At the time, I think that is so subtle. I might just as well have written a 2,500-word repetition of the phrase, ‘I HAVE A MASSIVE CRUSH ON JOHN KITE.’
But after the feature runs, Kenny stops calling me and offering me work. There is an ominous silence. There are no more trips down to London, no matter how often I ring him. Perhaps I should have stayed at school, and got those A levels, and resigned myself to being finger-banged by Craig Miller, who isn’t in a band at all. Maybe I have made a mistake.
For the first two weeks, it isn’t so bad, as John is on tour in the US. I lie on my bed with the music press, and read the reviews that come through with the eagerness of a mother reading letters from the battlefield, from her son.
‘What’s he up to now?’ I ask, fondly, as I open the page on his gig in New York, where he had apparently ‘charmed the crowd’ with his ‘shambolic between-song banter’, which is ‘less the announcing of the [non] hits, and more a stand-up routine delivered by a torch-singing Withnail’.
‘I know how funny he is, because he is my friend!’ I think. ‘I have seen him be funny for just me. I have heard the jokes no one else has. I saw him do a piss. No one there would have seen him do a piss.’
A week later, the accompanying feature comes out, written by Rob Grant, who is on Kite’s US tour. That was when things go bad for me, as I enter the third week of Anno domini Nostri Kite. Oh God, the agony of reading this piece.
Lying on top of my bed, eating raisins, I read how Grant has basically gone in and stolen my perfect night – the night I would have asked for before facing the electric chair in the morning.
He’s been there for the gig, for a 3am trawl around whisky bars and, eventually, Kite sitting out on the balcony of his bedroom, at 6am, as the sun comes up, singing Grant his new songs as New York honks into life below them.
There has been breakfast in a diner – ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but this jukebox doesn’t work.’ ‘That’s because it’s a cigarette machine, sir’ – and then they took the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty, drinking whisky miniatures and chaining Marlboros on the top deck, with the sky blue and new above them.
Each paragraph makes me progressively more furious. I chew the raisins to pulp, black pulp. Grant doesn’t need this day – he didn’t even fucking want it! His favourite band are Can, and he probably spent the whole fucking weekend moaning that he wanted to get back to his wife and kids!
I, on the other hand – I would have eaten that amazing day whole. I would have squeezed every fucking dot of glitter out of the night sky, and then been riding the balcony railings at dawn. You could have shot me dead at midday and I would have died with a smile on my face. Why had I not been there? In an exquisite torture, there were people who were writing about the life I should have been in – but instead, I am here, doing nothing, just waiting, and dying. Someone else is writing my diary, now – and not putting me in it.
It is because while I am in this room, I don’t exist.
‘You actually don’t exist while you’re in your bedroom,’ I say to the dog, so that she knows this important fact. ‘Teenage girls in bedrooms aren’t real.’
I pull my knees up into my chest, in order to become more like a bullet or a cannon-ball, and look up at my wall, where all the pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and George Orwell and Orson Welles have been obscured by new pictures of John Kite. It perfectly represents the inside of my head.
‘I have got to get out of this room,’ I tell him. ‘Please wait for me. Don’t have all the fun now. Don’t fill up on other people who aren’t me. Don’t ruin your appetite.’
I bite my hands. I am doing more biting, these days – on my knuckles; on the thumb knuckles. This is like a grown-up version of sucking your thumb – biting. This is what grown-ups do when they needed comfort – they bite their hands, quietly, in their rooms. It quells the anxiety – focused it down into two, small crescents of tooth-marks on my skin.
‘I am getting out of this room.’
And I know how. Next week, John Kite plays his homecoming gig in London, at the Falcon. I am getting out of this room. I am going to get on a train to London, and get back in this game.
I bounce downstairs, joyfully, to tell Mum I am going to London to see John Kite. I am already planning my outfit – maybe a flowery dress, from the charity shop. John would like a girl in a flowery dress. I could kill John Kite in a flowery dress. In a good way.
