Waiting for Kate Bush, page 4
Crinolyn began getting to her feet, a process that threatened to last a while. His mates led my antagonist away before he could embarrass them further. I was relieved he was gone, of course, and infinitely ashamed of myself for having stood back while Crinolyn did the heavy lifting.
Our meeting proper finally got underway. It wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for. As we stood up and introduced ourselves, the rest had to say, “Hello, Graham,” for instance, as though we hadn’t already had drinks and repelled bellicose yobbos together, which I thought quite twee. Graham spent most of his time unapologetically telling us about new recipes he’d discovered during the past week, never alluding to the effect of eating all the luscious dishes he described so lovingly. Nicola looked as though she were being tortured, which, in some key ways, she certainly was. Boopsie admitted that she needed to stay enormous to keep modelling for BHS, and everyone hated her for it. It occurred to me to ask if she thought BHS would make her redundant if she got supermodel slim, but I kept my lip buttoned. Crinolyn mentioned her weight only in relation to how difficult it made for her to catch her three defiant teenagers.
When I found out that addressing the group was strictly voluntary, I declined. Before we adjourned, I had to take everybody’s phone number and give them all mine. According to Graham, mutual support was the name of the game. We were all to feel free to phone one another at any time should we be struck by the urge to overeat. “But bother me when East Enders is on, or I’m having a row with one of my kids,” Crinolyn said, “and you’ll regret it big time.”
3
My Infinite, Familiar Shame
ONCE home, I was too excited about the idea of Nicola’s losing a lot of weight and becoming my girlfriend to eat. I put off calling her and put off calling her and put off phoning her. I felt 15 again. When I finally managed it, someone patently not she answered, but I nervously blurted, “Nicola?” nonetheless.
“No, her mum. Isn’t it a bit late to be ringing?” It occurred to me that her mum probably wasn’t much older than I, and that I ought to hang up. But I just sat there mortified into silence. “Shall I see if she’s still up?” her mum wondered helpfully, her tone becoming rather gentler. I didn’t say no. The next thing I knew, I was on the phone with a sleepy-sounding Nicola, marvelling at how it’s possible to hear some people blushing over the phone. All that noisy blood rushing to her face!
She didn’t remember me at first. “You know,” I insisted, “from the Overeaters group.”
“Oh,” she wondered uncertainly, “the slim one who looks like that film star?” I wouldn’t have guessed that she had it in her to tease so cruelly, but my exhilaration at her remembering me trumped all else. “The one Crinolyn was having a go at?”
I invited her to dinner. She actually gasped with embarrassment. I felt almost as though I had the upper hand, which I recognised as a mixed blessing. At all previous times in my life that women (or men!) had allowed me the upper hand, I almost invariably came to disdain them for it, and treated them awfully. Who but one worthy of the worst imaginable treatment would even dream of granting me the upper hand?
“I don’t eat dinner,” she finally managed.
“Then we’ll go for a drink and a chat,” I said decisively, feeling as though I was impersonating someone. She was too embarrassed to resist.
I offered Gilmour and Duncan money to drive me over to collect her. Gilmour was going with his friends to leer at pole dancers, though, and Duncan claimed his van was in the garage. I assumed it hadn’t been up to the task of transporting me, and was ravaged by guilt. Gilmour wondered why I didn’t take a fucking cab like anyone else. It occurred to me that he would probably always be thick. It’s not something one easily gets over.
I rang for a minicab, asking that they send the biggest one available. I have no idea how I managed to get in, but I got in. I suspect, in addition to The Knowledge, drivers are required to undergo sensitivity training. The guy didn’t bat an eye at the sight of me. He didn’t even offer any suggestions as to how I should position myself in the passenger compartment to keep from toppling his vehicle.
Nicola lived in Coldblow, in a road lined with trees and Citroëns. I wondered if one of her neighbours was a dealer who offered everyone in the neighbourhood an irresistible discount. There were, to be honest, a couple of Fiats too.
