Adventures of a Waterboy by Mike Scott Page A

‘on’ now, but only just, and the final drama was about to play.
    On the early morning of the show, lying in Kate’s bed and drowsing in the hinterland between sleep and waking, I became aware of sounds penetrating my dream. Then I heardfootsteps approaching, bare feet slapping on a wooden floor. The bedclothes were ripped off me. My skin felt the cold rush of air as Kate’s voice, in one of its high-pitched cartoon manifestations, burst on my consciousness: ‘Ha! I found it! I saw it in my mind ! I knew it psychically and here’s the evidence!’ I rolled over and looked up. She was standing over the bed, an explosion, hair piled high on her head, holding something in her hand and waving it triumphantly. I squinted until the thing came into focus. A notepad. My notepad, from my inside jacket pocket. She started to quote from it in a singsong voice: ‘Do I love Kate or do I love Krista? I probably love neither.’
    I couldn’t remember writing these words, but as she thrust the notepad an inch in front of my face I saw them there in my own once private handwriting, incontrovertible evidence of ... what? Not infidelity, certainly, but of confusion and uncertainty, yes. Guilty as charged. I felt in my guts I didn’t love Kate but my desire to please her and hold onto my illusions wouldn’t let me admit it: the incriminating words had been written in a rare moment of self-awareness. Krista was my Canadian ex-girlfriend, the one who’d asked me if it was easy to write songs, sparking the writing of ‘The Whole Of The Moon’. She’d turned up backstage at the Berkeley show and had fatefully found her way into my journal musings. Before I could respond Kate threw the notepad at me, swivelled on her heels and vanished into the bathroom, slamming the door and locking it from inside with impeccable dramatic timing. Within seconds I heard the rush of water hissing from the shower and then another sound, her voice, now blithe and carefree, singing a familiar old song, ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’. I sat up, horribly awake. I had a drama-queen eruption of the first order to negotiate my way through but what really worried me, what shook me to the core, was that Kate Lovecraft appeared to have clairvoyantly seen something I’d written days ago in my notepad, something I’d even forgotten I’d written. How else could she have known to look for the evidence in my pocket?
    It didn’t occur to me, nor would it for some years, that she’d simply been snooping in my garments and when she found something incriminating, made up a story about being psychic in order to mask her actions. To my twenty-six-year-old self, it appeared alarmingly clear that this powerful, unpredictable woman who over the short months of our relationship had shattered every personal boundary I had, had just breached the last one. She could see into my mind! Kate eventually emerged from the bathroom and after apologies and self-abasements on my part we negotiated a truce. She came to the concert that night and all, briefly, was sweetness again. But I was desperate to get back to London to regroup my thoughts and emotions.
    I say she had broken all of my boundaries, but before I left New York the next day she made an assault on one more.
    In the late morning Kate and I went to a café on Columbus Avenue. Having seen The Waterboys perform for the first time the night before she had some feedback on the show for me. She took out a sketch pad covered with her handwriting and began reading aloud instructions regarding the songs that worked and the ones that didn’t, what I should say on stage and what I shouldn’t, the good moves I made and the bad ones, how I should have ordered my songs, and so on. She was telling me how to make my music and present it to the public. I sat and watched, as if from some great distance, as this woman pushed her way with absolute entitlement into the most intimate relationship of my life – the one