Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (45 page)

Back in England I get a phone call. ‘Hello? Viviane Albertine?’ French accent.

‘Yes, speaking.’

‘I am sorry to have to tell you, your father, he has died today.’

I don’t say anything. I hope I’m conveying shock and sadness with my silence, because I think it would be terrible for the doctor to know I’m feeling nothing.

I have to go back to France and sort out the practicalities. To sort out a parent’s death is bad enough, but in a foreign country, in a foreign language, it’s daunting. But there’s no one else to do it – my sister lives on the other side of the world – so I take it one step at a time, put one foot in front of the other, and get on with it. If I actually thought about what was ahead, I would panic.

So:
first step
– fly to Toulon.
Second step
– check into a hotel.
Third step
– go to the hospital. They tell me to find a funeral director. I go to the morgue in the basement, they give me a card with the address of a funeral director in Toulon.
Fourth step
– get a taxi to the funeral parlour. I muddle through the meeting with the funeral director. I really like the thick glass 1930s door to the office and keep staring at it. When he leaves the room for a minute I take a picture of it on my phone.
Fifth step
– buy cleaning materials and rubbish bags and clean the apartment. This takes a whole week, working morning to night in thirty-degree heat. My father was a hermit and a hoarder; his apartment is the cave of a hermit and a hoarder. It’s crammed full with newspapers, boxes, bottles, biscuit wrappers, paper bags, tins, tools, clothes, letters, everything you come across in life. Ceiling-high towers of newspapers, mazes of cereal boxes, there’s hardly an inch of floor space. Even the wardrobes are full of empty cake wrappers, all smoothed out and laid one on top of the other, thousands of them. He sure did like his madeleines. There are hundreds of old containers put aside for possible reuse. I can’t rush through these towers of debris though, because three-quarters of the way down a tottering pile, sandwiched between a cake wrapper and a pizza box, I find his passport, or a lovely old family photograph; I even come across his will in an old biscuit tin. Every single piece of paper has to be sifted through. As I go through the flat, room by room, I think about his life; I can see a shape to it now it’s over. Now it has a beginning, a middle and an end.

He was born in Corsica to a rural family, he was the youngest of five children, pretty, blond and indulged. The other kids resented him. He was a bit Asperger’s, didn’t quite fit in. He joined the Free French Navy and met my mum at Queensway ice-skating rink in London during the war. They married and emigrated to Canada, then Australia. They had two girls and came back to England. He trained to be an engineer. He was always an outsider. Divorce. Loneliness. Mental breakdown. Moved back to Toulon. Lived alone for the rest of his life, all bitter and twisted, bent over and muttering to himself. What a waste of a life. Well, not me. That’s not going to be my story. But how can I possibly be normal when I’ve come from this sort of a parent, these embarrassing genes? I pack, bag up and scrub furiously, gradually erasing the crazy man from the apartment. But I can’t erase him from my blood. Neighbours call it ‘the mad house’. I am the daughter of the mad man who lived in the mad house.

Sixth step
– go back to the morgue. I have to take some clothes for them to dress the body in. I choose the most normal garments I can find, although they were normal back in the seventies, not now. I select a beige corduroy jacket, dark jeans, a blue shirt and navy tie. At the morgue they ask if I want to see him laid out. I say no. I’m not going to go and stare at a dead bloke. It’s morbid. But sitting in the white reception room – watching the young men and women glide past in white clothes with silent white rubber shoes, like a scene from the film
A Matter of Life and Death
– I start to feel sorry for him. How sad to be lying there, all dressed up in your Sunday best, and no one wants to come and see you, no one wants to say goodbye. I tell the mortician I’ve changed my mind, I will see him. I sit on a tiny gilt chair and look at him. The first thing I notice is how rigid his jaw is, clamped together in bitterness and resentment. He’s very thin. Disgustingly thin. I’m shocked; I think to myself,
I will never glorify or aspire to thinness again. It is abhorrent
. They’ve cut his long straggly hair and swept it back off his face, he looks quite distinguished, noble and handsome with his strong Roman nose, high cheekbones, silver hair and smart clothes. Like a French university professor. And I have a little cry. Because for a few minutes, right at the very end, just before he goes up in a puff of smoke, my dad looks like the kind of dad I always wanted him to be.

