Waiting for Kate Bush (8 page)

I should have rung one of the others from OA. I did no such thing. By the time I’d got through the Stella and Pringles, through Kate’s
The Sensual World
album and half of
The Red Shoes
, I was very drunk, and no longer fit to listen to Kate’s music. It was nearly half-eleven. I turned on the TV. The news had a report about a boy in Exeter who’d hanged himself rather than face another day of being bullied at school. His parents were holding onto one another for dear life, barely able to speak through their sobbing. How, I wondered, were they going to get to sleep? Indeed, how were they going to get to sleep ever again? I wept along with them for a minute, but then it was on to the introduction of Victoria Beckham’s new line of hip hop-inspired fashion. I marvelled at the ugliness and stupidity of the world we live in, and phoned Nicola.

Her fastidious little stepdad Cyril answered. “No,” I said because I was too pissed to care what he thought of me. “I haven’t got a fag.”

“Well, who is it?” I heard the mountain of flesh demand from across the room.

“Nicola’s new boyfriend,” he said, failing to get his hand over the receiver. I couldn’t help but be flattered.

The mountain of flesh began a tirade about how poorly bred I was showing myself to be, ringing so late. But a few seconds into it, I began demanding that Cyril hand the phone over to her.

“You don’t want to do that, mate,” he whispered. “Believe me, you don’t.”

“Do what?” the mountain of flesh demanded from across the room. “Give me the phone.”

“Don’t tell me what I do or don’t want,” I shouted at Cyril. Whereupon he put the phone down on me.

It occurred to me that I’d read somewhere about La Beckham being fat and lonely as a child. It made me slightly more patient with her hip hop-influenced fashions. It occurred to me as well that I had Nicola’s mobile number, that all of us overeaters had, at least in theory, given one another complete contact details, though I’d given the loathsome Hermione made-up numbers. If ever she needed me to keep her from a fatal orgy of overeating, she would be in very deep water indeed.

Nicola answered. “Are you having a good time, you slag?” I demanded.

I’d fully expected her to break the connection instantly, and to flush with blood in that way she had. I couldn’t be sure about the second part, but I couldn’t have been more wrong about the first. “Probably not as good as I’d be having if you hadn’t buggered off.” She’d obviously had a couple of her own.

“Who’s that?” someone demanded yobbishly.

“What’s your name again, darling?” I heard her ask the guy.

“Says his name’s Tarquin,” she came back on the line to inform me. “The bloke who was trying to chat me up when you disappeared. He’s lied about other things, so why not about his name as well?”

“What are you on about?” Tarquin, who’d had many more than a couple, demanded. “You’ve heard no porkies from me, darling, not a single one.”

How I wished I wasn’t full of Stella, and able to make sense of what was going on. I had to leave it to her to correctly interpret my silence as the child of my confusion.

“I fancy a bloke who’s willing to fight for me,” she explained, “not one who turns tail and pisses off home at the first challenge. It’s biological, isn’t it? Something deep inside, some primal urge, wants me to mate with the male most likely to defend our young.”

“I’ll give you something deep inside,” Tarquin snickered in the background. And then the line went dead.

I’ve always found being hung up on extremely sexy, and this time was no exception. I wanted her so much I could almost have pictured masturbating. I refuse to masturbate anywhere but in the toilet, though, and either Mr. Chumaraswamy or Mr. Halibut was in it.

S
OME months before, a junior NHS doctor of around 22 had prescribed an antidepressant called Cypramil for me, probably because she hadn’t been practising long enough to have heard of any others. I’d always thought of a doctor as a kindly, twinkly-eyed older man (I am the product of a sexist culture) with one of those things attached to his head to make it easier to look at patients’ throats. It had been lavishly unnerving to be asked if I’d “experienced suicidal ideation” by a girl who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a pop group geared to 14-year-olds.

The Cypramil she prescribed made me feel neutered. For the three weeks I forced myself to keep taking it, even though I found myself yearning for a nap around a dozen times a day, it didn’t even occur to me to masturbate. It hadn’t the slightest effect on my despair. I packed in taking them with nearly half left.

