How to Be Famous

  “I’m afraid I’m about to say, ‘We need to talk,’” I said.

  Oh, it was awful. If you take the virginity of a dear friend and then say, the next day, “We shouldn’t do that again,” it can’t help but get emotional. At one point, he apologized—“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.”—which made me shout at him: “You did nothing wrong!”—and then hug him, hard. We both cried. Then we made jokes about it—“But it was a lovely shag. I would give you five stars out of five stars. Thumbs-up!”—and then cried some more.

  “I think I’ll go and stay with my mum for a bit,” he said, at the end, and packed his bag. “That seems like a good idea. Otherwise things might get more complicated. Goodbye, Jo.”

  And he kissed me on the lips one last time.

  So this was my low point, right? I’d always thought sex would make my world bigger, but it had made it much smaller, instead. John had gone into the studio. Zee was back in Birmingham, with his mum. I still, theoretically, had Krissi—but I was trying to avoid his calls, as things with Dad seemed to be getting worse.

  Yesterday, Krissi rang me, voice high with fury.

  “The disgusting fucker’s given us all ringworm,” he screamed.

  “Oh my God. Is that—sexual?”

  “Jesus, Johanna—NO! It’s a fungal infection. You get it from contact with wet towels. He’s infected all our towels.”

  “You’ve got worms? You’ve all got worms?”

  “It’s not a worm, Johanna—it’s a fungal infection. You get red, itchy circles.”

  “He’s given you skin mushrooms? Oh, my word.”

  “We’re all having to use a fucking cream and boil all our towels, and I look like I’ve got the plague,” Krissi wailed. “Jeffrey won’t fuck me, because he’s worried about catching something from my dad. It’s beyond wrong. It’s your turn to have him, Johanna. You have to take custody of him, or I will take you to court. I will get a law degree, and I will sue you for bad sisterment.”

  I gently put the phone down. I just wasn’t in a my-dad place at that time.

  26

  And so I entered the Season of Suzanne. It was the beginning of spring—with all that daffodil fol-de-rol, and Suzanne had finished her album, and reentered my life with a bang.

  “These are my last few weeks before I’m famous,” she said, in all seriousness, turning up on the doorstep one Tuesday. “I want to enjoy my last few weeks of being a common person; and you’ve managed to fuck everyone out of your life. So come on—let’s go have some innocent fun together.”

  And Suzanne was very good at having fun. She had the knack of it. She introduced me to the game “Bus Fuck”—where, when you get on a bus, you have to look at all the passengers, and decide which order you’d fuck them in. If you had to.

  You had to do this discreetly—by nodding toward them, and putting one finger on your cheek, to indicate that they would be the first; then nod at the second, with two fingers on your cheek, and so on.

  She also introduced me to the game “Withnail”—named in honor of the bit in the film where Withnail leans out of the window of his car, and shouts “SCRUBBERS!” at a group of schoolgirls.

  “GROW SOME LEGS!” she would shout, from a taxi window, as we passed a short man.

  “GET A TAXI!” she would roar, as we passed a posh woman, jogging.

  In turn, I introduced her to the concept of “Journey Juice”: the idea that when you’re traveling to somewhere you’re going to drink, such as a party, gig, or pub, you have your “Journey Juice” on the way: a pop bottle filled with vodka. Just to “save time.” This was my greatest invention with Krissi, back in Wolverhampton. Suzanne took to Journey Juice with aplomb: “It makes public transport tolerable!” she said, swigging appreciatively on the top deck of the number 4 bus.

  At parties, Suzanne would enter like a Viking—roaring “LET THE FUN COMMENCE!”—invariably getting into a scuffle with someone from another band whom she believed wasn’t treating her with enough deference.

  In the morning, we would all wake at her house, and Suzanne would stagger into the front room, hungover, in a silk kimono, and say, “Julia—issue all the usual apologies to all the usual people,” with an airy wave of her hand.

  Suzanne was in a hypermanic phase—recording the album, on such a tight deadline, had kind of . . . whirlwinded her up, inside, and now she couldn’t stop.

