‘This is the happiest you’ve ever been,’ I told myself in the mirror, in the ornate Victorian bathroom, two hours later.
I was having a little girl-to-girl chat with me – getting a second opinion. Goosing my own Maverick.
‘You’ve made a friend! You’re making a friend right now! Look at your face, in the middle of friending! You are hatching an attachment! Because the thing about John Kite is – the important thing about John Kite is–’
The door opened, and John Kite’s head suddenly appeared – hair slightly ginnish over his forehead, fag in hand.
‘Duchess, I’ve put Guns N’ Roses on the jukebox, and they’ve emptied our ashtray with aplomb, and you really can’t waste any more time pissing, you know. It’s already 4pm.’
By 5.30pm, we had decided to move on – a man in a battered hat, who gave every impression of having only recently misplaced the pig under his arm, informed us that a pub called ‘Doran’s’ had the best whisky selection in Dublin.
We never found that pub – we wandered the streets excited by the fog that had descended; excited by how things would loom out of it, solid for a second, and then melt away again, a second later. Everything had the dreamy air of Through The Looking Glass to it – I would not have been surprised if a lumbering giant Rook, or knitting sheep, had materialised and then dematerialised on the invisible conveyor-belt we seemed to walk parallel to.
At one point, we walked down a street and nearly ended up in the Liffey – it came upon us so rapidly – and we sat on the cold stone, on the water’s edge, and looked across at the faint, bright lines of buildings on the opposite bank.
At 8pm, in the new, gentle dark, John turned to me, dirty blond forelock in his eye, and said, ‘Duchess, this is one of those great afternoons where you make a friend for life, isn’t it? We just seem to be … a lot the same.’
We got to the gig an hour late – Kite coming through the doors in his fake fur coat like some fabulous, Welsh, pissed pimp-hustler. I was holding his hand. I banked every jealous look, and became limitlessly wealthy on them.
In the dressing room, as Ed tried to give John black coffee – and John continued to calmly drink whisky, whilst batting Ed away like a moth – I looked around, and thought, ‘I am backstage! I mean, I am backstage. I am the backstage. I’m not just audience any more. I’m with the band.’
I looked across at ‘The Band’. He was trying to take off his tie, with some difficulty. It was a knitted, woollen thing – ‘But I’m going to put a bow-tie on, to perform,’ John said, firmly, ‘because I believe in a more formal attire when singing songs of heartbreak. A sense of authority conveys comfort, to the weeping.’
Because the theatre was packed – loud, hot; everyone slightly angry with everyone else for being into this singer they thought was their special secret – there was nowhere for me to stand and watch the show.
‘You’ll sit there,’ Kite said, with a flourish – pointing to the edge of the stage. We were standing in the wings, waiting.
‘No way,’ I said – but he’d already taken my hand and walked onto the stage with me, into the applause, which was solid, and filled the room, and felt like something you could actually see. Along with the white lights in your face, being on stage felt like opening the front door and finding the White Cliffs of Dover on your doorstep, waiting – ranked up from the stalls to the Gods. The White Cliffs of Dover stood, patient and huge, above us.
‘This is the Duchess. She’s with the band,’ he said, pointing to me. I waved at the audience, sat on the very edge of the stage, and then concentrated on looking appreciative of Kite, in a business-like manner.
‘And I’m The Band,’ Kite continued. ‘I am reliably informed by Melody Maker that I’m going to break the more fragile hearts in two, so – safety goggles on.’
I sat on the stage, and cried all the way through the gig. I must have looked like an art installation – ‘Crying Girl Is Affected By Sad Songs’. I tried not to – but by the time the second song started, I was gone: John’s songs had a breakable, scared quality to them that I recognised from sitting up alone, at night, and finding the future terrifying.
The song about his mother’s breakdown – ‘Subject to Melody’ – had him singing ‘A poor boy all alone/In a burning home/Choosing which one will walk out last,’ started me off; and by the time his stubby, pale fingers were picking through ‘We are the Cavalry’ – ‘You remind me of a field of crucified saints/Kindness is a wound/And at closing time/We wash the blood with/Our hair dipped in wine’ – I was snotting all into my mouth and having to eat it, silently shuddering.
