At this point, John’s life was like a zoo on fire. Animals running everywhere. If I kissed him here, then, that kiss would just be one more confused penguin, lost in a crowd of panicking zebras, and lions trying to eat eagles. I didn’t want to be a sidelined penguin. I wanted to be the whole Ark.
So because I was clever, and noble, and very good at metaphors, I did not kiss John Kite that night. This was an important moment—as it was the first ever available kiss I had not kissed. That bed, in March 1995, marked the first time I practiced sexual restraint. That it was love making me do it would have blown my mind two years previously. The idea that love, sometimes, stopped you kissing someone, was a lesson I had never known was there to be learned.
“Tell me,” I say, laying my head on the pillow, next to him. Lying away from the kissing. “Tell me about . . . writing songs. What’s it like?”
“Writing a song?” he says, slightly confused. He, too, felt that there might have been kissing, and does not know where the kissing has suddenly gone.
“Yes,” I say, swigging from the champagne bottle, and handing it back to him. “I want to know what it feels like. You are amazing, you know. I want to know how you do the amazingness. What’s it like, having a song inside you? I’ve never had a song in me. What does it feel like? How do they come?”
He thinks, for a while. I think, too—I play my favorite song of his, in my head. “Misericord,” which starts in the middle of what sounds like a long night of crying—the point where you long, long ago lost any last shred of dignity, or pride—when you are on your knees, crushed, and appealing to an empty sky. “I just don’t feel like a man / Anymore,” John sings, in his most ragged vocal.
And then, the turnaround, in the chorus—the sudden lift, to the uplands: “But if you just stay alive / Tomorrow’s tomorrow / Is your yesterday / And you survived this / You survived us!” in a peel of church-bell jangle, brass, and choir.
I hum it—a terrible croak. He starts singing it, quietly, alongside me. We sing together. I don’t mind singing badly with him. I am comfortable in all things, with him. We live in a world utterly without shame. I would never sing in front of someone else.
He gets to the end of the line, and then says, quite suddenly, “All the greatest songs are made of the same stuff, Dutch. It’s something full of light, and energy, and . . . intent. Something that needs to be. And everyone knows this stuff when they hear it. We all know the good stuff. The best stuff. The magic stuff. It is made of a wholly different substance to everything else. Your body reacts. Your hearing becomes sharp; your heart speeds up; the hairs on your arms raise. Your body knows, in the first four seconds. Great songs walk into the room and tell you they are about to change your life. They embed, in those first thirty seconds, and sit, and wait; and when they get to the chorus, they explode inside. You can feel the impact. That’s when you start crying, or dancing, or singing—or simply sit there, mouth open, going, ‘But this is . . . it.’ Great songs demand that you recognize them.”
John takes another swig.
“And then—they are inside you forever. You can never get them out. They become a part of you. And this is their reproductive method—once they are a part of you, you have to play them, over and over; play them to others; and you will spread them across your world. This is how they live. This is how they become immortal.
“And these songs—the truly great ones—I believe come from the same place. It is my belief, although I have no proof, that there is some kind of communal Garden of Eden, in the collective subconsciousness. A place where the water is sweet, and the grass covered in dew, and the soil is as rich and fertile as . . . plum pudding.”
“I know you have stolen that description of a magical place from The Wood Between Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew!” I interrupt. “I just want you to know I have noticed it.”
“Oh, it’s where all the magical places are, darling,” John says. “The garden wet with rain, from Van’s ‘Sweet Thing’; the mountains from ‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ the ocean from the Beach Boys’ ‘Til I Die.’ This is where all the great songs—the ones glowing and humming with the Stuff—live. Already written. Perfectly formed. Roaming around. And what the writer must do is, somehow, gain entrance to this place, and bring back the song—like a burglar, for mankind.”
“Not just songs! Poems! And books! They must come from there, too!” I interject, eagerly.
John nods.
