Moranthology (25 page)

 

And Winehouse.

W
INEHOUSE—
J
UMP ON
Y
OUR
V
OICE,
L
IKE A
L
ION, AND
R
UN
A
WAY

I
n a way not morbid or maudlin, all I can do is YouTube Amy Winehouse. I watch her in the kitchen, in the bedroom; in the garden, on the laptop, while I hack back gloomy loops of summer hops. Her voice seems unsuited for the outdoors, but I want her propped up on a garden chair. In the sunshine, now. In my head I call her “Winehouse,” like a cartoon character or a punky kid: Winehouse with her tattoos and her stapled-on beehive; Winehouse with her long ankles, bottle in hand, tottery and roaring. A post-apocalyptic Marge Simpson; Betty Boop in charge of a pirate ship. Winehouse on 
Never Mind the Buzzcocks
, shrugging off host Simon Amstell's joky, awkward concern, with the downbeat timing of Joan Rivers or Dennis Leary.

Would Amy like to collaborate with MOR chanteuse Katie Melua, Amstell wondered. (MOR is the genre otherwise known as “Middle of the Road,” for its resolute determination in steering an unobjectionable, bland course right down the center of rock/pop. Melua was, at the time, skilled enough to have become Europe's biggest-selling artist, thanks to her ability to keep right in the central reservation for 200 miles of pop, without once ever deviating into anything memorable.)

“I'd rather get cat AIDS,” Winehouse replied tartly, funnier than any comedian on the show, but still Winehouse—Amy Winehouse with the voice, with the astonishing voice, like Billie Holiday scared, angry, hot; tooling up. She wrote “Back to Black”—one of the best singles of the twenty-first century, a tendon-tight song that, halfway through, just dissolves into its own awfulness, leaving only the tolling of a church bell, and Winehouse singing “Black . . . /Black . . .” like it's the only direction she has left—when she was twenty-three. In the video, she dresses for a funeral. Sharp. Tight skirt. Eyeliner. She puts her gloves on, tearless. By the age of twenty-four, she has five Grammys. By twenty-seven, she's dead.

I can't stop watching her because I can't work out exactly how I feel about her dying. Her death is not something unexpected, after all—it had been coming down the tunnel for a long time. And yet it still rattled everyone—our preparedness is no preparation at all.

“This is how we will feel when polar bears finally become extinct,” I think, “after all that sad waiting. Or when the last tiger dies.”

We still won't quite understand why—even though we watched almost every minute of it happen. I'm not the only one puzzled—friends, particularly women, keep fretting over Winehouse's death. It's not some wailing, pent-up boo-hoo, like when Diana died. Rather, it's like when woodland animals circle another woodland animal who has died, uncomprehending as to why it has gone. How it could have gone.

Perhaps part of it is that we didn't see who Winehouse really was, at the time. Like everyone, I'd always thought her problem was alcohol and drugs: those years of being photographed in bloody shoes, bleakly marauding at 3
AM
. When the Hawley Arms in Camden—epicenter of the drunken world at that time—burned down, everyone joked Winehouse had done it, by accident. Winehouse, with an unfortunate combination of crack pipe and Elnett hairspray.

But when a friend said, “What if her biggest problem wasn't drink or drugs, but her eating disorders?,” the YouTube footage suddenly felt like it was being played again; but now, with new subtitles.

So here is Amy Winehouse at the Mercury Awards in 2007, coming on stage to gasps, the bright neons of her dress playing badly against the pint-sized hollows of her collarbone. Everyone thinks it's the crack—but she gives interviews where she says she spends all morning running on a treadmill. She wears hotpants and cut-off shirts, revealing that tiny, knotted belly—even in winter, even in snow. She cooks for everyone, but doesn't touch anything herself. “All she eats is Haribo,” a friend reveals to the 
Daily Mirror
. With an eating disorder like that, you'd have all the tolerance for drink and drugs of a newborn baby.

And because eating disorders are all about trying to regain control, it solves the biggest confusion I have had about Winehouse, since I heard she'd died: how you could have a talent—such a once-in-a-generation, seemingly gravityless, endless talent—and let it get so battered by your addictions that your big album, in 2006, is also your last. Surely you'd want to protect it as you would a child, serve it as you would an empress? Couldn't she discipline herself? To keep her very Winehouseness safe? Well, she was. She was very busy disciplining herself. She wasn't eating.

