by John Niven
♦
“I’m a bear! I’m the dancing bear!”
We were both dancing to some rave compilation when the furious cocktail of class As kicked in and Waters started tearing his clothes off. I suggested to him that he might like to pretend he was an animal of some sort. Now, an hour or so later, I’m lying back contentedly in Waters’ huge leather beanbag, watching him capering naked around his living room pretending to be a circus bear. He is fucking deranged.
I shout instructions and encouragement to him, making the most of the short window I have before he collapses. “Bear eat CDs?” I suggest, chucking a handful at him.
“Bear eat CDs!” Waters shrieks delightedly and stuffs a copy of Pulp’s Different Class into his mouth. He crunches right through it—jewel case, sleeve, CD, the lot. “Mmmm,” he says, turning to me and rubbing his naked belly happily, bits of paper and plastic falling from his bleeding mouth. A worried expression crosses his face. “Bear need…” He’s trying to say something, his eyeballs flipping back in their sockets, as though he’s trying to look at whatever is left of his brain.
“Bear need what? What does bear need?” I say encouragingly, like you would to a confused child.
“Bear need—” Abruptly he squats down and unleashes a torrent of foul shite all over his nice sea-grass carpeting. Then he loses his balance and falls into his own effluent.
The stench is incredible, arousing the sleeping dog. I lock him in the bedroom.
I check my watch—four AM. Enough’s enough. “Here, thirsty bear,” I say, lifting his head up—being careful not to get shit on me—and holding a mug to his lips. It’s filled with Evian in which I’ve dissolved a further two dozen of his Valium. Waters greedily gulps it down. “Good bear,” I say, patting his head, “good bear…”
An hour or so later I watch him sleeping—dying—while I snort the last of the coke and listen to the Menswear album. What the fuck was he thinking with this? “Roger! What the fuck were you thinking with this?” I shout, slapping his face with the CD case.
“Mmmmmm?” he mumbles, face down on the carpet, death nuzzling up close by, putting his feet up.
I turn the TV on and watch VH1 for a while—the Cardigans, Radiohead, Texas, the new Blur single—as Waters’ breathing goes from loud, laboured snoring to a rattling whisper to absolutely nothing. Satisfied he’s dead I get my cock out and piss all over him.
Then I go and root through his bedroom drawers, hitting pay dirt when I find a sex-trove of porn mags, videos, toys and lubes at the back of his wardrobe. I pull out a butt-plug. It’s about the size of a champagne cork and is attached to the handle/battery compartment by a grey wire about four feet long. I click it on. It thrums feebly so I replace the batteries with the ones from the remote control for the flat-screen TV in Waters’ bedroom. Much better—it’s like holding a small, angry frog. I get rubber gloves from beneath the sink.
Before I leave I flip through the channels until I find Red Hot Amateurs. Some spotty-bummed housewife in cheap red underwear smiles coquettishly into the camera as she fingers a dildo, like a flautist preparing for a tricky recital. I leave the TV on, bluish light flickering across Waters’ piss-spattered, shit-flecked corpse, the empty bottles of Valium and vodka atop the cokey mirror, the cord for the butt-plug trailing out from between his cheeks, a faint, muffled hum audible beneath the moans and groans from the TV.
I walk home to Maida Vale, the sun coming up and ‘Beetlebum’ in my head as I cross the Harrow Road. The long, festering strip studded with fried-chicken shacks and everything-a-quid emporiums—a greying London wound which gentrification will never reach—is deserted except for a solitary double-decker bus. It slams past me, ratling the pavement. It is full of tolers: poor people, their faces as grim and stark as pornography, as blunt as final demands.
They flash by me on their way into W1, where they will do whatever they do all day for no money. Yellow letters glow feebly on the front of the bus, telling me that these people have come from Kensal Rise, Cricklewood, Wembley and other places, poorer, more terrible places, that I don’t even know about.
Six
“If you are a fierce competitor then you want to beat the other guys’ brains out, because that’s what you love doing.”
Al Teller, former Columbia Records President
“What do you think? Honestly?” one of them—the bass player? the singer?—asks as the last blips of feedback fade out.
