The timing is perfect, because I really need my flat for a while—John Kite is back off his European tour, to play a one-off London gig, and so I can’t go and hide at his house anymore in order to escape my father.
Just thinking about how John is back in London makes my heart puff up and fill my whole body—until my head feels like a joyful red enamel ventricle. This train is bulleting toward a city that has, in the center of it, the source of all happiness: John. John. That word is the best word in the world. Science can prove that the letter “J” is the most beautiful letter; it shames the rest of the alphabet, because it is the letter of “John.” All Johns in history are more fascinating, because they are the precursors of this one. All men who smoke Marlboros and have messy hair are more glorious, because they must be a little like my John. If he is back in London, then London is like Narnia when Aslan returns: great merriment will occur! Dawns will be observed from balconies, as we talk! Roads will light up, and glow, as we walk down them! We will own whole days together. We will talk, knee to knee, with the jukebox playing our songs, and a bottle between us, like a Maypole, and we will weave in and out of each other’s sentences, until the twined ribbons of our thoughts run short, and the music stops, and we stand, facing each other, and bow.
I spend the rest of the train ride imagining what the best outfit would be to wear, the first time he properly kisses me. I settle, in the end, for green velvet. I want to look like wet river moss when he kisses me. I want to look like something from a legend.
When I get back, it takes me four hours to rinse the flat clean of every trace of Dadda. I scrub the toilet, and throw away all his greening bacon in the fridge, and try to remove his sweaty Turin Shroud outline from the pleather sofa. When this fails—his body fog is more powerful than Flash—I just cover the whole sofa with a rug, and light a joss stick.
I then wander around the flat, trying to remember what I used to do when Dadda wasn’t here. He’s been cramping my style for so long, I can’t remember. In the end, I have a hot bath, because that’s always a good thing to do, and try to masturbate with the showerhead, because I keep reading in dirty airport novels that that’s a thing, and I’ve had it on my “To Do to Me” list for a while, but I don’t think any of the women in dirty airport novels can have the kind of dodgy Camden plumbing I do. The water keeps running suddenly hot, then cold, in bursts—which alarms my vagina into curling up like a panicked hedgehog does, on spotting a speeding truck. Also, some of the jet goes up my bum, which I don’t find erotic at all: it just makes me want to do a poo.
In the end, I get out of the bath, and masturbate the old-fashioned way: with my trusty two fingers, on the bed. I love that it’s these two fingers that makes girls come—when people do the “gun fingers” sign, using the same two, I pretend they are not using an imaginary gun, but suggesting a wank, instead. This amuses me roughly fifty times a year.
I’m having a wank because it’s important to come when you return home after time away—it lets both the house, and your body, know you’re back. Besides, I haven’t been able to come for nearly a week, because I am fat, and the sleeping bag in Lupin’s room was very tight, and after I’d waited patiently, for hours, for him to go to sleep, I found I couldn’t form the necessary angle with my hand, because the bag was too tight, and it would get tired in the new position, and so, in the end, I just gave up, after whispering “sorry” to my frustrated libido.
Here, in the freedom of my own bed, I can position my hand wherever I please, and so I have a leisurely wank thinking about John’s hands on the guitar when he plays the really fast chords in “Count to Ten.” I make sure I say his name when I come—“John!”—because that is like saying “white rabbit” on the first day of each month. Coming is powerful—it basically borders on magic—and so when you say someone’s name, it’s like a little, lucky spell that binds them to you. I believe that, wherever that person is, it makes them think about you—just for a second—when it happens.
One day, when we are together, I will tell John about this, and we will spend exciting, erotic hours comparing notes on all the times he suddenly and mysteriously thought about me, over the years, as I crow “That’s because I was calling your name as I had a fiddle!”
As I muse on this—lying on the bed, feeling very relaxed—I realize I have probably based this belief on the bit in Jane Eyre where Mr. Rochester calls out Jane’s name, and she—hundreds of miles away, being bored to death by the drippy St. John—hears him, and comes running to him.
