Too Weird for Ziggy (2 page)

“For Christ's sake stop giving the bottle a blow job and get the fuck on with it,” said the man from
N.M.E
.

“If you'd shut the fuck up and let me I will.” He propped his boots on the edge of the coffee table and sank back in his chair.

“Of course, it's not that difficult disappearing in a huge metropolis like New York, but the music business is like a village. Everyone knows what everyone is doing before they've even e-mailed their lawyer about doing it. But Pussy's manager never could find her. And it wasn't for lack of trying. Jack Mackie spent a fortune taking out ads in all the major music magazines; women's magazines too. He hired a publicist to plant stories in the newspapers: that this film director she really liked wanted her to star in his next movie; that her old wardrobe girl was pregnant and planning to get married and wanted her to be bridesmaid; that her favorite bodyguard was dying of cancer and wanted to see her one last time before he rearranged his final face. Mackie said anything and everything, but nothing flushed her out.

“You've got to give the man credit for persistence. Finally—after years it must have been—he found out where she was. She was renting a tiny one-room apartment in a low-life neighborhood in New York. Of course, with her
money she could have easily bought one in the best part of town if she'd wanted to, but then it would have been simpler to track her down. And she didn't want to be tracked down—she didn't even have a telephone. Once Mackie got the address, he bombarded her with telegrams she never replied to. So he got on a plane and flew over to New York.

“Her flat was in one of those grim detective-movie buildings—rubbish in the hallway, kids running about everywhere. She was on the second floor at the end of the corridor by the fire escape. He rang the bell. She didn't answer. But he could sense she was in there. He came back several times that day and tried again. The next day too. But she still didn't answer. By now Mackie was getting pretty pissed off. He was hammering on the door and shouting, made such a racket one of her neighbors came out and threatened to do him over. So the following day he hired a couple of heavies and went back with them. ‘I've come five fucking thousand miles,' he said, ‘and I'm not leaving until you open this door.' She didn't. So Mackie said, ‘Break it down.' A swift boot to the lock and it caved right in. But as Mackie went to open the door, it barely moved. It had jammed against something solid.”

He stopped. We were all watching him now.

“And …?” said the barnacle-faced man from the
Times
. He had just seen the PR heading over to take him up for his interview and wanted to get the punch line before he left.

The freelance picked up his bottle and held it vertically over his lips, forgetting for the moment that it was empty. But he was undisconcerted—he had our attention
now and he was basking in it like a turtle on a rock. He puffed out his hollow chest and stretched out his thin arms.

“You'll have to wait till the story's published.”

“Wanker,” the
Times
man growled, and swept out.

The freelance grinned at us conspiratorially. “I'm not going to give some prick from the nationals a free story, am I? So anyway. One of the gorillas puts his shoulder to the door and manages to shove whatever it is aside. Mackie, feeling uneasier than he could ever remember feeling in his life, peered around the door. It was a metal filing cabinet. The place was full of them. Cabinets and cartons and cardboard file drawers. Though they couldn't make them out at first—it was so dark in there—there was a huge commercial refrigerator in front of the window blocking out most of the light.”

And then he saw her. She was pale as veal cattle; she'd been shut away for years. Her face was big and moon-white, her blonde hair now brown and smooth as a conker. Amid this city of cabinets, she looked contained and compact, everything held tightly in, like when you drive your car between a small gap in the traffic and hold your breath and pull yourself in at the edges to try and fit in the space. Next to her the hired men looked deformed, like giants. Mackie gestured to them to wait outside in the hallway. They stood there, still as mountains, while the manager opened, one after another, the cabinet drawers.

They were full of folders, every one of them neatly filed and tabulated. Each folder held a number of sandwich bags, zipped tight and tagged in the corner with a label, written out in her neat little handwriting. Some of them
appeared to be empty, a flat transparent square with dust and condensation trapped inside. The manager held it up to the little patch of light above the refrigerator. It could have been dandruff or a scraping of cocaine.

