How to Be Famous

  And yet, she’s so fucking fizzy and delicious, I want to swim around in her innards, like a dolphin.

  “How are you going to do it?” I ask.

  Suzanne gives a dramatic pause—one that has all the hallmarks of having been rehearsed many times, and being even more enjoyable because of it.

  “Be the change you want to see. I am the revolution. Make me famous, and you fuck up the world. I’m—Ugly Jesus. Do you know why we’re called ‘The Branks’?”

  “No.”

  “‘The branks’ was a scold’s bridle they used to put on women, in Scotland. To stop them speaking,” she explains. She pauses. “So it’s the best fucking band name ever.”

  Suzanne is the biggest fan of Suzanne. It’s oddly endearing.

  She looks up at the clock.

  “Oh my God—it’s two! The revolution has to go to work.”

  “What work?”

  “Publicity,” Suzanne says. “Julia. Come.”

  She applies lipstick with her cigarette still in her mouth—something I’ve never seen before (nor since).

  “It’s my day off,” Julia complains.

  “The revolution doesn’t have a day off!” Suzanne shouts.

  “I’m not the revolution,” Julia replies. “I do admin for the revolution. I was doing it until two this morning. Now, I am enjoying my leisure.”

  Suzanne flings the front door open, and stands dramatically in the doorway.

  “JULIA!” she barks. “COME!”

  Julia sighs, puts a dosa in her pocket, and follows Suzanne out of the door.

  We spend the next two hours walking around Camden. The market’s in full flow, and—in 1994—at the height of its freaky powers. Here is all the detritus of England’s lost empire, piled high: crinolines, gramophones, army surplus, ball gowns from coming-out parties—along with its current, edgy, black-market economy: bongs, bootleg CDs, and dealers selling either hash, or Oxo cubes, depending on your guile and/or luck. And, flowing through it: boys in greatcoats; girls in petticoats and ratty fur stoles; Goths; greboes; skaters; indie kids in stripey tights; and the newly forming Britpop massive, in their Adidas, and wooden necklaces.

  “What are we doing?” I ask Suzanne, who is sitting on the bridge, smoking a cigarette, and surveying them all.

  “Finding my people,” she says, suddenly sliding off the bridge, and approaching a girl with sea-green hair.

  “Hello!” she says, brightly. “Might I say how greatly I appreciate your look?”

  The girl smiles at her—happy, but confused.

  “Thanks?” she replies.

  “May I ask what you’ve come here to find today?” Suzanne asks.

  “Well, I’m just browsing . . .” the girl starts.

  “Because—you’ve just found it,” Suzanne continues, taking the girl’s hand, and pressing something onto it.

  The girl is so surprised, she says nothing, and just looks down at her hand. On the back of it, there is now stamped, in ink, the legend: “This girl belongs to The Branks. 12/9/94. 9 p.m., Electric Ballroom, Camden.”

  “We’re The Branks. You’re welcome,” Suzanne says, with a flourish.

  The girl’s still staring at her hand.

  “That’s our next gig. In two weeks. Come! Tell your friends! Tell your friends to come!”

  Suzanne starts to walk away.

  “Hey! What are The Branks?” the girl shouts after her.

  “The rest of your life!” Suzanne shouts back, without turning round.

  We spend the next hour doing this: searching for likely-looking girls—the ones with piercings; Day-Glo hair; Doc Martens; fat; eyeliner; hungry, fizzing eyes—and stamping their hands with The Branks’ tattoo flyer.

  Some protest—“What are you doing?”—to which Suzanne replies, variously, “You can’t fight an unstoppable force!,” “When I’m famous, you’ll tell everyone about this!,” or, tetchily, to those who protest the longest, “It’s just ink, for fuck’s sake—it’ll wash off. Don’t be such a pussy.”

  “It was Julia’s idea,” Suzanne explains at one point—as we stand by the entrance to the Stables, scanning the crowd. “Instead of paper flyers.”

  “I hate litter,” Julia says, shortly. “It clogs up drains. Causes localized flooding.”

  I nod, and make a mental note of this: Julia fears localized flooding.

