Waiting for Kate Bush (37 page)

I wanted to raise a moral objection, but was pretty sure she’d make me feel hopelessly uncool for it. But then the question became moot as Harold came in, his nose buried in the latest edition of
Men’s Health
, his mouth oblivious to Nepenthe’s having company. “So where for lunch? I understand the new noodle place in Conduit Street is adorable.”

By the time he looked up from the abs he was admiring, Cyril had slipped out of his chair and blocked the exit.

“Bugger,” Harold remarked, not happily.

“We’ll make this as simple for you as we can,” Cyril said, decisive now that it appeared he might get to hurt someone. “You make sure my mate’s landlady’s daughter gets properly fed, or Count Dracula here loses a few teeth, and maybe gets a shoulder or two dislocated into the bargain. Any questions?”

Harold dived whimpering under Nepenthe’s desk, but Nepenthe herself, rolling her eyes, then shaking her head, could hardly have been less perturbed. “I’ve got a couple actually. The first one is: How can anybody be so stupid?”

“No,” Harold gurgled from the south. “Don’t bloody antagonise them!” The view from Nepenthe’s window was now from the top of the Eiffel Tower. I have always marvelled at Paris’s reputation as a beautiful city, possibly because I’ve only ever stayed in the more squalid
arrondisements
, but from that great height it really was quite gorgeous.

“Do you honestly imagine we’d jeopardise Cathy’s health?” Nepenthe yawned. “It so happens we’ve got her up to 900 calories a day, and that she’s under the care of a very prominent physician. My dad’s his barrister. He put us in touch. How can you imagine that we’d take chances with her well-being? She’s going to make us rich. She’s going to replace some of these platinum discs with real ones.”

I wished I were nearly anywhere else. I was where I was, though, and knew it was crap of me not to help out. “But you were just telling us how Cathy would be worth more to you dead than alive!”

She rolled her eyes again. We were to know that we really were exhausting her patience. “Irony,” she said. “Irony. Is there something in your drinking water or something that makes you Yanks so crap at it? She won’t be worth more to us dead until she’s got a substantial back catalogue. Use your head, will you?”

Cyril, sighing, shaking his head, sat back down, and began to run his
hand back through his hair, only to remember too late that he hadn’t hair enough left for such an undertaking. He patted frantically at his combover, looking for a reflective surface, failing to find one.

I knew I’d wind up feeling foolish for having done so, but I asked why Cathy looked so emaciated on TV. Again Nepenthe shook her head, this time while smirking patronisingly. “It’s done the same way the views from my office window are done. Digitally. The software was originally developed to make overweight presenters look slimmer. You didn’t read about it last summer? The
Mail
did a major front-page exposé.
Megastar
uses it on both kinds of eating disorders. It makes someone like Cathy look more emaciated, but they can also use it to make the fatties look fatter, or the fatties look slender, or the anorexics Rubenesque.

“Cathy does all her interviews via video conferencing. We can make her look as gaunt as we like for different publications. It’s going to revolutionise the way celebrities and the press interact in this country.”

“So are we over our little hissy fit yet?” Harold ventured accusatorily from beneath her.

“Only one way to find out, isn’t there, mate?” snarled Cyril, whom humiliation had made hostile.

“How can we be sure you’re not just piling irony on irony?” I asked. “We won’t leave until we’ve seen Cathy face to face.”

“She isn’t here, though, darling. She’s at an undisclosed private residence in Bedfordshire. And the only additional joke I made was that the software was developed by the BBC to make its presenters look slimmer. Did you not get that one? I mean, can you, just off the top of your head, think of a single BBC presenter who isn’t borderline tubby? Oh, you Yanks.”

It isn’t like me to stand up for myself, but I’d had more than I could stand, and Nepenthe was a woman. “Do you suppose you could stop patronising us sometime soon?” I asked, beaming.

“Wow,” she said. “Sarcasm. Well played. Not quite as good as irony, but within hailing distance. And why are you the only one who gets to patronise?”

I admitted I had no idea what she was talking about.

