He looks at me.
‘Linx are a band, Wilde.’
Four hours later: we’re at a party, somewhere in Soho.
We’d left the pub at 5pm, in a gang. It is a majestic thing to walk out of a building, in a rangy booze-squad, and out into the very beginning of a long spring evening. The buildings on the South Bank are pale grey, like dirty bridesmaids; women in bright dresses, promenading to their next destination. London feels like an infinite toy. Evenings never end – they just, without you noticing, turn into tomorrow.
I was booked on the 7pm train back to Wolverhampton – but on the pavement, as I start to say goodbye, talk turned to the party they’re all going to tonight.
‘Come along,’ Kenny said. ‘Come out in the wrecking crew. Disc & Music Echo men are here – we drink your men and fuck your beer!’
‘I should really go home,’ I say. I do not want to go home.
‘Your man John Kite’s coming,’ Kenny says, slyly.
‘The last train to Wolverhampton is the 22:35,’ Zee offers.
‘And John Kite’s coming,’ Kenny says again, looking me right in the eye.
So here I am, at my first ever music industry party. First ever party, really – if you don’t count wedding receptions for cousins. At the last one of those we went to, we sat underneath the buffet table and sucked the cream out of a whole plate of eclairs – then played a game where we went on the dance floor and high-kicked our shoes off to Star Trekkin’ by The Firm. It was unfortunate that Lupin was wearing wellington boots, and that cousin Ali was sitting where she was sitting, but generally, it was an amazing night out.
This party is very different to a cousin’s wedding. The main problem is that I don’t know anyone. Obviously I’ve come with all the D&ME people, but I still don’t really know what to do with them. They walk in and stand by the bar – which, despite being free, has been abandoned by the staff – and wait, tetchily, to be served. I feel, in some odd way, that this is something I should be doing something about – not least because I can’t join in on their conversation, about the band Faust, because I’ve never heard of Faust.
After two further minutes of waiting, I take matters into my own hands.
‘What do you want, boys?’ I ask – climbing over the bar, and starting to serve them. I am bold with MD 20/20 and cider.
‘I’ll have a Jack and Coke, Wilde – but, erm, should you do this?’ Kenny asks.
‘We call this “Wolverhampton self-service”,’ I say, enjoying being legendary. ‘I once ran the bar at the Posada pub for twenty minutes on Christmas Eve. Given how much I was helping out, I thought it was churlish when they later banned me.’
All of this is a total lie – I’ve never drunk alcohol in a pub before today – but everyone seems excited by my legendariness, and what is the point of being seventeen years old if you can’t totally make up your back-story? I’m just doing what Bob Dylan did – but in a dress, with some free drinks.
Rob Grant’s giggling delightedly, like a girl – ‘I’ll have a beer, Wilde’ – so I double-up on my legendariness, and throw some nuts onto the bar.
‘Snacks, anyone?’ I ask. But then the bar man comes and does a very bad face at me, so I have to jump back over, saying, ‘Just trying to help a brother out!’ in a cheerful way, and knock back the gin I served myself in one throw – basking in the D&ME boys’ camply scandalised air.
‘We’ve got a live one here,’ Rob says, approvingly.
I love being ‘a live one’. It is an admirable substitute/upgrade for ‘being able to fit in’.
Still, once the ‘freelance barmaid’ excitement is over, I continue not being able to join in with the resumed conversation about Faust.
John Kite isn’t here yet – ‘He’s shooting a video in East London. He’ll be here by nine’ – and so I wander away from the D&ME crew, with a good two hours to kill before I have someone I can party with.
A party is definitely a collaborative effort, I observe, looking at all the other people having conversations, and dancing together, and, in the corner, kissing. Oh, kissing. I watch the kissing until it’s obvious I’m watching the kissing, and then I walk away, quickly. It’s bad to be seen watching kissing.
By now, my un-kissed kiss feels like gunpowder on my lips – if anyone comes near me with even the vague heat of attraction, I will go up in a sheet of flame – mouth first. I feel a sexual fury, for a moment. Oh, God – why won’t you let me fuck you! All of you! Everyone in this room. I have a feeling I’ll only ever properly make sense in bed, on my back. You would understand what I mean if we were there.
