2008 - Kill Your Friends

by John Niven

  Thirteen

  “I’m basically in the David Geffen business.”

  David Geffen

  It was Bournemouth last year, so it’s Brighton again this year.

  The TV set in my room says that the Grand Hotel welcomes ‘Mr S. Stalefox’. I pull back the net curtains to check the view again, to check that it really has happened.

  It has: brick walls, heating ducts, pipes. This is my ‘sea view’. I am overcome by another seismic jolt of fury. How could Rebecca have allowed this to happen? I try her mobile again and it just goes straight to message for the umpteenth time. Hatefully I picture her; on the train down here, or in the bar at Victoria, drinking wine and gossiping with the other sows while I am forced to live through this.

  They’ll be excited, of course, all the PAs and marketing assistants love the company conference. It’s an excuse to spend a couple of days wallowing in a five-star hotel, getting manicures and facials and fuck knows what by day, then agonising over what to wear in the evening before spending the early hours of the morning sweating over some guy’s coke-broke prick.

  My rage only increases the moment Trellick—wearing a dressing gown, his hair wet, his mobile cradled in his shoulder—opens his door. The chinless bastard has lucked into some kind of suite, with double French windows opening out onto a balcony overlooking the seafront. “Fuck you,” I say, taking two Scotches from his minibar.

  I take a seat by the open window, the chill September breeze filling the room as Trellick strides around, simultaneously talking on his mobile, smoking a cigarette and putting on his suit. I’m wearing a suit too, by the way. I flip through Trellick’s copy of Music Week. As has been known for a couple of weeks now, Neil Ferris, recently installed as MD over at EMI, has been hiring and firing people like a madman. He’s made Tris Penna Head of A&R. Incredibly Nick Robinson, the previous Head of A&R, has not been fired. He’s been demoted. He’s going to work under Penna. I mean, where’s your fucking self-respect? Wouldn’t you just top yourself?

  “What’s your problem, loser?” Trellick asks, hanging up.

  “Nothing,” I say. “When did you get here?”

  “Just now.”

  “Anyone around downstairs?”

  “I saw your mate,” (‘your mate’ is now the official euphemism for Parker-Hall), “in the bar, talking to Derek.”

  “Oh yeah?” I say casually. The networking little prick.

  The objective of the annual company conference is straightforward enough: you gather together all the sales reps from all over the country—along with key players from retailers like Our Price, Virgin, HMV and the like—and everyone from the label above the rank of janitor, you bang them all up in some five-star atrocity by the sea for a few days, and bombard them with speeches about how great we all are and show them videos and presentations of your new acts.

  Some of the acts, the priority acts, will play live at the conference. If you are in a band this must be your worst nightmare. Imagine striding onstage to belt out your heartfelt anthems of youth and alienation to a hotel conference roomful of sales reps: a roomful of Mondeo-driving, Next-suit-wearing, pebble-dash-semi-and-two-kids cunts. Some bands have kind of an existential meltdown about playing at conference. It’s too funny. It’s like they know it’s the antithesis of rawk and roll, playing for a roomful of ‘suits’, but they all want to sell records too, so they fret and moan for a while before, inevitably, agreeing to do it. They’re all good little capitalists at heart, bands. Even Thorn fucking Yorke, when he’s not crying and wringing his hands about what kind of coffee beans you should be using so some cunt in Outer Mongolia can afford to put an inside toilet in his filthy gaff, even he’s wondering what the marketing spend is looking like. He’s wondering about venue sizes, about playlists. He’ll tell you—with a straight face no less—that he thinks about all this stuff because he wants to ‘get the message across’. He wants to ‘reach as many people as possible’. That’s what he’ll tell you.

  But it’s bad news for us too, conference. In the evening, at dinner, in the hotel bars, you have to mingle with the reps; the retards who pound up and down the motorways in their two-litre Vauxhall mongol-wagons, desperately trying to get some cunt at Bob’s Records in Ipswich to take a few more copies of the new Mansun LP. You stand with an aching fake smile strung across your face as you listen to their stories about how many Celine Dion records they sold in a week, about what local bands from up North they reckon are going to be big next year, to their dismal, Chardonnay-fuelled views on the way the music industry is going.