Halfway down the stairs, I can see something bad has happened. Mum and Dadda are leaving the house – Mum crying, and Dadda slamming the door in his haste – and Krissi is standing, with a brown envelope in his hand. Because I’ve imagined this minute so often, you’d think that I would know how to cope with it. But I don’t. I’d never, ever been able to imagine past this point.
‘What’s happened?’ I ask.
‘They’re doing us, Johanna,’ Krissi says. ‘They’re cutting our benefits.’
‘Why?’ I ask.
I feel like I will wet myself, like when the children are terrified or have hurt themselves – but will simultaneously cry myself to death, too, in one, fast-forwarded, pyroclastic self-immolation.
‘They’ve “got some information”,’ Krissi says, grimly.
THIRTEEN
For the next six weeks, whilst pursuing their ‘information’ about a ‘possible irregularity’ further, the Social Services are cutting our benefits. Mum and Dad do maths on a series of backs of envelopes, and work out we’ve lost 11 per cent of our income.
Initially, I am relieved – I have been expecting 50 per cent, 90 per cent – every penny taken from us, and then what? Not even the poorhouse, in 1993 – maybe we would have to move into an aunt’s house, like families fallen on hard times in nineteenth-century novels. A spare family in the spare room, existent on charity. Seven Jane Eyres, of various sizes – throwing themselves on the pity of Aunt Reed. I’d have to sleep in a cupboard, and Lupin would be haunted by ghosts.
11 per cent, by way of contrast to this utter ruin, seems … manageable? After all, if I cut off 11 per cent of my hair, I’d barely notice. For a moment I think 11 per cent isn’t so bad.
What I’m failing, momentarily, to consider is that we are already on the very edge. There are no investments to cash in, to tide us over this 11 per cent dip – no bonds, savings or shares. There are no ‘little luxuries’ to cut back on, like going to the hairdressers, or a subscription to a magazine. We cut our own hair, and read magazines in the library. There are no grand plans we can temporarily shelve, during this cash lull – like replacing our car, or decorating the front room. We were never going to replace our car, or decorate our front room.
And there’s no one we can borrow from – for one of the truths about the poor is that they tend only to know other poor people, who also couldn’t afford an 11 per cent dip, and can’t subsidise ours.
The truth is, when you are very poor, that 11 per cent bites into the very bones of your existence. 11 per cent less means choosing between electricity, or food – electricity and food that is already rationed, and fretted over. 11 per cent is not very much – but, when you are very poor, it may form the bedrock of your survival.
And now you are standing on so much less than you were before. You are unstable. You are liable to fall.
The new maths of our existence has now been carefully worked out, on a piece of paper, stuck to the wall. Our new budget now, with no wriggle room for anything extra – not a pot of jam, nor a new pair of shoes. We cannot do anything other than stay very still. We are on 11 per cent less of was-never-enough-in-the-first-place.
The morning after my parents have made their new budget, I go into their bedroom, when they’re in bed, and sit on the end.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘This isn’t as bad as it seems. I’m earning now! When that cheque finally arrives, I can give you money!’
Making this offer, I have a combined feeling of relief and fear. I’m relieved that I can give the family money, and stop all this worry.
Besides, surely, the more money I give my parents now, the less angry they will be when they finally find out it was me that fucked up. If I can earn, and then give them, say, £1,000 before the big discovery, perhaps they won’t be angry with me at all! Perhaps I can buy their forgiveness! I will make them indebted to me! This is a good plan!
However, my mother immediately holes this plan.
‘When that cheque comes – if it comes – you’re going to put half of it into a savings account,’ she says, firmly. ‘And half of everything that comes after, as well. Me and your dad have discussed it.’
‘What?’
‘You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, Johanna,’ Dadda says. ‘Leaving school is a risk …’
‘It’s not!’ I say. ‘Everyone else on D&ME is like thirty, and they have, like, houses – it’s just a normal job!’
‘You’re so early in your career, Johanna,’ Mum says. ‘You need savings.’
