by John Niven
“Mmmm?” she ducks towards me, smiling uncertainly.
“Wanna do a bump?”
“Sorry?”
“A bump? You wanna do a bump?”
“Uh, whaddya mean exactly?”
“Do you want some bugle?”
“Huh?”
Fucking hell. “Gak? Racket, chang, beak, bag, nose?”
Nothing.
“Charlie?”
“Do you mean coke?” she says, her face scrunching, starting to look like someone’s farted.
“Oh yeah.”
“No thank you.”
“Ah, come on…” I say playfully.
She shakes her head and resumes listening to one of her bosses who is talking about ‘Madge’.
Fucking Shermans. They hit the Stairmaster, make a quick stop at Tofu World to pick up their lunch, and are at their fucking desks by 8 AM. It makes you sick. Fuck you then, you dyke cow, I think.
By the time dessert appears I’m translucent with booze and coke and I’m drawing the odd glare from Parker-Hall. Leaning across the table to squeeze the last few drops from a bottle of Rioja, I tune into the old manager chick’s conversation. She’s talking about some slag she looks after—Marianne Faithfull? Joni Mitchell? Kate Bush? Some ancient munter or other—and how hard it is to get exposure, press or radio, for them in this day and age. What a disgrace this is, living legends that they are and all. “It’s a different story,” she says, “when it’s Clapton, or Rod Stewart, but for the women…” she trails off, shaking her (big) hair sadly.
“Well,” I say, reasonably, “it does get harder for women as they get older.”
She turns towards me and through the booze and gak I see properly the angles of her spectacles, the sour, rock-critic cut of her dish.
“I beg your pardon?” she says, as if I’d just said, “I’ve done your mother up the coal-hole, no lube.”
“Come on,” I say addressing the table now, “it’s a tough break in general, being a chick and getting older. Being a pop star? It’s gotta be a nightmare.”
“Why would you say that?” she asks, genuinely curious. A bunch of people are listening now, out of the corner of my eye, shimmering, I see Parker-Hall looking my way, his cutlery suspended over his tart. (My entire meal has, of course, gone completely uneaten.) Fuck him. Why does he care what this miserable spunk-bucket thinks?
“Why on earth,” she continues soberly, “should things be any different for a female musician than they are for a man?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “but they are.”
“Are you saying,” the dyke in the Stones shirt chips in, “that older women in music should be afforded less opportunity for exposure and respect than men?”
“I’m not saying they should, but,” I gesture with my glass, suavely throwing red wine across the tablecloth, “they fucking are.”
“Why do you think that would be?” The horn-rimmed spectacled sow asks patronisingly.
“Well,” I say, marshalling my argument, “it’s like, you don’t mind seeing Jagger, or Bowie, fruiting about at fifty, do you? There’s a certain…charm there. Or Clapton, he’s just a muso, isn’t he? You don’t give a shit what he looks like. But, say, Debbie Harry at sixty?” A couple of people shake their heads, affecting disbelief at my cynicism. A cynicism they all share but are too reasonable (i.e. sober) to articulate. Fuck this, I think. In for a penny…“Cher,” I continue, “at seventy? Playing keepy-uppy with her fucking jugs? Cunt like a wizard’s sleeve? Face like a melted bucket of concrete? Fuck that.”
There’s a gasp. Literally a gasp. The manager woman looks like she’s about to cry. “What…what,” she says banging the handle of her fork on the table, sending shreds of pastry flying, “what about women who’re still producing important, artistically valid work? Nanci Griffith? Emmylou Harris? Chrissie Hynde?”
“Come on,” I say good-naturedly, “who really wants to want to fuck any of those cows?”
There’s a bunch of shouting—I think she actually tries to hit me—and then Parker-Hall is helping me up and we’re out on the street, the cool night air of Soho washing my face as he shouts for a cab.
Americans, I reflect as some Paki drives me back to the hotel, they’re so fucking serious.
♦
Morning manages to find a crack in the heavy drapes and comes crawling across the bed, waking me up. The TV is still on. The adult channel, obviously. I groan and engage the memory banks, fast-forwarding through the previous evening: drinking in the room, cab, gig, drinking, cab, chang, another bar, drinking…the restaurant, after that, nothing. Wait a minute, the restaurant. Go back. My leg gives an involuntary twitch, a physical spasm of pain as I freeze-frame on an image from last night: the manager chick’s face, twisted in disgust. Bad, something pretty bad happened.
