As he relaxes with me, he starts to show his aggression more. He shouts and throws things, flies into a rage if I remark that one of his stories doesn’t add up or contradicts his previous version, he can’t leave the house without getting into an argument with somebody on the street. And there are more warning signs.
He has no friends. Not one. ‘Oh, they’ve all settled down and moved away,’ he explains. Well, I suppose this can happen, everyone pairing off, having kids, moving to the country. At the same time.
When I’m not there, he doesn’t sleep at night. ‘I can’t bear the thoughts in my head.’ He stays awake until four or five in the morning and then curls up on the floor and falls asleep in front of the electric fire. How cute, like a little wild animal.
We have a play fight, but he can’t control himself and presses his fist hard against my throat. It hurts for about three days. When I ask him about it he’s shocked and upset that I would even consider that he did it on purpose. He seems so sincere, I must have imagined it.
We do have some good times, he cooks for me a lot – he only has one plate, one knife and one fork, but I like that he doesn’t care about possessions and he lets me have them whilst he uses a bowl and a spoon. He’s got loads of great vintage guitar pedals, he’s techy, a geek. I love that in a guy. Also, I can turn up on his doorstep, any time day or night, and he’s happy to see me. This is good: sometimes I work strange hours and not many men can cope with it.
But I’m crying a lot. This isn’t what was supposed to happen. I didn’t leave my marriage to be upset all the time. What kind of role model will I be for my daughter if I’m in an unhappy, un stable relationship? I want her to be strong and have self-esteem. She hasn’t seen me upset about this guy yet, and I don’t intend to let her. I’d better sort myself out. A couple of times I end it, but the day after an outburst he’s always so calm, intelligent and rational, so loving, I think I’ve imagined the whole thing and I go back. I’m so insecure about my ability to attract someone, so desperate to prove that I wasn’t the one in the marriage who was difficult to get along with, that I’m in denial. He’s quite clearly insane.
Eventually I face up to the facts and tell him calmly one evening that I’m very sorry, I can’t go on, it’s not working, I wish him well, and head for the door. Quite grown up and civilised, I think to myself proudly – I could easily have ranted and raved and had a blazing row about his peculiar behaviour, but instinctively I feel it’s better not to rile him.
He starts hissing at me to be quiet, not to make a noise. ‘The guy upstairs will think I’m attacking you.’
Eh? Where did that come from? I ignore him and collect my stuff.
‘I’m begging you to be quiet, Viv.’
The guy’s really losing the plot here; or is it me? Am I going insane? No, keep a grip on reality, you haven’t raised your voice. He says it again. Christ! If he’s that worried about noise, I’ll give him something to fret about. I purposely bang the front door open as I struggle out with my suitcase.
That bang is like a starting pistol. He’s straight off the blocks and flying at me with a demented expression, eyes blazing with furious hatred, arms outstretched, hands in a strangling position. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Not on any murderer in any movie. They don’t come close. Not a patch on the real thing.
Before I’ve even blinked, he’s snatched both my wrists, gripping them tightly together whilst dragging me back into the room. With his free hand he grabs a clump of hair at the back of my head and forces me to the floor, down onto my knees, pushing my face hard into the carpet, somehow he’s twisted my hands behind my back. All this happens in a second. He has the superhuman strength of a crack addict, the speed of a commando and the reflexes of a pretty boy who’s been in the nick and had to watch his arse – which he’s hinted to me has happened to him.
I sense utter madness, blind rage and a very practised hand, and decide with a calmness that is necessary for survival not to make a sound. Not to move a muscle. I go completely limp and acquiesce. You don’t argue with crazy. And I don’t want to give him one tiny reason to beat me to a pulp.