  “I feel like I’m growing a new part of my brain,” she said repeatedly. “I can feel where it is. Just here,” and she made me touch the part of her head, where she thought the growth had occurred. I could feel nothing, with my fingers, but I could see the gleam in her eyes, and sometimes, it scared me.

  “Soon, everyone will know me,” she said, happily, in a café, eating toast. “I will change the room, just by walking into it. I wonder when I’ll see the first girl who’s dressed like me? I wonder when I’ll happen?”

  And whatever we did in the day—Camden Market, looking for boots; the British Museum, listing which objects we’d most like to steal; Battersea Cats & Dogs Home, picking our favorite cat—the nights always ended the same: Suzanne, drunk, in my house, or hers, banging her hands on the table, and shouting, “The revolution is coming! Wait till you hear the album! The world is going to change!”

  In amongst all this, Suzanne did something unexpected: she noticed I had a body.

  Here’s how I felt about me, in the early spring of 1995. I was quietly happy with my face—I liked how pale, and round, it was; because when I drew around my eyes, with eyeliner, I looked like I was a painting of a girl I had dreamed of, and invented. Suzanne was very pro-eyeliner.

  “It’s the smart working-class girl’s look,” she said, approvingly, as I carefully brushed the thick, jet-black wings onto my lids. “It’s bold, it’s cheap, and it tells people to look you in the eyes—because that’s where everything’s going on.”

  And I loved my hair, too. I had finally discovered how to back-comb it, into a huge, tumbling mass, and Suzanne was approving of that, too. “Big hair is the accessory you can’t lose,” she told me, spritzing me with her Chanel No. 5. “Unless your head falls off, in the back of a taxi.”

  So, from the neck up, I liked me. That’s where my hairdo, and mouth, and eyes, and brain lived. That was where all the good stuff was.

  But from the neck down—oh, from the neck down, it was all sorrow. I would never, ever mention my body in a conversation—not even my shoulder, or my bones.

  I would mention my vagina, of course—because that is a thing with worth. Men want to have sex with vaginas—they make this clear all the time. They will even refer to women solely as vaginas—“Look at all the poon,” they say, looking at hundreds of whole women, and seeing only the hole. So I knew my vagina was a hot topic, and would often chuck it into a chat, metaphorically speaking.

  But the rest of me—the rest of me had no worth, in the outside world. I knew this as a fact.

  It gave me a despair so deep I could not acknowledge it—for the sorrow of being a teenage girl who is not slender, and sexy, and hot is so great . . . so fundamentally the opposite of what a teenage girl should be—that I could not go near it. To have confessed it would have been to be instantly overcome. It would mean finally admitting that I am not as I should be; that I fail at being what you should be, at nineteen: lithe-limbed, tiny-waisted, and living in shorts and cutoff tops. That’s what the teenage girls on TV look like—Californian girls, who can wear anything, and go anywhere, and do anything, with their proper bodies.

  I was supposed to hate these girls. Fat girls are supposed to hate skinny girls. That is a law—they are our designated enemy. That is the law—based on the subconscious understanding that because they are skinny, I have to be fat. That’s how it works. In some way, all women’s bodies are linked—and those skinny girls can only go roller-skating, in ra-ra skirts, because I am carrying their weight for them, under this huge dress, not roller-skating.

  In this incarnation, I carried the f
at of many other women. It was my duty. It was my fate. I had been given this shame, as punishment for some transgression I didn’t understand. My fat was my karma.

  And so, ironically, given its size, my body lived in a very small world. It could sit and write, it could sit and drink, it could sit and smoke, it could fuck, and it could sleep. That was it. That was its world. It was like an unhappy, housebound pet. And because I could not think about it, or acknowledge it—because I would speak for a thousand hours before ever mentioning my body—I couldn’t change it. You have to name the problem before you can solve it. And I would not name this problem, because I didn’t have the time, or the inclination, to feel embarrassed, and then cry for a thousand years. So—it did not change. You can’t become unfat, if you will not admit—rigidly, terrifiedly, proudly, despairingly—you are fat in the first place. Because I was silent, I was untransformable. I was stuck.

