Tania Kindersley
:: Goodbye, Johnny Thunders
It wasn't so very bad, having these strange distant creatures for parents. I went through a stage of being jealous of people who had close cosy families, mothers who made them chicken soup when they were ill, fathers who helped with the homework, real Brady Bunch families, who sat down to eat with each other, who teased and bickered and gave each other nicknames, who shared private jokes and holiday reunions. I thought for a long time that I wanted that, that I had been deprived, that I had nowhere I belonged. But as I grew older, I realised the advantages. I could do what I wanted after all, and that's worth something. There were no expectations put upon me. We didn't ask anything of each other. It was quite restful, in a way.
Louey had never been a child. He'd come into the world fully formed, twenty-one with a hundred-year soul and not a fly in sight.
.. [my father] was so clever himself it would never occur to him that he could have fathered a dunce. Everything he ever produced achieved rave reveiews. I was just another critical success on his long list, nothing to write home about.
I had left more places than most people ever go to, and that's enough to give anyone a veneer of sophistication. I knew that it could fool some of the people, some of the time, but Louey took an awful lot of fooling.
I sometimes think we should go back to the old days, when there was proper courtship, when people walked out together for weeks and weeks before anything happened. At least then you know something about each other, you have some solid ground to put your feet on. We're all so impatient now, we just want to get to the main action.
'You know every film, don't you?' he said. 'You know all the lines.'
I knew all the lines. Sometimes I thought that was all I did know, and where did it get me? You can talk the talk until you're blue in the face, but most of the time it doesn't mean so very much. Not when it's all other people's words in the first place.
Years before, I had met a clever nervy boy in Spain, who went everywhere with a copy of Solzhenitsyn under his arm and thought about things too much for his own good. He told me once, sitting up late in a deserted bar looking out over the sea, that the saddest two words in the English language were Too Late.
'There are some people who are good at that, just living. I never saw the point of it. Everything that ever happened was for me just so much material. Nothing seemed to count until I had used it, in a book. Then it was mine, I had shaped it, made it mean something. It seemed to me that there was no point to events, by themselves - that they only took on resonance and sense once they had been written.'