And when I look at myself in the mirrors of the changing rooms at Marks & Spencer now, my body looks, finally, awake.
But why did I get fat? Why was I eating until I hurt, and regarding my own body as something as distant and unsympathetic as, say, the state of the housing market in Buenos Aires? And why – while it’s obviously not wholly advisable to swell up so large that, on one very bad day, you get stuck in a bucket seat at a local fair, and have to be helped out by your ex-headmaster, Mr Thompson – is being fat treated as a cross between terrible shame and utter tragedy? Something that – for a woman – is treated as something in between sustaining a sizeable facial scar, and sleeping with the Nazis? Why will women happily boast-moan about spending too much (‘… and then my bank manager took my credit card and CUT IT IN HALF WITH A SWORD!’), drinking too much (‘… and then I took my shoe off and THREW IT OVER THE BUS STOP!’) and working too hard (‘… so tired I fell asleep on the control panel and, when I woke up, I realised I’d PRESSED THE NUCLEAR LAUNCH BUTTON! AGAIN!’) but never, ever about eating too much? Why is unhappy eating the most pointlessly secret – it’s not like you can hide a six-KitKats-a-day habit for very long – of miseries?
Seven years ago, a friend of mine broke up with a pop star, reactivated her bulimia, binged and purged for nine days straight, and then admitted herself to The Priory.
I strapped my toddler into a buggy and went to visit her – from a combination of love, and curiosity as to what The Priory was like. I think I’d presumed it was like the Chateau Marmont, but with amazing prescription drugs. Full of interestingly ravaged celebrities clawing their way back to normality, in the midst of some helpfully gorgeous décor.
In the event it turns out that, inside, The Priory actually looks, and smells, like a lower mid-range family-run hotel in Welshpool. Faded swirly carpets, teak-effect fire doors, and, somewhere – judging by the smell – a perpetually boiling cauldron of mince, working as the world’s biggest Glade Plug-In. It was less ‘Olympia, home of the gods’, and more ‘Olympia, tube station of the exhibition centre’.
And, as my friend told me, sitting on the end of her bed, chain-smoking, an institution full of emotionally troubled substance abusers turns out to be no fun at all.
‘There’s a pecking order,’ she sighed, shredding up her cuticles with her opposing thumbnail. She was burning a Diptyque Jasmine candle to cover up the evidence she’d just thrown up her breakfast, but the bile had lingered longer than she’d accounted for.
‘The heroin addicts look down on the coke addicts. The coke addicts look down on the alcoholics. And everyone thinks the people with eating disorders – fat or thin – are scum.’
And there’s your pecking order of unhappiness, right there in a nutshell. Of all the overwhelming compulsions you can be ruined by, all of them have some potential for some perverted, self-destructive fascination – except eating.
Consider, for instance, David Bowie. Here was a man who took so much cocaine that he took to keeping his urine in bottles, in the fridge, because he was scared that wizards ‘might steal it’. And yet despite storing his rotting wazz next to his ham, it doesn’t stop him being cool. On the contrary – who doesn’t find the fact that Bowie now describes his mind as being ‘Swiss cheesed’ from coke abuse kind of, well, adorably rock’n’roll? He’s David Bowie, man!
Or think of Keith Richards, in his Glimmer Twins days – snorting, smoking, injecting, drinking and screwing everything in sight. Everyone loves him! Keef? So out of it that he doesn’t notice when two groupies, fucking in front of him, accidentally set fire to their own hair? ROCK’N’ROLL! For many, that’s the best bit about the Stones!
Even though, by any way we can calculate it, he would almost certainly have been a complete nightmare to be around – paranoid, shaky, unreliable, prone to extreme moroseness or mania and, a good whack of the time, so deeply unconscious that the primary method of moving from one location to another would have been being dragged by the ankles – we still have a slight, cultural frisson of ‘Huh – cool’ when people get this fucked up.
