And of course I’m free—because I’m not with him! The only thing that would ever occupy me enough to not talk to him, would be being with him. Does he not understand that the rest of the calendar is in plain black and white—just hours, with events written in them—and that anything to do with him is illuminated like a medieval manuscript, with gold-leaf griffins and azure-blue saints scrolling into the margins, and bursting out across the room?
I lean my head on the bus’s window glass—to cool my face—and think about John. I read a quote, by Carson McCullers, recently.
“The way I need you is a loneliness I can’t bear.”
I burst into tears when I read it. When you feel you have found your other half—the one you were meant to do everything with—every moment without them is just that: an unbearable loneliness.
The nearest I’ve ever got to praying is for John Kite.
“Please, world,” I say, quietly, looking out of the window, at the bench where we kissed. “Please give me John. I will be so good if you do. I will work.”
I notice I’m crying. Maybe I am hungover after all.
In the D&ME office, it’s business as usual. The landscape: a room full of old papers, and records. The vibe: like a Wild West saloon, filled with rock cowboys.
When I first started working here, at the age of sixteen, I was a wholly innocent, pudding-faced girl—blown away at getting a job where music lived. In an office of oddballs—D&ME employs ex-punks, drug addicts, Goths—I was just another oddball: a sexually voracious sixteen-year-old girl in a hat, with oddly Victorian locution. I presumed we would all accept each other’s oddnesses, and proceed as esteemed colleagues and equals. My Lady Sex Pirate adventures were no more to be judged than Rob’s ferocious amphetamine habit, Armand’s continuing habit of making up entire interviews, and Kenny being convinced that everyone is secretly gay, and making that the subtext of all his features.
But, over the last year, I’ve become more attuned to certain . . . currents, flowing through the place. Let me be specific: since I had a brief dalliance with the paper’s star writer, Tony Rich, which ended when I declined a threesome with him, and was then sick out of the window of his parents’ house, I have been the Number 1 subject of innuendo, double entendre, and outright speculation on my freewheeling sexual attitude.
I did not complete my mission. My mouth wrote a sex check my vagina eventually declined to cash—and, now, as a result, I’m devalued. I’m the kind of person who sexually betrays men. I’m a quitter. I will walk away from an erection. And this kind of girl, I have discovered, makes men angry. It makes them bitchy.
I only found this out when I was drunk, at an aftershow party, when I decided to tell everyone the story of me and Tony Rich. I thought they would find it . . . funny.
“. . . and when he called me his ‘bit of rough,’” I said, leaning on the bar of the Astoria, “I swiveled on my heel, like a Musketeer, gathered my dignity around me, like a fur coat, and I walked out of that threesome. I said ‘Good day’ to him, gentlemen. Good day!”
I expected all “the guys” to respond like women would: “Oh my God!” “Good on you!” “Fuck him!”
Instead, they all sniggered a bit, and then Kenny said, “I’m surprised, given your reputation, that you turned it down, darling. I believed your motto was, in tribute to John Lewis, ‘Never knowingly under-hoe’d.’”
And I laughed, because everyone else was laughing, and it was a good pun, and because, at home, Krissi only ever makes jokes about me because he loves me. That’s what horrible jokes are, at home. But I feel like they might not be, here.
So I’m part of the gang, but not part of the gang. This is a common position for girls to be in. See: Mary Magdalene and the disciples; Madame Cholet in The Wombles; Carol Cleveland in Monty Python. I’m not actually part of the gang at all. I’m just . . . “The Girl.”
“So, scores on the doors. What have we got this week?” Kenny asks, at the Editorial Meeting.
As always, the Editorial Meeting does not look like an editorial meeting. People are smoking, drinking, telling anecdotes, coming down off pills. If someone who did not know the working methods of the D&ME passed by, they would presume this was a field hospital in the Rock Wars.
Rob has his head down on the desk, and is being fed dry Krackawheat from a packet “to help with the terrible burning and nausea.”
