How to Be Famous

  But today—today, for the first time, I was feeling something else—something which was making my face burn and my chest explode . . . something which was pumping the same adrenaline into me I felt whenever Suzanne and I marched up a huge hill, or jumped into a cold lake. A huge, new, terrible, amazing feeling.

  “I am . . . angry,” I said. I have never said those words before. “I am ANGRY. This is angry cry.”

  I pointed to my face. “Angry cry,” I clarify. “ANGRY.”

  Suzanne whooped.

  “Baby just got her Angry Wings!” she hollered, putting an arm around me. “Oh, babe—it’s always a festal day, when a woman finally gets angry for the first time. I’m so happy for you.”

  And she took a camera out of her handbag, and snapped a picture of me, right there—angry and crying on the pavement.

  “You’ll want to remember this forever,” she said, fondly, putting it back in her bag. “The day you finally let yourself get angry. I’ll send you a copy when I get it developed. Tell me. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “That I’m being punished for having sex, even though I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, blowing my nose on my sleeve. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I gave him some sex—the thing all men want—so why’s he being a shit about it?”

  “Yes yes yes,” Suzanne said, putting out her arm for a cab, and hustling me toward it. “This is the right thing to feel. That’s what I’ve been saying. Women have to get angry. Come on. Come back to mine—I want to whip your anger into fury. And then—onwards to murder!”

  Back at Suzanne’s, Julia was sitting in front of the TV in her pajamas, watching Mastermind. Her Afro was up in a turban, and she was wearing glasses that made her look automatically disapproving of everything.

  “Dolly’s angry,” Suzanne announced, dumping her handbag on the table, and pouring drinks.

  “Harold Wilson!” Julia shouted at the TV, then turned to us. “My God, you’re both paralytic. Have they evacuated the Booze Hospital?”

  “Tell her, Dolly,” Suzanne ordered, as I flopped onto the sofa.

  I told Julia the whole story about Jerry, from beginning to end. Halfway through—around the first, aborted blow job—she started drinking, too: “I can’t do this sober.” When I got to the end—having been interrupted, at various times, by Julia shouting “NO! HE DIDN’T!” and “MICHAEL STIPE?” and Suzanne going “You didn’t tell me THAT bit!”—both Julia and Suzanne were almost levitating with indignation.

  “So, to recap,” Julia said, swigging on a glass of red wine, “you bin this guy off, he uses Michael Stipe as a weapon to revenge-fuck you, tapes it, and is now screening it, at Pervert Parties?”

  “And everyone in London’s talking about it,” Suzanne added. “Dolly is the news.”

  I winced. “Yes,” I said. “Now you put it like that, I can see why I have been failing to turn this into an amusing anecdote.”

  “What are you going to do?” Suzanne asked, fiddling with her lighter.

  I thought. I’d been thinking about this for the last half hour.

  “Well,” I started. “In What Katy Did at School—the lesser-read sequel to What Katy Did—our formerly disabled heroine Katy Carr is accused by the punitive headmistress, Mrs. Florence, of flirting with boys from the neighboring boarding school, even though she is wholly innocent. And for a whole term she is ostracized, gossiped about, and punished by the school, and many of her classmates, until, finally, her shiningly good character wins them all over, and they apologize for ever doubting her. She knows it doesn’t matter what everyone else is saying about her—she knows she’s a good person. That this gossip will go away, in the end. Her righteous anger at the injustice keeps her going. And that’s what I’m going to do. Fueled by righteous anger, I am going to live through this, with my head held high, and outlive the storm, saying nothing.”

  “I love that book!” Suzanne shouted, just as Julia said, “That’s a shit idea.”

  “Why’s it a shit idea?” I asked.

  “Because Jerry doesn’t get punished, and you just have to suffer, and become stronger, and I hate stories where the conclusion is that women just have to suffer and get stronger,” Julia said. “Those are the worst stories.”

  Suzanne nodded, somberly. “Good point. Even though it is a great book.”

  “The bit where they get the Christmas boxes, and they’re full of cake, and jumbles!” I said.

  “The jumbles!” Suzanne said. Then: “What are jumbles?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “A kind of biscuit?”

