Kill 'Em All

by John Niven

  ‘I loved him!’ the boy wailed.

  March

  TWENTY

  Hollywood, California. Monday 13 March 2017

  It’s been a while since I’ve been involved with one and, to be honest with you, I’d forgotten just how much I’d missed it – being at a record label that is in the process of having a great, big, fat, stinking, enormous hit. You see everyone walking the hallways with an extra spring in their step. Genuine laughter around the water coolers. Macho bonhomie in the boardrooms and in the executive offices, like the stuff Trellick and I are indulging ourselves in right now as we stand up by the windows of the Unigram conference room high over Hollywood Boulevard, moving around the long table, looking at artwork.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ I say, throwing a glossy mock-up into the rejection pile.

  ‘He looks like he’s got fucking AIDS in this …’ Trellick says, holding up another one. The head of marketing and the creative director cower before us as we continue to eviscerate the stack of proposed album covers for the next Du Pre album, a collection of unreleased (indeed until now unreleasable) out-takes and odds and sods. The only problem being – we don’t have a single as yet. This may take some doing …

  The current Du Pre album, a straight-up greatest hits collection titled Remembrance: The Lucius Du Pre Story (the title took me a while. Inevitably the joke title whiteboard I set up in Trellick’s office ended up being fuller than the serious title board. Joke titles included Get Black, Half-Darkie, The Buggerer and I Fuck Kids), is number one all over the world.

  What a difference six weeks makes.

  I have to say, the outpouring of national grief for the cunt has been staggering, far in excess of anything we had anticipated. Even now, weeks after the event, there on the TV screen playing silently in the corner of the room, are the fans: housewives, children, the clearly mentally ill, some of them dressed up like him, all of them bent and twisted with grief, their faces soaked with tears as they gather in impromptu vigils all across the country to sing his songs and celebrate his memory. I mean, Trellick and I haven’t laughed like this since Diana died. And that time, unlike now, we weren’t Mercury. We didn’t even have the record. We fucking do now. The Top Twenties on both Spotify and Apple Music are entirely composed of Du Pre tracks. He is the most searched artist on the Internet. We’re even ruling with the CD. The fucking CD. Sales for that poor, forgotten coffee-table relic of Generation X have topped a million copies in the US alone. No CD has done this in years.

  The other thing that has astounded me has been the absolute lack of blowback. We fully anticipated a bit of this – some smarmy liberal fucks on chat shows trying to get a discussion going about the ‘darker’ aspects of Du Pre’s personal life. Probing articles in the newspapers about rumours and improprieties.

  We were, of course, fully ready to combat this stuff with our own ‘fake news’ blitz. But not a bit of it appeared. No one gave a fuck. I even watched an arts and culture programme where a woman journalist, talking about how well Du Pre did everything at his peak – sang, danced, wrote songs – said that she liked the idea of a ‘cookie-cutter’ Du Pre: you could pick out the bits you liked and leave the rest. Excellent! I’ll take the singing and dancing and just leave the troublesome inserting-your-penis-in-a-child stuff. This approach, the national mood of total love and forgiveness, suits us down to the ground of course and has been a major contributing factor in how well I have been able to deal with the Murphys and their good lawyer …

  The four of us met, at Hinckley’s office in Pasadena, the week after the accident, several days after they had been scheduled to have been paid, days in which, needless to say, I had not returned any of their increasingly frantic phone calls. To say you have never seen three people so broken by grief is an understatement. They stared at me dumbfounded as I laid it out for them. ‘Look, guys, he’s dead. No one was expecting this. I … we just can’t pay you right now. It’s chaos, the estate, the whole thing. Let us get things in order, put the greatest hits out, make some cash, and then we’ll come to an arrangement.’

  ‘No, we’re going to the media,’ the lawyer said.

  ‘Fucking A,’ Glen said.

