How to Build a Girl

  ‘There aren’t many of us in Wolverhampton,’ I sigh, in the most Jewish way I can.

  I consider running down Wolverhampton as a town full of gentiles, but I’m still not sure how you pronounce it – I’ve only ever read the word – and I figure it would be pretty gentile to pronounce ‘gentile’ wrong, so I abandon my burgeoning ethnicity to ask: ‘So – who are we slagging off? I hate them too. Deal me in.’

  ‘Just discussing your man John Kite,’ Zee says, mild-eyed and blinking. ‘Trying to work out how much he does for effect.’

  ‘Effect?’ I say. I am so astonished I momentarily stop perving Rich – which is a lot of astonishment. I feel as offended as a Christian who’s just walked into a conversation on whether the cross that Jesus carries at Calvary secretly had retractable wheels – like carry-on luggage – and that Jesus has, in effect, cheated.

  ‘Effect? I don’t think John Kite’s pretending to be John Kite,’ I say. ‘I’ve hung out with him. In Dublin, he pissed next to me while I was in a bath, wearing his fur coat and smoking a fag. John Kite is 100 per cent John Kite, 100 per cent of the time. I believe in him like I believe in Elvis singing psalms on Sunday.’

  ‘Is that a Eurythmics album-track you’ve just misquoted, in a defence of John Kite?’ Zee asks.

  ‘Yes. I panicked.’

  ‘Well done,’ Zee nods.

  Rich has winced at the mention of the Eurythmics – a band, I now recall, that he once described as, ‘The sound of approximately nothing, masturbating while watching itself in the mirror.’

  Not only do I love the Eurythmics – me and Krissi do a great version of ‘Sex Crime’; he’s always Annie Lennox – but I’ve also masturbated whilst watching myself in a mirror, as well. Well, the back of a CD. The CD’s hole kept lining up with my hole. It was very annoying. Maybe me and Rich will not marry, after all.

  ‘People become aware of their own legends pretty quickly,’ Rich says. ‘After you’ve read half a dozen reviews of yourself, every artist loses the innocence that fuelled their original persona. Every act is condemned to eventually turn into their own tribute act. ABBA had turned into Bjorn Again years before Bjorn Again came along.’

  ‘What’s my legend?’ I ask Rich.

  Rich looks me up and down – taking in the eyeliner, the top hat, the laddered hold-ups, the short dress, the cigarette. I like him looking at me.

  ‘Well, you’re still making it,’ he says, looking me right in the eye. ‘But I suspect it includes trouble.’

  His mouth is outrageous. I don’t care what it’s saying. I just want it on me. Christ, imagine it on your belly. Imagine him dipping down, and making the fur wet. Like in the pictures in The Whole Earth Catalog – but happening to me. To my actual me, everywhere.

  Dear God! GOD! GOD IN HEAVEN! Attend my words, now! Because I warn you – there’s going to have to be some kissing, soon. Some kissing – if I’m not going to die. Kissing will have to happen to wet my lips, and cool the heat out of me – I have something in my mouth that needs to be taken. Like how baby birds take seed, from the mouths of their mothers. I wonder if I could fit Rich’s whole mouth in mine – if I held his head perfectly still, and pressed up against him. If I made him. If I just went round and made people kiss me. Maybe that’s what I should do.

  I am mad with kissing.

  I have to catch my train.

  On the last train home, an hour later – still half-drunk on wine, and gin, and kiss, and Rich’s mouth – I think about this. I think about the whole day – smoking, and drinking, and the important information that interviews are not love-letters; and that I am a journalist now – not a fan. And that I am trouble. I must be – Rich has reviewed me, and he is the cleverest critic I know.

  In my bag, I have my notebook, in which I’d started making notes for the next album I am supposed to be reviewing, by a failing band called The Rational.

  The album is resolutely average throughout – just an indie potboiler – and I have started to sketch out whimsical descriptions of the guitars, and made a couple of jokes about the band coming from Dunedin – ‘They Dunedin some tunes, to be honest.’

  It’s all very jolly stuff – just a gentle piss-take of their essential hopelessness. Right at the end, I have started to describe the lead singer, Alec Sanclear – a rather dim, vain man with a blond mullet, spiked up on top: ‘It makes him look a bit like someone stuck a picture of a confused man’s face on a cockatoo,’ I have written.