So this is how I come to find myself, a middle-aged mother of a twelve-year-old girl – wearing a stripy blue-and-white sailor-style Sonia Rykiel cardigan with an appliquéd red silk heart on it, knee-length red linen skirt cut on the bias, bare legs, hair in a scruffy ponytail and blue Havaiana flipflops – on my knees, with my face pressed on the floor, in a poky bedsit above a Chinese takeaway in Camden Town, held down by a man fifteen years younger than me who has the strength and unpredictability of a lunatic. A man I’ve introduced to my mother and my daughter, cooked for, laughed with, worn my best dress for and attempted to amuse. Jeez, there’s just no pleasing some people.
Because I feel that to struggle will ignite his blood lust even more, all I can do is stay alert and grab the opportunity, if it arises, to escape. I’m playing each second as it comes, all my senses heightened like a trapped animal. But then he does something even more unexpected, although he has me under control, at his mercy, making no noise, offering no resistance, he jerks my head up and twists it into a vicelike headlock, digging his fist into my eye and cutting off my breathing by clamping his forearm around my throat. Uh-oh. Now we’re entering even darker territory. This is it, I’m going to get my head kicked in.
My beautiful innocent daughter’s face floats into my mind. I see her soft peachy skin, big round green eyes, button nose and rosebud mouth, and I feel ashamed. I talk to her across the ether, I’m so sorry, baby. So sorry that your mother is so stupid. I’ve let you down. If I get out of this alive, you will always come first and I will never put you at risk of losing me again. I love you, darling.
I steel myself and wait for the blows.
They don’t come. He lets go. I see the madness drain from his face, like someone’s stuck a straw in a coconut and sucked out the juice. He’s completely calm. I’m not. I’m furious. Now I know the danger has passed, I explode. ‘I knew it! I knew you were a violent nutter!’ He wants me to sit down and talk about it but I want to get out of there as quickly as possible. I fly down the stairs, out onto the street and home.
It takes three days until I start to shake. Three days for it to become real to me. Until then, I go about my life as if nothing’s happened.
It hits me in Berlin. I arrive at the Michelberger Hotel. My room is like a white womb almost completely taken up by the bed. I lie down on it. I’m meant to be meeting people to look around Berlin before my show but I can’t move. I just lie there shaking, flashbacks going off like fireworks in my head. Maybe it’s the distance from London and being away from my daughter that’s let me think about how near I came to something quite terrible. How I was groomed. How he waited. His patience and lies, soft voice, gentle manners, his pretence at respect, all drawing me in. It’s all so obvious now. I’ve been had.
I manage to do the Berlin shows, no problem to get myself into the zone, it’s a relief to forget for half an hour. I’m a bit highly strung though. A German boy waiting outside the first venue asks me to sign his autograph book, he shows me that he’s already got Ari and Tessa’s signatures. Then he says he asked them to sign some spare pieces of paper, would I sign them too? I sign them. Now he wants me to sign some more blank bits of paper. I get suspicious. I ask him if he’s coming to the show. He says unfortunately he can’t come. He’s busy. So I take the bits of paper I’ve signed and tear them up into little pieces and throw them on the ground. Not the ones with the other girls’ signatures, but all the extra ones. It happens quite a lot now, people waiting outside venues wanting autographs, with no interest in coming to the show, ghoulishly collecting memorabilia so they’ll be all ready and organised to pop it straight onto eBay when you die.
What astounds me is, for a short while, I miss the psycho. I’m deeply ashamed of myself, but now I have an insight into battered wives and why they go back. The cycle of abuse is hypnotising; the intensity of the
love they pour over you, followed by violence, contrition, your forgiveness and embarrassment, and then they love you again. But I’m never going back. And just to make doubly sure, I tell everyone I know what’s happened. Even my mum. Poor Mum, will it ever end? My catalogue of mistakes. I can’t be seen to forgive this man. Silence and shame are your enemies in this situation. I tell everyone where he lives, the different names he uses, everything about him, so if anything ever happens to me – anything – they’ll know where to find him.
30 LIVES WELL LIVED
Malcolm McLaren
22 January 1946–8 April 2010
I haven’t been invited to Malcolm’s funeral but I’m going anyway, I feel strongly about it. I know it will be full of people who never even knew him.
