by John Niven
“Oh fuck off. You know what I mean,” Waters says huffily. “Anyway…” he tries to change the subject.
“Excuse me,” I say as I get up and leave the room.
It’s hard to say what does it. Whether it’s his views on the Prodigy sleeve, or the fact that that dismal spunk-worshipper Derek could choose to make this guy Head of A&R over me, or the fact Waters doesn’t even know that Paul Weller is primarily known for being a songwriter. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a good drop of spunk about the Prodigy, or about Weller or his music—although it was certainly impressive that Go! Discs managed to resurrect the fossilised mod cunt and grind a million albums out of him—it’s just…the indignity of the situation suddenly hits me. No one knows what they are doing, yes, granted. But Waters…Waters really doesn’t know anything. And now he’s my boss. For a second I almost experience sadness, a sense of loss, regarding Schneider.
I walk into the kitchen. There, still in the corner by the fridge, is the blue-and-steel baseball bat.
Home security.
I come back in. He’s sitting on the floor with his back to me, hunched over the mirror on the low coffee table, already—always—shaping more lines. I check my watch. It’s almost 6 AM. A dance compilation plays softly. Waters is still talking, gibbering. To me? To the sleeping dog? To the wall? Who knows?
I walk up behind him. I start the bat back, swinging it so far over my head that I’m sure I feel it touch the heel of my right shoe. Then I bring it down with humming force. I can hear the air being moved aside. Waters is saying the word ‘crossover’.
Sound of Impact.
♦
Now, I expected there to be some crunchy give as his skull caved in and he slumped forward. Goodnight Vienna. But no. There’s a loud clear ‘thwock’—like hitting a very hard piece of wood—and Waters immediately howls in agony, grabs his head, and starts staggering to his feet, knocking glasses and ashtrays noisily onto the polished wood floor. The bastard dog explodes into life and starts yelping and growling. Stunned and shaking, it takes me a second or two to recock the bat, by which time he’s on his knees, halfway up. I swing down again, this time the bat glances off his forehead, which is already slick with blood, and sends him reeling into the middle of the room. He looks up, right at me. Then he looks at his trembling hands, which are covered in blood. The expression on his face…he looks confused, horrified. Like when you open your bank statement thinking you’ve had a quiet month, and scan down the tumbling debits, to the unthinkable figure at the bottom with the letters ‘OD’ beside it. The dog is barking its tits off, going crackers.
For a second I think he’s going to charge at me, and he’s a big guy, Waters. Then the force of the blow, the shockwave, hits him, his eyes start vibrating, his legs spastic about and he wobbles onto his knees, making a terrible ‘ohhhh…urrrr’ sound. Blood is pouring down his face now and it looks like oil under the soft halogen spots. I run towards him. He manages one actual word—“please”—as I bring the bat down for the third time in a massive, terrible arc. He’s on his knees, at around waist height to me, and I connect right in the centre of his dome. This time there is lotsof crunchy give and his skull caves in. A jet of blood sprays out of his nose and he goes over, falling onto his side and twitching on the floor.
Bear eat CDs!
“You stupid fat cunt!” I scream. “Paul Weller writes all his own songs! He’s one of the foremost singer-songwriters of his generation!” Just to be on the safe side, because the anger is fizzling out now, the adrenalin going, my blood clotting, becoming thick as tarmac in my veins, I smash the bloody bat down once more, onto the side of his head this time. With the sound of a loud, wet fart, a mess of grey-white ‘brains’ spurts out of the crack in the top of his head. The dog stops barking and growling and starts licking and nibbling at the spreading puddle of blood and brains which is oozing out of his master’s broken head. Disgusted, and with about the last of my strength, I smash the Jack Russell incredibly hard over the head. Its skull just explodes, the eyeballs both flopping out and dangling down its face and then it’s nice and quiet, the only sound that of the house compilation, Frankie Knuckles’ ‘Your Love’ playing softly. There’s something small, pink and bloody on the floor next to Waters’ mouth and I realise he’s bitten the tip of his tongue off. It’s just lying there, a few inches away from a bloodstained paperback copy of Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby.
