And this is why I was sad. Because I knew I might be an unusual teenage girl—loving music; meeting my heroes; writing about it—but I was, ultimately and undeniably, still a teenage girl. And if my best friend, and the man I loved, was so careless and disregarding of teenage girl-fans, then he was ignorant and disrespecting of my kind, and I could not let that stand. They are my people. My ultimate loyalty lies with girls like me.
Tonight was the night I did, for the first time, what I am destined to do at a hundred more parties in my life: I lay on the sofa, and pretended to have fallen asleep, as the party continued around me. And, as I lay there—eyes closed, listening to everyone—I thought: “I can write. I am good at writing. I am going to write something about teenage fans so good, it will make John a better person. I am going to upgrade him—with prose.”
22
Of course, it takes a while to write a piece that’s good enough to spark spontaneous moral evolution in the drunken, coke-blown pop star you love.
Six days later, I am up early, still working away on the piece, when I get a phone call from Krissi. It’s 7:00 a.m. Seven a.m. is a very unusual time to get a phone call from Krissi. Seven in the morning is a very unusual time to get a phone call from anyone.
“I think Dad’s living with me,” Krissi says, before I can even say “Hello.”
“What?”
“I think Dad’s living with me,” Krissi says, again. “He came down ‘for a visit’ two weeks ago, and he’s still not left. Can you ask him to come down and visit you? Pretend you’ve got some problem you need him to help with. Putting up a shelf, or . . . explaining jazz to you.”
“But what if he then just moves in with me again?”
“You’ve got more room there than me, so it wouldn’t be so bad. I mean, that would be the best place for him, really.”
“You’re asking me to . . . adopt Dad?”
“Come on, Johanna, give me a break—it’s a communal house, and it’s not fair on the others.”
“What do they make of him?”
“That’s the worst part,” Krissi says, miserably. “He gives them lifts in the MG, and gets them weed, and tells them stories about being in the toilet with Jimi Hendrix. They think he’s awesome.”
I can see how, if you weren’t related to him, you might think that.
“Say you need him back with you, Johanna. I’m begging you,” Krissi says. “I can’t take it much longer. Yesterday, he said he might ‘pop along’ to one of my lectures, and ‘give it a bang.’ It’s multivariate calculus and mathematical models. I’m at university with my dad.”
I feel bad for Krissi—I really do. But there’s no way I’m letting Dad come back here. I’ve only just started being able to sit naked on the sofa again without feeling inappropriate.
“He sounds very settled there,” I say. “Like when a stray cat decides to move in with you. Do you want to upset the cat?”
“The cat’s upsetting me, Johanna. I didn’t smash my balls through GCSEs and A levels to still be living with my dad. He keeps watching the Grand Prix with the sound right up, and taking really long baths. He was in there for an hour last night. I had to pee into a jug, and throw it out of the window. I’m starting to live the life of a medieval city-dweller. I want to ring a bell at him.”
“Krissi, I would love to help you,” I say, staring at my laptop screen, “but first, I can’t, and secondly, it’s just very funny. And thirdly, at least it’s not Mum.”
“That is my only comfort,” Krissi says, ringing off.
That was the 30th of January. On February 6th, Zee asks if we can meet in the pub, and even though I am tits deep in writing the piece for John that will explain everything to him, and make him a better person, Zee sounds so stressed that, half an hour later, I am sitting in the Mixer, with the dog, watching Zee try to get a pint of milk off the tetchy barman without causing some kind of international incident.
“I’m going to come straight to the point,” Zee says, sitting down, and looking awkward. “The Branks are still behind on their album. The lease comes up on my flat next week, and if I don’t renew I get my deposit back. If I give the deposit to the studio, I can keep them in there until they finish, and hire a cellist. But that would mean I’m homeless.”
“Can’t you sleep in the office?” I ask.
“Dolly, I had to give up the office when Suzanne burned the first demo tapes.”
