Julia clocked Zee.
“Oh, right,” she says. “Now I get it. ‘Professional.’ In a taxi by midnight. Hello, Boss.”
“Hello, Julia,” Zee replied.
Julia sighed.
“Shall we be honest?” she said, pouring herself a cream soda. “Now we’re all here? She is a cunt, isn’t she?”
The doorbell rang again.
“Is that Suzanne?” Zee asked.
Julia laughed.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said, taking a drag of her fag. “Suzanne’s always late. You know that. Technically, I’m still waiting for her to turn up to a lunch I invited her to. Two months ago.”
It was John—in a huge, ratty fur coat, signet rings glinting. He’d put on weight in the last two weeks—his face was puffy, and he looked as fat and golden as a bottle of Ruinart champagne. I knew this, because he promptly brought six bottles of Ruinart out of his bag, and put them on the table. They looked grand—like a crowd of small kings. He was already drunk, of course. And, I thought—looking at him—high. There was the cold frost of cocaine in his eyes.
“Do you know how easy it is to start spending a million pounds?” he said, gesturing to the collection. “Fabulously easy. It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done. The money just sails out—it really is quite incredible.”
Bottles deposited on the table, he caught me around the waist, and spun me round. “It’s so good to see you, honey. I will sit next to you, as is my right,” he added, before taking off his coat, sitting down, lighting up a cigarette, and then extending his hand across the table, to Julia, and Zee.
“I am John,” he said, beaming at them. “I have taken drugs. I shall now open champagne.”
It was a measure of how delicious champagne is, and what easy company Zee and John—and, after a drink, Julia—were, that we completely forgot Suzanne was coming until we heard a kerfuffle in the hallway, an hour later. A semi-ring on the bell, followed by a thump.
“The . . . man! The man . . . needs a . . . thing,” Suzanne’s voice came through the letter box.
Outside, Suzanne was doubled over, still talking through the letter box, and there was a taxi, with a rather annoyed-looking driver.
“He needs . . . money,” Suzanne said grandly, as Julia ran out past me to pay him.
Suzanne grabbed me, and whispered in my ear, “I’m not getting drunk in front of the boss, right? Good tactic. Clever Suzanne. But I’ve preloaded,” and tapped her nose.
She looked wired. I couldn’t work out what she had taken—my guess was that it was some random collection from her pill bowl. Still, she was dressed magnificently—red, curly-toed Moroccan slippers, a black silk jumpsuit unbuttoned to show a denim bra, and dark purple eyelids. As always, she looked as if the clothes had run toward her, going, “We wish to live nowhere else but upon you! You will make us glorious!”
If she could play guitar as well as she could wear trousers, she would be Number 1 across the world.
“So here we are, for inappropriateness, and shenanigans!” she cried out, entering the living room, depositing her battered guitar case on the sofa, and throwing her arms out wide. “I have done the catering, as requested!”
She proffered a very thin, blue carrier bag, clearly from an off-license, or petrol station. I took it from her, and put the contents on the table.
“A packet of six sausages, and eighty Marlboro Lights,” I said, looking at them. Even with my lackluster housekeeping skills, I was shocked. “How is this ‘the catering’?”
“There are four people here, so one and a half sausages each: that’s four hundred and fifty calories. The recommended meal size. But I don’t think,” Suzanne said, opening the Marlboros and pausing to light one, “people are going to get that hungry. We’re smoking. It’s a happening! It’s a party! We’ll be too busy talking to use our mouths for eating.”
She swivels to John. “And you—you are John Kite!” she said, going over, gathering his hands and kissing them, before curtsying.
“Almost constantly,” John replied, equably.
“I love you, man,” Suzanne said, straightening up. “But on the other hand—I fucking hate you! I hate you! You’ve had a Number One record before me, and that kills me. You’re winning! You’re beating me!”
“Well, I have the advantage of being a very, very old man,” John said, calmly. “I’m twenty-seven. And you must be—?”
