No one here has read the famous letter John Lennon sent to the Queen when sending back his MBE – so, yet again, this great joke is completely wasted. I’m going to have to start writing these down.
‘I bet that hair dye’s sodded your grouting, Angie,’ Aunty Soo says, flicking ash into the sink.
‘It’s like having a big black crow, moping around the house,’ my mother confirms.
‘You’ve already used that line,’ I tell her.
‘I’m your mother,’ she replies. ‘I can call you a big fat crow ten times a day, if I like.’
‘Ah, she’s not a crow – she’s a black swan, aye you, Johanna?’ Aunty Lauren says. ‘The black swan of the family.’
Aunty Lauren is ace. Aunty Lauren has ‘a bit of a past’ on her – in the sixties, she was one of the hippies who poured Fairy Liquid into the fountain in Queen’s Square, and filled it with foam. It was on the front page of the Express & Star. In the corner of the picture, you can just see the corner of Aunty Lauren’s handbag. She’s shown us the picture frequently.
Last Christmas, she invented ‘The Snowman’ – the usual Snowball of Advocaat and lemonade, but topped up with vodka.
‘Drink a couple of those and, in the morning, your kids wake up and find you’ve melted,’ she cackled. ‘They’re left in their pyjamas, just holding your wet scarf and crying. That’s why it’s called “The Snowman”!’
An hour later, she tripped over the sofa, dancing to Fleetwood Mac.
‘So what you doing at the moment, Johanna?’ Aunty Lauren continues. ‘Fifteen now, aye ya? You worked out what you wanna be yet?’
‘I’m going to be a writer. A music journalist,’ I say.
I’ve seen dozens of films about what happens to someone in the working classes announcing that they want to do something ‘arty’ – like be a writer, or singer, or poet. All the assembled relatives will look furious, and start saying things like, ‘Your dreams are no good – you’ve got to put bread on the table, pet!’ and ‘You’ve always thought you’re too good for us, with your fancy London ways.’ I am absolutely braced to become an outcast. I am ready to be a young Tony Hopkins, storming out of the room, to find my muse alone.
That is not what happens.
‘Ah, good on ya, Jo!’ Aunty Lauren says, immediately. ‘Good for you, turning all of that bullshit into cash.’
‘Cracking!’ Aunty Viv says – which is frankly astonishing, given that she once told me off for getting her Little Stephen to mime the Barbara Dickson/Elaine Paige duet ‘I Know Him So Well’ with me, because it ‘made him look bent’.
‘You know what,’ Aunty Soo says, ‘I knew a kid at school who ended up writing the pop reviews in the Express & Star and it was a bostin’ job – he ended up going to Edinburgh, with the Moody Blues.’
Suddenly everyone in the kitchen is going on about people they know who were writers, or went into the music industry, and what a great career it is for a young working-class person to aspire to. I feel obscurely aggrieved. Can’t my family do anything normal? I’m supposed to be feeling rejected and outsiderish right now. Instead, my Aunty Soo’s tipping me off that, if you become a music writer, ‘You get all your drugs free, so I hear.’
‘Johanna doesn’t need drugs – she’s got sausage rolls,’ my mother says, pointedly. She’s been sitting, palely, on a chair in the corner, and watching gimlet-eyed as I put a whole one in my mouth.
With as much dignity as I can muster, I take the plate of sausage rolls and go into the front room, to offer it to the cousins.
‘SOZZER ROZZERS!’ I shout, spitting crumbs, as they fall upon the plate. I’ve never counted how many cousins I’ve got. There’s a good dozen in here – playing a game where they have to get around the room whilst not touching the floor, by climbing over the sofa, chairs, mantelpiece, etc.
My goth cousin Ali is sitting in the corner of the room with her Walkman on, viewing them disdainfully. I do a quick circuit of the room – climbing on sofa, chair, windowsill, mantelpiece, back to the starting point, still eating the sausage roll, shouting ‘That’s how you do it’ to the awestruck toddlers – then sit next to her.
‘Alright,’ Ali says.
As I suspected, Ali is being a lot more friendly today – now she’s not showing off to some boy, and is also surrounded by small children she wants to distance herself from, as their elder.
