by John Niven
One morning towards the end of that hot week of enforced captivity I wake very early, around 4 a.m. Still dark outside. Chrissy comes out to find me sitting by the huge picture window in the living room, looking over to the Plaza, drinking coffee.
She wraps her arms around me from behind. Down below us, in the blackness, is the small gaggle of protesters who have been there all week, in their cheap clothes, clutching their handmade signs. (‘Love Trumps Hate’ etc.) The New York night – as it always is, but even more so right now – is rent by the whoop and gulp of sirens, the red and blue circles strobing up from the canyon depths far below. The corner at Central Park South is still a major crime scene, the phalanx of police and ambulance vehicles ringed by the (fake) news trucks, CNN, ABC, MSNBC and all the rest of it. ‘I can’t believe you have an apartment in this fucking building,’ she says again, still scandalised.
I bought the place ten years ago, when I first started making what I thought was real money, for 3.5 million dollars. It’s one of the very rare ‘J’ apartments in Trump Tower, occupying the building’s premier corner with spectacular views of Central Park and the George Washington Bridge to the north, grand sweeps west and south capturing panoramic views of the city. Of course, needless to say, I’ve hardly been here in the last year or so, given all the protesters and the Secret Service and the constant media presence and the tourists clogging the lobby and all the rest of the nonsense that’s happened since the big man descended the escalator down in the lobby and said ‘have some of this, cunts’. I was actually thinking about selling it, but, given recent events, I’ve developed a sentimental, almost talismanic fondness for the place. More sirens erupt below, heading along West 57th Street towards the site of the atrocity.
‘You know what?’ Chrissy says, off those sirens, sighing, pressing her already swelling belly into my back. ‘I think we’re doing the right thing. I mean, is this any kind of world to bring a child into?’ The abortion – all booked for tomorrow.
What kind of world is it?
It is, I think to myself, a wonderful world. A place where ambition still outstrips talent. Where common decency is about as common as Minotaur eggs. Where the kind and the weak are ripped apart like loaves of bread, like Cambodian babies in the streets of Phnom Penh in April ’75 (top lad Pol Pot). Where lefties and snowflakes – increasingly as rare as Minotaur eggs themselves, as rare as young Chrissy here, even now snuggling herself into my armpit for the warmth – gather in huddles in corners of the Internet and tell themselves that, although things are bad right now, although hatred and intolerance seem to be on the rise, this is a blip. That people are fundamentally decent and honest and kind and that good will out. They do not know, or refuse to understand, that the blip is the size of several continents now and is going to go on for a long, long time, a tiki-torch parade of screaming white faces stretching into infinity. A world where might is not only right, it is all. Where money doesn’t just talk, or swear, it nukes. It daisy-cuts. It levels all before it. The work is done – even the poor think the poor are fucking cunts nowadays. It is a world whose richest, most powerful inhabitant cuts about stripped to the waist fighting tigers and shit while he burns families out of their homes to make way for pipelines and has his enemies killed. (So what? You don’t think we’re killers too?) I am thinking of the tax breaks – both corporate and personal – that, with a little luck, I will be getting in the Trump administration’s first full budget. I am thinking of the BBC news report I caught from back home the other morning, the graph that showed the areas in the north-east of England who are going to be worst hit economically by Brexit. I’m thinking about all of the Untermensch, the no-marks, the zero-net-worth tolers who will be kicked off Medicare, who will lose their homes, who will see the pittance in their miserable pay packets shrivel to nothing, who will soon be living in a global Caymans – paying eight quid for a packet of fish fingers – and who fucking voted for it, and I find I am getting an erection.
I am wondering how all of this will mesh with my sale of Unigram. The unknown unknowns. Trellick does not know that he is about to have the shortest career as chairman of a major conglomerate in music industry history. He does not know about the fire sale that will soon be happening over at the company: our back catalogue sold off to Universal or Warners, our many prime parcels of real estate all across the globe turned into apartments and shopping centres. The boys over at Stern, Hammler & Gersh have got it all nailed down to the last telephone, computer terminal and company car. Turn it and burn it. Pop and chop. Break it up into tiny pieces and sell it all off to the highest bidder. SH&G are estimating that, with the currently enhanced share price, my piece of the sale should, at the very least, quadruple my 200-million-pound investment. Eight hundred sterling. Even at the current spot rate of 1.31 USD to the quid (I’m checking it half-hourly and know my broker can do better than this) that’s exactly 1,054,683,009 and fifteen cents. It’s there. Done. A billion dollars.