I’m just finishing up a spectacular bout of vomiting (and noticing that I seem to have managed an even more outstanding—and exotically placed—example during the night: the shower stall looks like someone has dumped a tub of dog food in it) when there’s a knock at the door. Blanket-wrapped and trembling, a ball of wet Kleenex in my fist I press a watery eye to the spyhole. There’s some old Latino chick there, housekeeping or something. “Come back later,” I shout.
I collapse back onto the bed, scrabbling with the Advil bottle. She keeps on knocking. These fucking people.
Angrily I pull the door open—the abuse already fully formed in my lungs, barrelling up towards my mouth—and it all happens very fast. A short, stocky woman sweeps into the room (hung-over as I am, I get a strong reek of booze from her), throws her raincoat off, and sits down on the edge of my bed, crossing her white-stocking-clad legs. “You call for a date, honee?” Eh?
“What?” I say. “What fucking date? Look, I think you’ve got the wrong room.”
“Room 335?”
“Umm…” I look at the TV screen, now showing an ad for ‘Co-Ed Foxes’, allegedly ‘Manhattan’s finest escort service’. “We visit you,” the voice on the ad says, “day or night.”
“You are Steeeven, yes?” She leers drunkenly, revealing a battered row of teeth so viciously bucked that, for a second, I think she’s slipped a chunk of comedy orange peel into her mouth for a laugh. As an ice-breaker.
Looking past her I see the credit cards and the scrawled scraps of paper by the phone. Understanding, memory breaks in on me as I remember making the call a few hours ago before I passed out.
“Right,” I say, taking her in properly now: a buck-toothed dwarf in her late forties, her stomach a crenellated apocalypse of porridgy stretch marks. Graveyard shift. “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. Can you just…how much for you to just leave?”
“Full charge, three hunner dollar.”
“Fuck off. I’ll give you fifty.”
She leaps up. “You pay me! You pay now or I go downstairs and get my driver. I go get Ramirez!” Fucking Americans, so serious.
“OK, fucking hell!” I sigh fishing my wallet out and handing over the bills.
“Thanks, honee,” she says, rubbing up against me, friendly enough now she’s got the fucking dollar, “you sure you no want me to stay? I know we can have a good time,” she says huskily into my face. I don’t know what she had for breakfast. Pilchards in garlic semen chased down with a mug of gasoline maybe? Her hand flashes through the sheet I’m wrapped in and starts massaging my bare prick. A good time? To recap: she’s an ancient Latino beast, pissed out of her mind, with a mouthful of Stanley knives and breath like a summer fish factory…who turns out to have an incredibly skilful way with a handjob. (I abandoned the blow job after an exploratory sixty seconds of fretful, white-knuckle gobbling. You’d be more relaxed with your cock in the maw of a ravenous Alsatian.) It only takes her about two minutes—all the time she’s shouting “CUM! CUM FOR MY BIG TITTIES!” while, with her free hand, vigorously working a small dildo into my rectum—before I start to shudder and buck. She pulls down her grimy bra and her burst jugs spill down to her stom
ach. “CUM! CUM ON MY BEEG TITTIES!” she screams. I swallow hard against the spiralling nausea and unload a wad of spunk all over her.
I collapse onto the bed, foetal with shame, while she gets busy with the Kleenex. “You feel better now, baybee?” she says, giving me a playful smack on the arse as she staggers towards the bathroom.
I bury my head under the pillow, groaning, and only hear the knocking dimly at first. By the time I leap up the crazy bitch is already tugging the door open.
Parker-Hall stands there looking clean, sober and rested in a crisp white shirt and jeans. Slowly he takes it all in: me, halfway across the room, naked and sweating, trying to cover my half-erect cock with a T-shirt, and the beast, forty-odd years and two hundred pounds of stinking Colombian whore with blobs of spunk still glistening here and there on the ruins of her tits and her stretch-marked stomach. A few feet away from Parker-Hall, directly in his line of vision, the shit-streaked dildo stands proudly on top the minibar. I notice for the first time that a yellow stud of sweetcorn I don’t recall eating is stuck to its tip. The room must smell bad.
