‘Well, now you’re part of the team, Annie, do you want to sit in on the editorial meeting?’ Kenny asks. ‘I can’t think why a teenage girl on the threshold of an amazing life wouldn’t want to sit in on the process that results in us putting Skinny Puppy on the cover, and losing 20,000 readers in a single week.’
‘Hey!’ Rob says, angrily.
‘Have you ever heard Skinny Puppy?’ Kenny asks me.
‘No, sir,’ I say. I’ve decided to start calling people ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’. I saw Elvis do it once, on telly, and it looked really cool.
‘Well, don’t,’ Kenny cautions. ‘It’s just horrible. Like someone burning a load of simple children alive.’
The Editorial Meeting happens in an adjacent room. Smoking appears to be pretty much mandatory, as does talking all over each other. Most people wear black, and everyone seems amazingly confident – they all seem to know what their character-types are, and stick to them consistently: there’s an angry man, a cynical man, a clever man, the man with the bandage on his head. This meeting is a scene they’ve played out many times before, and they all know their roles and tropes. As I am new, I have no idea what mine is, other than to sit here feeling very, very anxious. I stay very quiet.
There is a twenty-minute discussion about next week’s cover: it’s Lush, a boozy bunch of raconteurs that sound a bit like a baby My Bloody Valentine, and are fronted by Miki Berenyi – a half-Japanese, half-Hungarian Cockney with a cherry-red bob.
‘She is damn fine-looking woman,’ Rob says, to general agreement, as everyone looks at her picture. ‘A damn fine-looking woman.’
That is what is being decided in this meeting. That Miki Berenyi is a damn fine-looking woman. I am still absorbing the exact ramifications of this – there are many – when Kenny suddenly turns to me and goes, ‘So, the Upfront section. New bands. You got anything? Who are the benighted Midlands youth going wild over these days?’
I think. I have no idea. How would one know what new bands there are? I’ve learned everything I know from D&ME. Where does one even find new bands?
‘There’s a quite interesting three-piece from Derby,’ a boy on the other side of the table cuts in, during this awkward silence. Along with me, he’s the only person during the meeting who’s been quiet. He’s what my dad would call ‘a dark lad’ – Pakistani, maybe? – and I’ve presumed that he’s staying quiet for the same reason I have: we feel odd in this room.
‘A dancey kind of thing – they do big orchestral samples over mournful break-beats. Kind of like Shut Up and Dance, if someone had given them Now That’s What I Call Classical Music for Christmas. The lead singer looks like Catweazle,’ he continues, in a very dolorous Birmingham accent. ‘They played the 69 Club in Wolverhampton last week,’ he adds, directly to me, ‘didn’t they?’
‘Oh yeah!’ I say, pretending I know this. ‘Yeah – I have heard of them. Yeah. I think Peel played them last week. Sir.’
I have absolutely no idea if Peel did play them last week – but given that Peel plays around a hundred songs a week, I’m on pretty safe ground re anyone ever actually finding out if this happened or not. This is a solid, utilitarian lie.
Kenny nods, decisively, to the dark lad.
‘You want to follow it up?’ he asks. ‘Find out if there’s a single, do it then?’
The boy nods. I’ve just worked out who he must be – he writes under the name ‘ZZ Top’, and covers a lot of rap, dance and hip-hop. I never really read his reviews because I find rap, dance and hip-hop vaguely terrifying. I don’t have the right clothes to be into them, and it all seems a bit intense. I file these genres along with heavy metal and speed metal, under: ‘People who would kill, then eat me.’ I like bands with lead singers who look like I could, with the wind in the right direction, beat in a fight. I reckon I could probably deck Morrissey, if I had to. I’ve had practice – on Lupin. But I do not think I could fight my way out of a misunderstanding with Ice T.
‘Right!’ Kenny says, drawing the meeting to a close. ‘Off you all jolly well fuck to the pub. Same time next week?’
As everyone files out – shoving each other, talking – I hold back, because I have no one to shove. I note ZZ Top is doing the same – presumably for the same reason. We slowly put our notepads in our bags, and walk out at roughly the same time. ZZ opens the door for me, and I curtsey, and start walking though.
‘Thank you, sir,’ I say, like Elvis would. I’m going to stick with this Elvis thing.