I am looking online into the kind of yachts that will cause Geffen to crane his neck upwards in astonishment, a shadow falling over his deck as my boat (the Lebensraum) comes in to dock next to him in the Tobago Quays this winter. The look on his face as he sees me – spitting down at him, shouting, telling him to get in the fucking oven. And, yes, with all of this comes the chilling thought – what then? What next? And, it occurs to me, I now know the answer to that one too.
About the size of my pinkie now. By the end of this week, week fourteen, he’ll be three inches in length. He’d fit cosily into the cupped palm of your hand. Although Chrissy is unable to feel his movements yet, he’s all over the place at this point, arms and legs waving, body wriggling. A proper hooligan. Feeling his oats, testing his new powers, his external sexual organs beginning to emerge, penis and scrotum. I contemplate for a moment the grief these could cause, the untold pain, misery and damage he might inflict with them. The tears and the suffering and the rows and the fights and the balled hankies clenched in trembling fists. That’s my boy. Go on, my son. Where’s your tool? His brain is forming, waiting for the input only I can provide. Because it turns out that in the end, even I, the Übermensch, am not immune to it. To the primal, the oldest, impulse. An heir to the empire. Someone to be moulded in my own, fine image. Someone who understands what the world is, how and why men do the things they do. Someone who …
‘Chrissy,’ I say softly, turning, ‘let’s have the baby.’
Her lip starts to go as she collapses into my chest, sobbing, the warm tears of gratitude soaking my shirt, her whole what-about-my-career-I’m-too-young-what-a-world-we-live-in spiel blown apart in an instant. Because her decision-making, her true desires, are not being driven by career logic, or age considerations, or political concerns about the state of the world in the early twenty-first century. They are being driven by the lunacy nature has packed into her stomach – the demented piping of the fallopian tubes, the ovaries, the womb. You’re carrying a bag around inside you whose sole purpose is to create another human. That’d pretty much do it for you on the logical thought front, wouldn’t it? That alone would drive you fucking insane. ‘Are … are you sure?’ she says finally.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It’ll all be fine.’
She takes a deep breath, then reaches for the words.
‘I love you, Steven.’
I take Chrissy’s face in my hands, up there by the window, high over Fifth Avenue. I look into her brown eyes, hot and trusting, like a puppy’s, as I say the only thing to be said – ‘I love you too.’
I fold her into my arms while, behind me, out past Queens, past Long Island, out over the Atlantic, a beautiful June dawn is beginning to break (‘Oh say can you see …’), pink summer light starting to fall across Manhattan, spreading slowly from east to west, like spilled blood, flooding the dark trenches between the skyscrapers.
Morning in America.
Epilogue
Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles. Monday 4 December 2017
It�
�s a little after 7 a.m. I’m stretched out on the sofa, tired, shoes off, with coffee and iPad, as I shuffle between the trades – Variety, Billboard, Deadline – and the newspapers, LA Times, New York Times. The big story this morning is ‘HOUSE OF CARDS WILL RESUME PRODUCTION WITHOUT SPACEY’. I mean, he’s finished, isn’t he? Went full Du Pre. Tried to smash some fourteen-year-old actor kid’s back door in. You can’t help but feel sorry for the poor cunt, can you? Here he is just doing what every vaguely famous toerag has done for generations – openly using his celebrity to whip his cock out on some starry-eyed teenager – and suddenly he’s in fucking hiding? Largely, let’s face it, because he’s an iron. I mean, Elvis was all over Priscilla when she was fourteen and it was all good. Or here’s old Bill Wyman back in the day, walking about free as a bird with the fourteen-year-old Mandy Smith, the bloody great smirk on his face telling everyone, ‘I’m right up this skank and there’s fuck all anyone is going to do about it.’ Or Jimmy Page in 1973, falling out of some LA nightclub with the fourteen-year-old Lori Maddox on his arm, dragging her back to the Hyatt for a proper beasting while the whole world looks on and says, ‘Go on, my son, give her one from me.’ But when you’re a bender pummelling some teenager you’re not one of the lads, are you? You’re automatically just a straight-up fucking paedo.