Still, I’m not going to utterly prostitute myself to her affections for a second time. As a power move, I turn the plate, so she has to take one of the more battered sausage rolls. She takes a shit one. I accept this oblique apology with a nod. She ignores it. We sit in silence for a minute, watching the kids hit each other with cushions.
‘You wanna go for a fag?’ she says, suddenly.
I feel as startled as if she’d said, ‘Shall we go and milk a bison?’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
We pick our way over the wrestling children, and go and sit on the front doorstep. She takes a packet of Silk Cut out of her pocket.
‘The cigarette brand of the working-class woman,’ she says.
She puts one in her mouth, and proffers the packet to me. I take one.
‘Does your mum know?’ I ask.
‘These are hers,’ she says, lighting it, shrugging. I put mine in my mouth, but she doesn’t offer me the lighter, so it just … stays there.
She exhales a contented line of smoke, which we watch blow straight back into the house.
‘So,’ she says, finally. ‘How’s Tina Turner?’
‘Oh, I’m over Tina Turner,’ I say. I’m not. I did an amazing ‘Nutbush City Limits’ last night that made Lupin cry laughing.
‘I’ve been reading Disc & Music Echo,’ I add. ‘I’ve been getting into the Stone Roses, and the Happy Mondays, and Bongwater. I mean, I haven’t heard Bongwater yet. But they’re my favourites.’
She stares at me.
‘I’m waiting for them to come, from the library,’ I add. ‘And I’ve been listening to John Peel.’
‘Are you into John Kite?’ she asks, like it’s a test.
‘Who’s he?’
She exhales again – clearly working out if she can be bothered to tell me. A quick look up and down the street confirms to her that there’s literally nothing better to do right now.
‘He’s this brilliant Welsh council-estate pisshead,’ she says, eventually. ‘Like a cross between American Music Club and Harry Nilsson? And gobby. He’s just done this live album where between songs it’s like stand-up comedy – and then he sings about his mum being mental.’
‘I can relate,’ I say, giving my unlit cigarette a cowboyish twizzle.
‘I’ve drawn a picture of him,’ Ali says, getting out her sketchbook. ‘I draw pictures of all my favourite singers.’
She shows me her sketchbook. Ali’s quite a bad drawer. I look at one bony blonde.
‘Is that Zuul, from Ghosbusters?’ I ask.
‘It’s Debbie Harry,’ Ali says. ‘Her chin’s really difficult. That’s John Kite.’
She points. We look at a scruffy man, done in pencil, smoking a fag. He looks like a fat young man made from broken bedsprings.
‘I love John Kite,’ Ali says. ‘That’s another one of him – but I did his hair wrong, and turned it into Slash from Guns N’ Roses.’
We flick through her pad – Ali still smoking.
‘There’s a lot of Slashes,’ I observe.
‘Whenever anyone goes wrong, I turn them into Slash from Guns N’ Roses,’ Ali says. ‘You just scribble in lots of hair, and put a top hat on it. That one,’ she points, to a Slash in a Puffa jacket, behind a keyboard, ‘was Chris Lowe from the Pet Shop Boys.’
Ali finishes her fag, and grinds it out on the step.
‘So you haven’t got any records yet – but you want to be a music journalist?’ she asks – almost as if she’s interested.
‘No. And yes.’
Ali pauses, and thinks.
‘Well, yow’ve got to fake it ’
til yow make it, kidder,’ she says, finally. This superlative gay drag-queen motto, rendered in a flat, Wolverhampton monotone, by a depressed goth.
‘Fake it ’til yow make it.’
I’m still thinking about how brilliant this idea is – a third big truth I have learned in a year, along with ‘Never tell anyone your secrets’ and ‘Don’t do impressions of Scooby Doo on live television’ – when the uncles suddenly spill out of the front door and into the front garden.
Uncle Jareth has been down the off licence, and has bought a bottle of Asti Spumante, and the other uncles are now busily digging a hole in Uncle Jim’s front lawn.
‘Gonna lay down this vintage!’ Uncle Jareth is saying. ‘We bury this bottle here, right – then on the day Thatcher dies, we dig it back up again, and toast her coffin.’
The other uncles roar their approval. Jareth back-fills the hole, manically – enjoying the sweat.