‘Didn’t I see you on Midlands Weekend?’ ZZ asks. My heart very usefully empties all four chambers of blood into my face, and my guts turn to ice.
‘HAHAHA!’ I say. ‘HAHAHA!’
‘You were, weren’t you?’ he persists. ‘Something about a Scooby Doo? I was at my parents. You really freaked Wilko out. They should have had that clip on It’ll Be Alright on the Night.’
He looks like he wants to say more, but I cannot bear this conversation. It is making me profoundly anxious.
‘Well, I obviously owe you all a massive apology. BYEEEE!’ I say, and run into the Ladies’ toilets – leaving him standing, in the corridor, holding his rucksack.
I am the only person in the Ladies. There is a stack of BMX Weekly, whose office is on the same floor as D&ME, by the bin. This room is, clearly, used mainly for storage – because there are no ladies for the Ladies.
I go to the toilet and have some Midlands Weekend flashback-induced diarrhoea, and then notice that my period has started, in its usual, completely random, stupid way.
‘Oh, fucking great,’ I say to my knickers – rubbing the blood off as best I can, and then stuffing a wodge of loo-roll in my pants. Annie, Midlands Weekend, not saying anything during the meeting, and now Carrie in my pants – this is my most glamorous and successful day ever. I flush the toilet, and execute a slightly awkward waddle over to the basins – stride impeded by the makeshift pillow in my knickers. I wash my hands, looking at myself in the mirror.
‘Well, this is where you say something wise to yourself,’ I say, aloud.
I can see where I have drawn Dolly Wilde on top of my own face – the two uneasily co-existing – but perhaps others can’t. If I walk and talk fast enough, maybe no one will notice. All I need is a moment to compose myself, in here. Just a moment to compose myself. Perhaps the next eighteen years.
‘Something wise,’ I repeat.
But I’ve got nothing. I look like Dolly Wilde, but I’m still acting like Johanna Morrigan. That’s going to have to change. Because this is the place I need to be. I need to be able to keep coming back here, and make this my place, because this is how you get to meet bands, and make money, and be in the music. This is the only door I have ever seen that opens onto my future.
When I finally get out into the corridor, everyone has gone. I drop twenty-nine storeys on my own.
TEN
So now I am a writer. A writer! I have three albums to review this week – 200 words each – for which I will gain the princely sum of £85.23. And that is a princely sum.
However, the day-to-day business of my new job proves unexpectedly difficult. We have a computer – a Commodore 64, given to us by Uncle Jim – in the front room, wired into the television, and on my first day at ‘work’, a Saturday, I march into the room with my notebook, and my CDs, and prepare to clock on.
Lupin is on the computer, playing Dungeon Master.
‘Hop it, small fry,’ I say, in a not unkind manner. ‘I need to commune with my muse. Clear off.’
‘But it’s my turn,’ Lupin says, implacably. Not looking away from the screen, he points to the ‘Computer Rota’ – the painstakingly assembled schedule, written on a piece of A4 paper stuck to the side of the television, that we devised a year ago, after months of bloody warfare. And it is true. ‘Lupin – 9am–11am’ is right before ‘Johanna – 11am–1pm’.
But now, surely, everything has changed.
‘Yes – but this is for work, Lupin,’ I explain, sitting on t
he edge of the chair, so that I’m crushing him a little bit. ‘Jo-Jo needs to write 200 words on the Milltown Brothers album. Lupin go play with Sticklebricks for a while.’
‘It’s my turn,’ Lupin says, doggedly.
‘Not any more,’ I say, sliding into the chair beside him, and forcing him to pop out, like an oily pea from a pod. ‘You’ve been out-ranked. Leg it.’
‘MUM!’ Lupin shouts, falling out of the chair.
‘Yes – MUM!’ I shout, not moving from the chair.
When my mother arrives in the room, holding a twin, I find she is unexpectedly sympathetic to Lupin’s cause.
‘It is his go, Johanna,’ she says, firmly.
‘But he’s just … mucking around. He’s just –’ I look at the screen ‘– killing a ghost. And not even a real one. An imaginary one. But I’M AT WORK,’ I explain.
‘We can’t change everything just because you’ve got a job,’ Mum says. ‘Everyone is equal in this house.’