I like to think this was Charlotte Brontë’s codified way of referring to how she, too, called out people’s names when she came. I bet all the Brontë sisters wanked a lot. Their books are dead sexy, and, let’s face it, there was nothing else to do in that parsonage, except tut at Branwell. All the Brontës go on about secret mossy pools, and hard rain on their skin, and the stroking of frightened rabbits/horses, which gradually calm to their touch. I’m sure this is their secret way of trying to write about masturbation. I am sure there are secret messages in all books, if you look hard enough. Generations of girls trying to tell other girls secrets, without getting found out.
I am dwelling on this thought because—I am putting secret messages in my columns to John. I am becoming obsessed with the whole idea of secret messages in art. I recently read both Moby-Dick, and The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde—the first because Courtney Love recommended it, in an interview, and the second because Morrissey always bangs on about Wilde, and if I ever bump into him in the Europa mini-market round the corner, I want to make sure I get any Wilde references he drops whilst we’re queuing together in the Five Items or Less line—in between him inevitably fretting that the proper grammar is Five Items or Fewer.
Moby-Dick makes me sad that I haven’t read it earlier in my life—I’d always thought it was basically some dull, Hemingway-esque novel about fishing, and eschewed it on that basis. Turns out, it’s the gayest book ever—the first fifty pages are basically Melville crushing on the hotness of Queequeg, and trying to lie as close as possible to him in bed, and the rest of it reads like someone trapped in another century, trying to communicate with those in a future he imagines to be freer, and more glorious. Those long, bright pages are bursting with everything he knows—all that he has observed about waves, and wind, and men, and whale oil, and knives, and boats, and love, and fear. A burning desire to chronicle everything that he is, and knows, on the page, just to prove he existed. Just to prove you could be someone like Herman Melville, when everyone else in the world was not. A letter to a reader he can never know.
I look at the picture of Melville, on the back cover—a bearded clerk, who died without glory—and instantly burst into tears. I am so sure we would be friends, if we met now! I am sure we would go to a bar with Queequeg, and drink cocktails, and dance, and talk of great theories of humanity whilst lying on our backs in the park, crushing lavender in our hands, and they would kiss whilst I sang “Astral Weeks” to them, which they would never have heard, and would think of as magic.
And how Melville would have loved Wilde—also trapped in a smaller, tighter, more loveless century, trying to find ways to talk about the boys he loves, and the worlds he dreams of, without getting found out. Trying to tell the truth whilst disguising the noisy talk of his heart with art—using the goldenest curlicues and sharpest phrases, by way of camouflage and weapons—trying to smuggle the truth out into the future, and still being caught, and brought down, and broken. I would find them both, and invite them out to dinner together, and they would talk to each other so hard their faces would burn up like lanterns, and they would plan a dozen—a hundred—a million—new books, even before the waiter brought the bill.
Herman Melville! Oscar Wilde! You would love this world so much! I think. You would have felt so at home here! And all you could do was imagine it, and write it in your books, and then hide inside those books, and come talk to me, a hundred years later. That is where you live. A book is a beautiful, pap
er mausoleum, or tomb, in which to store ideas . . . to keep the bones of your thoughts in one place, for all time. I just want to say—“Hello. We can hear you. The words survived.”
Thinking things like this makes me cry, so I have another wank—a more sorrowful, reflective one, in honor of the dead geniuses—and fall asleep.
15
It’s January 8th. Suzanne is over at my flat, sitting in a chair by the window, smoking a cigarette, and picking at a spot on her chin. My first column in The Face was published today, and Suzanne rang me at 1:00 p.m., saying, “I’m coming over to talk about this now,” and then put the phone down.
She is currently twenty minutes into her first thought about it.
“I have five main reactions to this,” she’d said, coming into the flat, and slapping the magazine down on the table. “The third is quite long, so bear with me.”
The headline is “IN DEFENSE OF GROUPIES,” and it’s my explanation of why I don’t understand why groupies are so looked down upon and pitied, as I think it’s actually a good, healthy thing that teenage girls want to hang around stage doors, and try to have sex with pretty, famous, talented men. I’ve never seen anyone write about this before.
