Waiting for Kate Bush, page 20
I found my sweatpants, which I hadn’t worn since moving into Mrs. Cavanaugh’s, and was astonished to discover I could still get them on. I rummaged through my drawer for a headband, but after getting it on and looking at myself in the mirror, decided it made me look a twat –or, more accurately, more of a twat than usual. I thought of leaving the whole thing for another evening when it was warmer, or cooler, or earlier, or later. I very nearly turned the TV back on, but in the end actually left my room. Oh, the endorphins!
There seemed to be a row brewing just in front of the house. Normally I give rows a very wide berth for fear they’ll involve someone clearly victimising another, compelling a choice between doing what I clearly recognise as my moral duty and sparing myself the humiliation of being snickered at by the victimiser.
I was on a bus on Oahu one time many years ago with Babooshka’s mother. Yearning for a little solitude, we’d gone out to the side of the island opposite the Honolulu one. On the way back, an amiable-seeming hippie who looked rather like the singer of Jethro Tull boarded the bus and began chatting up everyone in the vicinity. For several miles, he was all peace, love, and implacable geniality. But then he suddenly got bolshie. Noticing the black American couple a few rocks behind him, he began spewing racist bile. It offended me, but I, in my customary responsibility-evading way, told myself that if the couple could ignore it, maybe I should too, rather than trying to be something I wasn’t.
It didn’t get better. Despairing of getting any reaction from the black couple, the hippie began loudly telling no one at all how he hated Mexicans, and had personally murdered a great many of them on behalf of the CIA. The fact that he was unmistakably mad made me feel slightly (very slightly) better about ignoring him.
He wouldn’t be ignored, though. It wasn’t only Mexicans he hated, but also native Hawaiians, of whom there was a great many on the bus, and he was going to murder a few of them too at his earliest opportunity. Which declaration inspired a muscular native Hawaiian teenager to leap to his feet and roar, “Shut the fuck up, you crazy haole asshole.”
The hippie wasn’t about to allow a dark-skinned person to speak to him in such a way, and got to his own feet, whereupon the Hawaiian punched him in the nose, but only hard enough (the hippie might have been under the influence of horse tranquillisers or something) to inspire the hippie to pull out a machete with which he might have sawed through the bus’s engine.
Here I, thinking always of my own skin, dropped the ball in a way of which I’ll always be ashamed. The hippie was between me and the Hawaiian teenager, with his back to me. If I’d been any kind of man, I’d have leapt on him from behind, or at least punched him in the back of the head or something. Instead, I scurried to get off the bus with everybody else. That the Hawaiian teenager didn’t perish on that bus had nothing to do with my accepting my responsibility, and everything to do with God paying attention for once.
The situation in the road outside Mrs. Cavanaugh’s didn’t seem to call for any such intervention, as it was only two blokes shouting at one another with increasing irritation, apparently over a parking space.
They turned out to be a rumpled tabloid journalist with a combover and dark perspiration spots under his arms, and a stylishly dressed young Asian, who’d apparently got his extremely cute Smart into the space in which the tabloid journalist had hoped to pull his prolifically dented early Nineties Vauxhall. “You don’t bloody need all that room for such a little car,” the tabloid journalist was fuming. “You can park nearly anywhere you like.”
The young Asian rolled his eyes superciliously. “Maybe you’d like me to try to find who owns the cars in front of and behind mine and get them to pull closer? Then you won’t feel that space is being wasted.”
“Why don’t you save your sarcasm for somebody who’ll enjoy it?” the tabloid journalist snarled. “It isn’t that you’re wasting space putting your little poofmobile in here. It’s that you can park anywhere you like, and I can’t, as my car’s much bigger. It’s simple physics, innit?”
“You’re calling me a poof because I’m socially responsible enough to drive a car with a very much more efficient engine than yours, and that can fit in a smaller space? Well, that’s to do with your own intellectual deficiencies, which I’m not going to allow you to make my problem.”