In the next cabinet he opened there were even more sandwich bags. Mackie lifted up a file and took out a bag at random. This time he could see what was in there, but it didn't help, none of it made any sense. It was hair—a tangled clump like you pull out of the plughole in the bathtub. The other bags had hair in them too. Sometimes just a strand or two, sometimes a handful.

In the top drawer the hairs were pale blonde with a smudge of brown on the crumb-tip. By the bottom drawer they were all brown. There were separate bags for eyelashes, and others stuffed with crunchy pubic hairs, like small, black springs squashed flat. And all of them were labeled with date and location, whether they'd been tugged from a hairbrush, culled from the sink, or swept up off the floor. The room was filled from top to bottom with bits of her—bits shed and hoarded, grouped and subgrouped, collected, catalogued, and safely filed away. The floor, every surface in the place, was immaculate. The dust from her dead skin cells had been brushed up and bagged as soon as it fell. There were bags of fingernails, tiny white crescents, and of toenail clippings curled thick and gray like dead wood lice.

And she just stood there watching him, small and hard and self-contained, as he went through all the cabinets, one by one, putting all the bags carefully back where he found them. She didn't say a word; he didn't either. He could hear an argument going on in the apartment upstair—banging,
a child crying. It was the only sound in this small, stagnant room except for the whirring of the giant refrigerator.

“Where the fuck is that waitress?” the freelance suddenly demanded. “All this talking is making me thirsty.”

A slender man in a smart black suit slipped out from behind his desk and walked briskly over. “Please keep it down,” he said, “or I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wait elsewhere. I'll send someone over to take your order.”

“The manager turned to go,” the freelance said, more quietly. “However much he'd needed to see Pussy before, what he needed now was to get out. Get some air. His legs felt unsteady. This was something he didn't know how to manage. But then he noticed the fridge. She was standing with her back to it, like a guard on sentry duty. The thing was bigger than she was. He knew he'd have to look in it before he left. As he approached, Pussy slid to one side. He ignored her and went straight for the chrome handle. Grabbing them, he tugged open the double doors.”

A light came on, shining through the frozen fog like it does on the stage, fuzzy at the edges but sharp enough to pick out the cold sweat on Mackie's face. The right side of the fridge was almost empty—a carton of milk, some Coke cans, something unidentifiable wrapped up in a take-away bag. The freezer side, though, was almost full—with what looked like ice creams, neat rows of red-tipped Raspberry Ripples, steaming cold. And more Ziploc bags, puffed solid with frozen juice. He glanced over at Pussy, who was leaning against the bathroom door, arms crossed, hips thrust forward, one leg crossed over the other, swaying on the spot like a little girl.

“Mackie reached into the icy air and pulled one of the drawers out into the light. It was stacked with all her old used tampons and frozen bags of piss.”

A couple of the male journalists started to look queasy. “Jesus,” said one, “what a fucking nut.” He stood up. “I'm gonna take a slash. If the waitress comes, mine's a Newcastle Brown.” He went to the bathroom.

Mackie pushed open the bathroom door.

It was tiny, barely bigger than a mouse-mat; you had to walk sideways to squeeze inside. There was a sink and a big old tub, white and gleaming but for the crap-brown rust stain running down from the tap, and over in the corner there was a toilet. It had a two-drawer filing cabinet on top of it. In front, in this minuscule space, she'd jammed a chemical toilet, one of those things you use in caravans that desiccate your shit. The drawers were full of bags of gray-brown powder. She'd hung on to everything. There was not one single bit of her that was going to get away.”

And that's all I heard. I was called up to do my interview. I suppose he'll get around to writing it up one day. What happened to her? All I know is the manager took her back with him to England. I hear she's making a comeback.

A man in a baggy blue suit custom-made not to fit stands by the carousel watching a lone unclaimed suitcase circle slowly around and around and around. He is thirty-eight, maybe forty years old, boy-thin and beautiful. His jacket, which would be loose on Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been pulled off one slim shoulder by the weight of a travel bag. His eyes are large and blue like his suit. His hair, straw-colored, is hacked off in a battered-child haircut you know cost the earth. A large leather suitcase appears at the top of the slide and one of the ground staff hurries over, as fast as her airline bondage skirt and stilettos will allow, and drags it off the carousel, deposits it with a flushed smile at his bashed-up Reeboked feet. He thanks her distractedly, hoists the shoulder bag back into place, turns the suitcase on its side, and wheels it toward the green channel.

