‘Are you having hot filthy perverted casual sex with lots of your friends, as well?’ I ask, like a cheerful yet cunning love detective.
‘My parents have an amazing cellar!’ he replies. ‘Who knows?!’
At my parents’ house, which does not have an amazing cellar – just a shed, full of old cans of petrol – I eventually put the phone down on this peerlessly gnomic phone call, and go and seek out Krissi.
He’s in his room, tending his seed propagator, which he bought at a jumble sale for 50p, and which is mint apart from a massive crack across the lid, which he’s Sellotaped up.
‘Whatcha growing?’ I ask, throwing myself on his bed, and taking a swig from my bottle of Jack Daniels. I’ve upgraded to Jack Daniels now. It’s what Primal Scream drink, and Slash, and Ernest Hemingway. I have graduated on from the nursery slopes of MD 20/20 in impressive time.
‘Get off my bed – I don’t want you perioding on it again,’ he replies. ‘You’re too free and easy with your bodily fluids. I found evidences of your viscera on my pillowcase last week. Marrows.’
I look at the rows of tiny marrow seedlings – each so small, they look like a tiny green needle, with a single pair of leaves at the top. They are the most fragile thing I have ever seen. I do not know how they stay upright. This is a box of impossible.
‘I don’t know if I’m Tony Rich’s girlfriend or not,’ I say, sitting obediently on the floor, and fiddling with his mist diffuser.
‘Well, you’re not,’ Krissi says, briskly. ‘Or he would have told you.’
‘It’s not that simple!’
‘Well, it is,’ Krissi says, crumbling compost into the tray.
‘Not it’s not.’
‘It is. He’s your smashing posh paedo not-boyfriend.’
I stare at him, open-mouthed.
‘He’s not a paedo!’
‘Johanna, he’s twenty-three and you’re seventeen.’
‘So?’
‘Bit paedo, innit? I mean, it’s not not paedo.’
‘Age is nothing but a number,’ I say, loftily. ‘Tony and I don’t think of those things. We’re just two hot equal hacks, having sex with each other.’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Krissi says. ‘Age is just a number to Tony Rich. It’s a number he keeps saying over and over to himself – ‘I’m fucking a seventeen-year-old! I’m fucking a seventeen-year-old! Gonna get some high-fives for this back at the office!’
I decide, angrily, that this is not the moment where I will tell Krissi about the slapping. Sex is complicated, and he doesn’t understand it. He’s just a commentator, on the sidelines. I’m the one on the frontlines of sex, actually dealing with it.
I sit sullenly on the bed, and take another swig of Jack Daniels. The problem is, Krissi is still treating me like I’m an unfucked fourteen-year-old trying to talk to him about Annie – despite my top hat, and my byline, and my shagging.
‘You know, in a couple of years, you’ll understand,’ I say to Krissi, crushingly. ‘And I will look forward to being more understanding than you have been today, when you finally start having sex.’
As soon as I say it, I know I shouldn’t have. It’s unfair to mention that Krissi is still a virgin. It’s not his fault – it’s an unfair point to score – I shouldn’t have said it, and I was wrong.
‘Kriss, I shouldn’t–’
He stands up, face white. I’ve never seen him so angry – actually furious, and not just annoyed.
‘Fuck off out of my room, you shit,’ he says. His face is cold. Colder than I’ve ever seen it. He looks like he’s going to say something else – say a billion things – but then he just says again, even more icily, ‘Fuck off, you shit.’
I immediately leave the room, and lean against the door that divides Krissi’s room from the kitchen. I say, through the wood, ‘Kriss, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’
From the other side of the door, in a cold, cold voice: ‘You’re an utter turd.’
‘I am a turd.’
Dadda comes into the kitchen, carrying a plate with toast crusts, and smears of fried egg on it, which he wedges into the sink.
‘You’re a turd, hey?’ he asks.
‘Not now, Dadda,’ I say, still leaning against the door.
‘In a way, we’re all turds,’ Dadda says, expansively. I can hear Krissi say, in a low monotone, ‘Well, you’d know,’ in his room.
‘It’s just a sibling conversation,’ I say, to Dadda.
‘I will kill you,’ Krissi says, in the same monotone.
