Two weeks later, at the NME’s annual Brat Awards, I realized that this plan wouldn’t work.
It started well. I was in a gang, which is always comforting. The Branks had finished their album, and the first single—“God Is a Girl,” the song Suzanne sang to us at the salon—is currently at Number 12 in the charts. Whenever anyone congratulated Suzanne on this, she said—almost offended—“But this was always going to happen?” She has never doubted her stardom.
This week, she is on the cover of the NME—something that delighted her in a way I didn’t think possible. When I turned up at her house, earlier, to pick her up, she was as excited as I’ve ever seen her—full-frontal mania, and bouncing off the walls.
“I’ve just HAD SOME COKE!” she said, as I came through the door. I found Suzanne’s way of taking drugs very endearing. Everyone else would be very clandestine, and mysterious—referring to it in oblique code; nodding and winking. Suzanne just shouted, “I’M GOING TO HAVE SOME DRUGS NOW! ANYONE ELSE WANT SOME?” It made cool boys angry. Nearly everything Suzanne did made cool boys angry.
“Coke? Oh—that explains it,” I said, noting that she was opening and closing her fists so rapidly, the knuckles were white.
“NO, NO!” she shouted. “You don’t UNDERSTAND! When my guy dropped it off, the wrap it was in—IT WAS ME!”
I didn’t understand, so she showed me the now-empty coke wrap. It was made from the front cover of the NME. It was a portion of her face.
“IT’S ME-COKE!” she shouted. “I’M A WRAP! THAT’S WHEN YOU KNOW YOU’VE MADE IT!”
“Be sure to tell them that’s what you’ve taken, when you OD, and the medics arrive,” Julia said, sitting peaceably on the sofa, eating a sandwich. “Me-coke.”
“Ambulances are for amateurs,” Suzanne replied cheerfully.
With The Branks now in the charts, they have been invited along to the Brat Awards, to provide a bit of excitement. Suzanne has rapidly become known for her reliably entertaining interviews. Appearing on The Word last week, she had repeated the thing she’d said to me, months ago—“It’s 1995. Everyone’s bisexual after eleven p.m.”—and then kissed a girl in the front row of the audience. And her first interview in the D&ME had ended up with her getting drunk, and high, in the pub, with Rob, chatting to a girl on the next table, and insisting on giving her a makeover: taking off her top, pulling off the girl’s, and swapping them.
“You belong to The Branks now,” she’d cackled.
The headline was: “HIGH. STREET. BRANKS.”
There was also the interview where she punched the journalist who called her “a classic angry feminist”—shouting “Go buy a vagina, Richard”—but that barely seems worth mentioning.
The cab decants us at the venue, in Camden, where a red carpet leads up to the door.
“Oh my God—let’s throw shapes!” Suzanne says, delightedly, dragging Julia and me down the red carpet, in the same manner Cruella De Vil drags her Dalmatian-fur stole behind her in 101 Dalmations. Our role is, definitely, as “living accessories.”
Not surprisingly, Julia does not happily take to the red carpet. She is dressed in a cutoff silver boiler suit, tights, and work boots, and has brought a satchel full of cider: “Champagne makes me gassy,” she’d explained, flatly, as she’d packed her bag. “And, let’s face it—it tastes like piss.”
On the red carpet, she looks very angsty. As they take pictures, she retrieves her first can of cider and takes a swig as everyone snaps away.
“Ah, fuck this,” she says, after a minute, as Suzanne poses gleefully for the photographers. “I’m not being paid to stand here doing a ‘surprised’ face.”
She wriggles us free of Suzanne’s grasp—to Suzanne’s glee, as it enables her to start doing “arm-posing,” too.
“Inside,” Julia says, heading toward the entrance. “I’ve put on my bad tights. The crotch keeps dropping, and I need to hoik them up.”
She turns just as I heard a voice shouting, “Hey! Dolly!”
I turn around, and see someone I vaguely recognize from Loaded. I start to wave, as he says, maliciously: “So where’s Jerry?”
I turn to Julia, in horror.
“Still hanging out the back of you?” he continues, in a horrible, faux-matey tone. For the first time ever in my life, I actually gasp. The brutality of the question, in daylight, sober, is shocking. That he’s seen me—with my friends, in my nice dress, smiling; just a girl, having her day—and the thought of me fucking has inspired him to wound me. To crush me. To coat me in the sticky black tar of shame. This is the machinery of his thoughts. This is how he has processed me. That is what he needed to do to me, when he saw me walking past him. The hatred is raw, inexplicable, and brutal.