“Or a poem, or a book. And all you have to do, when you’re bringing these already perfect things back to Earth, is just make sure you don’t . . . knock the mist off it. You can’t touch them too much, or handle them too much. You just have to . . . courier them,” he says. “And while you’re working on it, and recording it, you feed it with something that’s in your guts. I don’t know how that works. But that’s how it feels. Like there’s some milky, sugary substance in your guts, that it feeds off. So yes, it has your DNA in it; you give it your strengths, or neuroses, or bacteria. You’re in it. It wouldn’t be alive, in the world, without you. It smells of you. You dress it, in your preferred production, or strings. That’s your privilege, as its parent. But you also know it was around before you were born—in this other world—and that, if you hadn’t wandered in there one day, by accident, or design, and stolen it, retrieved it, that someone else would have, some other day. You are in no way irreplaceable. If you dally for just one moment, fucking Neil Young will streak past you, and have it, the bastard.”
“And how do you get into the Garden?” I ask. “Where is it?”
I am still looking down at him—his face all lit up, as he talks. God, I love how he talked. When he was at his most drunk, and Welsh, and enthused. It was like sitting under a waterfall of words. He talked like he’s speaking to a church full of people on their knees. It made you want to throw open the doors, and drag passersby in. It made you want to pray.
“Well, you never really remember,” he says. “You can spend months walking around, desperate for a song, and—nothing. Sitting in a studio with a guitar, begging for something—just a line, just a chord—and there will be absolute silence. But then suddenly—just as you’re going to sleep; or on a train; or when you’re drunk, something will just slide into your head. And you know it’s from there, because it comes whole—it appears in your head faster than you could sing it. You just have to promise that, whenever one arrives, you will drop everything, and start . . . milking your guts. Because, if you leave it even ten minutes, it will go again. You must be a faithful servant. You must be . . . reliable.”
He starts laughing.
“That’s rock ’n’ roll, ultimately, baby. Being reliable.”
Then he suddenly puts his head in his heads, and makes a sad, sad sound.
“And that’s what’s so hard at the moment,” he says, from under his big, bear paws. “I can’t write. I can’t get into the Garden. I’ve written nothing for the last year. I can’t remember where the Garden is—how to get there. It’s not anywhere I’m going. It’s not in a tour van, or at the side of a stage, or in a hotel, or in a bar, at four a.m. And next week, I go into the studio, to start the new album, and I have . . . nothing. I’m empty.”
I think of the last few months, and John’s compulsive consumption: food, booze, cigarettes, drugs. Like they’re a massive bran tub, in which he might find a song.
I am glad I didn’t kiss him. Right now, a kiss would be just another thing he would eat, hoping it might turn into a song. When I finally kiss him, I want him to find nothing in it but me.
“You are sleepy,” I say, looking down at him. Worn out with talk, and swimming, he is rapidly deflating into unconsciousness.
“John is sleepy, yes,” he admits.
I go to the bathroom, and fill the empty champagne bottle with water, from the tap, and put it on his bedside table.
“This—this is your Night Champagne,” I say, “so you feel better in the morning. And this, is my present to you.”
 
; I take, from my pocket, six sheets of A4 paper, stapled together in the corner. This is the letter I have spent the last month writing to John—to explain to him why he is wrong, so wrong, about his teenage fans. The letter I hope—with all the simple, admirable self-belief of a nineteen-year-old—will instantly make him turn into a better, happier, healthier man, who will then marry me.
“Read it when you wake up,” I say, tucking him in, kissing him good night, and leaving his room. “Good night.”
I hoped the letter worked quickly. Time was getting on. If John didn’t sort himself out soon, I might get to twenty, still waiting for my absolutely perfect life to start—and that seemed an intolerably old age.
24
A week later, back at home, two things happen in quick succession.
