Waiting for Kate Bush (26 page)

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.

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.”