“He’s busy fucking your mum in the eye, dickless!” Suzanne shouts back—still posing. “Come on. Screw this.”
I was still shaking as she put her arm around me, and marched me inside.
It’s a standard awards ceremony: tables, chairs, a stage. And now me, charging through the doorway.
“It’s okay,” I say, as Julia and Suzanne crowd around me—like as woodland animals around a fellow woodland animal who’s just been shot in the face. “It’s just some gossip, that will pass. I am still noble, and angry. I don’t care what anyone thinks, apart from my friends.”
“What other people think is none of your business,” Julia nods. “A drag queen called Sarah Cunt told me that.”
I sit down at our table—back ramrod straight—as Julia hands me a can of cider. I am burning with nobility. I am a martyr candle. I am so ready to be better than everyone else in the room.
“I wouldn’t normally share my cider,” Julia says. “But you—you’ve earned this.”
Tonight’s show is being presented by another of the rock ’n’ roll comedians, of whom London has a surfeit, at the moment: Tim Brazier, who also has a lot of material about liking cool bands, and not being able to find a girlfriend.
“Is there a factory that’s making these cunts?” Suzanne asks, as he launches into his opening monologue, about how he’d recently gone on a date with a girl who was beautiful, and hot, but liked Madonna, and thought that Black Francis from the Pixies was called “Fat Francis,” and so he’d dumped her.
“Never trust a man who doesn’t like pop music,” Julia says, lighting a cigarette. “For there, most assuredly, is a bore.”
The atmosphere is blokey; coke-y: “One out of two isn’t bad,” Suzanne says, who’s just dabbed some more coke under the table, after announcing to everyone else, “I think it might be time for some more drugs!”
She tries to persuade me to have some: “Just think of it as ‘powdered booze,’” she says, handing me a wrap. “Like in the war? Powdered eggs, powdered booze. Saves you having to go for a piss every half hour.”
“It’s a powerful recommendation,” I reply, giving her the wrap back, “and I’m sure you could sell it to the elderly, and incontinent, and possibly the military, on that basis, but it’s just not my game.”
“What’s not your game, babe?” a voice from behind me says. I turn around. It’s John.
“You’re here!” I cry, standing up, and hugging him.
I look at him—half expecting to see the same puffy, unhappy shambles I’d left in Eastbourne. But being locked away in a studio in Wales, recording, has clearly been good for him. His eyes no longer look like those of Sauron, he’s lost what looks to be nearly a stone, and his posture has gone from that of a victim, to that of someone about to start dancing.
“You’re back,” I say, waving an appreciative hand at his hotness.
Tonight, he has been nominated for Album of the Year, Single of the Year, and Solo Artist of the Year. Tomorrow, he begins a tour of America.
“I’ve been practicing my gracious face, for when I lose to Blur, Oasis, and Paul Weller,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “I’ve had a good early tip-off on one category—Kurt Cobain’s won something.”
“What for?” I ask.
“Bummer of the Year.”
“They’ve described the suicide of Kurt Cobain as ‘Bummer of the Year’?” I ask. “Blowing his brains out with a shotgun was . . . a bummer?”
“This is what will kill Britpop, in the end,” Suzanne says darkly. “An inability to process or express any emotion more complex than, ‘Oi oi, savaloy! Nice tits! Bummer!’”
“I dimly recall,” John says, “that in 1989, in the Readers’ End-of-Year Poll, the Reading Festival nudged the Number One slot over the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
He shrugs.
“In many ways, we are engaged in an arena of fools. This is not Avalon, but a knavery.”
I would like to say that Suzanne was grotesquely overstating the blokey, triumphal, emotionally-reductive mood in London in spring 1995—but she was not. As the evening went on, it became more and more apparent that this city—and particularly this industry, in this room—was now in a delirium of degeneration. What had, last summer, been a cheerful cultural excursion into simpler, childlike times—all the sunshine, Chopper bikes, bacon sandwiches, great blokes and top birds—had, nine months later, morphed into a shriller, willful regression. I guess you cannot stay a child, high on sweets, staying out late, forever. You eventually grow into a teenager—a sullen teenage boy, scared of girls; and it seemed like those teenage boys were running the show tonight.
There were two “sexy” female models onstage—one in a skintight PVC bodysuit, the other in tiny PVC shorts—who were there to hand out the awards. Their presence, we were assured, was “ironic”—but, as Suzanne pointed out, “A vagina in PVC hot pants cannot be ironic. It’s either here, or it’s not. It hasn’t got fucking quote marks around it.”
