backwards with a hard shove into the begonias, where he lay in amazed silence.
“How about you?” Ibrahim asked. He glared at me, and in a moment I came to love him for it. He could just as easily have seen the fear in my eyes and burst out laughing. He wouldn’t have been the first.
“None for me,” I finally managed, trying my best to sound hard. “I was just tagging along. In fact, good luck on the show. It seems to me it’ll be between you and Evelyn in the end.”
Oh, great, mouth, keep going well after you’ve said enough. After pretending for a millisecond that you’re actually on the same level, now prove that you’re not by buttering him up.
But instead of regarding me with contempt born of my feeble attempt to ingratiate myself, Ibrahim became the version of himself one saw on television. “Do you really think so?” he asked eagerly, suddenly seeming 12 years younger. “Cor, that would be a dream come true!”
I found this very unnerving, and was grateful for the distraction when poor Cyril began growling in the begonias. Whereupon, in the blink of an eye, Ibrahim was the other, far less charming version of himself again. “Get him out of the flowers and bugger off,” he suggested, and slammed the door in my face.
The cabbie and I coaxed the smouldering Cyril back into the cab. As we got back on the A24, he declared he would suffer no ethical pangs about keeping Andrea’s money even though he’d made Ibrahim feel no pain. “I made a good faith effort,” he said. “That’s all the code compels.” As for Ibrahim having made short work of him, he said, “Well, it’s been 25 years since I left the Territorials. Do you suppose Mohammed Ali was as good 25 years after he left the ring as in his prime?”
So all the years he’d been thugging, he’d been bluffing?
“Absolutely. We’re not like you Yanks, we English. We don’t wallop or shoot each other. Most of the time it’s about who can beat his chest loud enough to inhibit the other chap’s production of testosterone.”
15
Something Very Big Indeed
I TOOK the bus to the next Overeaters meeting. It was the driver’s job to worry about the possible consequences of someone my size sitting upstairs, and not mine. During the long ride, it occurred to me that I have probably sent Kate more flowers over the years than lined the route of Princess Diana’s funeral cortege in 1997.
Just for the fun of it, I tried to compute how much money I’d spent on gifts for Kate in the past 12 months, eventually putting the figure at just over £2,000, which I do indeed recognise (I am no nutter) as well out of proportion to the slightly less than £5,000 I have earned impersonating George Clooney in that same period. I would unmistakably have, when the money I’d inherited from my mother ran out, to send Kate far fewer, or far less expensive, gifts.
The really frustrating part, of course, being that I never received any sort of acknowledgement for the millions of flowers, the rivers of cognac, the countless dozens of books and magazine subscriptions, the shoes and handbags and scarves beyond counting, the hundreds of earrings and bracelets and necklaces, the lingerie on 14 Valentine’s Days, I’ve sent, as my intuition has dictated, to any one of half a dozen addresses I either got off the Internet or induced other Katefans to disclose in trade. In addition to a mansion on an island in the Thames in Berkshire, she was said to have a sprawling Victorian mansion in Greenwich, and a luxury flat overlooking the river in Battersea, and a couple of other places I can’t mention because my sources swore me to secrecy.
As I’m sure you can imagine, the other Katefans I trade with exacted very high prices for their information. I had to swap this Dutch guy one of my two copies of the Canadian promotional LP An Interview With Kate Bush (EMI America SPRO 282) for the address of her penthouse flat in Brighton, but that didn’t rankle nearly as much as having to trade both my only copy of the Canadian promotional record of ‘Wow’ on yellow vinyl and one of my three copies of the pink and white “marble” Canadian promotional edition of Hounds Of Love for her email address.
You might imagine that Kate’s silence has been painful for me, and I won’t deny that I would be thrilled to the marrow if she found the time to acknowledge me. But there is, in a strange way, a benefit to her silence. While others can only talk about their devotion to her, I can document mine. There are nearly 2,000 items in the special folder in which I save emails I’ve sent her, and none that I created in which to store her replies. Wouldn’t one who loves her less than I have given up long ago?