“I could see it in your eyes from the first moment we met. You never imagined we could have anything on the ball. You reckoned we were a couple of trust fund brats, and therefore incompetent. Well, that makes no more sense than imagining that all blondes with big tits are dim. It so happens that a lot of blondes with big tits are very clever indeed. It further so happens that a lot of insufferable trust fund brats
have really good ideas, bold new ideas, about artiste management. And I happen to be one of them.”

“And I’m another,” said Harold petulantly from beneath the desk.

As Cyril and I walked back to the train, I realised it might actually have been kindness that inspired her to cite stupid blondes with big tits as a misleading sterotype, when it could just as easily have been jolly fat people, or self-loathing ones. I hoped for the sake of poor Cathy, who Nepenthe promised would phone her mum, that it was indeed kindness.

* * *

I took myself for a walk along the river. The tide was out, but it was easy to see how high it had come. The line was clearly demarcated by thousands of plastic beverage bottles and a few plastic carrier bags that had washed up on shore.

I know that a big part of the problem is that there are no water coolers in my new country. If someone goes into a train station, for instance, hoping to quench his thirst at no charge, he’s out of luck, unless he’s happy to try to get his face under a tap in the gents. If you want something to drink, you need to buy it, and it comes in either a plastic bottle or an aluminum can, although here they say aluminium.

A solution occurred to me. Issue everyone in the country with two empty plastic beverage bottles, refillable wherever beverages are sold. Would there be some hygiene issues? Of course there would. But would any sane Briton prefer to live in a world whose rivers, parks and gutters (and ever scarcer landfills!) are full of discarded plastic bottles, or in one where it might occasionally be necessary to walk across the road to refill on Lucozade because the geezer at the Costcutter, let’s say, looks the sort who might have drunk direct from the tap?

I believe further that anyone observed simply tossing an empty plastic beverage bottle into a body of water or hedge should have the offending bottle stuck up his bum. Such a sanction would do much to make London more attractive to deep-pocketed prospective tourists.

There’ve been moments when I’ve aspired to hardness as much so I could confront litterers as stand up for myself. I feel strangely moral and other-directed at those moments, and nearly proud of myself. When I see someone casually tossing the wrapper from his KitKat bar on the pavement as he ambles along Charing Cross Road, for instance, I would like to be hard enough to be able to pick it up, catch up with him, and hand it to him. “I believe you lost this.” If he gave me any lip – if he told me, as the one guy I’ve actually confronted this way did,
those many, many years ago, to fuck off and mind my own business –I’d bloody his nose for him. I would love to be hard enough to ask anyone I saw flicking a cigarette butt away, “When did the world get appointed your ashtray, pal?”

That I am not now, nor have I ever been, hard, hurts sometimes in more ways than I have the energy to count.

B
ESIDES elevated levels of testosterone, God gave some Boys Who Could remarkable quickness and agility and strength. Commonly, boys who got those also got unusually small brains, but it hardly mattered. Other boys wanted to be their friends, and girls, seemingly reacting on a strictly biological level, unconsciously inferring that the sperm of a quick, agile, strong, aggressive boy would produce offspring more likely to survive than that of a boy who couldn’t climb the pole, wanted to have their babies.

When I switched high schools at age 16, leaving that at which, if I had any reputation at all, it was as one who was good with words and at drawing, but not nearly good enough to make up for being a woeful little dickhead, and getting a fresh start at another, where it took me several weeks to become known as a woeful little dickhead, I became the classmate of a boy called Ricky Abbott, who was aggressive, quick, agile, and strong, and also precociously bright. It was said that he intended to apply for admission to the Air Force Academy, and that they’d probably take him, as maths and physics were two of his best subjects. Naturally, I loathed him.

But then I got to know him a little bit, and the chair was kicked out from under me. He wasn’t only a star of the football team, a prolific interceptor, as a defensive back, of opposing school’s passes, and a frequent Scholar of the Month, but also avidly congenial, without a trace of arrogance, as cordial to people like me as he was to his buddies on The Team. Which made it very much more difficult, but certainly not impossible, for me to hate him. Of course I hated myself more for being so grateful for his cordiality.

As I said, he was an exception, the other really sporty boys being arrogant numbskulls who took their own fabulousness as a given.

