Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

by Viv Albertine

  Sixth step – go back to the morgue. I have to take some clothes for them to dress the body in. I choose the most normal garments I can find, although they were normal back in the seventies, not now. I select a beige corduroy jacket, dark jeans, a blue shirt and navy tie. At the morgue they ask if I want to see him laid out. I say no. I’m not going to go and stare at a dead bloke. It’s morbid. But sitting in the white reception room – watching the young men and women glide past in white clothes with silent white rubber shoes, like a scene from the film A Matter of Life and Death – I start to feel sorry for him. How sad to be lying there, all dressed up in your Sunday best, and no one wants to come and see you, no one wants to say goodbye. I tell the mortician I’ve changed my mind, I will see him. I sit on a tiny gilt chair and look at him. The first thing I notice is how rigid his jaw is, clamped together in bitterness and resentment. He’s very thin. Disgustingly thin. I’m shocked; I think to myself, I will never glorify or aspire to thinness again. It is abhorrent. They’ve cut his long straggly hair and swept it back off his face, he looks quite distinguished, noble and handsome with his strong Roman nose, high cheekbones, silver hair and smart clothes. Like a French university professor. And I have a little cry. Because for a few minutes, right at the very end, just before he goes up in a puff of smoke, my dad looks like the kind of dad I always wanted him to be.

  Seventh step – my daughter and I go to the funeral at the crematorium. We dress in black and huddle together as we hurry past another funeral, this one full of family and friends, cars and flowers. I’m aware of how pathetic we look, just the two of us, mother and child, following a coffin. The French pallbearers share a joke as they hoist the coffin up onto a trolley. I scowl at them. The funeral is dramatic, extremely florid emotive music plays at top volume as the two of us sit in the baroque room with the coffin, paying our last respects. The music changes to a sombre, doom-laden dirge, the doors to the oven open and the coffin trundles into it, there’s a fanfare as the doors close. My daughter is overwhelmed by the pageantry of it all and sobs her heart out. I wrap my arms around her and take her outside, past the big funeral and all the mourners, into the hearse and back to the hotel.

  In his will, my father leaves me £17,000. In France you have to leave your money to your children. It’s the law. I use this money to hire a lawyer and get myself out of my marriage. Husband wants out too. The rest I put aside to make an EP one day. (The last time I was left money was when my grandmother died and I bought a guitar.)

  26 SEX AND BLOOD

  2009

  ‘Well, now that we have seen each other,’ said the unicorn, ‘if you believe in me, I’ll believe in you.’

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

  I stumble through life in a state of shock and terror as my husband and I start divorce proceedings. I don’t know if I can do this. Can I live alone again after seventeen years? Can I pay the bills, mend the leaks and tax the car? Earn money? I have forgotten how to survive on my own. I talk to other divorced women and they say it all comes back. Married women tell me I’m making the worst mistake of my life and this is a terrible age to be divorcing: ‘You’ll never get another man.’ A very sophisticated, honey-highlighted blonde divorced mother from my daughter’s school confides in me outside the swimming pool: ‘When you’d rather live in a tent in a field than in your nice house with your husband, that’s when you’re ready for divorce.’

  My marriage is over. My husband and I have been living in the same house – but apart – for six months and I can’t stop thinking about sex. I have an urgent desire to shag someone, and this is for one extremely important reason – I am sure as hell going to do it before he does. Very mature.

  For seventeen years I’ve been with one man and I don’t know if I can bear someone else’s hand on my skin or to undress in front of a stranger; whether my body will be attractive to someone else; what to do or how to move with a different person. It’s as if I’ve only talked to one man for seventeen years and now I have to learn how to talk to a different one. It’s scary, but I’m not going to let Husband get in there first, so to speak. And deep down I hope it will hurt me less when he has sex with someone else if I’ve done it first (this worked, by the way). So, I have a very strong urge to fuck someone as soon as possible, but not anyone, a specific type of someone; someone unthreatening, with poor eyesight, and – due to my immense insecurity – someone who will be grateful.

  I choose a man who is very keen on me but, more importantly, he’s not intimidating in any way physically. He’s not handsome or fit. He looks like a minicab driver (his description of himself, not mine, but I have to agree) – not a taxi driver, they’re quite a different genre, edgy, could even be sexy. He is perfect for my purposes, I feel safe enough to give it a go.