  “There must be another way through this,” Julia said, who was still considerably more sober than Suzanne and I. “Come on—we must be able to make a plan here, and not derail on fucking jumbles.”

  And we talked about it for the next two hours—drinking wine, where appropriate—but at the end, when Suzanne had taken a pill, and fallen asleep, facedown, on the floor, it was still the only option I had: to simply be strong, and noble, and get through this on my shiningly good character. That’s all a woman can do, and therefore the best plan.

  28

  Two weeks later, at the NME’s annual Brat Awards, I realized that this plan wouldn’t work.

  It started well. I was in a gang, which is always comforting. The Branks had finished their album, and the first single—“God Is a Girl,” the song Suzanne sang to us at the salon—is currently at Number 12 in the charts. Whenever anyone congratulated Suzanne on this, she said—almost offended—“But this was always going to happen?” She has never doubted her stardom.

  This week, she is on the cover of the NME—something that delighted her in a way I didn’t think possible. When I turned up at her house, earlier, to pick her up, she was as excited as I’ve ever seen her—full-frontal mania, and bouncing off the walls.

  “I’ve just HAD SOME COKE!” she said, as I came through the door. I found Suzanne’s way of taking drugs very endearing. Everyone else would be very clandestine, and mysterious—referring to it in oblique code; nodding and winking. Suzanne just shouted, “I’M GOING TO HAVE SOME DRUGS NOW! ANYONE ELSE WANT SOME?” It made cool boys angry. Nearly everything Suzanne did made cool boys angry.

  “Coke? Oh—that explains it,” I said, noting that she was opening and closing her fists so rapidly, the knuckles were white.

  “NO, NO!” she shouted. “You don’t UNDERSTAND! When my guy dropped it off, the wrap it was in—IT WAS ME!”

  I didn’t understand, so she showed me the now-empty coke wrap. It was made from the front cover of the NME. It was a portion of her face.

  “IT’S ME-COKE!” she shouted. “I’M A WRAP! THAT’S WHEN YOU KNOW YOU’VE MADE IT!”

  “Be sure to tell them that’s what you’ve taken, when you OD, and the medics arrive,” Julia said, sitting peaceably on the sofa, eating a sandwich. “Me-coke.”

  “Ambulances are for amateurs,” Suzanne replied cheerfully.

  With The Branks now in the charts, they have been invited along to the Brat Awards, to provide a bit of excitement. Suzanne has rapidly become known for her reliably entertaining interviews. Appearing on The Word last week, she had repeated the thing she’d said to me, months ago—“It’s 1995. Everyone’s bisexual after eleven p.m.”—and then kissed a girl in the front row of the audience. And her first interview in the D&ME had ended up with her getting drunk, and high, in the pub, with Rob, chatting to a girl on the next table, and insisting on giving her a makeover: taking off her top, pulling off the girl’s, and swapping them.

  “You belong to The Branks now,” she’d cackled.

  The headline was: “HIGH. STREET. BRANKS.”

  There was also the interview where she punched the journalist who called her “a classic angry feminist”—shouting “Go buy a vagina, Richard”—but that barely seems worth mentioning.

  The cab decants us at the venue, in Camden, where a red carpet leads up to the door.

  “Oh my God—let’s throw shapes!” Suzanne says, delightedl
y, dragging Julia and me down the red carpet, in the same manner Cruella De Vil drags her Dalmatian-fur stole behind her in 101 Dalmations. Our role is, definitely, as “living accessories.”

  Not surprisingly, Julia does not happily take to the red carpet. She is dressed in a cutoff silver boiler suit, tights, and work boots, and has brought a satchel full of cider: “Champagne makes me gassy,” she’d explained, flatly, as she’d packed her bag. “And, let’s face it—it tastes like piss.”

  On the red carpet, she looks very angsty. As they take pictures, she retrieves her first can of cider and takes a swig as everyone snaps away.

  “Ah, fuck this,” she says, after a minute, as Suzanne poses gleefully for the photographers. “I’m not being paid to stand here doing a ‘surprised’ face.”

  She wriggles us free of Suzanne’s grasp—to Suzanne’s glee, as it enables her to start doing “arm-posing,” too.