  I’m still digesting this when I notice Suzanne is caught up in a contretemps, several yards ahead.

  Julia and I jog to catch up with her, and find her surrounded by four lads—two in Oasis tops—arguing with her.

  “Why are you doing just the women?” one’s asking.

  “Yeah—we want your stamp. What’s it for?” the other chips in.

  They have that always-dangerous air of young men with nothing to do, looking for reasons to get chippy. Like open-mouthed baleen whales, sieving the whole ocean for a spoonful of grief.

  “It’s a women-only gig, I’m afraid,” Suzanne says, cheerfully. “No stamps for you.”

  “There shouldn’t be things for just women. We’re all equal. Having things just for women is sexist,” the shorter one says, smugly. “Are you sexist?”

  “Oh, yes—I’m definitely sexist,” Suzanne says, beaming.

  This throws the short one. “So, you hate all men, then?” he says, clearly confident Suzanne will say no.

  “Well, I’ve not met all of them yet,” Suzanne says, reasonably.

  The taller one takes a step forward, and opens his mouth to continue the argument. Sighing, Suzanne takes a small red klaxon out of her rucksack, and presses the button. The volume makes my tongue swell, and my eyes bulge—it was a proper, honking weapon.

  Camden grinds entirely to a halt—staring at her.

  Eventually, she lets go of the button. The dying echoes seem to slide down the walls.

  “Pub?” she says, turning on her heel, and walking toward the Mixer.

  “Why did you . . . ?” I start to say.

  “No conversation with cunts, baby,” she says, not breaking her stride. “No conversation with cunts.”

  8

  But sometimes there are conversations with cunts.

  “I don’t understand.”

  It’s 3:00 a.m., and John is on the phone. From Poland, I think.

  “Am I a cunt? Is John a cunt?”

  John is half-drunk, and I am half-awake—so, intellectually, we’re both equally poorly equipped to deal with this question.

  “I mean, did I fuck this guy’s wife without knowing? Have I run over his child? Have I missed my own, terrible abomination?”

  Yesterday, the new D&ME came out, and in it was a massive interview with John, conducted by Tony Rich. As Rich had promised in the editorial meeting, he has a “few ideas” about John’s recent success, and new audience. Those ideas, it turns out, are based around the opinion that John is a cunt.

  The piece started with brisk hatred, and then continued in that vein for another two thousand words. “It’s always interesting: finding out which ‘artists’ insist they are in it for the music, maaaan—here to push boundaries, blow our minds, shake things up, or just speak from the depths of their broken heart, but who will abandon it all in a second when they hear the rattle of a teenage girl’s piggy bank. Two short years ago, when John Kite was the shambling, revered chronicler of the darkest part of the night, who could have guessed that, in 1994, he would be putting out singles that made R.E.M.’s ‘Shiny Happy People’ sound like Skin’s Shame, Humility, Revenge, and causing teenage girls to cream their jeans when he appears on Top of the Pops?”

  The basic premise is that John is a craven, opportunistic arsehole who has sold out.

  “You were really onto something, man,” Rich writes, at one point. “We all thought you were the real deal—that the prize you were jumping for was to be this decade’s Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Mark Eitzel. Instead, it turns out, you just wanted to be this decade’s Herman’s Hermits.”

  John is surprising
ly hurt by all of this. I’d always thought that he was pleasingly distanced from the barroom sniping of the music press—“They’re just comics for kids who can’t get laid”—but then, he was always their darling before. Now they’ve turned on him, I can see, for the first time, how, underneath all the Hemingway-esque bluster of the cigarettes, whisky, fur coats, and signet rings, he’s just an indie kid from Wales who grew up on these magazines, and can’t understand why they’ve suddenly rejected him.

  “Do they know how hard it is to write pop songs?” he rages, at one point. “Everyone’s trying to. Ask fucking Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine, or fucking Public Enemy. They’re all just trying to write a pop song. Public Enemy are pop, anyway. Everyone can sing ‘Fight the Power.’ It’s popular! That’s a pop song! The Dewey decimal system would file it under pop!”