I look around my office. The four musicians (early twenties, thin, anaemic, torn clothes) sit on the sofa and the floor while their manager (a couple of years older, a little better dressed) sits in the chair across the desk from me.
Waters’ non-appearance in the office this morning caused…nothing. I guess that, in most workplaces, it’s Unusual, reprehensible even, when people just don’t turn up. Or turn up so hung-over all they can do is vomit and cry. But not here. Not in the record industry. (‘Industry’. That’s blinding, isn’t it? “Diligence or assiduity in any task or effort.” I look through the glass wall of my office at all the diligence and assiduity going on around here: Rebecca, laughing her head off as she feverishly types a gossip-laden email to some whore she knows; Darren and Stan, our scouts, chasing each other around with water pistols; Schneider berating Nancy for failing to secure him a necessary restaurant reservation.)
What do I think? Honestly?
I picture the expressions which would appear on these earnest faces if I even began to tell them what I was thinking while we listened to their demo. “Well, kids, during the ludicrously overlong intro to the first number I started wondering if those fucks in the car department had finally gotten around to installing the new CD changer in the boot of my car. By the time your clicked, long-overdue first ‘chorus’ was finally dropping, I was mentally re-enacting a recent coke- and E-fuelled gang bang I had with a pair of cheap Eastern European prostitutes. Then I started worrying because I realised I’d forgotten to drop a suit that I want to wear to the Music Week Awards tomorrow night into the dry-cleaner’s and could they do it same day or should I have Rebecca pop by my flat at lunchtime and take it in for me? Or should I just buy a new suit? I saw one in Paul Smith I liked the other day, but could I possibly have any alterations done in time? Then Lisa from finance walked past the window wearing her low-cut jeans—the piano-wire of her thong just visible above the denim—and I started working her into the East European hooker gang bang, having her being fucked by one of them with a huge strap-on while I’m ejaculating an astonishingly large payload into her gagging mouth and blinking, grateful eyes while the other ostro eats her out from beneath. By the time I was standing there in my mind’seye, sweat-glazed, panting and triumphant, over the three tearful, naked semen-encrusted bodies, your last overwrought ballad was spiralling to a close and I hadn’t really heard a fucking note. Sorry.”
What do I think? Honestly? I think I would like to see you and the rest of your band die screaming in agony from something like testicular cancer. I think that last week I spent a hundred and eighty pounds on a necktie and lost it a few hours later, drunk in Soho. I think about telling these hopeless, penniless cunts this. But instead, pointlessly, I say, “Great guitar sound.”
“Yeah,” the manager says, and he starts crapping on about how Doug—or whoever—has been playing guitar since he was a fucking foetus or something. Doug looks up from the floor and smiles bashfully. It’s about all I can do not to punch his stupid, talentless face in. To stand up, run the length of the room, and boot him full-force in his pasty, pimply, stinking indie chops. But—ever reasonable—I just nod and listen and say things like “yeah?” and “yeah” and “great” and “really?” for a long time.
I hate indie music. Until a couple of years ago you didn’t really have to think about it. It was just a couple of hundred losers fucking around in Camden. Then a pair of Mancunian losers rock up clutching a Beatles songbook and suddenly you’ve got to listen to all this shite and take all these meetings in case you mis
s the next one. It’s a fucking nightmare.
I’m tired. I got home from Waters’ place and managed just a few hours’ fitful, cokey sleep before I had to get up and drive over to the new house, where there was another problem.
I’ve bought a toilet at the top of Ladbroke Grove. Desoto hooked Trellick and me up with a bent estate agent, one who specialises in finding ‘undervalued development opportunities’. What this means is that he convinces derelict pensioners (ideally ones without immediate families) who have been in their derelict houses since the dawn of time that the place is worth a lot less than it really is. You buy it, gut the place, lick of paint, couple of real fireplaces, do the floors up, and flog it a few months later for a sickening profit.
I pulled up at the place and walked through a trio of builders on the front steps—astonished-looking Albanians, buckled over tea and tabloids, smoking like lab beagles—down the hallway, where a couple more Albanians are hunkered down either side of a tea chest savaging a stinking parcel of vinegar-sodden fish and chips, and into the living room where Murdoch, their boss, my builder, stood in a large pool of water gazing thoughtfully at a wall.
