“That is Suzanne Banks,” Zee shouted into my ear.
Most people are built around a heart, and a nervous system. Suzanne appeared to be built around a whirlwind, kept trapped in a black glass jar. She seemed never to think before she spoke, took a drink, or opened a bottle of pills. She already seemed to be living three hours in the future. She was like a bomb that kept exploding, over and over.
I could feel that my mouth was open, like in a cartoon. I went right down the front, into the mosh pit, so I could be as near to her as possible.
“Good EVENING!” she roared. “We’re The Branks, and we have three cool songs, two great ones, and three flaming shits. The trick is—can you tell which is which? I can’t.”
And, still laughing, she started singing.
Oh man. Ten seconds in, and I think she’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.
When the gig finished—enlivened, at one point, by Suzanne wading into the audience and punching a man on the side of the head who kept shouting “SHOW ME YOUR TITS!”—Zee said, “Shall we go and meet her?” and I said, “Absolutely.”
We walked into the dressing room. I stood there for ten seconds, wondering what to do next—before Suzanne saw me, ran across, grabbed my hand, and roared, “Oh my God! You’re Dolly Wilde! Dolly Wilde from the D&ME! Honey! I used to be AS FAT as you! The secret is—don’t eat cheese!”
Within seconds, I realized that talking to Suzanne was like starting to watch a movie, twenty minutes in. Somehow, you’ve missed the vital first bit where all the characters are introduced, and the plot is established, and you get your bearings—and, instead, you joined when someone you’d never met was driving a car, backward, down a street, screaming, “Get in! We have to get those plans before midnight! Where’s Adam?”
Suzanne never, ever started a conversation with a “Hello! How you doing?” or, “I see it hasn’t stopped raining yet.” It was always straight into Ragnarök.
“Dolly! Dolly come here!” Suzanne was, clearly, high on something. She put her arm around me, and hugged me into her bosoms. She was much taller than me. “We have to talk. We have a common interest. I heard we’re Fuck Cousins!”
I had no idea what she was on about.
“I do come from a large extended family . . .” I began. “But my uncle . . .”
“No, no!” Suzanne bawled. “Fuck Cousins. We’re related not by blood—but by jizz. I don’t like to talk about it in public”—voice just as loud as it was before—“but I believe you have ‘knowledge’ of . . .”
And here she mouthed the words Jerry Sharp.
I don’t know how she managed to do it, but she silently mouthed these words in what I can only describe as “a loud way.” Several people turned to stare.
“Isn’t he a dog?” she said, furiously. “A man-dog?”
“Yes?” I said, faintly, and quietly. “I have . . . been with Jerry Sharp. How do you know this?”
“Oh, he’s a leaky vessel. He tells everyone. Don’t worry. Everyone’s slept with Jerry, baby,” she said, taking a cigarette from my packet, and opening it. “He’s like the Welcoming Committee for Likely Ladies. You can’t get into London without having to push through his cock, like a turnstile. He’s just there, waiting. Do you know who else he’s had? Justine. Anna-Marie. Rachel.”
I had no idea who these people were.
“How was he with you?” she asked solicitously. “Any freaky . . . stuff?”
She stared at me, intently. I’d only just met her, and I was in a room full of people—including Zee, who was so gentle and asexual, I’d always presumed that, if he had a penis, it was a knitted one—like his cardigans. I was not going to share the story of Comedian Sex Shame with this room. I shook my head.
“Come here,” she hissed, and pulled me underneath the table. We sat.
“When I encountered Mr. Sharp,” Suzanne said, “he took me back to his and tried to get me to watch his sitcom—while we fucked.”
“He did that to me!” I say. “Me too! Oh my God! I can’t believe this! What did you do?”
“Well, it’s not my first rodeo with a pervert. I’ve been around the block a few times. I’m twenty-five.”
“Plus the VAT,” a dolorous voice said. I looked up. Julia—the mardy bass player—was staring under the table.
“Shut up, Julia,” Suzanne said.
Suzanne pulled her under the table, too.
“Dolly—Julia. Julia—Dolly.”
