This is the first time I’ve ever heard his songs, outside our house. In our house, they sound huge – mainly because Dadda plays them very loudly, on his massive speakers. And his audience is us, and we pat them as they go past, like a farmer would a cow as it passed through a gate. These songs are our livestock. Our family’s pets.
Here, however, on the tinny office stereo, with two grown men sitting and listening quizzically, the songs sound very different. I’m quite startled by how small Dadda sounds. Small, and oddly lonely. Like a busker who’s been chucked out of a pub, for annoying the other customers, and is now standing outside. I suddenly have a terrible pang of sympathy for him. He was so happy making these songs – but they come across so sad.
Dadda is singing ‘And the bombs you make/And the lies you fake’ (Rob: ‘Here. How can you fake a lie?’ Zee, reasonably: ‘Well, a lie is a fake. That’s what it is.’ Rob: ‘It’s a fucking tautology, is what it is.’) when Tony Rich comes in – taking off his coat and putting it on the back of a chair, and putting his bag on the floor.
I have a momentary flashback to the last time I saw his coat come off – me taking it off him by candlelight before he fucked me on the floor, while I patted his back with my hands – as instructed to by that man, at that party.
‘This sounds fucking awful,’ he says, blankly, nodding at the stereo.
‘I’ve already filed that review,’ Rob says, cheerfully.
Everyone listens for a little while longer.
‘Oh, you could have a lot of fun with this,’ Rich says. ‘Who’s reviewing it? This bloke’s so Brummie. And God, it’s so mawkish. It sounds like a poster of Noddy Holder holding a dying unicorn, and crying “But WHY? WHY?”’
So far, I haven’t said anything. I’m standing in a room with my colleagues and my kind-of boyfriend, listening to my dad singing while they all slag him off like any other wannabe chancer who sends a demo into the D&ME, and I haven’t said a word. I wonder what I’m going to say?
‘I’ll review it,’ I say, eventually pressing ‘Stop’ and taking the cassette out. ‘I can just cut out and print everything you boys have said. Easiest job of the week.’
Later, I go to the Ladies, take the demo tape out of my bag, wrap it up in toilet paper, and put it in the bin. I push it right down to the bottom. Then I put more eyeliner on, and get into the lift with Tony Rich, and press against him until he gets hard, because it still thrills me that I can do that. That I can make a man hard. This is my main job, right now. Making Tony Rich hard. That’s all I’m thinking about.
That night, the whole D&ME crew is off to see Teenage Fanclub at the Brixton Academy. We all walk in, like a gang, with a vaguely menacing air: aftershow passes inside our leather jackets, smoking fags and talking at the back. I have learned quickly that ‘talking at the back’ is the right thing to do – after going down the front at a Primal Scream gig, moshing against the barrier, coming back sweaty and having Kenny ask, in a pained manner, ‘Are you covered in peasant sweat? Did any of them touch you? Show Kenny on the doll where they touched you, darling. We can get you whatever inoculatory jabs you might need.’
And so I moved, permanently, to the back of the room, by the bar, where my kind should live – doing a running commentary of the gig, with the other writers, instead.
Recently, however, it’s become quite difficult to go out – even if I stand at the back, with my gang. The indie-rock world is a small world, and I soon realise I have insulted around a third of it.
Standing with the other D&ME writers, instantly recognisable in my top hat, I am pretty visible to the enemies I have made – something I first realised when a small goth girl came up to me last month, and berated me at length for slagging off the Sisters of Mercy.
‘Where do you get off calling Andrew Eldritch “a weasel in painted-on trousers”, when you’re just a … fat cow, in the Child Catcher’s hat?’ she asked – a fair point well made, really.
A couple of press officers have refused to send me CDs any more – Kenny has to blag them and forward them to me when I need to review them, saying, ‘They fear your hatchet, Wilde – I had to tell them it was for ZZ Top, instead.’
And then, tonight, at the Brixton Academy, halfway through Teenage Fanclub, I am enjoying several whiskies when the bass-player from Via Manchester comes up to me at the bar, says, ‘You are Dolly Wilde, aren’t you?’, and waits for me to give my now-traditional reply – ‘Almost all the time’ – before throwing his drink over me.
