by John Niven
My mobile rings and I look at the screen. Rebecca. Bang on time. “Hi there,” I drawl.
“Hello, sexy,” she giggles, “are you home yet?” It’s Rebecca’s last night in London before she goes to Australia, to surprise her parents on their anniversary. She wanted us to spend it together but I told her I had a couple of gigs and a meeting. Why didn’t she go out with the girls and we could meet up later at my place? Have a late supper? She could stay the night and I’d drive her to Heathrow in the morning. She thought this was very sweet of me.
“I’m a bit tipsy and feeling very naughty…” she giggles. She sounds smashed beyond human belief. Sen-say-shunal. “Really?” I say. “Get your arse in a cab then.”
“Do you need anything? What’s that racket?”
“Ah, I’ve got a mate here. He’ll be leaving soon. Oh, you could get some champagne. That place on the Harrow Road will still be open. I’ll pay you back when you get here.”
“Mmmm, lovely. OK, sweetie, see you in twenty. Big kiss, Mwwah.”
I hang up and watch Woodham, who is swaying in the middle of the room, eyes closed, as he plays air guitar along to the Clash. What a fucking loser.
♦
Later, in the bedroom, I look up at Woodham and he looks back at me. The look on his face is an incredible cocktail of expressions: joy, terror, pleasure, embarrassment, confusion, shame, panic, hilarity, disbelief…they’re all fighting for position. I look down, at Rebecca’s naked rump, at my cock appearing then disappearing into her, at the back of her head, her dirty-blonde hair bobbing as it moves rapidly up and down over Woodham’s crotch. Rebecca is on all fours on my bed with Woodham and I positioned at either end of her in classic double-ender stylee.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t easy to pull this off. It took two fucking hours.
♦
Rebecca had been a little surprised when she toppled in the door—pulling her little trolley-suitcase behind her, and carrying two bottles of champagne (fucking Moet)—to see Woodham there. But only a little. I’d mentioned a few times that I’d been seeing a bit of him, and she knew I’d demoed his songs. Woodham, pilled up, drunk, chang’d and randy, had been delighted to see Rebecca.
The three of us did more coke. We had drinks and danced around to disco records. After an hour or so of this I convinced both of them that we should all do an E (“it’s Friday night for fuck’s sake!”). I took an aspirin while Rebecca necked her first pill and Woodham chucked a whole one back on top of the one and a half I’d already slipped him.
More drinking, dancing and coke until, an hour later, the three of us are stretched out on the big sofa, Rebecca in the middle.
“It’s…another fucking world,” Woodham says, gazing around at the flat, his pupils like manholes as he takes in the gorgeous girl, the drugs and empty champagne bottles, the evening meeting pop stars. The kind of life he thought he might have when he was a guitar-strumming nineteen-year-old? Woodham told me he lives in Forest Gate with the hag and kids. I nodded, but I do not know where Forest Gate is.
“Listen,” Rebecca says, taking Woodham’s hand, her jaw juddering, “if Steven believes in your music then it’s got to be good. He’s got the most amazing taste.”
I smile, allowing the compliment.
“I know,” Woodham says, looking like he might cry. “C’mere, mate…” He lurches towards me. Oh Christ. Woodham hugs me passionately. “I fucking love you,” he says into my neck.
“Hey,” says Rebecca, as she squeezes in and the three of us hug. Woodham—almost delirious now—buries his face in her cleavage and makes moaning noises. Rebecca shrieks delightedly. I leave them rolling around on the sofa and tool over to the breakfast bar, to the mirror where I’ve prepared three big, chunky lines. The three lines are near identical, except for the fact that one of them is simply cocaine while the other two are a brain-rupturing blend of 70 per cent pure ketamine and 30 per cent cocaine. I snuffle up the coke-only line. “Here,” I say turning back to the sofa, holding out the mirror.
A few moments later Rebecca is lying back in my lap, her eyeballs vibrating gently. I’ve freed one of her breasts from her dress and am slowly massaging the dark brown nipple while Woodham watches stupefied. I mean, he’s foaming at the fucking mouth.
“Shall we adjourn?” I say thickly and I lead the two of them into the bedroom, carefully stepping over the broken champagne bottle which lies on the floor at the foot of the bed.
