The next show was in Manhattan, at a club called the World and at a more civilised time at night. We climbed out of the van into the cold and across an intersection to the back door of the club. Steam swirled in the slipstream of a yellow cab, spookily revealing Cait in her new suit, with a guy called Bill Flanagan.
Costello had stayed back in London. His record King of America had just been released and he was doing promotion. Bill Flanagan, a journalist friend of Costello’s, seemed to have been engaged as Cait’s chaperone. Flanagan had a lofty hairline, a long nose and a small mouth. At all times, a shoulder bag hung from him.
During our gig at the World, through the heat of the lights burning down from the ceiling, my attention was drawn again and again to Rick Trevan’s American girlfriend, Heather, who stood in the middle of the crowd.
I had met Heather at Rick’s flat on one of her visits to London. She was something called a performance artist, and a writer. I had come across her huddled against the radiator in Rick’s living room, wrapped in a long tweed coat. She was talking with way-worn authority about New York to Spider, who was sitting on the sofa listening, his fingers in the shape of a church roof.
She was beautiful, with her blonde hair and slender shoulders. Beneath the old coat, she wore a short dress of kingfisher blue and white knee socks. I watched her rake her bony fingers across her forehead up into her fine hair. As if in confirmation that she was a writer, I saw her fingers were blue with ink. She fascinated me. It had been wondrous to come across someone so exotic in the Victorian tenements round King’s Cross.
At the World she was standing by herself leaning up against one of the columns away from the moil of heads and shoulders in the middle of the crowd, wearing a sleeveless dress. Though it was difficult to tell from that distance it seemed that every time I looked up, she was staring right at me and so intently that I had to look away. Throughout the rest of the gig I tried not to look in her direction again though I was constantly aware of where she was standing.
In the backstage bar afterwards, Heather’s blonde hair, incandescent under a recessed spot in a corner, led me to her like a beacon. She was staring into the rout, cupping an elbow, a cigarette propped in the V of her fingers, her forearms sheathed in satin opera-gloves. I sat down and flopped my arms on the tilting Formica table.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m doing good,’ she said. She was lovely with her aquiline nose and the thin dark lines of her eyebrows. Her mouth was lustrous with lip-gloss. Now and again her hair would fall across her face from where she had hoisted it. She would take it up again and push it back.
All I knew was that I was in New York for the first time with one of the most attractive women I had ever come across. To my shame and annoyance, Frank’s remark about us all getting blow-jobs when we came to America had put me in a fever of anticipation. I could think of little else than what was going to happen next, what we were going to do, where we were going to go, how we were going to get there. I deferred all the concerns I might have had regarding Debsey back in London to an indistinct point in the future. I put off thinking, too, about the friendship Jem and Marcia shared, it occurred to me, with both women.
There was a move to go to a bar on the Lower East Side. Out in the street a couple of taxis veered into the kerb to pick up the people shifting around on the sidewalk. Heather linked me from behind.
‘Yo!’ she said. ‘Let’s get this one.’ She pulled me across the sidewalk, stepped out between parked cars and hailed a cab on the far side of the street.
Our thighs touched as she put her face up to the window in the hazed Plexiglas screen.
‘We’re going to Attorney and Houston,’ she said to the driver.
We sat and smoked cigarettes with the window down. Though the storefronts were shuttered and it was one o’clock in the morning, the city showed no sign of abatement. Streams of cars and taxis jockeyed up and down the avenues. The fast-food joints and the corner delis lit the sidewalks. It felt as though the city, like me, was hurtling towards some turning point.
‘It’s a fucking mad place,’ I said.
‘I won’t live anywhere else,’ she said. ‘It won’t let me. If I try to leave it stops me somehow. If I leave, it brings me back. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I’d wonder why I wasn’t living here. I’ll never leave.’ She fell silent for a second or two.
‘I have beer at my place,’ she said then. ‘No I don’t, but do you want to come back to my apartment anyway? We just passed it.’
Against the free-standing wall that bisected her apartment, Heather had a four-poster which seemed to rise in valanced tiers. The summit was misted with mousseline and chiffon hanging from the metal rails. She climbed up and sat on her heels with her palms on her thighs.
‘Shoes,’ she said.
The following morning, I managed to get up without disturbing her. West 14th Street was clamorous with traffic and the honks of taxi cabs. The air shuddered from the engines of passing buses. Loudspeakers on the sidewalk in front of stores brayed Latin music. The speaker-cones had all gone but the vendors didn’t care or didn’t notice. I jumped at every noise. I seemed forever to be in people’s way. A man cursed me for sending him against a scaffolding pole because I hadn’t known which side to pass him on.
New York couldn’t care less about what I had done. It was loud, preoccupied, and indifferent to my infidelity. In desperation I went from store to store picking up things to take home for Debsey, things she would like, things that would distract her from asking questions.
*
Combined with the drinking we were doing and the hours we were keeping, our unfamiliarity with jet lag only went to magnify the five-hour time difference between New York and London. Cait, though, seemed to have a slenderer hold on sleep than the rest of us and was having problems. There was a nagging restiveness about her. Her complexion was wan. Her disposition was mettlesome. Her regression seemed due to more than just her being stricken with Costello’s absence. There was an ominousness about Bill Flanagan’s ubiquity.
