Waiting for Kate Bush (22 page)

It occurred to me that Babooshka probably smoked by now. I’d have bet that, in trying to repudiate me in every way available to her, she’d learned to love the hot, carcinogenic smoke in her lungs.

* * *

Cyril and I met – he, inevitably, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a replacement in his hand – at a pub near his home, the wonderfully named The Kings Bladder, which seemed, like so much in Britain, to be missing an apostrophe. He leapt up excitedly at the sight of me, and hopped gleefully up and down on the spot as he waited for me to reach him. In the end, he couldn’t bear to wait, and ran to intercept me halfway. What a sight we must have been.

He told me I was looking very well. Yet again I cursed my DNA for making me unable to detect irony except in the most blatant circumstances, such as a heroic doctor, newly arrived in darkest Africa to treat AIDS victims after abandoning his lucrative cosmetic surgery practice, being struck down by lightning as he goes out to buy toothpaste.

It was his impression that I might be able to offer some useful tips on going out with younger women, as he hoped to. He based this impression on my having gone out with Nicola. I found this creepy. I pointed out that if I hadn’t met her in the overeaters’ group, the chances of my asking her out would have been infinitesimal. I told him that our joint membership had made me believe, as I assumed it would make her believe too, that we had something in common. He looked at me quizzically. It made me uncomfortable – and enfranchised to ask how he envisaged going out with younger women in view of his being married to the mountain of flesh. The smoke from his cigarette was getting in my eyes.

“Me and the missus,” he laughed, oblivious to my discomfort, the worst kind of smoker, “are husband and wife in name only. I mean, can you honestly imagine me and her having it on?” He screamed with laughter, inspiring scowls all around us, as well, to be fair, as a couple of smirks, and then had to pay for it with several seconds’ agonised coughing.

I will never understand how the world works. While Cyril coughed, two guys at the adjoining table stubbed out their handrolleds and lit up fresh ones even while eating the Thai food now being delivered to their table.

“Fucking wog food,” one of them growled as he turned his plate in what seemed an attempt to make the stir-fried
ong choi
with yellow bean sauce he’d ordered look more palatable. “God help you if all you fancy’s a Scotch egg anymore.”

The server, a middle-aged Thai woman, winced, but said nothing. Cyril winced and said a great deal.

“Oi, mate, how about you show a little respect?”

The two handrollers looked at one another. The wog food one asked
Cyril, “How about you shut your fucking gob, you fucking pygmy, before I come over and pull your fucking esophagus out of your fucking bum?” And I’d thought the Thai woman winced before!

Cyril sighed in what at first appeared resignation. I felt my heart beating entirely too quickly. My stomach churned. He carefully stubbed out his fag in a way that suggested he hoped to come back to it, and stood up. His waist and the table saw eye-to-eye. Someone snickered.

“I very strongly suggest, mate, that you apologise,” he said, squinting malevolently. The same person who’d snickered a moment before snickered again. Someone else guffawed. If I’d been half a man, I’d have risen and stood beside him. Being who I am, I wanted instead to hide beneath the table.

The publican, bald, prolifically tattooed, and amply spare-tyred – not much to look at, but it’s all about how you carry yourself, isn’t it? –arrived and scolded the two prospective combatants. “If you lot fancy a punch-up, you can have it in the car park, not in here. You, sit bloody down. And you, eat your
ong choi
and shut up. And we ain’t got a car park.”

The handroller shrugged and rubbed his wooden chopsticks together, as seasoned diners in Oriental restaurants know they must to avoid splinters. Cyril stayed aloft long enough to suggest it was he who was the more disappointed by the publican’s intervention.

Where, at moments like this in my own life, had been those whose interventions might have allowed me to save face in such a way?

But then I discovered it might not have been Cyril whose face was saved. When I asked what he imagined might have happened if the handrollers had come for him, he laughed and said, “I’d have jumped up and down on their faces.” During the day, it turned out, he was a foreman at construction sites. Before that, and after his brief career as a jockey, he’d been a full-time thug. “My size really worked for me. I could get into places where a bigger fellow would have been suspected.” It turned out, in fact, that he’d just been offered a lucrative freelance thug job. “This bird in some singing contest on television. I understand she was voted out of the competition by the other singers –whose faces she thinks could do with some rearrangement.” He cackled delightedly. “If I have time, I’ll take it. The dosh is fabulous. And it’s been a long time since I did anybody in the music business. And if there’s any business full of people wanting doing, it’s that one.”

He cackled again, more loudly this time. I noticed the handroller who’d stayed out of it earlier, the one having
kaeng khiao wan nuea
,
looking annoyed. It took only a glance from Cyril to get him fascinated with his meal.

I realised I’d known Cyril – not literally, of course, but someone just like him – in junior high school, in my not-climbing-the-pole days. Billy Ayres was forever getting into shouting matches with boys big enough to have rested their chins atop his little head. It was invariably the bigger boys who walked away embarrassed. For all anyone knew, Billy might have been as weak as he was tiny, but no one ever tested him. He screamed. His eyes bulged. He didn’t express rage, but embodied it. Boiling testosterone must have accounted for 40 per cent of his body weight. I think the universal presumption was that anyone as fearless as that had to be brilliant at some fantastically lethal martial art, or maybe at all of them. He was the Sir Alex Ferguson of another time and place.