  ‘That’s your prerogative,’ I said. ‘But just think …’ I got up, walked across his small, fetid office and turned on the TV, to CNN. ‘Look at this …’ They were covering a Du Pre vigil in New York, in Central Park, thousands of them screaming and wailing like Muslims at a fucking funeral. ‘Look at the papers. The guy’s getting treated like a cross between the Pope and Martin Luther King. No one wants to be hearing he was a fucking paedo right now. If you go out with your stuff obviously we’ll deny it. We’ll “fake news” it. Say it was a lookalike in the video. Whatever.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Hinckley said. ‘It’s clearly, undeniably, him in the video.’

  ‘Is it?’ I said. ‘Look at the inauguration. The biggest crowd in history at that, right?’ Those photographs – Obama’s crowd stretching into infinity. The acres of white, empty space at Trump’s. Spicer up there with his blow-ups, telling everyone a banana was an apple. A jackboot was a glass slipper. Fucking genius. ‘Millions of fucking Americans believe that.’ Bridget and Glen looked confused. Hinckley saw where I was headed. ‘You know,’ I said, gesturing to the TV again, to the weeping multitudes in Central Park, ‘it’s incredible what you can get away with when you have a hardcore fanbase …’ I could see their minds working, the doubts slowly taking hold.

  ‘You wouldn’t da—’ Bridget began.

  ‘Now don’t get me wrong,’ I went on, cutting her off. ‘I don’t want to go down this route. Because you’re right, you might win, but remember – Art, you’re a lawyer – you’ll be dealing with his estate at that point, you’ll be dealing with debtors, creditors, family members, probate, the whole nine yards. It’ll take forever. I want to pay you your twenty million. It’s cleaner. Easier. Everyone wins. We just need some time.’

  You could see them, the gears turning, weighing up their options, until, finally …

  ‘How long?’ Bridget said.

  ‘Well, we’ve got to get the record into production, put an ad campaign together, all that crap … a few months. Say until the end of May. Memorial Day. Let us maximise sales. Let this press cycle end and wait until everyone’s bored and looking for a new angle. We all win.’

  They looked at each other. ‘You’ve got till the end of May,’ Hinckley said, relishing what the utter fucking clown thought was the chance to turn the screw. ‘I strongly advise you not to test our patience any further than that.’

  ‘Yeah. And … and we want another fucking mil in the meantime,’ Glen added. ‘A good-faith payment.’

  ‘Done,’ I said.

  I tune back into the artwork meeting, where Trellick is holding up another mock-up and saying, ‘Now, this one I don’t mind …’

  I take it from him. The proposed cover shows Du Pre’s face in profile, in black and white, heavily airbrushed, making him look like a light-skinned black man, rather than a child molester from a nightmare who’s just had acid thrown over them. His hands are clasped in prayer and his eyes are closed in penitent meditation or some fucking thing.

  ‘Very nice,’ I say. ‘Simple. Elegant.’

  ‘Oh, that’s totally my favourite,’ the creative director purrs. ‘It’ll look great on billboards.’

  ‘Yep, gets my vote,’ I say.

  ‘Seconded,’ Trellick says.

  There is one particular aspect of the artwork that pleases me greatly. It’s very small, tucked away on the back cover, down in the bottom right, below the various songwriting and producing credits:

  Executive Producer: Steven Stelfox

  Four simple words. One for each percentage point I have negotiated myself on all of Du Pre’s posthumous releases. I mean, Trellick’s a mate and all that and I like doing mates a favour. But, a favour? Do me a fucking favour.

  ‘Dinner?’ Trellick asks.

  ‘No can do,’ I say. ‘Got
plans.’

  He smiles. ‘And how’s all that going?’

  ‘All good,’ I reply, slipping my jacket on. ‘Laters.’

  I walk out of his office, say goodbye to Sam, and stroll down the long hallway. I make a left along the corridor of A&R hutches, stop at one and lean in the doorway. She looks up from tapping away at her computer. ‘Hey, you,’ she says.

  ‘Ready to rock?’ I ask.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We have a reservation at Animal, on Fairfax.’

  ‘You know what I’d really like?’ she says, turning her computer off, stretching as she gets up and comes round the desk towards me. ‘How about we just order in and go back to your place?’ Chrissy puts her arms around my neck, looking straight into my eyes.

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  We kiss.

  What a difference six weeks makes.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was so hot in paradise.

