Kill 'Em All

by John Niven

  Christ, Ali had thought. Should he let the powers that be back in LA know about this?

  ‘Lucius,’ he’d said, patting his patient’s leg, ‘you’re thinking too much. Let’s just enjoy ourselves. Now …’ Ali had glanced at his watch surreptitiously. He was off the tee in twenty minutes. He switched to physician mode. ‘Would you say you were feeling very anxious or just a little depressed?’

  ‘Well, this morning I was anxious. Now – maybe just sad?’

  ‘Hmmm. Hang on a minute …’

  Ali had crossed the room and gone into the walk-in wardrobe that also served as his pharmacy. He’d got his black medicine bag out from under the shoe rack and rooted through. He’d knocked four orange Dilaudid into his palm. Then half a dozen shiny white Demerol. He’d walked back into the bedroom and handed them to his patient. ‘Here, take a white one if you’re feeling a bit sad, the orange if you’re really anxious, OK? We’ll review in a couple of days.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And let’s have dinner tonight, yeah?’

  ‘Sure,’ Lucius had shrugged.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Ali had said. ‘Remember – you could have lost everything. We’re here saving it. We’re saving Narnia.’

  ‘Narnia,’ Lucius had repeated. He had been so happy there.

  Lucius had returned to his room and gone into the bathroom, an expanse of sandy marble and soft lighting. He’d stood before the mirror, a glass of water in one hand and an orange tablet in the other, staring at his face for a long time. Even with the scant amount of time he’d spent outside he was already pleasingly darker. Dr Ali hadn’t actually said the word. The hellish monosyllable ‘no’ had not escaped his lips. But, even so, Lucius had clearly expressed a desire. He wanted to go home. In the old world, when Lucius expressed a desire, whether it was for a movie, a car or a flock of emus, the desired object was placed in front of him. Another epiphany had come to him – ‘Then he blinded the eyes of Zedekiah; and the king of Babylon bound him with bronze fetters and brought him to Babylon and put him in prison until the day of his death.’ Jeremiah, 52:11. He had been tricked. That clever British guy.

  Lucius was a prisoner.

  Him. Lucius Du Pre. What could he do about it? He knew the first step he would have to take if he were to escape the clutches of his oppressors. It would be difficult. A hard road. But, like his brave forefathers – like Martin Luther King, like Malcolm X – he would screw his courage to the mast. The hardest step was always the first. Lucius had looked at his own trembling hand, already halfway towards his mouth, the orange tab of Dilaudid already seeming to glow with impossible promise, the promise of taking away all his doubts and fears.

  Lucius had dropped it into the sink.

  He had turned on the faucet and, with the rush of water, watched the opiate vanish.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘He got hit on the head, got amnesia, can’t remember anything.’

  ‘Oh, oh – he wandered for miles and wound up living with some family in the desert. They nursed him back to health.’

  ‘Too complicated. You’d have to hire someone to play the family. Then you’re into all that.’

  ‘When he realised he’d survived the crash he … he knew it was an opportunity to … to escape his life. Oh – maybe this is stupid …’

  ‘Hey!’ Ruth says. ‘Remember, kids – there are no stupid ideas when we’re spitballing!’

  We’re brainstorming. Spitballing.

  Present around the huge Carrara marble dining table in my apartment (the current meeting is way too hot to be conducting it within ten blocks of the label) are Ruth Blane and her two protégés Les and Jenny. Ruth is a legend in this business. New York Jewish, fifty(ish), sharp as the edge of a box-cutter and utterly devoid of scruple, sentiment or shame. Remember that basketball player who got caught with those fifteen-year-old twins at a motel in Reno? The former member of that boy band who killed two pedestrians after his car mounted the kerb outside Moonshadows? The married-with-five-kids chat-show host who got caught blowing the seven-foot Colombian transvestite? Basically if you’re in the NFL and you find yourself DUI and performing CPR on a MAW who’s about to be DOA and you know you’ll soon be looking for PR – Ruth is the ultimate expression of the art form in the twenty-first century. We have worked together several times over the last fifteen or so years, ever since Ruth helped with damage limitation after the Jesus kid fiasco on American Pop Star. Les and Jenny are both in their early thirties and are mini-Ruths, having been sucking at her intellectual teat since they left college. These three are being paid an incredible retainer for their skills and discretion in helping with phase two.

