2008 - Kill Your Friends
Page 25
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Bangkok Airport on New Year’s Eve.
Ross, Leamington and I are knocking back the local brew, which is called—brilliantly—Chang. It’s barely lunchtime and already half a dozen fat, brown empties are lined up on the Formica tabletop. We’re Chang’d up to the max and waiting for Trellick, whose flight out from Heathrow has been delayed. It’s a billion degrees outside but we’ve managed to wedge ourselves right under the air conditioner, so we’re laughing.
I feel great, tanned and fit. We’ve been here over a week, taking it easy down at Koh Samet. Beer and beach. Books and Discmans. Backgammon, torn yam gai and floating in the body-temperature ocean. No ostros. No class As. No quadruple Rockschools. This is, of course, all set to change with Trellick’s arrival. Later today we fly down to Phuket for a fuck-off party; tonight is when the real shit begins. It’s a boiler-fest down there—clean-tasting Scandinavian backpackers a go go. We’re also planning to pop into the human toilet of Pattaya and catch a few shows: bare-knuckle midget boxing and teenage ostros firing ping-pong balls, goldfish and frogs out of their cunts; pulling razor blades, butcher knives, landmines and Christ knows what out of their arses.
We’re larging it.
“Any more for any more?” Leamington asks. We both give him a thumbs up and he pootles off towards the bar, weaving a little.
I’m leafing through a week-old copy of the Guardian. Tony Blair is larging it too. He’s in the Seychelles, staying at some massive fuck-off gaff where (apparently) they filmed the soft-porn flick Emmanuelle. They reckon Tony will have spunked seven and a half million quid on travel and entertainment in his first year in power. Meanwhile, back home, he wants to slash benefits to single mothers. Top lad, Blair.
There’s a little piece about the upcoming Brit Awards. I want to be back in London for 12 January, for the nominations at the Cafe de Paris, where Songbirds are going to be nominated for Best Single. I gave an expansive interview to Music Week about the girls just before I left London. I said, “I’ve dealt with a lot of bands, but these girls are the best songwriters I’ve ever worked with.” And I said, “They’re real music fans. Trust me. They can give you the bar codes on their record collections.” Then, refuting a slight accusation that they were just another manufactured pop act, I said, “You wouldn’t believe the IQs of these girls. No one tells them what to do.” Then, finally, I looked the journalist in the eye and, with an absolutely straight face, I told him: “Songbirds will be around for a long, long time.” Oh yes I did.
We’re putting the second single out end of February, album beginning of March. There’s two more potential singles to come after that. Bish, bash, bosh.
I’ve got another big album shaping up for next year too. You won’t believe it, but the press have gone mental for the Rage story we leaked out: the whole ‘a crippled man dislocated from his environment communicating through electronica’ bullshit I drummed up with the press office went down a storm. He’s being perceived as some kind of drum’n’bass Stephen Hawking. Front covers with NME, Muzik and Mixmag. They don’t know he finished the record months before he got quadra-spazzed. And what does it matter that the record’s an unlistenable pile of shite? He’s riding his steel wheelchair across a massive wave of PC goodwill. Are you going to be the journalist who sits down and tells this poor, drooling mess that his record sucks? No one listens to this sort of album anyway, do they? You buy them and stick them down on your Habitat coffee table so that the cretins at your dinner party think you are on it. I’m not even releasing a single. We’re spending fuck all on marketing. It’s all being done via press and word of mouth. I reckon we’ll just about ship gold, which is little short of a miracle considering what we had to work with. Rage. The last turkey in the fucking shop sprouts some wings.
Ross drains his beer. “Ahhh,” he yawns contentedly, “it’s a hard knock life.” I light a duty-free Marlboro as Leamington reappears, three fresh Changs tinkling together on a plastic tray.
“Hey, look at this,” he says, slapping down a copy of the Sun he’s found. It’s dated 28 December, three days ago. Leamington flips as fast he can through the tired, soggy pages until he comes to the half-page story. There’s a photograph of Ellie Crush in a black dress and sunglasses. She’s a little out of focus, it’s clearly been taken with a long lens. Above the photograph, the headline: ‘ELLIE GRIEVES FOR SUSPECTED POP PAEDO’.
We all hunker round and read the story. It’s the usual guff—“ace record industry talent spotter…Brit winner Crush…police seized computer…sacked…six-figure salary…charges later dropped…”
Towards the end there’s a quote from Parker-Hall’s father, also Anthony, a solicitor, 57, from Hampstead, north London: “Anthony was innocent and we know we will clear his name. Now we hope we can be left alone to mourn our son.” There’s no photo of him and I wonder what Anthony Senior looks like.
