High society (17 page)

AN OXFAM SHOP, WEST BROMWICH

T
hat was top gear. Ah mean top, top gear. Ah will say that for Goldie and his boys, they had the best stuff an’ they let you have it. In fact, Ah think a grain or two more an’ all o’ ma troubles would o’ bin over that very night, ‘cos Ah was no’ used to such powerful stuff. Towards the end Francois had bought shite and mixed it with more shite, so Ah was more accustomed tae speed than smack, an’ that first dose offa Goldie nearly took me all the way tae oblivion for real. But they were careful an’ kept an eye on me an’ gave me some coke tae balance things out. Ah must say for a minute there, leaning back, high as heaven wi’ a cup of sugary coffee in ma hand, Ah really felt like Ah’d fallen on ma feet. Ha! On ma back was more tae the point of it, because they put me tae work that very night, although Ah was bruised an’ cut from the girls who’d done me over. To tell the truth, Ah was that out o’ it that Ah don’t think Ah realized Ah was being banged until ma second or third customer. Ah worried a lot about that afterwards, because normally, no matter how monged Ah am, Ah always remember tae slip a condom on the puntas just before they gets to it, but Ah swear that night, after Goldie’s first hit up, Ah couldn’a found a fellah’s dick, let alone discreetly bagged it up.’

FALLOWFIELD COMMUNITY HALL, MANCHESTER

W
e did one warm-up gig before hitting the road proper. Sort of obligatory these days, in’t it. I mean, you ‘ave ta do it, don’t you, the business expects it. Any act that can do fifty thousand seats in any town they fancy has to turn up at some shithole in the Smoke and play to eight fans and two hundred and fifty celebrities plus the rock critic from the Daily fookin’ Telegraph. You ‘ave to do it just to prove that you’re still down and dirty and can still cut it live.

‘So anyway, we’re booked in to do this single gig at the Astoria an’ I was determined it was going to be a total an’ utter explanation to the entire fookin’ business regarding the facts o’ the matter about who was boss. I was at Madonna’s when she were in the middle of the Music Tour and it were all right but it was all so fookin’ showbiz. You know what I’m sayin’? All the birds off the soaps and half the Spices, and Guy Ritchie’s fookin’ ‘ardmen actor mates. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Madge were blindin’ in a cabaret sort of a way, but I wanted my gig to rock! Now I don’t know if you know the Astoria, but it’s an absolute shithole between Oxford Street and Cambridge Circus. Normally it’s a one hundred per cent G-A-Y gig, you know, the place where all the girly popettes and failing boy bands go to relaunch their careers by becoming gay icons. But every now and then the gig gets hired out into the mainstream for a bit of solid rock. Tonight was my night, and of course the secret had got out, not surprisingly really, since we’d deliberately told Capital Radio that afternoon. We wanted to stop the traffic, close down half the West End, cause a riot an’ a public nuisance by the sheer power of my celebrity.

‘It were completely irresponsible, o’ course. We hadn’t warned the police or nothing, but that’s rock an’ roll, in’t it?

‘Boy bands and softies warn the police. The likes o’ Tommy Hanson do what they fookin’ well like.’

SOHO SQUARE

T
ommy’s limo was stuck on the north side of Soho Square. It was about a hundred metres from its destination, but it might as well have been in China. The whole of the east of the square was a mass of kids trying to get to the Astoria. Two or three thousand more were milling about in Charing Cross Road, along Oxford Street and up Tottenham Court Road. Tommy sat in the back of the big car looking out at the bodies crushed against the darkened glass, grinning with satisfaction. Tony the tour manager was in the front, his mobile as ever clamped to his ear.

‘Elton and David aren’t coming, Tom.’

‘You’re fookin’ jokin’. I belled the cont this morning. ‘E said ‘e was mad for it. Said he were ‘avin’ ‘is legs waxed special. Said ‘e might bring Kevin fookin’ Spacey an’ Gwynnie. What ‘appened?’

‘Tom, look out of your window. It’s goin’ berserk. Elton and David took one look and buggered off. So would you have done if it wasn’t your gig. Nobody can get through. Jon Bon Jovi’s jacked it and Ronan and Chris Evans and Billie. The PR company says there’s a gang of them gathering at Teatro having a drink. Maybe you should go and do the show there.’