‘Just a sibling conversation.’
‘You played anyone at the mag that tape yet?’ Dadda asks.
‘Still waiting for the right time,’ I say, as positively as possible. ‘You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.’
‘Ah, Kenny Rogers,’ Dadda says, nodding, and leaving the room. ‘Yeah. Do it like Kenny.’
I keep leaning against Krissi’s door for some time, saying ‘Sorry’ over and over. But all I can hear is Krissi spraying the tiny seedlings with his diffuser.
I sit on the floor, leaning against the door, just listening to Krissi moving around. I know I can’t go back in for a long, long time.
TWENTY-TWO
So it’s good to get away for the night – to Rich’s parents’ house. It is beautiful – you could kiss the front of it, like a girl’s face.
‘It’s the old vicarage,’ Rich had explained, on the train, as we sped into the bosky Cotswold August. We had met at Paddington Station, and kissed so hard, and for so long, some children came and stared at us. When I finally broke off from the kiss, I gave them a ‘thumbs up’. I want adult sexuality to have good nascent connotations for them.
But when we get to Rich’s parents’ vicarage, I see it isn’t like the vicarage on the Vinery estate, which is from the 1970s, and has an odd, yellow concrete wall on which some local wag has sprayed ‘OH GOD!’
This is a Victorian vicarage with table-like lawns, and willows, and a doorstep wide enough to sit my whole family on. There are roses swagged around the windows, and an arthritic Labrador comes out to investigate our cab when we pull up outside.
Rich’s parents are standing on the doorstep to greet us, like parents out of a sitcom where the casting-call went out for ‘Lovely, posh, slightly ditzy mum’ and ‘Ostensibly gruff, pillar-of-society dad with a penchant for whisky’.
Everything about them makes me instantly feel scruffy – when they show us to Rich’s room, with its double-bed, I feel ashamed of my worn Doc Martens on the white carpet, and the ex-army canvas rucksack I have, still splattered with dried mud from an all-day festival at Finsbury Park.
I immediately vow not to put it on the floor, bed or dressing table, with its beautiful crocheted cloth. I don’t want to despoil this place with my inappropriate things.
‘This is a lovely room, Mr and Mrs Rich,’ I say.
‘Isn’t it?’ Mrs Rich says. ‘It was Tony’s when he was a boy. Look!’ she says, pointing to a clay dish on the dressing table, gaudily splashed with purple paint. ‘That was his Mother’s Day present to me, when he was seven.’
I look at it. Tony has painted a picture of his mother on it that makes her look like a half-melted Data from Star Trek.
‘How lovely!’ I say, staring at it. The plate-mother has only one eye.
‘When you’ve settled, come and join us for drinks on the terrace,’ Mrs Rich says, withdrawing.
We ‘settle’ by me giving Rich a blow job as he sits on a beautiful oak rocking-chair – his hand on my head, repeatedly saying ‘Shhhh!’ every time I move too fast, and make the rocking-chair creak – because I am a great, as-yet-unannounced, girlfriend.
And then we get on the bed and kiss for a while: those long, slow-motion kisses he does so well; all his cleverness in his mouth, as I make myself come, because it’s now traditional that he doesn’t even try, and he whispers ‘Shhhh’ again, lest I make a noise. All my sex is done by me, an
d is silent.
And then I put my rucksack in the en-suite bath, where it won’t dirty anything, and put on a dress, and clean my boots with wet tissue until they shine, and join his parents on the terrace, as they call out: ‘Hello! You’re just in time for champagne!’, and the cork pops, and the glasses clink, and the butterflies fly up, beautiful and dim, and get trapped in the canopy of the giant parasol.
I have never been anywhere like this before – somewhere so devoted to calm, orderly, lavish pleasure. The stone terrace looking down over the lawns, to the slow-moving river at the bottom, draped with willows. The borders lush with lavender, euphorbia and rose.
I give his parents the gift I have brought – a Wolverhampton mug, from the Wolverhampton Tourist Information office in Queen’s Square. They boggle at its existence, and I tell them they’re quite right to: ‘While I was in there, two people came in and asked “Do yow do chips?”.’
Everyone laughs.