Dadda gets up to go to the toilet – ‘Just going to water the allotment, love’ – and Mum leans forward, whispering. For a moment, she looks like she used to, before the twins came.
‘If your dad had had savings, he wouldn’t have had to give up music when the band broke up,’ she says, urgently. ‘When things go wrong, you need money, so you don’t get … stuck.’
She looks at the twins – asleep on a mattress by the side of the bed.
‘What happened with our benefits?’ I ask.
‘I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough,’ my mother says. She speaks with the kind of flat sadness that comes from being tired, and trapped. The kind of sadness that makes you wild with fear, when you see it in a parent.
And then Dadda comes back into the room, and she slumps back on the pillows, pretending to look like her normal self again.
The next day, two men appear on the front door step, and take away the television. We’ve always rented – everyone on our estate rents. Whoever has £300 to buy? – and now it’s the first of the desperate cuts to be made.
The children line the route from the front room to the front door like it’s a funeral – weeping as it leaves the house.
We then go back into the front room, and stand around the empty spot – like sad woodland animals around Snow White’s dead body.
‘This is like our mother is dead. Our real mother,’ Krissi says. Even Krissi is crying, a bit – and Krissi never cries. The last time he cried was when he fell backwards off the bunk bed onto some Lego, and a chunk of skin came off his ear.
Lupin is properly hysterical – it’s halfway through the first season of Twin Peaks, which we have been obsessed by.
‘We’ll never find out who killed Laura Palmer now!’ Lupin wails, dribble coming out of his mouth.
Even my suggestion that we ‘play’ Twin Peaks – wrapping Lupin up in bin bags, and leaving him up the garden – doesn’t lighten the mood. After twenty minutes Lupin complains that he can’t breathe properly – even though we’ve made ample holes in the plastic – and the game is abandoned. We sit up the tree, sombrely, contemplating a future without television.
‘No Blue Peter or Saturday Superstore,’ Lupin mourns.
‘Or Crimewatch,’ Krissi says. We love Crimewatch. We regularly take down the number plates of every car that comes down our street – lest it contain a murderer, and become a vital clue. Crimewatch presenter Nick Owen’s oddly menacing catchphrase – ‘Please, don’t have nightmares. Please, sleep well’ – is our traditional way of saying goodnight to Lupin, after we’ve told him a long and gruesome horror story.
Now, this farewell rings hollow in our ears. For the nightmare has, finally, come, and it is worse than a murderer.
It’s not just the television. Everything must be cut. There are no more boxes of fruit and vegetables from the wholesale market now. Dadda buys a 50kg sack of wholemeal flour, and at least one meal a day now consists of chapattis – flour, water and salt mixed into a dough, flattened into plate-sized rounds, by hand, grilled, and then covered in margarine.
We find that by pricking them all over with a fork, before cooking, you can double the amount of melted fat they can absorb – which makes them marginally tastier. There are competitions to see who can get the most margarine onto a chapatti – a competition I am winning, with over a tablespoonful – until Mum finds out, and rations the margarine, too: ‘That price-sticker – 79p – means “79p”. Not “free to little piggies”.’
We become experts at finding sell-by-date bargains. For a while, the local supermarket discounts huge tins of saveloy sausages, in brine, and we eat them three times a week, with boiled white cabbage, and lots of own-brand ketchup, or salad cream. We live on ketchup and salad cream. Without them, there would truly be a riot. The sum contents of our morale comes in 1kg own-brand condiment bottles.
A gas bill lands, then an electric bill. Mum arranges a second overdraft, to pay them: so now we’re going backwards, twice as fast. Lupin’s shoes wear out – but there’s no money to buy any more: he wears Krissi’s old wellingtons. His feet are perpetually soft, and wet, and white with sweat.
My shoplifting rockets – ‘Hope: Be Cute’, the sign in the chemists reminds me, as I stuff my pockets with tampons and deodorant. Like Robin of Locksley before me, I am stealing sanitary towels from the rich, to line the knickers of the poor.