♦
So, here we are. The three of us are buckled and sweating and exhausted in a heap on my bed, the detective constable having just sprayed a goodly load all over my ‘fiancee’s’ breasts and chin. “Oh God,” Rebecca says, giggling and dabbing at herself with a Kleenex, “how did this happen?”
“Holy shit,” says Woodham.
“Go get us some more drinks, Alan,” I say.
“Uh, sure. Vodka and tonic?” I nod and he stumbles off, leaving us alone.
“I love you,” Rebecca says.
“I love you too,” I say, before adding, casually, “could you pass me up that glass of water?”
She crawls to the edge of the bed, hangs over the side and reaches down. Somewhere down the hallway I can hear Woodham clattering around in the kitchen. Music—fucking Radiohead now—hums from the living room. “Rain down ., .”
I jump on top of Rebecca, pushing her down into the mattress, grabbing her hair and pulling her head back. “Ooof! Gerrof!” she giggles, thinking I’m fucking around.
Critical moment of will.
With my free hand, I bring the thick, jagged stump of the Dom Perignon bottle up hard and plunge it into the base of her throat, ripping it upwards towards her chin, feeling the flesh tear, feeling her larynx come apart. There’s a terrible, flapping, sucking sound as she gasps and breathes in, the breath going into her body now through the fist-sized slash in her throat. It sounds like when the waste disposal gets blocked. Then she breathes out and a wash of syrupy blood sprays everywhere, all over the bed, the seagrass carpeting and the twelve-hundred-quid cherrywood cabinets from Heal’s.
I throw her forward—naked—into the pool of her own blood and she writhes onto her back, kicking and thrashing, her hands scrabbling at her throat, trying to get hold of the stump of the bottle, which is jutting out of her neck like a mad, half-arsed tracheotomy. Apart from a frothy gurgle she makes very little noise, I guess because I’ve just slashed her voice box to pieces.
Hello, you.
Very quickly—the whole thing has taken less than a minute—her kicks start to subside, becoming little random jerks as her staring, incredulous eyes begin to glaze over, and I take off—running full pelt and blood-spattered down the corridor and screaming, “Oh Christ! Alan! Alan! Help!”
December
Big A&R buzz on Campag Velocet. The Spice Girls LP is certified as the biggest selling American release of the year. Nick Mander, an A&R guy at Epic, signs a band called Headswim. He says, “We have been developing a strong reputation for breaking exciting new acts. Headswim can be the next one.”
Sixteen
“I’m all in favour of the Conservative values of personal responsibility, hard work and enjoying the fruits of your success.”
Geri Haliwell
London gets really cold and I develop a major thing for Natalie Imbruglia, this Aussie soap star whose debut single ‘Torn’ is all over the radio. Can she be fucked? I wonder. She’s A&R’d by Mark Fox over at BMG who I don’t really know. Cowell knows him though. Is it worth calling Cowell and testing the water? Nigel Godrich has worked with her. Is it worth giving him a bell? I think about the ins and outs of it a lot.
‘Fully Grown’ by Songbirds has been N°1 on the club chart for two weeks now. Demand filtering in from the shops is starting to look huge and I’ve put the release date back to the week before Christmas. It’s a gamble, but if it comes through…
I pull into the carpark early, around half ten. There are two police cars parked close to the front door of our bu
ilding. Two uniformed coppers come out of the entrance; the first one is carrying a computer monitor, the second has the keyboard balanced on top of the hard drive. As I lock the Saab I watch them carefully loading the stuff into the boot of one of the squad cars, overseen by some older plain-clothes guy.
I stroll into marketing on the first floor. It’s a morgue, no music playing, people sitting about in shock. “Morning, all,” I say brightly, as I cross the open-plan space. I’ve been a bit of a god in marketing lately, a few of the girls have even put bets on Songbirds being the Christmas N°1. But, this morning, I get no reaction beyond a couple of muted ‘hellos’.
I stick my head around Ross’s office door. He’s on the phone, talking quietly. “Listen, hang on,” he says as soon as he sees me, “I’ll have to call you back.”