We drink champagne, and I spread my dress out nicely on the chair, and they tell me what Tony was like when he was younger, as Tony squeezes my hand under the table in a ‘don’t mind my parents’ way: ‘Spending all his allowance on these awful sounding records–’
‘–experimental records.’
‘–and bunking off important exams at Harvard to go see the Pixies.’
‘He was very much the black sheep of the family,’ his mother says, looking at him indulgently.
Apparently all their lawyer-friends had been disappointed in his lack of interest in following in the family firm – ‘They’d been eyeing him up for their practices for years!’ – until they remembered their friend Martin who works for the Observer, and had passed Rich’s writing on to him: ‘And he said the boy could write! Next thing we know, he’s got a piece in there explaining about how these raves are the future of music.’
Rich is very silly and self-deprecating about the whole thing – ‘It’s just a passing fad, Dad,’ he says, lighting a cigarette while his mother tsks, but brings him an ashtray.
‘Isn’t that what they said about the Beatles?’ his dad says, re-filling the glasses. ‘Just a passing fad?’
It’s all very pleasant for an hour. Then Rich’s parents leave – ‘We’ll leave you all to your … wild bacchanaling! See you later,’ Rich’s mother says, kissing Rich’s upturned face – just as Rich’s friends start to arrive. Will! Emilia! Christian! Frances! Confident boys and girls with glossy hair, calling out as they come across the lawn.
I am excited by all the young posh people turning up. One of the things I can never confess to my father, in the middle of his Class War rants, is that I quite like posh people. Well, to be specific, confident, slightly foppish Oxbridge graduates: boys in tweed jackets; girls with glasses in flowery dresses, studying physics.
In another world – where I had not run away from school to earn money – I would have gone there, I think. My mock-exam results were high enough, and I would have left Wolverhampton and entered that intellectual Gormenghast, where there are no boys standing on street corners, shouting at you; no men threatening to put an axe in your dog’s head.
I would have taken the dog, of course – if Byron could take a bear, I could easily have hidden an Alsatian in my ‘digs’. Perhaps in a cupboard.
I would have read English, and written for Varsity, and gone out with the younger siblings of Hugh Laurie, and taken a punt to the corner shop, for fags. It would have been like a three-year-long holiday, spreckled with banquets. I would have luxuriated.
But instead, I ran away, and joined the rock ’n’ roll circus, for cash.
And so it is as a member of the rock ’n’ roll circus I greet them. Now Rich’s parents have gone, I can revert to type. Tilting my top hat at its most rakish angle, and putting a lit cigarette in my mouth, I stand to greet them.
‘Hello!’ I say, putting my hand out. ‘I’m Dolly Wilde! So lovely to meet you! Come and get some booze up you! I brought you a memento, from Wolverhampton.’
I hold up the bottle of MD 20/20 that I bought from the off-licence near the station.
Will says, ‘I might have a beer, thanks’ – I mark him out as a troublemaker, and immediately put his name in my Feud Jotter, under ‘drink refuser’ – but the others all gamely sit down, and have a shot.
‘Just like being back at uni!’ Emilia says, cheerfully, as they knock back the gleaming green medicine.
‘So you are the enfant terrible of D&ME,’ Christian says, cheerfully, sitting down. ‘I read your stuff.’
‘Rob Grant calls me the elephant terrible,’ I say, gesturing to my body, ‘which is rich, coming from an ex-punk with no teeth. Rob holds the record for being the journalist most frequently physically assaulted by musicians he’s slagged off – although I am coming a close second. The bass-player from Via Manchester threw a glass of piss over me, at a Teenage Fanclub gig last month.’
‘It was vodka, Dolly,’ Tony says, as the others laugh, in sympathetic horror. ‘And it was in June.’
‘He said it would be piss next time. And besides, the vodka in the Academy tastes like piss. And besides – nuh.’
Quietly, in the back of my head, I am scared that these golden children might turn the conversation to the clever things I have not yet read in the library – Kant, Greek philosophers, Schopenhauer. I’ve read Rimbaud, yes – but I’m still not sure how you pronounce his name – surely it can’t be Rambo? But if it is, I’ve got fifty Sylvester Stallone jokes ready to go – and I still feel the burn of shame from when I interviewed a band and pronounced ‘paradigm’ as spelt, and they mockingly corrected me.