I look at my watch and wonder how it can be taking so fucking long. It’s been three hours since they wheeled Chrissy off to the delivery room around 4 a.m. We are, naturally – or rather, unnaturally – having an elective Caesarean. (I mean, come on. Throwing a sausage down a hall? Waving a flag in space? Fuck that.) I also made it very clear from the outset that while she would obviously have the best care money can shoulder others aside to give you, I would emphatically not be in attendance while the kid was born. I do not need to be looking at that atrocity, some unholy cross between an abattoir and a butcher’s shop on fire.
Mind you, fuck Spacey, it’s dark times for the lads too. Weinstein a couple of months back. I’ve had my moments, don’t get me wrong, we all get a bit lively now and then, but it looks like Harvey was basically trying to rape anything that fucking moved. As they say, he’d come to your house and the fish would stop swimming. You’ve got to kind of admire it, haven’t you? The sheer work ethic. In addition to making tons of films and winning Oscars and all that shit, Harvey was also up at the crack of dawn getting his cock out at every given opportunity. As well as reading all those scripts and dealing with financing and budgeting and hiring and firing, he was having to plot and scheme to find ways to drag some young chick back to his lair and wander out of his bathroom naked, or with his robe hanging open. Then all the time and energy needed to meet with the lawyers and deal with all the NDAs and the pay-offs, to meet with the PR people and the private detectives to work out your counter-attacks and dig dirt up on your accusers. As I said, I like pumping and sucking and grinding as much as the next man. Maybe not as much as I did in the crazy days of my twenties and thirties, when, let’s face it, guys, most of us are running around like a cross between Ron Jeremy and Peter Sutcliffe, but to like it to a Harvey degree? And he was doing all this in the nineties and noughties, when he was in his forties, his fifties. The commitment. The passion.
The Donald, of course, has had a bunch of slags trying to say for ages that he had a pop. Even his own ex-wife reckoned he raped her but then (obviously) saw it slightly differently when a massive fucking cheque appeared. Then, just last month, it was Brett Ratner, Louis CK. It turned out that what a lot of these dudes liked to do was to get their cocks out and pull the head off it in front of some sobbing cow. I’ve seen a few people arguing that this was all about humiliating the women. I don’t know. I’m not sure. I mean, granted, I am not the world’s leading expert on feminist theories of sexuality and power, but I reckon if you’re standing there, softening cock in hand as a few drops of your own rapidly cooling spunk patter onto your bare foot, then there’s an argument to be had about exactly who is getting humiliated here. Whatever, it seems like the boilers have finally had enough. Time’s up. It’s them too. This will not stand any more. The grand traditions by which men have lived for centuries – that if you have enough cash and/or fame you can basically use whoever you like as a human toilet whenever it takes your fancy – are on their way out. Well, you read this stuff – in the Guardian, in the Washington Post, in the glossy monthlies – and then you go out. Like the other night. Trellick (we’re all good by the way, tighter than ever. His small block of shares cleared him somewhere in the region of sixty million dollars) and some of the lads took me out for a drink to celebrate the closing of the Unigram sale and we wound up attending the opening night of some new club in West Hollywood.
It was the usual – through the velvet ropes, through the crowded bar and dance floor, and then into the cool peace of the VIP lounge. Huge white sofas, table service and an ice bucket full of magnums of Grey Goose and Dom Perignon at five hundred bucks a pop. Soon enough, it began: the bouncers, parading a steady stream of girls from the main club past our table. They’d smile coyly. The hotter ones got asked to join us. The girls started hitting the booze. The bar sales went up. The bouncers got tipped. The bar staff got tipped. The girls got free drinks and we got … well. Everyone gets paid. It is the American dream in microcosm and it is beautiful.