There were very few other women in the room, and so the presence of the models became ever-more disturbing, as man after man in jeans, or wearing a parka, went up onstage to collect their award. Just two years after everything was PJ Harvey, Björk, Alanis Morissette, Courtney Love, and Riot Grrrl—clever, funny warrior women, smarter and bolder and faster than any man in this room—this queasy, silent return of “sexy silent lady models” was jarring. Not least because, as the evening went on, it became increasingly clear that the only woman who had won an award that night was Kylie Minogue, for “Most Desirable Person in the World”—and that she would, therefore, be the only woman who spoke all evening.
“This room is just a massive testicularium,” Suzanne said, gaping, as Kylie went up to get her award, to whistles, and shouts of “Alright darlin’?” She turned to me. “There’s only one thing to do: let’s go and take drugs in the toilet.”
In the toilet, I simply treat myself to going to the toilet, whilst Suzanne and, unusually for her, Julia do coke, in the cubicle next to me.
When we all come out, there is a drunken woman standing there, staring intensely.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any left,” Suzanne says, automatically, showing her the empty wrapper. “You can . . . lick it, if you need to?”
“You’re Suzanne Banks and Dolly Wilde, aren’t you?” the woman says, carefully. Quietly. Now I look again, I recognize her—she is a PR for Polydor. I’ve seen her around, at parties—I had her filed under “good-time girl.”
“Almost all the time,” Suzanne says, slightly unsteady on her feet.
“Jerry Sharp,” the PR says. Isla. That’s her name. Isla.
She lets out a painful, ragged breath, then says:
“Me too,” in a very small voice.
“He filmed it?” I ask.
“Yes,” she replies. “And now I’ve seen what’s happened with you, I am so, so scared.”
I hug her, stop—and then hug her again. There’s something unexpectedly . . . reassuring about hugging a woman who’s been through the same thing you have. The simple fact that you are both still here. So far.
“What can we do?” she asks.
I look at her.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “But I don’t think there is anything.”
She nods, as if she expected that answer, squares her shoulders, and leaves the room.
When I come out of the toilets, two things happen at once. The first is that I bump straight into John Kite, who is standing, agitated, next to the door. He’s clearly been there some time.
“Babe, word in private,” he says, pulling me into a dark corner. “I wouldn’t normally report this kind of thing back, but the table I’m on has just been told, loudly, by an enormously confident prick from my record company with the hair of an actual rapist, that Jerry Sharp got you your job on The Face because you shagged him.”
I wince, and start to say, “But that would have been imposs—”
“Babe, you don’t need to explain anything to me. Ever. I just wanted to make sure I was correct in telling him that, if I ever heard him repeat that spiteful bullshit about my friend again, to anyone, that I would personally break every fucking finger on his hands; and that he would be well-advised to go fuck Jerry Sharp now, and ask him for a job at another record company—because I was going to call the head of Warner’s tomorrow, and insist he fire him.”
He puts his arm around me.
“Are you okay, honey? I’ve heard a lot of weird stuff tonight. There’s a bad buzz going round.”
I am just about to reply to John, when the compere starts introducing the next award.
“Now it’s time for Video of the Year. Women in the audience—and you know who you are—rumor has it, this could be won by any of a number of you.”
There’s a small pause, and a gasp—and then the kind of laughter that I thought only existed as a sound effect when all the evil goblins laughed in Labyrinth. It has a particular tone to it—when men know they’re laughing at something wrong, it sounds a little like wolves. It is not a kind sound. And I know they are laughing at me. Dozens of them have turned to stare at me.
I bury my face in John’s jacket—I want to hold my face from them, somewhere safe—only to hear the laughter change, suddenly, into a confused, baying, “Oooooooooh!”
There is an almighty kerfuffle, down the front. I look up—and see that a furious-looking Suzanne is now climbing, effortfully, onto the stage—knickers flashing, although she clearly doesn’t care.
“Ah, I see Suzanne Banks has not had enough attention tonight. Big round of applause for Suzanne Banks, everyone!” the compere shouts.
Suzanne gains the stage, pulls her dress down with a sexy wiggle, lights a fag, and walks casually over to the microphone.
“Would you like me to adjust the mic stand for you, Suzanne?” the compere asks, patronizingly.
“Well, given that it appears to have been positioned so low down it’s broadcasting whatever your penis is thinking, yes,” Suzanne says, expertly adjusting the mic herself, to laughter, and then staring out at the audience.
“So, guys, guys, literally guys,” she says, over occasional shouts, “I thought I would come up here—in case you’d forgotten that women can actually talk?”
