Waiting for Kate Bush (25 page)

‘December Will Be Magic Again’, made Israel’s Top 10, but didn’t supplant that unspeakable Slade number I won’t dignify by identifying by name in the hearts of her fellow Britons, or at least its disc jockeys. Julie Burchill accused her of “coy mysticism”. She consoled herself with the rare Perspex and plastic sculpture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono posing for the cover of
Two Virgins
and a copy of the shooting script of
Magical Mystery Tour
she bought at a Sotheby auction of rock memorabilia.

* * *

My and Cyril’s other visit for the day was to be with Ibrahim, also of Essex. Where Genoa was forever inconsolable, Ibrahim was irrepressibly sunny. He’d been one of the least-popular-with-the-public contestants on two of the three editions of
Fab Lab
I’d caught, but each time had reacted almost as though he’d just been named the competition’s ultimate winner, showing off a mouthful of enormous teeth, most of which, in contravention of British custom, went in the same direction. When the most querulous of the judges had described his singing as desperately awful, Ibrahim’s look had been one of adorable self-censure. When the gentlest of the judges had suggested that he was out of his depth trying to sing rock, and ought to be thinking instead of a career in a boy band, he nodded solemnly, as though this was the sagest advice he’d ever been privileged to receive. He had to be the most gracious teenager in Britain, and here we were en route to cause him pain.

I found that I couldn’t bear the idea and asked Cyril how much Andrea was paying him to rough Ibrahim up. He said he wasn’t at liberty to disclose that. I bit the bullet and told him I’d pay him 10 per cent more than she was paying him not to lay a finger on Ibrahim. He gave me a look I’d never seen before, sadness mixed with affront. “That’s not something I could even consider,” he said. “Completely unethical, what you’re suggesting.”

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.”

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.”