  “Inside,” Julia says, heading toward the entrance. “I’ve put on my bad tights. The crotch keeps dropping, and I need to hoik them up.”

  She turns just as I heard a voice shouting, “Hey! Dolly!”

  I turn around, and see someone I vaguely recognize from Loaded. I start to wave, as he says, maliciously: “So where’s Jerry?”

  I turn to Julia, in horror.

  “Still hanging out the back of you?” he continues, in a horrible, faux-matey tone. For the first time ever in my life, I actually gasp. The brutality of the question, in daylight, sober, is shocking. That he’s seen me—with my friends, in my nice dress, smiling; just a girl, having her day—and the thought of me fucking has inspired him to wound me. To crush me. To coat me in the sticky black tar of shame. This is the machinery of his thoughts. This is how he has processed me. That is what he needed to do to me, when he saw me walking past him. The hatred is raw, inexplicable, and brutal.

  “He’s busy fucking your mum in the eye, dickless!” Suzanne shouts back—still posing. “Come on. Screw this.”

  I was still shaking as she put her arm around me, and marched me inside.

  It’s a standard awards ceremony: tables, chairs, a stage. And now me, charging through the doorway.

  “It’s okay,” I say, as Julia and Suzanne crowd around me—like as woodland animals around a fellow woodland animal who’s just been shot in the face. “It’s just some gossip, that will pass. I am still noble, and angry. I don’t care what anyone thinks, apart from my friends.”

  “What other people think is none of your business,” Julia nods. “A drag queen called Sarah Cunt told me that.”

  I sit down at our table—back ramrod straight—as Julia hands me a can of cider. I am burning with nobility. I am a martyr candle. I am so ready to be better than everyone else in the room.

  “I wouldn’t normally share my cider,” Julia says. “But you—you’ve earned this.”

  Tonight’s show is being presented by another of the rock ’n’ roll comedians, of whom London has a surfeit, at the moment: Tim Brazier, who also has a lot of material about liking cool bands, and not being able to find a girlfriend.

  “Is there a factory that’s making these cunts?” Suzanne asks, as he launches into his opening monologue, about how he’d recently gone on a date with a girl who was beautiful, and hot, but liked Madonna, and thought that Black Francis from the Pixies was called “Fat Francis,” and so he’d dumped her.

  “Never trust a man who doesn’t like pop music,” Julia says, lighting a cigarette. “For there, most assuredly, is a bore.”

  The atmosphere is blokey; coke-y: “One out of two isn’t bad,” Suzanne says, who’s just dabbed some more coke under the table, after announcing to everyone else, “I think it might be time for some more drugs!”

  She tries to persuade me to have some: “Just think of it as ‘powdered booze,’” she says, handing me a wrap. “Like in the war? Powdered eggs, powdered booze. Saves you having to go for a piss every half hour.”

  “It’s a powerful recommendation,” I reply, giving her the wrap back, “and I’m sure you could sell it to the elderly, and incontinent, and possibly the military, on that basis, but it’s just not my game.”

  “What’s not your game, babe?” a voice from behind me says. I turn around. It’s John.

  “You’re here!” I cry, standing up, and hugging him.

  I look at him—half expecting to see the same puffy, unhappy shambles I’d left in Eastbourne. But being locked away in a studio in Wales, recording, has clearly been good for him. His eyes no longer look like those of Sauron, he’s lost what looks to be nearly a stone, and his posture has gone from that of a victim, to that of someone about to start dancing.

  “You’re back,” I say, waving an appreciative hand at his hotness.

  Tonight, he has been nominated for Album of the Year, Single of the Year, and Solo Artist of the Year. Tomorrow, he begins a tour of America.

  “I’ve been practicing my gracious face, for when I lose to Blur, Oasis, and Paul Weller,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “I’ve had a good early tip-off on one category—Kurt Cobain’s won something.”

  “What for?” I ask.

  “Bummer of the Year.”

  “They’ve described the suicide of Kurt Cobain as ‘Bummer of the Year’?” I ask. “Blowing his brains out with a shotgun was . . . a bummer?”

  “This is what will kill Britpop, in the end,” Suzanne says darkly. “An inability to process or express any emotion more complex than, ‘Oi oi, savaloy! Nice tits! Bummer!’”