  I had thought of one way out. Just one. Every day, when I took my clothes off, and got into a hot bath, I lay there, looking down at all the soft rolls—the floating belly, the double thighs—and daydreamed that I get into an horrific car crash. One where my body was totally mangled. And, when I finally awoke from the coma, NHS surgeons had repaired everything, and cut away all the extra fat and skin, and I was reborn, as a thin girl. I was nine stone, covered in neat lines of stitches, and my proper life as a teenage girl could finally begin. I would have been remade. The authorities had taken over, and solved the problem of me. But I would never tell anyone that dream. I would never tell anyone anything I think of my body. I was too proud. I was too scared. I was locked in absolute, rigid denial.

  And—sensing something in me—no one ever mentioned my body. It’s amazing how well you can completely avoid the subject of thirteen stone of pale girl, if the girl in question has, in her eyes, a look that warns you that the universe will explode, instantly, if you ever mention it.

  And so my body was invisible, and undiscussed. It might as well have not existed.

  Then into this lifelong silence, Suzanne crashed.

  “You love dancing, huh?” she said, one morning, as we sat around in her flat. We were supposed to be having “Working Wednesday,” where I wrote my column, whilst she wrote her manifesto—but, as usual, we had made tea, and started chatting, and now three hours had gone by.

  “Dancing?”

  “Yeah. Whenever you get drunk at my place, you dance.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to this.

  “As soon as I put Madonna on, you’re grinding up all over the place, like a mad Midlands stripper. You were humping my sofa last Tuesday.”

  Oh my God.

  “I’m—sorry?”

  “Sorry? SORRY? Oh sweet Jesus—fuck this fucking girl. I love you dancing, Wilde. Tell me—what do you love about dancing? LET’S GET DEEP!”

  This conversation felt a bit dangerous—as it was about my body, and I worried where it might go. I did not want to cry in front of Suzanne.

  “‘Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free’?” I hazarded. When in doubt, quote Madonna.

  “Do you know what I think you’d like?” Suzanne said. On previous occasions where she’s asked this question—“Do you know what I think you’d like?”—her answer has been, variously, “Barcelona,” “going down on a woman,” “steak tartare,” and “John-Paul Sartre,” so I have no idea where this is going.

  “Adrenaline,” Suzanne said. “I think you’d love adrenaline.”

  Before I could think of anything to say, she grabbed my hand, and said, “Come on—let’s go get some,” and led me out of the house.

  “Adrenaline?” I asked, struggling to keep up with her; she was walking at a fair old pace down Kentish Town High Road, toward Parliament Hill Fields. I knew how Suzanne operated. I presumed we were walking to her dealer’s house.

  “Where do we get adrenaline?” I asked. “Do you know someone who sells it? How much is it? Will it make me freak out? You know I don’t like anything that makes me hallucinate. I will draw a line there.”

  “We’re not going to buy it—we’re going to make it,” she said, as we started walking up steep, leafy Swain’s Lane.

  Although I looked, subsequently, on maps, and in the A-Z, curiously, none of them mentioned that Swain’s Lane is the steepest hill in the world. But it definitely is. Within four minutes, I was a hyperventilating wreck. I stopped, like a mule, jerking Suzanne back. She let go of my hand.

  “Just . . . resting . . .” I said, leaning against a wall.

  My throat hurt. Why did my throat hurt? I could only presume that my body—having used, and exhausted, all the muscles in my legs, torso, and arms—had then tried to use my neck to get up this fucking Eiger.

  “You can have a ciggie when you get to the top,” Suzanne said, temptingly, taking my hand, and pulling me again.

  In the end, my pace was so slow and agonized—and my mortification so obvious—that Suzanne strode on ahead, whilst I trudged behind: all muscles firing, and yet still so pitifully slow and puddingy.

  When I finally reached the top, I found Suzanne had gone through the gates, into Waterlow Park, and was waiting for me, on a bench.

  “Lie down there,” she said, pointing to the ground. I wrapped my leopard skin around me, lay down, and stared up at the sky, breathing like an asthmatic train.

  “And?” I said.

  “Wait,” she said.

