I take the long way home – I stopped off at the playground, where a gang of thirty kids wrote farewell messages on my school-shirt in felt-tip. I have a cartoon mouse saying ‘WICKED!’ on my arm, ‘MADCHESTER RAVE ON’ on my back, and ‘UP YOUR BUM’ on my collar. I look like the wall on the Girls’ toilets.
When I get in, it’s gone 6pm, and Mum and Dad are in the front room with Krissi. They look like a furious intergalactic senate, on the brink of declaring war on a rogue Jedi, ie: me.
‘What you playing at, Johanna?’ Dadda says. ‘You’ve left school?’
‘You’re going straight back there tomorrow, and saying you’ve made a mistake,’ Mum says.
‘I can’t. I’ve given them my tie. And this is my only shirt,’ I say, pointing to ‘UP YOUR BUM’ on my collar.
‘You can stay up all night scrubbing it off while you explain to us what the hell you think you’re doing,’ Mum says. ‘You can’t just leave school.’
‘But everyone’s at school to get a job – and I’ve already got one,’ I say. ‘I mean, if I stay at school, I won’t be able to do my job. Gigs don’t finish until 11pm – I actually fell asleep during a swimming lesson last week. I was just floating face down, like the dead body in Sunset Boulevard, while people threw floats at my head. I’m already having to turn down things because of a stupid maths lesson. I’m never going to need maths! I’m going to be so good at English that I’ll earn tons of money, and hire an accountant! I’ve planned it all. I’m not stupid.’
I have never seen Mum look more angry. It’s even worse than when, when we were much younger, me and Krissi dressed a life-sized baby-doll in Lupin’s clothes and threw it out of the bedroom window, screaming ‘NO LUPIN NO!’ just as she was pulling up in the car. That bollocking lasted a full day.
This one goes on a week. That night, we argue until midnight – me crying hysterically from 9pm onwards.
At 7am the next morning, she wakes me up by pulling the duvet off me.
‘SCHOOL,’ she says. But I refuse to go. It gets shouty quite quickly.
‘As I work with the English language, I’m very loath to use a cliché like “I’m SIXTEEN now, I’m IN CHARGE OF MY LIFE”,’ I say, resolutely not moving. ‘It would be a trite piece of dialogue. So I’m going to “show, and not tell” instead.’
And I pull the duvet back over me.
‘This is me not going to school,’ I clarify, in case she hasn’t got it. ‘I’m in charge of my life. Ask Lupin to make me a thumb-sandwich.’
Mum does not find this call-back to an earlier transgression amusing. After twenty minutes, she leaves, to be replaced by Dadda.
‘You’ve got to get an education, Jo,’ he says, sitting on the bed. His attitude is much more conciliatory. Gentle. Almost … doubting. ‘You know? Pass those exams. Get those pieces of paper.’
‘You didn’t,’ I say. Dadda left school at fifteen to join his band. We know all the stories – gigging working-men’s clubs; playing strip-bars and US Army bases; eating steaks and learning how to play poker with prostitutes; and being only six months away from making it – really making it.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I didn’t.’
There’s a pause, as we both telescopically zoom around the house in our minds’ eyes – the stair-carpet, tattered and flapping on every tread. The bookcases made of bricks and planks: a piece of furniture widely known, on The Antiques Roadshow, as ‘The council estate escritoire’. The leaking shower, and the baby buggy with the broken handle, and the mouse-shit in the back of the cupboards. One of the twins is crying downstairs.
He sighs. His face looks suddenly very sad. I get up, and hug him. He pulls me onto his knee, for the first time in years.
‘You will really fuck your knees up,’ I say, aware of how much bigger I am since the last time he did this.
I put my head on his shoulder. He smells of fags, and coal tar soap, and sweat.
‘Oh, my daughter,’ he says.
I want to say, ‘I won’t fuck it up. I won’t fuck up … like you, Dad. I’ve learned your lessons. I know this is going to work’. But then that would acknowledge that Dadda did fuck it up, and didn’t make it work, and make his face even more difficult to look at.
So I just say, ‘Go oooooooooon. Let me,’ instead.
I hear him go downstairs to talk to Mum. I hear the low murmur getting louder and hotter, until it’s turned into an argument.