  He sighs, and says, “I don’t get it. I thought they would be—haha!—oh God. I thought they would be . . . proud of me.”

  He’s clearly embarrassed he’s said it, so I ask him what his room’s like to change the topic.

  “Booked before I sold out, honey—crappy brick thing, by a motorway, a literal whole mad sausage in the fridge. It would be better with you here.”

  “Not for me,” I say, cheerfully, whilst filing this comment away in the treasure box in my head where I file every lovely thing John has ever said to me. My plan is that when this hits one hundred quotes, I will say them all back to John, and end it with, “Look! One hundred compliments! This means you’re in love with me! Here is the inventory of all your unrealized love!”

  The thing is, as soon as I read Tony’s piece, I knew exactly what he was doing: he was using John as my whipping boy. Tony is exactly the kind of peevish, spiteful man who would publicly eviscerate a man’s career, just to get at a woman who once sexually rejected him. I have been John’s cheerleader—and so, now, in the quiet, cold war between Tony and me, John must be taken down, as a strategic stronghold. This kind of thing happens all the time in the music press—it’s such a small, incestuous world that the magazines are often used by way of a dead letter box, for writers to codedly snipe at each other, in front of eighty thousand bewildered readers. Tony’s not even being subtle about this effort: one paragraph talks of “a certain kind of teenage girl—the loud, attention-seeking, drunken ladette on the night bus, pock-marked with love bites, desperately name-dropping titles of books she read and did not understand, in the hope of impressing boys who are secretly horrified by her. Perhaps you know a girl like that—eh, readers?”

  I can’t help but feel that the unspoken last line of this Kite feature might be “Receipt for sexual rejection, issued to: Dolly Wilde. Account now closed.”

  John’s starting to sound sleepy, so I wind up the conversation.

  “Anyway, sorry to bore you, babe,” he says, as we make our final good-byes, and arrange to meet when he gets back, and send each other our love, “but it’s just: what if I am a cunt?”

  And then the man who had made twenty-six hundred people that night sing, and cry, and feel better about the world, rings off.

  I sit there for a while, burning with fury that my editor—Kenny—had let Tony put in that reference to a girl like me. Tried to shame me—at work.

  I smoke a cigarette, and then write a fax, to Kenny.

  “Surely the point of an editor is to edit out internecine hissy fits, posing as journalism?” I write. “Tony Rich has essentially used a national publication like a toilet wall, to write ‘Dolly Wilde is a slag.’ Am I now supposed to reply with a two-thousand-word feature on Pulp—half of which is a covert rebuttal, accusing him of being a dirty old man who shags teenage girls? Is this how it works?”

  In the morning, the reply has scrolled through: “Personally, I would find that deeply amusing.”

  I know the exact smirk he would have worn when he wrote that. I ring him.

  “Kenny!” I say, when he answers. “I want to work somewhere where I’m not being semi-harassed in print. Is that possible?”

  “I’m afraid we are as we are, Wilde. This is the way of my people. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the bitching.”

  “Are you asking me to resign?”

  “Are you offering to?”

  And I was so angry, I replied, “Yes.”

  9

  So that was early Friday morning. On Saturday morning, I realized something quite important.

  I was on the phone to Krissi, who’d gone back to Manchester. We were doing our usual thing of watching Live & Kicking together, whilst eating cereal. This was our Saturday morning routine.

  We’d just been analyzing Trev and Simon doing “The Singing Corner” again—it was a particularly good one—when a thought struck me:

  “Kriss?” I say, chewing on cornflakes and chopped-up banana. “I think Dad’s . . . moved in with me.”

  I looked out of the window. Dad was in the garden, digging a vegetable patch.

  “You wanna get your broad beans in now,” he’d said, going out there at 8:00 a.m. “It always pays to be self-sufficient, babe. The breakdown of civilization is always around the corner, heh heh heh. And who will survive? The workingman, who knows how to graft for himself. Peasant skills. That’s what you need. Get your veg in.”

  I enjoyed that this ode to working-class self-sufficiency was delivered whilst he held a spade he’d stolen from my posh next-door neighbors.