  Even with the fierce air conditioning, even with the chilling cocktail of opiates that coursed through his veins, Lucius found he broke into a fierce sweat whenever he had to do something more strenuous than lifting a glass or crossing a room, as he was now, to stand at the windows of his palatial bedroom and gaze out at the glittering Olympic-sized pool, at the palm trees casting shadows on the aquamarine water, at the lush gardens, gardens so vast you almost forgot that beyond them lay endless miles of desert. (Photographed from the upper atmosphere the Sultan’s estate looked like a postage stamp of bright green set in the middle of an enormous beige page.) He pressed a glass of ice water to his forehead, yawning, and watched two men loading baskets of dirty laundry into a van. It amazed him that anyone was capable of doing such work in this heat.

  But he couldn’t complain. He loved it here.

  He couldn’t exactly recall how he’d got here. He’d woken up stretched out on a sofa in a jet – a Gulfstream like his, but not as opulent – and the last thing he could remember was a sharp stabbing pain in his thigh, while he slept on the helicopter. Some terrible dream about falling.

  Dr Ali and a couple of people he didn’t know were on the jet with him and he was told it was done. It was all happening. Mr Stelfox’s plan. Ali gave him a nice drop of milk and he went back to sleep and when he woke up they were here, welcomed into their new home like Roman emperors returning from a long, hard-fought war.

  Dr Ali had his own set of rooms somewhere on the other side of the courtyard, the two of them occupying what was essentially a small mansion (25,000 square feet) set within the grounds of a larger mansion. Their days over the last six weeks had, as promised, passed very pleasantly. Indeed, the differences from his previous life in California were very hard to detect. Lucius would rise at his usual time of three or four in the afternoon. He’d slowly come round, sipping water and coffee, slowly recovering from the major-surgery-grade anaesthetic he’d taken in order to sleep the night before. Around six o’clock he’d have breakfast brought to him in his room, the only meal of the day he really ate, and even then not really. (The habits of a lifetime spent watching his weight were hard to shake.) He’d usually eat alone, although sometimes Dr Ali or Abdullah, the Sultan’s son, would join him. After breakfast there would be a shot of candy and a couple of drinks to get him into the party mood for the evening’s entertainment: whatever collection of beauties had been arranged for him that night. They were all young, twelve to fifteen, all very handsome and dark-skinned and (and this was a definite difference from back home) they were all fully compliant right away. No cajoling or threatening, no promised treats or sly administering of the Jesus Juice was needed here, in paradise. There were no Lexuses to be bought for guardians. No enormous ‘goodwill’ cheques to be cut to suspicious parents. The boys turned up, they all had a good time, the boys went away, a new consignment arrived a couple of days later. It seemed to Lucius an unimprovable deal. And running below all of this, under-scoring his happiness like a bassline, the first thing he thought about every day, was this: he didn’t have to do those stupid goddamn shows any more. (Admittedly now and then he would be requested to put on a display for the Sultan’s son, show him a few old dance moves, lip-sync along to one of his hits. Nothing too taxing.) Even though he sometimes missed his special friends – even Connor, that little traitor – when Lucius thought about how, right now, he might well have been in final rehearsals, preparing for the mammoth runs of concerts in New York and London, it was all he could do not to weep with joy, to go outside and kiss the hot Arabian dust with gratitude.

  A gentle knocking at the door, Lucius’s ‘come’, and two of the staff were wheeling his breakfast trolley in. They set it up at the end of the bed, facing the TV that was permanently tuned to the Disney Channel, just the way he liked it. There was French toast with strawberries and blueberries and a thick dusting of icing sugar. There was a champagne glass full of the morning’s pills – a cocktail of seventeen different caplets and tablets that Dr Ali prescribed to keep him ‘balanced’ until that evening shot of real candy. Lucius washed them down with a swig from a frosted beaker of freshly squeezed orange juice, and smacked his lips with satisfaction. There was another gentle knocking at his door and a moment later, Abdullah popped his head round. ‘Hi, Lucius,’ he said. ‘Is it OK if I watch TV with you for a little while?’