* * *
No one noticed me arriving at the meeting, and no one would have noticed me leaving. Everyone was too busy swarming around Dahlia, whose flirtation with Goth had apparently ended in midweek. “It just wasn’t me,” she explained, and Graham, unmistakably besotted, nearly swallowed his own tongue agreeing. She could do no wrong in his eyes.
He was the first to tell us about his fortnight. Glancing frequently at Dahlia, he told us he thought he was in love, as he hadn’t been for years. Wanting to look his best for the object of his affection, he’d taken to going to the gym daily since our last meeting, in spite of the hostile looks he got there, and lost three pounds. By my calculation, three pounds represented about three-quarters of one per cent of his weight, but I didn’t begrudge him the round of encouraging applause his exciting news won him. If Dahlia twigged that it was she who’d inspired him, she didn’t let on. She spent the whole of his time before us sending a text message.
Boopsie, who’d actually gained half a stone since our last meeting, had good news of her own. She’d been hired to appear in a series of magazine advertisements for the UK’s first chain of kebab restaurants. Her agent had predicted that the meteoric rise of morbid obesity assured her a lucrative future, provided her own morbid obesity didn’t result in her own morbidity.
Dahlia had even more exciting news. Noting the success of Fab Lab, ITV had rushed into production a third edition of Megastar, whose success had inspired Fab Lab to begin with. The original Megastar had launched dewy-eyed, cleft-palated teen heart-throb Daryn Doll, whose anguished yelping had somehow made ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’ hits for the ninth and sixth times, respectively, and Vinod, who’d originally positioned himself as the male Sri Lankan Britney Spears, only to decide that nothing would do but to be true to his own artistic vision, and to take to performing on television in jeans with ripped knees. In the second edition of the show, ten boys and girls had been chosen for two “bands” overseen by two Major Industry Figure judges. The girls had had the biggest Christmas hit of the previous year. The boys had been pulled from their limousine en route to their second public appearance, in Huddersfield, and beaten bloody.
Market research showed that viewers had made their strongest emotional connections during the original competition not only with the cleft-palated Daryn and the club-footed third-place finisher Claudine, but also with a blind boy from Plymouth, a cross-eyed paraplegic au pair from Norfolk, and a pair of Siamese twins from Solihull, exposed as frauds after their second appearance. (It turned out they weren’t even fraternal twins, never mind Siamese ones, but merely good friends who reckoned they had come up with a winning gimmick.) Noting which, the producers had decided to call the new reincarnation of the show Megastar: The Lame, the Halt, and the Blind, and to restrict the competition to 18- to 26-year-olds with heartbreaking infirmities. And who better to present it than Dahlia, so fat she was barely ambulatory?
For a long while there, none of us hardly mentioned our own problem with food. Nearly everyone admitted to having been inconsolable when Geoff Sparse, the 30-stone 19-year-old circus freak from Northumberland, was voted off. Those who’d heard it (Boopsie claimed not even to own a television) agreed unanimously that his version of ‘Unchained Melody’ had been at least half again as moving as Daryn’s. “But isn’t that the world in a nutshell,” Crinolyn mused bitterly. “The boy with the cleft palate gets presented to the bloody Prince of Wales. The boy with the glandular weight problem gets shown the door.”
Duncan visited to ask if I’d march with him in the weekend’s Gay Pride parade. I wondered if he was trying to seduce me, or at least taking the piss. How far did he imagine someone my size would get before I brought the whole parade to a stop, halting the progress of what politicians in my own country had enjoyed calling the Homosexual Agenda? “Well,” he sighed, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
He seemed disinclined to leave. Just for something to say, I asked if he didn’t agree that Gay Pride was a poor choice of names. He scowled suspiciously. Doesn’t saying you’re proud of something suggest that you chose it for yourself? And haven’t gays been telling their straight persecutors all along that they didn’t in fact choose their sexuality, but simply grew to accept it as something they were born with?
“Gays are fed up with being ashamed of who they are,” he asserted. “That’s where the pride bit comes in.”
“Of course they are, and understandably. But wouldn’t they be playing less into the hands of those who accuse them of being wilfully perverse if they called it the Gay Lack of Shame Parade?”
He rose, fatally fed up. “I came in here to extend a bloody invitation, not to play semantic footsie. Blimey.” I had my quarters to myself again.