Anyway. Over the next ninety minutes, I try a variety of different tactics to make it look like I’m not lonely at this party. My findings on how to ‘party on your own’ are as follows:
The buffet. There is a fabulous spread here, and no girl can truly say she is alone if she is standing next to a plate of honey-glazed miniature chipolatas! I eat six, thoughtfully – then worry that I simply look like an abandoned girl eating a lot of small sausages. Under the common teenage misapprehension that anyone is a) observing and b) gives any kind of a fuck what I’m doing, I then take two paper plates, and load them up – as if getting food for a friend, who is over the other side of the room. I give this scenario all I’ve got – deliberating over slices of miniature quiche, and then rejecting them, because my friend – ‘Claire’ – does not like quiche, ‘remembering’ that, unlike me, what ‘Claire’ really likes are Scotch eggs – then walk across the dance floor, ‘looking’ for my ‘friend’ ‘Claire’, until me and my two loaded plates reach …
… the toilet, where I bolt the door, and eat both platefuls. When I finish them, I can’t fit the two paper plates into the Bin of Shame with all the sanitary towels in it, because of the uneaten Scotch eggs, so I leave them neatly stacked on the floor, instead. By the time I leave the toilet, a small queue has built up outside. The woman at the front of the queue looks in, and sees the plates with their Scotch eggs, on the floor. ‘They will hatch soon!’ I tell her, cheerfully. ‘They are dragon-eggs! Good luck!’
Being a very busy journalist. If you’re a writer, are you ever really off-duty? The human condition never has the evening off – it must be reported upon, 24/7. I sit up the corner with my notebook, and write down all the astonishing observations that are occurring to me. When I find the notebooks, years later, I see that this consists of a drawing of a cat wearing a top hat; my bank account number – which I am trying to learn by heart; and, on a page all on its own, ‘I wish Krissi was here.’
A conversation with a stranger! ‘Do you know where the toilet is?’ ‘Yes – over there.’ ‘Ha – thank you.’ I’m glad I look like the kind of person you can trust to tell you where the toilet is. Whenever Krissi gets asked, at a party, he always points people towards a cupboard, and then watches, laughing. God I miss Krissi.
And, finally, smoking. There’s no two ways about it – this shit is useful. I have long observed its application in society, and concluded it to be needful. Everyone smokes – it just has to be done. Having finally acknowledged this, last night, I had bought a packet of ten Silk Cut from the newsagents up town. This shop is legendary for its relaxed attitude to selling cigarettes to children. Until recently, they used to vend a single cigarette, threaded through a Polo Mint, for 15p – in order to capture lunch-time smokers who needed to freshen their breath before going back in for PE. Sitting on the grass outside St Peter’s Cathedral, I doggedly taught myself to smoke. I’m impressed by how determined I am, because it is – and there’s no two ways about this – filthy. It tastes of the worst brown ever. It’s like sucking in everything you’d ever put in a bin – ashtrays, burnt pub carpet, yellow snow, death. Dadda at 2am. As my lovely clean throat and pink lungs sucked in the smoke, I felt very, very sorry for me: this is not what a child should be doing. In a right world, I should have needed to do nothing more than spend that money on eight Curly Wurlys and a couple of Refreshers.
But here, now, a
t the party, I am glad I have the cigarettes in my rucksack – because I now have a little task to attend to, and keep me busy. I go over to the window, take the packet out, light a cigarette, and smoke it, while looking thoughtfully out on the street below. I try to remember how I’ve seen Elizabeth Taylor holding cigarettes, and hold it up by my face. In my reflection in the window, I see that it looks less Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and more like I’m doing shadow-puppets of a swan. I put my arm back down, and cough a bit. Jesus, it is disgusting.
‘Aaaaaaaah,’ says a man standing next to me, lighting his fag. ‘You’ve gotta love a fag.’
‘Yes indeed,’ I say, in a slightly strangled voice. ‘I’ve been dying for this all day. And then of course,’ I continue, with the dark humour I presume all smokers will have, ‘I’ll be dying for it literally when I get to fifty!’
It seems this is the wrong thing to say.
‘Yeah,’ he says, before wandering away.