“Shocker,” says Ross, setting his beer down, “absolute shocker.”
We’re all quiet for a moment. “Do you think he was guilty?” Leamington says. “I mean, topping your fucking self? If you were innocent surely—”
“I can’t see it,” Ross says, “I mean, they dropped the charges, didn’t they? Now, if it had been Derek…” He trails off, leaving us to join the dots ourselves, to make our own solid connections between irons and paedos and demi-paedos, (Queer + cocaine × Internetaccess…)
“What do you reckon?” Leamington asks, turning to me.
Gak, chang, nose-up, bag, beak, charlie, krell, powder, chisel, bump, posh, bugle, sniff, skiwear…
What do I reckon? I pour more Chang into my plastic cup and the foam volcanoes up, lathering down the sides and running over the Sun, darkening the paper, bleeding into the blurry photograph of sad-looking Ellie. He was buried at Kensal Rise cemetery, at the corner of Harrow Road and Ladbroke Grove, near the William the Fourth. Good chips in there. Nice Bloody Mary. Crush’s face disappears beneath the expanding circle of golden bubbles. I wonder if Parker-Hall ever fucked her? Surely to Christ he must have? I wonder if he fucked Marcy from the Lazies? Because this is something that’s definitely on my ‘to do’ list for next year. It’ll be tough as she hates my fucking guts. But that may all change now, given that I’m her boss. We’re meeting soon.
To discuss producers and recording budgets and the like. I’m thinking Steve Albini.
Woodham called the office just once after that night, to see if there had been any interest in his songs. I didn’t speak to him. Jo gave me the message. I didn’t bother calling him back. I think we’ve definitely reached an understanding there.
We stayed in Bangkok last night, at the Ramada. This morning I got up bright and early and strolled to an Internet cafe near the hotel. I tapped into Rebecca’s Hotmail account (her password, obtained during a little good-natured pillow talk, is—fairly unbelievably—“Steven”) and sent the following email:
From: Rebecca_spears21@hotmail.com
To: stevens@******records.co.uk
Subject: I’m sorry…
Steven—I’m so sorry, but I won’t be coming back to work after the holidays. I think you’ll understand. What with Roger and losing the baby and everything, I’m just really messed up right now. I need to be on my own for a while. Sorry to leave you in the lurch, especially when you’ve been so understanding this year.
Love R x
Back home, after the holidays, I’ll be forced to tell people that Rebecca was pregnant with Waters’ child. She didn’t know what to do, whether to have it or not. She confided in me. Then she had a miscarriage. She was depressed…
Other than in these very practical terms I don’t think about Rebecca much. And I’m definitely not planning on fucking Jo in a hurry. I mean, there’s a level of fallout, of grief, you’ll take from doing a secretary—the frosty silences, the substandard work, her sporadic dashes to the bathroom with the red eyes and the balled Kleenex—and a level of grief you won’t take. (Like, for instance, a ketamine-addled copper dism
embering a fucking corpse in your en suite.)
“I don’t know,” I say finally, shaking my head, “you just don’t know about people, do you? Anyway,” I yawn, turning the page, “fuck him. One less guy we have to compete with.”
“Christ, Steven,” Leamington says, “you are hardcore.”
I am hardcore. I am the fucking King.
“OI! OI!” Ross shouts and I turn round.
About seventy yards away, I see Trellick appearing out of the handful of International Arrivals. He comes towards us pushing a trolley. He hasn’t seen us yet and he has that air about him that people do when you see them before they see you; alert, scanning, vulnerable, self-conscious.
“OI! LOSER!” I shout and a few Thai heads turn.
He sees us now and his face lights up reluctantly. He’s grinning as he trundles towards us through all the people, using his elbows to keep the trolley on line as he gives us a really stupid thumbs up. People, mostly Thais in their shitty sub-Western dress—tracksuit trousers and ‘The Pope Smokes Dope’ T-shirts, like Scousers from 1988—get out of his way, darting and dodging around his trolley, all smiling their heads off and it strikes me that the airport is pretty busy considering it’s New Year’s Eve, but then I remember that the holidays don’t mean much out here because they’re all Buddhists. I mean, they don’t give a shit about anything, do they?
♦
THE END
Table of Contents
January
One
Two
Three
February
Four
March
Five
Six
April
Seven
Eight
May
Nine
June
Ten
July
Eleven
August
Twelve
September
Thirteen
October
Fourteen
November
Fifteen
December
Sixteen