Waiting for Kate Bush by John Mendelssohn

Author:John Mendelssohn [Mendelssohn, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-323-7
Publisher: Music Sales Corp.
Published: 2004-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

15

Something Very Big Indeed

I TOOK the bus to the next Overeaters meeting. It was the driver’s job to worry about the possible consequences of someone my size sitting upstairs, and not mine. During the long ride, it occurred to me that I have probably sent Kate more flowers over the years than lined the route of Princess Diana’s funeral cortege in 1997.

Just for the fun of it, I tried to compute how much money I’d spent on gifts for Kate in the past 12 months, eventually putting the figure at just over £2,000, which I do indeed recognise (I am no nutter) as well out of proportion to the slightly less than £5,000 I have earned impersonating George Clooney in that same period. I would unmistakably have, when the money I’d inherited from my mother ran out, to send Kate far fewer, or far less expensive, gifts.

The really frustrating part, of course, being that I never received any sort of acknowledgement for the millions of flowers, the rivers of cognac, the countless dozens of books and magazine subscriptions, the shoes and handbags and scarves beyond counting, the hundreds of earrings and bracelets and necklaces, the lingerie on 14 Valentine’s Days, I’ve sent, as my intuition has dictated, to any one of half a dozen addresses I either got off the Internet or induced other Katefans to disclose in trade. In addition to a mansion on an island in the Thames in Berkshire, she was said to have a sprawling Victorian mansion in Greenwich, and a luxury flat overlooking the river in Battersea, and a couple of other places I can’t mention because my sources swore me to secrecy.

As I’m sure you can imagine, the other Katefans I trade with exacted very high prices for their information. I had to swap this Dutch guy one of my two copies of the Canadian promotional LP An Interview With Kate Bush (EMI America SPRO 282) for the address of her penthouse flat in Brighton, but that didn’t rankle nearly as much as having to trade both my only copy of the Canadian promotional record of ‘Wow’ on yellow vinyl and one of my three copies of the pink and white “marble” Canadian promotional edition of Hounds Of Love for her email address.

You might imagine that Kate’s silence has been painful for me, and I won’t deny that I would be thrilled to the marrow if she found the time to acknowledge me. But there is, in a strange way, a benefit to her silence. While others can only talk about their devotion to her, I can document mine. There are nearly 2,000 items in the special folder in which I save emails I’ve sent her, and none that I created in which to store her replies. Wouldn’t one who loves her less than I have given up long ago?

* * *

No one noticed me arriving at the meeting, and no one would have noticed me leaving. Everyone was too busy swarming around Dahlia, whose flirtation with Goth had apparently ended in midweek.

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