Anyway, I don’t owe Mum and Dad anything. Mum understands that. She gave up expecting anything ages ago. She’s still a mess because of Jen, and she hates Dad, and she’s given up on me, so everything’s all above board there. But Dad really thinks that he’s entitled to something, which is a joke. For example: he kept showing me these articles that people were writing about him, saying he should resign because his daughter was in such a fucking state, as if it was any of my business. And I was like, So? Resign. Or don’t. Whatever. He needed to talk to a career adviser, not a daughter.
It wasn’t as if we were in the papers for long, anyway. We made one more chunk of money, from a new Channel 5 chat show. We were going to really try and do it straight that time, but the woman who interviewed us really got on my tits, so I told her we’d made it all up to earn a few bob, and she told us off, and all these stupid brain-dead old bags in the audience booed us. And that was it, no one wanted to speak to us any more. We were left to entertain ourselves. It wasn’t too hard. I had loads of ideas.
For example: it was my idea that we met for a coffee regularly -either at Maureen’s or somewhere in Islington, if we could find someone to sit with Matty. We didn’t mind spending bits of the money on babysitters or whatever you want to call them; we pretended we were up for it because we wanted Maureen to have a break, but really it was because we didn’t want to go round hers all the time. No offence, but Matty put like a real downer on everything.
Martin didn’t like my idea, of course. First he wanted to know what “regularly” meant, because he didn’t want to commit himself. And I was like, Yeah, well, what with no kids and no wife and no girlfriend and no job, it must be hard to find the time, and he said it wasn’t a question of time actually it was a question of choice, so I had to remind him that he had agreed to be part of a gang. And he was like, So what, so I went, Well, what’s the point of agreeing? And he said, No point. Which he thought was funny, because it was more or less what I’d said on the roof on New Year’s Eve. And I was like, Well, you’re a lot older than me, and my young mind isn’t fully formed yet, and he went, You can say that again.
And then we couldn’t agree on where we’d meet. I wanted to go to Starbucks, because I like frappuccinos and all that, but JJ said he wasn’t into global franchises, and Martin had read in some posey magazine about a snooty little coffee bar in between Essex Road and Upper Street where they grow their own beans while you waited or something. So to keep him happy, we met up there.
Anyway, this place had just changed its name and its vibe. The snootiness hadn’t worked out, so it wasn’t snooty any more. It used to be called Tres Marias, which is the name of a dam in Brazil, but the guy who ran it thought the name confused people, because what did one Mary have to do with coffee, let alone three? And he didn’t even have one Mary. So now it was called Captain Coffee, and everyone knew what it sold, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. It was still empty.
We walked in, and the guy that ran it was wearing this old army uniform, and he saluted us, and said, Captain Coffee at your service. I thought he was funny, but Martin was like, Jesus Christ, and he tried to leave, but Captain Coffee wouldn’t let us, he was that desperate. He told us we could have our coffee for free on our first visit, and a cake, if we wanted. So we didn’t walk out, but the next problem was that the place was tiny. There were like three tables, and each table was six inches away from the counter, which meant that Captain Coffee was leaning on the counter listening to everything we said.
And because of who we were and what had happened to us, we wanted to talk about personal things, so it was embarrassing him standing there.
Martin was like, Let’s drink up and go, and he stood up. But Captain Coffee went, What’s the matter now? So I said, The thing is, we need to have a private conversation, and he said he understood completely, and he’d go outside until we’d finished. And I said, But really, everything we say is private, for reasons I can’t go into. And he said it didn’t matter, he’d still wait outside unless anyone else came. And that’s what he did, and that’s why we ended up going to Starbucks for our coffee meetings. It was hard to concentrate on how miserable we were, with this berk in an army uniform leaning against the window outside checking that we weren’t stealing his biscuits, or biscotties as he called them. People go on about places like Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that’s what you want? I’d be lost, if JJ and people like that got their way, and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers, small bookshops and small music shops and small restaurants and cafes. I’m happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no one gives a shit, and no one knows who you are. My mum and dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I’m like, Der. That’s the point.
The book group thing was JJ’s idea. He said people do it a lot in America, read books and talk about them; Martin reckoned it was becoming fashionable here, too, but I’d never heard of it, so it can’t be that fashionable, or I’d have read about it in Dazed and Confused . The point of it was to talk about Something Else, sort of thing, and not get into rows about who was a berk and who was a prat, which was how the afternoons in Starbucks usually ended up. And what we decided was, we were going to read books by people who’d killed themselves. They were, like, our people, and so we thought we ought to find out what was going on in their heads. Martin said he thought we might learn more from people who hadn’t killed themselves—we should be reading up on what was so great about staying alive, not what was so great about topping yourself. But it turned out there were like a billion writers who hadn’t killed themselves, and three or four who had, so we took the easy option, and went for the smaller pile. We voted on using funds from our media appearances to buy ourselves the books.
Anyway, it turned out not to be the easy option at all. Fucking hell! You should try and read the stuff by people who’ve killed themselves! We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself: she killed herself because she couldn’t make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that. I sort of identify with her a bit, because I suffer from that sometimes, but her mistake was to go public with it. I mean, it was lucky in a way, because she left a sort of souvenir behind so that people like us could learn from her difficulties and that, but it was bad luck for her. And she had some bad luck, too, if you think about it, because in the olden days anyone could get a book published because there wasn’t so much competition. So you could march into a publishers’ office and go, you know, I want this published, and they’d go, Oh, OK then. Whereas now they’d go, No, dear, go away, no one will understand you. Try pilates or salsa dancing instead.
JJ was the only one who thought it was brilliant, so I had a go at him, and he had a go back because I didn’t like it. He was all, Is it because your daddy reads books? Is that why you come on like such a dork? Which was an easy one to answer, because Daddy doesn’t read books, bad luck, and I told him so. And then I said, Is it because you didn’t go to school? Is that why you think all books are great even when they’re shit? Because some people are like that, aren’t they? You’re not allowed to say anything about books because they’re books, and books are, you know, God. Anyway, he didn’t like that much, which means I got him right where it hurts. He said that he could see that what was going to happen to our reading group was that I would wreck it, and how had he been so stupid as to expect anything else? And I was like, I’m not going to wreck anything. If a book’s shit, I’ll say so. And he went, Yeah, but you’re gonna say they’re all shit, aren’t you, because you’re so fucking contrary, sorry Maureen. And I said, Yeah, and you’re gonna say they’re all great, because you’re such a creep. And he said, They are all great, and he went through all these people we were supposed to be talking about in the club—Sylvia Plath, Primo Levi, Hemingway. So I said, Well what’s the point of doing the reading club if you know in advance they’re all great? What’s fun about that? And he said, It’s not Pop Idol , man. You don’t vote for the best one. They’re all good, and we accept that, and we talk about their ideas. And I was like, well if she’s anything to go by, I don’t accept they’re all great. In fact I now accept the opposite. And JJ got really worked up about that, and there was some unpleasantness then, and Martin stepped in and we decided not to do any more books for a while, in other words ever. That was when we decided to have a go at musical suicide instead. Maureen had never heard of Kurt Cobain, can you believe it?