April
London Records terminate their deal with Tony Wilson’s label Factory Too. R. Kelly is N°1 for a fucking month. XL spends a lot of money signing some band called Stroke. Whispers start to circulate that the new Radiohead LP is off its tits—an unlistenable prog-rock nightmare. Andy Thompson’s label VC Recordings prepares to launch an album by dance act D*Note. Thompson says, “I can see D*Note at the Royal Albert Hall. The sky is really the limit for them.”
Seven
“Lemme tell ya something—if a guy’s a cocksucker in his life, when he dies he don’t become a saint.”
Morris Levy
The day after I kill Waters I have to go to Dublin to see a band.
I hate the cab ride into Dublin. It’s a bitch. I mean, it’ll soon be the twenty-first century and these worthless Paddy tramps can’t even get their diseased, potato-ravaged arses into gear and build a fucking motorway. You have to sit for eternity on some two-lane B-road that winds through housing estates, high streets and Christ knows what, all the while with some lobotomised fucking Mick asking you all manner of crap about yourself.
“AndwillthisbeyerfirstvisittoDublinnow?” the horrible tip-scrounging cunt has the balls to ask me.
I just groan and crank up my Discman, turning to stare silently out of the window at the dreadful shops, bars and inbred mutants that crawl past in the rain-streaked gridlock. But the guy, the cabbie, swings round from the wheel again and keeps asking me something. I slide the headphones down.
“Andwhichhotelwasityewereafternow?”
“What?” I sigh.
He says it again, slower.
“The Clarence.”
“Ohverynicenowyeknowit’syennanfromyewtoowho…”
But I don’t hear the rest of this because I slip the headphones back up over my ears and Richard Ashcroft’s singing “You’re a slave to money…” as I return to staring out the window through cracked, stinging, hung-over eyes: a big Guinness poster, a dirty child on a mountain bike, an old man bawling in the doorway of a pub, and a bright red butcher’s shop with carcasses hanging from hooks and gleaming entrails piled in plastic trays.
I check in at the Clarence.
I go to my room, masturbate, and fall asleep.
I wake up and realise I’ve missed the gig.
I go back to sleep.
I get up the next morning and eat a late, expensive breakfast.
I lie in bed and watch a film called Outbreak starring Dustin Hoffman on pay TV.
I fly back to London.
I tell Derek the band were ‘promising’.
He nods, like he understands something.
♦
I waltz into the office around lunchtime the next day, sucking on an ice lolly and wearing shorts and sandals—London’s having one of those early-spring mornings where it thinks it’s summertime. As I round the corner towards my office I see Rebecca and Pam. They’re huddled over Rebecca’s desk, their faces red, both clutching wet, shredded Kleenex.
“Oh Steven,” Pam says, a catch in her voice, “it’s terrible…” She bursts into fresh hot tears.
“What?” I say.
“It’s…Roger…” she manages between sobs.
“WHAT?” I say.
“He’s dead!”Pam says.
“No!” I say. (I thought about saying “NO!”, but then I thought, no.)
She just nods, blubbing, shoulders shaking, crinkly tissue pressed to her face. I like girls’ faces when they’ve been crying—hot, soft and pulpy. I wonder if Pam—in her grief—is recalling the night after the Ivor
Novello Awards last year when she rashly went home with Waters and he tried—at length from what I heard—to cajole her into anal sex. She pulls herself together a little, sweeping wet strands of hair out of her face and taking a deep breath.
“A neighbour found him this morning. It looks like someone broke into his flat, a burglar, and Roger must have disturbed them. Or he tried to stop them or something.”
The idea of Waters being confronted in his living room at 3 AM by a couple of big, angry tooled-up niggers and doing anything other than begging for his fat, sleazy life is so laughable I have to bite my cheeks. Pam collapses forwards again into me, shuddering and sobbing as she buries her face in my neck. As I comfort her, and quietly enjoy the press of her (decent) rack against my chest, Rebecca and I look at each other. Rebecca’s eyes are red like Pam’s, her cheeks slick with tears too, but she’s looking at me strangely, with an expression on her face I can’t quite place.
