Kill Your Friends (28 page)

There’s a gasp. Literally a gasp. The manager woman looks like
she’s about to cry. “What…what,” she says banging the handle of her
fork on the table, sending shreds of pastry flying, “what about
women who’re still producing important, artistically valid work?
Nanci Griffith? Emmylou Harris? Chrissie Hynde?”

“Come on,” I say good-naturedly, “who really wants to want to
fuck any of those cows?”

There’s a bunch of shouting—I think she actually tries to hit
me—and then Parker-Hall is helping me up and we’re out on the
street, the cool night air of Soho washing my face as he shouts for
a cab.

Americans, I reflect as some Paki drives me back to the hotel,
they’re so fucking
serious
.

♦

Morning manages to find a crack in the heavy drapes and comes
crawling across the bed, waking me up. The TV is still on. The
adult channel, obviously. I groan and engage the memory banks,
fast-forwarding through the previous evening: drinking in the room,
cab, gig, drinking, cab, chang, another bar, drinking…the
restaurant, after that, nothing. Wait a minute, the restaurant. Go
back. My leg gives an involuntary twitch, a physical spasm of pain
as I freeze-frame on an image from last night: the manager chick’s
face, twisted in disgust. Bad, something pretty bad happened.

I’m just finishing up a spectacular bout of vomiting (and
noticing that I seem to have managed an even more outstanding—and
exotically placed—example during the night: the shower stall looks
like someone has dumped a tub of dog food in it) when there’s a
knock at the door. Blanket-wrapped and trembling, a ball of wet
Kleenex in my fist I press a watery eye to the spyhole. There’s
some old Latino chick there, housekeeping or something. “Come back
later,” I shout.

I collapse back onto the bed, scrabbling with the Advil bottle.
She keeps on knocking. These fucking people.

Angrily I pull the door open—the abuse already fully formed in
my lungs, barrelling up towards my mouth—and it all happens very
fast. A short, stocky woman sweeps into the room (hung-over as I
am, I get a strong reek of booze from her), throws her raincoat
off, and sits down on the edge of my bed, crossing her
white-stocking-clad legs. “You call for a date, honee?” Eh?

“What?” I say. “What fucking date? Look, I think you’ve got the
wrong room.”

“Room 335?”

“Umm…” I look at the TV screen, now showing an ad for ‘Co-Ed
Foxes’, allegedly ‘Manhattan’s finest escort service’. “We visit
you,” the voice on the ad says, “day or night.”

“You are Steeeven, yes?” She leers drunkenly, revealing a
battered row of teeth so viciously bucked that, for a second, I
think she’s slipped a chunk of comedy orange peel into her mouth
for a laugh. As an ice-breaker.

Looking past her I see the credit cards and the scrawled scraps
of paper by the phone. Understanding, memory breaks in on me as I
remember making the call a few hours ago before I passed out.

“Right,” I say, taking her in properly now: a buck-toothed dwarf
in her late forties, her stomach a crenellated apocalypse of
porridgy stretch marks. Graveyard shift. “Sorry, I’ve changed my
mind. Can you just…how much for you to just leave?”

“Full charge, three hunner dollar.”

“Fuck off. I’ll give you fifty.”

She leaps up. “You pay me! You pay now or I go downstairs and
get my driver. I go get Ramirez!” Fucking Americans, so
serious.

“OK, fucking hell!” I sigh fishing my wallet out and handing
over the bills.

“Thanks, honee,” she says, rubbing up against me, friendly
enough now she’s got the fucking dollar, “you sure you no want me
to stay? I know we can have a good time,” she says huskily into my
face. I don’t know what she had for breakfast. Pilchards in garlic
semen chased down with a mug of gasoline maybe? Her hand flashes
through the sheet I’m wrapped in and starts massaging my bare
prick. A good time? To recap: she’s an ancient Latino beast, pissed
out of her mind, with a mouthful of Stanley knives and breath like
a summer fish factory…who turns out to have an incredibly skilful
way with a handjob. (I abandoned the blow job after an exploratory
sixty seconds of fretful, white-knuckle gobbling. You’d be more
relaxed with your cock in the maw of a ravenous Alsatian.) It only
takes her about two minutes—all the time she’s shouting “CUM! CUM
FOR MY BIG TITTIES!” while, with her free hand, vigorously working
a small dildo into my rectum—before I start to shudder and buck.
She pulls down her grimy bra and her burst jugs spill down to her
stomach. “CUM! CUM ON MY BEEG TITTIES!” she screams. I swallow hard
against the spiralling nausea and unload a wad of spunk all over
her.

