‘No, really – I’m too … early to be let out yet,’ I say. ‘I keep breaking social situations. And penises.’
And so I tell him about Rich’s house, and his friends, and what I said, and how it ended. He yelps with laughter frequently through the story – ‘Attack ships off the shoulder of Orion, in your pants! Hahaha!’ – but winces more frequently towards the end, as I tell him about the awful sex. Finally:
‘So – what’s up with you and this Rich, then? Is it not true love’s first kiss, after all?’
I look down into my gin-glass.
‘You know when Princess Diana said there were three people in her relationship? I think there was only one in ours: me,’ I say. ‘I was not the thing, for him.’
‘No – I think he is not the thing for you,’ Kite says. ‘I would say you’re only interested in him because he’s a writer, and you’re a writer, and you basically want to fuck a writer, because that’s the nearest thing to fucking yourself. You just fancy yourself, darling. As of course, you should. Would you have gone out with him if he were a … cowboy, or a … spy?’
‘Haha, no,’ I say.
‘Well, then,’ Kite says.
I think about this for a minute. I think about what I like best about Rich: the dirty phone-calls; the way he describes sex as we’re having it. I realise something:
‘I think … that I might have only fucked him for the review,’ I say, finally. ‘I think I just wanted to be reviewed by Tony Rich. To see what I was like.’
‘HAHAHA! And I’m sure it would have been five stars,’ Kite says. ‘I’m sure you were Album of the Year. Bumming of the Year. But, you know? You can’t go out with the writing. People aren’t their work. We are not our art.’
‘I am,’ I say – then notice Kite is looking at me, eyebrows raised. ‘I mean, not now. Not all the … bitchy stuff. But I will be. I want to do something great. Something great, like men do.’
‘I’m sure you will, honey,’ he says, kissing the top of my head. ‘I’m sure you will be great art, one day.’
And so then we drink more gin, and then more gin, and have one of the loveliest afternoons of my life – the same kind of dreamy, unreal wandering as we’d done in Dublin. We took the gin bottle with us out of the Mixer – ‘We shall return!’ Kite told the landlord, with a flourish of his hand – and walked up Oval Road, towards Regent’s Park, in the late-summer afternoon sun, swigging and smoking as we went.
‘That’s Alan Bennett’s house,’ Kite said, pointing with a be-ringed finger to a Georgian house with a tatty van parked outside it. ‘And over there – Morrissey’s.’
The magic of London is obvious, that afternoon – that every street has a pet-genius; that this is the place everyone runs to.
We reached Regent’s Park, and walked through the rose garden, and I kept running off to particularly skittish roses who called out, like sexy girls, to me, burying my face in their myrrh-ish whirls, and calling out to John, ‘This is the best one – no, this! No – this!’
I was mad with roses – I wanted to be filled with the scent of roses. I saw myself as a glass bottle that swirled with them. I am decanter; I am atomiser. I am in love with the opulence of rose.
I don’t need to critique things, or have an opinion, or pose, with John – we just go around, being alive, and pointing at things. We’re just, simply, in the world. It had never occurred to me what a wonderful thing this was. Or perhaps it had, a long time ago – but I had forgotten. I am full of how great life is. I am so happy to be alive. That point of life is joy – to make it, to receive it. That the Earth is a treasure-box of people and places and song, and that every day you can plunge your arms in and find a new, ridiculous, perfect delight.
We found one tumble of yellow roses, and looked for its name on the plaque below – ‘Golden Showers’ – and became hysterical. After three minutes I was fearful a park-keeper would chase us away, as John boomed, ‘GOLDEN SHOWERS! You spend thirty years grafting cutting onto root-stock onto cutting, and then you call the fucker GOLDEN SHOWERS! Why not call it CASCADING BUMHOLES, you mad cunts? Or FLORAL SPUNKINGS?’
I paddled in the fountain while John sat on the edge, smoking, telling me about his latest visit to his mother – ‘She won’t even look me in the eye, now, Dutch – she just sits by the window, looking out, describing things, until visiting time is over’ – and I bang his thigh with my fist, in sympathy, as he says, wonderingly, ‘I never talk about these things with anyone apart from you, my sister.’