“Oh.” I feel ashamed I’ve not kept up with Zee’s comings and goings. But then, he really needs to start coming into rooms, shouting, “GUESS WHAT JUST HAPPENED!,” like normal people do. People who wait to be asked if their lives are collapsing are just asking for trouble, really.
I say “Oh” again—and then realize the obvious solution to all this.
“Stay at mine!” I say. “It’s only the sofa, and the dog will lie on you, but I promise to open a window when I smoke, and the mice are very friendly.”
“I feel terrible for asking,” Zee says, looking both awkward, and relieved. “But it’s only until the album comes out. And I can do you a proper deal—I could give you shares in the label?”
I would have let him stay for free anyway. The idea of having shares in something is so excitingly grown-up, I make a squeaking sound.
“Don’t tell Suzanne, though,” Zee says. “I don’t want her to feel under any more pressure than she is. The first single is out next month—I want her all guns blazing.”
“Does she have any other mode?” I ask. “I don’t think she has a ‘standby’ function.”
On the day Zee moves in, the dog stupidly barking as he carries in boxes and boxes of records—“I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll be gone the moment some money comes in”—a terrible thing happens: Melody Maker publishes the story of me, Suzanne, and Jerry fighting on its gossip page.
I know this, because Suzanne rings me up, and after the first three minutes of her going “The bastard! The bastard! The bastard!,” starts to tell me, even as I go, “No! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know! I can’t handle it!” and singing over her.
Even though I try to blot her out, I gather that the gossip columnist had approached Jerry for a quote about the incident, and Jerry’s quote—which made my heart stop—was, “The truth always comes out, in the end. And, to both quote Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, and shag as many women as he has, a lot of people can’t actually handle the truth.”
“Is that him . . . threatening me?” I ask Suzanne, in a tiny voice. “Is he threatening to tell everyone we had sex and filmed it?”
“YES!” she says. “YES!”
I don’t like the idea of Jerry talking about us having sex. I fear I will not come out of it well. It makes me feel incredibly anxious. He might describe my vagina to the public, and then I would have to die.
“That is blackmail, pure and simple,” Suzanne continued. “He’s trying to silence you. Us talking to his new birds has rattled him.”
“Oh, man,” I say, sitting down. In books, people always feel sick when they get bad news. I don’t get that. I go kind of deaf, instead—a ringing in my ears, like I’ve just been hit. I can’t really make out what Suzanne’s saying. When my hearing comes, Suzanne’s gleefully saying, “Karma’s a bitch. A bitch that will bite you,” and Zee is sitting next to me, patting my knee and looking concerned.
You okay? he mouths.
Yes? I mouth back.
“What should I do?” I ask Suzanne hopelessly.
“If there’s one thing I know about the world, it’s that it will pay him back for this,” Suzanne says, grimly. “He’ll get his. Anyway, I’ve got to go—I’ve got to do my solo now.”
“Remember—the strings go at the front,” I say, automatically, and Suzanne laughs, and rings off.
23
Friday is the last day of Kite’s UK tour. The reviews have come in for the first half, and they were not good: “messy,” “incoherent,” “drunk.” I had figured on leaving him alone, while he was on tour, but
at 11:00 a.m. on Friday morning, I get a call: “Please come,” he says. “It’s just Eastbourne. I need to end this tour on a high, and I’ve no one here except that cunt Andy Wolf.”
“He is a cunt,” I said, cheerfully.
“I’m glad you agree!” John said.
Then I could hear something in the background.
“Andy says I’m not allowed to call him a cunt, and that you’re a cunt for calling him a cunt,” John said.
So I could tell John was probably already drunk.
The gig was mortifying—John played the hits at twice their proper speed, as if horrified by them, and rambled so long between numbers that the audience became restless. Once or twice, he did something beautiful—the song about his mother, “St. Angelus Window,” was sung so delicately it was as if he was that scared teenage boy again, looking through the hospital window, and realizing she was going to die, and leave him in charge of his siblings. And not even John could fuck up singing the gleeful “Misericord,” yelping, “Well I survived this / Well I survived us!,” and then howling—although the way he sang it tonight made me think that the “us” he was singing about was the audience, who looked like patient, disappointed lovers who had had enough, and wanted to leave.