‘Except Dad,’ I say, sulkily. ‘He always gets the biggest pork chop. And he has dibs on the telly when the American Football’s on. We never get to watch That’s Life.’
‘Johanna, you will just have to wait your turn,’ Mum says. ‘I cannot give you special treatment. There are a lot of people in this house, and we have to be fair to all of them.’
‘I don’t want special treatment – just logical treatment. My need is greater. As a professional writer, I am now simply more entitled to access of the computer than Lupin is. It’s like … if we were trying to hammer out foreign policy right now. If I were Boutros Boutros-Ghali, you’d listen to me more than … Karate Kid here.’
‘I’m not going to argue with you, Johanna. You are not Boutros Boutros-Ghali,’ my mother says, leaving the room.
‘Please let me go on the computer,’ I whisper to Lupin.
But Lupin now has the self-righteousness of being backed up by my mother.
‘It’s my go,’ he says, stubbornly, sitting back down. I sit on him a bit more – to make my point – hiss, ‘Frankly, mean!’ at him, and then go into the kitchen to make myself a very strong Horlicks – my drink of choice, in times of crisis. I intend to drink it angrily, whilst nursing a sense of increasingly sleepy injustice.
Dadda is in the kitchen, frying himself some bacon, and wearing my pink dressing gown.
‘Ah – it’s Hunter S. Thompson!’ he says, as I open the jar. ‘How is life in the cruel and shallow money-trench they call rock?’
‘Lupin’s being a dick,’ I say, sulkily. ‘I’m not allowed on the computer for another hour.’
‘Aye, don’t worry about him,’ he says, blithely – pouring bacon fat over the bread. ‘I need to talk to you, about our plan.’
‘Our plan?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. How we storm the citadel, now you’ve got your foot in the door.’
I look at him, lost.
‘Johanna, I’ve spent twenty years waiting for someone to come along and get me a record deal,’ he says, getting HP Sauce out of the bottle with a knife. ‘I’ve been waiting in pubs, and sending off demos, and hanging around studios talking to engineers who say they know someone who knows someone who’s Peter Gabriel’s guitar-tech. I’ve been waiting for the one person who can get us out of here. And all this time, the person who was going to get me a deal was right here.’ He looks at me. ‘It was you.’
‘Er …’ I say.
‘Johanna – this is it, kidder!’ He takes a bite of his sandwich. He looks happier than he has in years. ‘We’ve just got to have one hit single, and we’re out of here. One poxy song. Even better if it’s seasonal. Look at Noddy Holder. All he’s got to do is put a Santa hat on once a year, shout ‘IT’S CHRISTMAS!’ and then put his feet back up again, the jammy git.’
‘Just get my name out there, in the paper,’ he says. ‘That’s all I need. Just get me one big nob.’
Thinking, ‘Just one big nob? But that is very much my plan for me,’ I go back into the front room, laughing to myself at how sexually liberated I am. For an unkissed virgin, drinking a double-shot of Horlicks, I am totally Riot Grrrl. I give thanks to my big sisters, across the Atlantic, for my lessons in red-hot drive-by sassing. I have no thoughts at all as to how to help my father.
2.30pm, and I’m finally in my rightful place – at the computer – typing away, when my attempt at a new power-dynamic in the family hits another hitch. I’m halfway through a difficult paragraph trying to describe the Milltown Brothers’ indisputable jangly guitars as anything other than ‘jangly’ – so far, I’ve got ‘quite jingly’ – when a wailing sound issues from the kitchen. I hear my mother going to investigate, and then her feet in the hallway. She appears in the front room, furious.
‘You got Lupin to make you a sandwich?’ she asks, looking extremely riled.
‘To be fair, I’ve made him millions, over the years,’ I say. ‘I thought he’d enjoy learning a new skill. And I’m on deadline! I’m starving!’
‘He’s just taken half his thumb off on the cheese-grater,’ she says.
Now I cock my head: that wailing sound from the kitchen does – yes – sound exactly like an eight-year-old boy who’s grated his thumb off. That’s exactly the pitch.
‘Johanna. We’re a family – not “Johanna Morrigan and her Supplicants”,’ my mother says. ‘You can’t go lording it over the kids.’
Obviously I can’t tell her that I’m trying to single-handedly save our family from potential ruin, because then I’d have to tell her about the potential ruin – which was all my fault in the first place.