And these girls, the young girls who’re fruiting about West Hollywood nightclubs at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night, the ones getting off the bus from Omaha, or Boise, Idaho, getting off the plane from Latvia or Ukraine, let me tell you, I don’t think they’ve been getting the message. I don’t think they’re reading the Guardian or the Washington Post. Because, in return for a few double vodkas and the promise of a reading for a non-existent pilot, they would literally suck your balls out through your urethra and store them in their cheeks like a crazed hard-gobbling squirrel getting ready for winter. Me too? Fuck you.
I put the paper down and look around the room: at the double bed, the wet bar, the fridge-freezer, stocked with food and drink, the rich carpeting and soft lighting. There’s even a little Christmas tree in the corner. (Although the weather outside continues to do its LA thing: a soupy twenty-one degrees.) Indeed, the only clues that we are in a hospital are provided by the chart at the foot of the bed and the array of drips (saline, etc.) hanging in their translucent pouches by the headboard, in case they’re needed later. This room is costing four thousand dollars a night. The birth of my son will end up costing me somewhere in the low six figures. Entry to the world, American-style.
But this is not a problem, I think, as I turn to look again at the huge flat-screen TV glowing with the sound down, showing Fox News. The coverage is still, as it has been for forty-eight hours straight, all about the new tax bill, which passed on Saturday. God bless Trump. 1.5 trillion dollars in cuts. It’s early days, and it’s complicated – we’re currently moving the money from the sale of Unigram around the world like it’s Phineas Fogg on speed – but the boys at Stern, Hammler & Gersh reckon that, very conservatively, the new bill will save me a minimum of three hundred million dollars in taxes over the next two years. That’s about half the cost of building the Lebensraum right there. It’s good news all round in fact – the average American family will be a thousand bucks a year better off. For a while. After that … maybe not so much.
Laugh? I nearly bought a fucking round.
There’s a soft knocking at the door and then it’s opening and Dr Rosenstein, our obstetrician, is coming in. I sit up.
He’s in a gown, with a surgical mask pulled down around his throat, and I am relieved to see there is no hint of blood or gore on his smocks. ‘Mr Stelfox …’ he begins and I notice, with alarm, that his voice has a catch in it, fear, lodged somewhere in his throat. His hands are trembling as he sits down in the armchair by the bed, opposite me. He looks at me with pale grey eyes as I say, ‘What?’
‘I … there’s been a complication. This … this very rarely happens …’
I feel the floor sliding away
, my stomach falling. What to hope for? Who to hope for? Who has died or is dying right now, somewhere along the corridor, surrounded by millions of dollars of technology and technicians? Chrissy or the baby? Who to root for? My mind is making calculations about full-time nannies and boarding schools alarmingly quickly. ‘Is the baby all –’ I begin.
‘They’re both fine. Perfectly healthy. Sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you. It’s just, it’s …’ He swallows. I’ve about had it with this cunt.
‘What?’ I say.
He begins talking.
Two or three minutes later I am being led along the corridor, shuffling, stunned, looking like someone who has survived an aeroplane crash, someone who cannot believe they are still here, still walking around. I am led through swinging doors into the delivery suite, the only coherent thoughts in my head to do with the 95 per cent accuracy small print he claims I would have been told, to do with lawyers and lawsuits, suing and countersuing. Chrissy is there on the bed, white as milk, as pale as an indie kid, as she cuddles the reddish-pink bundle. She looks up at me, shaking her head in astonishment at the turn of events, laughing a little now as she turns the bundle towards me, holding it out, offering it to me, the folds of bloody towelling falling aside, allowing me to see it briefly, the protuberant, lipped mound, bald, recognisable to me from pornography, from hookers.
‘It’s a girl,’ she says.
Chrissy hands me my daughter and, taking in my astonished, utterly vacant face, adds, smiling, woozy, addled from the meds, ‘Who knew? Five per cent chance the ultrasound was wrong. I’m still really happy, Steven.’ I take a moment, breathing deeply, trying not to faint, feeling the sightless thing writhing and kicking in my arms, feeling the eyes of Chrissy, Rosenstein, the two nurses upon me as I clear my throat.
‘Me too,’ I say, numb.
