A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Spoken like a gentleman.’

  Greedy crouches down in front of Zal and holds the bottle in his left hand, unscrewing the lid with his right. He extends the bottle towards Zal’s lips, at which point Zal grabs him around the back of the neck, pulling him off balance, and smashes his face into the iron pillar. Within a split second, Greedy is laid out flat with his hands cuffed together around the column in front of him. A second and a half after that, his ankles are cuffed together too, the chain looped through the iron frame of Zal’s bed.

  Zal pats him down, removes from various pockets the keys to the cuffs, van keys, wallet, phone.

  Greedy splutters, spitting out some blood that has run from his nose into his mouth.

  ‘How the fuck did you do that?’ he asks.

  Zal taps his nose.

  ‘Trade secrets, my son.’

  He flips through the guy’s wallet, checks the information on offer inside. Albert Samuel Fleet, says his driver’s licence. Zal takes note of a few things, then walks around into the guy’s view. There’s close to four hundred euros in cash, which Zal makes sure Fleet sees him pocket, before dropping the wallet contemptuously on to the floor. He doesn’t particularly need it (though you can always use a little more); he just wants the asshole to know he’s been burned.

  Then Zal eyes the passport and tickets once more, and sighs.

  He had told himself this prick wasn’t going to make up his mind for him, but he already has; did so the moment he appeared. Zal’s not going to Paris.

  They murdered his dad, to get to him. They tortured his best friend, Karl, to get to him. Sooner or later, someone was always going to come after him, and to find him they’d go through whoever he loved. He couldn’t face that again. He loved Angelique. There, that was his mind made up and admitted to. He loved Angelique. Loved her, how could there be any question? He’d spent only a couple of weeks with her, then the best part of a year thinking about her, defining his time according to her, trying to see a way of fitting her into the future picture. Loved her like he’d never loved any woman. Christ, you only had to look at what he’d done to be near her to understand that. He’d put himself in binary orbit around the policewoman investigating his own case, whom he’d taken hostage during the robbery, a material witness as well as the cop on his tail. All those added risks, just to spend time with her, just to find out who she was, just to find out if she felt the same way or if she was just playing him like she feared he was just playing her.

  Yes he loved her, but nothing had changed: it was still impossible. The risk/benefit equation hadn’t altered. He couldn’t see how either of them could benefit, how they could possibly make it work, and that meant it wasn’t worth the risk, especially when the risk was to her safety, not his. His coming back into her life could only mean trouble for her, danger for her. What happened to his dad, he had never entirely recovered from. If someone got to Angelique because of him...

  No. For both their sakes, his mind was made up. He loved her, and that was why he was going to save her from himself. He wasn’t going to Paris. He was going to disappear.

  He picks up his passport, takes a bag from the wardrobe, starts throwing in what he’ll need. He’s leaving this place and not coming back.

  ‘Wasting your time, mate,’ Fleet says. ‘Found you before, and I’ll find you again. ’Less you’re gonna kill me, that is.’

  ‘No need, Albert, old chap. I know you’ll come after me again. But ask yourself: what the hell makes you think it’ll work out any different? Ask Hannigan what his track record is like against me. Look where he is now, he’s in fuckin’ jail because of me. Look where you are now.’

  ‘Pro tem, mate. Pro tem. I’ll find you, old son, you mark my words. Me and Mr Spank.’

  Zal crouches in front of Fleet and smiles.

  ‘Oh, I’m already looking forward to it. But I’ll warn you just once: next time, I won’t play nice.’