Still, after sleeping forever the next morning and missing breakfast, I wondered if I should seek psychopharmacological solace before deciding instead just to turn on the TV. Trina, all lips and smugness, was interviewing the parents of school bullies. I imagined that her producers were probably elated by the coincidence of the programme being broadcast virtually simultaneously with the suicide of the boy in Exeter. I was feeling pretty cynical.

The parents, nearly all working class, were unrepentant. One of them clearly spoke for the rest, judging from the enthusiastic nodding of all their heads, when he pointed out that, insofar as his sons’ behaviour at school was concerned, he wasn’t his brother’s keeper. I’d have been lying if I claimed that failed to amuse me. He’d tried, this emphatic labourer, to teach Graham and Ian to be good blokes, but if they forgot what he’d taught them when they got to school, how could
he or the missus be held accountable? What more could a parent do, innit?

In that skilful way of hers, Trina brought to light that this particular parent generally thought the most effective way of ensuring his sons’ being good blokes was walloping them when they were otherwise. “Hear! Hear!” a couple of the other parents agreed. When a member of the studio audience asked, in a middle-class accent that made the wallop-prone labourer sneer from the first syllable, if the dad saw any connection between him walloping his smaller, weaker sons and his sons walloping their smaller, weaker classmates, one of the other working-class parents answered for him: “Bollocks!” If the occasional wallop had been good enough for them, it was good enough for their kids as well, innit? “You coddle a brat,” one of the mums observed, “all you get is a bigger brat.”

Were they sorry when they heard of how their kids tyrannised their classmates? Well, some were and some weren’t. The weres wondered if maybe they hadn’t been guilty of too much coddling of their own. The weren’ts thought it was the job of the parents of the bullied to teach their children how to stick up for themselves. “You don’t get the respect in this world that you deserve,” one of the working-class dads, heretofore silent, suggested. “You get the respect you bloody well demand.” I, who’d never dared demand any, and received exactly as much as I’d demanded, was surprised to find myself agreeing.

A few of the working-class kids were brought out, blinking in confusion at the audience’s applause. If anything, their accents were even rougher than their parents’. The first to whom Trina tried to speak would hardly let her begin. “Who said I done anything to anybody?” he demanded pre-emptively, smirking defiantly. “If somebody at my school has a problem with me, let ’em tell me about it to my face, innit?”

“Since when,” one of the working-class dads wondered enthusiastically, “does somebody what’s meant to have committed a crime not get to face his what’s-it, his accuser?”

Trina sighed in that world-weary way she has. “In some cases, we have CCTV footage of your kids – not yours specifically, Dave, but yours in general – taking classmates’ money, or intimidating them physically.”

“Bloody Big Brother we’re turning into, innit?” Dave snarled. “How about a person’s right to privacy?” All of his fellow parents, all of the kids, and about a third of the studio audience erupted in applause. I wanted to cry.

I went to the toilet. It was still occupied. I’d got breathless walking all the way from my room, and didn’t want to have to walk all the way back. I sat down on the stairs to the third floor and tried to be as quiet as I could. I can’t bear to have anyone within hearing distance when I’m using the toilet. I learned from my mother that one should be deeply ashamed of the need to eliminate. I kept as still as possible in case whoever was in there had been similarly poisoned.

When the door finally opened, I was surprised to see Cathy, the youngest of Mrs. Cavanaugh’s three children, emerge. I’d met her briefly months before, when I first moved in, and found her very hard work, as who isn’t at 15? She seemed to have lost a great deal of weight. She’d been slim to start with.

“All right, Cathy?”

“Yeah. OK.” Had I found it that much of an imposition to make eye contact when I was her age? I could hardly believe she didn’t remember me. It wasn’t as though her mum was boarding others of my proportions. Get two of us on the same side of the house and it was apt to tip over! I reminded her of my name and asked what she was doing home in October. My understanding was that she was away at school.

“Having a bit of a break,” she said, not quite managing a smile, clearly wishing I’d let her go. I obliged.

I returned to my room, found a couple of gifts in the Littlewood catalogue for Kate, thought about bullying, and was ashamed to remember that I hadn’t always been the bullied. For a long stretch there between 11 and 13, I’d done more than my own share of bullying.