  I scribble everything out except this last line, and start again.

  ‘Oh, God – why has this cockatoo-haired cunt been allowed out of his cage to make a second album?’ I write. ‘Can we not ring some kind of helpline, and send in the RSPB with big nets – to re-capture him? Or perhaps we could drug some raisins, and leave them scattered around his squat – like they do in Danny – Champion of the World. Actually, yeah – that would work. That plan’s a goer. So we spike The Rational’s rider with Seconal, yeah, go into the audience, and watch, as flocks of hapless Sanclears fall from the sky. Wheee! Thud. Wheeee! Thud! There they go. Crashing from the ceiling.

  ‘That last bit, by the way, is also the perfect onomatopoeic description of pretty much every track on here: it’s all wee and thud.’

  I am on the last train home, being trouble.

  SIXTEEN

  The next two months I feel drunk, permanently. Half of this is because of the instant success of my new role: that of a hell-raising gunslinger. Trouble.

  I rock up at gigs, with my notebook, and watch a succession of middling indie-bands with a sarcastic look on my face, who I then go home and eviscerate. It’s so much easier than what I was doing before – being nice about bands – and, if I’m honest, it’s more fun. Why stand there trying to politely join in on a conversation about Faust, when you can just jump over the bar and give everyone STRONG DRINKS? Everyone loves a bad kid on a roll.

  The subsequent reviews are a hit – my profile at the paper rockets. I’m working six days a week – sitting in my bedroom, with my latest financial acquisition – a brand new computer – turning out hatchet jobs at 7p per word. Trouble is profitable. Trouble is a good, steady job. Trouble is the future.

  ‘If you want to get ahead, get a hate,’ Kenny says, gleefully, as he gives me lead review after lead review.

  The thrill is giddying – letters start appearing about me on the Letters Page, bands talk about me in interviews. For someone who lives in a house without mirrors, seeing yourself talked about by others is exhilarating. I’d always had a slight worry that I might not exist – that I was a very long dream I was having. Or maybe that Krissi was having, and that he was desperately trying to wake up from.

  But I am incontrovertibly real now – now that other people are discussing me. Now that my byline is on page 7, and page 9, and three from pages 17 to 20, and the Gossip Page has a picture of me, drunk, at a party, standing on a table in my top hat, captioned, ‘Slash has let himself go.’

  Because the other reason I feel drunk, permanently, is because I am drunk, permanently. Well, not permanently. But every night, at every gig I go to, I drink – who would let a penny of their £20 ‘refreshment budget’ go undrunk, save the mad? In the long days, the unnerving, violin-like screeching of worry can be firmly sat-up with the thought, ‘By 9pm, I shall be partying.’ And besides, I’m drinking for practical reasons. Having spent all my money on my computer, I walk home from gigs, down the A449 to our estate, and the alcohol keeps me warm, and means I do not stint on the top-notes when I sing. High Land, Hard Rain by Aztec Camera gets me as far as the Springhill turn off, and then up the black, empty streets to our house – past Violet’s house.

  ‘What did you say to them?’ I wonder, as I walk past – the net curtains like stiff white cataracts on the windows, making the house look myopic, and stubborn. ‘What will happen next?’

  At one gig in Wolverhampton – drunk, of course – I bump into my goth cousin Ali.

  ‘Alright,’ she nods, over her
pint. I note that she is not a goth any more – she’s now dressed like a classic shoegazing indie-kid: black ankle-boots, jeans, stripey Breton top, huge fringe.

  ‘Ali!’ I say. ‘Oh my God! Hello! I love John Kite too, now! I slept in his bathtub! I heard him piss!’

  ‘I’ve gone off him,’ Ali says, flatly. ‘I’m into The Nova. They’re brill.’

  I have no idea who The Nova are.

  ‘They’re over there,’ Ali says, nodding towards a corner of the club where five skinny boys in black jeans with black hair, also in Breton tops, are hanging, sullenly.

  ‘They’re nova there, you mean,’ I say. ‘Nova there. They’re nova there.’

  ‘I’m shagging the bass-player,’ Ali says, adding: ‘I’ve heard him piss, and all. And do the other.’

  ‘I’ve never heard a popstar do the other,’ I admit. Ali always has one up on me.