  ‘He, the shock, in his shock, he found God,’ Les says.

  ‘He’s already found God, ya schmuck.’ Jenny doesn’t look up from her screen, monitoring the bot accounts. ‘Or how about,’ Jenny goes on, ‘he survived in the mountains for months, living wild. Then –’

  ‘Sorry,’ I interrupt. ‘I know we’re spitballing here, but that is a fucking stupid idea. Have you seen the cunt? He couldn’t survive in the mountains for three minutes. I mean, the guy hasn’t bought a carton of milk in thirty years.’

  ‘COME ON, YOU HICKS!’ Ruth yells at her guys. ‘THINK!’

  ‘Jesus,’ Trellick says. He’s been pacing in the background while all this is going on. (Only the people in this room know where this thing is heading next. The new way – a small, utterly committed team controlling the national narrative.) ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know about all this.’ The PR team look up from their laptops.

  ‘What don’t you know, James?’ Ruth asks.

  ‘Just, I mean, what? We’re going to unveil him at some press conference and say “Surprise! He’s not dead! He’s been living in New Mexico with amnesia”?’

  ‘That’s not bad …’ Ruth says.

  ‘How fucking dumb do we think people are?’

  For all Trellick’s cynicism, part of him, like Chrissy and her friends, is still living in the old world, where certain laws applied. Truth. Reality. He has not yet fully made the leap into the new world, where uttering these words has become like saying ‘penny-farthing’ or ‘blunderbuss’. What’s that you’ve got there, you fucking libtard clown? Oh, a picture of some gas chambers? Didn’t happen. Here’s a screenshot of Pepe the Frog giving you the thumbs up and telling you you’ve been schilled. A million people appear to have retweeted it. This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, those Welsh socialist miner fucks sang, way back in the day, before all of this happened. Nowadays? This Is My Lie Prove Me Wrong. ‘Trellick,’ I say. ‘Prove it. Prove to me that something like this isn’t what happened.’

  ‘Something like what?’

  I lean back in my chair, clasp my hands behind my head, and precis the most convincing take we have yet. ‘Lucius was thrown clear of the crash and knocked unconscious. He can’t really remember much about what happened then. The next thing he knew he woke up in this guy’s home. Some sick, crazy redneck hillbilly fuck, some John Wayne Gacy motherfucker who tortured Lucius in ways he will never fully be able to recount –’

  ‘Until the autobio and the book tour,’ Ruth chips in.

  ‘– who kept him prisoner for months until he was finally able to escape. And here we are.’

  Trellick sighs. ‘Everyone will know that’s utter bollocks.’

  ‘Who?’ I ask. ‘Who’ll know?’

  ‘Every sentient person with an IQ over eighty-five,’ he says.

  Ruth just laughs at this.

  ‘Jenny,’ I say without turning, ‘what’s the Internet saying?’ She turns her screen around to show Trellick. The hashtag ‘#LUCIUSLIVES’. The Facebook pages devoted to conspiracy theories: he was murdered … he didn’t actually die in the plane crash … the CIA did it. Blah blah blah. Some of these are just genuine nutters, madmen out there, braying at the world, howling at the silver moon. But many, of course, are our own bot accounts, guys in a basement in Eastern Europe, helping the nutters along, telling them wha
t they need to hear, giving them memes and hashtags and, most importantly of all, telling them what every lunatic needs to hear – You’re right. You’re not alone. You are not mad, my friend. All of it is nonsense of course, all of it muddying the water, softening the ground, paving the way, lubing the anus, for the outrageous cobblers, the monster cock to follow.

  ‘When we drop this,’ I say, ‘it’ll be almost July. We’re going to have the biggest-selling album of the summer, the biggest in history.’

  ‘We don’t have a single …’ Trellick says flatly.

  ‘Oh, on that subject, get onto A&R again. There must be more in the vaults. Have them dig out everything. Every last out-take we have. Seriously – song sketches, abandoned demos, jam sessions, soundcheck recordings …’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ he says, ‘there’s nothing there.’

  ‘I’ve even got the title.’

  ‘Go on,’ Trellick says.