“What’s up with the coppers?” I say, strolling in.
He looks at me for a moment before asking, “Have you been upstairs yet?”
“No, I just…”
“Shut the door and sit down.”
I do it.
“Strap yourself in,” Ross says standing up.
“For fuck’s sake…”
“The police arrived about an hour ago, no one’s been allowed to go up to A&R since then. We only know because Jeannie came down and told us. It’s…” He stops, shaking his head in disbelief.
“For fuck’s sake mate, what is it?”
“Parker-Hall’s been arrested. They’ve found obscene images of children on his computer. I mean, proper hardcore stuff. Babies and shit like that.”
I let my jaw drop. “You. Are. Fucking. Joking.”
“I swear to God, Steven. The cunt’s a paedo.”
♦
So Woodham came crashing and stumbling down the hallway behind me. I stood aside and let him see. Rebecca, naked, dead and twisted in a mad heap, her green eyes staring and the green stump of the champagne bottle still jutting out of her throat, blood still pumping weakly over her brown freckled skin and trickling down her breasts and belly.
“Oh my God. Oh fucking Christ.”
“We were messing about, play-fighting. She…she fell off the end of the bed. The bottle…”
He inched towards her and extended two trembling fingers to the side of her neck. I picked up the phone and started to dial.
“What are you doing, Steven?”
“Calling an ambulance.”
“She’s dead.”
“We need to—”
“Don’t be fucking stupid.”
He took the phone from me and sat down. “Fuck!” Woodham said. “Fuck it!”
“We have to—”
“Think. I’m a policeman. We’re off our heads. There’s drugs all over the fucking place, she’s full of them. We’ve both…do you know how this will look?”
“Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus, Alan.”
“Shhh. Let me think.”
I sat down on the bed and buried my face in my hands and pretended to cry while Woodham thought.
“Right,” he said, “give me a hand. Wrap her up in this sheet and we’ll, yeah, strip the bed. Here…”
Later I sat in my bathrobe, cradling a half-pint of Glenfiddich, chain-smoking and watching MTV with the sound turned way up, the ceaseless din of the videos—Jamiroquai with the floor moving under him (I wonder if we could get Jonathan Glazer to do the Songbirds video?), Pulp, Kula Shaker, Mansun—partially obliterating the sounds of sawing, splintering and hacking coming from the bathroom. Well, I reflected, the four hundred quid on that set of Japanese butcher’s knives hadn’t been completely wasted after all.
It took almost two hours for Woodham to cut Rebecca up into manageable sections (torso, hips, limbs and head) that would fit into my two biggest suitcases. We sat in silence for a while after he’d finished. Finally he looks at Rebecca’s suitcase and turns to me, remembering something we must have been talking about earlier. “She said she was going to Australia today?”
“Yeah.”
“To visit her parents, but it was a surprise? They don’t know she’s coming?”
“No.” I’m acting kind of numb.
“She must have her passport on her.”
“Yeah.” It was in her coat. I’d checked.
“How long was she going for?”
“Till the new year.”
“Right. Good.”
Then he got up, got showered and dressed and, just before the sun came up, we hauled the suitcases out to my car. I handed Woodham the keys. He said he had a place in mind and that it was probably best if I didn’t know any more.
I watched Woodham drive off, the silver Saab disappearing towards the Harrow Road as the feeble sun came up. Then I walked back through to the bedroom. I picked the digital video camera up—its black eye had been peering through a crack in a pile of sweaters—and turned the little switch from ‘record’ to ‘rewind’ to ‘play’. I had a decent shot of the naked, bloody Woodham saying, “Think. I’m a policeman…” I put the camera in a drawer and went off to sleep in the spare room.
Remind me not to get sent to prison.
Trellick and I are sitting in the visiting room of Wormwood Scrubs waiting for Parker-Hall to appear and sipping plastic coffee from styrofoam cups. The room seems to be unchanged from the 1960s: brick walls gloss-painted in filthy white, and brown, chipped Formica tables, those orange plastic seats with the holes cut out of the back.