  “I dimly recall,” John says, “that in 1989, in the Readers’ End-of-Year Poll, the Reading Festival nudged the Number One slot over the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

  He shrugs.

  “In many ways, we are engaged in an arena of fools. This is not Avalon, but a knavery.”

  I would like to say that Suzanne was grotesquely overstating the blokey, triumphal, emotionally-reductive mood in London in spring 1995—but she was not. As the evening went on, it became more and more apparent that this city—and particularly this industry, in this room—was now in a delirium of degeneration. What had, last summer, been a cheerful cultural excursion into simpler, childlike times—all the sunshine, Chopper bikes, bacon sandwiches, great blokes and top birds—had, nine months later, morphed into a shriller, willful regression. I guess you cannot stay a child, high on sweets, staying out late, forever. You eventually grow into a teenager—a sullen teenage boy, scared of girls; and it seemed like those teenage boys were running the show tonight.

  There were two “sexy” female models onstage—one in a skintight PVC bodysuit, the other in tiny PVC shorts—who were there to hand out the awards. Their presence, we were assured, was “ironic”—but, as Suzanne pointed out, “A vagina in PVC hot pants cannot be ironic. It’s either here, or it’s not. It hasn’t got fucking quote marks around it.”

  There were very few other women in the room, and so the presence of the models became ever-more disturbing, as man after man in jeans, or wearing a parka, went up onstage to collect their award. Just two years after everything was PJ Harvey, Björk, Alanis Morissette, Courtney Love, and Riot Grrrl—clever, funny warrior women, smarter and bolder and faster than any man in this room—this queasy, silent return of “sexy silent lady models” was jarring. Not least because, as the evening went on, it became increasingly clear that the only woman who had won an award that night was Kylie Minogue, for “Most Desirable Person in the World”—and that she would, therefore, be the only woman who spoke all evening.

  “This room is just a massive testicularium,” Suzanne said, gaping, as Kylie went up to get her award, to whistles, and shouts of “Alright darlin’?” She turned to me. “There’s only one thing to do: let’s go and take drugs in the toilet.”

  In the toilet, I simply treat myself to going to the toilet, whilst Suzanne and, unusually for her, Julia do coke, in the cubicle next to me.

  When we all come out, there is a drunken woman standing there, staring intensely.

  “I’m
afraid I don’t have any left,” Suzanne says, automatically, showing her the empty wrapper. “You can . . . lick it, if you need to?”

  “You’re Suzanne Banks and Dolly Wilde, aren’t you?” the woman says, carefully. Quietly. Now I look again, I recognize her—she is a PR for Polydor. I’ve seen her around, at parties—I had her filed under “good-time girl.”

  “Almost all the time,” Suzanne says, slightly unsteady on her feet.

  “Jerry Sharp,” the PR says. Isla. That’s her name. Isla.

  She lets out a painful, ragged breath, then says:

  “Me too,” in a very small voice.

  “He filmed it?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she replies. “And now I’ve seen what’s happened with you, I am so, so scared.”

  I hug her, stop—and then hug her again. There’s something unexpectedly . . . reassuring about hugging a woman who’s been through the same thing you have. The simple fact that you are both still here. So far.

  “What can we do?” she asks.

  I look at her.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “But I don’t think there is anything.”

  She nods, as if she expected that answer, squares her shoulders, and leaves the room.

  When I come out of the toilets, two things happen at once. The first is that I bump straight into John Kite, who is standing, agitated, next to the door. He’s clearly been there some time.

  “Babe, word in private,” he says, pulling me into a dark corner. “I wouldn’t normally report this kind of thing back, but the table I’m on has just been told, loudly, by an enormously confident prick from my record company with the hair of an actual rapist, that Jerry Sharp got you your job on The Face because you shagged him.”

  I wince, and start to say, “But that would have been imposs—”

  “Babe, you don’t need to explain anything to me. Ever. I just wanted to make sure I was correct in telling him that, if I ever heard him repeat that spiteful bullshit about my friend again, to anyone, that I would personally break every fucking finger on his hands; and that he would be well-advised to go fuck Jerry Sharp now, and ask him for a job at another record company—because I was going to call the head of Warner’s tomorrow, and insist he fire him.”