We wander on to the Zoo – Kite paying for the tickets – and sit, smoking, and listening to the gibbons making their high, looping, electric cries to each other, from the tree-tops.
By this time, we’re very drunk – draining the very last drops of the gin – and we quietly sing along with the gibbons; Kite dueting with one lonely male; singing snatches of his own songs inside the wails. There’s something very beautiful about watching a man you love dueting with a monkey – the gibbonous melancholy suits the moon, rising pale in the blue sky, over the cages.
In order to maximise this experience – to be having the most of the most – I have been chain-smoking all afternoon. As I open my second packet of Silk Cut, John looks at me, for a moment.
‘I have never seen anyone smoke with the rapacity and dedication to the cause you show,’ he says, mildly.
‘You can’t say that,’ I say – pausing with my lighter. ‘I only started because of you.’
‘Ah, well – I only started because of John Lennon,’ he sighs, taking one from my packet. ‘Rock ’n’ roll is a terrible babysitter, baby.’
Watching him, I have a thought I am so excited about that I know I cannot keep it in much longer. I have something to tell him.
I drag Kite to the wolf enclosure – bubbling, bursting, stumbling – because that is where Withnail made his great speech, and I am about to make mine. John adjusts his cuff-links, and says, ‘Well?’
‘I’ve run all the science and maths on it, and the conclusions are: we should kiss,’ I say, decisively. ‘We must kiss, and it must be now. I cannot leave you unkissed any longer. We need to kiss, so that we know. Let’s not shilly-shally any more. Let’s start our kissing. LET’S GET ON WITH IT!’
When I wake up the next morning, that’s the last thing I properly remember – talking about kissing with John Kite, in front of the wolf enclosure at Regent’s Park.
What then? What then? I don’t know. Everything after that is gin-blasted darkness – the brain cells that would hold the troubling memory have been destroyed by the alcohol. It is a workable system, of sorts.
I open my eyes.
I’m in Kite’s hotel room – lying in his bed, fully dressed. He’s still asleep, in the bath-tub, fully dressed. A memory of him saying, ‘My turn to sleep in the bath, Duchess,’ and climbing in, to sleep. So we were still talking then? I can’t have done anything too bad – except I know I did. I talked about kissing. Oh, Johanna – never talk about kissing. Stop. Stop doing things, and think for a while.
Right. I am going home – to think.
I bundle everything into my rucksack – taking the ashtrays from the table, as Kite has taught me – and write him a note: ‘Got to get home. THANK YOU. Sorry. Have ashtrays, of course. xxxx.’
I leave the hotel – where are we? Soho, I think. Am I still drunk? Yes. I start walking to the train station, trying to sober up. I talk to myself, as I would a troubled child, or Lupin, in the middle of a terror. Johanna – what are you doing?
I remember again my vision of what I thought my adult life would be like: attending a party in London full of my peers, applauding me when I entered the room in honour of the new thing I have written, or have done. People calling ‘Bravo!’ and sending over champagne, as they would when Wilde opened a new, daring play.
I think of what I’m actually getting: a new issue of D&ME coming out, and me getting lager thrown over me by my peers because I’ve called one of them ‘A bucket-faced time-wasting f
uck-Womble’.
But surely they will know underneath it all I’m a good and noble person, in love with the world? Surely you get a sense of that, underneath what I’m actually saying? People must be able to smell that, underneath all the harsh words, I’m someone who still wants to own a sausage dog, and cries about Nelson Mandela.
When I get to Euston station, I go to the newsagent and buy a copy of the D&ME. I’m going to do an experiment. I’m going to pretend I’m John Kite – waking up, and confused about why one of his friends tried to proposition him last night, and wondering if she might be a bit mad – and I’m going to read everything I’ve written in this week’s paper, and see if he would conclude I’m a good person or not. I’m going to put my written self on trial, to see if it’s actually me or not. If I am art, as I wish.