‘And that’s a waste of a good drink,’ he says, standing over me as I blink, vodka running down my face. ‘I was going to make it piss – but my manager said to save it for next time.’
I try and remember what I said about Via Manchester as I cry in the toilets, where Kenny is giving me my first line of his legendarily terrible sulphate, ‘To cheer you up.’
Previously, when he’s offered it me, I’ve turned it down, as I’m scared of putting anything up my nose. But now, I feel like I should have something, to make me better. I need something new inside me, to counteract this equally new and bad feeling. It’s like medicine, really.
‘I can’t remember if I said they were the ones who proved the threat of Mad Cow Disease was real – or if they were the ones I said should be buried up to their necks in all their unsold records, then stoned to death by angry peasants,’ I say, crying, as Kenny chops out my line.
I do it – chopped out on the top of the cistern – in a devil-may-care way, and notice that it tastes like money. I don’t know what I’d previously thought drugs might taste like – dry ice, maybe, or some kind of metallic snow – but this tastes exactly like a £5 smells.
I wonder, with a sudden clarity, if this is because every £5 I’ve ever smelled has traces of sulphate on it. If all money is dusted with drugs. God, everyone is on drugs. I can’t believe I’ve left it so long. Thank God I’m doing some now. Otherwise, I’d never catch up.
‘Kenny, I don’t want to go around upsetting people,’ I say, as the sulphate makes me start crying again. ‘I didn’t think they’d actually read it. I just thought, like, their press officers put it in a box, and it just kind of stayed there, and they just carried on doing what they’re doing, and we carry on doing what we’re doing, and we all know it’s just some fun, I was just riffing, I mean why do they care what I think? This is a band who said they wanted to put an E up John Major’s bum.’
They had indeed – live, on The Word. It had caused quite the controversy.
The speed has kicked in so rapidly that I have said all of this on one furious exhale, whilst crying. I look up – Kenny is staring at me.
‘Fuck them,’ he says, briskly. ‘They’re all big boys. This is the game. This is what we all do. They make records, we write about them. They make the records they like – we write the reviews we like. Everyone gets their go. If you don’t want to be written about – don’t put records out, or prance around on stage like a tit.’
I think about this for a minute. I feel comforted.
‘This is the game,’ I repeat. I take a tissue, and blow my nose.
‘Oh my God – your drugs, Wilde!’ Kenny says, in horror – staring at my tissue. ‘Don’t blow out your drugs!’
I look into the tissue, where I’ve just deposited the half of the line my nose didn’t have time to absorb. I look at Kenny. It seems I have made a drug faux-pas. He stares at me.
‘Should I … eat it?’ I ask him, trying to work out what the done thing is.
‘Not now,’ Kenny says, bending over to do his line, screwing up the empty wrap, and flushing it down the toilet. ‘But maybe keep it in your pocket, for later. For who knows where the evening might lead?’
In the short-term, the evening leads to coming back to this toilet three more times, and doing some more of Kenny’s speed. I am finding it a surprising experience. It isn’t like I thought it would be at all. Even though the truism about Kenny’s speed is that it’s awful – ‘Rat poison and aspirin,’ someo
ne at D&ME had explained, briskly. ‘Even Shane McGowan from the Pogues won’t take it’ – it doesn’t really have much effect, other than making me want to talk a great deal more, ie: to unbearable volumes.
But – like smoking and drinking – I find it pleasingly communal, and bonding. I guess if we still lived in an agrarian society, we would feel the same bonding experience when bringing in a harvest, or pulling together, as a village, to raise a clapboard house in a day, like in Little House on the Prairie. Robbed of this opportunity, we all pulled together, as one, to smuggle me past Security’s eye into the men’s toilets, to culmi-natively pile through two wraps, instead. It gave the evening a pleasant sense of questiness.
But the evening leads, eventually, as so many evenings do, to having sex again in Tony Rich’s flat. We fall through the door all over each other – in the white-hot state where you’re just pawing at each other – kissing in that way that is a series of questions. If I do … this, then you will do … that, and then I will do all these other amazing things.
