Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (41 page)

I make a point of sitting as far away from Vincent as possible, to signal there will be no physical contact. He looks confused. The sexual tension just sort of hangs there in the air between us. He flops backwards onto the bed and stretches his arms above his head. I can see the top of his grey Calvin Klein underwear peeping out from under his trousers. I can see a line of hair leading from his navel to … I know what’s down there. I’ve seen it on film. Kind of weird to know what a man’s thing looks like before you’ve ever met him.

Vincent paces around as we talk. He’s not all nice and friendly like he was on the phone. He seems a bit cross. He slides his back down the wall and sits on the floor, drawing his knees up to his chest. He says he’s cold and pulls a blanket off the bed, wrapping it around himself. Then he starts to shake. His whole body trembles. I look at him coldly. What’s he up to? I like him, but I don’t trust him. I talk to him in my head.
Stop it, Vincent
. Then his eyes start rolling back like he’s having a fit. He says he’s got a type of narcolepsy. I don’t believe a word of it. I think he’s trying to make me go over to him. I don’t know if I’m right, but that’s what I think. I ain’t going. If this is something real, it will wait.

We get out of the hotel and walk along the streets of New York to a restaurant.
Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near
… Girls keep coming up to him. ‘I just want to say I really love your work.’ Yeah, right. Back off, girlie. Today he’s mine. A band plays on a doorstep. He makes a cynical comment. A flurry of spring snow is followed by sun. I feel like I’m on the cover of
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
.

My senses are heightened from lack of sleep and the newness of the situation; I try to read every little bit of body language he emits. Data scrolls behind my eyes, like the Terminator. I’m on red alert.

He looks over at me, unsmiling.

‘We’re never going to have sex, because you’re
married
.’ He says the word ‘married’ like he’s just stepped in dog shit and is trying to shake it off his expensive shoe.

We walk a few more steps.

‘Do you know the Dusty Springfield song “Some of Your Lovin’”?’ he asks.

‘I prefer her singing “You Don’t Own Me”.’

‘Not the best version.’

His hands are thrust deep into his pockets, his shoulders hunched, he walks very fast without any thought as to whether I can keep up (I can). And then it hits me, in a moment of divine clarity, like someone has struck a big old brass bell in my head, a true, clear note sings out:
This is a man who walks alone
. That’s it. He walks through life alone. That’s how he wants it. That’s how he likes it. That’s how he’s always done it and is always going to do it. It’s plain as day, the truth, revealed through the simple act of walking. I try with all my might to fight my insight, but there’s no going back, it’s lodged in my brain, and from this moment on it informs everything I say and do with Vincent. Underpinning all my words and actions is my belief that he’s not someone who can deliver on an emotional level. He’s lots of other interesting things, but he’s not that. And my subconscious steers me steadily away from him, even though my heart and my ego are begging to stay.

We sit opposite each other in an empty, low-key Japanese restaurant. He reaches out across the table and gently pushes my hair back from my face.

‘Don’t be against me, Viv.’

I’m not against him, it’s just that at last I’ve realised:
This man can’t give me back my self
. No man can. They can only reflect my anxiety, my confusion and my insecurity, straight back at me. I’ve got to rebuild myself on my own.
Bollocks
.

Enter Patti Smith.

No one else in the entire place, and in walks Patti Smith with a friend. She and Vincent nod at each other a tad frostily. Could there be a clearer sign to get on with my life, to resurrect the person that I was back in 1977, to pull my finger out and finish the job, than the woman who unlocked me appearing at this crucial moment?

It’s time to go to the New Slits’ gig at Webster Hall. It’s fun getting all dressed up in the hotel room with Kate and my friend Angela. I first met Angela Jaeger in New York in 1980. She came backstage after the Slits played their first show at Danceteria on New Year’s Eve – an extremely pretty, creamy-skinned, straightforward young girl – she told us that her sister, Hilary, had a little club called Tier 3, she couldn’t pay us, but it was a very cool place, would we consider doing a gig there? So we went with her and played a show (and that’s where Vincent saw us play when he was eighteen). Angela and I have kept in touch ever since. She’s a great singer and was in Pigbag.