A tiny, normally proportioned, fastidious man whose bulky blue cableknit jumper was precisely the colour of his socks answered the door. He had awful teeth and the slightly off-balance look of one trying to conceal a bald spot with hair allowed to grow long on one side of the head, and then carefully combed over to the other. “Well, you’re not at all what I expected,” he marvelled. He offered me his hand, giggled nervously, and wondered under his breath if I had a fag. Before I could answer, a huge voice demanded from the lounge, “Are you going to have the simple courtesy to invite him in, Cyril, or leave him out there to freeze?” It wasn’t nearly as cold as all that.
He gave me a look that implored, Isn’t it something what we fellows have to put up with? I followed him into the lounge, where a mountain of skim-milk-coloured flesh lay propped up, listening, astonishingly, to Kate’s Never For Ever. They were Katepeople! This was going to be like taking candy from a baby. Which isn’t to deny that, with the best will in the world, I’d long since given up trying to learn to enjoy most of Kate’s pre-Hounds Of Love work. Sipping from a flute glass, overflowing the widest chaise longue in all Christendom, the mountain of flesh seemed to dislike me instantly, but nonetheless offered me her hand and pronounced herself Nicola’s mum. Her teeth, while bright white in a way that those of no one over 35 are without the use of expensive bleaching agents, were rather on the small side. Nicola had inherited her wonderful skin.
She stopped the music with her remote and sighed. “Every couple of years we try again,” she said, referring to the CD. “Given the extraordinarily high quality of the rest of her work – and I believe Under The Pink to be the greatest album of the last 35 years, we worry the failing must be ours. But every time we try, the result’s the same.” Being American and no good at irony, I couldn’t tell if she was taking the piss. Under The Pink is the unspeakable Amos’s.
“Nicola will be with you in a moment,” my hostess yawned, still bothering neither to reveal her own name nor ask mine. “She was actually ready a quarter of an hour ago, but I said it simply isn’t done not to keep a gentleman caller waiting for at least a short while. It isn’t as though the poor thing has had a great many dates.”
“If it’s all right,” Cyril said, “I’ll just leave the two of you to …”
“It is most assuredly not all right,” the mountain of flesh interrupted annoyingly. “For once, and let’s bear firmly in mind that your second chance might be years in the future, you will do the gracious thing, and not run off to sneak a fag while I’m left to try to converse with a perfect stranger.”
Cyril sighed and looked at the tops of his loafers.
“Well?” Nicola’s mum demanded. “Can you think of even one thing you might want to try talking to him about? How about sport? There’s a classically manly topic. Ask him if he supports anyone in the Premiership. Ask what he thinks of David Beckham. Every English male has a strong opinion about David Beckham.”
He looked at me sheepishly. I envied David Beckham’s golden good looks and extraordinary bankable skill, but otherwise had no opinion. “My dad used to support Chelsea,” Cyril finally managed. “And I think his dad before him.” The mountain of flesh snorted in exasperation.
Cyril changed the subject. “Nicola’s bedroom’s down here as well as Mother’s. It got too hard for them going up the stairs, and they couldn’t really fit anymore even if they’d had the strength. The past couple of years, I’m the only one who actually sleeps upstairs.”
“Oh, that’s a nice thing to be telling him,” the mountain of flesh seethed. “Just the sort of thing you want to tell your stepdaughter’s first gentleman caller in God knows how long!” The pair of them were coming more and more to remind me, in the one’s naked contempt for and unchallenged dominance of the other, of my own parents.
Nicola, blushing luridly, stepped into the room, sideways. She was radiant. Her hair and beautiful skin glowed, and she smelled as gorgeous as she looked.
“Nicola’s gained six pounds this week,” the mountain of flesh informed me accusatorily. “I suppose someone like you finds that very exciting.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I reckoned I was very much happier not knowing. Nicola seemed to be trying to faint in mortification. “You look gorgeous,” I told her, and she literally had to sit down now, as every drop of blood in her body was hurtling to her face.
“Oh, I know your type,” the mountain of flesh seethed at me. “I know it only too well, in fact. You and Cyril are birds of a feather.”
