Waiting for Kate Bush (27 page)

“But that was only Cathy,” Mrs. Cavanaugh, showing more of the strain with each passing moment, blurted. “What about the rest of us, who’ve always been rather more circumspect?”

The Sri Lankan sighed, a little patronisingly, I thought. “You really don’t read the tabloids, do you, dear lady?”

“The
Guardian
, actually. Occasionally the
Independent
as well.”

“Well, if you deigned occasionally to venture out of your ivory tower, you’d know that, insofar as celebrity harassment is concerned, the sins of the father are very much the sins of the child as well, if you see what I mean, and vice versa.”

“Mind your fucking tone,” Gilmour snarled. I don’t think he understood what the Sri Lankan had said, but it was clear to all how she’d said it.

The Asian who’d nearly come to blows with the tabloid journalist intervened. “What my colleague is trying to say is that, in today’s celebrity-mad culture, families and friends and even casual acquaintances of celebrities are fair game.”

“If you didn’t want us to be here,” the tabloid journalist contributed, “maybe you shouldn’t have let your daughter and sister go on television and break everybody’s heart.” His tone suggested that he imagined himself being wonderfully clear where the Asians had been opaque. “Now how about just a quick look through her personal effects?”

Before Gilmour could reiterate his ugly threat, there was a commotion behind us. A black Daimler limousine had entered the road from the Vicarage Road end and now, having found it impassable, was trying to back out, only to find its way blocked by several late-arriving gossiparisites. “It’s her! It’s Cathy!” somebody shouted, and it was Beatlemania revisited, with people all over the Daimler like cockroaches.

The excitement was too much for a person of my proportions. I headed inside, and was able, even though he was clearly desperate by now to break someone’s – anyone’s – leg, to get past Gilmour, and into the kitchen. In which, to my astonishment and confusion, sat Cathy. My howl of surprise brought Mrs. Cavanaugh and Gilmour running.

Mrs. Cavanaugh burst into tears at the sight of her, and embraced her so hard I thought she’d fracture something. “I thought you were out in that car. I thought we’d lost you for sure.”

“She’s a decoy,” Cathy explained, looking very, very tired, if not at death’s door. “I’ve already signed to a management company, and it’s a good thing. They have decoys for all their stars. Good job somebody thought of it, I’d say.”

“But that poor girl out there!” Mrs. Cavanaugh, ever compassionate, wailed.

“An asylum seeker. Would have been deported next week if she hadn’t done this. It’s a cruel thing, but it was entirely her choice. And it isn’t like she didn’t have a driver and a couple of bodyguards in there with her.”

“We taped the show,” Gilmour said. “You were deadly. Come watch.”

Mr. Halibut, who’d come down to see what all the excitement was about, and I helped Cathy into the lounge, one of her frail arms around each of our necks. Gilmour found the spot on the videotape with her performance, which sounded even better on second hearing. I hadn’t realised that the make-up artist and publicist judges’ mouths had both been hanging open through the second half of the song. But we never got to the end.

It turned out that what Cathy was wide-eyed with was horror. “Stop it!” she wailed. “Please! Don’t make me watch!”

“You were marvellous, love,” Mrs. Cavanaugh implored her. “And this is exactly how Kate herself felt after seeing her first appearance on
Top Of The Pops
. She described it as feeling like watching herself die. But people adored it. It changed people’s lives, that performance, even if she didn’t like what she’d chosen to wear.”

She sobbed. “Did you see how fat I looked? Did you see? And on the word
heart
, did you hear I was sharp? Oh, my god. Oh, my god!” She looked at me. “Do you have any more of that antidepressant stuff left?” I shivered with revulsion. She turned frantically to Gilmour. “Kurt Cobain used a shotgun. Can you get one somewhere? One of your mates?”

Mrs. Cavanaugh slapped her. I’d never seen her lose her temper, but who had ever been so sorely provoked? “You will stop this sort of talk immediately, Cathy! Do you hear me?”

The bodyguards in the Daimler could probably have heard her –through bullet-proof glass. She was screaming. “Have you not put me and your brothers through enough already? Shame on you! Shame on you!”