‘If I don’t keep this job, then my only future career-options are working in Argos, or being a prostitute,’ I say, wildly.
‘Maybe you could work in Argos as a prostitute,’ my mother says, merrily. She appears to be enjoying this conversation. ‘They could list you in the catalogue, and people could queue up, and wait for you to come down the conveyor-belt.’
Because I am well-read, I know what a terrible cliché it is for a teenager to shout ‘I HATE you. I never ASKED to be born’, so I refrain.
Besides, I have used this line before, and my mother replied, very calmly, ‘Well, as Buddhists, we believe children do actually ask to be born. You would actually have requested me as a mother, Johanna. So if it’s not working out, I’m afraid that’s down to your poor karmic judgement in picking me. Sorry.’
On this occasion, I just put my headphones on, and listen to John Lennon’s ‘Mother’ in the most sarcastic way I know how.
And so the weeks play out.
A phone-call. Kenny, at D&ME.
‘We haven’t heard from you in a while,’ he said, laconically. ‘Been busy?’
I can’t tell him that no one’s currently allowed to use the phone at the moment, while a red bill for £78 sits on the dresser, and that I’ve been praying hard that he’ll call me, and offer me more work.
‘Yes!’ I say, brightly. I have learned all the lessons from the Editorial Meeting, and I know how to talk, now. I know what kind of person I need to be when I’m talking to Kenny. ‘I’ve been partying hard, Kenny! It’s hard to schedule in all of the fucking, and then all of the drinking.’
I’m sitting on the stairs in my nightie, watching one of the twins in his buggy, quietly and peacefully being sick all down his chin.
‘Well, if you could put the boys down for just one minute, Wilde,’ Kenny says, amused, ‘we’ve got some more of that writing business you seemed so keen on. Smashing Pumpkins at the abstrusely named Edwards Number 8, in Birmingham. Fancy 600 words on that? Next Thursday. We thought it was time to give you a bigger piece. Take you up a notch. It’s a promotion! Plenty of time to stock up on the emergency drinking and fucking, before temporarily getting down to work. Yes?’
‘Yes, sir!’ I say. I will work out exactly how – with my no money, no money at all, until I actually receive my first, dawdling pay-cheque – I will get to Birmingham later. Perhaps Birmingham will, in the next week, move closer to Wolv
erhampton, and I can simply walk there!
‘Record company’s press officer is Ed Edwards – he’s utterly fucking useless, but then, they all are,’ Kenny sighs, before giving me Ed’s number. ‘Get on the guest list. You can even have a few drinks while you’re there! Keep the receipts, there’s a good chap. Sadly, I don’t think IPC’s expenses run to claiming “some fucking”, as well – although you could give it your very best shot.’
‘Expenses?’
I feel like I’ve just been shot in the head by a bag of gold.
‘Expenses?’
This is a magical word. ‘Expenses.’ Oh, most beautiful word! Expenses means … more money.
‘So can we claim travel expenses, as well?’ I ask. I’ve crossed all my fingers and toes, and legs, willing him to say ‘Yes’.
‘Well, eyebrows might rocket if you go First Class, or pedalo there on a … swan, but generally, yes. IPC mercifully acknowledges that you’re not going to “Birmingham Edwards Number 8” for anything as pleasurable as … pleasure,’ Kenny says, before ringing off – leaving me lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, mouthing, ‘Yessssssssssssss.’ I have a big new job. I have been promoted.
Whilst Lupin might be unwilling to be helpful towards my new-found role – that of ‘important employee of a national publication’ – my father, with his eye on my position as ‘someone helpful to his career’ – is much more helpful. This is having mixed results.
At this moment in time – Thursday night – he is trying to reverse the caravanette into a parking space outside Edwards Number 8 that’s marginally too small for it, by insistently nudging at a pile of bins that are in his way. Presumably this is making a loud banging and scraping sound outside – but he’s playing ‘Buffalo Soldier’ so loudly inside the van, I can’t tell. The bass is making the gear-stick vibrate.
The last week has been exciting. By which I mean, awful. Having asked my dad for a cash advance to cover my train fare to Birmingham, he outright refused, on the basis that, ‘I know what I was like on late-night trains when I was a younger man, and I don’t want you meeting any cunts like that.’