A section of plaster around six feet in diameter had been hacked away leaving a black, gaping wound, exposing the guts of the old house; a hydra’s head of ancient wiring, rusted copper pipes. One of the pipes had been hastily bandaged, but a thin trickle of water still ran from it down into the wall cavity. “You’re joking?” I said.
“Dinnaeworry,” Murdoch replied cheerfully, “Plumber’s-cummin’rooninnamimut. Jistasweelwefunoutthenoo.”
“Found out what?”
“Thonpipe’sbinleakin’furdonkey’san’it’sweekendyer halewathere.”
Murdoch was saying that the pipe has been leaking for a long time and has caused damage to the entire wall. It’s taken three agonising months but I’m now fluent in the land of horrible, guttural Scottish Murdoch speaks. It’s like I’ve been forced to learn a language I will never use again.
There’s no point getting angry at Murdoch. He just talks more. You just have to ask the question. “How long and how much?” I said.
“Well…” He fired up one of his unspeakable cigarettes—a Raffles, a Mayfair, a Concord, a Savoy—and started talking.
I didn’t listen—it’s not worth the effort. It really isn’t. Whenever a problem comes up with the building work—which it does on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis—Murdoch will crap on for eternity, giving me several options. He’ll then tell me why the cheapest option isn’t worth bothering with. And then why the mid-priced option isn’t really what I’m after either.
It’s all good for Murdoch though. No matter how tits up anything goes—he just keeps raking in cash. He has squadrons of crazed Albanians all over north-west London. Some of them do very well, Murdoch’s Albanians. Strong work ethic. You come over here and you work your balls off from dawn until dusk—plastering and painting and bodging and fucking up—while the wife (or sister, or mum) does her bit across town, ankle-deep in spunk in some massage parlour off the North Circular.
I say Murdoch gives me options, but he doesn’t really. He just talks shit for a while until I wind up spending more money. But what can I do? What do I know about this stuff? Murdoch could lift up some floorboards and show me a pair of elephants, chained to a tandem and frantically pedalling, and tell me that the building is, in fact, elephant-powered and that we need to replace one of the beasts. I’d display irritation, but only mild surprise, as I scribbled out a cheque for the most costly house-powering elephant on the market.
“Abootseevenoreightthoosanahreckon…” he finally said.
“Fuck me.”
“Ayeit’sbadnewsrightenuff.”
“Right, whatever. Do it. And will you please tell your guys to stop eating that stinking fucking takeaway food in here?”
“Ayeah’lltellthemtaewatchitbuttheboayshuvgotaeeathke.”
I’m now three months and a lot of money into this nightmare. I’ve reached the point where just the sight of Murdoch’s mobile number popping up on the screen of my Nokia makes me feel sick.
Murdoch went on, talking about skylights and RSJs and supporting walls, about hardwood flooring and cornices. About new windows and planning permission. And it’s all expensive. None of it is cheap.
The funding for this whole farce is, of course, borrowed. Just a few years back it would have been impossible to do this at my age and income. To obtain the financing you’d have needed guarantors, collateral and accounts going back to the Stone Age. I just told them a mad pack of utter crap—I’m Senior Vice President of A&R for the Fucking World—and I earn a billion quid a minute. Bosh. Done Deal.
I drove back to the office, for this meeting. Crawling along Ladbroke Grove with the top down I got stuck in traffic across from a pub; until very recently a crunchily carpeted pit of bitter, satellite TV and boil-in-the-bag pies. Now there are polished oak floors and pan-fried, line-caught Scottish trout. Frosty bottles of champagne and Sauvignon gleam in glass-fronted coolers. An ancient local, baking in his tattered overcoat and cap, stands on the pavement outside, frowning at the braying laughter and the Propellerheads pumping from the jukebox. He’s easily eighty and squints through thick glasses at the chalkboard menu, which is telling him that today’s special is seafood linguine with Irish lobster, scallops and prawns. The chalkboard may as well read ‘go home and die, you fucking old cunt’. I smile. What wars and depressions, what hardships and indignities has this poor bastard lived through, coming of age as he did during unarguably the worst stretch of the twentieth century, to end his days having to witness this shit?