“Twenty-five,” Suzanne said, slightly too fast.
“Yeah—in dog years,” Julia said quietly, coming into the room, having put the sausages on to fry.
I was quickly learning the first thing about convening a party of performers. Performers are semi-nomadic, and semi-feral. They don’t really know how to be in a domestic environment.
For the first hour, we just concentrated on drinking the champagne—Suzanne very pointedly counting out “That’s drink Number One—only four left!” “Drink Number Two there—only three more for me! I’m working in the morning!” in front of Zee.
I could see how painful this was for Zee—being cast as Suzanne’s jailer, when the reality was he was someone who’d just given her £50,000—simply because he believed in her.
Before now, I’d never really realized that was what record companies—little indie record companies—were: transactors of love, and belief. What an amazing invention. What an amazing invention Suzanne is shitting all over.
Still, this was not my biggest problem. Since I had known them, I had harbored the fond belief that, when I got Suzanne and John together, they would become the best of friends. They were the two most alive, vital, funny, not-fuck-giving people I knew—it seemed obvious that, when we all finally gathered in one place, we would form a gang. I have never been in a gang before—ever—and the idea of finally being in one seems like the solution to all unhappiness and doubt. I’m pretty sure that I will never be sad again once I am flanked by my Friar Tuck, Potsy, and Goose.
In the event, this belief turned out to be a wrong belief.
After spending just ten minutes in Suzanne’s company, John took me into the kitchen, on the pretext of finding an ashtray, knocked back two shots of whisky in one go, and said, “Is she an actual fucking madwoman? Has she escaped from a ward, or prison? Or suffered a recent blow to the head?”
I looked out into the living room, where Suzanne was wearing John’s fur coat, and matter-of-factly crushing pills on the table with the heel of her shoe, then sprinkling them into a spliff, whilst continuing a long, unbroken monologue on how, as a teenage girl, she used to sporadically throw herself down the main staircase of her local WHSmith: “They’d think I fainted. They’d take me into their back room and give me cups of tea, and fags, and free copies of Vogue. It was amazing.”
“Why did you do that?” Zee asked, concerned.
“To get cups of tea, and fags, and free copies of Vogue,” Suzanne replied patiently.
When I planned this party of fuck-ups, two weeks ago, I had decided I would theme it like an informal nineteenth-century salon—beginning the evening by introducing intriguing conversational topics which would spark effervescent debate, to the edification of all. I presumed this would be a fairly normal thing to do.
As I said before, I had never thrown a party before.
As I could see that Suzanne was about to launch into another anecdote—“Therapy? Oh God, let me tell you about therapy. My first-ever therapy session, for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, I was half an hour late. I got distracted, doing a Cosmo quiz on ‘How Self-Obsessed Are You?’”—I decided that this was the ideal time to start the intellectual part of the evening.
Again, that was a wrong decision.
Banging on the side of a mug with a spoon—“Attention, please! Hem-hem!”—I posed the first question: “An easy starter for ten: What, ultimately, is your biggest ambition?”
Julia’s answer was “To leave the Branks,” and John’s was the purposely facetious, “The ambition in the heart of every man, darl
ing—to make art that changes the whole world, and to lose two stone.”
Zee had just started explaining why he found the idea of running a record label so moving—“It’s like a union. You pay your dues—a pound ninety-nine for a single—so kids like you, can make songs about kids like you”—when Suzanne, who was personifying the belief that, really, there was no such thing as “conversation,” just people waiting for other people to stop talking, so they can say something, interrupted, banging her palms on the table.
“If you’re gonna ask me, I think, as an artist, your job is to fall on your arse,” she said, restless as a wasp jar. “You have to dare. You have to not be scared. You should believe you are a blueprint of the future. ‘This life is but the draft of a draft.’ That’s Moby-Dick,” she added, to the table at large.
“I know it’s Moby-Dick,” John replied, tetchily.
“‘Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in me,’” Suzanne continued. “Those are words to live by. That’s Moby-Dick, too.”