  When Krissi left, four days ago, my father notably declined to go with him. He said he wanted to hang around to “do a couple of little things around the house. Help out my lovely daughter!”

  He’d fitted a huge bolt to the front door, “for security,” but used screws that were too long, so they jutted out and kept snagging my tights. He’d noticed the rug in the hallway kept rucking up, and nailed it down—thus almost certainly invalidating my tenant’s agreement; run an illegal secondary phone line to my bedroom, “So you don’t have to get out of bed to tell people to fuck off, heh heh heh”; and made a “coffee table” for the front room by stealing an empty wooden cable reel out of a skip, knocking most of the spiders off it, and rolling it into place, in front of the sofa.

  It was now very difficult to reach the sofa. You had to kind of climb over the cable reel to get to it. Also, the surviving spiders have now taken up residence in the top left-hand corner of the room, in a terrifyingly large complex of webs. It means I have to keep them in awkward visual contact at all times when I’m over there, turning the TV on—in case they want to do that spider thing of jumping onto me, and burrowing into my hair. This is why I’m generally not going in the front room, anymore. That, and the fact my dad’s sleeping on the sofa, naked.

  This is a sad return to a persistent trope of my childhood—being haunted by my dad’s knackers. One of the main things I was looking forward to, about leaving home, was never again seeing my father’s genitals, resting in his lap like a sad, furless Bagpuss. But here they are again. Will I ever be free of them? My father’s balls are the albatross around my neck. Why must I always be confronted with the place from which I sprang? Can I never leave my roots? Is this a gigantic metaphor for being working class?

  When I asked him if he could, maybe, borrow and wear one of my nighties—they’re roomy!—he replied, “Nah, kid—I sweat a lot”—an unnecessary comment, as the room reeked of his Guinness sweats.

  On hot mornings, there was a palpable miasma. Like the kind of mist you get in rain forests. It made you feel drunk, to walk into it. It left a Turin Shroud–like imprint of his body, on the sofa.

  “It’s just occurred to me,” I say to Krissi now, watching Dadda lean on his spade, and smoke a fag. “He’s not actually leaving . . . he’s starting to cultivate. That’s not a man who’s leaving, is it? A cultivator? He’s planning a spring harvest.”

  “This is his midlife crisis, Johanna,” Krissi says, spitefully. “He’s left Mum for a younger woman. You.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Not in a sexual way—he just wants
you to look after him.”

  “SHUT UP!”

  “You’re his . . . Sugar Baby.”

  “KRISSI STOP IT.”

  “Johanna, I know you’re not going to like this—”

  “No!”

  “—but you know what you have to do—”

  “No!”

  “You’re going to have to talk to Mum.”

  Ten minutes later—after bracing myself by listening to the Pixies’ “Debaser” three times in a row—I ring my mother, from the illegal phone in the bedroom, so my dad can’t hear.

  “Oh, Johanna. To what do I owe the honor?” she says, in her usual, needling way. It’s a weird thing she has—always wanting you to ring her, but then making you feel bad when you do. I don’t understand it. When people I like call me, I scream “HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO!” at the top of my voice. I like the start of a phone call to feel like the start of a party—not the start of a landmark case at the European Court of Guilt.

  “How are you?” I ask, deciding to get all the heavy work out of the way at the beginning of the conversation.

  She tells me that she still feels depressed; Lupin’s being “a pain”; the twins have moved on from the “terrible twos” and are now in the “feral fives”; her feet hurt “all the time,” even with her new special sandals; the washing machine is “erratic”; and that she’s still angry about Sue Lawley presenting Desert Island Discs: “She’s too severe, Johanna. It’s like she’s put them on that island on purpose.”

  “Did you get my last check?” I ask. I am sending Mum a check for £50 a month, to help out. It means I can’t afford to buy any new clothes, but, as my mother once pointed out, “You might as well save the money for when you’ve lost weight, and can buy something nice.”

  The first time she said that to me—when I was thirteen—I decided to get anorexia, to make her feel bad. I lasted until 6:00 p.m. It was baked potatoes for tea. I love baked potatoes.