There was something just a bit off about a girl in my elementary school class called Mary Priscilla Enser. She had sharp features and frizzy hair and, at least where her classmates were concerned, a weird middle name. (Girls were meant to be called Susan or Nancy or Cathy or Patty or Bonnie or even Melody. It wasn’t as though her parents hadn’t had miles of leeway.) There was one and only one workable response to taunting at my school, and probably at every other school in human history – to punch the taunter in the nose hard enough to make it bleed, or, if you were a girl, to ridicule the taunter far more hurtfully than he or she had taunted you. Mary Priscilla Enser only looked sort of confused. Her eyes asked, “When I’ve never so much as spoken to you, why are you trying to hurt me?”

Naturally, the more she didn’t fight back, the more cruelly she got taunted, to the point at which she became the class scapegoat by a wide margin. (I never had to endure half of what she had to, though of course it didn’t seem so at the time.) As children of later generations
would call one another dorks or nerds, we called one another priscillas. We accused her, in the time-honoured American tradition dating back to the Salem of the 1600s, of being a witch. We made her day at school a living nightmare.

And guess who was always right there in the forefront, trying to win his classmates’ esteem by taunting Mary Priscilla Enser more imaginatively and implacably than all the others? I, who knew from the inside how much it hurt to be shunned and ridiculed. I, who should have been more empathic than anyone.

I have my excuses, my patently inadequate excuses. Who could blame me for trying to encourage my classmates to give someone else a hard time for a change? And who could help me for despising her, in view of how vividly her passivity reminded me of my own?

I have somewhere the little autograph book that each pupil at my elementary school was given at the end of his or her sixth grade term, just before going on to the unimaginable horror that was junior high school. Inside the first page is a group portrait of my class. In the margins, in my precociously gorgeous 12-year-old’s penmanship, I have written the names of all my classmates. In one case, though, I wrote not a name, but an epithet. Witch.

I believe, at my age, that it’s the exception, rather than the rule, for people to get what’s coming to them. Arrogant wankers with no perceptible talent, but fantastic luck, make fortunes early in their thirties, and then spend the rest of their lives imagining themselves clever and talented, being deferred to as though they are indeed clever and talented by people who want some of their money. Conversely, noble, kind, hardworking, genuinely gifted people live lives of almost unendurable frustration, or even lose their children in freakish accidents.

But in the case of Mary Priscilla Enser, I got exactly what was coming to me, in the second semester of my fifth-grade year. There was an unexpected epidemic of decency, gentleness, and sense of fair play in my class just before we were to elect a new president and vice president, and both Mary Priscilla and I were nominated. I was beside myself with joy. How, in her wildest dreams, could Witch get even a single vote?

I came in a distant second.

* * *

When at last EMI deemed Kate ready to record, Andrew Powell, apparently believing The KT Bush Band fine for pub gigs, but not up to the task of recording (save for Paddy’s appearance on one track),
introduced her to the musicians he’d recruited to be her backing band –drummer Stuart Elliot and keyboardist Duncan MacKay from Cockney Rebel, and guitarist Ian Bairnson and bassist David Paton from Pilot. They were embarrassed by the subject matter of some of the songs she played for them – by the incest in ‘The Kick Inside’, for instance, and by the unusually candid expression of female lust that was ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’ – but far less embarrassed than gobsmacked by how good both she and her songs were. If they’d had any thoughts of patronising her, of playing the seasoned studio hotshots to her 19-year-old naïf, there was no trace of them left by the end of the first session. And it turned out that she wasn’t only a terrific songwriter and singer, but also quite happy to make everyone else tea, or dash out for sarnies.

Seven weeks later, the album was finished. EMI scheduled its release for November and sent out advance copies to DJs. Listeners to Tony Myatt’s Capital Radio
Late Show
thought Kate’s music really … weird, and God knows it was. However weird, though, no one seemed content to hear it only once.

Kate posed for Gered Mankowitz, best known for his mid-Sixties photos of The Rolling Stones. Such was her energy that he described himself as feeling, at shoot’s end, “as limp as a rag”. Few heterosexual males would feel similarly when they saw the work they’d done together.