Tony Rich is looking at his reflection in the window, and fiddling with his hair, whilst pouting. In advance of seeing him, I have spent weeks practicing a “noble face,” in case we make eye contact. When he finally does look up, it’s with a horrible, knowing grin, which 100 percent means “I can remember having sex with you whenever I want,” and I reflect on how unfair it is that people get to keep their memories of you, even when you have removed them from your life. If only there were some way you could, whilst breaking up with them, flounce around their head with a bin bag, going, “And I’m going to take this image of me giving you a blow job, and this vignette in the back of a cab, and I’m absolutely reclaiming all footage of me losing my virginity to you.” If only you had copyright on memories of yourself. If I could charge him a fiver each time he thinks about me, that would be justice. And would pay for a very good lunch.
There are the usual squabbles/agreements about work. Tony Rich is being dispatched to do his latest in a long line of eviscerations of U2 on tour. Rob’s done Oasis, hence his “rock illness” this morning.
“At one point, Liam started arguing with himself,” Rob marvels. “Said Oasis were the best band in the world, then said, ‘Fuck anyone who thinks we’re the best band in the world—we’re the best band of all time. Fuck those nipples.’ Got proper furious. Amazing.”
Talk then turns to John Kite, whose latest single has just gone into the Top Ten.
“Don’t bother putting your hand up, Dolly,” Kenny says with a sigh, even as my hand is going up. “I think you have delighted us enough with your thoughts on the swoon-some Kite.”
The first feature I did for D&ME, three years ago, was interviewing Kite. High off spending a night in Dublin talking with him, it was, essentially, a love letter, and nearly resulted in me being sacked “for being an overexcited teenage girl.” For the last two years, it has been the office in-joke that I am in love with him, and that his record company have requested I remain a minimum of one hundred yards away from him, lest they have to summon security. I tried, once, to explain that we are actually friends, in real life, and that I water his plants when he’s on tour, which resulted in Kenny screeching, “Mark Chapman’s got the keys to Lennon’s house! RUN, JOHN, RUN!” So now, I say nothing.
“Big crossover audience,” Kenny was saying. “The Kids are into it. What’s our take?”
“I volunteer,” Tony Rich says, raising his hand languidly. “I feel like I’ve got some stuff I could run with.”
“SOLD!” Kenny says. “We done? Pub?”
Everyone half stands, ready to leave.
“It’s just . . .” I say.
Everyone turns to look at me, and then sits back down, reluctantly.
“I was thinking of doing a piece . . . about how male Britpop is?”
I would say the response around the table is “mainly irritated.”
“Go on, Gloria Steinem,” Kenny sighs.
“It’s really noticeable how few female artists are involved in Britpop,” I say, earnestly. “Basically, Louise from Sleeper is having to represent a whole gender. Do you know how many bands at last year’s Reading Festival had women in? Eight. Out of sixty-six. Elastica, Echobelly, Lush, Hole, Sleeper, Transglobal Underground, Tiny Monroe, and Salad. That’s it. It’s all very blokey. It’s all a bit ‘No girls allowed in the treehouse.’”
“You know, she’s got a point,” Rob said. Rob was the nearest I had to a feminist ally at the paper, although he did feminism his way. Today, this was by adding, sympathetically: “There’s hardly any flange in the paper.”
He starts leafing thro
ugh this week’s issue, on the table, reviewing each page. “No flange; no flange; no flange; flange—oh no. That’s not flange. That’s Richey from the Manics. Get a haircut, love. You’re confusing me.”
“So, what should we do?” Kenny asks, slightly aggressively. He really wants to go to the pub.
The problem is, I don’t know, exactly, what we should do—I have this thing where I don’t often know what I really think until I start talking, and then my mouth suddenly says what I was subconsciously pondering. I was hoping that, when I raised the issue, everyone else would join in, and we’d have a conversation about it, and I’d work it out. But there is no conversation happening here. So I can’t work it out.
I shrug.
“Important point raised, Wilde,” Kenny says, impatiently. “Keep having a think about it, and let us know, yeah? And . . . off we fuck to the pub, then.”
Everyone gets up to leave, and I think: I don’t know if I should work here anymore. I feel . . . lonely. I feel like all those pictures of the heads of state of the world, where it’s eighty-nine men in suits, and then the Queen, being a woman, on her own. I feel like the Queen, but without her backup of castles.