After the show, I wait in the bar at the hotel John is staying at—a huge, run-down Victorian redbrick thing, with massive windows, overlooking the sea.
John arrives with Andy Wolf, who looks like a man in a comedy film who has inherited a spirited chimpanzee from an eccentric aunt, but has yet to learn the lighthearted lesson having such chaos in his life could teach him.
“Andy, I feel you have delighted me enough with your presence,” Kite says, sitting down heavily at my table, and squeezing my hand. “The duchess here can look after me now.”
“Well, yes—we do have guidelines at the record company about leaving priority artists with children,” Andy says, giving me a hateful smile.
“Fetch me my medicine,” John says, waving his arm at the bar.
“And I’ll have a whisky and coke, please, Andy,” I say, smiling at him. “You’re a pal.”
As Andy goes to the bar, I look at John. He is a mess. The puffiness has worsened—he looks waterlogged, like Henry VIII in his final phase. His eyes are bloodshot, and his usual hand tremor is now a permanent shake, as if there are small earthquakes inside him.
“I’m so fucked, Dutch,” he says, with a painfully bright smile. “I’ve got the morbs.”
“The morbs” is John’s phrase for “feeling morbid.”
“Is there anything in particular?” I ask.
“I think I might be allergic to success,” he says, and laughs, then looks like he might cry. “I’m so tired. Last week, someone suggested I try smack—they said it was like having a holiday, without disrupting your schedule. People are trying to give me heroin for practical reasons, Dutch.”
I feel very brisk. Zee and I have spent the last few weeks talking about John, and what is happening across London. Britpop has now turned into a Faustian gold rush; a cocaine Klondyke. There are now dozens of musicians in the same position as John. The Good Mixer is full of the wired, jangling, bleary, and chaotic. And you only make a jangling sound when things are working loose, inside.
“I don’t think you’re allergic to success at all,” I say. “You’re just exhausted. You’ve been touring this album for almost a year now. The B sides, the videos, the photo shoots. Your brain and face are knackered.”
“My face is knackered,” John says, ruefully, pawing at it.
“And you’ve had a few drinks, here and there?” I say, tactfully.
“I have drunk every day since last July, except one,” John replies, cheerfully. “The next morning, I woke and automatically took painkillers—before I remembered, I hadn’t drunk last night. That I was actually well. I have stopped expecting wellness. I am permanently ill.”
He puts his head in his heads, and says, sadly, “Maybe I do just need some relaxing heroin.”
“Here’s something I read,” I say. “It takes you five years to understand something big that’s happened in your life. Five. For you to truly see the edges of it; make sense of it. And you—you have something big happening every ten days. Most people never stand in front of two thousand people, and talk to them, while they scream. That would be the biggest and weirdest thing that ever happened to them. You do it every night. You’re just suffering from cognitive overload.”
I enjoy the fact that I’m saying “cognitive overload” as Andy comes back to the table with the drinks. It’s the least teenage groupie thing I could be saying.
“Anyway, we should be celebrating!” John says, straightening up in front of Andy. “Look! I have been gifted! Fan booze!”
He pulls a massive bottle of champagne out of his bag, and opens it.
“I’ve just bought you a Jack and coke, John,” Andy says, in a pained voice.
“Double fist them!” John says, taking the whisky in one hand, and the champagne in the other, and swigging from both. “Come on! Last day of the tour! John’s last stand!”
He looks at us both. We both try to smile at him, but we’re both clearly concerned.
“I’m just going to put something on the jukebox,” he says, and disappears.
Andy and I look at each other, warily, across the table—like a divorcing couple who are still nonetheless worried about their child.
“Interesting week?” I say, diplomatically.
“Interesting week,” he says back. He pushes a key across the table. “He told me to get you a room.”
“Thank you,” I say, very politely. “I will need somewhere to sleep.”
I might as well have said, “Thank you. I am not a groupie.”
Andy looks like he’s about to say something in reply, when he looks out of the window, and stands up.