But imagine if – instead of taking heroin – Keef had started overeating and got really fat instead. If he’d really got into spaghetti bolognese, say, or kept coming on stage holding foot-long Subway Meatball Subs, and pausing in between numbers to have a bit of a chomp. Wandering down to Alphabet Street, twitching, four hours on the cluck, desperate to score Dairylea. Long, crazy, wired nights after gigs, in penthouses, nubile dollies scattered across the room, and Keith in the centre, sprawled across a silk-draped Emperor-sized waterbed, eating salt and vinegar Hula Hoop sandwiches and Tunnock’s teacakes off a tray.
By the time of Their Satanic Majesties Request, what his Satanic Majesty would be requesting was a 38-inch waistband, and everyone would have mocked the Stones for having a faintly ludicrous wobble-bot on guitar, who was ruining the concept of rock’n’roll.
But, of course, all this time, Keef would have been behaving like a total darling: waking at 8am, keeping his hotel rooms tidy, thanking everyone, working a solid 12-hour day. There would be no going AWOL for 48 hours, then coming back with a dead goldfish in your pocket and a new tramp friend called Alan Fuck.
Because people overeat for exactly the same reason they drink, smoke, serially fuck around or take drugs. I must be clear that I am not talking about the kind of overeating that’s just plain, cheerful greed – the kind of Rabelaisian, Falstaffian figures who treat the world as a series of sensory delights, and take full joy in their wine, bread and meat. Someone who walks away from a table – replete – shouting ‘THAT WAS SPLENDID!’, before sitting in front of a fire, drinking port and eating truffles, doesn’t have neuroses about food. They are in a consensual relationship with eating and, almost unfailingly, couldn’t care less about how it’s put an extra couple of stone on them. They tend to wear their weight well – luxuriously, like a fur coat, or a diamond sash – rather than nervously trying to hide it, or apologising for it. These people aren’t ‘fat’ – they are simply … lavish. They don’t have an eating problem – unless it’s running out of truffle oil, or finding a much-anticipated dish of razor clams sadly disappointing.
No – I’m talking about those for whom the whole idea of food is not one of pleasure, but one of compulsion. For whom thoughts of food, and the effects of food, are the constant, dreary, background static to normal thought. Those who think about lunch whilst eating breakfast, and pudding as they eat crisps; who walk into the kitchen in a state bordering on panic, and breathlessly eat slice after slice of bread and butter – not tasting it, not even chewing – until the panic can be drowned in an almost meditative routine of spooning and swallowing, spooning and swallowing.
In this trance-like state, you can find a welcome, temporary relief from thinking for ten, 20 minutes at a time, until, finally, a new set of sensations – physical discomfort, and immense regret – make you stop, in the same way you finally pass out on whisky, or dope. Overeating, or comfort eating, is the cheap, meek option for self-satisfaction, and self-obliteration. You get all the temporary release of drinking, fucking or taking drugs, but without – and I think this is the important bit – ever being left in a state where you can’t remain responsible and cogent.
In a nutshell, then, by choosing food as your drug – sugar highs, or the deep, soporific calm of carbs, the Valium of the working classes – you can still make the packed lunches, do the school run, look after the baby, pop in on your mum and then stay up all night with an ill five-year-old – something that is not an option if you’re caning off a gigantic bag of skunk, or regularly climbing into the cupboard under the stairs and knocking back quarts of Scotch.
Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It’s a way of fucking yourself up whilst still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren’t indulging in the ‘luxury’ of their addiction making them useless, chaotic
or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. And that’s why it’s so often a woman’s addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums. All the KitKats in office drawers. All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge-light.
I sometimes wonder if the only way we’ll ever get around to properly considering overeating is if it does come to take on the same, perverse, rock’n’roll cool of other addictions. Perhaps it’s time for women to finally stop being secretive about their vices and start treating them like all other addicts treat their habits instead. Coming into the office looking raddled, sighing, ‘Man, I was on the shepherd’s pie last night like you wouldn’t believe. I had, like, MASH in my EYEBROWS by 10pm. I was on a total mince rush!’
Or walking into a friend’s house, hurling your handbag on the table and barking, ‘I have had one HELL of a day with the kids. I need six shots of cream crackers and cheese RIGHT NOW, or I am seriously going to lose my shit.’
