and yes, on one level I’m enjoying the kiss, but my mind is screaming, screeching, body-popping, lambada-ing, every dance-craze-there’s-ever-been-ing. Playground fads are revisited: yo-yos, hula hoops, pogs, the works, every exciting moment from childhood condensed into a single kiss. “Kiss properly, stop thinking about pogs, you idiot, get on with this kiss, stop thinking how this is going to sound in a book and get on with the kiss.”
So I get on with the kiss, and I think it’s a good kiss, but of course there’s all this analysis going on simultaneously. I’ve got to get her out the house. Ludicrously I say to her, “Do you want to come back to mine … Kate Moss?”
We get a minicab – from a number I had in my phone. Some bloke comes round in a beat-up car that stinks of fags, there’s a blanket on the back seat. Kate Moss gets in, I get in, we sit in the back seat and drive the short journey geographically but a long journey in terms of interior design style and property value from Sadie Frost’s in Belsize Park to mine in Gospel Oak – what Matt calls “not quite Hampstead”. A garret, digs. Mismatched pans and a duvet that was there when I moved in.
I make her tea. There’s a bit where she’s in my garden, there’s a bit where she’s sitting with my cat and he doesn’t care that she’s all mysterious and wonderful. I know he’s a cat but he should recognise that she has transcended the everyday. To be in her presence in my house doesn’t make sense, it is a baffling fusion of the real and the imagined. It’s like looking into the garden and seeing Vegas Elvis mowing the lawn, or going into the kitchen and finding Elvis in the Elvis Comeback Special ’68 suit cooking up beans, or going into the bedroom and there’s golden jacket Elvis from ’54 before he cut his hair, before the army cut off his balls. Elvis, lying on my bed looking into my eyes. Elvis Presley has entered the building.
Of course my mind will not shut up and let me enjoy the moment, there is an endless incessant narrative throughout it. Which is a shame because what I enjoy most about encounters with women is relief from the endless buzzing of needless thought, the neurological chaos, the Tokyo of neurons smashing into each other, the fizz, the buzz, the clatter abating, the hive of my mind quietening, but not that night.
The next day, ludicrously, I had to get up and live my normal life. Filming sketches with Matt and dopey Gareth Roy for our MTV chat show, 1 Leicester Square, dressing up as an old Michael Winner-type man and Matt as a Nosferatu baby.
Life begins again each day anew, and when you awake you could be anybody. During the hiatus that each new day brings, I think firstly “Who am I?” and secondly “What was I doing yesterday?” My mind begins its programme and it seems more preposterous than ever – “Well, Russell, yesterday you went to bed with Kate Moss.”
“That’s an interesting notion, brain, and I’m going to humour you and open my eyes, but if it proves false I won’t trust you again and may go back on drugs.”
I open just one eye at first, because my brain’s broadcast seems so unlikely, but one eye is sufficient because, brighter than the daylight flooding through the curtains that I should have replaced because they were too short, is the raging dawn of a sleeping Kate Moss, the illumination warring with the daybreak – intimidated by her radiance, the sun disappears behind a cloud. Her hair fans over the pillow like a peacock’s tail.
I open the other eye. Kate Moss is indeed in the bed, and for a minute I feel like I’ve murdered her. “Oh my god, what have I done, don’t panic, don’t panic.” I get up and back away like a butler on his first day with the Queen, not daring to turn from her for a moment. Like a cartoon drunk, I rub my eyes and peer at my bottle – it’s only mouthwash. It is definitely Kate Moss. Not the Listerine. It’s getting late. I’m going to have to leave for work, where I must do pop video reviews with Matt. What a stupid life.
I leave the house, the cat, the plants, the angel sleeping in my bed and walk out into a different London. I have been given patronage by Kate Moss and I can hear the gossip columns being typed, the photos from the previous night being processed and printed. Before I’ve seen a newspaper I know that I’ll be in them. With a kiss she has issued what decades of hard work could not – fame. Bigger, though, than the realisation of a lifetime’s ambition is the chaos she has left in my belly. I am unable to distinguish between this feeling of insane joy, this blissful disarray and love. It feels like love.
On my way home from a day of elation and delirium I chat to Nik Linnen, my partner, my manager, my outsourced rationale. I tell him what I’ve just told you, that I think I’m in love. With Kate Moss, or the idea of Kate Moss – which to my brain is indistinguishable from actual Kate Moss. A conveniently reductive device for dividing women who spend the night in your house is those who make the bed and those who don’t. If a woman makes the bed, the insinuation is that she cares for you, that she wants to take care of you. If she doesn’t, it doesn’t make her a bad person, it just means she’s busy and has to get out and on with her life and has no time for sweet, domestic ritual.
“If she’s made the bed, Nik, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Don’t get yer hopes up, mate,” he replies in his Manc twang. “It ain’t important, you’re already investing too much in it – saying you love her an’ that – you don’t even know her.”
I open the dark blue front door of No. 7 Courthope Road. Lucky seven. I am courting hope.
“I do know her – she’s Kate Moss,” I argue, entering the dingy communal hall with yellow walls and obligatory gas meter cupboard where I hide the spare key.
“Yeah. That’s what you’re in love with, you idiot – the idea of Kate Moss – not an actual woman. You’re being daft.”
I open the door of the flat. Morrissey my beautiful cat weaves about my feet, still unconcerned by last night’s visit.
“Look, you weren’t there. We really connected. If she’s made the bed it’s a sign.” I step into my empty flat and it has never been so empty. I make my way towards the bedroom.
“Don’t be stupid,” says Nik, “it don’t make no difference – she probably would’ve left in a hurry. Don’t build it up in yer head.”
“I’m not building it up. I’m just curious.” I close my eyes, inhale and open the bedroom door. I turn on the light and Morrissey bounds in, leaps up and lies down on the perfectly made bed. And I know that I’ll never sleep again.
†
Chapter 2
New Musical Expletive
Being sanctioned by the Princess Diana of counterculture made an immediate impact on my career. The relationship itself went nowhere as I was ill-equipped to cope with the protocols of having a globally worshipped paramour. (To be honest, I struggled to maintain the marriage to my cat – I stoke the romance by taking him up west once a week to the Ivy, plus I keep things spicy in the bedroom by putting dead birds down my pants, so that relationship pretty much takes up all my time.)
What no one realised, not Kate nor the red-top tabloid press, was that far from viewing her as a conquest, I was absolutely smitten. When I clumsily ballsed it up by flatly telling journalists who I’d not yet learned to ignore that I was “just larking around”, she wisely withdrew and I had enough sense to stop calling her. I didn’t delete her number from my phone though. I left it stored under “Grimy Tyke”, which is what I called her in an attempt to punctuate the endless flattery and awe. She’s probably had about five different numbers since then, but I keep it as a digital memento, just to assure myself that it did really happen, that it wasn’t a dream.
I could never have anticipated the instant elevation that this liaison would afford me, it was like being awarded a celebrity Victoria Cross. The word “approved” was stamped on my forehead and I was now to appear in the Sun newspaper as regularly as the horoscopes and as spuriously as page 3. My mate Mark Lucey, with whom I worked on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, remarked that in the paparazzi photos from the night I met her I looked like a shifty, greased rat as I peered out all blinking and apologetic from the back of the rain-spattered cab. “You