I collapse onto the bed, foetal with shame, while she gets busy
with the Kleenex. “You feel better now, baybee?” she says, giving
me a playful smack on the arse as she staggers towards the
bathroom.

I bury my head under the pillow, groaning, and only hear the
knocking dimly at first. By the time I leap up the crazy bitch is
already tugging the door open.

Parker-Hall stands there looking clean, sober and rested in a
crisp white shirt and jeans. Slowly he takes it all in: me, halfway
across the room, naked and sweating, trying to cover my half-erect
cock with a T–shirt, and the beast, forty-odd years and two hundred
pounds of stinking Colombian whore with blobs of spunk still
glistening here and there on the ruins of her tits and her
stretch-marked stomach. A few feet away from Parker-Hall, directly
in his line of vision, the shit-streaked dildo stands proudly on
top the minibar. I notice for the first time that a yellow stud of
sweetcorn I don’t recall eating is stuck to its tip. The room must
smell bad.

She grins at him. “You his fren? You wanna join us eet’s
extra.”

“I’ll see you at the airport,” Parker-Hall says and then he’s
gone.

♦

We meet again in the BA executive lounge at Kennedy a few hours
later. I’m sitting reading
Billboard
and sipping a quadruple
Bloody Mary when Parker-Hall strides in. He gets himself an orange
juice and sits down next to me.

“Look, Tony, I—” It’s as far as I get.

“Listen,” he says, “this has gone far enough. I don’t give a
fuck what you do on your own time, but last night you made an utter
cunt out of us in front of the American label and it has to stop.”
He looks at me coldly. I am dying here. “I think you might need
help,” he adds.

“Help?”

“With the drinking and the coke.”

“Oh come on,” I say, “I was just taking the piss. She was a
pompous old—”

“She’s Ashley Werner’s fucking
wife
.”

Shit. “Look,” I say, “we haven’t been working together
long—”

“Listen, mate,” he says sharply, cutting me off, “we might as
well get this straight. We aren’t ‘working together’. You work for
me. And as long as you fucking are working for me you’d better
shape up. Right? You sign a few fucking hits and then you can get
off your nut at dinner and take the piss out of whoever you want
because, I’m telling you, you’re on thin ice, Steven. Thin fucking
ice.”

With that he drains his glass and strides off across the lounge,
out through the opaque glass doors, and disappears into the busy
terminal.

He’s right. This has definitely gone far enough.

♦

I get back to London early the following morning—Parker-Hall and
I sat well away from each other on the flight, we avoided each
other through the plastic tunnels of Heathrow and took separate
cabs in the wet dawn—and get into bed. I don’t get out of it for a
week.

I call Rebecca. “A fever,” I tell her and she offers to come
over. “No,” I say.

She cancels meetings and I crumple back down beneath the duvet
where I sleep feverishly for short stretches, often waking
screaming from terrible dreams: there are dreams where Trellick and
I are working in a concentration camp, butchering babies, dreams
where I am being raped by a handicapped man, dreams where I am
standing on the top of Centre Point watching a shower of nuclear
missiles—thousands of them—falling over London, dreams filled with
sly, grinning dogs with hypodermics for teeth, dreams where I am
married to Rebecca and our babies are crawling all over me and the
babies have no eyes, dreams where I cradle Waters’ body while I
reach into the hole in his skull, almost up to my elbow, scraping
around in there for a long time before finally pulling my bloody
arm out and seeing that I am holding a fistful of tiny silver
statuettes: little Brit Awards, each one the size of a jelly
baby.

I wake up screaming—the only light in the room coming from the
TV screen; either a fizz of static or a hardcore shot, as I almost
always have a pornographic film on. I watch the video of Annabel
Chong fucking three hundred guys five or six times a day. Over and
over she pumps and sucks and grinds. Over and over semen is sprayed
across her face, belly, breasts and bum. I watch a scene where she
upends a used condom over her mouth and greedily slurps down the
contents perhaps a hundred times, my thumb shuttling numbly between
the play and the rewind. I watch the Rape Tape repeatedly: a
compilation Ross had some guy at an edit suite knock up for him;
basically all the classic rape scenes from modern cinema—
The
Accused, Straw Dogs
(is it or isn’t it up the Ronson?),
Salvador
(nuns—awesome),
Leaving Las Vegas, Clockwork
Orange, I Spit On Your Grave, Thelma and Louise
(well, the
bloke nearly gets in there before the dyke shoots him)—spliced onto
one video. We wondered about the possibility of selling it
commercially. I reckon there’s a market but Trellick said you’d
have too many clearance and distribution problems.