As I fiddle around with a broken strap on my rucksack, Kenny sidles over to me.
“Did you know Tony’s seeing Camilla from Polydor now?” he says, a look of sly glee on his face.
Camilla is a very posh, very blond, very thin woman who, I believe, on her passport, under “occupation,” has “coke whore.” Even though she’s awful and he’s a bastard, and my mother would refer to such a situation with a tight-lipped, “Well, at least they’re not ruining another couple,” this information still makes me feel slightly nauseous. There’s always a part of you that hopes, when you break up with someone, that they cry for six weeks, then get on a horse and say, “No woman will ever be your equal. I am going to join the Crusades, and die for Christ in your name, you extraordinary creature.”
Banging Camilla from Polydor is the exact opposite of that.
“I wish them both great joy,” I say with dignity. “If they share things equally, that’s an inch of penis each—enough for a sexual feast.”
Actually, Tony Rich has a perfectly average-sized penis—but it is traditional, as soon as you break up with someone, to tell everyone they have a tiny penis. The impression you have to give is that, when you broke up, you took most of their penis with you. I presume it’s an ancient, witchcraft thing. I can’t argue with it.
Kenny is still laughing as I leave, thinking, it’s time for me to leave this place. The Queen would not put up with this.
6
A week later, I went to the Good Mixer, to meet Zee. Zee was already standing at the bar, and at the center of some fuss, as usual. Zee does not drink alcohol—something so unusual, in the nineties, that barmen across London were regularly put into a tailspin by his presence.
As I draw level with Zee, and hug him, the barman is saying, in a borderline angry way, “What—you mean . . . just a black currant? With nothing in it?”
“Yes—just a pint of Ribena, please,” Zee says, blinking anxiously. He hates to cause fuss or disturbance of any kind—and, knowing how regularly problematic his nondrinking is, he regularly asks if we can not meet in a pub. I have to tell him, sadly, that that will never be possible, for the pub is the citadel of all joy.
“Not even . . . a vodka?” the barman continues incredulously. “Just with . . . water? I mean, I don’t even know what to charge you.”
He fiddles around with the till, disgustedly. It appears there is no “pint of Ribena” button. He sighs—the deep, heavy sigh of a man who has been tested to the limits.
“Ten pence?”
Zee slides across a ten pence piece. Even though the barman has asked for it, he looks as if picking up such a small sum will degrade him.
“Thank you, thank you,” Zee says, blinking, and taking a sip of Ribena. The barman is still agitated.
“I mean, it’s not even worth getting the glass wet for ten pence,” he continues to complain before turning to me. “What do you want?”
“Three shots of Jack in a pint glass, topped up with Coke,” I say, briskly. This is my drink, “The Wilde.” You can sip it like a pint, but it kicks like spirits. I am endlessly impressed with this invention.
“A proper drink, then,” the barman says, pointedly, to Zee.
I carefully take my receipt, and put it in my special purse. I can claim all drinks “on expenses.” This is one of many odd things about my life. I can get drunk for free—indeed, I travel around the world for free, interviewing bands—but I cannot afford new clothes, or “stuff,” or a flat bigger than a medium-sized shed. I live a life in which luxuries are essentials, but practical things unaffordable. It lends an odd perspective. I essentially lead the life of a globe-trotting, drunken, yet bankrupt playboy.
We take our glasses to an empty table, and sit. I beam at Zee. It’s lovely to see him. I take a sip of my drink, which tastes—as the first drink always does—like the beginning of adventures, and light a cigarette which tastes—as the first cigarette always does—like the beginning of the conversation.
The late-summer sunshine is slanting, copper, through the windows—the open door lets the sound of the men from Arlington House, the homeless refuge, float in; they are sitting on the doorstep outside, arguing. Behind me, two members of Blur are playing pool. I feel a swell of love for London. It’s always so busy being London. Oh, this is definitely the place for me.
“So—how are you?” I ask Zee. “Snazzy jumper.”