The first is that I get the worst case of horniness I have ever experienced. It’s weird, but I have never seen or read a woman really talking about what it’s like when you get the horn. They might say something wistful-yet-jocular, like, “It’s been a long time. I’ve almost forgotten how to do it! Maybe it’s all sealed up, below!” and then they sigh, and eat a Twix, and maybe buy a new skirt, and that is the extent of their lamentation.
This is not the extent of my lamentation. A Twix will not solve this.
I have not had sex since I had that terrible time with Jerry, back in December. It is now March—which means I have not been kissed, or touched, for three months. I do not want to sound whiny—but this is appalling.
For starters, there is something absolutely needful about being regularly kissed. It’s not just a pleasant optional extra, like pudding. It’s something that sustains you, like bread, or wine.
We are like pearls, I think, mournfully. If pearls are not touched often, they lose their luster. They become dull—they turn into just bone-colored beads, on a string.
I am losing my luster. I am a bone-colored bead, on a string. I need to be kissed.
The thing about being horny, when you are a girl, is that you feel hungry. Hungry “down there.” You keep getting telegrams from your knickers, using increasingly urgent syntax: “It has been three months now! We are becoming desperate! Please send penis! Your people are crying out, ma’am!”
I am starving, sexually.
That night in the hotel with John didn’t help. Whenever I think of it, I can coldly strip away the fact he was drunk, and unhappy, and that sex would not have been appropriate, and just revel in imagining climbing into the bath with him, and kissing him as the bath overflowed. Or pulling him on top of me, in bed.
Waking up in the morning next to each other, and fucking before we’d even opened our eyes—just rolling into each other, and having a lazy, pre-breakfast screw, before eating breakfast, and then fucking again.
In the dream, I’m wearing hold-up stockings. Dreams can ignore the fact that the only time I wore hold-up stockings, their name turned out to be a lie, and they fell down as I ran for a train at Euston—with me dragging them behind me, like Peter Pan’s shadow, as I bolted for the 10:37 p.m. Wolverhampton train. That’s the point of dreams. You can make stockings work in them.
Imagining fucking John in that hotel room has become the greatest sexual stimulus I have ever had. More even than the idea of fucking bears, or Paul McCartney in 1969—when he had the beard, and a baby in his coat.
In the last week, my horniness and wanking have become borderline problematic—in that the wanking doesn’t seem to be solving the horniness. Indeed, it seems to be exacerbating the problem—in that as soon as I come, I want to come again. I’m just pouring wank-petrol onto the horny-bonfire.
The root of the problem is that my horniness is now so profound, it’s not just about coming anymore. The time for wanking is over. It’s not enough. I simply need a man. I need to make someone want to fuck me. It’s becoming existential—because, if everything has an equal and opposite reaction, and I am this horny—with sparks pouring out of my fingertips, and my skin phosphorescent with lust, and my knickers screaming like a wolf at any passerby with half a face—and there is no equal and opposite reaction from a man, then, ipso facto, I must not exist.
“I’m afraid I’m not real,” I tell the dog, mournfully. “I’m starting to disappear.”
Poignantly, she ignores me.
The second thing that happens, in the middle of the Great Horn Storm, is that Zee comes home, wearing a new jacket.
“That’s a nice new jacket,” I say, as he dumps his bag on the table, and puts the kettle on.
“Oh, this?” he says, coming back into the room. “Yeah, I went shopping. I’ve never been shopping before—but I’ve not seen my mum in a while, and I walked past Gap, looked in the window, and thought, ‘Hey! Why not own some clothes that weren’t bought for you by your mother!’”
It’s not like anything he’s ever worn before. Navy, with a Nehru collar.
He looks both proud, and a bit shy, about his new jacket. Like he knows it’s a bit hot. Which is hot.
“I got you something,” he says, giving me a small paper bag. It’s long, and white, with a picture of a Victorian lady in a crinoline on it.
“This is . . .”—I looked again, to confirm—“the bag in ladies’ toilets you put sanitary towels in?” I say.
“Look inside.”
Inside is . . . gravel.