It wasn’t enough, of course. As a teenager, Cathy felt that it was her God-given right to put those who loved her through every kind of hell. “Well, excuse me for having an awful disease that I can’t do anything about, Mum!” Her eyes filled with tears. “I suppose you’d be screaming at me if I had leukaemia as well!”

Mrs. Cavanaugh reared back to slap her again, but then collapsed to her knees like a marionette whose strings had just been snipped. She wanted to cry, but there were no tears left for her. She just shook her head, back and forth, back and forth.

Cathy burst into enough tears for the both of them. The taciturn Gilmour followed suit. The three of them held onto one another for dear life. Mr. Halibut and I looked at one another. We both seemed to feel like intruders, and went upstairs.

I watched the gossiparisites swarm over the Daimler from my window, pounding on the window, pulling furiously at the locked doors, trying even to open the bonnet. When they realised it was trying to inch back out of the road, a couple of them lay down in its path, whereupon their comrades began chanting, “Their blood will be on your hands! Their blood will be on your hands!” It reminded me of my college days, but the student radicals of the Sixties were much better at it than this lot. Loath to have their legs crushed, the two sacrificial lambs kept slithering out of harm’s way. The Daimler’s progress was glacial, but unmistakable. By the time the Old Bill finally turned up and cleared a path, it was halfway to freedom anyway.

I
WOKE up the next morning to an impatient pounding on my bedroom door. It was Duncan, with neither seduction nor Gay Pride on his mind. “You fucking Judas,” he howled as I opened my door. “You quisling! You louser!” I hoped I was still dreaming, but there was nothing dreamlike about how he grabbed a handful of my pyjama top and pushed me back into my chair. He threw the morning’s
News Of The World
into my lap. Its headline screamed C
ATE THE
G
REAT’S
B
ROTHER
: A B
ENDER
!

She sings one song on television and is already Cate the Great?

“That obviously isn’t the bigger problem,” Duncan said, reading my mind. “How could you? How bloody
could
you?”

I couldn’t have, and hadn’t. And I told him so.

“But you’re the only one who could have,” he said, “you or … the bloke who used to look after me and my partner’s daughter. Oh, bugger.” He shook his head morosely.

“Well, you might not like them,” he finally sighed, “but they’re good at what they do, aren’t they? Bloody terrific at it, in fact.”

“It’s their livelihood,” I said, “at least those who don’t have well-paying IT jobs during the day.”

He left and I switched on the television. When I was up in the morning, I especially enjoyed watching editions of
Trina
on which the results of paternity tests were revealed to leering, multiply pierced teen yobs whose misshapen slag girlfriends had accused them. I seemed never to tire of the leering teen yobs assuring Trina that they couldn’t possibly be the kid’s dad because they’d shagged their misshapen slag accusers only once. Biology seemed to be taught in the British state schools even less rigorously than in my own country’s.

This morning’s edition, though, would reveal no paternity test results. Rather, its theme was
My Talented Daughter Got Left Out of Megastar Because She Isn’t Anorexic
. A tweed-capped working man from
Scunthorpe was telling Trina how his household had gone without such pleasures as cable television for years so that his daughter Julie, indistinguishable from the indignant unwed young mums I was accustomed to seeing, could have singing lesions. But then, when her big chance came, it turned out not to have come at all, as
Megastar
’s producers announced they wanted only contestants with heart-tugging medical conditions.

“Ain’t bloody fair, is it,” demanded Julie, who apparently imagined her singing voice sufficiently beautiful to compensate for her straggly, oily hair, spots, huge nose, faint moustache, double chin, small breasts, big tummy, huge hips, thick legs, enormous feet, and appalling make-up. Let Britain get an earful of this girl, I thought, and Kylie Minogue can start looking for work as a cleaner or market researcher. “And just because I’m normal-sized.”

Trina brought on another guest, an emaciated male bulimic from Reading who’d also sung on the previous night’s
Megastar
, though with less spectacular results than Cathy. In his view, it was high time someone other than what he referred to as “gorgeous normals” got to entertain for a living. All the eating disorders in the studio audience –and they were about half of it – applauded as feverishly as their weakness would allow.