There is uncomfortable laughter.
“I am a physical reminder that we do still exist? That we are fifty-two percent of the population—that we are fifty-two percent of your consumer base, music industry,” she continues, squinting out into the crowd.
“I just asked one of the staff here how many people are here tonight. Two hundred and fifty-eight, apparently. Of which, approximately, sixty are women. Or seventy, if you include the waiting staff. All the ladies in aprons having men click their fingers at them, give me a ‘Fuck you, assholes!’”
The room remains silent. No waitress in the world will shout, “Fuck you, assholes” until her paycheck is cashed. Waitresses aren’t stupid.
“Tough crowd. But then, that’s the problem, isn’t it? In a room full of powerful men, lesser-paid women tend to stay silent. Look, I’m too loaded to be nuanced about this. I just took some coke from a wrapper with my face on, so I’m kind of quite high right now, which is cool. Although I can see my label manager saying, ‘Don’t say that, Suzanne!’ Hi, Zee!”
She waves at Zee, who arrived five minutes ago—just in time to watch his key artist slag off the entire music industry from the stage. He has his head in his hands.
“Don’t do drugs, kids,” Suzanne says. There’s more laughter. “And here’s another thing not to do—don’t be a cunt, yeah?” The room goes silent. “Do you know how fucking exhausting it is being a woman? Every woman here—we’ve had to fight four times as hard to get here, we’ve spent five times longer than you getting dressed, our feet already hurt because of our fucking shoes”—here, Suzanne takes off one of her shoes, and throws it into the audience—“and then, when we finally get in the room—when we get to be in the room where all the winners are; where all the deals are being made—we find that all women seem to be good for is winning a prize for ‘Most Wanked Over’—no offense, Kylie; I’ve flicked one off thinking about you too, babe. Or being Hester Prynned by gossip. This is a classic hostile work environment. You,” she says, turning to the compere, who looks genuinely discomforted, “have created a classic hostile work environment. You know, you’re not cheekily referring to the ‘elephant in the room’ when you talk about the ‘Video of the Year.’ You brought it up. You just brought the elephant into the room. You’re an . . . elephant pimp, you dick.”
She takes a swig of her drink, and stumbles a bit. She is absolutely trashed. By this point, I’ve run to Zee, who is quietly wailing, “What should I do? As her friend, I think I should get her down now. But a man can’t remove a woman from the stage when she’s talking about the patriarchy!”
Julia sighs, and walks over to the stage.
“Suzanne!” she calls, loudly.
“My colleague wants to talk to me. Hang on a minute. Just be cunts amongst yourselves,” Suzanne says into the mic—then bends down to listen to Julia. Julia speaks to her for thirty seconds, and then Suzanne comes back to the mic.
“Julia wants to remind you all our debut album, God Is a Girl, is out next month on Jubilee Records, and that she thinks you’re all cunts too. I’m Suzanne Banks, fuck you all very, very much. Good night!”
Suzanne carefully climbs back down from the stage, as the compere walks back to the mic, and says, “It’s so embarrassing when your mum turns up at work, drunk,” to explosive laughter, and relieved cheers.
Suzanne—not breaking her stride—kicks her other shoe off and up, into her hand, turns, throws it at the compere’s face, and carries on walking out, whilst shouting, “I AM TWENTY-FIVE!”
As she leaves the room—us running in her wake—half the photographers are photographing her, and half are photographing the host, standing onstage, bleeding profusely from his nose, as the glamour girls stare at him with a cold, hard blankness.
We stand outside the venue for a minute—Suzanne, Zee, Julia, John, and I—not knowing what to do. I have a ringing in my ears—like when you’ve been hit on the side of the head. The others look similarly stunned. Except Suzanne. She lights a cigarette and stands there, shoeless, looking unperturbed.
“Well, I think that went well,” she says, leaning against the wall.
I don’t know what to say. On the one hand, my dear friend has just got up in front of a room of people and defended me—whilst, in the process, losing two good shoes. So I feel very loved.
But on the other hand, by defending me against a couple of dicks, she has—of course—ensured that everyone in that room will now be talking about me.
Gossip is a virus, for which there is no treatment, and contact serves to spread it. If there was anyone in that room who had not known what the compere was insinuating, they would—even now—be asking the person next to them. “Video—what video? What woman was he talking about? Dolly Wilde? No!”
And then, later, they will tell others, and others, and others. I can imagine London lighting up with this story—the computer circuits running overtime. And then—the printer springing into action. For this is, now, surely, going to be written about, in reports of the night.