  ‘I wonder who does the loudest poos in pop?’ I muse. ‘I bet Celine Dion has one of those fancy porcelain Victorian toilets, with all flowers on the inside of the bowl, which she fills with millions of tiny dry pellets – like a rabbit. Pting ting ting ting ting!’

  ‘Ar,’ Ali says. Her expression doesn’t change – it’s the same, cold, blank face she’s had since birth – but she’s clearly intrigued; as she then says, ‘Prince does it secretly behind the sofa – like a cat. And then scratches at the carpet a bit, before going off to shag Sheena Easton.’

  ‘I reckon Nick Cave emits a pellet from his mouth, like an owl. He opens his mouth and it comes out – with all little bones in it.’

  We carry on like this for a while, until we’ve described the toilet-habits of pretty much everyone in the Top 40. Then:

  ‘So – did you shag him, then?’ Ali asks, after a contemplative, fag-smoking silence. ‘Did you shag John Kite?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  ‘No, then,’ Ali says. ‘You still look like a virgin, anyway.’

  ‘I am not a virgin!’

  ‘You am.’

  ‘I’m not! I know … what spunk tastes of!’

  Ali looks at me.

  ‘It tastes of bleach.’

  I once read this in an interview with Sally from the band Bleach, who was explaining why the band was called ‘Bleach’. Apparently, Sally’s information was good, as Ali looks satisfied.

  But her inquiry has stirred something in me. My un-kissed kiss is now a palpable weight – like a goitre; or an unlucky horseshoe, on a chain, that I must drag round with me. Sometimes, it feels like it stops me talking. Sometimes, it feels like it stops me breathing.

  ‘I haven’t got off with anyone for ages, though,’ I confess, which is true: my seventeenth birthday has now passed, and, in every year, I haven’t got off with anyone. An entire life is ages. John Kite doesn’t count – there were no tongues.

  ‘I’m gagging for it.’

  Ali looks at me for a second, and then nods towards The Nova.

  ‘See the lad with the band?’ she asks. There is a gangly youth of indiscriminate hair and face standing with them.

  ‘He’ll get off with you. He’s “The Kisser”.’

  I look at him again. The Kisser. I don’t know how to describe him. He’s just … normal. All the parts in the right place, and facing the right way. He’s got, like … a head, and stuff. Legs. Doc Martens. The Kisser.

  ‘He will get off with you, if you want,’ Ali says. ‘That’s what he does. He’s got off with all my mates. You know those things they have outside shops that’s like a giraffe, and you put 10p in and have a ride? He’s like one of those. You just … get on him, then get off with him. He’s a man-slag.’

  I look at The Kisser again. I then, because I’ve had a couple of drinks, look at my watch. I think subconsciously I’m seeing if it’s time for me to have my first proper kiss. My watch tells me that it’s 9.47pm on Wednesday, 17th May, 1993 – but then, it is a little fast. Like me! I’m about to be fast! Because I’m going to get my first kiss!

  ‘How does it … work, then?’ I ask.

  Ali starts walking across the dance floor, and I follow her.

  ‘Alright, lads,’ Ali says, to The Nova, and The Kisser.

  ‘Alright, Al,’ they reply.

  ‘This is Jo – Dolly Wilde. My cousin.’

  ‘You’re Dolly Wilde from Disc & Music Echo?’ one of The Nova asks, looking impressed.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Almost all the time.’

  ‘Whoa – nice one!’ He then frowns. ‘Hang on, though – you slagged off Uncle Tupelo last week. They’re alright, Uncle Tupelo.’

  Oh, for fuck’s sake – I’ve come over here to procure a kiss – not get drawn into an argument about Americana.

  ‘I’m off duty at the moment!’ I say, with an expansive hand-gesture.

  ‘Was yours the review with all that stuff about how Neil Young owns, like, 70 per cent of all the buffaloes in America?’ another member of The Nova asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I believe so,’ I reply.

  ‘Is it just me, or is that weird?’ he asks. ‘Neil Young owning all the buffalo. That’s just weird.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s like finding out that Mike Nesmith from The Monkees’ mum invented Tippex.’

  The Nova are astounded.

  ‘She never!’

  ‘She most surely did,’ I reply. ‘Presumably after she saw how badly her son had typed the phrase “The Monkees”, and needed to correct it with some kind of … liquid paper.’

