by John Niven
It’s a Christmas episode; the girls’ apartment has a huge tree in the corner and outside, through that big many-paned window, snow is—of course—gently falling on the sound-stage Manhattan. It’s almost Christmas here in London too, but no snow. Rachel comes in looking really hot—tiny black skirt with black tights and knee-high leather boots. Yeah, forget Monica, Rachel—now there’s a proper fuck-jar. The sound on the TV is off, I’m listening to rough mixes of tracks from the Songbirds LP, lying on the enormous sofa in my new house in Netting Hill, drinking Scotch and eating guacamole. The songs are mostly utter donkey. It doesn’t matter. We’re about to have a huge hit with ‘Fully Grown’ and we’ve got two more killer singles. I’ve even got one of Woodham’s less offensive numbers on the LP, which should recoup the idiot’s publishing advance and pay me back.
You should see the video for the single. It’s incredible.
Annette, Kelly, Jo and Debbie—dressed as schoolgirls, as pubescent spunk-worshippers, as teenage cock addicts—throw themselves around a gymnasium in tight hardcore porno-choreography. Tanned and toned, rehearsed to death and sumptuously lit, they are a living, grinding-sucking-pumping monument to what can be achieved with crazed ambition and near unlimited funds and bear no resemblance whatsoever to the council-estate prostitutes who fidgeted in my office six months ago.
The girls have been reacting to their sudden success in the usual manner. There have been strops, walkouts and catfights. There have been tears and tantrums. Bulimia and bitching. Less believably they’ve taken to referring to themselves as ‘artists’ and voicing opinions about the kind of material they’re being offered to sing. There are rumblings from Debbie about her songwriting ambitions. (If they really start selling some albums next year I’ll probably have to start listening to some of this fucking nonsense. Jesus wept.) For the moment, however, it’s fine. It’s all manageable. They’ve worked hard; let them preen and strut and enjoy the short window they’ll be afforded before they’re spat out the other end. (Spat reeking into rehab and from there onto the daytime TV confessionals, the presenting jobs, the ghostwritten autobiographies—“I always knew I was different from the other kids”—and taking a good fucking kicking from their footballer husbands before drifting into middle-aged mega-obscurity.)
It’s some rush, the process of having a hit record. A proper hit record, I mean. Not some stinking indie piece of shit that pops up on the midweeks at N°12, drops to 17 by the Friday, and charts at 21 on Sunday. No. I mean a proper fucking hit: a record that slashes and burns its way in at N°1 and then plants itself in the top five for weeks. A record that every lowlife toler, spod, pikey, uber, granny and foetus in the country is going to be singing for months to come. You turn on the radio, any station, and you hear it. You flip channels and you see the video. You go into a nightclub and every sour-cunted working-class sow in there is throwing herself around her fake designer handbag, smouldering Kensington in one hand, tumbler of vodka and sugar in the other, all doing some mad quasi-synchronised dance they’ve invented.
It’s at moments like this that you genuinely feel like you’ve contributed to the culture in some way.
‘Fully Grown’ is now the most played record on Independent Local Radio. It’s the third most played record on Radio 1, who, having blanked the single first time around, have sensed how huge a hit it’s going to be and have come on board with a vengeance on the Dex and Del Mar remix.
Daily now Dunn sidles into my office. He joshes. He punches me on the arm and talks about football and fucking as he gives me updates about TV appearances and airplay. He even, over two beers after work, goes so far as to tell me how he knew right away that ‘Fully Grown’ would be a hit, it just needed a little time. A sleeper. He says he always had his doubts about Parker-Hall. His banter, his forced jocularity, has the desperate tang of a man trying to joke his way out the gas chambers, showing a card trick to the guards even as they’re forcing him to strip and are sizing up his gold fillings.
He is a dead man and he knows it.
Through the glass wall at the end of my office the new temp Jo (twenty-five, great rack) taps away at her computer, sucking thoughtfully on a strand of her blonde hair. She treats me appropriately, which is to say she treats me like a god with a hangover. She doesn’t know it yet, but in the new year, when Rebecca mysteriously fails to return from Down Under, she will be offered the job on a permanent basis.