  Audition

  ‘You join me here on the red carpet outside London’s famous – and utterly fabulous – Tivoli nightclub, for what I can promise you is going to be the music-biz bash of the year. Everybody who is anybody in the world of pop is going to be walking through those double doors in the next fifteen minutes, and you can also expect lots of famous names and faces from the world of fashion, from the world of football – accompanied, of course, by the very glamorous WAGs – from all the soaps, from comedy, you name it. It is going to be celebrity central here tonight, and the best part is that PV1 is your Access All Areas VIP pass: not just inside, but onstage, backstage and pretty much anywhere we can fit our camera, because we don’t want you to miss a thing. My name is Jessica Hanson and I am very excited to be reporting for PopVision 1 tonight, live, from what will be an amazing party celebrating Nick Foster’s Lifetime Achievement Award. As you know, Nick picked up the award itself at the Brits 08 ceremony just a few weeks ago, but tonight is the night when the pop world gathers round to celebrate what he has brought to the industry throughout a quarter of a century, during which...‘

  The girl babbles to camera with a strained giddiness, overselling her enthusiasm and thus involuntarily conveying that she is precisely as excited as she is being paid to be. Girl? She’s pushing forty, make-up not quite concealing the fan of lines flanking each eye, such marks of age seeming all the more pronounced by her trying to act like she’s still twenty-two. She’s buttonholing the new generation of spoilt nobodies while they take their time on the red carpet, as instructed by their PR people to ensure the paparazzi don’t miss a shot. She’s dressed in less material than you’d expect to find wrapped around cutlery in a decent restaurant, trying to look like she belongs among the lads-mag spank-bank nymphettes, but managing instead to resemble their embarrassing aunty, the one who is single, increasingly desperate and whose lack of a significant other is most manifest in her having nobody to tell her she shouldn’t dress like that any more.

  She’s trying to sound pally with them but it’s obvious they’re only talking to her because she’s got a cameraman behind her and a microphone bearing the PV1 logo. Poor cow, the folk she’s interviewing were in nappies back when anyone gave a fuck who she was, titillating the post-pub audience late Friday nights on Channel Four. Her fifteen minutes long since expired and she knows it, but you gotta make a living, and they won’t let you be merely a jobbing reporter on a shitty down-the-listings cable channel. No, you’ve got to humiliate yourself by pretending to still be a celebrity while you hold that mike, because in this world, there’s no such thing as a mere reporter. As long as you’re in front of the camera, you’re a celebrity too.

  The limos pull up, the snappers flash away. This is an indispensible assistance to Jessica and any members of the viewing public who have missed two consecutive issues of Heat magazine and therefore may not be sure which of these nondescript wank-stains are supposed to be famous this week.

  A toothy adolescent, dressed in an outfit comprising what appears to be two curtain tie-backs, stops outside the vehicle she just exited and self-consciously adjusts the top half of her assemblage. This is ostensibly an effort to protect her modesty, but its true intention is to draw the paparazzi’s communal attention to how little she’s wearing. She’s been sitting in a car for ten minutes, waiting for her turn to make an entrance, but it only occurs to her to check her tits aren’t hanging out once she hits the red carpet? Sure.

  Similarly, two teen members of a boy band whose new single has just tanked, spontaneously erupt into gesticulative argument in front of the cameras, the remaining constituents of their quartet pulling them apart and urging them towards the double doors. The single is called ‘Not Pointing Any Fingers’. I said gesticulative, didn’t I? Further description would be superfluous. It’s fucking pathetic.

  And in the gaps between the limos disgorging their payloads of ostentatiously attired affirmation addicts, Jessica fills the void with the media equivalent of a 69: interviewing another reporter.

  ‘I’m joine
d for a chat just now by Damien Salter-Astwich, Fleet Street’s Mister Showbiz. Damien, what can you say about Nick Foster? And does this crowd and this party not just say it all for you?’

  Damien is some chinless cock-socket with unacceptably floppy peroxide hair and a retro-Sixties Italian boy suit. He’s trying to pretend they were allowed a transistor radio in his dorm at Harrow.

  ‘What can you say indeed, Jessica? The landscape of British pop music simply would not be the same without him. You’re looking at three decades of, not just of hits, but of act after act after act, so many careers, so much success, and all one man. I mean, you go back to the Eighties and the guy was just a one-man hit factory, wasn’t he? In those days, when you heard one of his songs, you knew within seconds that it was one of his, and that it was going to be a smash.’

  ‘He really had the Midas Touch, didn’t he?’