‘You know it’s more complicated than that!’ Mum shouts, at one point.
I put my headphones on, and listen to Courtney Love singing ‘Teenage Whore’. Courtney left home at fourteen, and became a stripper – and she’s absolutely fine. I don’t know why they’re worrying.
The argument between Mum and Dad lasts a week. She is obdurate that I should stay in school and finish my exams – he keeps saying ‘Let her go for it, Angie’, while she rattles red bills around on the dresser and frets about me ‘fucking herself up with a load of druggie freaks’.
I stay in my room, writing my reviews – only adventing downstairs to make cups of tea in a very respectable manner, projecting the most innocent and aggrieved air I can.
In the end, after a week of rowing, she capitulates: ‘On both your heads be it,’ she says, ‘But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ Then she says, looking at Dadda, ‘I don’t think you’ve thought this through. It’s going to be more difficult than you think. It’s a lot for Johanna to take on.’
I hug her, screaming, and then him – him for much longer.
‘I promise I’ll make this work!’ I say. ‘It will be good for all of us! I will be able to contribute to the house! It will be like when Jo March writes short stories to help Marmee out, in Little Women! Or when Pauline Fossil gets the role of Alice in Alice in Wonderland, in Ballet Shoes. I’ll give you fifteen shillings a week, towards board and keep! If Daddy goes to war, we can send him blankets, and brandy!’
‘The only war I’m going to sign up for is the Class War,’ Dadda says. He quotes his favourite line from a film: ‘Your dad wants to shoot the Royal Family, and put everyone who’s been to public school in a chain gang. He’s an idealist.’
He then adds: ‘But we could definitely use the brandy.’
And it seems he will get the brandy sooner than we all thought: the next day, Kenny rings up and says, ‘Congratulations, Wilde: you’re going to Dublin next week, to interview John Kite.’
ELEVEN
I am on a plane. I’M ON A PLANE. I’m on a plane. I have never been on a plane before. Of course, I’m not going to tell Ed Edwards that – Ed Edwards, press officer for the record label the legendary Welsh pisshead John Kite is signed to. I don’t want him to pity me. I don’t want him to see what I look like when I do something for the first time. I don’t want anyone watching me change. I will do all my changing in private. In public, I am, always, the finished thing. The right thing, for the right place. A chrysalis is hung in the dark.
I was surprised how little resistance my parents offered to me going to Ireland on my own. My mother said, ‘You’re going, alone, to hang out with a band, in another country? I’m not sure I like that. What are these people like?’ – clearly imagining Led Zeppelin in their pomp, throwing fourteen-year-old girls out of the hotel window, and putting live fish inside televisions.
But I’d shown her interviews with John Kite – him talking about welfare, and the Beatles, and his favourite kind of biscuits – and she sniffed, and said, ‘Oh, he’s not a proper rock star then. He’s just a musician,’ in such a way as suggested that musicians didn’t have penises, and therefore would not be a threat to me.
Dadda, on the other hand, was mainly interested in ‘the blag’: ‘They putting you in a nice hotel? Are you flying first class? And taxi from the airport? Ah, record companies. Benevolent mother to us all.’
Once he’d worked out it was costing John Kite’s record company just under £500 to send me to Ireland, he seemed content to let me go: ‘Big companies show how much they love y
ou by how much they spend on you,’ he said, wisely, smoking a fag. ‘They’re not going to spend half a grand on throwing you to the wolves.’
So here I am – just me, with my tiny rucksack, on a runway, about to go to another country. I note to myself, cheerfully, that last week, my former class at school made their first venture abroad: a French exchange-trip. Emma Pagett got billeted with a family who put her in a bunk bed with a twelve-year-old who kept saying ‘Kenny Everett’ in a ‘posh’ English voice, and had salami and cheese for breakfast. Her subsequent letter on this seethed with outrage:
‘We all went into town to see if we could find cornflakes. Tim Hawley was crying,’ she noted, with satisfaction.
By way of contrast, I’m staying in a hotel that has a swimming pool. With a star.
‘Bono’s been asked to be put on the guest-list tonight. Bono!’ Ed says, sitting in his plane seat like it’s a chair in a pub. He’s got the paper in his lap. He’s preparing to read while we fly. He is going to do a crossword. A diversion – for the bored!