“So, you’re a teenage girl, and you’re hot to trot,” the piece begins. “You’re supposed to be revising your geography homework, and all those sedimentary layers—but your knickers are screaming ‘TAKE ME OUT AND PARTY!’ and you just can’t stop looking at the picture of Jeff Buckley’s arms that you’ve got Blu-Tack’d to the wall. You want to have sex with someone, and you’re bored of that someone being you. You want to bring a second person into this relationship.
“At this point, you only really have two options. The first is to bite the bullet, and have sex with some guy you know at school, which is what you are supposed to do. That’s the normal, ‘good’ thing to do. But why? Why is it the good option for me to have sex with some inexperienced, nervy, trigger-happy, warty-fingered Herbert I’ve known since I was eleven, and who is statistically very likely to turn up at school the next day and act like bragging Danny Zuko in the opening act of Grease—‘She got friendly / Down in the sand’—and make me the subject of gossip for the next six months?
“This is why I think option two—having sex with rock stars—is a far more useful option. Say what you want about Robert Plant and his teenage groupies, but (a) I’ve never seen a picture of him with warts, (b) he was almost certainly better in the sack than anyone currently living in the Whitmore Reans area of Wolverhampton, and (c) he was far too busy singing ‘Immigrant Song’ to subsequently write ‘Dolly is a slag’ on the toilets of Highfields School, and go around the canteen saying, ‘Smell my fingers. Guess who it is?’ whilst people are trying to eat sponge, and weird pink custard.
“Why can’t a teenage girl be ambitious with whom she wishes to sex with? Why can’t she shoot, literally, for the stars? I instinctively like a girl who wants to have sex with rock stars. It suggests she has a healthy level of confidence, is culturally engaged, wants to seek out the best for her knickers, would prefer to have sex in a nice hotel suite rather than at the top of the ‘big slide’ in the playground, and wants to learn about humping from someone with a bit of experience. Those are all good things! That’s likely to be a positive experiment! After all, what are the other options for ‘having sex with someone with a bit of experience’? Shagging one of the weird blokes who hangs around outside the school, or one of your dad’s mates. When it comes down to it, when I finish a one-night stand, I’d far prefer a lover who cynically said, ‘Babe, thanks for all the teenage poon, but you’ve got to go now. I’ve got another three groupies lined up outside, and a seven a.m. flight to Denver,’ over someone likely to say, ‘Next time you see your dad, tell him I’ve got him that gravel he wanted from Wickes.’”
“I LOVE THIS!” Suzanne roars, pointing at the paragraph. “YES! YES! I mean, obviously, there’s tons of creepy, rape-y pop stars taking advantage of young women, but that’s true of any profession you work in. The most I ever got propositioned was when I worked in the DVLA. You’ve just got to figure that, wherever you are, twenty percent of men are dog rapists. Twenty percent of all conversations are basically a man saying, ‘If this was 1642 and we were alone in a field, I would be fucking you right now.’”
Although this seems dubious to me, Suzanne seems very confident about this statistic, so I let it pass. She starts reading the next part of the column out loud.
“Most rock stars are men, and most people writing about rock stars are men. Of course they wouldn’t think it was good for teenage girls to want to fuck rock stars. That’s not what they see when they look at them. I guess it’s kind of upsetting, that their heroes have a whole other life that doesn’t include them . . . that is only for their girl fans. Something they’re totally excluded from, and unwanted in. Something they can’t have. Something they’re missing out on. The sex. That’s just between the rock stars and the girls. Seen from a male point of view, those girls might well look as if they’re being ‘used’ by the be-leathered yodelers. Those men want to protect the young women. What they can’t see in this scenario—the information that isn’t appearing on the graph; that is invisible to them; that is so obvious I’m screaming as I type it—is that the young women WANT to fuck the rock stars. They are simply making a decision—‘I want that thing’—and then going and getting the thing. And the thing wants them back.