Last week Derek invited me to a drinks thing over at his house, his virus pit. I declined, but still. He knows he backed the wrong horse. He knows that the industry perception is that he’s the raving iron who hired a rampant paedo. To my surprise a lot of people haven’t really needed all that much prompting to put together the desired equation. It’s roughly something like this: queer + Internet access × cocaine = potential paedophile. We’re having lunch together next Tuesday—right after the Songbirds midweek arrives—to discuss my new job.
He is going to pay.
A few hundred yards away on the Portobello Road people are already buying Christmas tree lights and wrapping paper. They’re buying hot sausages with fried onions. My one present was bought some time back: tickets for my mother and her friend to go to the Caribbean for Christmas and New Year. It’s a present that works both ways, as it means I won’t even have to see her over the holidays, which is fortunate—I won’t be here anyway.
Ross—that dickhead—strolls in and joins in the argument, taking the girls’ side I think, and Joey and Chandler stomp off to their place, Chandler turning round and getting a good crack in before he goes. I wonder, not for the first time, about the viability of a series of pornographic Friends-videos; filmed on a replica set, with quality lookalike actors and decent production values, although super-hardcore of course. The One with All the Fisting…The One with Phoebe’s Double Penetration…The One with the GHB and the Ben-Wa Balls…You could even do a sideline for the faggots and the diesels—Joey and Chandler finally go for it, looking tenderly into each other’s eyes, a thick rope of milky jizz connecting Chandler’s mouth to Joey’s twitching prick. Monica and Rachel in a long, rapturous 69. The One with the Ten-Inch Strap-On. Massive legal problems of course, you’d have to keep the whole operation untraceable, but I’m sure there’s a huge market.
As someone who makes their living from anticipating, from shaping, the tastes of millions of tasteless morons, you have to tell yourself that the things you feel are universal, that the things you think and feel are thought and felt by millions of other people.
I turn the stereo off with the remote and lie back, looking up at the cream ceiling fifteen feet above me. Six months later than billed, and nearly a hundred grand over budget, Murdoch and the Albanians are finally gone. The room I’m in, the ground-floor living room, is really two rooms knocked into one. It is forty-four feet long and eighteen feet wide, narrowing to fourteen feet towards the back of the house. The huge windows overlook the corner of Basing Street and Lancaster Road. The only furniture in the room is the sofa, a massive hardwood coffee table, and a matt-black wall of TV, VCR and stereo equipment. I won’t be here long. Shortly after I get back from holiday in mid-January I’m letting the place to a banker, some Sherman.
The monthly rental is absolutely horse-choking. Foxtons are handling everything.
Next year Trellick and I are looking to buy a bigger place together. Paint the whole gaff cream, seagrass matting throughout, chuck a couple of nice fireplaces in and sell it sharpish.
I top my glass up and wander over to the window. A couple of streets away, along Basing Street, left on Westbourne Park Road, right onto Ledbury Road, is Parker-Hall’s place. It’s on the market and stupidly overpriced. It would be pleasant to stand here—in this huge, warm, soon-to-be profitable room, with Glenmorangie fumes tickling my nose and tearing up my eyes—and picture him: shivering in the dark, turning over in his bunk to face the cold, brick wall, pulling the grimy pillow over his head to drown out the sound of his cell mate aggressively masturbating, but
, sadly, the CPS wound up dropping the charges a few weeks later. Trellick was right; insufficient evidence. Still, there was comfort to be had.
The day after he made bail, the headline on page four of the Sun raged, “PAEDOPHILE POP GURU!” Below two starkly contrasting photographs—one of Parker-Hall with his arm around Ellie Crush at the Q Awards and one of him being led into court by two coppers—the story continued, “…the talent scout responsible for discovering multimillion-selling Brit winner Ellie Crush was arrested after police seized computers from his west London office. Detectives later found files containing hundreds of depraved images of child pornography. Managing director Derek Sommers, 45, confirmed today that Parker-Hall’s recently signed employment contract was ‘under review’…”
Parker-Hall’s contract remained ‘under review’ until the Star ran with the story on the front cover the following day. Then it was terminated. Last week, after the charges were dropped, Parker-Hall took a flight to Canada. Apparently he’s got relatives out there.