I will not be reading while we fly. My face is pressed against the window. When we fly, I am going to be absolutely present for every metre, and every cloud. No one will ever have flown more than me.
‘Bono! Brilliant,’ I say. ‘I can make him personally apologise to me for … everything.’
I am currently pretending I hate U2 – mainly because I have noticed everyone on D&ME hates U2, and I guess they’ve just … seen through the whole thing.
Secretly, however, U2 are one of my favourite bands. If I hear ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?’, I sob, and can’t stop until I imagine Bono hugging me. I would love Bono to hug me. I would love Bono to give me ‘the Bono Talk’ – the infamous speech where he takes hot, young, bewildered things to one side, and counsels them, and vows to defend them, in the rock equivalent of Glinda’s kiss upon the brow.
When you get the Bono Talk, that means you’re saved. I would love to be saved. I would love someone to empirically tell me what I should do. Having to guess – improvise – all the time is so wearying.
‘He’s on at 10pm – it’s a late start over there – so we’ll eat first,’ Ed continues, filling in nine down. ‘Then after the gig, you get John all to yourself.’
The plane starts to taxi along the runway. I had no idea they went so fast. This is the fastest I have ever gone. We are already going too fast – and then we accelerate. Planes cruise at 600mph. Is this 600mph? This speed is inhuman, and unholy. It’s angry. Planes have to become furious before they can fly. They kick the ground away, and punch into the clouds, screaming. We are fighting our way into the sky. The earth drops away, like we weighed it. You count to three, and the trees and roads and houses become tiny. You count to six, and the towns have shrunk down to a grey patch, stuck to a motorway.
‘… he’s not pleased with the piece in the NME,’ Ed is saying, confidingly. ‘They put in all that stuff about his ex-girlfriend that was supposed to be off the record, and his mum rang him up, crying …’
Shut up, Ed – the world below us has turned into a map. A real map! The woods look like the ‘Woodland: deciduous’ markings of Ordnance Survey. It is just as they drew it! Who knew! Who knew you could put the whole world on paper, after all! The artists were right! This is so reassuring!
‘… and when we got to MTV, the only luggage he had was a carrier-bag with a pair of headphones in, his passport, and a bottle of duty-free mead. Mead! I mean – who drinks mead?’ Ed gives an amused chuckle. ‘John is mad.’
The windows go pale grey – we’ve flown into the clouds. Rainclouds are dirty, and wet – looking out of the window at them makes you feel you have temporarily gone blind. The inside of a raincloud is like a bubble of night. And then the plane pulls up higher – the clouds ripping across its nose – and we suddenly burst out into bright, bright brilliant sunshine.
And in the same way my first dose of adrenalin anxiety blasted through me like black flood-water, two years ago, this is now the opposite.
Sitting in seat 14A, in the sun, I float on a full-moon tidal joy unlike anything I have ever experienced. I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it’s always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on Earth – every day I have ever had – was, secretly, sunny, after all. However shitty and rainy it is in Wolverhampton – on the days where the clouds feel low, like a lid, and the swarf bubbles and the gutters churn to digest – it’s always been sunny up here.
I feel like I’ve just flown 600mph head-on into the most beautiful metaphor of my life: if you fly high enough, if you get above the clouds, it’s never-ending summer.
I resolve that, for the rest of my life, at least once a day, I will remember this. I think it the most cheering thought I have ever had. When we finally land in Dublin, and I go off to meet John Kite, I am essentially drunk on the sky.
John. He was not a beautiful boy, nor a tall one. He was round, like a barrel, in a shabby brown suit he’d mended himself – and his hair was neither one colour nor the other. His face was slightly crushed, and his hands shook a lot for a man of twenty-four – although, as he put it, later, ‘In dog-years, my liver is sixty-eight.’ But when the wind blew in on the street corner, you could see his heart beat under his shirt, and when the conversation accelerated, you could hear his mind chime, like a clock. He was bright bright bright, like the lantern above a pub door in November – he made you want to come in and never leave. He was company – good company – the only company for me, I soon found.