  I’ve done it. We lie together naked, tangled up on the sofa. The room is dark except for a puddle of pale light from the full moon on the oak floor. A warm sea breeze wafts in through the open glass doors.

  I am off somewhere in my head, congratulating myself: Haha. I did it before you. Na na nana na.

  The minicab driver interrupts my thoughts.

  ‘You’re very wet.’

  I reach down between my legs and touch myself. I am wet. Not ‘turned on’ wet. Absolutely soaking. I lift my hand up to have a look. It’s covered in blood.

  In the moonlight, our limbs appear luminous white and the blood splattered all over them looks black. Sticky black blood. It seeps into the sofa cushions and drips down onto the floor, like we’ve spilt a tin of molasses over our laps. Here it is haunting me again, my old enemy, Blood. Bugging me again. Bloody bloody Blood. Always there when I don’t want it and never there when I do. I jump up, a river of red gushes down my legs. We’re in the middle of a bloodbath, like the prom scene in Carrie. In my mind I can hear Carrie’s mother screaming, ‘The curse of blood is punishment for sin!’

  There’s no obvious physical reason why this has happened. It isn’t my period, we haven’t had rough sex and he doesn’t have a massive cock, so what’s wrong with me? It must be true, I’m being punished for the sin of having sex without love, for being so shallow and for daring to think I could leave my marriage, go out into the world and live a liberated artistic life. This is punishment for being a bloody, feisty, witchy woman.

  I fake nonchalance, excuse myself and go into the bathroom to take a shower, completely forgetting about the blood-spattered guy in the living room. I turn the water pressure up high. Hot water smashes into my face and pours down my body, but even this vicious shower can’t obliterate the nagging thought at the back of my mind …

  It can’t be. Can it? Please, not now. Not now I’m at the beginning of a new journey, striking out on my own. Not after all the risks and courage it’s taken for me to get this far.

  Please god, not the return of fucking cancer.

  I go straight to my consultants, Professor Jeffrey Tobias and Dr Anthony Silverstone, the two men at UCH who saved my life in 1999, and they whisk me into hospital for an internal investigation. I’m pumped full of anaesthetic and come round to Dr Silverstone telling me that I am extremely sensitive inside but there is no return of the cancer.

  Six months later I go for another check-up with Dr Silverstone, he’s known me for ten years now, watched me come slowly back to life. I say to him, ‘I still haven’t met anyone.’ And in his wonderful reassuring voice he replies, ‘You will. One day you’ll find someone who will look after you.’ I hold back the tears until I’m outside the consulting room. He may as well have said, ‘One day you will find a unicorn.’

  27 FLESH AND MILF

  2010

  I’m recording again. This is something I never envisaged, I thought that life was gone. I thought I was an imposter who’d been found out. But here I am, in the Levellers’ studio in Brighton for two weeks, making songs. The weirdest thing of all is that I sort of know what to do. Even though I haven’t listened to music properly for twenty-five years, I know what I
want the instruments to sound like, where I want backing vocals and where to put a bridge or a pause. I’m exhilarated, I can’t bear to go to the bathroom because I don’t want to miss one second. Dylan Howe (a great drummer who plays with Wilko Johnson, has his own group and is the son of Steve Howe from Yes – funny how he’s had another distant influence on me) is on drums; he’s also producing the record. I couldn’t do it without him, his strength, knowledge and enthusiasm carry me through. Sometimes I’m so exhausted I can’t think any more but Dylan never tires.

  The first track, ‘I Don’t Believe in Love’, I wrote the day I found out my father had died. I’d grieved a long time ago for the lack of a decent father in my life, but I didn’t realise until he was gone that I was still holding out a little shred of hope it would all be all right in the end. He’s gone and now I’ll never have a good father, I moped to myself. I thought about what effect it may have had on me, having a father who didn’t or couldn’t love. Have I ever been able to truly love a man? Has a man ever loved me? Fuck love. I don’t believe in it any more. Look at most of the couples I know, they’re not in love, they’re scared of being alone, financially entwined or hanging on to a partner to try and convince the world they’re acceptable human beings. I can’t think of one couple I’m envious of. When a woman I know comes up to me and says, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your marriage,’ I think, No, I’m so sorry to hear about yours. At least I had the courage to get out. On the day of my father’s death, I decided that from now on I’m only going to believe in things I can see and touch, no more woolly concepts like love and religion.

