Waking, the next day—sleep-deprived, and with my boots still on—I was momentarily confused about what had happened the night before. This is one of the hazards of encountering famous people—when you’re used to seeing them on the TV, or in magazines, your memories of actually meeting them in real life seem vaguely surreal: did you really see the penis of the guy who was on the cover of Time Out last month?
I looked in the mirror, and saw the love bite Jerry had left there.
“Yes, Johanna,” I told myself, as I swung my legs out of bed. “You did see that penis. And it saw you. But only briefly.”
You must not despair, I consoled myself as I got dressed—you still have all the fun of telling Krissi about this insane encounter. He’s going to be both really impressed when you tell him you pulled that comedian that he fancies; and then amused when you tell him how bizarrely it ended. This is going to be fun!
I bounce upstairs, and find Dadda in the kitchen.
“All right, you dirty stop-out,” he says. He’s already very stoned, and it’s only 10:00 a.m. Dadda’s trip down Memory Lane is turning into quite the Long March.
Krissi is sitting at the table, looking very hungover, and eating a huge fried breakfast. My father appears to have used every single utensil in the house to cook it—the sink is full of dirty dishes.
“Tea?” Krissi says, pushing a cup over.
I take the cup, sit down, and prepare my best “I have news” face.
“So, you’ll never guess what! I did it! I pulled Jerry Sharp! Ask me any question you like!”
Krissi stares at me. There is a long, confused pause.
“Who’s Jerry Sharp?”
“Jerry Sharp! That comedian you fancy! I did it for you! I pulled him! Ask me anything you want!”
“Jerry Sharp?” Krissi says, again. “I don’t know who Jerry Sharp is.”
“That comedian—at the gig last night! The one you were freaking out over!”
“Oh,” Krissi says. “Oh dear. That was Jerry Sharp? Oh, I don’t fancy Jerry Sharp.”
He looks at me, clearly puzzled. “I saw him on Have I Got News for You, once . . . I thought he was a bit of a prick, to be honest,” Krissi shrugs. “I thought that guy last night was Denis Leary. Now him, I fancy. Oh God, I really was drunk.”
“Johanna, you want a sausage?” Dadda says, pushing a plate over.
I stare down at it.
All of last night suddenly seems like a very bad idea.
As it turns out, I have no idea just how bad.
Still, life goes on, doesn’t it? It really always does. It keeps bloody going on. I mean that in a good way, of course. However much you fuck things up, life just keeps going on, washing you downriver—even if you’re just floating there, like a listless dead thing, making no effort, mouthing “Oh God, oh God,” facedown underneath the water. The current bears you on until, soon, the awful events are just tiny specks, left far behind you, and you can say, “Oh well, it was just a bad sexual tussle. I barely remember it now.”
Today, I have to work; I have go into D&ME, to file my copy. After eating what I think of as, unfortunately, “Dad’s Bad Sex Consolation Sausage,” I have a bath, put on something that doesn’t smell of Jerry, or fags, clap on my hat, and get the bus.
Luckily, I don’t have a hangover. You don’t really have hangovers when you’re nineteen. Your liver and kidneys are young, and vigorous. They can process alcohol quite efficiently. You might feel a bit sleep-deprived, and more inclined to eat a whole loaf of bread, but it’s not really a “hangover” as older people know them: the pain, suffering, nausea, and terror.
In many ways, our laws around the vending and consumption of alcohol are all wrong. Teenagers are the best people to be drinking it. It doesn’t hurt them so much. By the time you’re of legal age to drink, you’ve only got a few years left before it starts to destroy you. Were I in charge, I would make it illegal to drink alcohol after the age of twenty-one. Teenagers can handle it. Anyone older can’t.
So, no. I’m not really physically suffering.
What I am experiencing is regret.
And if you have regret—which is just a thought—then, in order to feel better, all you have to do is crush the regretful thought with a bigger, non-regretful thought.
However, as I cast around for a thought that is bigger than my regret about Jerry Sharp, I come up against the biggest thought in my head: John Kite.
Oh, John Kite! Do you know how much I think of you? I sometimes think you do—and it’s what both gives me hope, and kills me. You are the first and third thought in any sequence—the fifth and the ninth. I think about you, on average, every seven minutes. That’s what love is, isn’t it? When you’ve met someone so exciting and endless that the whole world is simply, “things that are them,” and “things that are not them”?
This bus route is filled with “things that are John.” It’s like running through a tunnel of ghosts. Past the Good Mixer pub, where I sat and cried with him, brokenhearted, after I’d broken up with Tony Rich, and he roared “If any cunt has hurt you, he will RUE ME!”