“I was in Wales,” he says, “and I know you love Wales—so I brought you some Wales back. This is from the carpark, in the Travel Lodge.”
It is a very Zee present—it is supposed to make me laugh, but it is also quietly, unshowily thoughtful.
I hug him—lovely Zee!—in thanks. And this is when I notice an odd thing: that when I hug him, his body feels unexpectedly awkward. Like it’s trying to shout something, which Zee is trying desperately to silence.
I look up at him—about to say, “Are you okay? Have you had lunch?”—when I see the look in his eyes. It’s only there for a second—he does a magnificent job of concealing it by quickly saying, “Did you know that, in 1969, the US Army switched off Niagara Falls, to clean it? I just heard that, on Radio Four”—an admirable deployment of a bewilderingly random fact; a smoke bomb of an anecdote—but I have seen it.
Zee fancies me.
I don’t know if you’ve ever suddenly and unexpectedly had sex with a friend at 1:00 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon; stone-cold sober. I have. With Zee, on that day.
It’s weird—having sex with someone you know. I’d never done it before. I would definitely say there are a lot more plus points than negative points. The biggest plus point being that I actually liked Zee. It was nice to be in a room with him anyway—just having a cup of tea, or doing the washing-up—and so taking his clothes off and seeing what happened next was extra-enjoyable. Like, I knew we’d make the best of it, together, and almost certainly he would tidy up any mess, afterward.
I’m kind of confused as to why more friends don’t do it, to be honest: it seemed a very simple and straightforwardly fun thing to do—like going on a picnic with someone; or going to the movies. An adventure. With a pal.
The downside was that, because we were friends, Zee was very worried we were doing something wrong.
“Dolly, I think you know how I feel about you, but—isn’t this too fast?” he says, breaking off midkiss, on the sofa.
I look up at the clock—we have been kissing for six minutes, and I have really enjoyed all of those minutes. I’ve never kissed anyone in my house before, either—that is another first. It is definitely more relaxing than doing it in a club, at a gig, or outside a pub in the rain. We are warm, dry, and unlikely to have someone drunk scream “GET A ROOM!” at us. We have got a room. “Get a room,” it turns out, really is very good, practical advice.
“Shouldn’t we—take it a little bit slower?” Zee continues. “I’d really like to, you know, take you out to dinner; talk a bit. I’m just quite old-fashioned . . .”
“Or,” I say, very reasonably, “we could just . . . carry on doing this?”
>
And I kiss him until he stops worrying, and kisses back.
When we get into bed, he is still worrying.
“Are you sure?” he says, as I unbutton my dress. “I’m not rushing you?”
“No—let’s be clear: I’m rushing you,” I say. He’s so polite! It’s really, really nice. It makes me feel like a cheerful good-time lady, instructing a trembling boy.
On the other side of the door, the dog starts howling. To distract from her annoying noises I roll over on top of Zee.
“Tell me what you like,” I say.
“You,” he replies, simply.
I unbutton his shirt, as he stares up at me. I can feel how hard he is. Oh, it’s a simple pleasure—making someone hard. I never tire of the magic. It’s like summoning a dragon, or a platinum, clockwork owl. I’ve read somewhere—probably More magazine—that the best way to move, when fucking someone on top, is in a figure of 8. Making your hips into a switchback. In the spirit of novelty, and celebration of the erection, I start to give this a go—but it proves much harder than you would think. I manage maybe a figure of 5 before the crotch of my tights snags in Zee’s flies, and I have to detangle them. More has not taken into account the potentially troublesome nature of hosiery.
As I detangle my tights, I notice that Zee is staring up at the ceiling. I stop.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“I’ve never done this before,” he finally whispers, to my lampshade.
“Never done what?”
“This.”
“You’ve never . . . never?”
“No,” he says. He looks worried. Like I might shout at him, for being a virgin.
A virgin! I have a virgin in my bed!
Oh, I am thrilled!