Hastings comes out of his office. “Isn’t it terrible?” he says. I put a hand over my face and say, “Excuse me, please.”
I run into my office, slamming the door behind me, and throw myself face down on the sofa, my shoulders shaking and my whole body convulsing. I can feel Hastings, Rebecca and Pam watching me through the glass partition. I can feel their buffoonish concern upon me.
It must really look like I’m crying.
♦
Later, seven o’clock, after everyone’s gone home and the place is empty, I go and sit in Waters’ office. It is strange to sit there as it slowly gets dark, surrounded by the things he saw and touched every day—his computer, his diary, phone and stereo—and think about how he said ‘please’. On the wall is a framed gold disc from the one (almost) successful act Waters signed. (They’re ‘bands’ or ‘groups’ when you’re trying to sign them, and ‘acts’ once you have. I don’t know why that is.) Scattered around his desk and perched on his shelves are various Star Wars products; little X-Wing fighters, a Millennium Falcon, a big R2D2 that’s actually a phone. Like many men in the record industry in their late twenties/early thirties Waters thought Star Wars was cool. Just looking at his dismal toys feels like justification enough for killing the cretin.
I’m bound to get a few of his acts dumped on me. But that’s not so bad—most of them are so fucked that they’re beyond rescue. ‘It was broke when I got here’ stuff. I plan to suggest we drop pretty much all of them.
A Jiffy bag, with an EMI address label on it, is propped up on his keyboard. I feel inside and pull out a promo CD. I squint at it in the half-light: Radiohead. Their new single, which isn’t out for a month or so and which I haven’t heard yet. Dunn says most radio stations are giving it the fuck off.
I slip it into Waters’ machine and a strange, terrible noise fills the room. I turn it down.
I open the top drawer of his desk and have a root: taxi and restaurant receipts, half-completed expenses claims, cassettes and CDs, pens and pencils, a couple of empty cocaine wraps. One half-full wrap…
I do a line off his mouse mat. The mouse mat is a picture of Herve Villechaize, the midget actor who played Nick Nack in the James Bond film and Tattoo in Fantasy Island. (Like many men in the record industry in their late twenties/early thirties Waters thought that shit TV shows from the seventies and eighties were cool.)
Herve was three foot ten and weighed four stone, but the mad dwarf cunt fell in love with, and married, a fully grown woman. When she divorced him and took all his cash he went mental; he hit the painkillers, the Scotch and the chang and wound up topping himself. He taped his own suicide too. Honestly. He got hold of a tape recorder, pressed ‘record’, put a pillow against his chest, held a big fuck-off gun up to the pillow, and he said, “Goodbye, my darling. I could not satisfy your love,” and shot himself through his tiny heart.
Or rather, he tried to. Somehow he missed everything vital and had to cock the gun again and shoot himself a second time. Apparently the tape ends with him moaning and groaning, saying, “Ohhh it hurts, it hurts. I am dying…I am dying now.”
The Radiohead track, which is called ‘Paranoid Android’, has built through an appalling crescendo of arty noise into a kind of washed-out coda with Thorn Yorke, bleating and warbling the words ‘rain down’ over the top. What the fuck were they thinking with this nonsense? They’re finished. Surely no cunt’s going to be having this?
I turn it off and just sit there in Waters’ office in the quiet dark, doing the last of his chang and thinking about Herve Villechaize, until it’s time to go to the Borderline, to see some band called the Hitchers who Lamacq has been banging on about.
♦
The car from the airport seems to take a long time and we pull up at the church already—always—late. While Trellick winds up a call on his mobile I get out the car and look around: grey skies, windy, brutal. Down the hillside, off in the distance, is a big, dismal city. Sheffield or something, I suppose.
Christ, I hate being out of London.
The cabbie is saying something to us but he’s Northern and none of us understand a word. Ross slips the guy a fifty and tells him to wait for us. The cabbie blinks at the big, unfamiliar, strawberry-coloured note and carefully folds it into his shirt pocket, like it’s an old, delicate parchment or something. “Pay your mortgage off, mate,” Ross says as we walk away. We go through the gate and up the path towards the grey stone building, towards soft, horrible organ music.