On the train, I get a seat – a whole table to myself! Bullseye! – and start drinking my emergency hangover McDonald’s chocolate milkshake, flicking through the new issue with shaking hands. There’s a momentary panic when I see a lead review by Tony Rich – don’t think about Rich! Don’t think about Rich! – but then I go back and read it anyway, doing what I always do: seeing if there’s anything, even obliquely, about me in there.
But there’s nothing – nothing about love, or fucking, or any kind of woman at all: it’s clear that however many times I suck this man’s cock, he will not immortalise me. John’s right. The only place I will ever see myself in this paper is in what I have written – and here, on the next page, is my lead review: bigger than Rich’s, I note, gleefully.
It’s my ‘analysis’ of the new Soup Dragons album – a Scottish band who’d jumped onto the Madchester bandwagon, to much derision all round. Kenny had mentioned something on the phone about it, after I’d filed, but at the time, I dismissed it. I note now, with alarm, that he has given it the headline ‘Finally – Wilde Goes Too Far’.
The review centres around the conceit that the band are in the dock, charged with crimes against humanity for their career.
‘If we are to take the Geneva Convention seriously…’ – I began –
… if we are to hold to account those who commit atrocities that lead to the destruction of humanity, then surely the knock must come, soon, for the Soup Dragons. They will be taken from their jangly Scottish hovel squat – do not drink of the milk in the Soup Dragon’s house! For, surely, it will be suppurating whey and dreck! – by stern-faced security-forces with guns, and put up in the dock. Observe them, in their shackles.
‘What is your defence?’ asks the judge – a kind-eyed man, wearied by all the evidence he has heard; a man still having screaming, traumatic flash-backs to all four minutes of ‘Dream-On (Solid Gold)’.
‘We were just trying to entertain The Kids!’ the Dragons will bleat. ‘We were just trying to be free, to do what we want, any old time!’
‘But did you wilfully, and with fore-knowledge, take your previous, shambling, jangling indie-rock, and cravenly nail onto it a Funky Drummer back-beat – much like a previous inhabitant of that dock, Dr Mengele, coldly sewed together the bodies of Romanian orphaned twins – but not even in the name of medical science, but simply for the procurement of cash, and a startlingly ineffective placing at Number 72 in the Independent Charts?’
‘I want my mother!’ lead-singer Sean Dickson cries, as the Visitors’ Gallery starts calling out, as one, for the ultimate penalty – for the Soup Dragons to be placed onstage at the Reading Festival at 11am on Sunday, and pelted to death with bottles filled with urine, by their peers.
I can’t read any more of me. I close the magazine. Oh God. I’ve compared a drummer, a bass-player, a guitarist and a man with some maracas and a bowl-cut to the Nazis, and their music to the medical experiments of Mengele. I’ve trashed a load of working-class kids from the provinces, who just love music – kids like me – and tried to make them feel ashamed of wanting to do that glorious thing: write a song. Write a song that someone, somewhere, might need. Of all the jobs in the world that need doing, this inglorious task is the one I’ve given myself.
Even though I have written every word, this – just like Rich’s review – has none of me in it, either. I’m not here – in this bile-filled persona I have gone to all the time and trouble of making.
I started writing about music because I loved it. I started off wanting to be part of something – to be joyous. To make friends.
Instead, I’ve just, bafflingly, pretended to be a massive arsehole, instead. Why would I do that? Why would I put all this effort into pretending to be … less than I am? After nearly two years on the D&ME, I have to conclude: this experiment has been a massive failure.
As if the D&ME were contaminated, I get up, and put it into the bin in the toilet. I come back to my seat, but am finding it increasing difficult to handle sitting in a chair. I feel bad. I feel bad in every place and part of me. I have no comforting thoughts to fall back on.
My ultimate bad thought is this: that I have offended John Kite. He will wake up this morning – confused about what I have done – and read this, and decide he never wants to see me again. There’s nothing here that would make someone love me, or wish to be on my side. Even I’m not on my side, here. I have lost my one friend. My good mirror.