She grins at him. “You his fren? You wanna join us eet’s extra.”
“I’ll see you at the airport,” Parker-Hall says and then he’s gone.
♦
We meet again in the BA executive lounge at Kennedy a few hours later. I’m sitting reading Billboard and sipping a quadruple Bloody Mary when Parker-Hall strides in. He gets himself an orange juice and sits down next to me.
“Look, Tony, I—” It’s as far as I get.
“Listen,” he says, “this has gone far enough. I don’t give a fuck what you do on your own time, but last night you made an utter cunt out of us in front of the American label and it has to stop.” He looks at me coldly. I am dying here. “I think you might need help,” he adds.
“Help?”
“With the drinking and the coke.”
“Oh come on,” I say, “I was just taking the piss. She was a pompous old—”
“She’s Ashley Werner’s fucking wife.”
Shit. “Look,” I say, “we haven’t been working together long—”
“Listen, mate,” he says sharply, cutting me off, “we might as well get this straight. We aren’t ‘working together’. You work for me. And as long as you fucking are working for me you’d better shape up. Right? You sign a few fucking hits and then you can get off your nut at dinner and take the piss out of whoever you want because, I’m telling you, you’re on thin ice, Steven. Thin fucking ice.”
With that he drains his glass and strides off across the lounge, out through the opaque glass doors, and disappears into the busy terminal.
He’s right. This has definitely gone far enough.
♦
I get back to London early the following morning—Parker-Hall and I sat well away from each other on the flight, we avoided each other through the plastic tunnels of Heathrow and took separate cabs in the wet dawn—and get into bed. I don’t get out of it for a week.
I call Rebecca. “A fever,” I tell her and she offers to come over. “No,” I say.
She cancels meetings and I crumple back down beneath the duvet where I sleep feverishly for short stretches, often waking screaming from terrible dreams: there are dreams where Trellick and I are working in a concentration camp, butchering babies, dreams where I am being raped by a handicapped man, dreams where I am standing on the top of Centre Point watching a shower of nuclear missiles—thousands of them—falling over London, dreams filled with sly, grinning dogs with hypodermics for teeth, dreams where I am married to Rebecca and our babies are crawling all over me and the babies have no eyes, dreams where I cradle Waters’ body while I reach into the hole in his skull, almost up to my elbow, scraping around in there for a long time before finally pulling my bloody arm out and seeing that I am holding a fistful of tiny silver statuettes: little Brit Awards, each one the size of a jelly baby.
I wake up screaming—the only light in the room coming from the TV screen; either a fizz of static or a hardcore shot, as I almost always have a pornographic film on. I watch the video of Annabel Chong fucking three hundred guys five or six times a day. Over and over she pumps and sucks and grinds. Over and over semen is sprayed across her face, belly, breasts and bum. I watch a scene where she upends a used condom over her mouth and greedily slurps down the contents perhaps a hundred times, my thumb shuttling numbly between the play and the rewind. I watch the Rape Tape repeatedly: a compilation Ross had some guy at an edit suite knock up for him; basically all the classic rape scenes from modern cinema—The Accused, Straw Dogs (is it or isn’t it up the Ronson?), Salvador (nuns—awesome), Leaving Las Vegas, Clockwork Orange, I Spit On Your Grave, Thelma and Louise (well, the bloke nearly gets in there before the dyke shoots him)—spliced onto one video. We wondered about the possibility of selling it commercially. I reckon there’s a market but Trellick said you’d have too many clearance and distribution problems.
Every few hours I ring for food and a guy—some gook, some dago—will come to the door with Chinese, Thai or pizza.
Between meals I dry-swallow Valium.
I cry a lot.
A few days into this—having smoked nearly the entire two cartons of cigarettes I brought back from America and needing to freshen my crackling stack of overused hardcore—I try to go the corner shop and find that I cannot leave the house.
So I stay in bed, my hair greasy, my fingernails encrusted with filth, rancid semen-cracked tissues balled up all over the bedroom, overflowing ashtrays teetering on piles of unwashed clothes, waxy pizza boxes and fungal takeaway cartons littered across the floor.
