Waiting for kate bush, p.9
Waiting for Kate Bush, page 9
Her name was Indira. She was studying to become an orthodontist. “I reckon anybody who can straighten teeth will never starve in Britain.” Her own teeth were exemplarily straight and white. I supposed that orthodontia students were able to have their teeth bleached at a significant discount. Her moustache was faint, but not so faint that you didn’t notice it right after the remarkable nose, and even before the wonderful teeth. She addressed me as sir. She seemed to be travelling alone.
I could feel a Diane Geller situation coming up. Back in junior high school, when I commonly summoned the nerve to invite pretty girls to dance, I never actually spoke to them as I shoved them gracelessly across the dance floor. If anything, poor Diane Geller was as Semitic as the girls I fancied were blonde (often artificially, but that made it even better for me), as short and thick as they were tall and slender, as eager as they were aloof, as dowdy as they were tawdry. And here she came cutting in on the surfer girl beauty I’d been studiously ignoring while shoving her around the dance floor, tapping her on the shoulder to indicate that she wanted to dance with me.
Surely every eye on the premises was fixed now on me and Diane Geller, and every mind attached to the eyes thinking, They suit each other. Oh, the unbearable shame.
A better person than I – a decent person, a person not destined to become a corpulent grotesque later in life – would have seen the song out. But not Leslie Herskovits. Eight bars after losing his surfer girl, Leslie Herskovits abruptly let go of poor Diane Geller’s hand, mumbled, “Excuse me,” and ran for the gym, there to be picked last for an impromptu game of basketball. The memory of all of which made me absolutely ravenous, of course.
I imagined Indira’s whole life. I imagined she’d never been asked out, much less made love to, and that she was on her way to Ibiza because she’d heard it was impossible not to get shagged there. It broke my heart, and it wasn’t my problem. Even we self-loathing grotesques have our standards.
Well, I was going to do better by her than I’d done by poor Diane Geller. I was going to be forthright. My message would be cruel, but my tone kind.
“Listen, darling,” I interrupted her. “There’s something I need to say to you right now, before we even converse any more. Attraction is a strange, inexplicable phenomenon. Who can say for sure why one person finds another attractive? Is it something inborn, or something learned? I don’t pretend to know. What I do know is that, although I find you personable and vivacious, and assume you’re very intelligent as well, and even though I appreciate your trying to intervene on my behalf when that moron tried to take my second seat, I just don’t think it very likely that I’ll ever come to fancy you.”
I’d actually done the right thing. It was exhilarating. And she was coping with it! All the fears we carry around within ourselves of others not being able to deal with our candour? Maybe most of them are ill-founded! The look on her face hadn’t changed. There were no tears in her eyes.
“Oh, I don’t think I could ever fancy you either,” she said. “You’re far too old for me, for a start. And I’m actually going on holiday with my boyfriend, Ranjana. He’s our co-pilot, you see. I’m flying free.”
We waited for our luggage together, Indira and I. When her bag came, and she left with it, the blond idiot with the pierced eyebrow and his mate Chris came over. I expected the worst, and got it. “We don’t fancy yours much,” they said, and then roared with laughter. Everyone seemed to be looking at us. For a long moment, I considered whirling round and seeing if my ripping the stud out of his forehead might make the blond idiot a little less generous with his opinions, but of course I didn’t.
* * *
It occurred to me on the taxi ride to my hotel that, aside from the locals, I might be the only person on the island over 30, or anywhere near my size. It occurred to me I needn’t have come to Ibiza to feel alienated, but then remembered I’d come so I could tell Nicola without lying that I’d done so. I had told more than three lifetimes’ share of lies by the age of around 35, and was commonly caught out and humiliated. I tell the truth now not because I’m any more noble, but because I’ve come to realise you usually get caught anyway.
By the time I got up to my hotel, my clothing was sticking to my skin. The lobby was full of blazing red British young people in shorts and the agonised expressions of hangover sufferers, although in some cases it might well have been sexually transmitted infections making them so miserable. “I’ll never raise another pint to my lips,” a tall, skinny ginger-haired boyo moaned in the cadence of Cardiff. “And you can quote me.”