That’s okay. I’ve got other things I can concentrate on. In the street below, a posh-looking drunk man is reading the card of a prostitute, Blue-Tacked up by a doorbell. He’s examining it with all the forensic care I presume he puts into reading a wine list.
‘What are you looking for?’ I ask him, in my head. ‘What woman will go best with your main course of terrible, horny loneliness?’
I speculate, briefly, on how different the world would be if it were run by women. In that world, if you were a lonely, horny woman – as I am. As I always am – you’d see Blu-tacked postcards by Soho doorways that read, ‘Nice man in cardigan, 24, will talk to you about The Smiths whilst making you cheese-on-toast + come to parties with you. Apply within.’
But this is not that world.
I watch the posh, drunk man – obviously not captivated by what he has read – stagger off down the street, into the darkness, still alone. I lean my head on the glass. I am still smoking.
At 9.59pm, John Kite finally turns up – a flurry by the door heralds his arrival, and the sound of a pissed Welsh man going, ‘I’ve got to get this bloody coat off – the rain has made it smell like a zoo. An animalarium.’
I go over and there he is – taking off his huge, soaking fur coat, and hanging it on the coat-rack, wet hair plastered over his eye, fag in mouth.
‘Duchess!’ he says, seeing me. His hug – huge – is the fourth-best thing to ever have happened to me, after birthdays, Christmas, and the Easter when it snowed on the first roses. I feel the battered gold rings on his hands press into my back.
‘You’re like a bad drink in a good world. I didn’t know you’d be here! That’s fucking – Gold Run, man. Where’s the gin?’ he asks.
I hand him a gin and tonic. I bought it at exactly 9.29pm – anticipating his arrival. Most of the ice has melted now. The drink is quite watery.
‘Do you want me to get you one with ice?’ Ed Edwards asks. Kite has a small entourage with him.
‘No, no – this counts as the glass of water between drinks,’ Kite says, knocking half of it back in one. ‘It’s healthy.’ He coughs. Kite’s entourage are still hanging around him.
‘Shall we go for a fag?’ I ask Kite. I am holding the packet in my hand – the box that acts as a shield against loneliness, each cigarette a tiny wand that I can wave, to re-order a room however I wish. With this cigarette, I can spirit Kite away from people.
‘Yes!’ Kite says.
We’re over by the window – entourage left way behind – before he realises what’s happening.
‘You smoking now, Duchess?’ he asks.
‘I thought it was time for me to get another hobby,’ I say, with a daring air, trying to light it.
Kite leans forward. ‘It’s just, most people smoke them the other way round.’
He gently takes the cigarette out of my mouth, and puts it back in the right way. My mouth fills with the taste of burnt filter.
‘But never be afraid to experiment, sweetness,’ he says, lighting the proper end with a flourish. ‘If anyone could invent Backwards Cigarettes, it’s absolutely you, my love.’
For ten minutes, I’m about as happy as I’ve ever been. Standing in this big window with John, smoking our fags – clever decision, me – and gabbling about what we’ve been up to. He tells me an anecdote about touring in Canada that creases me, and I tell him about Lupin’s teeth and play it for laughs, very successfully, I think. At one point, he takes my hands in his and says, ‘And thank you for that lovely interview you wrote with me. You made me sound like Owain Glyndwr with a twelve-string, bombing his own castle. It was a beautiful thing to read on the tour bus. I read it out loud to Ed Edwards until he told me I was acting like a monkey in a zoo, touching its own cock and laughing.’
But then John grinds out his fag, knocks his drink back in one, and does the equivalent of pressing a massive cannon-snout right against my heart.
‘Right – I gotta go now, Duchess. It’s bed-time for John-John.’
I laugh.
‘You’re leaving early? Kite, the only way you’ll ever leave anywhere early is on a gurney – paramedic pumping your heart and shouting, “WHAT DID YOU TAKE, JOHN? JOHN, TELL ME WHAT YOU TOOK.”’
There is no way this joker is leaving early.
This joker is leaving early.
‘Seriously, Dutch. We’re doing MTV in Holland at 8am tomorrow. I have to go,’ he says. ‘I’ve been read a riot warning. Apparently I am never again allowed to stay up all night with you, then die by a swimming pool.’