I hadn’t seen him for years, then I heard he’d died. Not Malcolm. He was so impish and mentally alive. I realised what a huge influence he’d had on me, his views on life, his playfulness, the way he made everything he did into an adventure. Even going to the bank or a business meeting he turned into an event. He made mundane chores into happenings.
For the funeral I wear a black chiffon dress with tiny green dots by Phillip Lim and black Prada Mary Janes. I don’t try and look edgy, I just want to look nice. Be myself. It’s in One Marylebone, the church building on Marylebone Road. We file in silently and fill up the pews. I recognise a few people, but not many. Paul Cook and Glen Matlock are here; Steve Jones is in LA but sends a joke about Malcolm taking the cash with him.
Vivienne’s son by her first marriage, Ben Westwood, gives a sweet, honest speech about what it was like growing up with Malcolm around. How Malcolm was always trying to get rid of him and wanted Vivienne all to himself. It’s funny and affectionate. A few other people give speeches and a pattern emerges: he surrounded himself with very organised, hard-working people. His girlfriend from New York, Young Kim, makes a big impression on me. They were together for twelve years, she’s elegant, intelligent, restrained, tactful, loving. If Malcolm can have a long relationship with a girl like that, he can’t be all bad. Then Vivienne gets up. She’s dressed in one of her own asymmetrical suits. She says a few throwaway things about Malcolm giving the boys piggy-backs and making paper aeroplanes and then launches into a tirade, it’s not quite clear if she’s criticising him or people in general. She’s saying stuff like, ‘What’s the point of being a rebel if you don’t do anything with it? It’s all just fashion.’ Malcolm’s lying there behind her in the box. I imagine him stretched out with his feet pointing up wearing red Anello and Davide tap shoes – which I heard he used to wear when he was at art school – and his curly orange hair. I look around the church but everyone is staring ahead blankly. Vivienne moves on to saving the planet. She’s in mid-flow when this voice shouts from the back, ‘Capitalist!’ Vivienne doesn’t hear the voice and goes on talking, he shouts it again, ‘You’re a capitalist!’
Vivienne stops and leans down to a flunky by her side, ‘What did he say?’
I can just imagine the flunky replying, ‘He said you are a capitalist, ma’am.’
She asks the flunky, ‘Who is it?’ The flunky whispers something. Vivienne straightens and squints into the darkness, trying to focus on a face at the back of the church. ‘Bernie?’
He shouts back, ‘Bernard!’
Vivienne bends down to the flunky again, ‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “Bernard,” ma’am.’
Vivienne looks up and says, ‘Oh, very well, Bernard then.’
This is hilarious. Bernie Rhodes, the Clash’s ex-manager, storms down the aisle to the front of the church, his face strangely puffy (he reminds me of David Gest), shouting that he knew Malcolm better than anyone, knows what Malcolm was trying to do, it was him, Bernie, and Malcolm together who did it all, changed the world and blah blah blah, inserting himself into the narrative of Malcolm’s life. It’s like the marriage scene from The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman banging on the glass shouting, ‘No! Noooo!’ And I think, Malcolm would be having a right laugh at all this. Bernie stands in front of the coffin, addressing the pews and rambling on for ages. No one stops him. He’s ranting away right in the middle of the funeral. I have to be held down by my friend, Mark, to stop myself jumping up and putting a stop to it. Why doesn’t anyone cart him off? I am mindful of Malcolm’s sweet girlfriend sitting in the front pew, she’s probably finding this all very upsetting and disrespectful. Vivienne is pacifying Bernie now, ‘I know what you mean, Bernie,’ she says, nodding sagely. Vivienne doesn’t mind people standing up to her; it’s when you have no opinion that she can’t tolerate it. Bernie eventually runs out of steam and the funeral continues.
Sitting here, remembering how Malcolm thought and lived, I feel more affected by him dying than when my father died. That’s how much his ideas have infiltrated and influenced me.