I nodded to her. Julia had the tired, patient air of a zookeeper. Suzanne, clearly, was the livestock.
“For the purposes of rock ’n’ roll, I am absolutely twenty-five,” Suzanne clarified, as Julia, next to her, mouthed, “Thirty-one.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“What any sane woman would have done: I stood up, and gathered my fur coat around me, like a cloak of dignity, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve just remembered I need to absolutely fuck off,’ and left. Can you imagine?” Suzanne boggled at me. “Shagging while watching his own show! It’s like Picasso trying to fuck you, whilst drawing an eye on your chin.”
“Do you think he does that with everyone?”
“It’s always the same type of girl he hits on,” Suzanne said. “They’ve always just moved to London, they’re ambitious, maybe don’t know many people . . . they’re always . . . shiny. The ones with a bit of moxie. The ones who are going places. He fucks them up, then . . . eats their souls. Jerry Sharp is a vampire.”
“He’s just a prick, Suzanne. You don’t need to over-egg it,” Julia said, sensibly.
“You agreed with me when I said this!”
“I wanted you to shut up. The whole top deck of that bus thought you were insane.”
“It’s true,” Suzanne said, earnestly, to me. “The stories about vampires are true. They walk among us. Some men are into feet. Some men are into being sat on. And some men are into . . . making girls feel small. Fucking with girls. Shrinking girls. They huff their burning confidence like crack cocaine.”
I thought back to the night I spent with Jerry. It was not . . . an equal sexual exchange.
Zee’s head appeared under the table.
“Is there no such thing as privacy?” Suzanne roared. “This under-table area is reserved. For women.”
Zee looked abashed.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “but I’d like to talk to you, Suzanne, if I may?”
“Do you have fuck gossip?” Suzanne asked. “Do you know any sexual vampires?”
“No,” Zee said, looking very awkward, “but I think I’d like to offer you a record deal?”
If Suzanne was enlivened by gossip, talk of a record deal engaged her booster rockets. She pulled Zee under the table, and her body language constructed a secret booth that she and Zee were in, and in which a bright key light illuminated her whole face. She looked beautiful.
“Tell me more, Mr. Zeigfield. What’s your deal?”
Zee explained, with much stuttering, that his record label was new, but offered a 50/50 deal to bands—“It seems only fair”—and that they had complete artistic control. As he ran Suzanne through the details, it occured to me that Zee wore his knowledge about music very lightly. In all my excited conversations with him about Erasure, or Crowded House, he’d never let on, for one second, that he knew any more about music than I did. He could have steamrollered me at any minute. Instead, he just listened to all my theories, and excitement, and joined in.
Oddly, because of this, I suddenly found him ten times more impressive than I did before. I’d never met anyone with “hidden depths” before. Everyone else I knew—my dad, John Kite, me—laid out the entire buffet of their personality straightaway; as if we had pork pies and cakes stapled to our chests. Zee, it seems, only brought it out if someone actually said they were hungry.
Mulling on the novelty of this, I crawled out from under the table to leave. Suzanne grabbed my arm.
“You’re going?”
I looked at Ze
e. He clearly had much more to say.
“Yes.”
“Thursday. Come to my house on Thursday. We’re going to be friends,” she said, as if this was something non-debatable. “Julia—give Dolly my address. I’m going to talk to The Man.”
And she exited from under the table, and walked off with Zee.
“Do I have any say in this?” I asked Julia, as she wrote out Suzanne’s address on a piece of paper. “Do I get to choose to be her friend?”
“No,” she said, simply. “You’ve been chosen. In the words of Princess Leia to Luke—‘Good luck.’”
I was still looking at the piece of paper—noting that Suzanne lived in Kentish Town, very near to me—when I heard her roar from across the room: “Dolly—we’ll list every girl he’s fucked! AND REMEMBER! NO CHEESE!”
7
There is an unspoken understanding that the person who’s in a band is the social superior—even if they’re in a band no one has heard of. It’s something to do with the fact that they have formed a gang, and given it a name, and decided there are things they stand for, and things they don’t. Suzanne is “Suzanne Banks, from The World of The Branks.” I’m just . . . me, on my own. She literally out-branks me.