I look up and I can see Ed Edwards holding the door open for him – waiting for him to go through it, into the car, and away, to Holland.
‘Fucking hell – you really are.’
I am silent for nearly ten seconds – the longest, I think, I have ever been silent in my life. I climb into a coffin. I nail down the lid. I basically die during this silence.
‘Well,’ I say, finally. ‘Well. Good luck. Remember – always ride out as if meeting your nemesis.’
He leans in, and kisses me on the mouth. I don’t know what it means. I just stand there, and get kissed. One kiss. As gentle as snow.
My heart explodes like a swarm of bees.
‘Goodbye, Duchess,’ he says.
And then he is gone – my entire point of being in the room; in London; alive. My £18.90 train-fare and my whole life getting into a taxi, leaving me this room full of people – a party – as a parting gift.
I have never wanted anything less.
I stand there, alone, for a few minutes, his kiss still shouting in my bones. While I try and work out what I think, I smoke another cigarette. God, they are useful. I should have started this much younger! Perhaps if I’d been smoking while I was still at school, I wouldn’t have felt so lonely!
This is the first time a man has ever touched my mouth. Ever. It was just a goodbye kiss – dry, quiet – but it was the first time anyone had ever not kissed to the left or to the right of me – but gone right into the centre, as men and women do.
‘The mouth is the heart of the face,’ I think, taking a glass of free wine off the table and knocking it back; hands vibrating; bee-headed. I don’t really know what to do with myself. I want to do more of the kiss. I want to finish the kiss – go on and on and get to the bit where someone just eats the clothes off my body, and just fucking does me. Why do I keep not having sex? What is going on? This is a massive operational error.
I look around the party. I should go and be in this party. Zee is over by the bar, holding a pint and talking to someone. Zee is nice, my five gins tell me. I go and join him.
‘Hiyarrrr!’ I say. ‘Hiyarrrrrr!’
‘Dolly – this is Tony Rich,’ Zee says, introducing me. ‘Anthony, this is Dolly.’
‘Hello,’ Rich says.
I know who Rich is, of course – he’s D&ME’s star writer. Exotic courtesy of doing his degree at Harvard – he’s been to America! Where Marilyn is from! – Rich is both incredibly clever, and incredibly vicious. His vibe is a general dissatisfac
tion with the majority of music that’s in the charts. Last week, he described jolly indie Midlands’ heroes The Wonder Stuff as ‘The sound of five idiots laughing with their mouths open. They are the point where music finishes its amazing, expansive outward journey into space, docks at a desolate space-station, and then starts proudly colonising the rubbish-chutes, holding up turds as treasure.’
Anyway, none of that is important right now. What is important is that I’ve just realised that Tony Rich is incredibly hot. A tall boy with a big mouth and very pale skin, whose eyes are as clever as rockets – guns – the sun – and the exact colour of Coca-Cola.
I am astonished that they don’t have reports on how scorching he is on the News pages, every week. Why would they not headline this news? The paper has really dropped the ball here. This is what comes of having an all-male environment: not only do they not advise you to wear a sports bra in the mosh-pit, but Grade A perving opportunities for the ladies are being missed left, right and centre.
I can’t believe how kind the timing is on this issue: thirty seconds after John Kite, my future husband, has left – leaving me hot, and useless, with kiss – the world has served me up my second future husband. Or maybe I’ll have an affair with Rich, while I’m married to John. Or maybe I’ll just have sex with both of them – proper, total sex – and then marry Gonzo from The Muppet Show, as I’d planned since I was nine. It’s all still definitely to play for. I am full of potential right now.
‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ I ask Rich, in my best ‘chat’ manner. ‘I found out I’m half-Jewish last week, too! On my mother’s side!’
‘Mazeltov,’ Rich says, laconically. I didn’t find out I was half-Jewish last week at all, of course – Mum is from Peterborough, and her parents are from the Hebrides – but I have read all of Harpo Marx’s autobiography (Harpo Speaks!, Limelight, 1985), so I know what a ‘shiksa’ is, also ‘pinochle’, and I sometimes wish I was Jewish – and that’s got to be basically the same thing. Besides, lying has worked very well for me tonight. I’m just making me up as I go along! I’m jazz! I drink another gin.