  I smile. ‘“The Resurrection”.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘Fucking hell.’ Danny Rent drained his beer and set it down on the counter of the poolside bar at the Delano Hotel, his market-trader accent standing out like a cat at Crufts. He looked around at the girls of the Miami Winter Music Conference – brown bodies, sheathed in diaphanous white silk wraps and shirts, in bikinis and tube tops and shorts – and said, ‘There’s some fucking birds in here …’ before adding, hastily, ‘no offence, Chrissy love.’

  ‘None taken,’ Chrissy said, following his gaze around the pool. She knew these girls. They traipsed the world, representing brands, organising events, looking after models and DJs and whatever, following the sun and the fabulous people from Glastonbury to Ibiza to Miami to wherever, their lives a blizzard of the three Cs: clubs, cocaine and cock. They earned a pittance but then they didn’t need to earn anything: they didn’t eat, the flights and the room were paid for, and one of the guys who followed in their wake would pick up the drinks tab. It was a life of sorts, Chrissy thought, until they hit forty: their skin like sandpaper, their wombs dried up like used condoms left on the beach over there, under the Florida sun.

  ‘Where’s Steven by the way?’ Rent said, changing tack.

  ‘Oh, he’s around. Said he’ll catch up with us later.’

  ‘This your first time working together?’

  ‘Well, we’re not really working together, Danny. He’s a consultant for Unigram. Takes an interest in the odd project.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet he fucking does …’ Rent said, grinning. Danny liked Stelfox. He did. They’d had some laughs together. But Danny remembered all too well the end of the Songbirds’ short career. He remembered how, after the success of the first album, when the second record started stiffing, the girls had gone from being ‘Steven’s band’ to being ‘our band’ to suddenly being ‘Danny’s fucking band’. Steven didn’t take prisoners and he didn’t do failure.

  ‘So, Danny,’ Chrissy said, putting her glass down, tiring of the fun and games. ‘What do we need to do to get this deal signed?’ Christ, she needed this. These guys had built their own fanbase and cultivated their own image. They had developed it to the point where they could headline Brixton Academy or Hammerstein on their own. They had done it all by themselves. You wouldn’t need to do a fucking thing except spend more cash. They were the perfect major-label signing. ‘We can’t go any further on the money. Christ, we’re at seven hundred and fifty grand now. We’ve matched the competition step-for-step. Have you any idea how big an advance that is in the current climate?’

  ‘It ain’t about the money, Chrissy. I’d sign it tomorrow, love,’ Rent said. ‘But for the guys, for an artist, you know, XL are hard to say no to …’ Danny liked this girl. He did. He’d have loved to make it work with them, he really would. But sometimes, well, the manager was just the messenger, wasn’t he? He had been building up to how to tell her. Fuck it, just rip the Band Aid off, it was never pleasant. ‘Look, Chrissy, I like you, I like Unigram, but –’

  Here it came. The hammer blow. The phrase she’d already heard several blood-chilling times in her short career: ‘but we’re signing to Island/Capitol/Matador/Whoever …’ Right then Rent’s phone pinged loudly on the bar, the cheerful digital tone cutting through the party din, cutting off whatever he was about to say. He looked at the screen and frowned.

  ‘But…?’ Chrissy said.

  ‘Just a sec …’ he said, holding up a finger as he opened and read the message, his frown deepening then fading as he poker-faced it. ‘But …’ Rent resumed, trying not to stutter, trying not to let his face colour in reaction to what he was reading, ‘I … think it’s just going to take the band a little while longer to come round to my way of thinking …’

  ‘So …’ Chrissy said, stretching out the vowel cautiously, experimentally. ‘We’re still in this?’

  ‘Yeah. Course you are. Ain’t over till it’s over. Look, love, I gotta shoot right now. See you at the party tonight, yeah?’ He went to lay his room key on the bar, for the drinks.

  ‘I got these, Danny.’

  ‘Yeah? Sweet. Laters.’ He pecked her on the cheek and headed for the lobby.

  In the elevator, on the way up to his room, Danny Rent read the text message again, to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. No, there it was, in the bright green box: ‘We’ll double the XL advance. 1.5 million. Offer open for 24 hours. SS.’ Fucking hell. It wasn’t about the money and all that. But, at the same time, it was always about the money.