Inside it’s busy—a couple of hundred people—and we have to stand at the back. A minister, a vicar or something, is crapping on about Waters: “…in London, in the music industry, where he enjoyed great success and made a great many friends, so many of whom have travelled here to be with us today. As a boy Roger was always a huge fan of music and it was because of this…”
It’s been a far easier ride than I ever imagined. Two policemen came to interview me as I’d been out with Waters on the night he died. I told them we’d gone to see some bands in Camden and I’d dropped him off in a cab before going home. They’d nodded away, made some notes and that was that. They reckon it was a burglar. Then again, perhaps this isn’t so odd:
Schneider had his mobile and wallet taken from him at knifepoint on Hammersmith Broadway a few months ago. The Kaffir doing the mugging even let him finish his call.
Darren was knocked off his bike in Kentish Town. He got up, dazed and bruised, to find himself surrounded by a mob of teenagers, who proceeded to kick the shit out of him, dip his pockets, and ride off on his bike.
Leamington got back from holiday and walked into his basement flat in Fulham. Everything gone and the proverbial smoking log in his bed.
Rebecca was waiting for the bus in Shepherd’s Bush. They punched her in the face and grabbed her handbag.
Nicky from International was sitting at the lights on the Cromwell Road when the car door burst open and the kid—a snarling mess of gold teeth and sportswear—took her bag, phone and a handful of CDs. (“I thought he was going to get in the car. I thought he was going to rape me,” she said, telling the story in a meeting. Trellick and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing —you’re fucking dreaming, love. )
Daily, it seems, you walk out to your car in the morning to find your feet crunching on the tiny pebbles of glass, then the brick on the passenger seat, the wires hanging like guts from the dashboard, and your Blaupunkt being flogged for a tenner’s worth of rocks in some local ragga den.
It serves me well, London: the streets crawl with suspects. The houses and the cars gleam with motive.
I look around the church at the people who I guess Waters grew up with. The girls, apart from the industry whores who made the trip up, are all utter fucking monsters. I’m guessing that most of them are around thirty, Waters’ age, but Christ, they look like pensioners—lined, wrinkled faces, massive sagging teats, arses like busted sacks of gravel. The kind of working-class sows who stop being doable around the age of twenty-one. You look at the guys who are with them, guys around our age (bu
t poor guys, failures) and they look innocent. They look like they don’t know what’s going on. Like they’re unaware that they’ve married some disfigured atrocity. I mean, you look at these guys and you’d expect to see a little shame. Self-consciousness at the very least. If I was one of them I wouldn’t be able to look a stranger in the eye without gesturing to my monster and saying, “Sorry, mate, I don’t know what I was thinking.” Maybe they don’t. Maybe they look at these women and see the girl they met at school. Is that even possible? That kind of…well, love, I suppose you’d have to call it. I shudder at the word, at the thought. No wonder Waters got the fuck out of here as soon as he could.
It occurs to me, not for the first time, how strange it must be not to come from London.
After what feels like a long, long time it’s over and we all bow our heads as what I presume is Waters’ immediate family file out behind the coffin. There’s two girls (his sisters?) who look bad, they’re shaking and crying and holding onto each other and stuff, and, behind them, the parents. The father looks like he isn’t quite there—red-rimmed eyes set in a thousand-yard stare—but the mother. Jesus wept, the mother. She’s this tiny woman crumpled into a ball, half clinging to her husband’s arm, half being carried along by him. She’s clutching a soaking handkerchief in each fist and is making this noise. It sounds like the noise ghosts make in old horror films, a sort of wobbly moaning, whining ‘woooo-aahhhh-ooohh’. I mean, she looks fucking insane.
The guys holding the coffin have to pause, to get something out of the way, and she comes right up against the coffin. She starts screaming—“No! No! My son! My son!” type stuff—and this triggers off loads of the girls in the crowd crying even harder until a couple of old hags calm her down and they get her out of there.