“Jesus Christ!” he shouts, and runs out of the bar.
I look out. There, on the beach—orange in the streetlights—is John, taking off his clothes. The bottle of champagne is rammed upright into the sand.
“Oh, fuck,” I say, following Andy.
By the time we get to the beach, running across the road and through the traffic, John is twenty feet out, in the sea; the orange glow of the fag in his mouth marking where he is, like a fisherman’s float. He appears to be swimming toward France.
“JOHN!” Andy bellows. “JOHN! JOHN! Christ—is that cunt doing a Reggie Perrin?”
John carries on swimming, oblivious.
“Christ alive, I’m not being paid enough for this,” Andy says, starting to take off his shoes. “I’m a primarily desk-based PR.”
As Andy wades into the water, shouting “JOHN! JOHN! COME BACK HERE, YOU STUPID BALLS!,” John begins to circle back round to the shore—fag still glowing. By the time Andy’s up to his waist, John’s wading back out again—still smoking—in nothing but his pants.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Andy says, staggering out of the water.
“Just enjoying the pursuits of the seaside,” John says, cheerfully, picking up his champagne bottle and walking back to his clothes. “Taking a break, as advised. Clearing my head.”
On the way back to the hotel, Andy bollocks John severely, whilst John continues to stroll, unperturbed, almost naked, and smoking in an almost postcoital manner.
“I need you to assure me you’re just going to bed now,” Andy says, repeatedly, as John walks across the street, swigging his champagne. “This is enough, now. ENOUGH.”
“I will go to bed now,” John says, sweetly. “I have had my holiday. Come, Dutch. Let’s go see if we can find a quiz on TV,” and we get into the lift—John still dripping—as Andy stares at us, balefully, until the doors close.
In the bedroom, John runs a bath while I put the TV on. I try to find a quiz, but there are no quizzes on, this late at night. In the end, I just put Ceefax on, take my boots off, and lie on the bed.
John has left the bathroom door ajar, as he takes his bat
h. On the floor is his fur coat, his trousers, his brogues. From the bed, I can see his back, in the bath—a broad, ursine expanse, like the side of a Welsh mountain. The steam from the bath is curling around him, just like the dawn mist, in the valleys. Oh! He is a whole land!
I’ve never seen this world before—so I lie there, just luxuriating in it. This view is my sweet reward, for being a good person. God has given it to me. Thank you, God, for putting this hot, big boy in my eyes tonight. There’s something so insanely hot about the fat on his hips—that would be the bit I would have my hands on, while we were fucking; to pull him in. Why does no one ever go on about how sexy a big man is—on top of you, gently crushing you, like a bear? I have a crush on him crushing me.
He nudges the door closed with his hand, to get out of the bath, and I pretend I’m watching Ceefax. Mmm, Blue Suede Views.
He comes into the room glowing from the hot water, in a clean shirt and pants, holding the bottle of champagne, and sits on the end of the bed, weakly.
“Head rush!” he says, collapsing backward on the bed. “Nature’s amyl nitrate!”
He hands me the champagne, still looking at me. “Alone, finally.”
I take a swig, and shuffle down the bed, so my head is near his. I kiss his shiny, sweet forehead.
“Are you very drunk?” I say.
“Oh, yes,” he replies, still looking at me. “Singingly drunk. The drunkest.”
I look down at him—this drunk, shiny boy, puffy from recent unhappiness, still smarting from being booed and jeered, who has just walked out of the sea.
He looks up at me. Here we are, on a bed. I don’t want to be egotistical, or boastful, but I’m pretty certain that, if I had kissed him at this moment, he would have kissed back. He was drunk, and there was nothing on TV—that is how 80 percent of kissing starts in Britain. He would absolutely have joined in in any kissing I innovated, or invented.
But . . . I didn’t. Not with him messy, and sore. To have kissed him then would be like kissing something that was melting, or fragmenting. When you kiss someone, it should be the biggest, and most transforming, thing that happens in their life that year. It should be the turning point in the plot—the spike on the graph.