Seventh step
– my daughter and I go to the funeral at the crematorium. We dress in black and huddle together as we hurry past another funeral, this one full of family and friends, cars and flowers. I’m aware of how pathetic we look, just the two of us, mother and child, following a coffin. The French pallbearers share a joke as they hoist the coffin up onto a trolley. I scowl at them. The funeral is dramatic, extremely florid emotive music plays at top volume as the two of us sit in the baroque room with the coffin, paying our last respects. The music changes to a sombre, doom-laden dirge, the doors to the oven open and the coffin trundles into it, there’s a fanfare as the doors close. My daughter is overwhelmed by the pageantry of it all and sobs her heart out. I wrap my arms around her and take her outside, past the big funeral and all the mourners, into the hearse and back to the hotel.

In his will, my father leaves me £17,000. In France you have to leave your money to your children. It’s the law. I use this money to hire a lawyer and get myself out of my marriage. Husband wants out too. The rest I put aside to make an EP one day. (The last time I was left money was when my grandmother died and I bought a guitar.)

26 SEX AND BLOOD

2009

‘Well, now that we have seen each other,’ said the unicorn, ‘if you believe in me, I’ll believe in you.’

Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking Glass

I stumble through life in a state of shock and terror as my husband and I start divorce proceedings. I don’t know if I can do this. Can I live alone again after seventeen years? Can I pay the bills, mend the leaks and tax the car? Earn money? I have forgotten how to survive on my own. I talk to other divorced women and they say it all comes back. Married women tell me I’m making the worst mistake of my life and this is a terrible age to be divorcing: ‘You’ll never get another man.’ A very sophisticated, honey-highlighted blonde divorced mother from my daughter’s school confides in me outside the swimming pool: ‘When you’d rather live in a tent in a field than in your nice house with your husband, that’s when you’re ready for divorce.’

My marriage is over. My husband and I have been living in the same house – but apart – for six months and I can’t stop thinking about sex. I have an urgent desire to shag someone, and this is for one extremely important reason –
I am sure as hell going to do it before he does
. Very mature.

For seventeen years I’ve been with one man and I don’t know if I can bear someone else’s hand on my skin or to undress in front of a stranger; whether my body will be attractive to someone else; what to do or how to move with a different person. It’s as if I’ve only talked to one man for seventeen years and now I have to learn how to talk to a different one. It’s scary, but I’m not going to let Husband get in there first, so to speak. And deep down I hope it will hurt me less when he has sex with someone else if I’ve done it first (
this worked, by the way
). So, I have a very strong urge to fuck someone as soon as possible, but not anyone, a specific type of someone; someone unthreatening, with poor eyesight, and – due to my immense insecurity – someone who will be grateful.

I choose a man who is very keen on me but, more importantly, he’s not intimidating in any way physically. He’s not handsome or fit. He looks like a minicab driver (his description of himself, not mine, but I have to agree) – not a taxi driver, they’re quite a different genre, edgy, could even be sexy. He is perfect for my purposes, I feel safe enough to give it a go.

I’ve done it. We lie together naked, tangled up on the sofa. The room is dark except for a puddle of pale light from the full moon on the oak floor. A warm sea breeze wafts in through the open glass doors.

I am off somewhere in my head, congratulating myself:
Haha. I did it before you. Na na nana na
.

The minicab driver interrupts my thoughts.

‘You’re very wet.’

I reach down between my legs and touch myself. I
am
wet. Not ‘turned on’ wet. Absolutely soaking. I lift my hand up to have a look. It’s covered in blood.

