Altar Ego (21 page)

‘Now that you’re starting to make it big, Zack, perhaps you could consider a move?’

‘Move? I like it round here. It’s kinda funky, yer know what I’m sayin’?’ He led me up the doddery staircase above the salon. ‘Real arty.’

‘Um … Zack, men with underpants on their heads yodelling “Kill All Bitches” are probably not buskers, you know.’

‘Besides, I’m broke. I blew all my dead presidents on my goddamn Herculean quests.’

Zack’s flat, which I had previously seen as a love nest, was also losing its allure. For the first time I noticed how the walls were varicose-veined with damp. Mould bulged beneath the flaky skin of wallpaper. The edges of the mangy, fungal carpet were curling inwards like sandwich crusts. I also became aware of the thrum of hungry, multiplying bacteria; bacteria so big you could net them individually and shoot them with a tranquillizer gun.

Cobwebs billowed from the ceiling, illuminated by bare light bulbs. The plumbing had developed a smoker’s cough and the loo was blocked up. Actually the entire bathroom should have been cordoned off with ‘Crime Scene’ Police tape.

Not wanting to look middle class, I said nothing. But by the end of September I was desperately missing
Julian
’s house with the John Lewis shag pile, crisp sheets and central heating warm enough to ripen a guava plantation.

Yes, love kept you warm … but so did a goosedown duvet, I thought, as I was skewered by invisible daggers of draughts.

The food situation was just as grim. At Zack’s, we didn’t so much eat as
forage
.

‘Um … peanut butter spooned directly from the jar is not a meal, in the true sense of the word,’ I told him the next night – then shut up abruptly in case he took the hint and actually cooked. Cooking here could kill. The stove was so greasy it looked like another Exxon disaster.
E-coli
the size of semi-trailers were idling in every corner of this lamentable kitchen. Besides, I was in love, wasn’t I? And when you’re in love, you’re not supposed to notice these things. Right?

I tried to ignore it, truly I did. I was in Domestication Denial. But on my third week as a rock chick, I could stand it no longer. We were necking in the bedroom when I abruptly came up for air.

‘Don’t you think it’s starting to get a little Quentin Crisp around here? It would help, you know, if you stopped putting wet towels on the bed. They create an ecosystem that supports the growth of entire populations of microscopic spores.’
Where’d I heard that before?
‘I don’t know how to tell you this, Zack, but closing the lid of the toilet does not equate with cleaning the bathroom, either.’

‘So?
You
clean it then. Women are better at housework. Kitchen surfaces are just at the right height for yer to clean,’ he smirked.

I shoved a pair of discarded boxer shorts into his hands. ‘And while you’re washing your clothes, why not throw yourself in with them?’ I crossed into the kitchen. ‘There’s enough dirt under your nails to support organic farming on a commercial scale.’

‘I’ll feel demeaned, man.’ Following, he pressed up against me. ‘My masculinity will suffer an’ I’ll need Viagra to get it up again …’

I pushed him away. ‘You won’t
need
to if you don’t clean the fridge now and then.’ I promptly threw out anything that moved before I prodded it. Zack’s refrigerator was a penitentiary for food sentenced to life imprisonment. I found yoghurt whose expiry date read ‘When Dinosaurs Roamed The Earth’ I found chutney bottled during the reign of Elizabeth I. ‘Honestly, not even the homeless would live in this flat. They’d walk in and just bend double with derision.’

‘Is that all, babe?’ he said, mildly irritated. ‘Or is there some other little thing?’

‘Well, now you mention it. Do you
have
to hold your knife like a fencing foil? And chewing with your mouth wide open. That’s got to go. As does calling me “babe”. As does belching …’

‘Hey, where I come from that’s a goddamn after-dinner speech.’

‘… And then there’s the clothes. How can I put this? There’s a refugee in Bosnia who needs those clothes. No, come to think of it, refugees would send them back.’

‘I s’pose you want me to start wearin’ Haute-Couture threads. Haute Couture is just a big fat nothin’ with its nose in the air.’

‘I just want you to stop wearing black. Why do musicians always dress as though somebody just died?’

‘This is all to do with that dinner party the other week, ain’t it? Yer tryin’ to turn me into one of them limp-dick limo-liberals lippin’ on about edible fungi and how much Islam has to offer the West, ’ain’t yer?’

‘It’s just that there are certain rules of behaviour …’

‘What?’ he said flippantly, moving his languidly athletic body close to mine. ‘Like not going down on a woman on a first date?’