Uncle Jim looks at the hole, as Jareth lays the turf back on top, and bangs in a stick, by way of a marker.
‘All we can do is outlive the bitch,’ he says, quietly. ‘We’ve seen her come in, and we’ll see her go back out again. We will out-run this. We will out-run all of them.’
Everyone is quiet for a second – staring at the ground, smoking, in the way only men can. Then Dadda shouts ‘Because we are the BASTARD SONS OF BRENDAN BEHAN, AND THEY WILL RUE THE DAY!’, and everyone cheers, and Uncle Jim goes in to get more beers, and the chairs from the kitchen.
It’s getting dark. In the house over the road, another celebration has started to spill out into the street. Someone is playing ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ by Elvis Costello. They’re going to make a night of it.
If you want to know why we’re poor, and why Dadda doesn’t have a job, here’s why: back in our house. By Dadda’s bed. A big, white pot of pills. Daddy’s pills.
Daddy was in a band, and when they didn’t make any money, he got work as a fireman, and one day – it was a very bad day – he got trapped on top of a burning factory.
And when he woke up in hospital, they told him he’d broken nearly a quarter of all the bones in his body when he jumped. They did sixteen operations on him, and now he is the Tin Man – all screws and plates and tiny metal joints that we pretend to oil, with an oil-can, whilst he lies on the sofa.
He showed us a list of all the bones that snapped, and the x-rays, and it was interesting to look inside a foot, or a shoulder. There was a portion of his right foot that looked like powder – all the bones exploded into sand. And the screws looked just like the screws you would find inside a toolbox – except they were inside a man, a real man, who was our daddy.
Daddy was very poorly and we had to be careful of his legs: you could not climb on Daddy, or bounce on Daddy. Daddy could not do piggybacks, or races. If it was rainy, you had to cover Daddy with a blanket, because the pain got worse then, and it made rainy days particularly gloomy, because he filled the whole sofa, and his knuckles were white, and you could feel the shouting coming; waiting on the front door step, in the hallway.
‘I’ve got a bone in my leg,’ he would say, as we trailed away from him, with the unread story, or the unplayed-with puppet. ‘I am Arthur Ritus.’
And his mouth would be thin, and the leg stiff with metal under the blanket, and the rain and the rain, and the ants under the sofa, and the rain.
And he would say, on these most awful days, ‘I’m gonna get the band back together, and get us out of here, kids. I promise you that. I promise you. We’re not staying here. This time next year, there’ll be no more beans on toast. I’m going to be limping out of here, into a limo, and into the Ritz – and you’re all coming with me!’
And that was 1982, when there was just me and Krissi. And now it was 1990, and there was Lupin, too, and the twins. We would need a very big limo, now. One of those long ones, from America, that you see on Whicker’s World. Which we will not get whilst we are on Invalidity Benefit, Income Support and Child Benefit.
But some bits of Daddy ached more than others. We didn’t know at the time, but years later (during a night in The Bell – this is why we drink; all the truths are kept behind the bar! In the optics! Ask away!) one of Daddy’s colleagues told us about what really happened that night.
That, before he jumped from the roof – as the gas canisters were exploding around him, one after another – Dadda had started screaming the same thing, over and over again: ‘It found me! It found me! It found me! It found me!’
And that he was shouting it right up until he hit the car park.
And what happens, when ‘it’ finds you, is that something happens to your eyes. When you get angry, they go very pale blue, like bone china made of real bones, and your anger becomes so big that it fills the house, and everyone lives in it. You caught it, off the explosion. You are exploding, now. You are trying to be bigger than the explosion. Because you never stopped being scared of the explosion.
Anger is just fear, brought to the boil.
And the thing about scared people is, whenever you ask them for advice, on whatever subject, they only ever have one thing to say to you: ‘Run.’
A bad day.
I am sitting on the wall, in the garden. I am crying. Thatcher resigned two weeks ago, now – but I’m not crying about that, of course.