And then there’s the people—these lifetime losers and their broods. The dads sunk down into their striped pyjama-style prison shirts with their matted hair and stubble, wearily listening to the hags they married banging on about money and gossip, wondering which of their mates or neighbours is lumping it into her in their absence. The wives are, of course, something else entirely. At the top end of the scale there’s a couple of council-estate readers’ wives (a type I’m not completely averse to) Razzle-rejects, bottle-blonde jobs in tight jeans and crop tops who look like they’d take you into a side room right now and break your cock off for forty quid. Down the bottom end of the market it’s the twenty-stone thirty-year-olds who look sixty-five, women who look like they’ve had their cunts kicked in from dawn till dusk every single day of their lives since birth and who expected nothing else. The kind of women who, when their man looked up and told them ‘before we get married you should know, darling—I’m a convicted rapist with a history of GBH who’s wanted for armed robbery’, replied ‘let’s do this fucking thing’, and started cheerily humming ‘Here Comes the Bride’.
Their kids sit sullenly, fidgeting, kicking their cheap supermarket trainers at the worn lino, headphones on, tinny drum’n’bass audible, all lost in their own little ragga worlds, already hatching their embryonic schemes for greatness: cashpoint muggings, ram raids, crack deals and lifting your Nokia at knifepoint. Everyone—even the kids, the babies in their tattered strollers—seems to be smoking roll-ups. I mean, roll-ups for fuck’s sake. Where’s your self-respect? You’d just quit, wouldn’t you? (Then again, self-respect can’t be too high on the agenda if you’re in here for arse-fucking a struggling nine-year-old, for taking a chisel to a granny for eight and a half quid.) People are shouting at each other and banging the tables. Women are crying. The air is flinty with tension and barely suppressed rage. It reminds me of something. Business Affairs meetings. It reminds me of Business Affairs meetings.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
“Fuck,” Trellick whispers as Parker-Hall appears, shepherded over to us by a warden. He manages a cracked shaky grin as he sits down. Jesus Christ. He’s only been here for three days and he looks appalling. There is a glassy terror in his eyes, like he’s numb with horror, like he can’t believe it’s happening, and yet he’s twitchy, nervy, like he knows it could all get much worse at any moment—the sharpened teaspoon in the dining hall, the ebony hand, black as a grand piano, on his shoulder in the showers.
“You know,” he asks us, head bowed, “I didn’t do anything. Don’t you?”
“Course we do,” I say.
“No one believes it,” Trellick lies.
I slide across some magazines I’ve brought him—Q, Uncut, Mojo, NME. “There’s a good live review of the Lazies in there,” I say but he just stares at the magazines dumbly, perhaps feeling too keenly the distance between bis old life and his current one.
“Why is this happening to me?” he says to no one.
“Listen,” Trellick says, using his best let’s-get-a-grip-shall-we? Etonian voice as he counts off the positives on his fingers, “a) you’ll get bail next week, b) the company will pay it, whatever it is, and c) that was an old computer in your office. Christ knows who’s used it over the years.” Trellick talks law for a bit, burden of proof, beyond reasonable doubt stuff.
“But what are people going to say?” Parker-Hall looks very small and very young now. He looks like he might cry.
“Listen, Tony, everyone at the label is behind you,” I say, “and Derek’s totally put a lid on discussing it outside the company. Don’t worry, it’s not going to get into any of the papers.”
Well, this wasn’t strictly true. The first call I made when I left the meeting where Derek put a complete ban on discussing the Parker-Hall situation was to Leamington. His next call, as I knew it would be, was to one of his mates at Music Week. Front page next week. With a little luck, if they pick up on the man-who-discovered-Ellie-Crush angle, it will be all over the tabloids in time to coincide with Parker-Hall’s release on bail.
“Thanks, guys,” he says to us, wiping his eyes.
“Don’t be daft,” I say. “You’re a mate.”
♦
Monica is telling Joey and Chandler off about something. She has her hands on her hips and her hair tied back. The tits are good and high in a tight black vest thing. I’d like to fuck Courtney Cox and idly wonder how the planets would have to align in order for this to be possible. (A huge hit record in the States? I’m on tour with the act, they’re in LA playing the Hollywood Bowl, she comes backstage, David isn’t there, she gets a little drunk, I’m being charming and ‘English’…)