“I am happy for you that you have read that book,” John said. “I, too, have read that book. I am thinking about it, quietly, in my head, now.”
“‘It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him,’” Suzanne sniped.
I didn’t know much about drugs, but she seems to have taken the drugs that make you quote Moby-Dick all the time. I’ve not come across them before today.
Is she like this all the time? John mouthed at me. I nodded.
“By the way,” Suzanne said, leaning across the table, and tapping John on the arm. She beamed at him, like the news she was about to impart was tremendous. “By the way, I’ve made a big decision: I’m not going to fall in love with you.”
“That’s—very kind of you?” John said. It was the first time I’d ever really seen him disconcerted in a conversation.
“It would be too obvious,” she continued. “You and me? Too Taylor and Burton. I mean, you are hot, there’s no doubt about that. And the sex would be, of course, amazing. But we’d fight all the time—twin layers of lightning, man. And I just want some peace. So I wish you well. But—no.”
Suzanne’s air was as if John has just formally proposed to her, and she was having to regretfully crush his long-harbored dreams.
“Thank you for letting me down gently,” John said. Under the table, he took hold of my hand. “Tell me, Suzanne—have you ever considered going to ‘me-hab’? So you can get treatment for talking about yourself all day long?”
Suzanne ignored this completely. “John, I’m glad we have this chance to talk,” she replied. Her posture changed—to that of the maverick CEO of a multinational company, about to fire the entire board. “Because, I will be honest—I accepted the invitation to this party for a reason.”
Oh dear. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to end well.
“I came here with a mission,” Suzanne continued. “And I’m telling you now, because none of these other assholes will—because they don’t want to be assholes . . .”
“I’m fine with being an arsehole,” Julia said. “I really am.”
“But John. Kite. You need to snap out of it, man.”
Suzanne banged her fist on the table. Julia—with a practiced air—removed the drinks nearest Suzanne, and put them at the other end of the table.
“I’m so sorry,” John said, with an icy formality. “But I thought I heard someone wearing Mr. Claypole’s shoes telling me to ‘snap out of it’?”
We all looked at Suzanne’s shoes. They were a bit Rentaghost. I could see that now. Suzanne ignored him.
“That last gig,” Suzanne said, going up a gear. “What was that? You emotionally machine-gunned the first twenty rows of that gig. You made all those teenage girls feel like idiots for being there. You know what? If you don’t want those fans—give them to me. Give me those girls. Don’t waste those girls! Don’t treat them like that! I will have them. I have something for them.”
“Is it a hat, with bells on?” John slurred, pleasantly; but his eyes were tight, and hard.
“Allow me to utter the catchphrase of all hearts: Let me show you what I’ve got,” Suzanne said, getting her guitar case. She had an ability—which served her well in life—to completely ignore people taking the piss out of her. As she took the guitar out of its case, I tensed: Suzanne was an incredible person in many ways, but “playing a guitar whilst sober” was not one of her strengths, and I shuddered to imagine what she would be like in this state.
“Remember—strings at the front,” Julia murmured.
John, sighing, reached across the table and poured himself a mug of whisky. His expression, in the face of an incoming song, was that of a baby spying its second spoonful of mashed carrots: his mouth was tightly closed.
However, when Suzanne started playing, it was unlike anything she’d played before. Her voice still sounded like a roof-cat yowl—but there was a new, true soreness that flew straight to the heart. It made me think of something I’d read about Japanese pottery—back in the library, years ago: I’d read everything else, and Japanese pottery was the only thing left—about how broken cups, and bowls, are deliberately mended with precious metals, so that the cracks look beautiful. Suzanne’s voice was now like this—something broken, but threaded with platinum. A net of gold scars.
“And if God is a girl / She would not send me you / She would not let you do the things you do,” Suzanne sang, sadly, and Zee suddenly looked alert—hopeful, eager—whilst John nodded, grudgingly.