Shoplifting’s harder, now, as there’s no more money for bus fares up town: I have to walk in and out: six miles there, six miles back, along the dual-carriageway, lorries whipping the hat off my head, over and over.
Often I take the twins with me, in the buggy – just so I’m not lonely during the walk. Or Lupin, and the dog – I sing to them, as we walk. I sing ‘I Am The Resurrection’, and ‘Cemetry Gates’ by The Smiths.
These songs mean even more to me now the money’s run out. Even the handfuls of 20ps to hire new CDs are gone – and so my record collection is stuck on the 148 records I had before: these 148 records, pirated from library CDs, are my whole world. A lighthouse in the distance that only I am steering to. A place I will get to, eventually.
In Central Library – pockets still full of stolen tampons, dog tied up outside – the twins sleep in the buggy while I read the D&ME, Melody Maker and NME I’ve walked six miles to. To get all the value, I read every word – even the gig-listings, at the front, which are nothing more than a register of the small-to-mid-sized venues across Britain in 1993: Rayleigh Pink Toothbrush, Derbyshire Wherehouse, King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut, Buckley Tivoli, Windsor Old Trout. I can recite all of these, like a rosary of places where people still go, and things still happen – and to which, one day, I, too, will go, and I, too, will happen. I will not stay stuck here. I refuse.
One week, there is an interview with John Kite in the D&ME, billed on the cover. I reflect on how useful it is when your friends are a bit famous, and interviewed in magazines. It’s a lovely way of being able to catch up with them in your spare time. So handy. Look how we are keeping in touch!
In the first paragraph alone, I learn that John has been given a new necklace by a fan in Germany – a crucifix, ‘For if I have a sudden death-bed situation and need to hastily kick-start my sclerotic Catholicism’, has written a song on mushrooms called ‘Increase The Lexicon’, and has had a small tattoo, of a Welsh dragon, inked onto his pale, soft upper-arm: ‘Although, I will be frank with you – the place we went was not reputable, and it looks more like a long cat, with eczema.’
The main part of the interview, however, is about class – currently a big issue. All acts are being asked about the recession, and the Major government, and benefits, and politics, and poverty. Everyone is asked where they stand.
And, so, this question now falls to John Kite – a Welsh working-class boozer and infamous bar-room monologist – in an interview with Tony Rich in D&ME. Sitting in Central Library with the rain pouring down outside, I read it.
‘There’s one big difference between the poor and the rich,’ Kite says, taking a drag
from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time.
‘The rich aren’t evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I’ve known rich people – I have played on their yachts – and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And they are not stupid – or at least, not any more than the poor are. Much as I find amusing the idea of a ruling class of honking toffs, unable to put their socks on without Nanny helping them, it is not true. They build banks, and broker deals, and formulate policy, all with perfect competency.
‘No – the big difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are blithe. They believe nothing can ever really be so bad. They are born with the lovely, velvety coating of blitheness – like lanugo, on a baby – and it is never rubbed off by a bill that can’t be paid; a child that can’t be educated; a home that must be left for a hostel, when the rent becomes too much.
‘Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you’re comfortably middle-class, what’s the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 per cent and leave your bins, unemptied, on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine – but maybe cheaper – go on holiday – but somewhere nearer – and pay off your mortgage – although maybe later.
‘Consider, now, then, the poor. What’s the worst a government policy can do to them? It can cancel their operation, with no recourse to private care. It can run down their school – with no escape route to a prep. It can have you out of your house and in a B&B by the end of the year. When the middle-classes get passionate about politics, they’re arguing about their treats – their tax-breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they’re fighting for their lives.
‘Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That’s why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won’t vote. That’s why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us – no walking around National Trust properties, or buying reclaimed flooring. We don’t have nostalgia. We don’t do yesterday. We can’t bear it. We don’t want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate, then. That’s why the present and the future is for the poor – that’s the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better, later. We live now – for our instant, hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.