* * *
Dahlia’s show came on. It was true what they said about the camera making you look heavier. She introduced the show’s three judges, trading cheerful small talk as though they’d known one another for ages. One was a perpetually startled-looking former disco dolly who’d had a couple of Top 20 hits in the early Nineties. I surmised that the reason she didn’t smile when she was introduced was that botox had paralysed many of her key facial muscles. I guessed that, grateful as she was to have something other than cleaning work after having been so long out of the charts, and never in the Top 10, she’d be the one of the three with a kind word for everyone. To her left sat Shania Twain’s former assistant make-up artist, to her right a publicist from one of the big record companies. Having duly noted that Simon Cowell had made a fortune being gratuitously brutal to those whose ambitions slightly exceeded their abilities, the makeup artist and publicist seemed impatient to sink their talons into trembling white flesh.
A deaf girl from Darlington sang a few bars of a Celine Dion hit I’d never liked. She wasn’t bad for being unable to hear herself. The make-up artist and publicist thought it the worst thing since ethnic cleansing, but the deaf girl, unable to hear, wasn’t devastated. Nor, of course, was she heartened by the praise of the former disco dolly, who characterised her performance as crackin’. I got the impression the girl’s younger brother, who translated their respective remarks into sign language, might have edited them substantially.
An epileptic boy from Lincoln came on and got through Take That’s inevitable ‘Back For Good’ without a seizure. Indeed, we had to take it entirely on faith that he suffered from the affliction he claimed. The disco dolly thought he was crackin’. The make-up artist said he’d sooner have his ear drums punctured with ballpoint pens than ever have to hear anything so awful again. The publicist, who seemed to be trying to undress the boy with his eyes, agreed with the disco dolly. “Star quality,” he said, licking his lips. “You can’t teach it. A singer either has it or doesn’t. And Peter has bloody lorryfuls of it.”
And then, to my astonishment, came none other than Mrs. Cavanaugh’s daughter Cathy, so frail she had to be brought on in a wheelchair. She sang ‘Unchained Melody’, of all things, and very nearly made it her own. She was really, seriously good, one of the best singers I’d seen on any of those shows. By the end, the former assistant to Shania Twain’s make-up artist was crying too hard to say anything more than, “Miraculous!” The disco dolly pronounced Cathy not just crackin’, but really crackin’. She seemed to be trying to cry too, but her tear ducts were apparently paralysed. The publicist yawned theatrically and said the performance had made him envy the first contestant, the deaf girl. The studio audience howled its outrage. The disco dolly called him a bastard and the studio audience affirmed her judgement with its fervent applause, almost surely the most fervent the disco dolly had ever elicited. You could tell she wanted desperately to smile, but it just wasn’t going to happen. You could also tell the publicist thought this could be the beginning of something very big indeed.
The make-up artist saw the writing on the wall. It hadn’t been by praising that Simon Cowell had become the richest man in Britain, or at least on the list of the Top 5,000, but rather by making frightened young singers weep. He reacted to the next contestant, a rotund punkish girl from Swansea whose legs, judging by the fact that the platform of one shoe was very much thicker than that of the other, were different lengths, as though she’d invented prostate cancer. She looked nauseated with embarrassment. The publicist wasn’t going to relinquish his lead without a fight, though. In his judgement, the girl should have been drowned in infancy. The disco dolly pronounced her crackin’, but it was too late. The girl threw up voluminously between her feet, drawing further attention to her handicap, and then collapsed gasping to her knees. Dahlia led her away while a resentful-looking technician ran on stage with a towel for the mess. It was wonderful television, but I didn’t see how it could not go downhill from there. I switched off the TV and decided, as I hadn’t for months and months, to attempt a walk.
I marvelled at my own deterioration. During my modelling days, it wouldn’t have been a mere walk I’d have contemplated, but a wonderful long run, usually ending with a sprint up the La Cienega hill to Sunset Blvd. By the time I reached the streetwalkers who regularly convened on that corner, I’d be awash in my own endorphins, drenched in my own sweat, aglow with brute vitality, eager, at least until the endorphins in my bloodstream got diluted, to take on the world. And now I was wondering if I’d be able to manage a bloody walk round the block.