Every few hours I ring for food and a guy—some gook, some
dago—will come to the door with Chinese, Thai or pizza.

Between meals I dry-swallow Valium.

I cry a lot.

A few days into this—having smoked nearly the entire two cartons
of cigarettes I brought back from America and needing to freshen my
crackling stack of overused hardcore—I try to go the corner shop
and find that I cannot leave the house.

So I stay in bed, my hair greasy, my fingernails encrusted with
filth, rancid semen-cracked tissues balled up all over the bedroom,
overflowing ashtrays teetering on piles of unwashed clothes, waxy
pizza boxes and fungal takeaway cartons littered across the
floor.

I have been reduced to the bare fundamentals of human existence:
eating, smoking and wanking.

Somewhere around the end of the week I am crumpled in a corner
of the living room, naked, when I begin to have, well, epiphany is
a very strong word, but I’m thinking about all the wrong, all the
evil I’ve done. I’m haunted by an image of Waters’ mother at his
funeral—trembling her way along the aisle, emitting that crazed,
inhuman
woooohooo
sound. Maybe it could be undone. Some kind
of atonement? I’m looking at the Karma Bank and it’s bad. It’s
fucking bad. It’s like looking at one of my own bank statements;
the tumbling, unreal zeros, DR stamped everywhere. Debit, debit,
debit. Maybe if…if I stop. Change. Do good. Charity. Join the VSO
and go and work abroad, nursing swollen-bellied babies, helping
African villagers rebuild, I don’t know, a dam or something? I
could volunteer for spoon-feeding lukewarm soup to skeletal
pensioners, or going around the underpasses and subways of central
London on January nights, handing out sandwiches and blankets,
tucking in freezing derelicts, my only reward being allowed to bask
for a moment in the warmth of their grateful smiles. I could move
to the country and raise children, try to live happily on the other
side of the Prodigy sleeve, the side with the green fields and the
smiling people.

The phone rings. Or rather, I become aware of its ringing. It
might have been ringing for two days. I crawl across the floor
towards it and watch it with dread: six, seven rings and then the
machine clicks on.

“Hi…Steven? Uh, it’s Barry from club promotions. Listen, I need
to speak to you. I don’t know if you…”

I pour a litre of Evian over my head, breathe in deeply a few
times, pick the phone up and croak, “Barry?”

“Oh, you’re there. Christ, you sound like fucking shit,
mate!”

“Yeah. Flu or something.”

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you, your mobile’s off. Anyway,
what are you doing Saturday night?”

“What? Why?”

“You won’t believe this…”

And Barry tells me first good news I’ve heard in a long, long
time.

♦

“Oh my fucking God,” Trellick says from the back seat, “will you
look at this…” We turn a corner and come onto what I guess is the
high street. It’s eleven thirty on a Saturday night and the
tolers—hundreds of them—are doing what they do up North: an
overweight girl wearing a thong, a boob tube and high heels is
vomiting over a Keep Left sign. A bunch of lads are pissing against
a shopfront in full view. Another girl lies unconscious on her back
in the gutter, her skirt hauled up and her tights shredded, a
bottle of some demented alcopop, some estate juice, still clutched
in her hand. “Are those…
chips?
” Ross asks. The four of us
squint. As far as you can see, for a few hundred yards in front of
us, the air is filled with flying chips, bags of them being hurled
upwards as dozens of fights break out. A kid staggers in front of
the Saab, blood pouring from a cut in his forehead. He’s pulled off
the road and disappears under a flurry of fists and kicks as three
blokes pile back in, kicking the shit out of him. A handful of
chips spatters off the car and I put the foot down.

“Welcome to Rotherham,” Barry says laughing.

“Should have left the car at the fucking hotel,” I say.

The club is a giant metal hangar on the outskirts of town. From
the outside it could be a bowling alley, an ice rink, a swimming
pool. The giveaways are the dull whump of bass coming from inside
and the angry mob fighting to get in. A clutch of bouncers, all in
black bomber jackets, all with little earpieces in, stand at the
top of the stairs, chewing gum. Their faces are blank, mongoloid.
We hang back and Barry talks to one while the tolers of Rotherham
look at us strangely—in our dark jeans and black and navy cashmere
V-necks. We’re the only guys not wearing untucked knock-off Ralph
Lauren shirts in head-splitting iridescent shades of lemon, violet
and turquoise. It is almost freezing and we’re the only people
wearing coats.