  Ali’s boyfriend reveals how the first time he ever got high, it was from sniffing Tippex – ‘Well, it was own-brand corrector fluid’ – and the conversation veers off into a knowledgeable, five-minute discussion of what, exactly, can be bought at a stationer’s shop that gets you high. Glue, marker-pens, butane gas re-fills for lighters – I had no idea. Basically, the WH Smith in the Mander Centre is Wolverhampton’s version of Studio 54. It’s a narcotic goldmine. I had no idea. I’ve only ever used it to buy staples.

  But none of this is getting me kissed, so I stare at Ali – who then tactfully takes The Nova away ‘to do … stuff’, and leaves me with The Kisser.

  As I’ve not been kissed before, I’m not really sure how you activate this function on a man. I think of all the kissing I’ve seen. I know that saying, ‘You may now kiss the bride!’ has a 100 per cent success-rate – but that seems inappropriate here. Leia got Han to kiss her before they swung across a chasm in a spaceship on a rope together – but that’s going to take a lot more infrastructure than I have available.

  I’m just trying to remember how the kissing starts in The Sound of Music – usually, when it gets to the soppy bits, we fast-forward them, because Lupin starts screaming ‘YUCK!’, and all I can recall is images of Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews pursuing each other around a pergola at high speed – when The Kisser lives up to his name, and just … kisses me.

  It appears to be some kind of ‘Factory Pre-Set’ kiss – one, two, three kisses on the lips, and then in with the tongue – but it’s happening! I’m in a kiss! The captains of this nightclub are picking their teams of Sexually Active Teenagers – and my name, finally, has been called!

  I carry on being in the kiss for a couple more minutes – it’s a bit difficult, because my hair keeps getting in the way, and we have to keep removing it from our mouths. In the end, I get practical, say, ‘Hang on a minute,’ and put it into an easy, convenient ponytail – and then I get straight back into the kissing again. Kissing, as I always thought it would be, is brilliant: I would put it just below telly – but definitely above drinking, squeezing blackheads or fairgrounds. Or squeezing Krissi’s blackheads, on his back – which he let me do one Christmas, if I promised never to tell anyone.

  At one point, I open my eyes, and see Ali on the other side of the room, watching me – arms crossed, smoking a fag.

  ‘Get in there,’ she mouths.

  Me and The Kisser kiss for nine minutes – I check on
my watch, later – and then the band comes onstage, and The Kisser says, ‘Oh, I like this song,’ and goes off down the front, to mosh – but there are no hard feelings. The Kisser has done his job. I am grateful for his services. If I had needed sheep moving from one field to another, I would have called a shepherd. If I’d lost my wedding ring down the U-bend, I would have called a plumber. And as I needed my first kiss before I got another day older, I have used The Kisser. I feel better now.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I ask Ali, later. ‘The Kisser, I mean.’

  ‘Gareth,’ she says. We looked at each other.

  ‘Let’s just keep calling him The Kisser,’ I say.

  When I get back home, Krissi is in the front room, watching Eurotrash, with Lupin asleep on him.

  ‘I thought it would be educational for him,’ he says, looking down at Lupin. ‘But he fell asleep before the naked male gimp cleaners came on.’

  ‘I got my first kiss!’ I tell him, triumphally. On the walk home, all I’ve been able to think about is telling Krissi. It seems very important to tell him what I did.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, still staring at the TV.

  ‘First kiss! I did my first kiss!’ I say, again.

  ‘Right,’ Krissi says.

  ‘I didn’t want you to be … worrying about it,’ I say. ‘I thought you might think there was something wrong with me. But nuh-uh! I’m someone people will kiss!’

  Krissi looks at me.

  ‘Was it Gareth, by any chance?’ he asks. ‘Looks like … an average boy?’

  ‘Yes! Yes – it was Gareth!’ I gasp. ‘It was Gareth!’

  ‘He got off with Fat Tommy last year,’ Krissi says, factually.

  I’m still working out what to do with my face when he adds, ‘Dad wants to talk to you. He’s in the garden. He’s pissed.’

  I’m pissed too, so that’s okay – we can be pissed together! That’s the point of being drunk!

  At the bottom of the garden, Dadda’s sitting on the bench that he made – of course – with a plank and some bricks. His cigarette hovers in the dark, above his hand, like a tiny orange marsh-light.