“Mr. Bigword, aren’t you?” the clearly overwhelmed journalist snarled. “Ain’t it just like you posh sorts, when it comes time to be accountable for your crap behaviour, to hide behind polysyllability?” One of the small crowd that had formed around them enjoyed the irony of that, but it was lost on the tabloid journalist himself, whose nose and the Asian’s were nearly touching now.
“And how exactly did you go about surmising that I’m posh?” the Asian demanded.
Now, as the tabloid journalist’s anger switched into a higher gear, their noses weren’t just touching, but flattening each other. “You think those of us who work for the tabloids don’t know that you glossy periodical boys look down on us? Well, we know all too bloody well, mate.”
Here, someone much more a man than I, albeit a woman, finally stepped between them. She was Asian too, much darker-skinned than the Smart driver, with glossy, lank hair that reflected the streetlights. “Leave it out, you two,” she said in the slightly impatient, but mostly slightly amused tone of an infant schoolteacher. “There’s plenty to go round. And she’s likely to turn up at any moment now. Is slagging one another off more important?”
The Asian guy looked sheepish, and offered the tabloid journalist his hand to shake, but the tabloid journalist either didn’t see it, or did a convincing imitation of not seeing it, as he turned round.
He noticed me. “Come on,” he said, loudly enough for others to overhear, “maybe you can help me find a space big enough for my socially irresponsible Vauxhall, which I drive not because I’m keen to deplete the world’s bloody oil resources, but because it’s the best I can bloody afford with what I make freelancing for the bloody Mirror.”
How to turn down such an invitation?
I asked who the Asian in the Smart car was. “Freelance for Posh Filth,” he said, “and maybe a couple of other of the glossy one-syllable gossip magazines by now. Put somebody’s work between glossy covers and they reckon theirs has quit stinking. Arrogant little twats.”
I felt duty-bound to admit I wasn’t really George Clooney, and thus not worthy of being stalked, especially in such inclement weather. He had to look at me to ensure I wasn’t joking. “It isn’t you I’m interested in, mate,” he said. “It’s Cathy Cavanaugh. Did you see Megastar tonight? She’ll be the talk of the country tomorrow morning. Whoever finds out the most embarrassing stuff about her or her family will never have to work again.”
It took a while for him to find a space. There seemed to be lots of people looking, none in a Smart. We hurried back and discovered that my road had become impassable. I saw that Mrs. Cavanaugh and Gilmour were at the front door of the boarding house, addressing a small mob, to whose periphery we hurried as quickly as my girth permitted.
“I’m telling you the truth,” Mrs. Cavanaugh was imploring them, wearily, but with dread in her eyes, “she’s not here.”
“Well, can you at least let us come in and have a sift through some of her personal effects,” the glossy-haired Sri Lankan woman who’d separated the tabloid journalist and Mr. Smart asked, a little petulantly, a little accusatorily.
“Set one bloody toe inside this house,” Gilmour said, “and they’ll need dental records to identify what’s left of you.”
Mrs. Cavanaugh winced. “There’s absolutely no reason for you to be taking that tone with us, sir,” the Sri Lankan said. “We’re just doing our jobs, or at least our second jobs. I, for one, work during the day in IT, as you might have inferred from my ethnicity.”
“We have a right to our fucking privacy,” Gilmour asserted.
“I would suggest otherwise,” the Sri Lankan said. “We in celebrity gossip come up against this all the time. I submit to you that the family forfeited access to the privacy privilege when young Cathy became a contestant on Megastar.”
“But that was only Cathy,” Mrs. Cavanaugh, showing more of the strain with each passing moment, blurted. “What about the rest of us, who’ve always been rather more circumspect?”
The Sri Lankan sighed, a little patronisingly, I thought. “You really don’t read the tabloids, do you, dear lady?”
“The Guardian, actually. Occasionally the Independent as well.”
“Well, if you deigned occasionally to venture out of your ivory tower, you’d know that, insofar as celebrity harassment is concerned, the sins of the father are very much the sins of the child as well, if you see what I mean, and vice versa.”
“Mind your fucking tone,” Gilmour snarled. I don’t think he understood what the Sri Lankan had said, but it was clear to all how she’d said it.