By the time we fall onto the bed, shoes, coats and half our clothes are off, I’m so high on lust that I feel like some kind of kiss-drunk werewolf. I feel happily, dumbly animal. This is the best remedy to a bad night – to fuck. I am at my best when I am taking my clothes off with a boy. I can make no mistakes, or offend anyone, here. Here, I am a force for the good – making boys who need to come, come. This is the purest humanity. In a way, it’s very noble.
My thoughts of intense nobility are interrupted by Tony.
‘So – lipstick nun blow jobs,’ he says, amusedly, pausing in our fumbling on the bed. We’ve taken a break to get our breath back. I’ve been on top of him, grinding him, hard.
‘You’ve been getting around a bit.’
‘Yes!’ I say, proudly. ‘I’ve been having Lady Sex Adventures!’
I start unbuttoning his shirt – grinding down into him again. No talking! Let’s get back to being animal!
‘So you’re quite adventurous,’ he says, hands in my hair. His voice is heavy, and slow.
‘Yes,’ I say, kissing the chest revealed from the unbuttoning. ‘I’m like Christopher Columbus – voyaging around the world, always looking for Newfoundland in someone’s trousers. Oh look! I’ve just found New York!’
I unbutton his flies.
‘You’re so dirty,’ he says, delightedly. Then he says it again, but more seriously. ‘You’re so … bad.’
It’s an oddly simple and reductionist word for Tony to be using – usually he would qualify any moral judgement with a paragraph of social context, like the time in the office that Rob Grant said that Sinead O’Connor was ‘a bald goon-eyed mentalist’, and Tony lectured him for half an hour about the Catholic Church in Ireland, and the need for feminism to have feral out-runners, in order to ‘grenade impacted assumptions’. All the way through that speech, Rob had stood behind Tony, making ‘blah blah blah’ faces, and doing an impression of Sinead O’Connor being bonkers. Anyway.
‘Super-bad,’ I agree with Tony.
‘You know that story you told everyone about the guy with the candle …’ he says. ‘And all the hot wax. That was an … interesting story. You know, you have to pick the right kind of person for that kind of thing. The right kind of person.’
He looks at me in a significant way.
Oh, okay. Right. I get you, my handsome, posh pervert. There’s a candle by the bed. I give Tony my very best ‘dominatrix look’ – seeing my reflection in his eyes, I see it looks less ‘Venus in Furs’, and more ‘Mrs McCluskey from Grange Hill when Gonch has set off the fire-alarms again’, but still – and reach over to get it. I will drip hot wax onto this man’s genitals! I take requests! But Tony suddenly rolls over on top of me.
‘The thing I like about you, is that you like doing all the wrong things,’ he says, pinning my hands above my head.
The next half-hour is odd. I had always thought if I did have some kind of S&M sex, I would be the S, not the M. I feel like a natural S. The S has to make all the effort – the S is put to work, soothing, controlling and relieving the gratitude-drunk M.
As someone not afraid of a hard day’s work, I’ve always presumed I would be the sadist, in any sexy games. I am a sexual grafter! A lovely, beneficent, hard-working mistress, in a great leather outfit – like out of Madonna.
But it appears I have got me all wrong – as Tony has seen the secret masochist in me. He must have – or why else is he doing what he’s doing now?
For the first few minutes, I feel quiet … huffy. To be honest, I feel I would be a better sadist than Tony. I’ve read about it, in dirty books, in the library – I’ve read de Sade, and Anaïs Nin, and Gravity’s Rainbow, and Story of O. First you have to have pleasure – then pain. I know how you should never strike the same place twice in a row; how you should choose the softer, fleshier areas, rather than the bone. How you coax, and cajole, in between the crueller moments. How you tell the story of your fuck.
What Tony’s doing, by way of contrast, is essentially like the ‘wrestling’ matches I have with Lupin. Except Tony’s actually hurting me. At one point, I say ‘OW!’ in a very broad and indignant Wolvo accent, but I can see this is ruining the mood – so I make the next one more of a ‘MmmmmOW!’ instead. I am nothing if not helpful.
Really, I should be in charge of all this. I feel a bit like I am the Bob Dylan of sadistic fucking, and have turned up at a party, and offered my sexual genius to the room – only for the host to say, ‘Oh, it’s okay – my brother has a Bontempi organ, and is going to do us a couple of Hue & Cry numbers, instead.’