On the morning we were to leave New York City for Washington DC we gathered, bedraggled, in the lobby with our luggage. To add to the mêlée, a journalist and a photographer working for the NME, Mat Snow and Bleddyn Butcher, had turned up with their belongings for the journey down to Washington. Amid the confusion of checking out, no one else heard one of the receptionists tap on the glass of his cubicle.
‘Phone call for the Pogues?’ he said.
I went across. Cait’s voice sounded distant. She said she had left for the airport and that she was getting a plane back to England.
‘I’m splitting,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think I mean?’ she said and hung up.
‘Who was that?’ Frank wanted to know.
‘Cait,’ I said. ‘She’s splitting.’
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
Frank exploded into supposition and after that into action. It was Costello who had orchestrated Cait’s escape. It was Bill Flanagan, upon instructions from Costello, who had picked her up from the hotel and taken her in a taxi to the airport and had bought her ticket back home.
Frank took the second Econoline we had and assigned to it as many as would fit in, to travel down to Washington DC. The remainder – himself, Terry, Spider and Shane, along with Snow and Butcher – would go in Bill Rahmy’s van to try to intercept Cait at the airport.
In our Econoline on the way down the New Jersey Turnpike, Jem and I taught Darryl what bass-lines he didn’t already know. It had only been a couple of months since Cait and Costello had missed the charter plane out to Waterford.
Later, I leant my forehead to the window looking out onto the wintry landscape, the grey woods rimmed with spruce. I watched the cars passing us. Many were rusted, tail pipes clanking underneath, panels loose. Inside a couple, the upholstery was burst. Dingy fabric hung down from the cei
ling and snapped in the wind coming in through the windows. The cars floated over the slabs, but the wheels shivered over the uneven concrete ledges of the pavement which slammed underneath our bus. The sill of one particularly ill-set slab bounced the entire back axle and wheels of a dump truck off the road surface. It banged down, released a cloud of rust and skittered back to equilibrium. Everywhere I looked it seemed the place was driving itself into the ground.
I became distracted by the replacement driver we had whose large-frame glasses I could see in the rear-view mirror. He wore a baseball cap with an exaggeratedly curved peak.
‘You guys had any Mercan pussy?’ We pretended not to hear. ‘No?’ he added.
‘No,’ Jem said. ‘I’m happily married.’
‘You don’t wanna go home and not had some Mercan pussy,’ the guy said. ‘It’s the best in the world.’
In a couple of weeks, I would be going home to Debsey.
Frank’s Econoline arrived at the airport too late and Cait was gone. We played the next couple of shows without her. We played well enough, though tentatively, at least in Washington DC. Andrew was relieved. He had been complaining about Cait’s bass-playing for a few months, frustrated at either her inability or her unwillingness to synchronise her playing with his bass drum, irked but thankful for her lack of eye contact on stage. In Darryl, Andrew was relieved not just to play with someone who actually had a talent for bass-playing and for music in general, but with someone who evinced enthusiasm for it too.
After Andrew’s septicaemia it all seemed to have changed. Once he had returned to what was considered a drummer’s rightful place sitting down with his battery of instruments around him, Andrew became a musician again. Cait, though, hadn’t been playing along. If anything, she was going in the opposite direction.
Cait returned to the tour with little fanfare at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. How Frank had managed to get her to come back didn’t interest me. Some of us teased her about having jumped ship, but from a safe distance.
Once the tour resumed and we headed north to Massachusetts she kept herself to herself. I interpreted her insularity to signify contrition, until she happened to show Spider the diamond and emerald engagement ring she had returned from England with.
For the rest of the tour Andrew committed to suffering her bass-playing. He ignored her on stage and off. We played three more gigs – in Massachusetts and Rhode Island – before returning to Manhattan where we played at Danceteria, an after-hours dance club where we were told Madonna had once worked as a hat-check girl.
Perhaps in unconscious resentment of having had to suffer Cait’s indifference to the synchrony of bass drum and bass guitar, Andrew dropped Ecstasy and ended up pitying his drums so much for the walloping he was supposed to give them that his playing became a matter of delicate and apologetic taps.
*
A week after our return from New York we had a three-day run of St Patrick’s Day shows at the Hammersmith Palais. On the first of them, Mat Snow’s article appeared in the NME. His report of the conversation in the van on the way to intercept Cait at John F. Kennedy airport sent her into a smouldering fury. The atmosphere backstage was thunderous with animosity.
In the article, Spider and Shane’s allusions to the size of Cait’s breasts were harmless compared to what must have been the damage to Cait’s spirits when she read that our revenge against her for deserting, according to Shane, should be to ‘post her Elvis’s head with his cock in his mouth’ and that in reference to Costello’s girth we should all ‘dress up as Michelin Men and gang-bang her’.