I held him at arm’s length. ‘Manners maketh record deals you know, Zack?’

Peeved, he slewed open the door of the fridge I’d just cleared out and cracked open a beer. That was all that was left, besides three rolls of film and a half-empty bottle of bison grass vodka. ‘Bullshit, man. Good manners are what you Brits use instead of brains.’ He picked up a pen and paper and started scribbling.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Writin’ a letter to my agent … Would yer mind
tellin
’ me how to spell conde-fucking-scending?’

I knew it was asking a lot. In the rock and roll world, the only social gaffe is to think that there are any social gaffes. Training your pet dog not to sniff the labias of the back-up singers is about as well mannered as most musicians get. At first, Zachary refused to allow me to Pygmalion him. But then, Julian started ringing in the middle of the night to swear undying love. He sent flowers daily. I woke one morning to the exquisite caress of a string quartet playing beneath our bedroom window. Two movements into a Schubert variation, Zachary finally agreed to be tutored.

Lesson one, he had to stop beating up on the English language. ‘You could be had up for assault … GBH, of the mother tongue.’

‘Okay. Okay. Stop dissin’ … Naggin,’ he translated, ‘-ing’ he reluctantly kowtowed.

But for a guy with no education he was still outsmarting me. When I gave him a
Roget’s Thesaurus
he only wanted to know one thing. Why there was only one word for thesaurus.

I turned his mono eyebrows into two separate ones. I sent him off for a facial with lime-scented towels.

‘That’s not hair,’ I said, ordering Vidal Sassoon to run a mower through it. ‘That’s a lawn. That hair could have garden gnomes in it.’

After convincing him that his clothes should never be louder than his music, I coaxed his Atlantean
physique
into a sharp, tailored suit. He even agreed to an opera excursion. ‘Opera’s cool. It’s the only place in the world where the fat chick gets laid.’

Okay, so I had a way to go. But hell, it was definitely a beginning.

It also had to be the beginning of the end of Julian’s presidency of the Wife From Hell fan club. The poor angel was going for a medal in the Men’s Long-Distance Cross Bearing. My guilt gland throbbed at the thought of what I’d done to him. I was a monster. Any minute now I’d be sprouting bolts from each side of my neck.

Vivian had let slip that Julian had a Privy Council case pleading for the lives of dissidents on death row in Anguilla. I accosted him there, outside the main gates of Downing Street.

‘You have to stop the flowers and the phone calls, Jules. A separation usually actually means Being Separate.’

‘Separate? What am I? An egg white?’ he looked pallid, stooped, worn.

‘I’m not worth it. I’m trash, no kidding. Soon I’ll be moving into a trailer park and wearing white stilettos with no stockings.’

‘I must see you. Come out with me. Tonight.’

‘Oh, Jules, you never wanted to take me out when we lived together. Except to benefits for torture victims. I never knew whether to talk to them during
the
pre-dinner cocktails and get indigestion … or over the port and get insomnia. Besides, I’m going to an awards ceremony with Zack tonight.’

‘What? His high-school graduation?’

‘The British Music Awards, if you must know.’

‘The British Music Awards? Oh yes,’ Julian mocked. ‘They’re just like the Oscars, aren’t they … only without the
subtlety, flair and sophistication
.’

Julian’s bewigged colleague prissily reminded him that if it wasn’t too inconvenient, would he mind stepping inside to help save a few lives?

Watching Julian trudge down the cobbled cul-de-sac towards the Privy Council, I felt wracked with contrition. I truly did. Then I thought of arriving at the Docklands Studios on my rock star’s arm – was this every girl’s wet dream since puberty, or what? Was I going to indulge in a night of glamour and hedonism? Or should I show a bit of character? ‘Call out to him! Beg for forgiveness,’ I lectured myself sternly. My brain was threatening to secede from my body. It was time I listened to my conscience!

But then I thought – hey. You really shouldn’t take advice from strangers – and went to get a leg wax.

22
Welcome to Tonsil-Town!

A MUSIC AWARDS
ceremony is the place a girl goes when she has nothing to wear. Literally. I had never, ever seen so much naked flesh.