The Asian who’d nearly come to blows with the tabloid journalist intervened. “What my colleague is trying to say is that, in today’s celebrity-mad culture, families and friends and even casual acquaintances of celebrities are fair game.”
“If you didn’t want us to be here,” the tabloid journalist contributed, “maybe you shouldn’t have let your daughter and sister go on television and break everybody’s heart.” His tone suggested that he imagined himself being wonderfully clear where the Asians had been opaque. “Now how about just a quick look through her personal effects?”
Before Gilmour could reiterate his ugly threat, there was a commotion behind us. A black Daimler limousine had entered the road from the Vicarage Road end and now, having found it impassable, was trying to back out, only to find its way blocked by several late-arriving gossiparisites. “It’s her! It’s Cathy!” somebody shouted, and it was Beatlemania revisited, with people all over the Daimler like cockroaches.
The excitement was too much for a person of my proportions. I headed inside, and was able, even though he was clearly desperate by now to break someone’s – anyone’s – leg, to get past Gilmour, and into the kitchen. In which, to my astonishment and confusion, sat Cathy. My howl of surprise brought Mrs. Cavanaugh and Gilmour running.
Mrs. Cavanaugh burst into tears at the sight of her, and embraced her so hard I thought she’d fracture something. “I thought you were out in that car. I thought we’d lost you for sure.”
“She’s a decoy,” Cathy explained, looking very, very tired, if not at death’s door. “I’ve already signed to a management company, and it’s a good thing. They have decoys for all their stars. Good job somebody thought of it, I’d say.”
“But that poor girl out there!” Mrs. Cavanaugh, ever compassionate, wailed.
“An asylum seeker. Would have been deported next week if she hadn’t done this. It’s a cruel thing, but it was entirely her choice. And it isn’t like she didn’t have a driver and a couple of bodyguards in there with her.”
“We taped the show,” Gilmour said. “You were deadly. Come watch.”
Mr. Halibut, who’d come down to see what all the excitement was about, and I helped Cathy into the lounge, one of her frail arms around each of our necks. Gilmour found the spot on the videotape with her performance, which sounded even better on second hearing. I hadn’t realised that the make-up artist and publicist judges’ mouths had both been hanging open through the second half of the song. But we never got to the end.
It turned out that what Cathy was wide-eyed with was horror. “Stop it!” she wailed. “Please! Don’t make me watch!”
“You were marvellous, love,” Mrs. Cavanaugh implored her. “And this is exactly how Kate herself felt after seeing her first appearance on Top Of The Pops. She described it as feeling like watching herself die. But people adored it. It changed people’s lives, that performance, even if she didn’t like what she’d chosen to wear.”
She sobbed. “Did you see how fat I looked? Did you see? And on the word heart, did you hear I was sharp? Oh, my god. Oh, my god!” She looked at me. “Do you have any more of that antidepressant stuff left?” I shivered with revulsion. She turned frantically to Gilmour. “Kurt Cobain used a shotgun. Can you get one somewhere? One of your mates?”
Mrs. Cavanaugh slapped her. I’d never seen her lose her temper, but who had ever been so sorely provoked? “You will stop this sort of talk immediately, Cathy! Do you hear me?”
The bodyguards in the Daimler could probably have heard her –through bullet-proof glass. She was screaming. “Have you not put me and your brothers through enough already? Shame on you! Shame on you!”
It wasn’t enough, of course. As a teenager, Cathy felt that it was her God-given right to put those who loved her through every kind of hell. “Well, excuse me for having an awful disease that I can’t do anything about, Mum!” Her eyes filled with tears. “I suppose you’d be screaming at me if I had leukaemia as well!”
Mrs. Cavanaugh reared back to slap her again, but then collapsed to her knees like a marionette whose strings had just been snipped. She wanted to cry, but there were no tears left for her. She just shook her head, back and forth, back and forth.
Cathy burst into enough tears for the both of them. The taciturn Gilmour followed suit. The three of them held onto one another for dear life. Mr. Halibut and I looked at one another. We both seemed to feel like intruders, and went upstairs.