This is the terrible thing about learning everything from books – sometimes, you do not know how to say the words. You know the ideas, but you cannot discuss them with people with any confidence. And so you stay silent. It is the curse of the autodidact. Or ‘autodidiact’, as I said, on the same, shameful day. Oh, that was a conversation that went so wrong.
And so I do what all insecure people do – I pull the conversation onto territory I feel safe on. Me. I talk about me, all afternoon. I tell all my battle-stories – the lipstick nun blow job, Big Cock Al, ‘fat girls are good at swimming’. I even tell the story about going on Midlands Weekend, because I feel I can laugh at that girl, now. Dolly Wilde can laugh at Johanna Morrigan, with her unpainted face, and bad clothes.
‘I am the life and soul of this party!’ I think, as I pour myself another drink, and watch them all laughing, happily scandalised, at my stories. Christian is particularly taken with my story of how, when I interviewed Mark E. Smith from The Fall, I’d asked him if he got much groupie action, and Smith replied – gimlet-eyed – ‘I’ve had more birds than you’ve had hot dinners, love,’ to which I replied, patting my ample belly, ‘I very much doubt that.’
‘Hahaha, fucking brilliant,’ Christian says.
I don’t tell him that, in reality, I only thought of saying ‘I very much doubt that’ four days after the interview, while I was in the bath. At the time, I just nervously said, ‘How lovely for you! And them!’, and moved onto the next question.
But tiny lies do not matter. I feel as if I could have said it – and that’s basically the same thing as actually having said it. Little lies do not matter when you are being legendary. And when you are being legendary, it doesn’t matter that you keep talking over people.
6pm, and the alcohol has had the unforeseen consequence of making many people feel sporting.
‘No more talking!’ Rich says, firmly – herding his slightly restless guests onto the lawn for a game involving shuttlecocks and badminton rackets.
‘I don’t really have the right bra for it,’ I say, when they ask me to play. I note, with a tiny pain, that Rich seems relieved I am to be left here. I decide to be noble about it – waving them onto the lawn, in the manner of an imperious Maggie Smith.
There is no way I am going to engage in a physical activity in front of these lithe people – I am not top-dog in a scenario that inv
olves running around, and hand-eye co-ordination.
Instead – nodding to them beatifically – I sit and watch them play, in the late evening sunlight. They look – languid, now. It’s like the video to Roxy Music’s ‘Avalon’ – all misty focus, and gilded youth.
‘Come and play, Dolly!’ Will calls out – breathless, holding out a racket.
I shake my head, with cheerful regret.
Because they come and ask you to play, in paradise, but you do not know how to board their caravel, and you do not know how to ride their swans. They call out their names – ‘Emilia! Will! Frances! Christian!’ Names that do not have to bear heavy weights, or be written on benefit application forms – pleading. Names that will always be just a joyous signature on a birthday card, or cheque – and never called out, in a room full of anxious people.
Oh, your names – your names! Will you ever understand how anxious they secretly make me? That I worry I cannot say them unsarcastically. Your names are jokes, where I come from.
I sigh, and light another fag.
Two hours later, and dusk has fallen. I am sitting with Emilia, who has invalided herself out of the game after Tony accidentally smashed into her hand with his racket.
Her hand is resting on a bag of frozen peas, and we are medicating her pain with gin – the MD 20/20 having all gone, now. We are quite, quite drunk – that warm stage where you are just two floating faces, talking to each other.
We’ve had an interesting and wide-ranging conversation – Marxism, Suede, Chanel No. 5, fear of insanity, Guns N’ Roses, how her parents like her best and how awkward that is, what the best animal is – consensus reached on ‘centaurs’ – and whether all velvet jackets make you look fat (yes).
She spends a long time discussing my writing on D&ME, which she’s ‘a fan’ of – particularly my review of The Breeders, where I said Kim Deal’s calves were so bulgingly, disproportionately muscular that I presumed she ‘spent all day riding a very, very tiny bicycle up hills’. ‘It was abso-fucking-lutely hilarious.’