  ‘He had something even more valuable, in my opinion: he had a recipe for success. As I was saying, just a few seconds into each song, it was instantly recognisable. Think of all those hits: they each started with a quick burst of synth drums, then straight into the chorus melody played right up front in the mix on synth brass, so that you already knew the hook by the time the first chorus came around on the vocals. Hit after hit, a winning formula, regardless who the singers were: it could be an established act or a complete newcomer, it didn’t matter. Same style, same result: yet another smash!’

  Their conversation runs over a compilation of clips showcasing the great man’s multifarious musical progeny. The montage is so on-the-money as to strongly suggest this is a lessthan-spontaneous little chin-wag. Jessica confirms this by teeing Damien up for his next verbal cum-shot.

  ‘And what about all those spoilsports who said it wasn’t real music? Because he took a bit of flak from the grumpy and serious types, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s true some critics at the time said the songs all sounded the same and the performers were interchangeable, but if you ask me, Nick Foster democratised pop music, a lot more than we keep being told punk was supposed to have done. He demonstrated just how arbitrary notions of talent could be, proved that you didn’t need angst, you didn’t need posturing, you didn’t need to have undergone an apprenticeship of rehearsing in filthy garages and playing in dingy little venues. You just needed a catchy tune and a bit of cheerful enthusiasm and anybody could be a pop star. I think he proved to everyone what he always said – that it’s not about the music. It’s about colour, it’s about flamboyance, it’s about fun. And that’s why so many people are all here tonight.’

  ‘Yeah, we’re all here to have a lot of fun. There’s quite a few of those Eighties stars have already walked along this red carpet tonight, but Nick was no slouch in the Nineties either, was he?’

  ‘No slouch at all, Jessica. He made soap stars into pop stars, he made pop stars into TV stars, and he took the idea of a recipe for success a stage further in the Nineties when he started auditioning to put together the right personnel. In the Eighties, it was all about the formula for the songs, but in the Nineties, the formula he perfected was for the chemistry of the groups. That colour, that flamboyance I was talking about, he knew how to deliver that with a really vivid sense of variety by combining different images and personalities in a band. The result was that we got groups who offered something for everybody. Four Play had two boys and two girls, two blondes, two brunettes, two black, two white. Their biggest hit was “You’re Dynamite”, and they certainly were a pop explosion. Sunshine Seven must have been the most multi-ethnic line-up ever to grace the charts, and of course there were the Angel Cakes, the biggest girl group of that entire decade, maybe of all time. Even all these years after the Angel Cakes split, everybody can remember their nicknames – that was as important a hook as any melody, and Nick Foster was the man who understood that. He gave us five great characters to relate to before you even began to listen to a record. You had the funny one, Joker Angel, the wild one—’

  Damien cuts himself off in response to the camera suddenly swinging away from him towards the kerb, where another limo has vomited out its payload of limelight-attracted moths: this time the recently re-formed members of Foster’s late-Eighties abomination SWALK. The quartet split up in 1993 ‘to pursue solo projects’. These solo projects having largely transpired to involve point-of-delivery positions in the retail and catering industries, the group very quickly (but just a little too late) learned a new respect for each other’s contributions, as well as an even greater regard for the creative input of the man who brought them together in the first place. Consequently, they are now attempting to ride the nostalgia wave surrounding all things Foster-associated, and hoping the clippings files don’t go back far enough to exhume any of those nasty things they said about him taking all the credit and stifling their individuality.

  Jessica manages to get one of them to join her for an interview. It’s Baz, ‘the cheeky one’. He looks less than delighted to have been buttonholed for a soundbite on cable TV while his bandmates are busy hawking themselves to the tabloid snappers. He rallies a bit, however, when Jessica’s questions prompt the realisation that it’s a chance to suck up to his erstwhile svengali, and cement SWALK’s long-term association with the genius in the TV audience’s minds.

  ‘That’s why we’re all here, it’s why we found so many people wanted us to re-form: the man has just given everybody great fun, good memories. A soundtrack to the happy times in our lives. I’ve had people come up to me and say they only need to hear “That Precious Look”, which was our first number one, and they remember everything they enjoyed about that time. It came out on a vinyl seven-inch, but in a way the song itself became like a CD-ROM or a USB stick: it contains more than just a piece of music for people, it contains all these memories too.’