In the moonlight, our limbs appear luminous white and the blood splattered all over them looks black. Sticky black blood. It seeps into the sofa cushions and drips down onto the floor, like we’ve spilt a tin of molasses over our laps. Here it is haunting me again, my old enemy, Blood. Bugging me again. Bloody bloody Blood. Always there when I don’t want it and never there when I do. I jump up, a river of red gushes down my legs. We’re in the middle of a bloodbath, like the prom scene in
Carrie
. In my mind I can hear Carrie’s mother screaming, ‘
The curse of blood is punishment for sin!
’

There’s no obvious physical reason why this has happened. It isn’t my period, we haven’t had rough sex and he doesn’t have a massive cock, so what’s wrong with me? It must be true, I’m being punished for the sin of having sex without love, for being so shallow and for daring to think I could leave my marriage, go out into the world and live a liberated artistic life. This is punishment for being a bloody, feisty, witchy woman.

I fake nonchalance, excuse myself and go into the bathroom to take a shower, completely forgetting about the blood-spattered guy in the living room. I turn the water pressure up high. Hot water smashes into my face and pours down my body, but even this vicious shower can’t obliterate the nagging thought at the back of my mind …

It can’t be. Can it? Please, not now. Not now I’m at the beginning of a new journey, striking out on my own. Not after all the risks and courage it’s taken for me to get this far.

Please god, not the return of fucking cancer.

I go straight to my consultants, Professor Jeffrey Tobias and Dr Anthony Silverstone, the two men at UCH who saved my life in 1999, and they whisk me into hospital for an internal investigation. I’m pumped full of anaesthetic and come round to Dr Silverstone telling me that I am extremely sensitive inside but there is no return of the cancer.

Six months later I go for another check-up with Dr Silverstone, he’s known me for ten years now, watched me come slowly back to life. I say to him, ‘I still haven’t met anyone.’ And in his wonderful reassuring voice he replies, ‘You will. One day you’ll find someone who will look after you.’ I hold back the tears until I’m outside the consulting room. He may as well have said, ‘One day you will find a unicorn.’

27 FLESH AND MILF

2010

I’m recording again. This is something I never envisaged, I thought that life was gone. I thought I was an imposter who’d been found out. But here I am, in the Levellers’ studio in Brighton for two weeks, making songs. The weirdest thing of all is that I sort of know what to do. Even though I haven’t listened to music properly for twenty-five years, I know what I want the instruments to sound like, where I want backing vocals and where to put a bridge or a pause. I’m exhilarated, I can’t bear to go to the bathroom because I don’t want to miss one second. Dylan Howe (a great drummer who plays with Wilko Johnson, has his own group and is the son of Steve Howe from Yes – funny how he’s had another distant influence on me) is on drums; he’s also producing the record. I couldn’t do it without him, his strength, knowledge and enthusiasm carry me through. Sometimes I’m so exhausted I can’t think any more but Dylan never tires.

The first track, ‘I Don’t Believe in Love’, I wrote the day I found out my father had died. I’d grieved a long time ago for the lack of a decent father in my life, but I didn’t realise until he was gone that I was still holding out a little shred of hope it would all be all right in the end.
He’s gone and now I’ll never have a good father
, I moped to myself. I thought about what effect it may have had on me, having a father who didn’t or couldn’t love. Have I ever been able to truly love a man? Has a man ever loved me? Fuck love. I don’t believe in it any more. Look at most of the couples I know, they’re not in love, they’re scared of being alone, financially entwined or hanging on to a partner to try and convince the world they’re acceptable human beings. I can’t think of one couple I’m envious of. When a woman I know comes up to me and says, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your marriage,’ I think,
No, I’m so sorry to hear about
yours.
At least I had the courage to get out
. On the day of my father’s death, I decided that from now on I’m only going to believe in things I can see and touch, no more woolly concepts like love and religion.

Once I’ve made the EP, good things start to happen. Gina Birch introduces me to Thurston Moore backstage after a Sonic Youth show at the Forum in Kentish Town. He’s interested in what I’m doing now and asks me to send him the recordings, says he’ll release the EP on his Ecstatic Peace! label, which he does.

Jane Ashley invites me to come and have a look at Mick Jones’s Rock ’n’ Roll Library in Portobello Road and suggests I play a short acoustic set there next week. I’m very scared but I say yes. Mick comes to watch me, I can see him smiling at the back of the room. Afterwards he says he wants to record one of the songs I played, ‘Confessions of a MILF’.