Most major athletic stars’ lives seemed to follow a similar trajectory. Early on, usually before age 10, they would win the admiration of their
classmates, and, slightly later, the lust of the girls. By age 20, in many cases, they’d have signed professional contracts that, unless they entrusted the money to charlatans, would ensure their never having to get up barbarically early to catch a train on which they’d have to stand with someone’s unwashed hair in their noses all the way to some godforsaken trading estate in the ugliest building in Willesden, where they’d spend eight hours in an airless office rotting of boredom and frustration surrounded by people they’d have much preferred not to be around. Instead, wide-eyedly worshipful boys would follow them wherever they went, swooning rapturously if accorded a syllable of greeting. Journalists would beg to hear them mumble platitudes. Models and pop singers would eagerly open their gorgeous long legs for them.

Then they’d write their autobiographies. Actually, they’d spend a few hours mumbling platitudes and yawning inanities at some poor moonlighting journalist, who’d then spend months making them seem rudimentarily articulate. There’d be great huge stacks of the book at W.H. Smith and Waterstone’s, which would have two drastically discounted copies of the poor moonlighting journalist’s novel. The tabloids would pay huge amounts of money for the right to an exclusive preview, which would highlight the book’s sole vaguely interesting revelation.
When I was first introduced to the wife of So-and-So, my manager at Such-and-Such, she asked if I fancied a rim job
.

While no one but their spouses cared if those trying to cure breast cancer or muscular sclerosis lived or died, athletes’ every last sprain would be analysed and agonised about by tens of thousands. Then, after years of such worshipful treatment, they’d announce their imminent retirements, and people who would earn a fraction over the course of their working lives what these athletes earned in a season would shower them with gifts. The stars would claim they wanted to spend more time with their families, but after two weeks at home, they’d realise that spending time with their families might involve aspects of parenting other than being a distant, godlike masculine ideal, whereupon they’d devote themselves to playing golf in foursomes with three guys content to talk about nothing but the newly retired stars’ brilliant exploits.

If they were able to speak four-word sentences semi-intelligibly, they’d be offered jobs encouraging those still active to mumble the same platitudes on television that they themselves had once mumbled.
Well, we’re just going to go out there and give it 120 per cent and hopefully put more balls into the back of the net than the other fellows
. And everywhere
they turned up for the rest of their lives, people would defer to them, praise them, rush them to good tables in restaurants in which others, with reservations, had been cooling their heels for an hour.

And all because God had enabled them to perform some utterly irrelevant physical task involving a ball.

I’ve admitted already that as a high school boy, I used to hope that the arrogant sporty boys to whom I tried to attach myself performed dismally, or even hurt themselves. As an adult, I came to realise that professional athletes are on the whole far more likely to be racist, homophobic, or, at best, politically reactionary – nostalgic for a time when queers didn’t have parades and the dark-skinned and women knew their places – and began to watch games solely in hope of seeing someone I detested being carried off on a stretcher, writhing in pain, sure that he was leaving his career back on the pitch.

It happened too infrequently for my taste, and in time I ceased to watch anything other than England away games, during which one could always hope that the host country’s fans, furious about Blair’s complicity with Bush, bored with Beckham to the point of belligerence, would swarm onto the field and spirit one of Our Lads away, later to sell him into white slavery. Instead, as you know already, I took to watching programmes on which smooth-faced young singers were ritually savaged by vengeful middle-aged no-talents.

In any event, when I got back from failing to intimidate Harold and Nepenthe with Cyril, the two worlds converged. Sir Ivor Praiseworthy, the legendary Charlton Athletic striker of the early Eighties, had actually produced a commercial – an infomercial, actually – in which he appealed to viewers not to vote his youngest son, Claude, out of the
Megastar
competition. He hadn’t hired a couple of chimps with a camcorder and editing software for the job, but had spent some major money. The spot opened with a montage of what I assumed (I was in California when he was scoring them) were Ivor’s most illustrious goals, with the exultant roar of the crowd getting a little louder with each one. Then the frame froze and dissolved to the contemporary Ivor, shaven-headed now, maybe a pound or two heavier, but still fit and handsome, looking wistfully out of a window, sitting by a fireplace, sipping tea, looking soulful. “Ever since my youngest son, Claude, was born in 1984,” he confides as the camera slowly pulled in on him, unashamed of his cragginess, “I knew there was something a bit … off about him.”