Dad is sitting on the steps up to the lawn, smoking angrily. I came to him with a question, and his reply has been long, and furious. I have chosen the wrong day to talk to Dadda – a white-knuckle day. A day he’s in pain. This is why his reply has gone on for half an hour, and has become louder, and more furious. I started crying about ten minutes ago. I am now kind of hysterical, but I can feel the speech is coming to an end:
‘… and so if you do want to be a writer, Johanna,’ he says, lips thin, and white, with fury, ‘… if you want to be a fucking writer – then be a fucking writer. Just fucking write. Write something! WRITE SOMETHING. Stop fucking going on about it. I can’t stand you going on and on about it. Get on with it. What are you waiting for? Get out of here.’
And he gets up and limps, heavily – quietly moaning, in pain, ‘Fucking legs,’ back into the house.
I’m hiccupping too much to say what I want to say: it’s not as easy as that! It’s not as easy as that, Dad. I’m only just fifteen, and it’s not as easy as that. I can’t just be a writer. I still haven’t heard any new music! I get scared on the bus alone! I sit at my desk and I do not know where the words are hidden! It’s not as easy as that!
It is as easy as that.
NINE
OCTOBER 1992
Dolly Wilde is sitting on a low wall outside IPC Tower in London, on the South Bank, wearing eyeliner, and her hair piled up into an ornate eighteenth-century do, fastened into place with Biros. Behind her, the Thames is wide, flat and brown, with St Paul’s doming in the middle of the horizon, seeming to emit a low humming sound, like a gong. This is London where John Lennon and Paul McCartney sat, eyeball to eyeball, guitar to guitar, playing the greatest game ever played on Earth – being the Beatles, in 1967, and where Blur are currently getting pissed in The Mixer. This is the best place in the world.
In the best place in the world, Dolly sits, with a notebook in her lap, which she is pretending to write in, as she is almost an hour early for her appointment, and is trying to keep herself ‘looking busy’. She is sitting on a wall because she has never gone into a café or a pub before, and is obscurely worried she might do the wrong thing in there. She is, however, secure in the knowledge that she is well-practised at sitting on walls, and so that is what she is doing. Here’s what she is writing in her notebook:
Everyone in London looks weird, they all wear camel-coloured coats – not like Wolverhampton where you have ONE COAT and it’s either navy or black and waterproof. They all walk very fast. Their faces are different – their features all flow backwards off their noses – their noses look like the nose-cones of jet planes. They have velocity. Everyone here has a purpose. You can feel the money
, in this place. You can hear it being made. I never understood why people voted for Margaret Thatcher before – it never made sense in Wolverhampton – but it does here. I understand why people here think miners and factory workers belong in a different century, and country. I can’t imagine anyone I know being here. The people walking by talk like they’re in a movie. I do not feel like I’m in a movie – unless that movie is The Elephant Man. Maybe I should have a bag over my head. That might work. I am so nervous! I can’t help but think everything would be much easier if I’d EVER KISSED SOMEONE. The kissed generally have more authority.
Dolly Wilde pretends to suck on her Biro, like it’s a fag, then realises she’s still holding it like a pen, and turns back into Johanna Morrigan. She has managed to be Dolly Wilde for approximately nine minutes.
This is worrying – because she is about to go in for a job interview as Dolly Wilde, as there is no way that Johanna Morrigan will get a job at Disc & Music Echo as a music journalist. Johanna Morrigan has signed all the letters to D&ME as ‘Dolly Wilde’ – she has picked up the phone and spoken to them as ‘Dolly Wilde’, and the twenty-seven album reviews that she sent them – all carefully written out on Uncle Jim’s computer, and printed out on his Daisy Wheel printer (‘Daisy Wheel’! I could have called myself ‘Daisy Wheel!’) – one sent, each day, for twenty-seven days, all have the byline ‘Dolly Wilde’.
Except, of course, it’s not really a byline yet. A name doesn’t turn into a byline until it’s in a magazine, or newspaper. Until then, it’s still just your name, but typed.
And today is the day Dolly Wilde goes into D&ME and finds out if she is going to turn into a byline, or just remain a name that is typed.
I have spent the last two years building ‘Dolly Wilde – music journalist’ as assiduously as I can. I have now borrowed 148 albums from Central Library, listened to pretty much every John Peel show, and am now an expert on the indie/alternative music of 1988–92. I have done a lot of thinking, in my room; I can now tell you what the music of the nineties sounds like, to a sixteen-year-old girl. There are three kinds.