But I was wrong about Cyril. He’d been tested extensively, as a bantamweight boxer. He’d been the Territorial Army’s champion one year. His record as an amateur was 22–0. Of the 22, he’d won 15 by knockout. He was said to have fists of stone. There’d been talk of his turning professional. At 18, while trying to launch his jockeying career, he was working as a bouncer for Basildon’s most popular discotheque “and getting to break four or five big yobs’ noses per week.”

I looked at him in a new light. And then, seeing him in it, enquired gingerly about his relationship with the mountain of flesh. “The meekness and that?” he wondered delightedly. “Just good fun!”

Just as he’d always been good with his fists, he’d always been submissive. “Couldn’t tell you why,” he mused. “My dad was, God knows. Mum gave him a good verbal trampling every day of my childhood, and I hated it. Maybe my being so aggressive sprang from that, do you suppose?

“As a child, I was like other boys, being the brave defender of the weak female and all that bollocks. But everything changed when I got to adolescence, didn’t it? Other boys seemed to want girls they could order about, but I always fancied the ones who wanted to do the ordering. They seemed loads more interesting, loads more challenging.”

Just what I would have needed as a teenager. As though any girl wasn’t too challenging in the first place.

His mobile rang, and he was transformed. He seemed instantly to get even smaller. His voice lost resonance. His spine seemed to curve. “Hello, darling,” he mumbled. “Of course, darling. Absolutely, darling. If that’s your desire, darling. Yes, darling. I will, darling.”

He beamed with pleasure as he folded his mobile back up. “The
missus. On the warpath today. Says she’ll cane me when I get home if she has the strength. Brill!”

His accent was fairly common to my newly repatriated ear, but he worked at it. He’d actually been to an expensive public school and learned to speak without parting his teeth. It was there that he’d developed his taste for the cane. “It was one of those schools that thought making you suffer was good for your character,” he laughed. I hate people with no talent for bitterness, or at least don’t trust them. “We were caned quite regularly for nothing at all really. In fact, I remember getting caned once for not having been caned in the previous fortnight. They reckoned that nobody my age could be that virtuous, and punished me for concealing my misbehaviour so well. ‘It would have been much better for you,’ the headmaster said, ‘if you’d been man enough to admit your naughtiness.’

“They also reckoned that praise stunted a boy’s growth or something. The only time I remember ever getting any was while being caned. I didn’t writhe or yelp. Matron said, ‘Brave lad.’ I was over the moon for weeks.”

He discovered that he was out of cigarettes, and did the most extraordinary thing – blagged a handrolled from the guy he’d nearly come to blows with earlier, who seemed only too pleased to provide it. I just detest those with no talent for bitterness. Or maybe it was that, once their testosterone levels had got back to normal, the two might-have-been warriors recognised one another’s manliness, and admired one another for it. It was a feeling I’d probably never know.

“Odd thing about Matron,” Cyril chuckled, “is that I saw her again years later, in a phone box in Wardour Street. Well, not her, but a photo. She hadn’t lost her interest in naughty boys. In fact, she seemed to have gone into the business of disciplining them.” He screamed with laughter. Soon everyone within four tables of us was helpless with mirth too. If it had been me, someone would have come over and told me to shut up. And I’d have listened.

He had to get home, but wanted to know if I’d enjoy accompanying him on one of his upcoming thug runs, hurting one of the singers who’d voted his new client off her show. “If it were
Fab Lab,”
I said, “I might have a problem, as I’d liked Evelyn, at least, and thought a couple of the others seemed quite nice.” He shrugged disapprovingly. “In my business, there’s no room for moral distinctions. You’d be taking food out of your family’s fridge.”

I told him I was busy. He didn’t believe me. “No, really,” I said. “Bollocks,” said he. There could be no resisting him, and I wound up
agreeing to let him collect me the next morning at eleven.

I had him drop me off at the florist on the high road, rather than at Mrs. Cavanaugh’s. After all I’d been through, sending Kate a bouquet of chrysanthemums made me feel much less overwrought. I wrote a note reminding her how much I and countless tens of thousands of others were looking forward to her new album, but decided in the end not to attach it. If she didn’t know by now, she’d never know.

Plaistow of the pierced eyebrows and Ben Sherman shirt was lurking in the hedge outside Mrs. Cavanaugh’s as I managed to climb laboriously out of the cab that took me home. He seemed disgusted that I was alone. As though there’d have been room in the back of the cab for both me and another person! I asked who he’d have wanted me to be bringing home. “A male pop star not previously known to be a bender,” he said, “or, even better, a well-known footballer or rugby player, or, best yet, a Cabinet minister thought to be a devoted family man.” I told him I’d see what I could do, but didn’t envisage being able to do much, given my devout heterosexuality.

Herself. (LFI)

Kate would later reveal: “I was unhappy at [St Joseph’s Convent Grammar School] and couldn’t wait to leave.” But not without enough O-levels to spell
boot
five times.
(Omnibus Press)