I think about money. I’m running two mortgages, a bridging loan, an overdraft and six credit cards, as well as all the usual monthly outgoings: large and regular tabs must be settled with west London’s cocaine dealers. Drinks, fine dining and regular exotic holidays must be factored in. Monthly, it seems, I must write cheques (or rather, Rebecca must before I sign them) to various London parking authorities for hundreds of pounds’ worth of fines. There are clothes, gadgets and impulse buys in Heal’s and Harvey Nicks of a Saturday morning—last weekend a pair of cherrywood bedside cabinets, snapped up for just twelve hundred quid when I was hung-over and showing off in front of Trellick, four hundred quid the week before on a set of Japanese butcher’s knives which sit gleaming and never-used on the black granite breakfast bar. There’s the cleaner, a witless Colombian demi-hooker whose efforts in the flat seem to diminish in direct proportion to the wage increases she regularly demands. Some days I bowl through the door and the only significant difference to the place is the fact that she’s lifted the money from the kitchen counter. I jump into Sainsbury’s for a pint of milk and stumble back to the Saab three hundred quid later, juggling bottles of champagne and Ecuadorian kiwi fruit, foie gras, fresh Loch Fyne oysters, Jerusalem artichokes, Belgian chocolates, sushi and dinky miniature vegetables. The champagne is drunk and the food is tossed straight into the bin from the fridge by the cleaner a couple of weeks later after it’s started to fester and turn incredible florid colours.
Because I’m never home, of course. I sometimes think I am buying all this stuff solely to impress the monosyllabic retards who work the supermarket tills. I smoke three packs of Marlboro Lights every day—my tabs tab is approaching four hundred quid a month. An average night out with the lads—drinks at the Atlantic bar, dinner somewhere new and ludicrous, more drinks at Soho House or the Groucho, coke, cabs and boilers—clocks in at about eight hundred quid. It’s no wonder I’m trying to keep it down to two or three nights out a week. Even though a fair chunk of this can be punted onto expenses, it still takes a lot of fucking dough to keep the wheels on the wagon. My bank manager stutters in disbelief as every month brings the same request to maintain, or increase, my overdraft. He knows what I earn. (About five times what he does.) He can’t believe I’m getting through it either. On the plus side my hooker expenses do seem to be steady and manageable at around a grand a month th
ese days. Maybe it’s the cold weather. Sometimes, in the feverish months of spring and summer, I have to admit I go a bit bonkers.
Anyway, the answer to all of these problems is simple enough: Big. Fucking. Hit. Records. Have a few of those and—bosh—no more problems.
I edge along Ladbroke Grove—at one point ecstatically managing to get into third gear—and I keep seeing them; hunched on doorsteps with their tabloids and their tea, smoking their Raffles or Coliseums as they heft rolls of seagrass matting and lengths of hardwood flooring in and out of the dusty old houses. The builders. You see? Everyone’s doing it. It’s like you can look along the road, through the leafy trees towards Holland Park, and see the fireball of cash come flaming down the hill, burning out all the tolers: the Kaffirs, the old people, the welfare families. They’ve had it around here. Finished.
Finally, blissfully, the meeting is ending and I’m saying things like ‘let’s do some demos’ and ‘see you soon’. They hand me a flyer—a picture of Malcolm McDowell from the movie If, presumably a totem of cool in whatever sorry universe these jizz-rags inhabit—for their next gig as they leave.
I flop down on the sofa and start rolling a spliff. There are days at work, whole days, where nothing seems to happen. All morning long there is coffee and cigarettes and phone calls where I say things like ‘send it over’ and ‘in last week’s NME’ and ‘shipping a hundred thousand’ while I watch MTV—Foo Fighters, Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers—and think about lunch. Somewhere in the mid-afternoon I’ll have a spliff and a belt of Scotch, or a line of gak, and the day will look a little brighter, sharper. I’ll make the same calls and watch the same videos with a little more enthusiasm. Or sometimes I’ll just crawl behind my sofa for a nap after lunch, the blinds drawn against the outer office and music whumping from my stereo. Later I’ll start to drift up, suspended in that sweet honey-drop between waking and sleeping, to see that the street lights have started to come on along the park across the road.