So it’s quite awkward when I turn up, the next day, on her doorstep, for our appointment, as arranged, and—after I’ve rung on the doorbell several times—Suzanne opens the door, in her toweling robe, having clearly just been woken up, and looks at me like I’m insane . . . even though this was all her idea.
“Hello?” she says.
“You said to come round today? I am wearing my best Fuck Gossip Hat,” I say. I point to my top hat, which—where the Mad Hatter has a ticket that says “10/6”—I’ve written, helpfully, “FUCK GOSSIP.”
“Today—what day is today?” she asks, vaguely.
“Thursday,” I remind her, helpfully.
“Thursday . . . Thursday,” she says, as if Thursday is something she’s heard about, happening to other people, but which she herself has not experienced.
“I bought a Rolodex,” I say, bringing it out of my bag, by way of jogging her memory. “To alphabetize all the names? Of the people Jerry’s fucked?”
In the early-morning Camden sunshine, holding out a Rolodex to file away sex stories seems very wrong.
“It was seventeen pounds ninety-nine,” I add, by way of further information. “I can claim it, on ‘business expenses.’” Suzanne looks pained.
“I think you need to go back to sleep . . .” I say, stepping backward. “Sorry. I’ll see you around.”
I start to walk away, but Suzanne emits a kind of “Gnargh” sound.
“No—come back. I guess I should do Thursday,” she says, gesturing me through the door. “Come in; come round; come on,” she adds—more to herself than anyone else.
I come into her front room and find Julia sitting at the table, eating a Tupperware container of dhal, and reading a book.
“Oh, hi,” I say, slightly discombobulated.
Julia looks up.
“Hello,” she says, in return.
“I didn’t know you lived together!” I say, brightly. “At the gig, Suzanne called this ‘her’ house.”
Julia stares at me, balefully.
“Well, she would, wouldn’t she?”
“Sorry about ringing on the doorbell so many times,” I say. “That must have been annoying.”
“Julia never answers the door. It’s never for Julia,” Suzanne says, breezily. “I’m just going to get ready.”
She disappears. Occasionally, we hear her shout something from her room—“Make yourself tea!” “Get cigarettes from the corner shop!” “Answer the door, would you?” and “My God—all my pores have opened up. They look like the mouths of fucking baby clams”—whilst Julia studiedly ignores me.
I try. “Do I detect a . . . Midlands accent?” I say, brightly, after the first, silent minute, as Julia continues to eat, and turn the pages of her book. “Because—I’m from Wolverhampton!”
“I’m so sorry about that,” Julia replies, which is a very Midlands thing to say. After another minute of silence, she adds, possibly out of pity, “Yes. You are correct in detecting a Midlands accent. I am from Kidderminster.”
“Kiddy! Posh!” I say, which is the traditional Midlands thing to say about people from Kidderminster.
“Yeah—everyone says that,” Julia says, still not looking up from her book. “But if you think about it, Kiddy’s exactly like Wolvo, but with a river. And a river isn’t innately posh, is it? It’s just . . . nature’s drain.”
“I hadn’t thought of rivers like that before,” I concede.
As Julia makes it very clear she doesn’t want to talk, I amuse myself by looking around the flat, instead—it’s clearly been decorated by Suzanne.
The walls are painted teal, an unusual color in those days—“I had to get it mixed up by a guy in the theater,” she told me, later—and everywhere there are piles of old Vogues from the 1950s and ’60s, delicate silk Chinese fans, embroidered shawls, and beat-up volumes that seem to encompass Suzanne’s two favorite things: Romantic poetry, and radical feminist classics. Keats and Yeats battled for space with Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and Andrea Dworkin. The combination has the effect of overripe lush excess—like a perfect peach, in the first hour it turns, and starts to decay.
It immediately becomes my ideal of how a grown woman’s house should be. It feels like Suzanne instinctively homed in on the most pure, extreme things. There is nothing make-do, and plain, in the house—no cheap beige mugs from the market, or a normal cushion from BHS. Everything has weight, history, purpose, impact. Everything means something.