  Finally Trellick is dressed so we do a quick line and hit the bar.

  I decided not to have Songbirds appear at conference. True, we finally have a single ready to release, a fizzy slab of pornographic dance-floor baloney called ‘Fully Grown’ (the lyrics rammed with near-the-knuckle plays on how close to the legal age for fucking the girls are), but if anyone actually heard them sing live, the jig would be up in a nanosecond. Derek, desperate to fill out the upcoming releases roster, begged, nearly demanded in fact, that they do a mimed PA instead, but I held out. This too would have been fraught with danger because it would have involved the girls dancing in public.

  I’d assumed that, like most teenage girls, they’d be able to stomp and bomp around in some sort of coordinated fashion and that eventually, with the aid of some pricey choreography and dance gurus, we could knock together a couple of routines. I was disabused of this notion when I attended one of the dance rehearsals. It was like watching…carthorses won’t quite cover it. Annette and Kelly at least had a basic move they could execute, a sort of running up and down on the spot while grinning their heads off kind of routine. Jo had this whole other thing going on—it was like watching a baby horse, a five-minute-old colt, still gloopy from the womb, trying to stand up. Her legs, absurdly too long for her body (like all the girls in Songbirds she has freakishly pronounced sexual characteristics: their arses jut out like ledges, the tits are gravity-insulting miracles, even through baggy combat pants you can make out Debbie’s pussy lips) twanged and skittered away from her as she tried to keep her balance while she shadow-boxed, furiously thrashing the air with her tiny fists. Dance? Jo could barely fucking walk.

  All this, however, was prologue to Debbie. Perhaps having already realised and come to terms with her inadequacies as a dancer she abandoned all pretence at the choreographed routine and chose instead to concentrate on the sexual angle of the performance. All the time rocking epileptically to the music, she slid her hand down her pants and worked two fingers in her crotch. She massaged and tweaked her own breasts so hard that the choreographer (who by this point was watching the whole thing from behind his clipboard, a clenched fist in his mouth, salty tears of anguish running down his face) thought she might perform a half-arsed mastectomy on herself. She started dry-humping the microphone stand. As the track climaxed, she dropped onto all fours and swivelled round to present her rump to us, shaking it madly while she tugged her G-string up and down her butt crack in wild frottage. The whole time, all around her, Annette and Kelly jogged resolutely up and down on the spot with idiotic fixed grins on their faces and Jo skittered around like a Glaswegian drunk on ice.

  It was like watching CCTV footage of the tail end of a twelve-hour hen night in Liverpool.

  But we should be able to cobble some kind of video together…and I still have this feeling. Instinct, I suppose you’d have to call it. I instinctively know that I’d love to fuck every one of them (particularly Debbie) in a vicious and degrading manner. I am nothing if not resolutely populist in my tastes, so I have no reason to believe that any other guy in the country would feel any differently. If we can just get them to put one foot in front of the other and then throw in some nice ditties and some cool clothes for the little girlies to like, we might just have a chance. We might just have it away with this piece of shit.

  A guy I vaguely know, some marketing guy from some other label in the group, comes up to us in the crush
at the bar. “Hi, Steven, how’s it going with those girls you signed?”

  “OK,” I tell him. “It’s going OK.”

  Dinner is hell. I get sat next to some rep who talks to me for a long time about the new GPS system in his car. I’m not making this up. He really talks about it. Derek gets up and makes a ridiculous speech in which he actually singles out Parker-Hall for praise, for ‘injecting a new energy and focus’ into the company’s A&R. Jesus Christ. Parker-Hall acts embarrassed, pulling his sweater up over his head, but you can tell the little fucker is loving it.

  As soon as it’s respectable—i.e.: the moment a waiter holding a dessert plate walks into the ballroom from the kitchens—I’m out of my seat and heading for the toilets.

  ♦

  Derek has a party in his suite—a massive lair on the top floor—and, in the early hours, I find myself in the bathroom with Ross. I’m sitting on the edge of the huge circular tub, sipping Jim Beam straight from the bottle, while he racks them out on the counter. For some strange reason we’re reminiscing about Waters.