“You were a size 16 when I asked you to marry me,” Cyril exploded. “A bloody size 16! You bought your clothing off the rack in ordinary high street stores when we started seeing each other. Let’s not have another bloody syllable about me chasing chubby!”
It was all too familiar. The mountain of flesh didn’t have to say a word, but only to pretend pointedly that he wasn’t even in the room anymore. Cyril’s fury abated as quickly as it had appeared, and was replaced by embarrassment. “Sorry, darling,” he mumbled.
“You’re sorry,” the mountain of flesh repeated mockingly. “You cause a humiliating scene for your stepdaughter on the extremely rare occasion of her having a date, and that’s all you have to say?”
“I’m very sorry.” He looked at Nicola, who seemed to wish that a very large hole would open in the middle of the lounge floor and swallow her.
The mountain of flesh shook her head in disbelief. “You spiteful, awful little man, you.”
“I said I was sorry!” Cyril blurted furiously. Oh, this was just like my childhood all over again – the multiple explosions, the awful recriminations, the whole grotesque dance. And then, absolutely true to form, Cyril felt even guiltier than he had on the first go-round, and burst into tears. “Nic, I can’t begin to tell you how ashamed I am. I know this must be a really special moment for you, and here I’ve rubbished it.”
I couldn’t bear to see anyone suffering the agony he was in (and that Nicola was in too, for that matter, but in her case I didn’t know what to do). “Not at all,” I said in a hollow imitation of cheerfulness as I reached for Nicola’s hand. “It’s been a pleasure meeting the two of you, and I’m sure Nicola and myself will have a marvellous time.”
“After this little exhibition of spitefulness on her stepfather’s part you honestly believe that Nicola has any chance of enjoying her evening? I can’t believe you’re serious.”
We got out. If we’d been with them even a moment longer, I probably would have burst into tears. Cyril followed us. I thought he was going to apologise for his wife, but it was to ask again if I had a fag. I made Nicola laugh by wondering aloud if Cyril had thought I’d taken up smoking while he and her mum were dancing their awful dance. But when we reached the minicab, the gaping driver said, “You must be joking. You’ll need a proper black cab, if not a lorry.”
We decided to forego the bright lights of Dartford, and to stay local. There was a pub at the end of the road called The Goose & Syringe. Hours later, we arrived, Nicola glistening from sweat, breathless with exertion.
They did food. Their speciality, as I’d have inferred from their name if I hadn’t been preoccupied thinking what I’d do if poor Nicola collapsed before we made the pub, was foie gras, but they did Thai as well. My intuition was that a secret law requiring 50 per cent of London pubs to do Thai food had been enacted sometime in the spring of 2000 without anyone noticing. Or maybe the media had known full well, but stood to profit somehow. I think everyone profited, in the sense that even the worst pad thai is more flavourful than even the most scrumptious Scotch egg, for instance.
I got Nicola a still bottled water with a lime wedge and ice and myself a sparkling one with lemon, and a couple of baskets of Thai prawn crackers. I learned that at four months old she’d won a Beautiful Baby contest. At three, she’d been in TV adverts for Cadbury’s and Michelin. She was popular at school, and something of a tennis prodigy. She entered puberty early, at around 11½, and was surrounded by boys, whereupon her girlfriends, all a year or two away from full breasts of their own, abandoned her en masse.
Her mother, the mountain of flesh, left her biological father for having ceased to find her attractive when her weight came to exceed that which a standard bathroom scale would display, and took up with an actor whose greater interest turned out to be in Nicola. The mountain of flesh blamed Nicola, who, finding herself estranged not only from friends, but also from both her parents, found refuge in Haagen-Dazs ice cream. She knew that the brand’s exotic name was fanciful, and that the company was in fact the brainchild of a cigar-smoking dese-’n’-dose Brooklynite with hairy knuckles and dark sweat stains beneath his arms, but it nonetheless tasted to her like consolation. She became nearly her mum’s size. The boys lost interest, but her former girlfriends, preoccupied now with the boys, didn’t return to her.