  And, as I lay there, I got a sudden, ice-cold whoosh in my belly, that flamed across my body. My head felt like I’d just stuck it under a tap, on a hot day—clear, and almost empty. As if decades of clutter had been removed, in one stroke.

  I sat up, to tell Suzanne this news—and noticed that sitting up felt really easy, as if my entire body were four stone lighter. Moving felt easy! I had never experienced this before. I waved my arms around, delightedly—they felt amazing. I was, suddenly, so into having arms! These arms were sources of intense pleasure.

  Suzanne looked at me.

  “That’s adrenaline,” she said. “You have just tricked your body into flooding with adrenaline. You have just got very, very high for free. You’re welcome.”

  “Oh,” I said. Then: “It makes me want to poo.”

  “That’s my girl,” Suzanne said, proudly.

  After Adrenaline Day, as I thought of it in my head, Suzanne would regularly force me into further hits. “I’m the pusherman,” she would say, delightedly, walking me, like a dog: across the Heath; from Camden to Soho; along the river, to Hammersmith . . . looking delighted every time I would suddenly straighten up, twenty minutes in, and cry, “I feel it! I’m getting the rush!”

  As we spent that spring walking, and talking, I became aware of a gradual shift, in my head. I slowly started to . . . like my body. A bit. Just a bit. After a long day, I lay on the bed, and felt something completely new: total physical exhaustion. And it felt amazing. My legs and thighs glowed with the springy ache of exertion. Lying in a hot bath, looking down at my legs, I felt fondness for them, for all the work they had done.

  “I am proud of you, old friends,” I said, patting them, like a horse. “Well done, you.”

  I told Suzanne this, about the patting. About the fondness. About how I’d stopped describing my body, to myself, as “the problem.”

  “A body is something that should never be described,” she said, firmly. “That way lies insanity. A body is a thing that should do.”

  It was a novel feeling, to look at my body, and see it not as a problem—a shame, to be covered, and ignored, like the statue of a discredited dictator who had failed his people—but a source of satisfaction, instead. A new thing to do. A new world—just below my neck. Suddenly, I was so into me. I was so into me, doing things. I wanted to run into rooms, naked, and point at my arse, shouting, “Listen! I have a muscle here! It did not exist a month ago—but now, it can walk me all the way from Victoria to Richmond Park! I am the mother of arse-muscles! I have created them! I know you cannot see it, for I am still l
uxuriously padded, but push your finger in here! Feel it! Feel all these secret pistons I am building!”

  In the midst of this physical renaissance, on the first truly hot day of spring, at the start of April, Suzanne turned up at my house holding a 1950s bathing suit—all jolly sailor frills, bows, and stripes—and said: “Today, we’re going UP a level. You are Kate Bush’s shoes.”

  When I looked at her, confused, she explained: “I’m going to throooooow you in a lake!”

  We took the bus up to the Heath, and she took me down the newly greening lane, to the Ladies’ Bathing Pond.

  “I don’t like water I can’t see through. I’m scared of what’s in there,” I moaned, as we stood in the changing hut, pulling on our costumes. “There might be fish. Or eels. They might go inside me. I swear to God, if something touches me, I will scream.”

  “In Jungian archetypery, water is your subconscious,” Suzanne said, pulling up her shoulder straps. “You’re just scared of your subconscious. Of what you’re repressing.”

  “Well, if there’s eels in my subconscious, then yes, I’m very scared of them,” I say, shivering. “I don’t want eels in my head. Of course I’m going to repress them. Who wouldn’t repress eels?”

  We stood on the pontoon, looking out at the lake. It was a dark, soft green—like liquid fertilizer, or nettle soup. Three or four women skulled around, in fabulous bathing caps. They all looked like bluestocking High Court judges. This was very much the pond of matriarchs.

  Suzanne took my hand.

  “The advice is, on your first visit here, to lower yourself in slowly, to acclimatize to the temperature,” she said, stepping toward the ladder, and gripping my hand tightly. She looked at me for a second—then jumped in, pulling me after her.

  When I surfaced—coughing and gasping from the cold—her face was right next to me, beaming.

  “But this is more fun, isn’t it?”