When I first saw him, he was in the saloon bar of a pub off Temple Bar, arguing with a man who was boasting about smoking eighty cigarettes a day.
‘But what cunt counts them?’ Kite asked, popping his cuffs.
He smoked every cigarette with ceremony – as if each one were hand-crafted, and contained a little gold – rather than being easily available from corner shops, in packets of twenty.
He’d walked into the pub – over an hour late – like a judge walking into court. This was, clearly, where business would be conducted – but this was also the theatre of the human heart, where all things happened and all things would be revealed, given the fullness of time.
He was still arguing with the man – ‘You smell like you smoke less than fifty a day to me, my friend. You are borderline odourless, for an obsessive’ – when Ed went over, and touched his elbow.
‘John,’ he said. ‘D&ME is here!’
‘Alright,’ John said, nodding, to me.
‘This is Dolly,’ Ed said.
‘Alright – Duchess,’ John said again. He turned, looked at me, and was suddenly fully engaged. All the lights went on – like someone had plugged in the Wurlitzer. The dance-floor flooded with jivers.
‘Dolly,’ he said, ‘it is a pleasure to meet you. Shall we brutalise ourselves, with gin?’
John was a beamer – a proper beamer. When he smiled, he looked like all his life, he’d never wanted to do anything more than sit at this table with me, and smoke, and talk, while we watched people pass by the window.
He smiled when I said that I would only drink Coke – ‘But thank you’ – and he laughed when I said I didn’t smoke: ‘I applaud you, Dolly,’ he said, lighting a fag. ‘I applaud your fucking brightness. The thing is, when you start smoking, you think you’ve bought a fun baby dragon. You think you’ve charmed a fabulous beast, as your toy, that will impress all that see it. And then, twenty years later, you wake up with your lungs full of cinder and shite, and the bed on fire, and you realise the dragon grew up – and burned your fucking house down.’
And he coughed – a big, hairy man-cough – to prove it.
And he clinked my Coke glass with his gin glass, and beamed until his eyes were just lines of joy, and we just started talking and never really stopped: families, and madness, and Ghostbusters, and our favourite trees – ‘Broadly speaking, I never met a tree I didn’t like – save the lime, which is an irredeemable cunt’ – and Larkin, and To
lstoy, and dogs. And whether ‘Septuagesima’ was a better word or phrase than ‘gibbous moon’, and council estates, and what it was like to go to London for the first time, and feel ashamed of your shoes: ‘Although not any more,’ he said, putting his feet up on the table. ‘Handmade brogues. £20 in Oxfam. They only hurt when I walk. But look how beautiful the burnish is. The vamp is of calf-skin; the closure-style – Derby.’
And within twenty minutes – and then, for the next twenty years of my life – I knew a very important thing: that all I wanted to do was be near John Kite. That things would now divide, very simply, into two categories: things to do with John Kite, and things not to do with John Kite. And that I would abandon anything in the latter in a heartbeat if the chance of the former was on offer.
I had met a good boy who could talk, and every so often I would look up, and see us reflected in the mirror, under the low golden pub lamps, as the fog curled wetly outside the window, and it was the happiest picture of me never taken. We looked so happy together.
John Kite was the first person I’d ever met who made me feel normal. That when I talked ‘too much’, it was not the point where you walked away, going, ‘You’re weird, Johanna’ or ‘Shut up, Johanna’ – but that that was when the conversation actually got good. The more ridiculous things I said – the more astonishing things I confessed – the more he roared with laughter, or slapped the table and said: ‘That is exactly how it is, you outrageous item.’
I told him about wanting to save the world, and wanting to be noble, and how being at the D&ME made me feel like an odd toddler. I told him about my hat coming off at the Smashing Pumpkins, and my dad and Pat turning up backstage, pissed, and he slapped the table, weeping laughing.
Emboldened, I told him I fancied Gonzo from The Muppets, and he took it totally seriously, and said, ‘You, my friend, would adore Serge Gainsbourg. Have you ever heard any? He looks exactly like Gonzo. Exactly. It’s my contention that they modelled him wholly on the dude. Oh – you and Serge are in the stars! I will send you a tape the minute I return home! For myself, I have always suspected Mary Poppins would be filthy.’