Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (39 page)

The scene with the young girl at the hotel reception – that was me when I was her age. Waiting and hoping and believing such a romantic thing would happen – that a handsome man would come into my life and whisk me off. My heart broke for her when he drove away without her. I played out the rest of the scene – which wasn’t in the movie – in my head: her coming out of the house with her bags, him gone, thinking he’ll be back in a minute and waiting and waiting, but he never returns. How it hangs over her for the rest of her life.

How nice to have someone who’s doing interesting things with their life show some interest in me. Vincent’s attention is like an exotic present from a mysterious distant relative who lives abroad, totally unexpected and just what I want, even though I didn’t know it. I decide to call him.

Sunday morning. I’m dialling Vincent Gallo’s number. I have no idea what to say, I’ve only spoken to children and other mothers for the past ten years. Vincent’s the opposite of everything that’s in my life: tennis lessons, pony club, fresh-faced, blond-haired, well-spoken children, shopping, cleaning, walks, sheep, fields. I think I will be very easily manipulated by a man I imagine is a player and a womaniser. I’m out of my depth and off the scene. What can he possibly want? He mentioned in an email seeing me play in New York when he was eighteen, and being quite smitten. Maybe he has a terminal disease and is rounding up all the girls he’s ever wanted to kiss before he dies.

I decide I’ll just have to be myself. I’m sick of pretending anyway – of policing my words and editing my thoughts. Husband never wants me to talk about the Slits or my ceramics or make rude jokes, I’m losing every ounce of the person I used to be. I know she wasn’t all good, but she wasn’t all bad either. I’m not going to pretend to be something I’m not for this bloke who lives miles away across the sea. I’m not going to try and be nice and seductive for him. There are so many people in my life that I’m putting on a front for, I don’t need one more. If he doesn’t like me for who I am, forget it.

It’s a sunny morning so I sit outside on the garden wall looking at the turquoise sea sparkling and listen to a phone ring somewhere in America.
I feel strangely calm
, to quote Charlie Brown on the morning of an exam he hasn’t prepared for.

A highish man’s voice with a New York accent answers after a couple of rings.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Vincent, it’s Viv Albertine. Is this a bad time?’

‘No, it is a very good time. Let me call you back. I’m sure I can afford it more than you can.’

Cheeky fucker.

My daughter runs in and out of the open glass door, showing me her drawings. The cat throws up on the grass in front of me, butterflies flit around the hawthorn hedge and my husband works at his computer inside the house. Meanwhile me and Vincent Gallo chat away about this and that like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Like we’ve known each other for … ever. I love that word. Forever. I love that forever doesn’t exist, but we have a word for it anyway, and use it all the time. It’s beautiful and doomed.

We talk about architecture, food, exercise, love, the Slits, what he’s doing,
The Brown Bunny
, loads of stuff. After about an hour I have to go. I tell him I’m surprised that he’s so easy to talk to and not pushy or after anything.

‘Did I disappoint you?’ he asks.

‘No.’

Did I disappoint you?
Insistent, masculine, sexual.

My voice disappears into a whisper.

‘No.’

Bloody hell. No guy has talked to me like that for a very long time. I’m high as a kite. For the first time in years I’ve been spoken to like I’m a woman, like I’m a girl, and most exciting of all, like I’m an artist. Not just a mother, not just a wife. OK, maybe this is the oldest trick in the book to get a girl’s attention, but it doesn’t matter, because the life force that was in Viv Albertine – that has been bottled up for so long – has been released.

Husband’s not too pleased. Sitting in our glossy Italian kitchen a couple of hours later, looking across the solid oak Habitat table at his wife twinkling away, waving her arms around excitedly as she talks and laughs too much, having ideas above her station, he realises that through someone else’s eyes – someone he quite admires – I appear interesting. And that worries him.

Everything looks and feels different as I go about my usual daily routines. I watch myself, I listen to how I talk. I’m seeing myself through fresh eyes. Vincent’s eyes. You know how it is when you meet someone new, someone you admire or fancy: you imagine them watching you and you glide about, a superhero in your own little universe. And my universe is very little; I can only glide up and down the aisles in Sainsbury’s, reaching balletically up on tiptoe for the rice and Marmite. I start dressing a bit differently: younger, more stylish. I feel more confident with the posh mums. I’ve found someone who gets me. It’s OK that I don’t fit in here, I fit in somewhere else, so I can relax. I’m not mad, I’m not wrong, I’m just not in the right environment.