I went out and found a tapas restaurant, where I ordered aceitunas aliñadas, alcachofas a la vinagreta, canelon de atun, tostadas de pisto, tortilla española, patatas ali-oli, ternera asada, plato combinado, jamon iberico, salpicon de marisco, salmon ahumado, ensalada rusa, pimientos asados, patatas bravas, pincho de pollo, champiñones a la plancha, pincho de solomillo, queso de cabra, croquetas de pollo, calamares a la plancha, gambas al ajillo, pulpo a la plancha, patatas a la importancia, salmon a la pimienta, raxo adobado, mejillones a la marinera, chorizo y morcilla, almejas en salsa verde, and vieiras a la plancha. I’d have ordered something else, but that’s all they had on the menu, and only celebrities can order off the menu.
The pulpo and chorizo were so delicious I had a second portion of each, and then wasn’t only unable to eat anything more, but probably in greater pain than the hungover kids in the hotel lobby. But of course I deserved to suffer, if not to be gaped at as a quartet of waiters were doing. “Lo siento,” one of them apologised. “But it is such pleasure for us to see a British person enjoying our cuisine. Most of your young compatriots come in wanting only chips and lager. It is like spitting in the face of the chef’s mother. Sometimes we want to cut their hearts out and stew them until tender in the chef’s special tomato sauce.”
I suppose I looked aghast. The waiter laughed. “We would not serve such a dish to you, señor. We reserve this dish for those of your young compatriots who dare to order real Spanish cuisine.” I didn’t bother telling him I wasn’t a Brit.
By the time I got back to my hotel, the hungover young people were beginning to perk up with the help of cold cerveza. A couple of them managed to get in the lift with me, and were kind enough not to remark on how little space I left them. I went to my room and had a fitful siesta. The melody of Mr. Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ kept running through my mind. I wondered if it had been that to which Diane Geller and I were dancing when I abandoned her so cruelly. Teenagers in those days would occasionally be caught dead listening to music their parents liked, or even dancing to it. I made myself throw up and was able to sleep.
The street outside the hotel was already an Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life when I woke. Bare-breasted girls whose DNA doomed them to a premature capitulation to gravity, and who thus would have been well advised to keep their tops on, were being chatted up by slobbering boys who three or four pints earlier wouldn’t have had the cheek to chat up any girl, even one with floppy tits. The more attractive boys and girls had found one another, as they always manage to, and had their tongues down one another’s throats, though a few removed them occasionally to vomit. There were boys bellowing football songs, and other boys peeing in such numbers against the walls of nightclubs charging £40 cover, but which included one very watered down drink, that the bouncers didn’t even try to stop them. There were couples shagging in the doorways of closed shops. There were drunken girls menstruating unashamedly like Marilyn Monroe in the street while crowds of boys made animal noises of encouragement. There were sunburn victims writhing in agony on the pavements, and friends trying to cool them off by pouring beer that had cost £6 a bottle on them. The sizzling sound of the cold beer against the inflamed skin was enough to make one vomit. It was in all ways every bit as awful as I’d expected, and slightly worse, and just what I deserved.
I wiped my mouth on the lank blond hair of a boy who reminded me of Chris from the aeroplane, and headed, as my genes compelled, for the same restaurant where I’d had lunch. I lived as a boy with my parents in Los Angeles, a very large city on the west coast of America. It is not known as a restaurant city in the same way that San Francisco is, but even then it had a few million residents, and thus a great, great many restaurants. And from the time I was around five until I left home at 19, my parents only ever ate at one, the Chatam on Westwood Blvd. in West Los Angeles. Never mind that it couldn’t have been more mediocre. They’d gone there in 1951 or something, and neither felt overcharged nor been poisoned, so it was there that they went forever after, content with the very low level of pleasure they’d been taught in childhood was their due.
Kate Bush is known to have been a vegetarian from an early age, but thought to have taken to eating fish sometime after the release of The Red Shoes. She has, over the years, endorsed several organisations seeking to end barbaric treatment of animals, but has resisted the temptation to introduce her own line of frozen vegetarian ready-meals. I for one would fill my freezer with them without hesitation. But it, like The Red Shoes’ follow-up, is apparently not to be.