  “Remember conference last year? In Bournemouth?” he asks me. “When everyone ran out of coke and he had that guy drive halfway down from London with about twenty grams and he drove halfway up and met him at a Little Chef or something?”

  “Christ,” I laugh, remembering Waters’ reappearance a few hours later, when he’d literally been attacked by a coke-ravenous mob. “Yeah,” I say, “he was a proper fucking gakhead, wasn’t he?” (A proper gakhead: someone you do not like who does exactly as much coke as you do.) Ross snorts a line and sits down on the toilet, passing me the note. I reroll it carefully.

  “Yeah,” Ross says, almost wistfully, “that was a shitty way to go, wasn’t it? Getting your head caved in by some fucking burglar?”

  “Yeah,” I say, leaning into the powder, remembering the expression on Waters’ face as he turned, after I’d hit him the first time, the tiny tear of black blood appearing at his hairline. How he just looked shocked, his eyes wide, his mouth a tiny little ‘o’, like the blow hadn’t hurt him. Like it had just really…surprised him. “It might have been, I don’t know…drugs?”

  “Drugs?” Ross says.

  “Yeah. You never know. Drug debts, some mad dealer…” This is all pure malicious invention, but I quite like the sound of it. Might be worth putting it out there, it might well gain some credibility.

  “Fuck,” Ross says.

  I perch up on the counter and tip my head back, sniffing, feeling my throat constricting and numbing, feeling the trickle of cold, bitter froth. I stare into one of the spots sunk in the bathroom ceiling until it hurts my eyes and then, blinking, I turn to face Ross. “Hey,” I say, “I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and all that, but, Waters was a fucking idiot. All we ever did was bitch about the fat cunt.”

  “Christ, Steven,” Ross says, laughing, “you are fucking hardcore.”

  There’s a knock at the door. Ross unlocks it and Rebecca pops her head around. “Room for two little ones?” she asks mock sheepishly. “Quick, shut the door,” Ross says as Rebecca hops in trailing this girl Grace, who we know a bit. She’s a press officer or something. Rebecca goes to get a gram out of her purse but I motion her towards our pile as Grace hops up on the counter beside me. Rebecca has a short skirt on and I’m wondering if it’s tights or stockings. I have to admit it, she can look pretty doable sometimes. “So,” Grace says, “what are you freaks talking about?”

  “Waters,” Ross says, climbing fully clothed into the tub.

  “Oh please don’t,” says Rebecca, already scrubbing her room key against the back of a fifty-pound note, “it’s too horrible…”

  There’s another knock at the door. “Fuck off!” I say.

  “Stelfox?” Derek asks gruffly through the door. Shit. Ross is already scrambling for the lock. “Ah,” Derek says brightly as he comes in, “making yourselves at home?” Like everyone else he’s coked up, sweating like a fucking rapist.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I say.

  “Do you want a line, Derek?” Rebecca says, pointlessly, as he’s already squeezing greedily around her towards the pile. He claps me on the leg as he passes. I try to imagine the number of cocks his hand has closed around in its time, but it’s unimaginable. “How are you, Steven?” he asks, genuinely friendly for some reason.

  “I’m good, Derek. Great,” I say unconvincingly.

  “Ross!” Derek says abruptly, looking in the huge mirror and seeing Ross sprawled in the bathtub behind him. “Tell me, what’s the projected marketing spend on the Lazies LP up to?”

  Derek has left the bathroom door half open and out in the darkened hallway of the suite I can just see Trellick, smiling and nodding as he listens to something that black girl from finance is saying.

  ♦

  I wake up the next morning—just, it’s 11.58 a.m.—to a ringing phone. “Hello?” I groan.

  “Wakey-wakey!” Parker-Hall shouts brightly (he doesn’t really do coke). “Get your arse in gear! I’ll see you downstairs in ten.” We’re flying up to Glasgow together, the idea being that we can catch up on the flight, discuss progress on various acts on the roster, and generally ‘review A&R strategy’. I was clearly off my fucking nut when I agreed to this nightmare.

  I hang up and look around the darkened room at the usual debris—suit trousers and jacket strewn across the floor like a police outline, clutch of bottles and glasses on the table, coke-spackled CD case on the bedside table next to a bottle of Valium and a half-full whisky tumbler. There is a G-string on the lampshade.

