‘What a fucking terrible idea.’ Krissi’s voice comes, from the back.
I can see Krissi, in the rear-view mirror. He’s squashed in between the duvet and my curtains, with the dog on his knee. The dog, like me, suffers from travel sickness, and can’t travel on the floor or it pukes.
‘Can we just get the fuck out of here? This van now stinks of meat, and I can’t wind the window down, because there’s a whole dog’s face in my way.’
Last night, Krissi came into my bedroom – ‘Knock knock. Promise me you’re not fapping yourself off with a bottle of Elnett, Johanna, or I swear to God, I’ll end you’ – and told me that he was coming down to London with me, for my first few weeks, ‘To make sure you’re okay, and you don’t accidentally write your shopping-list on your arm with an axe.’
This is what he says – but I’d seen him surreptitiously looking at the club listings in The Pink Paper in a newsagents, and I know what he’s really coming down for: to take me to my first-ever gay club, so I can finally make a gay best friend!
‘Please, gun the hog,’ Krissi says. ‘This car park is starting to oppress me.’
Dadda turns the engine on, eases out of the parking bay, and fiddles with the stereo: ‘Any requests?’
This is a question that I have been ready for for some time. I have Blur’s new single, ‘For Tomorrow’, on cassette. I’ve been obsessed with it for the last month. Still with a weather-eye on legendariness, I have long-planned that this is the song I will listen to as I emigrate to the south – Damon singing all about London, and getting lost on the Westway, during which I intend to look as noble and full of destiny as possible. I have even imagined my dad turning to me and saying, ‘Aye – that’s you, kid. You’re a twentieth-century girl,’ and me lighting a cigarette and saying, ‘You bet your ass, Da.’ It will be like casting a fortunate spell on my future life. It will charm my way. It will be a key moment in my life.
Everyone listens to it in silence for a minute, as we pull onto the motorway.
‘This is Cockney shit,’ Krissi says, eventually. ‘Put the Bee Gees on.’
I put the Bee Gees on – ‘Tragedy’ – as Dadda overtakes three cars.
‘So,’ Dadda says, conversationally, as he swerves in front of a Vauxhall Astra, ‘So. I see that Bjork is playing tomorrow night. You can get us on the guestie, can’t you, Johanna? Old Pat Morrigan plus one? Because I’ve got a plan. We’re gonna hit the aftershow party, yeah, and start talking to the wankers.’
He looks excited.
‘The big wankers. The powerful wankers. The worst wankers. To be honest, I feel like a right prat with all this “sending off demos” and “poxy journalists” bullshit – no offence, love. All this time, I should have just been getting in there, instead. Be in the room when all the blow and hookers come out – that’s when the business gets done. I bet it’s still the same fuckers it was back then. I’ll put money on knowing someone there. I used to know them all. There was this one A&R guy, right …’
I look at the road ahead – where all the signs say, with impossible thrillingness, ‘LONDON and THE SOUTH’. I’m seventeen. I’ve got my brother, my dog and a laptop with ‘John Kite’ Tippexed on it. I believe in music and gin and joy and talking too much, and human kindness. I have warning scars on my arms, a new blank wall to fill with faces and words. I still want to change the world in some way, and I still have to get my dad famous. I’ve eaten drugs off a hanky, had sex with a medically inadvisable penis, confused The Smashing Pumpkins, binned off a threesome with a quote from Blade Runner, and tried to kiss my hero whilst being serenaded by singing gibbons. And, like all the best quests, in the end, I did it all for a girl: me.
‘… and he definitely owes me one,’ Dadda continues, starting to roll a ciggie with his left hand, trucker-style. ‘I can’t remember his name. I can’t remember anyone’s name, to be honest. But when you’ve carried someone else’s unconscious wife down the fire escape of a hotel in Berlin as a favour to a dude, you tend to remember that dude’s face. If I see him, babba. If he’s there tomorrow, love, then –’
Dadda lights his fag.
‘Ker-ching. We’ll be shitting fucking diamonds by Christmas.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing a book is literally worse than giving birth to a baby – in hell – then dying, then being brought back and having to have another baby that, this time, is coming out of your eyes – even though your eyes aren’t holes, and there’s no way a baby can come out of them. But worse than that. Did I say it’s difficult? It’s really difficult. When you sit on a chair all day, your arse really hurts. I mean, really. And then, there’s that baby coming out of your eyes. Oh, it’s a palaver. And so these ‘acknowledgements’ aren’t really acknowledgements – more abject, weeping gratitude to the people who dragged me over the finish-line. My British editor – Jake Lingwood – and my US editor – Jennifer Barth & katzp – both of whom put in so much time, love, attention and stone-dead skillz into How To Build A Girl. I really can’t imagine having better people on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s like being edited by Godzilla and Mothra. You are extraordinary. Double-bubble.
And Louise Jones and Claire Scott at Ebury UK, and Gregory Henry at HarperCollins US – there is nothing more sexy than cheerful eminence and the cry of ‘Cocktails?’, and you all do both constantly.
John Niven, who was so nice about the draft I showed him that I cried. See you in hell, Shitbix.
My brothers and sisters – bad-asses to a man/woman. I’m really sorry – I’ve written another book full of wanking and shagging. Don’t worry – I won’t ever ask you if you’ve read it. We can all pretend this whole ‘book thing’ never happened. You are the greatest people I have ever met, without a doubt – and I’ve met all of the Inspiral Carpets, and the man who wrote Bagpuss, so that’s a pretty big statement. To be fair.
Simon Osborne and Imran Hussain at the Child Poverty Action Group, who worked out what benefits the Morrigan family would have been on in 1990. THANK YOU. The maths was making me want to jump out of a window.
Most importantly, THANK YOU to Georgia Garrett – an agent so extraordinary that I can’t actually believe other agents actually exist. Georgia answered an emergency call in July, came to my house, and found me sitting in the garden, face down on a picnic table, next to my laptop, and crying whilst listening to Daft Punk’s Get Lucky over and over again. ‘I can’t write this book,’ I said. ‘I’ve made a terrible error. Also, I am the worst person who has ever lived, I don’t even know words, and I’m going to change my name and go and live in another country. Perhaps as a cabbage-farmer. Or a night-soil porter. I’m getting the fear. I’M GETTING THE FEAR. Oh God, I’ve lost all the sensation in my head. I’M GOING NUMB.’
And she got me a cup of tea, and sat there and just kept … asking questions, and suggesting things, until, suddenly, I saw that I might actually be able to finish the book, after all.
And then she did that another nine times. NINE TIMES. It was actually quite funny by the end. For me. Maybe not for her. George – this book really wouldn’t have happened without you. That’s not an exaggeration. I keep saying this, but if you ever stop being my agent and friend, I will simply throw myself down a well.
The band Elbow, whose entire back-catalogue I caned mercilessly during the writing of How To Build A Girl, as the best example of how the working classes do it differently – with hard work, ‘universal emotions rendered in potent details’ (copyright Dorian Lynskey), and love.
Lauren Laverne, who handed me my sanity back on a plate, literally, in Giraffe.
And, finally, to my husband, Pete, who has helped build three girls, now. And is also the only person who would have noticed that when I mentioned Grant Lee Buffalo in the first draft, they had, at that point in the timeline, ‘only released one limited-edition EP, and would not, in all likelihood, be known of in Wolverhampton’, and that I really should change it to Uncle Tupelo, instead. And then he went off to build his o
wn gramophone. I love you.
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First published in 2014 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright © 2014, Caitlin Moran
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Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
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