Years after the Chatam restaurant went under, a victim of changing tastes, and was supplanted by a restaurant whose menu wasn’t printed entirely in Olde English script to suggest its elegance, my parents’ tendency to stick with the tried, true, and not very good got them in trouble when they decided to get a professional in to landscape their back yard. He was known to drink, and to disappear for weeks at a time while one’s back yard remained uninhabitable, but he’d done the Andresens’, across the road, and the Jendens’, a few doors up from the Andresens’. According to my mother, he was the only landscape designer in the city. When she told me this, I went through my usual repertoire of gestures of disdainful incredulity. I suggested, in my familiar cuttingly sarcastic way (learned from the best – her!) that in a city whose population had grown to three and a half million, he quite possibly wasn’t the only landscape designer. She got that weary, hurt look that I was to see more and more in her early seventies, when I realised with increasing clarity how she’d poisoned me as she became ever more abusive, and said, “Well, he did the Andresens’ and the Jendens’, and I didn’t want to do a lot of looking around.” Meaning that, as ever, she chose the devil she knew.
And got exactly what one might have predicted. The guy dug up their back yard, planted a few trees and some ground cover, and disappeared for the better part of a month, not returning my parents’ ever-more-plaintive phone calls, in which, far from threatening to take him to court or something, they appealed to him, like children to an unyielding father, from a position of absolute weakness and supplication.
I was visiting them one Saturday afternoon when he and a couple of his illegal immigrant crew, whom he almost certainly paid far less than the minimum wage, actually materialised in the back yard, and hurried out to confront him. Very far from apologetic, he was openly defiant. Had he promised my parents that he would finish by such-and-such a date? No, he hadn’t. Therefore, he wondered if they could stop leaving messages on his goddamn phone machine.
We stood there glaring at each other, and then I grabbed his ponytail with one hand and awarded him a smart uppercut to the chin with the other, sending him sprawling backwards. His jaw broken, he moaned for the Mexicans to help him, but for the minimum wage he was paying them, did he really expect them to take on a force of nature like me? I kicked him in the ribs, feeling a couple cave in. He whimpered for me to stop. I brought my foot down hard on his abdomen. There was no air left in him. I spat on him. I told him if he didn’t show my parents the respect they deserved, I’d find him, wherever he tried to hide, and beat him so badly he’d hardly be recognisable as human.
I wish.
What I really did was tell him – not plaintively, but glaring right back at him – that I really hoped he’d be able to find a way to finish the work soon. And then I turned on my heel and walked back into the house.
Remembering all of which made my blood sugar level drop so precipitously that when I got to the restaurant, I frantically ordered everything I’d had for lunch, except the almejas en salsa verde, which I hadn’t much liked the look of, and then a couple of raciones as well. I was the only non-local in the place. The waiters beamed at me almost adoringly enough to make up for my childhood. The food was delicious, but I hardly tasted it. What I tasted was the pain of having let my parents down, and having humiliated Diane Geller.
A quartet of young British idiots came in, loudly. They were led to a table and offered menus, on which they gave up quickly. “ ’Ere, Ramon,” their spokesperson demanded slurredly, “can we just get some fucking chips and sausages? And I’m talking proper sausages, not bloody spicy wog ones. And make it quick, all right, mate? We want to have time for a proper dessert. We’re having crumpet.”
His three pals absolutely shrieked with amusement. Crumpet! Oh, what a sidesplitter!
They did the nearly impossible – ruined my appetite. I wasn’t yet two-thirds of the way through my chorizo. My waiter looked brokenhearted.
I headed into the thick of the mayhem outside, and by the time I’d got 20 steps from the door had been handed 20 flyers telling me about the low booze prices and sex-starved nymphets awaitingme at various local bars and clubs. I’d have been handed many more if those handing them out hadn’t abruptly turned away at the sight of me, repulsed by either my girth or my age. But the mini-skirted, knee-high-booted reps-gone-wrong who stood in the doorway of every bar and club in Sant Antoni couldn’t have found me more attractive, waving at me like shipwreck victims at a rescue helicopter. I hadn’t felt so popular since my Marcel Flynn days.