Past the off-license where we bought cherry brandy, and walked down the street, while he showed me how to shape chords on the bottle neck.
Past the busker at the Tube station—the same one!—who John gave a twenty-pound note to, telling me, “You’ve got to pass it on, babe,” before asking the busker one favor: “Don’t play Nirvana, babe—it’s too sunny for a downer.”
And the trees of Regent’s Park . . . Regent’s Park, where I kissed John. It was definitely me, kissing him; he explained that I was too young to kiss back, but that we would kiss one day, as, “You’re a you, and I’m a me.”
And on this gentle, jokey promise—on this kind thing, said to a sad girl—I have moved down to London, because, one day, I will be old enough for him to want to kiss me back, and I want to make sure I’m standing right next to him when that happens. That’s why I’m here. That’s the basis of my whole life.
And this is a good, solid, sensible plan to have.
Other people might call it “unrequited love,” but I call it “everything to play for.” I am a grafter. I am unafraid of pain. I like just hanging out on my cross, here, for John. And, besides, it all worked out for Jesus. Pretty much.
There is a problem with my plan, however—to have John realize he’s in love with me, and for us to spend the rest of our lives together.
Because, in the three years that I have known him, John Kite has become very famous. His second album—which I call, in my head, Since I Met Johanna, but which everyone else refers to by its title, Everyone’s Wrong Except You—has seen him unbutton his shirt and let all his songs fly out, like birds from a cage, and they have migrated across the world, and landed on radio waves, and into bedrooms. They have done the unfortunate thing of sharing John with the world.
Now, he is known by hundreds of thousands—and this is my greatest possible sorrow. It is difficult enough to be seriously, officially in love with someone who still thinks you’re too young to be loved back. But it becomes whole fathoms harder when there are thousands of other young girls who are also in love with your love.
I hate every single one of his new fans, even as I admire their great taste. Part of the reason I fell in love with John is because no one else seemed to be in love with him; he was an unlikely heartthrob, and I applauded my rare good taste in wanting him, whilst also coldly calculating that my chances of having him were all the higher, given his bearlike shuffle, squashed face, and shabby suits.
But now, he’s famous for being an unlikely heartthrob—i-D had him on the cover, with lipstick kisses on his face, and the headline “YOUR NEW CRUSH,” and every time John appears on the cover of a magazine, I feel like angrily hovering by the newsstand, and interrogating every girl who buys it: “Did you love him back in 1992, when no one cared? Did you love him when he wore that coat that was a bit too small, and his hair was still a bit shit? Did you? Then your love is invalid. GOOD DAY TO YOU, MADAM—GOOD DAY.”
The most fundamental thing about being famous—being known by hundreds of thousands of people—is that you become very busy. When John was just a cult figure, he lived the pleasingly low-key life of a dole bum. There would be whole weeks when he was doing nothing, except “writing,” which seemed to be a moveable feast—we would spend days in the pub, or walking around, or going to gigs, or watching TV while it rained outside: him with the dog draped, hugely, across his lap, occasionally being startled when John shouted out “CANDIDATE!” very loudly, at the Countdown conundrum.
Since this album came out, however, he is always away—touring, being interviewed, in the studio recording the endless B sides singles needed, in the nineties.
At first, he treated it like a Tommy, in the First World War: “I’m a flash in the pan,” he said, cheerfully, after his first Top of the Pops appearance. “I’ll be all over by Christmas.”
But as the album takes off in Italy, Australia, Sweden, the end point of the publicity campaign gets pushed further and further away. New tours are tacked onto the end of the itinerary, so he won’t be finished until September, November, March.
First weeks, and then months go by where I don’t see him. I watch Countdown on my own. I have the keys to his house—I go in, occasionally, to water his plants, stack up his post by the phone, and lie facedown on his dirty pillow for twenty minutes, breathing in his fading head-smell, sighing, “Your fading head grease is as opium to me,” then letting myself out of the house again.
We are phone friends, now—it will ring at 11:00 p.m., 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., and a drunken John will be on the other end, saying, “Sorry Dutch—I can’t work out what time it is there. Can you talk?”
And of course I’m free—because I’m not with him! The only thing that would ever occupy me enough to not talk to him, would be being with him. Does he not understand that the rest of the calendar is in plain black and white—just hours, with events written in them—and that anything to do with him is illuminated like a medieval manuscript, with gold-leaf griffins and azure-blue saints scrolling into the margins, and bursting out across the room?
I lean my head on the bus’s window glass—to cool my face—and think about John. I read a quote, by Carson McCullers, recently.