Then people would be able to address your dysfunction as openly as they do all the others. They could reply, ‘Whoa, dude. Maybe you should calm it down on the high GI-load carbs for a bit, my friend. You have gone a bit bongo-mondo. I am the same. I did a three-hour session on the microwave lasagne last night. Perhaps we should go to the country for a bit. Get our heads together. Clean up our acts.’
Because at the moment, I can’t help but notice that in a society obsessed with fat – so eager in the appellation, so vocal in its disapproval – the only people who aren’t talking about it are the only people whose business it really is.
CHAPTER 7
I Encounter Some Sexism!
So, I’ve lost weight, I can wear a dress, and I’ve got a job. I am now – as I cheerfully say, to everyone – The Least Important Person At Melody Maker, the weekly music paper that everyone confuses with NME, which is far more famous but, we think, less cool. At the NME, they take drugs, but don’t really write about it. At Melody Maker, on the other hand, it’s often the basis for a whole feature.
Whilst the NME is staffed by normal, respectable men, who all go on to high-flying careers in broadcasting – Stuart Maconie, Andrew Collins, David Quantick – Melody Maker’s retinue looks like the cast of The Addams Family. During editorial meetings, there’s a distinct sense that everyone’s come here because they failed the door policy at the cantina in Star Wars.
It is an odd, mismatched group. Everyone here is a social outcast for one reason or another. In the case of some of the staff, it’s because they’re antediluvian sexists with odd hair, and a distinct aura of not having left the pub since 1976. With others, it’s because they’re so admirably, innovatively un-normal that it’s clear that no other city but London, and no other employers but this publication, would have them.
Pricey’s a strapping Welsh goth with his hair in two piggy-tails of ginger dreadlocks, who goes right down the front at Public Enemy gigs, wearing lipstick and nail varnish. When the Manic Street Preachers are in town, he leaves the office with a black lace fan and a bottle of Malibu. Anyone who talks to him is astonished to discover he is a) heterosexual and b) from this planet.
Ben Turner is a tiny, shaven-headed man-child who appears to be around 13 years old. When I first meet him, I presume he’s a kid with leukaemia, who wrote to the Make A Wish Foundation, asking to hang out at a ‘real music magazine office’ for the day. After a few weeks, I find that he’s, in fact, a) a fully grown adult, and b) one of the leading authorities on dance music in Britain, who eventually goes on to defeat the imaginary leukaemia I’ve given him, and found the Bestival festival.
The editor, Jonesy, is in his late forties, and looks like a rugged bison – but with the incongruously glossy, glamorous, auburn hair of Carol Decker from T’Pau. Viewed from behind, in a bar, he is often the subject of initially lustful comments from men. When he turns around, they run away, screaming.
The Stud Brothers wear leather, swear like cunting dockers, and often come in drunk from the night before, then fall asleep under a desk. Simon Reynolds is a beautiful, pre-Raphaelite Oxford graduate into unlistenably cutting-edge dance music, who spends all his time in clubs where people have guns, and is so clever, half of us are too scared to talk to him. Pete Paphides has just left his parents’ chip shop in Birmingham, and come to work for a magazine with an ethos of ‘no music too cool, too weird or too marginal’, whilst nursing his ABBA, ELO, Crowded House and Bee Gees back-catalogues, and wearing a selection of snugly cardigans from M&S.
And, now, there’s a 16-year-old from Wolverhampton, in a hat, who chain smokes, and kicks people’s shins if they slag off The Wonder Stuff. In the first week, I make David Bennun bleed. Twenty years later, I run into him, in Manchester, at a Lady Gaga gig, and he ruefully rolls up his trouser leg and shows me the scar I left. Then he reminds me of the occasion where I threatened to push someone out of the window, 26 storeys up, whilst most of the staff calmly carried on typing at their computers. It’s not a normal workplace. We think this is why we are cool. The NME think we’re wankers for exactly the same reason.
This is the first time I’ve really been out in the world, and met adults. Previously, all my socialising took place on the dance floor and toilets of the Raglan, a tiny, dark pit populated by fringed, boot-wearing teenagers: essentially a playpen, with a bar. Our innocence was obvious – it shone in our faces the same way our teeth glowed white under the UV light. Yes, people were having sex, and fighting, and spreading rumours, and taking drugs – but it was essentially like tiger cubs knocking each other around, claws velveted. We were all equal. There was no calculation, or recrimination. Everything was forgotten after a nap.