I hadn’t come to Ibiza to feel popular.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. As I passed a bar called Tu Madre La Puta, I overheard a trio of bare-chested young Scots with Sir Alex Ferguson tattoos advising the girl in front of it that they’d come in only if she gave each of them a rim job. Without a moment’s hesitation, she knelt on her pile of flyers before the least repulsive of the three, and reached for his zip.
As I rounded the corner into Del Progres, I was set upon by a mob of swarthy little Hawaiian-shirted men with shifty eyes and pencil moustaches, Iberian wide boys who addressed me as jefe and amigo, and one another as puto. “Lowest prices on es on the island, jefe,” hissed one, apparently referring to ecstasy. “When my hashish is gone, amigo, it’s gone,” predicted another, “and at these prices, it’s going to be gone soon.” A third wondered, “Charlie, jefe?” I wasn’t quite sure what he was asking, and so just gave him the curt smile I had developed back in London for vendors of The Big Issue. I hoped he hadn’t mistaken me for a mate. If he had, wouldn’t he wrongly accuse his mate of having given him the cold shoulder?
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. “Fake Louis Vuitton handbag for la mujer, amigo?” offered a little local with a gold incisor and a glass eye. “Can’t tell it from the real thing. Guaranteed. She love you for it, amigo.” I had the feeling that if I didn’t at least appear to consider the offer, I might get knocked over the head.
Sifting through the guy’s wares, I nearly fainted to discover that they included the Earthrise videotape from 1992, featuring not only Kate and Peter Gabriel singing ‘Don’t Give Up’ in superimposition, rather than hugging one another in front of a solar eclipse as in the far more familiar, far less collectible, version, but also Kate’s brief appearance in Spirit Of The Forest, along with other stars as diverse as Debbie Harry, Lenny Kravitz (with whom she would at no point be linked romantically), and LL Cool J. I’d been trying to get my hands on it for over a decade. The guy wanted 50 euros, and was flabbergasted when I handed them over without a trace of hesitation. He claimed he’d meant to say 75. I said 50 was all I’d pay, and that he should throw in a fake Louis Vuitton handbag. He did, eagerly. I thought maybe Kate would enjoy having it.
I put the precious tape into my shoulder bag and turned into Del Progres proper. Finding a place to step on which someone hadn’t vomited, or wasn’t lying unconscious drooling out of the side of his mouth, was no easy undertaking, and every couple of seconds a drunken young reveller, stumbling over one of those already passed out, hurtled by at an alarming rate. It was rather like walking across a firing range.
A crowd of hooting drunken British youth had formed around a girl with bare breasts, though mere bare breasts hardly seemed enough to attract a crowd in this nightmarish place. Then I realised she must be lactating, as she was squirting milk into her admirers’ mouths. I shuddered with revulsion. A wobbly young lout with the emblem of Blackburn Rovers tattooed on his forehead accosted me. “What’s the matter, mate? You a poof or summat?” But our confrontation was short-lived, as he proceeded to lose consciousness and pitch face forward into what I hoped was a pile of dog poop, but was probably human. “This,” another lout felt called upon to advise me, “is the most fun I’ve ever had.”
I spotted a botega window against which no one was throwing up or peeing, and went to collect myself against it. A large group of bare-chested buffoons suddenly began to swarm like excited honey bees to my left. I drew closer to investigate. The strongest, best-looking boys, those likely to protect their young with the greatest ferocity, had pushed themselves to the centre of the swarm, and were flexing their pectorals and lats and biceps, flashing their dazzling white smiles, frantically preening. Their fleshier, less gorgeous brothers had to be content with trying to suck in their guts, and saw that it wasn’t Pamela Anderson in their midst, or Holly Valance, or Danii Minogue, but a small, dark-haired woman.
It was Indira from the plane, smiling shyly, looking mostly at the ground between her feet, clearly embarrassed by the preening she’d inspired, but clearly enjoying it too.