  I sense the extra warmth as I turn over and lift the covers a little. A naked back. She’s well tanned, just the white ‘T’ that runs around the waist and down the crack of her arse. I prop myself up on my elbow as she rolls over to face me.

  “Hello you,” Rebecca says.

  ♦

  Doing your secretary is a shocker. Worst-case-scenario shit. Here’s how it happened:

  We went back to my room in the early hours, to have a chat about ‘a few work things’, or some such nonsense. We lay on the bed drinking and nosing, getting closer to each other, and the conversation turned into what it always turns into in those situations.

  “What’s your favourite position?” Rebecca asks me, giggling coyly.

  Bitch tied up with a knife at her throat, I think, but, ever reasonable, I say, “Doggy,” then ask her, “Do you masturbate?”

  “Of course I bloody do! Come on, it’s the nineties for Christ’s sake! Have you ever done a hooker?”

  “No.” (Tip: never tell the truth here.) “Have you ever done two guys?”

  “Ummm…pass,” she says, hiding her face.

  “Really?” I say. What a fucking spunk bucket.

  “Have you ever done two girls?”

  “Yeah. How about anal?”

  “What about it?”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  Rebecca reaches into her handbag and rummages around. “Do you want one of these?”

  I look down at her hand. There, in the middle of her outstretched palm, is a big, blue triangular pill.

  “What is it?”

  “Viagra.”

  Well, I don’t mind telling you, I got greedy. Very greedy. Greedy? I went fucking berserk—pumping, sucking, grinding, fisting. Rebecca, as it turned out, is a demon in the sack. I got the fucking mother lode—soup to nuts. At one point as I was viciously doing her from behind, she reached down and—unprecedented this—began to guide my cock towards her arsehole. Bosh! I started furiously pummelling her up the Gary and the next thing I know she’s screaming, “No! No!”

  I stop.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, looking back over her shoulder, breathing hard and still pushing back against me. I am up to my nuts in her dung funnel.

  “Please keep fucking me up the arse.”

  I resume. “No! No!” she starts screaming again, really enjoying it now. Wow, I think, sometimes when they say ‘no’ they really do
mean ‘yes’.

  “Talk dirty to me, Steven.”

  “You nasty bitch.”

  “Yes…oh God…fuck me.”

  “You dirty fucking whore…”

  “Oh God, I’m…”

  “You slut…you whore…you…”

  But that’s the problem with talking dirty. You’re hardly going to start out with ‘you very badly behaved girl’ and gradually crank it up, are you? No. You go straight in at the deep end with ‘you dirty fucking slut’ and stuff like that. And then there’s not a lot to move onto later. I pump her harder and try for a bit of variety.

  “You fucking…idiot.”

  “Don’t call me an idiot!” she says, stopping her thrusts, sounding genuinely hurt.

  “Sorry. You fucking…cow?” This restores order and she pushes back onto me again. Bit close to the bone there possibly.

  Well, things degenerated from there. I mean they really went downhill—coke, Valium, more Viagra and amyl were all relentlessly produced from Rebecca’s handbag and the minibar was thoroughly emptied as we got off our chanks and went properly crackers. Somewhere around dawn, even with the cock-pills, my prick is destroyed. It’s a cautionary tale—a bloody, red-raw, still-erect slab of disgrace. And still Rebecca wants more. She’s lying back, eyes closed and a couple of pillows underneath her as she busily works the index and middle fingers of her right hand over her pussy. “Please keep fucking me,” she moans.

  Fuck her? Fuck me.

  I root around on the floor of the bedroom. Nothing—I thought there might be a champagne bottle, but we’ve been drinking the mini-splits of Moet from the minibar. And I don’t think a mini-split is going to do it here. I mean, she wants a fucking battleship up there. She wants the Death Star.

  With Rebecca still moaning and writhing on the bed I charge into the bathroom and still find nothing. There’s no deodorant cans, no big bottle of shampoo, not even a bog brush—nothing which could make for a reasonable facsimile of a functioning cock. In desperation I throw open the wardrobe. Coat hangers. “Hang on a minute…” I say.