We cared less and less for Cait. She had made it too difficult for us to retain even the most rudimentary sympathy for her. Jem was civil enough, but privately showed the scantest compunction when it came to revealing his true feelings about her. Off stage, Andrew barely tolerated her. On stage, he struggled to make sense of playing in the same band. Ironically, the two people who it seemed had done her the most damage were the ones who defended her.
‘She’s a bloody good bass player!’ Shane had been quoted in the NME article.
The fact was, though, she had never been much of a bass player. As her relationship with Costello developed, it seemed to me that she was more than ready to sacrifice her interest in bass-playing to what was now her new life. After spending most of his time in the studio and on the road with us, the release of King of America – and within a couple of weeks the commencement of recording his next album – meant the resumption of Costello’s career. Costello, it was obvious, was ready to return to the lofty stratum he’d come from. Cait, it seemed, was eager to go with him.
Twenty
I let myself into my flat the morning of our return to London from New York and had to hold my breath against the smell. I opened a few windows. There were dead flies on the sills. There were crusts of penicillin mould in the tea mugs. Once I had tidied up and aired the place out, I rang Debsey.
Banishing the words ‘Mercan pussy’ from my mind, I traded my guilt for Debsey’s delight in the gaudy string of plastic beads, the striped tights and the parrot-blue wig which had been hanging under one of the awnings on the sidewalk of West 14th Street the morning after our show at the World.
‘Your face is all blotchy,’ Debsey said then, looking at me. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re drinking too much.’
My hair was falling out too. That week she remarked on the hairs I left in the sink after I washed. Over the past couple of months an open sore had appeared on my left foot. My arm hurt from forever dragging open and hooking closed the bellows of my accordion. After gigs I couldn’t hold anything in my left hand without my arm going into spasm.
‘You should go and see a doctor,’ Debsey said.
After our three nights at the Hammersmith Palais, we had a week off before starting a month-long tour of France and Germany. Mindful of his appeal to give him two years of our lives, I surrendered to Frank’s urgency to break us, territory upon territory. I wasn’t unhappy to be going away again, and so soon. I was glad to pack my belongings in the canvas holdall from my dad’s days in amateur dramatics and lock up my flat for weeks on end. I promised Debsey I’d see a doctor before we were to go to Europe.
The last thing we had to do before going away was to finish recording our contribution to the soundtrack for Alex Cox’s film Sid and Nancy. Cox wanted another couple of songs. We met at post-production studios in Soho.
‘Hot Dogs with Everything’ was a song I had played with Shane in the Nips. After going through all manner of versions of the song – in the style of Costello and the Attractions, as a reggae song – Frank burst into the studio.
‘Just play the fucking thing how you used to play it!’
Shane took up a guitar. We ended up lashing through the song even more unflinchingly than the Nips had ever played it. Spider bleated the lyrics. Shane abraded the middle eight with a guitar solo. He fisted the guitar, head down, and with such recklessness that I was embarrassed how quickly at my audition for the Nips I had admitted that I could do disconnected shards of industrial noise. I ducked out of playing guitar on the next song – a minute-and-a-half Millwall Chainsaws’ song called ‘Glued up and Speeding’. Abandoning the tyranny of tuning and refinement, Spider, Shane, Cait and Andrew hurtled through it.
The recording done, Alex Cox took Shane and Spider out to dinner in Notting Hill. Afterwards, as Shane was getting into a car, a black cab coming up Westbourne Grove knocked him down. He broke his arm and tore ligaments in his leg.
*
Portugal at the end of March was beautiful. Debsey and I stayed a week at a farmhouse in the Serra de Monchique which a German friend of mine shared with the other bus drivers in his hippie coach company.
What marred the otherwise paradisiacal interlude was the sleepless nights I had, while I nursed the conviction that I was falling out of love with Debsey. After the farm-dogs had finished their barking, my predicament regarding our four-year relationship seemed inextricably linked
to the baleful rectangle of moonlight which slipped from the bedcovers to mount the wall and fill the room.
When I got back to England I went to visit Shane. His leg and arm were in plaster and he was going about with a walking stick.
‘How was your holiday?’ he sneered.
‘How are you?’ I asked. In pubs, he told me, people moved to let him put his leg up and got him drinks.
‘Not much changed there, then,’ I said.
It was the first time in a couple of years I found I had nothing to do. There was a rerun of the eleven-episode Heimat on the television. I took up driving lessons.
I went to see the doctor about the suppurating lesion on my foot and the pain in the crook of my left arm. For my arm the doctor prescribed an ointment, made, he said, from the pituitary gland of a pig. He suggested weight training and swimming.
D.J. was a keen weight trainer. He took me to enrol at a fitness centre he went to in Camden. Though we laughed that D.J.’s enthusiasm for weight training was due to the similarity of the endorphin rush to that of heroin, we respected his commitment.
Guilty about the ebb of my feelings for her, I spent a lot of time with Debsey. We went swimming at Kentish Town Baths. We went up again to my parents’ country cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. In the course of an afternoon spent holding her hand while she sat crying on the bed in one of the upstairs rooms I finally admitted to myself that the end of the relationship was near.
Here Comes Everybody Page 21