Heathrow Customs. Thin wooden partitions, generically drab like a VD clinic, jerry-built into an alley where grim-faced men in uniform loiter on either side. Their eyes bore into you like they know the secrets of your soul as you walk past, trying to look normal, looking straight ahead to the open door where people are waiting, waving. But Spike can't look normal. Spike is a Star. He's used to being looked at. He's used to running the gauntlet while people gawk and scrutinize. But now he feels uncomfortable, his body feels tight and prickly under his loose clothes as Her Majesty's representatives stare at him with the familiar Englishman's
challenge in their eyes, the reminder to a returning Brit of his original, unforgivable sin of ever having dared to leave.

One of the men gives the other the nod and he strolls up casually with that policeman's roll, the arrogant humility, the questions that are orders: “Excuse me sir? Could I ask you to step over here with your bags? If you'd like to put them up here? Right, sir, if I could take a look at your passport?”

And of course they know who he is. Everyone knows who he is. The postman, the bank manager, the cleaning lady, everybody knows everything about him, from the size of his pool to the size of his plonker. His last girlfriend, sweet young thing, sold her story to the papers. Over last Sunday morning's eggs and bacon, fifteen million of his fellow former countrymen learned that he's “hung like a horse,” “rogers like a rabbit,” and, completing the
ménagerie à trois
, “when he pulls his pants down, people throw buns at it.”

It makes him smile; he's almost aroused for a second himself until a shiver shrivels his balls. They're going to want to take him in the back room and get his pants off so they can tell their mates in the pub tonight that they've seen Spike's tackle and the papers were lying well-they-do-don't-they. He'd had the rubber glove and flashlight enema so many times his arse was getting stretch marks—but that was a long time ago, back in the days when rockstars were open season for customs men, and you'd pull down your trousers with a flourish, like Malcolm McDowell in
If …
, and you'd bend over with a smirk of a man who knows that however unpleasant it is to have your rear end rummaged by a stranger it's a far far better thing than having to do the rummaging. But times have changed. Rockstar butts are clean now. Colonically
irrigated. He feigns an unruffled nonchalance, a sublimely bored look on his face.

“Could I ask you where you've traveled from today, sir? Los Angeles? What was the purpose of your visit?” all the while looking down, thumbing through the well-worn pages tattooed with stamps and visas, stopping at the U.S green card. “Oh, of course. You live there.” Spike can sense the menace behind the politeness. Very English. Predatory, but apologetically so. “Don't blame you. They did a survey. Over half the people living in England said they'd rather be living somewhere else.
Anywhere
else. You're well out of it, mate.” Closing the passport up, handing it back to him. “Thank you, Mr. Mattock. Now if you wouldn't mind unlocking your suitcase?” He smells of dispenser soap and stale polyester. Spike casually turns the combination lock, lifts the leather lid. Hands pink from frequent washing shuffle, lift, and rummage.

“Well, well.” The customs man has fished out a large pack of condoms and is brandishing it to the discreet amusement of the first-class passengers walking past. “Playing it safe then, Buttock?” Spike isn't listening; he stands there still as a photograph, gazing at nothing. The customs man raises his voice. “Haven't changed then, Buttock. Every time we landed in the shit, you'd be the one in the rubber suit.”
Buttock
. His old school nickname. A flock of startled birds take off from his stomach. He focuses in on the customs man with a jolt.

A small man, thin but flabby. Crumbly white-gray complexion like a piece of old unchewed gum you find in your coat pocket a year later. Sparse hair—field
mouse–colored once maybe, now house mouse-gray. Gray and dry like an ash sculpture but for the red hands and the two dots of red high on the cheeks. An old teacher, a friend of his father's? “You don't know who I am, do you, Buttock?”