“Suzanne,” I begin. “What you just did there was amazing—don’t get me wrong—but I think maybe talking about it was the wrong thing?”
“I’m an ENTJ,” Suzanne shrugs. “My personality type is all about getting things done. Lance the boil!”
“I think Dolly’s personality type is more ‘never complain, never explain,’” Julia says. “Silent, dignified suffering—like Jesus.”
“You know how much I love you, don’t you, babe?” Suzanne says, ignoring Julia. “Something had to be done. You know what Audre Lorde says.”
I do not know what Audre Lorde says.
“‘Your silence will not protect you.’” She kisses me. I’m still stunned.
Julia takes over.
“I think Suzanne is very high right now,” she says, matter-of-factly, “so I’m going to take her back to the Phantom Zone, like Zod, to have a little think about what she’s done.”
She puts her arm out, for a cab, and bundles Suzanne into it. “You, come,” she says to Zee, who is still standing there, looking helpless. “We’re going to get the press calling us—we need to talk strategy. John—look after Dolly.”
The cab disappears up Parkway, with Suzanne hollering, from the window, “THIS TOWN IS RUN BY SEXUAL CRIMINALS” until it disappears from view.
So—I have an unsolvable problem.
I have just had the horrible realization that it doesn’t matter how noble I am, or how much I know I’m a good person—because I must now walk around in a city where to hundreds—maybe thousands, I don’t know—of people, I am the punch line to a joke. It’s all very well saying that it doesn’t matter what other people think of you—because the simple truth is, it really does matter.
The category of humanity I have just been placed in is: “A thing to make comments about; to have opinions about; to be pointed at.” You always wonder, when you’re growing up, what your “thing” will be—what people will remember you for, what you’ll be the shorthand of. You live your life, and you work hard, always wondering, “Is this my defining moment? Is this the first thing someone would say about me? ‘She was a really kind person.’ ‘She was really funny.’ ‘She was a great writer.’ ‘She was a true friend.’”
And all of that has gone by the wayside now—because, all the time I was working hard, and trying to be decent, Jerry was waiting in the wings, to steal the idea of me. To most people, I’m not “me” anymore. I’m just a thing that happened in his life, instead. I’m a dirty footnote. I’m the beginning of the salacious sentence, “Did you hear?”
And that is devastating, because: all I have is me. I have no money, or powerful friends, or well-connected family, or status. All I ever had was the idea of me. That was all I had to invest. All I had to live off. My creation of me had been so painstaking—so hard-won. I have tried, so hard, to be good! And now Jerry—Jerry has stolen it.
I see what he did, that night, when Suzanne and I confronted him at the John Kite gig. Even as I walked away, he jumped on my back, and now he won’t let go. I will have to carry him around forever. He’s hijacked me.
This is what I try to say to John, in between all the crying, as John offers increasingly violent ideas for solving the problem: “I’ll do an interview, where I tell the truth. I’ll break into his house, and steal the video, and smash it to bits. I’ll hit him, Dutch. I’ll break his fucking neck. I’ll do time for you.”
And even as I laugh-cry at his increasing, desperate fury, I explain to him that there’s nothing he can do, because the problem is that story is now spreading, like a plague, and the only way to defeat it would be to set fire to this entire city, and kill everyone in it.
John immediately takes his lighter out. “Say the word, babe, and I’m good to go. I’ll burn this fucker to the ground.”
“Oh, I can never leave the house again,” I wail, hysterically. “People are out there, rating my sexual performance—like I’m Fuckoslavakia in the Eurovision Song Contest. I shall have to become a hermit, and communicate only by phone and letter. I can never look another person in the eye again—in case I look at them, and know they know.”
“Or,” John says, grabbing me by the shoulders, “you could just . . . come with me.”
“What—to your house?” I ask.
“No—America,” he replies. “I am getting onto a plane in seven hours, to a country where no one knows who you are. Come with me. It would be such a delight to have you. I want you with me. Sometimes, the only, best thing to do is just—run away.”
“I can’t just go to America,” I say—even as I fill with absolute joy at the idea of it.
“Of course you fucking can. Andy! ANDY!”
John’s PR, Andy Wolf, emerges from the shadows, where he’s been lurking.
“Andy, you can sort this, can’t you? Bring the duchess to America with me?”
“I would be absolutely fucking delighted to,” Andy says, with the air of someone who would like to kill everyone in the world, one by one, starting with me.
“First class, yeah?” John continues. “No small seats. We don’t do small seats,” he says, putting his arm around me. “Always evacuate a burning life in style.”