The thought I can’t have is ‘I don’t want to do this’ – because how do I know if I don’t want to do this? I’m still terra-forming me. I’m learning so many new things about me, every day. Perhaps this is the day I find I am secretly a masochist – even though each blow does just feel like someone thumping me, rather than some high-octane sexual release.
In the end – not really getting the point of being, essentially, told off by a man with a hard cock – I do what I have always done during sex: concentrate on how much he is enjoying it, instead. I imagine what it’s like to be sexy posh Tony Rich, with a dirty seventeen-year-old girl in his bed. I think how much it must delight him. I think how incredible it must be to put your cock into someone – how magical to have something so hard and full, and to push it, over and over, in this hot, friendly place. To be able to move a girl around a bed, and put her in the positions you want. To have someone want you.
He must want to do these things very badly. I’m making his dreams come true. That’s a pretty cool thing to be doing, I think, on all fours, as he slaps my arse in the same place, over and over, like an amateur who’s never read any pervy books, until my bones hurt. I am making dreams come true.
‘You’re amazing,’ he says, afterwards, as we lie on the bed, breathless. He strokes my hair, and looks at me quite tenderly – admiringly.
Am I? Was I amazing? Is what I just did amazing? If I think about it, what happened here tonight was Tony Rich had sex with someone who was pretending they were Tony Rich. I don’t think I was here at all.
‘You are so adorably filthy,’ he says, kissing me. So I smile, because I am so adorably filthy. This is, after all, the best thing anyone has said to me for months.
‘You are so adorably filthy,’ I think to myself, the next day, back in Wolverhampton.
I’m lying on my bed, thinking about Tony Rich. I’m doing my usual thing, of trying to look at things positively. I can’t help but think what we did yesterday means, ultimately, we are at a new stage in our relationship.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Tony Rich is falling in love with me. Last night was as some kind of bonding ceremony. He trusts me. The girl he was going out with before – maybe she wouldn’t let him do those things, and that’s why they split up. That’s why he’s with me, now. Because he’s falling in love with me. A girl he can do bad things with.
As the wee
ks go on, my only problem is, I’m pretty certain it’s against all the rules of being a foxy chick to ask outright. Popping your head around the door on the way to the toilet and saying, ‘I’m going to make a brew – anyone want one? And, hey! By the way! Are you completely demented with love for me? Those things you write – are they about me? Do you dream of me? Am I the thing? Are you in this with me – or am I here alone?’
But then, on the other hand, the opportunities to casually, accidentally find out if we’re in a relationship seem few and far between. All the conversations we have are either about music, or fucking. I can’t see any way I can trigger in Rich the sentence ‘… and, of course, obviously, I am your boyfriend’ in either a nerdy deconstruction of Nile Rodgers’ guitar-playing, or the instruction ‘More. More,’ as he slaps me. I just don’t have those chat-chops.
All that summer, as I end up in his flat over and over, drinking his wine, having his bad pervy sex, and then lying on the bed, talking about Auden’s influence on Morrissey, I feel like we’re in a huge, ongoing, surreal session of the Rizla game, in which Rich has stuck a Rizla on my head on which is written either ‘My girlfriend’ or ‘Not my girlfriend’, and I am having to guess which it is with a series of questions which he can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This whole situation seems like a massive societal problem. Why have we not yet discovered a way to find out if someone’s in love with you? Why can’t I press a litmus paper to Tony’s sweaty brow, when we’re fucking, and see if it turns ‘pink’ for love – or ‘blue’ for casual fuck? Why is there no information on this? Why has science not attended to this matter?
Whether I’m in love with him seems far less important than whether he’s in love with me. I never take me to one side and ask myself, ‘Do you actually want him?’, because I feel like I never really see me around, any more. This is another drawback of living in a house with no mirrors.
As if trying to confuse me more, in the middle of July, while I’m back in Wolverhampton, Rich calls me, and invites me down to his parents’ for the weekend – LIKE YOU DO WITH A GIRLFRIEND – then adds, ‘But don’t worry – lots of friends are going.’ Like you exactly don’t with a girlfriend.