Another funny incident last week too…
♦
Saturday night and we—me, Trellick, Ross, Darren, Desoto and a few waifs and strays—wound up, unusually, south of the river, in Club UK. Three AM and we were all separated, wandering around, pilled up, moving from room to room, checking out boilers. I was standing by the dance floor, swaying, pleasantly off my tits when I become aware of a black guy smiling at me. There was something familiar about him—beyond the usual they-all-look-the-same business I mean. He continued grinning and began nodding downwards, urging me to look too, his expression saying ‘take a peek at this’. I followed his gaze down—half expecting to see a cock or something—and saw another black guy, his head at about waist height. In the dark and noise of the club it took me a few seconds to realise who it was. One side of his face was all screwed up—from the beating? from the brain haemorrhage that followed?—and one side was sort of loose and flabby. It looked like he was sucking a lemon with one half of his mouth and trying to blow bubbles with the other. Something chrome sparkled all around him in the dark. I looked up at the guy pushing him, recognising him now as the guy who kissed his teeth at me at the gig that night. “It’s Steven, ain’t it?” he said. “Yeah.”
“He wanted to say hello,” he nodded at the deformity in the wheelchair.
“Hello, Rage,” I said. Rage tried to say something but only managed to produce a frothy bubble of saliva.
“E don’t tawk no good since his accident.”
I nodded. Rage beckoned me closer with a twisted, flopping hand. “T…” he said.
I continued nodding, smiling indulgently, like you do at children and mongoloids. It dawned on me that Rage wasn’t just a metaphorical mongoloid any more—he’s the real fucking deal.
“T…tu…” he went on, producing a lot of spit, but starting to get somewhere, and now I noticed that the wheelchair wasn’t some vamped-up custom job, with power steering and alloys. It was a bog-standard NHS number. Leather-look vinyl and wheel yourself. Times, I concluded, must be hard.
He finally got it out: “T…T…TUNE!” he spluttered, gesturing at the air around us, at the record pounding out of the speakers. Some drum’n’bass nonsense.
“Yeah!” I said, giving him a thumbs up. “Fucking tune!”
The minder, or helper, or whatever, leaned down to Rage and did two things: first he wiped the (considerable) drool from Rage’s mouth and chin, then he held a thumbnail of cocaine up to Rage’s quivering nostril. But Rage couldn’t inhale it—maybe something to do with the loss of motor functions or something—so the guy just rubbed it into his gums, over the chrome and gold teeth, the teeth themselves now a relic, a reminder of something Rage once was.
The minder glanced quickly around the packed dance floor and held a grubby thumb towards me. “Bump?”
“Nah. I’m all right thanks.”
He did it himself and we stood there nodding along to the music for a moment, me wondering how quickly I could get the fuck out of there, when we both became aware of a terrible stench. We looked down together. Rage was twisting and puffing and jerking his head about. “Packing hell. Sorry, mate. Happens sometimes.”
I gave the only possible response. I nodded slowly.
“Do you know where the bogs are?” I didn’t, but I pointed off into the middle distance anyway, pointing anywhere away from me.
They trundled off and I stood watching them go, wondering if the minder’s just a mate or if he’s on the payroll. If so, how much? What’s the going rate for scraping the crap out of a former ‘drum’n’bass superstar’s’ caked pants? Well, at least it keeps him off the streets.
Rage, of course, is literally of the streets. The cunt’s in a fucking wheelchair.
I found Trellick in one of the smaller rooms—his shirt off and going bananas to some techno tune. I leaned in and screamed in his ear, “Have we actually dropped Rage yet?” I had to repeat it a few times. He shook his head. “Don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Do. Not. Drop. Rage. Yet. Got an idea.”
♦
The theme music from Friends comes on very softly in the background. “I’ll be there for you…” I walk to the coffee table and drop fresh ice into my glass and then listen to it splinter under the amber wash of Glenmorangie. I walk back to the window and sip my drink, resting my left palm on the windowpane. It’s cold out there.