I watched the gossiparisites swarm over the Daimler from my window, pounding on the window, pulling furiously at the locked doors, trying even to open the bonnet. When they realised it was trying to inch back out of the road, a couple of them lay down in its path, whereupon their comrades began chanting, “Their blood will be on your hands! Their blood will be on your hands!” It reminded me of my college days, but the student radicals of the Sixties were much better at it than this lot. Loath to have their legs crushed, the two sacrificial lambs kept slithering out of harm’s way. The Daimler’s progress was glacial, but unmistakable. By the time the Old Bill finally turned up and cleared a path, it was halfway to freedom anyway.
16
Major Suss
I WOKE up the next morning to an impatient pounding on my bedroom door. It was Duncan, with neither seduction nor Gay Pride on his mind. “You fucking Judas,” he howled as I opened my door. “You quisling! You louser!” I hoped I was still dreaming, but there was nothing dreamlike about how he grabbed a handful of my pyjama top and pushed me back into my chair. He threw the morning’s News Of The World into my lap. Its headline screamed CATE THE GREAT’S BROTHER: A BENDER!
She sings one song on television and is already Cate the Great?
“That obviously isn’t the bigger problem,” Duncan said, reading my mind. “How could you? How bloody could you?”
I couldn’t have, and hadn’t. And I told him so.
“But you’re the only one who could have,” he said, “you or … the bloke who used to look after me and my partner’s daughter. Oh, bugger.” He shook his head morosely.
“Well, you might not like them,” he finally sighed, “but they’re good at what they do, aren’t they? Bloody terrific at it, in fact.”
“It’s their livelihood,” I said, “at least those who don’t have well-paying IT jobs during the day.”
He left and I switched on the television. When I was up in the morning, I especially enjoyed watching editions of Trina on which the results of paternity tests were revealed to leering, multiply pierced teen yobs whose misshapen slag girlfriends had accused them. I seemed never to tire of the leering teen yobs assuring Trina that they couldn’t possibly be the kid’s dad because they’d shagged their misshapen slag accusers only once. Biology seemed to be taught in the British state schools even less rigorously than in my own country’s.
This morning’s edition, though, would reveal no paternity test results. Rather, its theme was My Talented Daughter Got Left Out of Megastar Because She Isn’t Anorexic. A tweed-capped working man from Scunthorpe was telling Trina how his household had gone without such pleasures as cable television for years so that his daughter Julie, indistinguishable from the indignant unwed young mums I was accustomed to seeing, could have singing lesions. But then, when her big chance came, it turned out not to have come at all, as Megastar’s producers announced they wanted only contestants with heart-tugging medical conditions.
“Ain’t bloody fair, is it,” demanded Julie, who apparently imagined her singing voice sufficiently beautiful to compensate for her straggly, oily hair, spots, huge nose, faint moustache, double chin, small breasts, big tummy, huge hips, thick legs, enormous feet, and appalling make-up. Let Britain get an earful of this girl, I thought, and Kylie Minogue can start looking for work as a cleaner or market researcher. “And just because I’m normal-sized.”
Trina brought on another guest, an emaciated male bulimic from Reading who’d also sung on the previous night’s Megastar, though with less spectacular results than Cathy. In his view, it was high time someone other than what he referred to as “gorgeous normals” got to entertain for a living. All the eating disorders in the studio audience –and they were about half of it – applauded as feverishly as their weakness would allow.
“Bollocks to that,” proclaimed Julie’s dad from Scunthorpe. He apparently looked at Julie through love’s eyes. “Who’s bloody forcing you to binge and purge, or whinge and emerge, or whatever it is you lot do?” The normals in the studio audience erupted in applause of their own. “Why don’t you just eat properly and stop your moaning?”
“It’s out of our hands,” the male bulimic from Reading began to try to explain, but a punch-up had broken out in the studio audience. Actually, it was a punch-up in theory only, as the emaciated girl combatant had the strength only to cover her ears with her hands while her fat woman antagonist beat her with her handbag.
As security guards pulled the fat woman off her victim, Trina dashed over with her microphone and meticulous coiffure. “Obviously emotions run high around this issue,” she said to the fat woman, seeming to hope she would hear the statement as a question.