Since she was born, I’ve wanted my daughter to have everything I didn’t have – a happy, stable family, access to books and art, a good education, a beautiful home – but this quest has become my whole world. I get upset if she’s had a bad day at school. Last week I broke down and cried at the thought of her leaving home when she’s eighteen. That’s eleven years away. I’ve suppressed myself so she can have the perfect upbringing. I monitor everything I say and do. I want her to fit in with her posh mates, so I go to coffee mornings and garden centres and listen to conversations about rearing Labradors or pot-bellied pigs, growing organic tomatoes and making Aga towels (don’t ask). I like the women very much, but I don’t fit in. I chose private school for her so she would have confidence and an excellent education. So she would learn how to work hard and be self-disciplined. So she would be Nothing Like Me.

Now Vincent and I chat regularly on the phone, I begin to rediscover myself. My old self and my new self. And he helps me do this. He laughs at my jokes, listens to my tales about past boyfriends (you don’t talk about them in a marriage, but those relationships help define you). He asks me about my musical past – also a taboo subject at home – and finally, one day, he says to me exasperatedly:

‘Viv,
do
something.’

Although I’m a bit miffed at his insinuation that bringing up a daughter and running a home is not doing anything, I choose to take his call to action as a challenge. Permission to go ahead and do anything I want. Something artistic, not something domestic, which is all I’m facing for the rest of my life and which would be fine if I was happy, but as I get fitter and healthier, I realise I’m not. I’m so lacking in confidence, though, that I can’t believe that I still might have something to give, or that anyone out there would be in the least bit interested.

Vincent Gallo believing in me is like a secret door being opened again to a world I left a long time ago. This world is not fame or fortune, I never had that: it’s self-expression. And in this man’s opinion, it’s not impossible for me to take the journey from Hastings housewife to … well, whatever I want. It’s possible to believe him because he is so sure, he’s a force of nature, a tornado. Like the tornado that ripped through our hamlet a couple of months ago …

… it was a hot summer’s evening. The doors and windows were open. We were pottering about doing normal family things. Making toast, playing on the computer. There was a sudden stillness. Funny how you can notice stillness. ‘There’s a difference between stillness and doing nothing,’ as Jackie Chan said. It has a power of its own. I looked up from the computer and saw a piece of paper on the dining table lift up into the air, hold there for a second, and then float back down. It was eerie. I glanced out of the window: the sky had turned black, as if a swarm of insects was gathering over the sea. The blackness was moving towards us. Really fast. A woman screamed. A door slammed. I rushed around shutting all the windows. Husband and I hustled our daughter upstairs; she jumped onto the bed and curled up into a ball. I shouted at her to get off, because she was under the glass skylight. She burst into tears. The room went dark.

We huddled together and watched as our beautiful exotic garden, our new roof and our fancy Audi were torn to shreds and stoned with huge balls of ice. It lasted about ten seconds, then it was gone. The sky was blue again. The sun came out and beamed on the devastation. Windows were smashed, trees felled, gates torn from their hinges. Nothing left standing. The giant agaves, decades old, were in ribbons.

We went out onto the lane and met groups of neighbours, wandering around, picking their way through the debris. I saw Anne Crosby, an intelligent feisty older woman I loved.

‘Just like the war!’ she shouted.

I was in tears.

‘You wait,’ she said. ‘It’ll grow back even stronger.’

And she was right. It did. Within a year, that garden was lusher and greener than it had ever been …

… well, Hurricane Vincent is what it took to raise me from my torpor. No doubt there will be devastation. Let’s just hope that I grow back stronger too.

I start to look forward to Vincent calling. Our long telephone conversations inspire me and spur me on to meet new people and try new things. The calls become more frequent, two or three times a week, at the end of his day and the beginning of mine. He sounds sleepy and intimate after a long day’s filming. ‘You don’t know how to love,’ I tease. ‘You don’t know love until you have been loved by me,’ he replies.