♦
Generally speaking I don’t like Christmas. It reminds me of childhood and me and my mother, just the two of us, exchanging gifts; me handing her the usual box of bath salts or whatever and her reciprocating with the envelope of cash.
This year is a little different. This year I don’t mind the half-hearted decorations in the office, or the extra crush and traffic around Regent Street, or the struggle to get a decent table anywhere.
Yeah, Christmas looks a whole lot brighter when you have the Christmas N°1.
Derek and I go to lunch at the River Cafe. I have duck, he has the penne. We both drink champagne. On the mid-weeks that morning ‘Fully Grown’ by Songbirds is outselling its nearest rival by nearly two to one. Un-fucking-touchable. Derek does the contrition thing, phrases like ‘tremendous asset’ and ‘great ears’ are freely bandied about. At one point the deluded bender—high on the festive spirit and a couple of Bellinis—even goes as far as to tell me he knew we’d ‘always had a great respect for each other’. I generously tolerate this nonsense for a while before graciously accepting his offer of the position of Head of A&R.
He stammers and splutters a little as I spell out the insanely avaricious terms of my acceptance—bonkers salary increase, signing-on bonus, profit-share, car upgrade, etc.
—but he pretty much agrees to everything. My lawyer can work it all out with Trellick in the new year.
In the new year I intend to have a platinum album with Songbirds.
In the new year Derek’s own contract comes up for renewal. I am going to make life very difficult for Derek.
In the new year I am going to have Dunn fired.
I am going to have Nicky fired.
I am going to fire Rob Hastings.
Everyone is going to pay.
Derek signals for the bill. Outside the plate-glass windows of the River Cafe people, poor people, walk by, their chins jammed hard down into their collars and scarves and their hands in the pockets of thick coats. I’m leaning back from the table in shirtsleeves. Although I can’t feel it I know there is a freezing, salty wind blasting up off the Thames and rolling over the pavements and people of Hammersmith. The Thames is not quite frozen yet, here where it bends and heads out towards Oxfordshire. Guys in canoes slide along it. The trees along the riverbank flatten back in the chill wind. A Big Issue seller—who looks far too fat to be genuine—has his tattered copy blown from his frozen hand.
The cold doesn’t worry me too much. When Derek’s paid the bill we’ll stroll the three yards across the pavement to the waiting car, a t
oasty chauffeured Merc from Addison Lee, and trundle the half-mile back to the office, where the temperature is the same every day of the year. Later, when my busy day is done—there are final travel arrangements to be made for Thailand, the interior of my new Range Rover to confirm, the clearing out of my new office (Parker-Hall’s old office, Schneider’s old office) to supervise, a rough cut of the new Songbirds video to approve—I’ll walk the eighteen feet from reception to my new parking space next to Derek’s. (Parker-Hall’s old space. Schneider’s old space.)
No, I’m not worried about the cold at all.
Derek’s mobile twitters its deranged ringtone. He pops it open. There are a lot of dusty old houses on these side streets, in the strange hinterland along the river, between Hammersmith and Fulham. Ash-streaked net curtains, non-opening, fifty times painted-over window casements, dead gardens. Probably all full of old boilers who’ve been living there since the Blitz. Probably all undervalued to fuck. Find yourself a simpatico estate agent—bish, bash, bosh. I must talk to Trellick about this.
“No! Oh God no!” Derek says, his hand going to his mouth in that queenly way. My first thought is that something unthinkable, something truly terrible, has happened: somehow one of the records behind the Songbirds single has had a dramatic sales surge and has overtaken us.
“What is it?” I say, but he turns away from me, finger in the ear, still listening. This can’t be happening. We were outselling the nearest record by…
He hangs up and turns to me, his moutkhanging open.
“Tony Parker-Hall’s committed suicide.”
The sensation of relief I experience is tidal, almost orgasmic.
Finished. Game Over. See you later, Sooty.
“Thank fuck for that” almost comes out of my mouth but I manage to say, “Oh my God,” because I suppose that’s the kind of thing you’re meant to say.