  Once I’ve made the EP, good things start to happen. Gina Birch introduces me to Thurston Moore backstage after a Sonic Youth show at the Forum in Kentish Town. He’s interested in what I’m doing now and asks me to send him the recordings, says he’ll release the EP on his Ecstatic Peace! label, which he does.

  Jane Ashley invites me to come and have a look at Mick Jones’s Rock ’n’ Roll Library in Portobello Road and suggests I play a short acoustic set there next week. I’m very scared but I say yes. Mick comes to watch me, I can see him smiling at the back of the room. Afterwards he says he wants to record one of the songs I played, ‘Confessions of a MILF’.

  With Mick, the Rotten Hill Gang, Zoë and Dylan after recording ‘Confessions of a MILF’

  We record it a week later. I wear a black skirt and my Vivienne Westwood boots. Mick has asked the Rotten Hill Gang along to play on my track. I’m so touched that all these guys – plus Dylan Howe – have turned up to play on my song for nothing. We go through the track a couple of times before we start recording. This is one of the best days of my life and it all happens because of Mick. He was always very generous about my music.

  28 THE MIDFIELD GENERAL

  2010

  Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain, For now she’s alone again and all in pain …

  Stevie Smith, ‘Marriage, I Think’

  My daughter and I move back to London. She goes to a comprehensive school. Like I did. I’m not ashamed of myself any more, or worried that she will be like me. She fits in at the school and I fit in with the parents. Now I’ve got to get out and about, go to anything I’m asked to, build a social life. There’s a party at Gaz’s club tonight. I haven’t been to a club for years. I go with a friend. Mick Jones is there and quite a few other people from West London that I’ve started to see again. It’s not so bad. I can be single.

  I’m wedged between a couple of guys I vaguely know, just about finding enough things to talk about. Give it ten more minutes and I’ll go home. I’ve done my duty, gone out to Soho for the evening and survived. That’s how out of practice I am, to get through an evening is like an assault course.

  The guy to my left, long hair, shades, says he and a few friends are going back to someone’s house in a minute, do I want to come?

  I say, ‘No thank you, I’ve got to get home.’

  ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘We’re going to do the midfield general.’

  Should I know what that is? At the risk of sounding completely naïve, I ask him what the midfield general is.

  ‘It’s a mixture of MDMA, ket and coke, and my friend, Dave,’ he points to an out-of-shape, middle-aged bloke next to him, ‘chops it up and blows it in your arse with a straw. It’s fantastic. Goes straight into your bloodstream.’

  I decline. He tries again. ‘Last time we did it, all these girls’, he gestures towards three dyed-blonde West London posh girls of a certain age, ‘knelt down in a row with their pants down, arses in the air, and Dave went along with the straw doing one after the other.’ I must look horrified because he says, ‘Oh, don’t worry, he’s like a doctor, he doesn’t check you out, he does it all the time.’

  I say it’s really not my thing, I don’t take drugs, but thanks anyway, I must be going.

  He gets annoyed. ‘Oh, you don’t drink and you don’t take drugs? Yeah great, you’ll die a beautiful corpse, but you’ll be lonely. And you’ll never meet a guy. Only queers don’t drink.’

  I can’t wait to get outside onto Oxford Street and catch the bus home.

  Touring France. I translated all my song titles into French – this is ‘Never Come’. Still in the 1977 Vivienne Westwood boots. Jacket Vivienne Westwood, 2011

  29 BEAUTIFUL PSYCHO

  2010

  I had heard that madmen have unnatural strength.

  Bram Stoker, Dracula

  I play a show one frosty February night in Camden Town. After the gig I’m hanging out with a bunch of mates in the downstairs bar. I’m buzzing, not on drink or drugs, just happy. I look across the crowded room and see this face, and I think, That’s my kind of face. Not because it’s a handsome face, because it’s a familiar face. The Mediterranean skin, the dark eyes, a slight innocence to the expression, the shape of the chin and the brow. Maybe he reminds me of my dad. I try not to look at him again. I just get on with enjoying the evening.