At one point he looked across and saw me weeping, and it seemed to throw him for a minute – he looked like he might stop the song. And then I bravely smiled, and he smiled back – as gleeful as he had been in the pub – before going back to his sad, sad chorus.
And that was the point I knew I just loved this filthy, ugly, loquacious man in a fur coat, who would spend the day roaming all over town, looking for bright lights, and laughter – and then at night come on stage, and unbutton two buttons on his waistcoat, with his clumsy, fat fingers, and show you his heart beneath.
After the gig, he stayed backstage for three drinks – which, being John Kite, he inhaled like vapour in less than ten minutes – and then he shrugged everyone off, with a cheerful ‘Gotta be grilled by the Duchess now’, and took me back to the hotel, for the interview.
I only had one cassette for my recorder – a single C90. It had never occurred to me that, in the end, I would spend from midnight until 5am talking to him. He’d drunk just enough to never stop talking, and I had never learned to stop talking in the first place.
He told me about his mother being committed when he was nine years old – how his dad was a drunk, and he was left with three younger siblings to look after. And that he would put on his mother’s coat, and sit his small, motherless brothers on his knee, and hug them, so they could smell the coat, and pretend it was her.
‘I read that was what you do with puppies,’ he explained. ‘And they all looked like little puppies, Duchess. Puppies left in a cardboard box, under a bridge.’
And how they were so poor that they’d steal firewood from the council bonfire, on Bonfire Night, and take it home in the pram – the baby sitting on top. And how, when he went to visit his mother in the hospital, feeling so broken and small and old, she would never hug him, or touch him. She could not bring herself to make any physical contact. Instead, at the end of the visit, she would kiss the tips of her fingers, and press them to his mouth – saying ‘And that is John’s goodbye.’
In turn, I told him about my family – my drunken dad, the dreary estate. How I’d brought about our impending ruin, and how I was running as fast as I could to outstrip it. How Mum had become an angry ghost, who didn’t like who I was now. That Mum thought that Dolly Wilde wasn’t who I really was at all.
‘Oh, God – people always want to tell you what you’re really like,’ he said, with contemptuous dismissal – as if this were a wholly repulsive hobby; like Morris dancing, or wanking cats. He lit a fag. ‘What a fucking bore people are.’
We talked until dawn, when John put pillows in the bath in his en suite, to make me a bed.
‘You gonna Norwegian Wood it, love?’ he said, as I crawled off to sleep in the bath.
Once I was in – it was unexpectedly cosy; like lying in an egg – Kite came and laid his fur over me. A white bath, full of fur.
‘Is it still early?’ he asked, hopefully, sitting on the side of the bath.
‘John, it’s 5am,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, thinking. ‘We might as well keep talking, then.’
It would be boring to say how much we laughed. He lay in his bed, and told stories, and would go quiet – asleep? – and then he would giggle, and then I would giggle, and he would say, ‘You put the phone down,’ and I would say, ‘No, you put the phone down.’
At one point, he staggered in for a piss
, three feet from where I lay – a thunderous unloading of whisky, Guinness and gin.
‘You put the phone down,’ he said.
‘No – you put the phone down.’
‘Love you, babe.’
He flushed, and went back to bed.
We were like two kids on a camping holiday.
First a taxi, then the airport. A plane. I think the shadow of the plane is a whale, in the Irish Sea. I love how it is following us, all the way back to Britain. Heathrow. Piccadilly line. Victoria line. Train. Wolverhampton.
512 bus. I have fallen out of the sky onto the 512 bus. My clothes still smell of Ireland, but I am back here. The Penn Road! With your monstrous knotted trees! I salute you!
My rucksack is on the seat beside me – heavy from the three ashtrays Kite insisted I steal. Two from pubs, one from the hotel.
The hotel one was the one he was most firm about. I had woken at 9am, and found him sitting at the table, by the window – the ruins of breakfast around him.
‘There were no flowers on my breakfast tray,’ he explained, vexed. ‘No carnation. No rose! This will necessitate the separate, time-consuming purchase of a buttonier.’