  ‘Sure, Abby,’ Lucius said, using the nickname he’d bestowed upon the guy, something Abdullah had mistaken for a sign of affection when it was in fact simply less bothersome for Lucius to remember than the tricksy trisyllable.

  Abdullah hopped up on the bed next to Lucius. ‘What you watching?’ he asked, adjusting one of his epaulettes. (He was almost always dressed like Lucius from a certain period of his fame. This morning it was the military pimp look of his Ceasefire period of the late nineties.)

  ‘Beauty and the Beast …’ Lucius replied, nibbling a tiny corner of French toast.

  ‘Oh, I like the part where they have the dance,’ Abby simpered.

  ‘Me too,’ Lucius said.

  ‘Beast’s so good-looking …’

  ‘Ewww. Oh, you mean when he changes?’

  ‘No! Even when he’s Beast!’

  ‘Ewww!’

  Anyone reading a transcript of this conversation would certainly have identified the interlocutors as being girls of around seven or eight, not a twenty-two-year-old and a fifty-year-old man. Abby lay on the bed beside Lucius while he ate and they went on talking about Disney films and how much they liked maple syrup and what they were going to wear for that night’s party when Lucius became aware of a certain … pressure on his thigh. He looked at Abby – who was biting his bottom lip as he pressed what was clearly a monumental boner against Lucius’s leg.

  ‘Excuse me, Abby,’ Lucius said primly.

  He went into his bathroom, where he clutched the sink and took a few deep breaths. Oh my God. Abby was, like, ancient! He had to weigh two hundred pounds! I mean – AS IF!

  And here it was, just like the Bible said.

  In paradise – a serpent.

  TWENTY-TWO

  A girlfriend. That’s right. Fuck you. Yeah, I know what I’ve said in the past but, but …

  It just kind of happened. We went out a couple more times, to talk about the NDC deal. Well, we soon gave up on the pretence that either of us really gave a fuck about that and, one night, after dinner and drinks, we fell hungrily into each other in the basement parking garage of the Chateau Marmont while we were waiting for my car to be brought out. We woke up in bed together the next morning and I had the strangest urge. Or rather, I didn’t have the usual urges. I didn’t want to slip from the bed and creep out without waking her. Or call the doorman, or the maid, and get them to show her out. I wanted her to stay. How fucking perverted is that? It is weird though. Waking several mornings in a row with the same girl. One you have not violated in multiple, barely credible ways. One for whom you do not have to invent a meeting – or give a stack of bills – to make go away. (A common misconception when it comes to
hookers: you don’t pay them to come. You pay them to leave.) Don’t get me wrong, the habits of a lifetime are hard to shake. Sometimes in the last few weeks I’ve caught sight of us, in the mirrored wall of a restaurant, or an elevator, in the smoked glass of a limo, and thought what any sane person would think – why are that pair of cunts so happy?

  And we do the things couples do. We have breakfast. We go into the office together, the twenty-minute drive east along Fountain filled with chatter, industry gossip, celebrity nonsense and so forth. We go to the market. We go to parties together, making our debut at the bash Unigram threw at the Roosevelt to celebrate the number-one position for Remembrance. Chrissy’s friends all coo over her new-found happiness while undoubtedly hating her for having a boyfriend who is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and secretly bitching about the fact that he is nearly twenty years older than her.

  Some things about Chrissy: she is a Texan who is almost a vegetarian. She’s an indie rock kid (her playlists, fuck me, Modest Mouse, Saint Etienne, Mogwai – the kind of music that makes you want to own a slaughterhouse, or join the NRA) who works at a major label. She’s a Democrat who voted for Hillary but really wanted Bernie. She likes to read, is a cunning, fiercely competitive tennis opponent and she can cook. But why? Why am I doing this? Why her? Why now?

  Well, maybe, it was just time. I’m certainly conscious of one thing. There’s no two ways about it, if you’re still single at my age – no matter how many models you do, how many stonking-hot boilers you’re photographed falling in and out of parties and nightclubs with, no matter how many romances you’re linked to in the tabloids – people do begin to wonder if you’re either a ginger beer or the full fucking Du Pre.