“Bollocks to that,” proclaimed Julie’s dad from Scunthorpe. He apparently looked at Julie through love’s eyes. “Who’s bloody forcing you to binge and purge, or whinge and emerge, or whatever it is you lot do?” The normals in the studio audience erupted in applause of their own. “Why don’t you just eat properly and stop your moaning?”

“It’s out of our hands,” the male bulimic from Reading began to try to explain, but a punch-up had broken out in the studio audience. Actually, it was a punch-up in theory only, as the emaciated girl combatant had the strength only to cover her ears with her hands while her fat woman antagonist beat her with her handbag.

As security guards pulled the fat woman off her victim, Trina dashed over with her microphone and meticulous coiffure. “Obviously emotions run high around this issue,” she said to the fat woman, seeming to hope she would hear the statement as a question.

“Bloody right, they do,” the fat woman affirmed, gasping. “I’m fed up with the self-disabled demanding everybody’s sympathy.”

“Is that true?” Trina wondered, clearly trying to goad her studio audience. Its normals howled, brayed, and bellowed their assent, in many cases waving their fists.

Trina was clearly displeased with the level of blood lust she’d
fomented, and I thought how awful it must be for her. She watched tapes of Jerry Springer and Rikki Lake and saw American studio audiences eagerly throwing chairs at one another, trying to gouge out one another’s eyes. She tried to inspire mayhem among her own audiences and they were content with a bit of braying.

“How about it, eating disorders?” she challenged the other half of her audience, looking as though she’d sooner have been almost anywhere else. “Are the normals heartless swine?” Weak as they were, the eating disorders’ affirmation was very much less shrill.

“Pathetic,” Trina said, shaking her head in disgust. “Really feeble.” She leaned down into the face of the nearest eating disorder. “You,” she snapped. “Is your problem with food something you chose for yourself, or is it as much out of your hands as an alcoholic’s problems with drink?”

“I certainly didn’t choose it,” the terrified young woman muttered.

“Speak up, for God’s sake!” Trina said.

“I didn’t choose it,” the young woman repeated, right into Trina’s microphone this time. “It’s horrible, Trina. It’s hellish, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

The eating disorders tried once again to roar their assent, but they’d pretty much spent themselves on the last one. Trina let her hands drop to her sides in disgusted resignation, a commercial for a feminine hygiene spray came on, and someone tapped faintly on my door.

It was Cate the Great herself, predictably beside herself, feeling, she revealed, as though on a runaway train. She was obviously in no condition to be confronted about her appalling question about my Cypramil the night before. She’d come home from her brief hospitalisation almost seven pounds heavier than when she left, and even menstruating again. But she appeared as she sat before me to have lost all seven pounds again, and maybe a couple more into the bargain.

“My mate Judith just rang,” she said. “She’s in
The Sun
today, about how she’s made more suicide attempts than any other girl her age in Britain. She was so embarrassed that she tried again this morning. And it’s my fault.”

“Really? Since when do you write for
The Sun?”

“Don’t be sarky. You see what I mean.”

“Did you do anything more than sing really well on
Megastar?”

“I sang crap. I was so sharp you could have sliced bloody cheese with my performance.”

“Do you get the impression anybody minded?”

“They just felt sorry for me because I’m fat. Anybody can see that.”

“I don’t see it, Cathy. There were other eating disorders on. Why would they have felt sorrier for you than for the others?”

She just glared at me. I figured at any moment she’d bolt from the room. But I was mistaken. “You live your life,” I said. “If the ghouls at some horrid tabloid choose to profit from your friend’s misfortune, that isn’t to do with you. It’s on their heads.”

There was another knock on my door, this one very much more assertive than Cathy’s had been. I waddled over to find out who it was. I opened the door to peek out and nearly got trampled by the pair lurking behind it, who entered the room about as diffidently as the Nazis entering the Sudetenland. “Who is this?” the female half, around 22, blonde-streaked, striking, intense, reeking of cigarettes, demanded, glaring at me.

“My mate,” Cathy said. I couldn’t remember anyone having referred to me as a mate, and I found it sweet and touching beyond expression.

“Welcome to my room,” I said, and loathed myself for having done so. I’d intended nine parts censure to one of hospitality, but it had come out sounding almost entirely hospitable. We passive aggressives die a little bit each day.