He gestured to his empty lapel, where there was usually a flower.
‘I must register my dissatisfaction,’ he said, stuffing the ashtray into my rucksack, with a flourish – following it with all the miniature shampoos, lotions and soaps, before attempting a hand towel, and failing.
‘This is negative customer feedback, to the hotel manager,’ he said, emptying the minibar into my side-pockets.
The bus jolts a lot, down the Penn Road, which is making holding the pint glass of Guinness I have in my hands tricky. The Guinness is my big souvenir from Dublin.
At 10am this morning, in the taxi on the way to Dublin airport, I’d made Ed Edwards stop the cab outside a pub while I ran in, bought a pint of Guinness, and then asked the barman, with as much legendariness as I could muster, ‘Could you gift wrap this? I need to take it to England.’
Between us, we’d devised a method whereby I’d put a coaster on top, like a lid, and he’d then swaddled it in almost a whole roll of clingfilm, from the pub kitchen. I have spent the subsequent seven and a half hours tenderly carrying this sticky brown mummy all the way from Dublin airport to Wolverhampton.
I have done this because, for as long as I can remember, my father has had a recurring rant about the ultimate unsatisfyingness of the Guinness in Britain.
‘The only good pint of Guinness,’ he will say – stubble flecked with creamy foam – ‘is made in Dublin. The water’s different. I’d give my balls for a proper pint of Guinness.’
And so I have brought this pint for him – a proper Irish pint, from Ireland. This pint – brought through the sky, and over the sea. I am finally buying my old man a good pint of Guinness.
As I walk through the door, holding the glass – kids throwing themselves at me, one already crying – I hold it out to Dadda, and tell him to sip it.
He tears the clingfilm off – looking at me, confused – and then takes a sip.
‘Christ. That’s flat,’ he says.
An hour later, I go up to my room. I put on John’s album, Forestry, as loud as I can.
As it played, I remembered how he looked when I told him about how it was the first time I’d been on a plane – ‘Aww, love! I wish I’d seen your fucking face! I bet you loved it, you fucking ingenious whore! I bet you exploded!’
I liked telling John Kite that it was the first time I’d done something. He seemed to find my innocence joyous. I can’t imagine telling anyone else. Other people seem to find my inexperience a liability. John Kite is the first person I’ve ever met who doesn’t make me feel I am weird.
I start writing a list of things I want to talk to John about that I can’t with anyone else, headed, firmly: ‘The Next Fifty Conversations with John Kite.’
I tear pictures of John out of Melody Maker, D&ME, NME, Select and Sounds in the library – surreptitiously – and Blu-tack them to the wall, next to the Manic Street Preachers, Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, and Kurt Cobain, wearing a dress. I start writing my diary to him, instead of to Gilbert Blythe. I put the three ashtrays on the desk, and stare at them.
If I smoked, I could smoke using John’s ashtrays, and it would be like we were smoking together. Maybe I should start smoking. Maybe that would be the right thing to do.
Four days later, I get a letter. A long, cream-coloured envelope, with my address scrawled on the front in a looping hand, in grey Biro, and a cassette inside, with ‘Gonzo Gainsbourg’ written on it, in the same pen. I’ve never seen grey Biro before. Who the fuck knows where to get a grey Biro? I put the cassette in my stereo, and press ‘Play’, as I read the note.
‘Hiya Duchess,’ it begins – the best two words I have ever read in my life. My first and only christening. ‘Hiya Duchess.’
Thought you’d want to know our alcoholiday ended with me in the swimming pool of the hotel at 11am, asleep on a sun-lounger, still in the big fur. I thought I’d go for a dip to sober up, lie down to have one of your copyright ‘profound thoughts’ TM, and, when I woke, an entire family in cossies and trunks were standing around me, with their mum at the back going, ‘Leave the man alone! Keep away from him!’
No one’s ever called me a ‘man’ before – I felt proud, and stern. This could be my gateway into adulthood.
Good to meet ya, princess – I will see you soon, yes? Let’s make it soon – I don’t want to have to wait twenty-four years to meet you again. I’m going for a walk. I ain’t left the house in three days.