Suzanne only sang the first verse and chorus before her fingers fumbled on a chord, and she hit the guitar abruptly, and stopped, with a laugh.
“It’s called ‘God Is a Girl,’” she said, putting the guitar down again. “We were thinking, we could put cellos on it?”
Zee calculated in his head, winced, then nodded.
“Like ‘She’s Leaving Home’?” he asked.
“Like ‘She’s Leaving Home,’” Suzanne said.
John stood up and steadied himself by putting his hands on the table.
“Suzanne,” he said, swaying from side to side. “You may—you may have my girls. Have all my teenage girls. The whole fucking zoo. They’re yours. Do with them as you will.”
Suzanne did a neat bow, and John sat down again—heavily, almost missing the chair. He was really sweating now—he looked like Henry VIII trying to get the lid off a jam jar. Some jam he really wanted.
“I’ll . . . round them up into a fucking truck, and send them to you tomorrow,” he continued. “A truck of moon-calves. With my blessing.”
“Pudding, anyone?” I said, brightly. I have a Viennetta in the freezer. I though John might need food, to sober him up.
“John shall not get fatter!” he said, outraged. “John shall have his meal substitute!” He put a wrap of coke on the table, and started chopping out lines. “Just one instead of breakfast, and another at lunch, and then a healthy meal in the evening. You’ll see the pounds falling off!”
John had always been a drinker—a joyous, Viking drinker—but this was the second time I’d seen him in this state: the kind of drunk that starts early, and explosive—then feels like a slow slide down, into darkness. Before, he seemed to drink to make the world bigger, the night longer, the stories brighter. He drank to fly.
Now, he seemed to be drinking to drown.
When he came up from snorting his line, he was gasping a little, as he thumbed his nose. The expression on people’s faces the second after they take coke had always intrigued me—they always look a little surprised they’ve actually done it. As if, up until the last second, they thought they might think better of it—but have just realized that, actually, no: they really do just want to get fucked-up.
“My darling?” he said—offering me the rolled note, and the line on the table.
“No, thank you,” I said, cheerfully.
“Waste not want not,” Suzanne said—suddenly appearing beside me, and hoovering up the
line expertly. She thumbed her nose, and sat back down again.
“You know, good for you that you don’t do cocaine. Good for you,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s one of the most unethical products on Earth.”
“Yeah.” John nodded his head. “There’s no point in boycotting Nestlé, if you’re then up all night railing gak. There’s no organic cocaine. There’s no friendly cooperatives of lesbians growing some mellow shit. Every single person involved in the production is a murderer.”
As he gave this fast, sniffing speech, he chopped out another two lines.
“Colombia is fucked for starters,” he said, bending over the table, inhaling, then sitting back in his chair, as Suzanne came in for her line.
“And now, I am high on cocaine and hypocrisy,” he said, eyes slightly out of focus, lighting a cigarette.
I looked around my first ever party. Zee and Julia were by the record player, chatting over a pile of records. Suzanne and John were yabbering at each other in cocaine fast-forward, looking like some weird Eastern European cartoon.
I realized something: I was tired of my party, now. Sadness makes you tired and, tonight, John had made me sad. It wasn’t really the drunkenness, or the cocaine—pretty much all of London was drunk and on cocaine. If I were to make moral judgments about everyone who was drunk and on cocaine—even something brief, like, “Oh! That’s quite disappointing behavior!”—I would barely have enough time left to be disappointed in myself.
No. It’s what he said earlier—about his teenage fans. That he is so careless about their love that he offered to “give” them all to Suzanne. As if their love were a commodity which he could box, and give away—rather than being the souls of actual people, who had been filled with magic by his songs. As if their love wasn’t theirs at all, anymore—but his. Separate from the person who made it.
When John looked out at a crowd, he clearly saw just a single, solid mass, and not thousands of young women, who had waited months to be there; whose walls were covered in pictures of him; who quietly sang his lyrics to themselves when they were scared, walking down dark roads at night. Young women like me.