  ‘Yeah, and of course, interesting you mentioned the USB stick, because Nick Foster has embraced the delivery technology of the Noughties in the most ingenious – not to mention controversial – way, hasn’t he, with Bedroom Popstars?’

  And now we really do get That Precious Look. It’s a timeless moment as Baz stares wordlessly at his interviewer, licking and biting his lip like he’s just eaten a doughnut.

  ‘Yeah,’ he eventually says. ‘Amazing man, he really is. Look, I gotta catch up with the band – we’ve got a party to go to.’

  With which he gets out of there fast before he says something he’ll regret. Because even the no-talent, vapid, self-deluding forgettables who fronted Nick Foster’s McSingles in the Eighties and Nineties struggle to conceal their righteous disgust, envy, resentment and gnawing sense of injustice whenever Nick Foster’s pop-biz zenith is mentioned. It’s like witnessing a guy who won a million on the football pools twenty years ago complaining about somebody trousering ten times that from the National Lottery. There’s something going on there that’s a lot more complicated than mere jealousy: a potent mix of insecurities, unpalatable truths and a dizzyingly vertiginous sense of fickle caprice. Small wonder Baz would rather not attempt to articulate it.

  Damien, however, is seldom troubled by the problem of reticence. He talks shite for a living, and to him this particular subject is therefore like a society-wedding contract to a caterer.

  ‘Well, Baz keen to reunite with his bandmates, something of a habit for him recently, you could say,’ Jessica observes with, ooh, was that just the faintest trace of cynicism? ‘He was out of time to talk about Bedroom Popstars,’ she continues, ‘but what’s your take on it, Damien? Nick’s finest hour?’

  ‘Nick’s finest hour, and finest half-hour-results update after the news,’ he quips, in a way that makes you want to push the lenses of his glasses out of their frames and through both his eyeballs until the jelly squirts between your fingers and the jagged edges of the shards scrape the membranes lining the sockets. ‘But seriously, Bedroom Popstars, what can you say? It was beyond genius. I mean, just when everybody thought the phone-in-vote talent format was starting to look a little worn,
Nick found a way of pushing the envelope like it had never been pushed before. I was talking here just now about democratising pop music, well this was the ultimate democratisation of it, the ultimate freeing up of the process by which anyone – anyone – can become a pop star, if they want it enough.’

  ‘That is the key, isn’t it?’ Jessica interjects. ‘How much do you want it? Actually, we’ve got a little clip here of Nick talking to us recently about the idea and where it all came from.’

  Now we’re finally in the presence of greatness. The man himself appears, reclining on a sofa against a wall bedecked with gold and platinum discs, his feet up on a table upon which several award statuettes just happen to be nonchalantly sitting among a number of magazines featuring his face on the front cover. He’s dressed in black leather trousers, snakeskin cowboy boots and a black t-shirt. Always a black t-shirt. There’s no colour more forgiving and concealing of middle-age spread. He would be the living embodiment of smug even if there was a bag over his head to hide his face, but unfortunately we aren’t granted such a mercy, and his ridiculous but perpetually self-satisfied visage smirks to camera in all its improbably shiny glory. It looks like somebody drove a stake through his scalp at the back of the head and then twisted it until his skin was drawn taut against his skull, which together with the long-term effects of prolonged sunlamp exposure, makes him look like a haemorrhoid with a ponytail.

  ‘There were a group of us in the VIP box at Wembley, watching Robbie Williams, and I happened to remark that his secret was that he acted onstage like a teenager in his bedroom playing at being a pop star, miming to the mirror with a hairbrush for a microphone. That was the joy he brought to his performance, and that was what people related to: he’s not some distant one-in-a-million figure, a Freddie Mercury or a David Bowie, touched by genius and cultivated to the nth degree. He could be one of them, plucked from the crowd. And boom, that was the epiphany: when it comes to becoming a pop star, half the battle is simply acting like one. In that moment, you could say, Bedroom Popstars was born.’