For anyone without a talent like Winehouse's—and that's all of us—we just stare, like unjealous Salieris, and wonder how someone could have something so astonishing move through them—yet not have it elevate them at the same time. We become like children. Couldn't that talent, somehow, have saved her? Couldn't a song as astonishing as 
Back to Black 
vouch for her against demons? Couldn't Amy Winehouse just climb on to her voice, like it was a lion, and jump out of the window, and ride far, far away?

But then, perhaps that's what she did.

 

This is the last piece in the book. Ending where we began—in bed, with my husband unwillingly dragging himself out of unconsciousness to deal with the kind of issue that looms large in the heads of women the world over, but seems like an outright declaration of insanity to all men.

M
Y
T
RAGICALLY
E
ARLY
D
EATH

I
t is 11:48
PM
. We are just about to go to sleep. I can hear the dishwasher downstairs come to the end of its self-aggrandizingly-named Superwash. The house is silent.

Beside me, Pete's breathing changes down three gears—into early, stop-motion dreams. It has been a long day. He deserves his rest. Today is now ended. Sleep well, sweet prince, I think. Sleep well.

“Pete?”

“M.”

“What would you miss most about me if I died tragically young?”

“Whrrr?”

“If I died—tomorrow—perhaps brutally—what would you miss most about me?”

“Not now. Please. So tired.”

“When the sad, young policeman appeared at the door with his
Casualty
face on, and said, ‘I'm so sorry—there's been an accident,' what would be the first thing that popped into your head, that started you crying?”

“This is happening? Oh God, this is happening.”

Pete turns over. I sit up in bed.

“It's just, I know what upsets
me
most about me dying tragically young,” I say. “Not being there for the girls the first time some fifth-form bitch is catty about their shoes. Never having learned French. Never having written that BAFTA-winning sitcom set in a lookalikes agency, called
Cher & Cher Alike.
But what about you? What would be making you feel utterly destroyed and helpless?”

Pete sighs. He is now totally awake. He does also look a bit sad. Talking about death in bed appears to be a bit of a downer. He finds my hand under the duvet, and takes hold of it.

“The total loss of companionship, love and sex,” he says, with a squeeze.

Pause.

“That's a bit broad,” I say.

“What?”

“I wanted more specific things.”

“What?”

“I wanted to be able to imagine the exact points, during a day, you would suddenly go ‘She's gone!' and collapse on the floor, sobbing.”

“Why. On.
Earth.
Would you want to do that?”

I think this is a bit of an odd question.

“All women wonder it,” I explained, patiently.

“Why?”

“We just do. It's a woman thing. It's a thing we do. You just have to accept it, as part of sharing the Earth with us—in the same way we accept you will come into the kitchen and show us a book on the history of service stations, from 1920 until the present day, going, ‘Look at the pictures! Every single one is a gem!' while waving around a shot of three men in Sta-prest trousers smoking a fag outside a café on the A6.
You
do that.
We
like to imagine the after-effects of our tragic early deaths on our menfolk. So. What,
very specifically
, would leave you feeling hopeless and broken?”

“Splinters,” Pete says.

“What?”

“Splinters. When the girls get splinters. You can go in there with the pin. Jesus. I can't do that. Splinters.”

Pause.

“Okay,” I say, “now you're being
too
specific. Can you take the focus of your Mourning Camera at some midway point between ‘Total loss of companionship,' and ‘splinters'? Something in the middle?”

Pete thinks. He thinks for quite a long time. His breathing catches a bit. Oh God! He's crying. I have a massive stab of love for him—crying for me, his dead wife, in the dark.

“Is it upsetting you?” I ask, squeezing his hand.

“Blarrrr. Fell asleep again,” he says. “Did I start snoring? So tired.”

“I'm DEAD,” I say. “DEAD at thirty-six. Fucking tell me what the worst bits are! Now! Do it now! Now!”

“Okay,” Pete says, totally awake now, sitting up in bed. “I would miss you when I wake up. I would miss you when I go to sleep. I'd miss you when I'm scared, and you say ‘Everyone can screw themselves,' and it seems to make things better. I'd miss you every time our kids laughed, or cried. I'd miss you every time I looked at that tree at the end of the garden that you love, or smelled your perfume on a woman walking by, or saw someone laughing so much they made piggy snorting noises and lay on the floor, crying. I'd miss you all. The. Time.”

It's a beautiful list. So full of love, and memory, and pride. I am a lucky woman.

“What about my bread and butter pudding?” I say. “No one else's bread and butter pudding is as good as my bread and butter pudding.”