She became ever more enormous. For a while, she was able to maintain a flat of her own with her earnings from the shampoo commercials in which clever directors and editors made it appear that her gorgeous cornsilk hair, always seen from behind, belonged to girls with supermodel bodies. Then she got too big to drive, and too big even for most cabs, and moved back in with her mum and the unfortunate Cyril. Since then, she’d actually lost close to four stone, but still weighed over 26.
As she recited this litany of horror, she maintained eye contact with me for a total of perhaps a second and a half. She’d considered suicide for a while, but then saw an edition of Trina, Britain’s demure answer to Jerry Springer, featuring enormous fat women and the normal-sized blokes who adored them, and reckoned there might be hope for her. Here she made another couple of hundred milliseconds’ eye contact. I’d have hoped she’d have asked to hear how I’d become elephantine myself, but she was either too shy or not bothered.
I needed to pee. She clearly wasn’t very happy with the idea of being left alone. Praying that the gents’ wouldn’t have a narrow entrance, I assured her I’d be quick.
I was, but in the short time it took me, two laddish sorts with spiky hair had joined her, one on each side. I prayed they weren’t ridiculing her. The look on her face suggested they weren’t. Indeed, the look on her face suggested she was enjoying their company more than she had my own. I went to the bar and ordered another sparkling water even though I’d got through only half of the one on our table. I went back in the gents’ and ensured there weren’t unsightly deposits of masticated prawn crackers in the crevices between my teeth. Someone came in to pee and gave me an odd look, but I reckoned it was more to do with my girth than the masticated crisps between my teeth. I undid my trousers and tucked my shirt back in. I prayed the laddish sorts would be gone.
Nope. In fact, Nicola was actually laughing now, throwing back her head, the lot. One of them had his hand on her thigh. She finished her laugh and touched his reciprocally. I felt as though back in junior high school.
I waited for her to notice me. I had a long wait. I wanted it to seem that I was just getting back from the loo. I managed a smile. Oh, you’ve made some new friends, darling? How lovely for you.
The whole of a Stevie Wonder record played, and then the first 16 bars or so of one of Marvin Gaye’s lesser-known duets with Tammi Terrell, before Nicola finally looked over. I’d have expected her to flush with embarrassment, in that way she did at the slightest provocation. Nope. She just smiled and turned back to the lad with his hand on her. Now it was his turn to throw back his head and laugh. How wonderfully droll she was apparently being.
All right, mate, I pictured myself marching over there and snarling decisively, on your bike. Sorry? Who am I? I’m only Nicola’s date. What am I going to bloody do about it? Glad you asked, actually. What I’m going to do about it is bash your heads together until you’ll be identifiable only by dental records.
Hang on a second, mate. You’ve left your wallet behind. What do you say I take these four £20 notes out of it for you? Make it a bit lighter for you, a bit less thick. Sitting on a thick wallet can cause chiropractic problems, you know. You’re going to do what? Ring a few of your mates and ask them to wait outside for me? Be my guest, mate.
I was snapped out of my reverie by the realisation that the one who didn’t have his hand on Nicola was on his way over to me. Your bird, gov? Awfully sorry. Obviously we didn’t know. We’ll clear right off.
Nope. He actually said only three words, you, and piss, and off. And to my infinite, familiar shame, I did.
4
A Postcard From Princess Diana
THERE’s something wrong with my DNA or something. Male toddlers are meant to be aggressive, but I’d be willing to bet that even as a toddler I was creative, droll, and passive, a born patsy.
Or maybe it was that there was no role model for anything other than passivity in my life. When no one ever defended himself around me, how was I supposed to have any idea how it was done? My dad happily endured all the verbal abuse my mother could dish out, and what an awful lot that was. She wasn’t just aggressively nasty with him, but rapaciously so, a panzer division of contempt, an endless deluge of ridicule. Around 99 per cent of the time, he’d look sheepish and cowed, a whole mini-menagerie of quiescence. But every few weeks he’d flare up in anger for a second or two, usually out of all proportion to the situation at hand, and she’d wilt like spinach over boiling water.