This thought is the thought to end all thoughts. I find it makes me quite breathless. My breath gets shallower and shallower, until I have to lean against the train window and suck my thumb, and breathe, raggedly, around the knuckle. I despair at myself. I wonder how many times in my life I’m going to burst in on me being a dick, and have to shout ‘What are you doing, Johanna? What have you done?’ at me, like I’ve just found Lupin scribbling on the wall.
I spend the next hour of the train-journey thinking about how – and if – I can make this all better. I must first write a letter of apology to the Soup Dragons, of course. And C+C Music Factory, and the Inspiral Carpets, and U2, and roughly one-third of all bands in existence, to be honest. Christ – being a reformed bitch is going to cost a fortune in stamps.
Then, I must exile myself away from John Kite, for a while – so I don’t have the unbearable moment of seeing him looking at me in sorrow.
And after that, I need to go back to how I used to write – before I turned into some weird, angry old man, puncturing the ball of every band who kicked their ball over my fence. I must go out there and prove that I am a halfway decent human being. That will be my next, new career.
But all of these things will, of course, take time. They don’t answer my most urgent question: What do I do now with this bad feeling? Today? This afternoon? This second?
The only thing I can think of is a sudden, longing regression to childhood – to be found lying at the bottom of the stairs again – but, this time, really broken. Because to break yourself means that you are sorry, and I am so sorry. I have the wild, wild comfortless remorsefulness that makes you want to run into walls.
Back at home, in my room, having drunk the best part of half a bottle of Jack Daniels, I am doing the nearest thing I can think of to throwing myself down the stairs, or running into a wall: I am very quietly cutting my thigh with a razor. I have chosen my leg because a thigh looks like a piece of pork, and I have scored pig fat before, in the kitchen, on a Sunday. If you’re going to start self-harming in a fury of self-flagellation, you might as well fall back on skills learned in the ‘Meat’ section of Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England:
‘Pig Pye (Fourteenth century): Flea Pyg and cut him in pieces. Practically nothing is wasted in a good pig. A pig killed in November would still provide fresh meat, brawn and pie until Christmas.’
The first cut hurt so much that I made the second one just to distract myself – this time on my arm. And then another eight – quickly. With careless anger.
It really hurts. I am surprised.
It had never occurred to me that self-harm would be … harmful. For the rest of my life, it’s a truth I just can’t believe – in the same way that I never really believe the o
nly way to stop smoking is not to have another cigarette, the only way not to get drunk is not to drink, and the only way to keep a secret is to never, ever tell anyone.
But then – the payback. For as I sit there, in pain, I suddenly notice I have changed. I am not self-loathing anymore. These billion cheap blackbirds inside me – beaking the wires of the cage, frantic – are now on the ground, sleeping. This billion-eyed mess, which I cannot comprehend, contain or name, has now disappeared – replaced by these hot, red lines on my leg and arm.
‘So this is the point of self-harm!’ I marvel. ‘It is translation of emotion into action! It is simpler! It’s admin! It’s just paperwork!’
The essential boringness of it almost puts me off. I thought I’d become high and Byronic on endorphins. Instead, I’m just being kind of … stupid and angry at my limbs. I am just being angry at my skin.
For a minute, I feel quite clever and calm. Then I notice that I’m bleeding quite a lot.
From upstairs, I can hear the Velvet Underground’s ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ on top volume, coming from Krissi’s bedroom. I go down, and knock on Krissi’s door, saying, as cheerfully as I can, ‘C’est moi! C’est le party!’
Usually this is met with ‘Fuck off!’ – but this time, there is silence. I open the door, and see Krissi lying, fully dressed, on his bed, surrounded by shelves and shelves of seedlings. The volume is deafening – John Cale’s awful, slate-scratching violin, the occasional, ferocious piston-hissing of feedback, and Lou Reed singing like a chained Gollum. The room has all the cheerfulness of the catacombs in Paris. This room is like some terrible Midlands ossuary.
‘You’ll kill your veg like that,’ I say, eventually.
‘This town is killing me,’ Krissi says. His voice is utterly flat. I continue standing in the doorway, until he looks up at me. When he sees me, his face changes immediately.
‘Jesus Johanna – what have you done?’
‘I tried to make things better,’ I say. ‘But I got it wrong.’