“Yes,” Pete says, still emotional. “I would be sad to eat someone else's bread and butter pudding.”

“. . . and punning,” I say. “Your second wife would never be as good at puns as I am.”

“That is, also, true,” Pete says, slightly brisker.

“And I think one of my real strong points has always been my ability to absorb a large amount of information, then render it down to the essential parts in a really easy-to-understand way. . . .”

“Just so you know,” Pete says, turning over to sleep, “this is definitely another memory that will make me cry. A lot.”

 

Acknowledgments

T
his book would have nothing in it were it not for the fact that, over eighteen years at
The Times,
I have had a series of parodically clever and lovely editors, who made being a columnist for them a dream job, which I would willingly have done for free. Thank you, a million times, to Sarah Vine, Alex O'Connell, Emma Tucker, Shaun Philips, Mike Mulvihill, and particularly the properly demented and brilliant Nicola Jeal, for making my job something where I might, on occasion, find myself at 4
PM
in February at Cliveden, in a massive wedding dress, wearing a Kate Middleton wig, and pretending to kiss a Prince William lookalike. And James Harding—you are the Gentleman Editor of Fleet Street, and I am proud to work for your paper. I know how lucky I am to deal with you all. Thank you.

At Ebury, I cannot spade enough appreciation onto the head dude, Jake Lingwood, who dreams BIG and then makes it all come true, and Liz Marvin, for being wholly indomitable. And there's a reason why Ebury's PR, Ed Griffiths, wins awards—he's scientifically and provably the best. I love you, Mr. Jeff Pigeon.

At my American publishers, Jennifer Barth insanely believed that
How to Be a Woman—
a book written by someone from Wolverhampton who once, while watching television with her family, sneezed a mouthful of sardines on the screen, then scraped it off and ate it again—could sell in the States, and got it in the
New York Times
Top Ten. This is an event which frankly I'm still lying on the floor about, having cold gin flicked at my face, trying to process.

And Gregory Henry, the US publicist for the book, wrangled an astonishing campaign—despite having to work around the massive disability of working with an author who says “lift” instead of elevator, and doesn't know who Diane Sawyer is. Or who those nice ladies we met on the
Today
show are. Who were they? They smelled of wine. I liked it. Thanks too to Jonathan Burnham, Erica Barmash, Amy Baker, David Watson, Dori Carlson, Lelia Mander, and all the other lovely people at HarperCollins.

Georgia Garrett—if you ever stop being my agent, I will end myself. You've got a mind for business, a body for sin, and the heart for long lunches.

To all the people who let me come and hang out with them for features—thank you. I hope I was reasonably accurate. It was a proper thrill to meet you all. Gareth Dorrian—thank you for replying to my panicked, anxious Tweet of “I AM THREE WEEKS OVER DEADLINE AND WILL GIVE CHAMPAGNE TO SOMEONE WHO CAN THINK OF A TITLE FOR MY BOOK” with the perfect, elegant, pun-ny and Beatle-ish “Moranthology.” Enjoy your champagne. I've never been happier to put three first class stamps on a bottle of blanc de blanc.

As with the last book, I must thank all the people I hang around with all day on Twitter, in the saloon bar of my virtual “Cheers”: @salihughes, @gracedent, @Martin_Carr, @DavidGArnold, @heawood, @Hemmo, @pgofton, @laurenlaverne, @traceythorn, @alexispetridis, @Dorianlynskey, @porksmith, @mydadisloaded, @mattpark, @nivenj1, @indiaknight, @victoriapeckham, @jennycolgan, @mrchrisaddison, @laurakirsop, @evawiseman, @emmafreud, @scouserachel, @julianstockton, @zoesqwilliams, @EosChater, @sophwilkinson and @stevefurst. Thank you for being my friends in my laptop.

To my daughters—Mummy lied. “The Man” has
not
, in fact, closed down Disney World, all the rides
didn't
get melted down to make more useful things, like school chairs—and YES! We
can
go there, now mummy's finished all the typing! The Guys—Caz, Weena, Eddie, Col, Henri, Gezmo, Jimmy and Jofish—BOOM!

And, finally, to my husband, Pete: thanks for letting me make up all those ridiculous conversations with you, over the years; just to fill up column space. We know I'd never
really
stay stuff like that—and your current silence on this issue is a legal acceptance that I really am
not
like that, and I am finishing the book now so you can't argue back yes yes thank you byeeeee.