I have been reduced to the bare fundamentals of human existence: eating, smoking and wanking.
Somewhere around the end of the week I am crumpled in a corner of the living room, naked, when I begin to have, well, epiphany is a very strong word, but I’m thinking about all the wrong, all the evil I’ve done. I’m haunted by an image of Waters’ mother at his funeral—trembling her way along the aisle, emitting that crazed, inhuman woooohooo sound. Maybe it could be undone. Some kind of atonement? I’m looking at the Karma Bank and it’s bad. It’s fucking bad. It’s like looking at one of my own bank statements; the tumbling, unreal zeros, DR stamped everywhere. Debit, debit, debit. Maybe if…if I stop. Change. Do good. Charity. Join the VSO and go and work abroad, nursing swollen-bellied babies, helping African villagers rebuild, I don’t know, a dam or something? I could volunteer for spoon-feeding lukewarm soup to skeletal pensioners, or going around the underpasses and subways of central London on January nights, handing out sandwiches and blankets, tucking in freezing derelicts, my only reward being allowed to bask for a moment in the warmth of their grateful smiles. I could move to the country and raise children, try to live happily on the other side of the Prodigy sleeve, the side with the green fields and the smiling people.
The phone rings. Or rather, I become aware of its ringing. It might have been ringing for two days. I crawl across the floor towards it and watch it with dread: six, seven rings and then the machine clicks on.
“Hi…Steven? Uh, it’s Barry from club promotions. Listen, I need to speak to you. I don’t know if you…”
I pour a litre of Evian over my head, breathe in deeply a few times, pick the phone up and croak, “Barry?”
“Oh, you’re there. Christ, you sound like fucking shit, mate!”
“Yeah. Flu or something.”
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you, your mobile’s off. Anyway, what are you doing Saturday night?”
“What? Why?”
“You won’t believe this…”
And Barry tells me first good news I’ve heard in a long, long time.
♦
“Oh my fucking God,” Trellick says from the back seat, “will you look at this…” We turn a corner and come onto what I guess is the high street. It’s eleven thirty on a Saturday night and the tolers—hundreds of them—are doing what they do up North: an overweight
girl wearing a thong, a boob tube and high heels is vomiting over a Keep Left sign. A bunch of lads are pissing against a shopfront in full view. Another girl lies unconscious on her back in the gutter, her skirt hauled up and her tights shredded, a bottle of some demented alcopop, some estate juice, still clutched in her hand. “Are those…chips?” Ross asks. The four of us squint. As far as you can see, for a few hundred yards in front of us, the air is filled with flying chips, bags of them being hurled upwards as dozens of fights break out. A kid staggers in front of the Saab, blood pouring from a cut in his forehead. He’s pulled off the road and disappears under a flurry of fists and kicks as three blokes pile back in, kicking the shit out of him. A handful of chips spatters off the car and I put the foot down.
“Welcome to Rotherham,” Barry says laughing.
“Should have left the car at the fucking hotel,” I say.
The club is a giant metal hangar on the outskirts of town. From the outside it could be a bowling alley, an ice rink, a swimming pool. The giveaways are the dull whump of bass coming from inside and the angry mob fighting to get in. A clutch of bouncers, all in black bomber jackets, all with little earpieces in, stand at the top of the stairs, chewing gum. Their faces are blank, mongoloid. We hang back and Barry talks to one while the tolers of Rotherham look at us strangely—in our dark jeans and black and navy cashmere V-necks. We’re the only guys not wearing untucked knock-off Ralph Lauren shirts in head-splitting iridescent shades of lemon, violet and turquoise. It is almost freezing and we’re the only people wearing coats.
Finally, with some grunting into headsets and gruff ‘excuse mes’, a two-bouncer escort is moving us through the throng, the velvet rope is lifted and we’re being escorted along a stickily carpeted hallway towards the music by some guy called Steve, the promoter I guess. He seems very pleased to have some London industry types in his shithole. “You’ll ‘ave a fooking good crack tonight, lads. The birds in here? Un-fooking-believable, like. We had that FFRR mob up here a while back. Pete Tong’s lot, you know ‘em?” Barry fields the loser’s questions as the music grows louder and louder.