“The way I need you is a loneliness I can’t bear.”
I burst into tears when I read it. When you feel you have found your other half—the one you were meant to do everything with—every moment without them is just that: an unbearable loneliness.
The nearest I’ve ever got to praying is for John Kite.
“Please, world,” I say, quietly, looking out of the window, at the bench where we kissed. “Please give me John. I will be so good if you do. I will work.”
I notice I’m crying. Maybe I am hungover after all.
In the D&ME office, it’s business as usual. The landscape: a room full of old papers, and records. The vibe: like a Wild West saloon, filled with rock cowboys.
When I first started working here, at the age of sixteen, I was a wholly innocent, pudding-faced girl—blown away at getting a job where music lived. In an office of oddballs—D&ME employs ex-punks, drug addicts, Goths—I was just another oddball: a sexually voracious sixteen-year-old girl in a hat, with oddly Victorian locution. I presumed we would all accept each other’s oddnesses, and proceed as esteemed colleagues and equals. My Lady Sex Pirate adventures were no more to be judged than Rob’s ferocious amphetamine habit, Armand’s continuing habit of making up entire interviews, and Kenny being convinced that everyone is secretly gay, and making that the subtext of all his features.
But, over the last year, I’ve become more attuned to certain . . . currents, flowing through the place. Let me be specific: since I had a brief dalliance with the paper’s star writer, Tony Rich, which ended when I declined a threesome with him, and was then sick out of the window of his parents’ house, I have been the Number 1 subject of innuendo, double entendre, and outright speculation on my freewheeling sexual attitude.
I did not complete my mission. My mouth wrote a sex check my vagina eventually declined to cash—and, now, as a result, I’m devalued. I’m the kind of person who sexually betrays men. I’m a quitter. I will walk away from an erection. And this kind of girl, I have discovered, makes men angry. It makes them bitchy.
I only found this out when I was drunk, at an aftershow party, when I decided to tell everyone the story of me and Tony Rich. I thought they would find it . . . funny.
“. . . and when he called me his ‘bit of rough,’” I said, leaning on the bar of the Astoria, “I swiveled on my heel, like a Musketeer, gathered my dignity around me, like a fur coat, and I walked out of that threesome. I said ‘Good day’ to him, gentlemen. Good day!”
I expected all “the guys” to respond like women would: “Oh my God!” “Good on you!” “Fuck him!”
Instead, they all sniggered a bit, and then Kenny said, “I’m surprised, given your reputation, that you turned it down, darling. I believed your motto was, in tribute to John Lewis, ‘Never knowingly under-hoe’d.’”
And I laughed, because everyone else was laughing, and it was a good pun, and because, at home, Krissi only ever makes jokes about me because he loves me. That’s what horrible jokes are, at home. But I feel like they might not be, here.
So I’m part of the gang, but not part of the gang. This is a common position for girls to be in. See: Mary Magdalene and the disciples; Madame Cholet in The Wombles; Carol Cleveland in Monty Python. I’m not actually part of the gang at all. I’m just . . . “The Girl.”
“So, scores on the doors. What have we got this week?” Kenny asks, at the Editorial Meeting.
As always, the Editorial Meeting does not look like an editorial meeting. People are smoking, drinking, telling anecdotes, coming down off pills. If someone who did not know the working methods of the D&ME passed by, they would presume this was a field hospital in the Rock Wars.
Rob has his head down on the desk, and is being fed dry Krackawheat from a packet “to help with the terrible burning and nausea.”
Tony Rich is looking at his reflection in the window, and fiddling with his hair, whilst pouting. In advance of seeing him, I have spent weeks practicing a “noble face,” in case we make eye contact. When he finally does look up, it’s with a horrible, knowing grin, which 100 percent means “I can remember having sex with you whenever I want,” and I reflect on how unfair it is that people get to keep their memories of you, even when you have removed them from your life. If only there were some way you could, whilst breaking up with them, flounce around their head with a bin bag, going, “And I’m going to take this image of me giving you a blow job, and this vignette in the back of a cab, and I’m absolutely reclaiming all footage of me losing my virginity to you.” If only you had copyright on memories of yourself. If I could charge him a fiver each time he thinks about me, that would be justice. And would pay for a very good lunch.
There are the usual squabbles/agreements about work. Tony Rich is being dispatched to do his latest in a long line of eviscerations of U2 on tour. Rob’s done Oasis, hence his “rock illness” this morning.