I rapidly compile a list of neat touches I will steal for my flat—the beaded rose-colored veils over the lamps; the photo of an old lady hitting a Nazi with her handbag—when Suzanne roars from her room, “JULIA! Where are my BLUE PILLS?”
“On your dressing table,” Julia says at a normal volume.
“JULIA! Where are my BLUE PILLS?” Suzanne roars again. “My TRIANGULAR BLUE PILLS?”
“ON. YOUR. DRESSING. TABLE.”
There’s the sound of enormous crashing and bashing—as if many things are being overturned—and then Suzanne finally emerges, fully painted, in jodhpurs, riding boots, ornate Victorian blouse, and ratty sheepskin coat. She looks like Virginia Woolf, managing a football team. She’s just . . . good at clothes. Clothes liked her. She can make them look funny and hot at the same time. It’s an amazing trick.
“I can’t find them. I’m taking the red ones, instead,” Suzanne says, eating the pills in her hand.
“Oh, Christ,” Julia sighs.
Suzanne swallows them with a flourish.
“Phase One completed. Now—Phase Two,” she says, starting to make coffee in a stove-top pot, and lighting a cigarette.
I never found out exactly what all these pills were—the “blue triangular ones” were her favorite, and made her gracious, and tactile, and there were small red ones that made her “lively,” and some white-and-yellow ones that seemed to have a random, lottery effect on her moods, which certainly added an extra pep to the day. When I found out that Suzanne’s mother was American, it all made sense. Americans, I had noticed, love prescription pills. Suzanne had inherited her love of pills from her mother—like a chin, or a religious inclination.
“So, you’ll get this,” she says, sitting down, drinking the coffee, and dragging on her cigarette. “My whole thing is, I want to write songs for ugly girls.”
I don’t quite know how to take this. I see Julia roll her eyes, and bury herself deeper in her book.
“Have you noticed how all songs about girls are written about beautiful girls?” she says. “All of them. They’re all fucking mesmerizing; they all walk into a room and light it up; they’ve all got fucking . . . charm. But girls like that don’t need songs written about them. The whole fucking world is writing songs about them. Give them a break. Leave them alone.
Write songs about the ugly girls—they’re the ones who need them. And that’s what I’m gonna do. I want to make biffers swagger. I wanna make terrible skanky whores strut. I’m gonna come and get these girls, and mind-fuck them to glory. I’m going to lead the charge.”
It’s ten past one, on a Thursday. I don’t think ten past one on a Thursday expects this kind of speech. I certainly hadn’t. But all the hairs are standing up on my arms.
“Look at all the women wanking themselves silly over Gerard Depardieu,” Suzanne continues. “He’s a fucking hog of a man! A HOG! So why’s he sexy? I’ll tell you why: because he’s famous. Put an ugly face on a million posters and, suddenly, this ugly guy’s got currency. Awwww, Depardieu, we go, the fiftieth time we see him. I have become fond of your face! Because he’s famous—because we see him every day. Men have a bigger lexicon of what is hot. He’s hot now! With a face that literally looks like someone drew some eyes on a cock and balls! No plastic surgery or self-loathing for men who look like Gerard Depardieu! They’re beating off the fanny with a stick. So, that’s what we have to do. Women. We have to make ugly girls famous, too. Increase our lexicon. We’ve got to make lady-trolls as hot as man-hogs. Famous is the shortcut to power. It’s how you hot-wire the revolution. I’m gonna make lady-hogs sexy. And then—because there’s more of us . . . because we’ve got the numbers—the ugly girls are going to take over the world.”
I look at Suzanne. I guess you could call her “ugly”—a word I wince to think, let alone say, because it, along with the word “fat,” is used so often as a weapon, it puts my nerves on edge to hear it used as a simple descriptor. But she is ugly—her nose looks like it should have a Roman centurion’s helmet pressing down on the bridge, and her eyes are, now I look closer, quite small: it is the cunning, theatrical application of makeup and lashes that make them seem intense, and stare-y. She has wide shoulders, and huge feet, and the faint trace of a harelip operation, from nose to lipstick. In short, she’s not the kind of woman a small girl would draw as a princess.