For the New Slits show I wear a floaty cream Jim Morrison-type silk shirt by Kate Moss for Topshop and very wide black Balenciaga trousers – I’ve dwindled to a size six, that’s a US size two – trousers look great when you’re thin. I think thin girls look good dressed, but fuller girls look better undressed. We arrive at the hall. Ari has sent Maria outside to look for us and we’re waved in, skipping the queue. We all chat in the dressing room but the girls are busy being interviewed and putting on makeup; I don’t want to get in the way so we go out onto the balcony and dance to the music. I’m introduced to Chloë Sevigny, although I’ve met her before, I was going to cast her in my feature film,
Oil Rig Girls
(not been made yet). I’m tempted to ask her about Vincent, but what’s the point? I’m pretty sure I know what she’ll say and anyway, tonight’s all about the girls: the New Slits playing at a celebration of Chloë’s first collection for the label Opening Ceremony.

I don’t feel jealous of the band, or wish I were part of them. I’m relieved to be in the audience. The place is packed, there’s a real buzz. They come on stage and start to play. Ari is still one of the best front people in the world. Up there with James Brown in my opinion. She’s as cheeky, sexy and irreverent as she was the first time I saw her perform, at the Coliseum in Harlesden back in 1976, when she was fourteen. It’s so strange to hear my old songs played back at me. I’m proud of them, they sound good, but I feel a bit territorial, like my children have been taken away and brought up by someone else.

This evening has been so uplifting, I decide that if I can learn to play the guitar in time, I’m going to do a couple of shows with the New Slits and see how it works out. I’ll have some explaining to do when I get home, but seeing Ari and Tessa up there having fun, connecting with the audience, makes me think it’s not so ridiculous a concept.

Vincent and I meet one more time before I leave for England. As we walk to a cafe, he tells me he’s so happy because he’s just found a rare record by the Poppy Family. He says it with exactly the same inflection that he used when he told me a couple of months ago that he was so happy he found me, like I was a rare vintage record or guitar for his collection. As we talk, I realise that since seeing Ari and Tessa play, I’ve already got stronger. I’ve got plans. I’ve changed, I’m not so vulnerable to his charms. Before we part, we hug – the first and last time we touch. Of course being held by Vincent Gallo is no ordinary affair, nothing about him is ordinary. He avoids my friendly kiss and pushes his cheekbone across my face, grazing me with his stubble, his mouth is in my hair as he crushes me into his chest – like Heathcliff – holding me so tight I can hardly breathe. I can only imagine what the rest would be like. No, better not. We separate and head off in different directions. I turn and watch him beetle around the corner and think,
That is the last time I will ever see him
.

I go back to the hotel and bawl my eyes out in front of Kate. Not because Vincent and I aren’t John and Yoko, but because I have a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach signalling to me that without the crutch of an affair to distract me, without any money of my own to protect me, despite being unemployable and a very certain age, my marriage is over.

Going to see Vincent in New York was like trying on a couture dress you know you can’t afford (a little trick of mine). Nine times out of ten it doesn’t suit you anyway, and it’s good you know, because then you don’t hanker after it any more. The truth is, Vincent is not my princent. And nor should or could he be. That’s a ridiculous thing to ask of anyone – god I’m such a slow learner, I bore myself.

I walk back into my home, into my life, a different person. Husband is standing at the hob frying mushrooms. He looks over at me.

‘Did you have a good time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see Vincent Gallo?’

‘Yes.’

He winces. ‘Did you fuck him?’

‘No.’

I take my suitcase upstairs and press my forehead on the cool glass of the bedroom window. Rain splashes onto the shiny tropical leaves, slowly transforming the garden below from a fresh minty green blanket into a muddy brown pool. Our relationship is broken, and I have played a part in the breaking of it. My judgement became clouded – it was rusty – I haven’t needed it, safely swaddled in marriage and motherhood. I can judge a cake all right, and I can judge whether a necklace goes with a blouse. But I can’t judge if a man is sincere or not.

I still can’t.

18 TO PLAY GUITAR

2008

If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.

Louise Bourgeois

I don’t know what size I’ve dwindled to now, but I look disgusting. The mothers at school are concerned and ask if they can do anything to help. I take all my clothes in to the dry cleaner’s to have them altered because they’re hanging off me. The man behind the counter is worried about my weight, even though he’s never seen me before. I laugh it off, I’m not
that
thin. I think I’m looking quite svelte. A friend’s husband tells me I look terrible, he says, ‘You looked better before.’ My friend shushes him. Well, somebody had to say it.