Steve New
16 May 1960–24 May 2010
A month later I’m at Steve New’s funeral. This is more like it. Packed with people who actually knew and loved him. Lots of girls. He loved women. There’s even a paragraph in the words he wrote for his funeral thanking all the girls he’s ever known for being in his life. His family play some music he’s been working on, it’s the sort of sound I imagined him making, dreamy and technically complex. He was a great guitarist, a prodigy, very intelligent, very beautiful and iconoclastic, he remained himself to the end and he never licked anyone’s arse. Ever.
Ari Up
17 January 1962–20 October 2010
My phone pings by my bed in the middle of the night: I’ve got a text. That’s funny, I never usually leave it on, must have forgotten. I’m not pissed off, I’m awake anyway, woke up at five o’clock. It’s from Vice Cooler, the Raincoats’ drummer, who lives in LA. So sorry to hear about Ari. It can only mean one thing. She’s gone.
Baby Ari went first. She was the youngest of all of us, not just of the Slits but the whole scene. Grew up in front of us. Had more energy than all of us put together, even at the end. I thought she’d get better: she had a will of iron, of course she’d beat it. How ridiculous of me, I know about cancer, it’s not about your will, it just depends what type you’ve got and how bad you’ve got it.
Ari emailed me a couple of times recently, I didn’t take enough notice of the emails. In the first one she invited me to the New Slits’ London show, her last London gig; she knew it was her last. I couldn’t be bothered to come up from Hastings, was too bogged down in divorce shit. She invited Poly Styrene too. Poly and I talked it over, ‘Shall we go or not?’ Of course we would have gone if we’d known she was dying, but we assumed that if she was playing gigs she couldn’t be too ill. I don’t wish I’d gone so I can say, I was at Ari’s last gig, or anything ghoulish like that, it would have been to show her I cared for and respected her.
The next email from her was very sweet, a couple of days before she died, telling me where some photos of the Slits were, saying I should get them and have them. I still didn’t twig. I wrote back a couple of lines saying I’d get onto it.
I think of Ari every time I practise guitar, especially when I’m playing with a metronome to work on my timing. I think how she would love to still be alive, to still be making music, she was a truly dedicated musician, music was her life. Ari was an artist and an artist needs love more than anyone, she needed loads, but I don’t know if she got enough on a one-to-one level. Everything came second to her music, even family. You have to be selfish to be an artist; your family just have to accept that. It’s not personal, it’s not that you don’t love them. What an artist gives their family isn’t routine and their constant presence, they give vitality and ideas, independence and creative thinking. That’s what I think Ari will have passed on to her sons and to many people who never knew her. As each month and year goes by after her death, I feel warmer towards her and I realise more and more what an amazing woman she was.
Poly Styrene
3 July 1957–25 April 2011
I saw a lot of P
oly. We’d meet up about once a week because we both lived in Hastings. We’d have a coffee and talk about music. We were in pretty similar positions, coming back after years of silence, except she had some hits and is better known than me.
I saw her sitting outside a cafe when I went back a couple of months ago. She said she could hardly move, felt like her back was broken, but the doctor wouldn’t take her seriously, said she was mentally unstable. Her face was grey and twisted from the exhaustion of bearing constant pain. In the end, her friend Naz, a photographer, called up the hospital and demanded they send an ambulance immediately or she would sue them and tell the press. The ambulance came straight away and later that week Poly was diagnosed with cancer. She was put straight into a hospice.
Before she was ill, Poly and I went to see her daughter sing at Cargo in London; I drove and played her my new EP in the car. She was amazed, she hadn’t wanted to come back to music because she felt she’d moved past the ‘punk’ thing, but when she heard my songs she saw there was a way to record and do gigs again that was compatible with being an adult. She thought I was crazy at the beginning of the car journey – ‘Why would you want to do that?’ – but gradually she got it. She saw I wasn’t trying to be young, she could hear that in the songs, I was myself, writing honestly about my life now. I sowed a seed, not by lecturing her, just by doing it. I’m glad she got her drive back and made her album, Generation Indigo, before she died. She got on with it immediately and finished way before I completed my album. She was a real doer.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. Page 33