Going into the adult world, then, is a shock. Rolling up at the office for my first day, I’m smoking a fag as I come out of the lift – so they know that I, too, am a grown-up. I offer everyone a nip of Southern Comfort, from the bottle in my rucksack, for the same reason. Most demur, but Ben Stud – who’s just come off the ferry from Amsterdam, from interviewing a band – says, ‘Handy!’, cheerfully, and takes a swig. He is, I notice, looking down, using a promotional Frisbee as a combined ashtray, plate for his bacon bap, and somewhere safe to keep his house keys.
I’ve already decided I’m going to have sex with as many people in London as I can. There’s no reason not to. With my first wage cheque – £28.42 – I’ve bought some new, pretty, grey-and-lace knickers from Marks & Spencer, and finally thrown away my mum’s now too-capacious inheritance, so I’m looking none-too-shabby in the knack. Although I’ve offered it all around town, no one in Wolverhampton seems remotely interested in taking my virginity, so I have concluded it’s one of those things you can only get done in London – like natural-looking highlights, or Dirty Martinis. It’s a specialist job.
So my task this month is to work out just how to be both a red-hot journalistic wunderkind and a red-hot piece of ass that someone, hopefully quite soon, will have sex with – but without getting a ‘reputation’. Yes: at 16, I am having to learn how to drive the 16-wheeled vehicle that is my Flirt Truck; but without ruining my career.
Flirting in the workplace is a tricky subject for feminists. Many of the hardcore don’t believe in it at all: as far as they’re concerned, you might as well go the whole hog and just install yourself in a window in Soho with a card reading ‘Model, 18, Hand-Jobs’ next to the doorbell.
And you know, for many, that’s the right view to take. The idea that women should have to flirt in order to get on is just as vexing as any other thing women are supposed to have to do – such as be thin, accept 30 per cent lower wages, and not laugh at 30 Rock when they have food in their mouth and it falls out a bit, on to the floor, and the cat eats it.
Some women just don’t flirt. They don’t want to and they don’t have the bones for it, and it makes them feel tetchy, and like they might punch someone. They feel about flirting like I do about anything that involves upper-body strength, high heels or spatial awareness. They just w
ant it to fuck off.
But for other women, flirting’s just … how it comes out. It’s not there as a defence mechanism, or as a result of years of being unwillingly sexualised by the goddamn patriarchy. It’s not a consequence. It’s an action. It comes from an almost demented joy in being alive, talking to someone who isn’t boring you to death, and conspiring in an unspoken, momentary, twinkly, ‘I like you, and you like me. Isn’t it lovely that we’re being total lovelies together?’ conspiracy.
If you’re a natural flirt, it’s not even a sex thing, really. You flirt with everyone – men, women, children, animals. Automated response ticket-booking phone lines (‘Press ‘3’ for more options? Oh darling, I don’t think you have a button for the option I’d like’).
As a cheerful, born flirt, my rationale is, if you’re going to spend all day having conversations with people – even if it’s only on the phone, arranging the delivery of a new dishwasher – why not try to make it end with everyone feeling a bit bucked and perky? For me, flirting is the bit in Mary Poppins where Mary says, ‘In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. Find the fun, and – SNAP! The job’s a game.’
But did flirting help me at Melody Maker? Did I further my career on the basis of my devastating sexual allure? I must be brisk here: no. Bear in mind, though, I was a tipsy 16-year-old in a huge hat, who still looked slightly scared of the lighter she was using to light her fags. At the time, my flirting skills were very, very rudimentary – as I recall, the majority of it revolved around ‘bold’ winking, a bit like a mad pirate. I also have a suspicion that my idea of subtly indicating my interest in matters of a sexual nature consisted of little more than saying, ‘Cor. Sexy intercourse, huh? It’s sexy,’ during otherwise perfectly normal conversations about, say, when the lift might arrive.
How to Be a Woman Page 11