I’ve developed a terrible chesty cough. It’s agony. I go back to Dr Shah, he looks up from his desk, ‘You’re much too thin. What’s happened?’ I tell him my marriage is in trouble. He listens to my chest and tells me I have pneumonia. He prescribes me antibiotics and says, ‘I’m giving you one week to start putting some weight back on. If you haven’t by Friday, I’m sectioning you, admitting you to Hastings Hospital and putting you on a drip.’

No way I’m going to that hospital. I buy a load of protein drinks and force myself to drink them, as well as eating as much pasta and bread as I can bear. I lie in bed. I can’t function. I can hardly breathe. I think I might be dying. What I’m actually doing is facing the truth: Husband and I don’t love each other any more, no, it’s worse than that, we don’t like each other any more.

After two weeks I’ve put on enough weight to satisfy the doctor I’m getting better and the pneumonia is showing signs of clearing.

I have a goal: learn to play guitar in five months and be ready for the New Slits gig. I feel like a contestant on the reality-TV show
Faking It. Take a bored Hastings housewife and turn her into a punk-rock guitarist in five months
. I go to the local music shop – in the sleepy old town of Rye – which just happens to be a great guitar shop run by Richard Kingsman, the guitarist with the band Straight Eight. It was his pedals Ari pissed over at the Music Machine, back in the seventies. I buy a second-hand Fender Squier for eighty quid, a little practice amp, a guitar lead and a couple of picks. I think Richard will laugh at this middle-aged woman coming in to buy an electric guitar but he’s encouraging and acts like it’s the most normal thing in the world; he even shows me a couple of ‘vamps’ (chord sequences) to practise.

I set up the little amp next to the kitchen table, cut the nails on my left hand right back to little stumps, and after my daughter’s gone to bed I try to get my fingers back around those chord shapes that I used to be able to play twenty-five years ago. I’ve completely lost it. I have to start from scratch. I remember the shapes, but my fingers can’t make them on the neck of the guitar, so I sit there night after night, my tongue sticking out as I concentrate on spreading my fingers apart and keeping them pressed on the strings long enough to strum a chord. I ignore the pain of the wire cutting into the pads of my fingers. I don’t watch TV, read newspapers, meet anyone for coffee or lunch or do anything that will take a second away from my playing. I just do the minimum I have to do domestically and that’s it. Everything else stops. I take the guitar with me wherever I go, it’s always in the back of the car; if my daughter’s at a tennis lesson, I sit in the car, push the front seat back and practise whilst I wait for her. I take it to my studio in Hastings and play for a couple of hours before I have to drive back to school and pick her up. I play it in the car park at school for ten minutes until the bell goes and she comes out; I even play it on the train if I’m in an empty carriage. I’m seething and burning with determination and drive. I will do this. I have no idea why, or where it’s going, but nothing in the world is going to stop me. I play to survive. I’ve got to express myself to stop imploding into depression, so I write songs. I buy a little exercise book, just like the old days, and scribble down snatches of thoughts and conversations, quotes, anything that resonates, and attempt my first song. I have no idea how to put chords together any more or what works lyrically, but I have to write about what I’m feeling or I’ll burst.

I need some help to learn how to play guitar again, I need a teacher. Richard from the guitar shop says, ‘Well, it’s got to be Nelson King, hasn’t it?’

I’m standing outside a dinky little cottage on the outskirts of Hastings, flowers round the door and everything, my Squier in a droopy black plastic case on my back, feeling a fool. I ring the bell. Nelson King answers, friendly, smiling, longish hair, non-judgemental. I don’t tell him about the Slits; as far as he knows, I’m just a woman who wants to play electric guitar. He’s fine with that, not because he’s a teacher, but because he’s such an open-minded person, a true musician. I go to him every week and he shows me some scales and bits and pieces. I start to feel more confident, not about my playing, but about telling him my secrets. I confess I’ve written some songs and he wants to hear them. I can’t sing, but I trust him so completely that I stumble through them anyway, it’s excruciatingly embarrassing for me, but nothing is going to stop me doing this. He loves the songs, he can hear past all the mistakes and the out-of-tune singing and says I must sing them myself, not get somebody else to do it. ‘I can hear a lovely voice in there,’ he says.