Love, The Band.
The cassette John has copied for me is Gainsbourg’s Melody Nelson: it sounds incredibly, unbearably sexual. Dark and astonishing. Like a future I’m both scared of, and will run towards. Coupled with the letter, it pops a part of my child-brain, and I suddenly burst into tears.
I think I cry for at least half an hour – the kind of crying that is like rain where it starts without warning, and violently, but eases off into sudden rainbows, and blackbirds calling out in gratitude as they swoop across wet lawns. The weeping of relief.
Without even knowing what I’m doing, I lift the letter to my face, to see if I can smell any faint trace of John’s hands – hands that make the music. The hands that play his guitar. I don’t know why, but his hands break my heart.
Oh thank God thank God thank God, I think – I am not going to die having not received a letter. I get letters now. People write me letters. I am friends with the music. I can go out into the world, can make friends. It’s working. I’m with The Band.
TWELVE
The next few weeks are some of the worst of my life, because I have discovered something amazing: that some people aren’t just people, but a place – a whole world. Sometimes you find someone you could live in for the rest of your life.
John Kite is like Narnia to me – I’ve pushed through his fur coat and into a land where I am Princess Duchess, High Chatter of Cair Paravel. In John Kite, people walk down the street holding pigs, and we walk on stage holding hands into the bright light, and I fly over tiny maps to great theories, and I sleep in the bath-tub, still talking. I wish to be a citizen of John Kite forever – I want to move there immediately. I know he is the most amazing person in the world. Things happen with John Kite.
‘I can’t live here any more,’ I tell the dog, sadly. I have climbed out onto the shed roof, and encouraged the dog to come with me.
‘I can’t stay here,’ I continue. ‘It doesn’t work. The house is too small, and nothing happens, and I will never be older than twelve here.’
Since I’ve been up in a plane, and seen the houses turn into matchboxes, all the houses in Wolverhampton seem to have shrunk. I’m like Alice when she gets bigger, then smaller, then bigger again, in Wonderland. My scale has changed. I am still at 30,000 feet. I can’t fit through tiny doors. I have dreams that I stand up and stamp on the houses, and flatten them, and
run away. I need to run away to London, where John Kite lives, and where I will be the Duchess, and live in a variety of bars.
But I can’t. For the awful thing is that now I know what I want – to be roughly no more than fifteen feet away from John Kite for the rest of my life – I can’t have it. Now I’ve filed my John Kite feature to Kenny, I can’t help but notice that work has dried up completely. Kenny is a bit odd with me on the phone: ‘Do you like the feature?’ I ask him.
‘Well, you left us in no doubt where you stand on the man,’ Kenny says, and changes the subject.
The piece runs on the eighteenth – I walk to the newsagent and there it is, billed on the front:
The stand-first, written by Kenny, describes my night out with Kite: ‘Dolly Wilde flies to Dublin, racks up a £217 bar-bill, ends up in John Kite’s bath, and explains why Kite is now “More important than the Beatles” [Really? Ed].’
In the feature, I’ve tried to describe what it’s like being so close to the music – to hold its hand, and stand on stage with it, and talk to it, and then listen to it going to the toilet. I have one objective in the piece: to make every single person who reads it want to buy John Kite’s records. I call him a ‘dirty, crusading angel’, and a ‘filthy choirboy’, and ‘a beating, bleeding heart in a tattered suit’. After each of these descriptions, Kenny has written ‘[Oo-er, Madam – Ed]’, or ‘[Blimey! Ed]’, which makes me feel uneasy.
But Kenny hasn’t written anything after the paragraph where I describe how John’s face looks when he sings – how his fringe is wet in his eyes, and his whole demeanour is that he will sing this song to you, and then jump over the side of a ship, and swim to Paris, to start a new life, because he is embarrassed he has been so truthful. So maybe it’s okay.
It is my first ever love-letter, although I don’t realise at the time – perhaps the mood of over-wrought semi-hysteria should have alerted me. Or – more prosaically – the bit where I went, ‘I am in love with John Kite. His music, that is.’