  In his suite, a couple of floors above where Rent was now getting off the elevator and hurrying to his room to call the band and their lawyer, Steven Stelfox was pouring two glasses of Cristal. As he finished Chrissy stepped into the room, her phone ringing. ‘Sorry,’ she said to him, answering it. ‘Hello?’ He watched her, enjoying the moment, sipping his champagne. ‘What?’ she said. ‘I didn’t auth … wait, James, that’s … that’s crazy money! Is this any way to get the fucking deal? I … he’s here right now.’ She looked at Steven, sitting calmly in a club chair by the window onto the balcony. ‘OK.’ She hung up and looked at him, folding her arms. ‘What the fuck is going on? That was Trellick. We’ve just offered one and a half fucking million on the NDC deal? That’s just nuts! It says we’ve got nothing to offer but money. What if XL match it? What if –’

  ‘Chrissy,’ Stelfox said, ‘calm down, sit down, listen and learn. One – we’re not going to pay one and a half million. Two – we don’t have anything to offer except money. And three – there’s no way XL are going to match it.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘You want this deal, right? You want to get on? Sign a big, hit act? Then trust me and come over here. We’ve got an hour till dinner. Come on. Take that off. Here …’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Gold and marble. Marble and gold.

  ‘I mean, he must have cornered the market in these two substances, right?’ Dick says, laughing through a mouthful of Caesar salad. I lean back in my (heavily gilded) chair, taking the dining room in.

  It’s restrained decor-wise compared to the lobby, but still. It’s busy too, on this warm Sunday lunchtime, a lot of the guys still wearing chinos and polo shirts – Lacoste, Ralph Lauren – red-faced from the golf course, frowning into the heavy menus, cutting their thick steaks. The women are all painted, freeze-dried hair, silicone-racked, airbrushed in the way of ageing dick-and-dollar worshippers the world over. Dick’s a golfer. A member here. When I knew I was coming to Miami I rang and made him bring me for lunch. I’ve left Chrissy back at the Delano, an hour south, working the conference. I just told her I had a meeting. Safe to say she wouldn’t have approved of this side trip. Me? I just wanted to breathe the same air, so to speak. Get inspired …

  Everywhere in the building you hear the whispers (‘he’s on the fourteenth … he just made a birdie!’) and you see the guys: dark suits, sunglasses, bulging armpits. The security to get in was incredible. (Although not, Terry would probably tell you, impregnable.)

  Dick and I go back to
the show, to American Pop Star. A TV veteran, he knew the networks and I knew music (or at least knew the drama that surrounds the making of music) and together it all worked. Dick made a fortune too when we sold up and now he winters in Palm Beach. At sixty, this place is definitely more his speed these days than the Delano or Soho House. I look at my plate. I have ordered the meatloaf and mashed potatoes, out of respect, because they say it’s one of his favourites.

  ‘So,’ Dick says, ‘I noticed you got a producer credit on the Du Pre record. What’s with that?’ He cocks an eyebrow.

  ‘Nothing. Seriously. Trellick asked me to help out. I just advised on sequencing, oversaw a couple of remixes …’

  ‘You got points?’

  ‘I just did a mate a favour.’ I can see from the way Dick sips his ice tea that he knows this is about as likely as one of these women around us sucking a cock without having first been bought a Rolex, but he lets it go. Granted, I didn’t do much on the Du Pre greatest hits to earn a producer credit. No. That was a reward for my ‘conceptual’ input. The input that resulted in Du Pre currently being out of sight on the other side of the world. (Schitzbaul is checking in regularly with Dr Ali and the Sultan. Everything seems to be fine and dandy out there.) However, rest assured I will most definitely be earning my producer credit on the next Du Pre record, the comeback album, The Resurrection.

  I have spent the last few days in LA combing through the years of Du Pre out-takes, trying desperately to find something unreleased that could be moulded into a hit single, to drive the sales of whatever drivel we put on the album. It has been a fascinating exercise in its own hellish way. There were hours of cover versions of old Motown tunes. Half-realised arrangements of some of his greatest hits. Endless ‘jam’ sessions, the band churning a riff over and over while Du Pre tried to come up with a top line. There must have been several hours alone of Du Pre singing acappella versions of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, the national anthem being the tune he always used to warm up his vocal cords for a gig or a recording session. Hours of him intoning ‘Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light …’ in his fragile, delicate voice. Interesting enough stuff for the rabid fan or completist, the kind of satanists who read Record Collector, but in terms of finding the raw materials to manufacture a hit record, it has so far been about as useful as tits on a bull, as Chrissy would say.