  My friends are giving me a lift home in their truck and they keep texting me, they’re waiting outside and are impatient to leave – so I pick up my guitar and make my way through the crowd to the exit. My gait stiffens slightly as I pass the nice-looking guy and I try to look nonchalant. To my amazement he looks me straight in the eye as I pass and says in a gentle voice, ‘Goodbye.’ This is no ordinary goodbye. It’s a meaningful goodbye.

  Outside I rush up to Trace and complain, ‘It’s not fair. No nice guy like that would ever approach me at a show and ask me out. They’re too shy and respectful.’

  She says, ‘Go back in and give him your phone number.’

  I’m appalled. ‘No way. I can’t possibly do that. He might have a girlfriend. It’s embarrassing.’ Then I think, he did kind of make a move. I turn to my friend Barry who’s standing next to us and say, ‘You do it.’

  Giggling away together and trying not to be noticed, Barry and I peer through the pub window to make sure he approaches the right guy. ‘Him in the black jacket,’ I point and then duck below the window. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Barry goes in with my number scribbled on a piece of paper. And I go home.

  The next day I get a text from the guy at the bar and we arrange to meet at a tearoom in Camden. I’ve never done this before – well, not since I was sixteen. Have I lost my marbles completely? Am I in a divorce-induced hysteria? But I really don’t want to sink into a man-free solo existence: must get back on the horse.

  I dress down and opt for a V-neck slate-grey Donna Karan jumper, jeans and boots. I’m feeling a bit nervous as I walk past Sainsbury’s … better stop at the cash machine and get some money out. Can’t expect him to pay, a bit presumptuous.

  I walk into the tearoom. A young guy is standing at the counter, wearing a V-necked dark blue jumper, jeans and boots. He looks at me questioningly. I panic and look wildly round the room. This can’t be him. For god’s sake, Viv, what were you thinking? He’s gorgeous.

  But it is him. We sit down with a pot of tea betwe
en us and start to talk, I like his voice, he’s from New York. How many warning signs does a girl need before she backs away? Well, post-divorce, a bit green and lacking in confidence, quite a few.

  He waves his arms around in a nervous manner: Keith Richards, Nick Kent and Captain Jack Sparrow come to mind. A sort of druggy twitchiness. He tells me he was a junkie in the past. But that was a long time ago. I admire his honesty.

  He calls homosexuals ‘fags’. Must just be a New York thing.

  As he walks me home, he tells me it’s important never to give way to oncoming pedestrians, he sees it as a jungle out there, ‘You’ve got to establish your dominance.’ He must have grown up in a tough neighbourhood, poor thing.

  He would like to see me again. ‘Don’t make it too long,’ he says softly.

  OK, a couple of things about him are a bit weird, but I can handle weird, can’t I? Wasn’t I in the Slits? Didn’t I hang out with Sid Vicious? I’ve known all sorts of weird people. That’s who I was, and that’s who I’m trying to find again, so this must be what I’m supposed to be doing: reconnecting with the sort of creative, interesting people I hung out with back then. Right?

  We go on lots of dates. He’s funny and has precise and discerning musical taste, which matters to me. I take it slow, try to be sensible, we don’t kiss or touch for ages, months. He’s on best behaviour, and eventually I start to relax and we get physical. But things in the bedroom are turning out to be a bit strange.

  I can feel he’s holding himself back sexually. Controlling himself. It crosses my mind that maybe he’s holding back because if he lets go, he’ll get violent. He keeps trying to put off sexual encounters. Says he’s almost ready, can I give him another fifteen minutes? Is he on medication? Viagra? Why won’t he talk to me about it? I’ve told him all my problems, it’s not like I’m in a hundred per cent working order myself. He can’t come. He can keep an erection but he can’t ejaculate. I’m totally confused. Is this what men are like nowadays? Is it an age thing? I’m so new to the dating scene that I don’t know what to expect, what’s normal. Eventually one night he does come, but he has to rub himself so hard against my dry stomach that I fear his penis is going to split open. Is this the result of years of masturbating? Maybe he can’t come inside a vagina because it isn’t tight enough. I don’t think I’m too bad inside, I had a Caesarean, but there’s no way he’ll get the kind of pressure he can get from rubbing that hard (inside anyone’s front bottom anyway).