“At one point, Liam started arguing with himself,” Rob marvels. “Said Oasis were the best band in the world, then said, ‘Fuck anyone who thinks we’re the best band in the world—we’re the best band of all time. Fuck those nipples.’ Got proper furious. Amazing.”
Talk then turns to John Kite, whose latest single has just gone into the Top Ten.
“Don’t bother putting your hand up, Dolly,” Kenny says with a sigh, even as my hand is going up. “I think you have delighted us enough with your thoughts on the swoon-some Kite.”
The first feature I did for D&ME, three years ago, was interviewing Kite. High off spending a night in Dublin talking with him, it was, essentially, a love letter, and nearly resulted in me being sacked “for being an overexcited teenage girl.” For the last two years, it has been the office in-joke that I am in love with him, and that his record company have requested I remain a minimum of one hundred yards away from him, lest they have to summon security. I tried, once, to explain that we are actually friends, in real life, and that I water his plants when he’s on tour, which resulted in Kenny screeching, “Mark Chapman’s got the keys to Lennon’s house! RUN, JOHN, RUN!” So now, I say nothing.
“Big crossover audience,” Kenny was saying. “The Kids are into it. What’s our take?”
“I volunteer,” Tony Rich says, raising his hand languidly. “I feel like I’ve got some stuff I could run with.”
“SOLD!” Kenny says. “We done? Pub?”
Everyone half stands, ready to leave.
“It’s just . . .” I say.
Everyone turns to look at me, and then sits back down, reluctantly.
“I was thinking of doing a piece . . . about how male Britpop is?”
I would say the response around the table is “mainly irritated.”
“Go on, Gloria Steinem,” Kenny sighs.
“It’s really noticeable how few female artists are involved in Britpop,” I say, earnestly. “Basically, Louise from Sleeper is having to represent a whole gender. Do you know how many bands at last year’s Reading Festival had women in? Eight. Out of sixty-six. Elastica, Echobelly, Lush, Hole, Sleeper, Transglobal Underground, Tiny Monroe, and Salad. That’s it. It’s all very blokey. It’s all a bit ‘No girls allowed in the treehouse.’”
“You know, she’s got a point,” Rob said. Rob was the nearest I had to a feminist ally at the paper, although he did feminism his way. Today, this was by adding, sympathetically: “There’s hardly any flange in the paper.”
He starts leafing through this week’s issue, on the table, reviewing each page. “No flange; no flange; no flange; flange—oh no. That’s not flange. That’s Richey from the Manics. Get a haircut, love. You’re confusing me.”
“So, what should we do?” Kenny asks, slightly aggressively. He really wants to go to the pub.
The problem is, I don’t know, exactly, what we should do—I have this thing where I don’t often know what I really think until I start talking, and then my mouth suddenly says what I was subconsciously pondering. I was hoping that, when I raised the issue, everyone else would join in, and we’d have a conversation about it, and I’d work it out. But there is no conversation happening here. So I can’t work it out.
I shrug.
“Important point raised, Wilde,” Kenny says, impatiently. “Keep having a think about it, and let us know, yeah? And . . . off we fuck to the pub, then.”
Everyone gets up to leave, and I think: I don’t know if I should work here anymore. I feel . . . lonely. I feel like all those pictures of the heads of state of the world, where it’s eighty-nine men in suits, and then the Queen, being a woman, on her own. I feel like the Queen, but without her backup of castles.
As I fiddle around with a broken strap on my rucksack, Kenny sidles over to me.
“Did you know Tony’s seeing Camilla from Polydor now?” he says, a look of sly glee on his face.
Camilla is a very posh, very blond, very thin woman who, I believe, on her passport, under “occupation,” has “coke whore.” Even though she’s awful and he’s a bastard, and my mother would refer to such a situation with a tight-lipped, “Well, at least they’re not ruining another couple,” this information still makes me feel slightly nauseous. There’s always a part of you that hopes, when you break up with someone, that they cry for six weeks, then get on a horse and say, “No woman will ever be your equal. I am going to join the Crusades, and die for Christ in your name, you extraordinary creature.”
Banging Camilla from Polydor is the exact opposite of that.
“I wish them both great joy,” I say with dignity. “If they share things equally, that’s an inch of penis each—enough for a sexual feast.”
Actually, Tony Rich has a perfectly average-sized penis—but it is traditional, as soon as you break up with someone, to tell everyone they have a tiny penis. The impression you have to give is that, when you broke up, you took most of their penis with you. I presume it’s an ancient, witchcraft thing. I can’t argue with it.
Kenny is still laughing as I leave, thinking, it’s time for me to leave this place. The Queen would not put up with this.