I was sizzling with excitement. All those teenage years singing into a hairbrush in front of the bathroom mirror. All those posters of unobtainable Rock Gods on the bedroom wall. The first love of my life had been David Bowie. When he didn’t reciprocate, probably something to do with the fact that he was a multi millionaire megastar and I was an acned trainer-bra-ee, I thought I’d never get over it. And in a way I hadn’t. Which was why I was here, welded to the arm of the most gorgeous man on Earth. Although the word ‘gorgeous’ withered next to Zachary Phoenix Burne. Knowing that I was doing what squillions of women could only dream of doing whilst half-naked
in
their hot-tubs, and clocking the envious female stares in the street outside, put a certain spring into my step. Wasn’t this why I’d abandoned the fusty, rusty rituals of marriage? To sample this elixir of lust?

Not everyone was as thrilled about my arrival as I was. Eddy Rotterman, for one, looked like a man who’d realized too late that wearing nylon undies while sporting testicle rings will give you a violent electric shock when you least expect it.

‘What thuh fuck …?!’ he greeted us eloquently.

As we moved down the red carpet along with the flotsam and jet set, with paparazzi running backwards in front of us like eighteenth-century French courtiers, I felt Rotty’s breath on the back of my neck.

‘Thought I told you to stay away,’ he harangued. ‘Yer little shit weazil.’

I half turned, a smile acid-etched on to my face. ‘You know they found a cure for baldness? … Hair.’

Everyone was kissing everyone else. At a do like this, when in doubt, just keep on kissing. French kiss twice, thrice. Basically you just keep on kissing until your lips go numb. This was not Tinsel but Tonsil-Town.

A complete stranger, wearing a mock-croc mini and silver reflector stilettos, engaged me in a lip lock. As I prised myself free, I saw Rotterman’s face gored red with anger. ‘And forget blackmail,’ I hissed. ‘I’ve left Julian.’

‘Yer an old mutt. J’know that?’

‘Yeah? Well if I’m a dog, then
you’re
a post,’ I replied, outwardly calm, while inwardly panicking. Old dog? Moi? What about
him
? Think pot, think kettle, think black. Rotterman’s buttocks, in tan suede flares, resembled a two-car garage. The man could be arrested for persistent chest-hair exposure. Chest hair
with
gold chain. Zachary’s manager was single-handedly keeping the gold jewellery market buoyant.

But his words curdled my confidence. I looked at the women around me. They were blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful – proof that Barbie and Ken dolls do have sex.

Feeling self-conscious in an outfit that suddenly seemed implausible for a woman out of puberty – thigh-high boots and leather hot pants (I’d mistakenly presumed that my pre-Julian wardrobe was so outdated it’d be fashionable again) – I clung to Zachary with life-raft tenacity as we thronged into the auditorium.

The awards ceremony was like upmarket karaoke, except that the musicians’ lips were out of synch with their brains. Despite this, every single laborious mime-to-playback was described in the mirthless humour of the host as a ‘phenomenon’ – which kind of belied the adjective. The Phenomenon next to me spoke to the Phenomenon on my right, ‘Zack, man. He’s a Phenomenon,’ he said, phenomenally.

An hour or so later I found myself curiously disenchanted with public displays of rhythm. Maybe if I
just
concentrated on Zachary’s shapely lips and ignored the thumping music, I could avoid narcosis?

‘And
coming up
…’ the autocue-ist was oozing charisma on to television screens, live across the country. ‘Zachary Burne is
in the house
! So, don’t touch that nob!’ he gushingly
double-entendre’d
.

‘Now I’ve repositioned him in the white rock market, yer bad for his image,’ Rotterman sneered when Zack had kissed me and made his way backstage. ‘I have ways of keepin’ yer away, yer know,’ he said darkly, arching a brow towards Zack’s bodyguard. I quailed as Danny (the Dog Fondler) de Litto flexed his rent-a-muscles. This was the sort of guy who mouthwashed in battery acid and gargled with lighter fuel, a man who’d been rejected by the SAS for being too aggressive.

After a live performance by a band called ‘Neuronal Meltdown’ at a volume capable of atomizing igneous rock – the only award
this
band was likely to win was in the ‘Crappy, Inaudible Lyrics in Pseudo Bondage Wear’ category – Zack slunk on stage in a pair of cling-film satin trousers hugging what the British tabloid press universally claimed to be the most prodigious organ outside Westminster Abbey. As he sang, live, the song he’d dedicated to me, my fantasy fulfilment was dampened by two things. First, the nit-infested pony tail of the man next to me that kept flicking into my beer as he head-banged in time to Zack’s beat. Flick. Flick. It was frothing it up like a cappuccino. And
secondly
, the Agent from Hell, who lectured me for the entire duration of the performance about the brilliant future Zack now had behind him, thanks to me.