“‘Protecting’ women from rock stars is basically preventing women trying to do something, which is one of man’s most prevalent and tedious pursuits. It’s just one of a million daily instances of young women being told what to do—being told that their thoughts and their desires are wrong—and which happens so constantly, and on such a wide scale (‘You don’t want to: be a firefighter/get a tattoo/get drunk/study physics/cut your hair/eat that cake/wear those trousers/fuck a rock star’) that it’s little wonder modern women’s most frequent refrain is ‘I don’t know who I am, or what I want! I don’t know who I am!’
“Young women do know who they are—OF COURSE THEY DO!—it’s just they’re told they’re not allowed to be it so often, and told to suppress their feelings so continually, that they gradually lose their entire instinct for happiness and self-realization, and turn into those panicking creatures you meet at parties who dance madly when ‘I Am What I Am’ comes on the stereo, then spend the rest of the evening crying.
“And this is, surely, one of the big purposes of culture—of heroes. Of famous people. They’re supposed to be desirable things—the things we want . . . the things we want to be. To deny half of their purpose is to be blind to fifty percent of all art, and it leaves people emotionally broken. And all of this could be avoided if, at the age of sixteen, when girls say, ‘I’m off for the evening—I’m going to hang around the stage door at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton and see if I can bang that dreamy bass player from Teenage Fanclub,’ their parents said, ‘That sounds very healthy, dear. Give him one for me.’”
Suzanne is snorting with laughter over her favorite bits.
“This is so the theme I’m working on at the moment,” she says, picking up her guitar, and starting to tune it. Suzanne is terrible at tuning her guitar. She always makes it sound worse than when she’s started, then says “Punk rock!” and plays it anyway. “The idea that women’s desires are dangerous to them, and have to be constantly chivvied, and nursed. Have you read Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden?”
“I’ve read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden?” I say. “Poor, pale Colin,” I add, sympathetically.
“Nancy Friday’s secret garden is a very different garden, Dolly. It’s a collection of women’s secret sexual fantasies,” Suzanne says, strumming away, tunelessly. “They’re filth. They turn into huge robots, and crush men under their robot feet, or squirt their breast milk all over them. It’s really fierce. Like, scary, and disgusting, and therefore amazing. Women are scary, and disgusting. That’s one of our biggest secrets.
What’s the most disgusting sexual fantasy you’ve ever had?”
“Covering Keanu Reeves in melted-down Cadbury’s Caramel,” I say, automatically.
“Balls,” Suzanne says. “That’s no one’s actual sexual fantasy. That’s just what they say on the letters page of More. Who really wants a man covered in chocolate? Think about it.”
I think about it. She’s right. I actually don’t want Keanu Reeves covered in chocolate. He’d be all sticky and brown, and I’d feel sick after about thirty seconds of eating his sexy crust. Plus, it would take a minimum of five minutes to cover Reeves in chocolate, and what would we talk about whilst I industriously emptied pans of Cadbury’s Caramel all over some of the more boring bits—like knees, and toes? “I can’t wait to lick all this chocolate off you—thus solving the problem I am currently busily creating—and get down to some actual pumping”? Why don’t I just cut to the chase, and pump him? But only in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Not Point Break. He’s too serious in that.
“I dream I get fucked by wolves,” Suzanne says, conversationally, interrupting my thought process. “And dogs. Really desperate dogs. Under the table in a cafeteria, with everyone watching. If I’m really good at fucking the wolves, I get to fuck the men.”
She looks up.
“Your turn. For instance: have you ever wanted to fuck a woman?”
“That’s . . . random.”
“Not really, baby. It’s 1995. Everyone’s bisexual after eleven p.m.”
“I don’t think I am,” I say, sadly. “I once made a list of all the women I fancy—Brunhilde Esterhazy, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Doris from Fame—but then I noticed they were all women I think are a bit like me. I just fancy me. I’m not a lesbian. I’m a me-bian.”
Suzanne laughs.
“Well, get ready to talk about it. You’re a woman writing about sex in a public arena now. People are going to want to talk about it. People are going to ask you weird questions. Girls aren’t supposed to talk about sex. You’re just supposed to do it, and shut up. You’re going to make a lot of people very uncomfortable.”