This is getting out of hand – for me, anyway. Instead of talking to my husband, I’m sharing my new thoughts with a virtual stranger. I’m being emotionally unfaithful. It’s easy for Vincent to be all supportive and funny and sexy from thousands of miles away: he has nothing to lose. My husband, on the other hand, doesn’t look so cool, he’s suspicious and angry, but that’s because he can see the balance of our life tilting precariously, a balance we’ve spent sixteen years creating. He is – quite rightly – pissed off and threatened by what he perceives as my passion for Vincent Gallo, but it’s what Vincent makes me feel about
myself
that is intoxicating, not what I feel about
him
. If Husband had encouraged me, even a little bit, in my creative exploits, I wouldn’t have been blindsided by Vincent Gallo.

I’m driving through a perfect little English village after dropping my daughter off at school one winter morning. As I tootle past the old stone church and village store, braking for three fat white ducks to waddle across the road, I decide it has to stop. I can’t keep talking to Vincent. It’s just not an appropriate thing to be doing, being married and all. This decision is not easy for me; I’ve nothing much in my life. My daughter is growing up, I have no work – I’m virtually unemployable – and I’m living in the middle of nowhere amongst the country set, mixing with people I’ve nothing in common with. I swerve up onto the grass verge, scratching the side of the car with the hawthorn bushes, turn off the engine and burst into tears.

The thought of giving up Vincent is unbearable. But this isn’t the shocking bit. The shocking bit, I realise, is that it isn’t Vincent I’ll be giving up, but
myself
. He’s helping to feed and water the old me so she can blossom and flourish again. But I’m not even a bud yet. Just a tiny green shoot poking out of the ground into the light. I’m not ready to let go of the only person who is part of this rebirth. I don’t think I can make it happen on my own. My eyes have been opened, I can’t go back, but I feel too unsure of myself to go forward alone.

Later that night, I’m in the bathroom cleaning my teeth, Husband is in the bedroom getting ready for bed. I call out to him, through a mouth full of toothpaste, ‘I’m not going to be in touch with Vincent Gallo any more, it doesn’t feel right.’

He comes up behind me. I turn round and look at him, toothpaste on my chin. I feel ashamed, I got carried away. He’s been a good husband. Stuck with me through difficult times. We’ve shared everything, every thought. He doesn’t deserve this. I’ll tell him the truth, even though it’s a bit embarrassing to say in case I’m imagining things, no one’s given me a second glance for years as far as I’m aware.

‘And I get the feeling he may be coming on to me.’

He comes back immediately: ‘Not unless he wants to fuck his mother,’ and with that, climbs into bed.

I turn on the tap and catch some water in my cupped hands, pressing them hard together so I have a little pink pool quivering in my palms. I lift them up carefully and splash my face. I feel so still. So cold inside. Not shivery cold.
Cold like steel
.

I have a wry little laugh to myself as I pull the bedcovers over me, switch off the light and turn my back on my husband. He’s five years younger than Vincent Gallo.

16 THE YEAR OF SAYING YES

2008

I’ve decided not to let go of Vincent just yet. I’m in a full spin now, like a kamikaze pilot. I’m going to see where it takes me.

I have two voices in my head. A rational daytime voice:
You’ve sacrificed yourself for this dream of domestic perfection. It was your choice to do it this way. Your decision. Don’t go and mess it up now, you’re too far down the road
. But at night another voice slinks in. It snaps and snarls like a wild dog.
Go on
, it growls.
Take it all the way. Dive. I dare you.
I can’t believe that the loving mother and committed wife I was just a matter of weeks ago is turning into a selfish monster, putting herself ahead of all others. I lie next to my sleeping husband, my eyes wide open, staring into the darkness, terrified, ashamed and exhilarated.

On Christmas Day Vincent writes that he loves me. I’m furious.

Each morning I get up exhausted, my cheeks hollower, my body thinner. The weight is dropping off me. I imagine lumps of flesh left behind in the bed. I’m becoming deranged from sleep deprivation. You can fool some of yourself some of the time, but you can’t fool all of yourself all of the time.