“Yeah—it’s another Mum Special,” Zee says. Zee’s mum gets him all his clothes. He’s head-to-toe in Marks & Spencer’s stuff she bought him in the sales. He’s the only person I know who wears ironed clothes. She comes down every month, and does his laundry: “Don’t argue with Iranian mums,” he sighs.
We swap life news. For the last few months, Zee has been making gnomic statements about something he’s doing, referring to it as “that thing,” or “you know.”
For a while, I just nodded—pretending I knew what it was even though I didn’t. Then I found out that he was actually starting his own record label, but was too embarrassed to talk about it. This was mainly because the D&ME staff found it hilarious.
The last time I was in the office, Rob Grant greeted him with an, “Awlright, Richard Branson,” as Zee shuffled in to file his copy. “You parked the balloon outside? You wanna watch the wardens on the double yellows. Don’t wanna get a ticket for your blimp. That’ll dent your trillions.”
When it came to Zee’s record label, the guys at the D&ME had the air of leisured gentlemen, horrified that an acquaintance has betrayed them, and gone into trade.
“Why the fuck would you want to make more records?” Rob would ask, casting a hand around the D&ME offices.
There were records everywhere you looked, piled on shelves, scattered across desks, heaped on the floor, nailed to the wall with “FUCK OFF” scrawled across them.
As if to prove his point, the postboy arrived at that moment, with another sack full of them.
“They’re replicating, like fucking Tribbles,” Rob continued, despairingly.
That afternoon finished, as many afternoons at D&ME did: with Kenny opening the windows, and skimming records out, one at a time, into the London sky, whilst Rob Grant shot at them with a BB gun.
“Fuck you, Yoghurt Belly! African Head Charge! Land of Barbara! Mr. Ray’s Wig World! Huge Baby!” Rob screamed, as he pumped pellets into them, and they exploded over the Thames.
Zee, however, has continued in his quiet, determined way.
“How is Zee Records?” I ask.
“Still not called that. Still not called anything.”
We spend ten minutes spitballing names for the label: “Unisex”; “Test Pressing” . . . I like “The Vinyl Solution” but Zee vetoes it. We order more drinks.
“So, what you up to?” Zee asks.
I don’t want to ex
plain that I’m trying, desperately, not to go back to my flat, as my father and brother are getting stoned there, so I talk about work instead.
“Do you think the D&ME is a bit . . . blokey?” I say. “This time last year, it was all Riot Grrrl and PJ Harvey. This week, the only picture of a woman—in the entire paper—is of the Titanic.”
Zee looks confused.
“All ships are female,” I explain. He winces at the fact—and then, in a rare moment of insistence, leans across the table and says:
“And this is why you need to come and see this band tonight. I’ve just discovered them. I think I’m going to sign them. I think you’d like them,” Zee says. “I think you’d like . . . her.”
Making an entrance is an underrated art. We throw the phrase around too casually—we use it about someone who has simply walked through a door. Most people just . . . walk through the goddamn door. But people who can really make an entrance walk in like they’ve just left the Napoleonic battlefield, or the Algonquin Round Table, or a Roman orgy, and stepped into your world. That only a second ago, they put down a sword, or a cocktail, or a man—and that, soon, they will return to them. Making an entrance is their job.
The rest of the band were already onstage: a drummer, who was just “the drummer,” an identikit man who I would imagine even the band referred to as just “the drummer.” On bass was a brown girl with a massive corona of hair, wearing Wellington boots and a yellow rain mac. She had the pissed-off air of Chris Lowe from the Pet Shop Boys—I enjoyed her anti-Britpop mardiness. She looked like, at any minute, she might look at her watch, sigh, and leave the stage. Her un-rock ’n’ rollness was very rock ’n’ roll. She and the drummer held down a basic, restless backbeat whilst we waited for the lead singer to arrive.
And then—there she was. Cigarette in mouth, dressed in junk-shop glam—leopard-skin fur coat, pearls, thighs, blue suede boots—striding across the stage as if she were about to start a fight. As the band reached a fraught crescendo, she threw down her cigarette, brought the guitar round with a flourish, shouted “NOW!” and struck the opening chord.