Took.’

‘The Gallaghers are in, though. Apparently they just punched their way straight through to the front door. They’re in the VIP bar now. You have to admire them.’

‘No, I fookin’ don’t. They’ll get arseholed on my beer an’ then shout out rude Mancy witticisms during me ballads. Warrabout Robbie?’

‘Still in LA, of course, but he sent flowers.’

‘Flowers!’

‘Yeah, and a card. Most amusing…‘Dear Ex Pop Hero. Thanks for warming up the UK crowd for me. I’ll be back next year to show them what a rock ‘n’ roll star really looks like.’ Nice, eh?’

Tommy’s normally fairly indulgent sense of humour instantly and completely deserted him. He was overtaken by sudden fury, a feature of the drug cocktail that he had already consumed.

‘Right, that’s it. Turn round, take me to fookin’ Heathrow! Get me on a fookin’ plane. I’m going to give that bastard a smack in the mouth. I’ll whack ‘im, I’ll twat ‘im, I will ‘it ‘im wi’ me knob. The sweaty little fookin’ mushroom.’

‘Can’t turn round, Tom. Can’t go forward, can’t go back.’

‘Well, what are we gonna do?’

‘Dunno.’

Tommy did what he always did in such circumstances. On this occasion his choice of stimulant was a couple of nosefuls of amphetamines.

BEHIND THE ASTORIA THEATRE, SOHO SQUARE

I
n Sutton Row, just round the corner from where Tommy’s car was stuck, a difficult social situation had developed.

Peter Paget was in the process of conducting a small group of MPs, including a Home Office minister, around the backs of various London theatres. It is an accident of architecture that these stage-door areas have become one of the prime locations of choice for the injection of heroin and the associated activities of whoring, pimping, slumping out unconscious, urinating on walls, fighting and dying. If you are a homeless and hopeless addict it is actually quite difficult to find a relative degree of privacy to satisfy your cravings. The fast-food outlets have become increasingly wise to the fact that their toilets were being adopted as shooting galleries and have made efforts to prevent the practice, in some cases installing blue lighting that prevents people from being able to see their veins. The backs of theatres, however, are no-man’s-land. Nobody seems to have responsibility for them, and the mainstream of life passes them by in the glamorous streets out front. Normally these dingy stage-door areas open on to alleyways, their walls indented with emergency exit crash door alcoves, while large dustbins often provide further cover. The only legitimate population of these places is the nicotine-addicted actors who are no longer allowed to smoke in their dressing rooms. This makes these areas reasonably attractive to those whose options for rest and privacy are severely limited. Not as good as a Burger King toilet, but a lot better than down by the river under some stinking, dripping bridge.

If the matinee audiences of the latest Ayckbourn revival or fascinating transfer from the Almeida had X-ray vision and could see beyond the actors and through the back wall of the theatre they were sitting in, they would very likely see the real human drama of people with their trousers round their ankles and their skirts hitched up around their waists poking dirty needles into their genitals. Were Hogarth to drop in to such a place from the gin-soaked alleys of the eighteenth century, he would find little that surprised him.

It was in order to view this unedifying offshoot of the West End’s glamorous theatreland that Peter Pa get had led his little cross-party group from the stage door of the Dominion Theatre across St Giles Circus and up Sutton Row to the rear of the Astoria. It had been his intention to then take his fellow MPs to the back of the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue, a place where the ageing brickwork is so soaked in urine that the actors inside refuse to take ground-floor dressing rooms because of the stink.

Unfortunately, Peter had reckoned without Tommy Hanson’s ‘secret’ gig. As they stood speaking to a heroin addict named Robert, who had been seeking privacy in a crash door alcove, it was as if half the teenagers in London had descended upon them, along with every shop assistant on Oxford Street, who, having finished work, had wandered down to catch a glimpse of Tommy.

Trapped as he and his colleagues were with this dirty junkie, conversation was beginning to flag. Having established at some length that if Westminster Council were to provide a pkce where Robert could use clean needles and dispose of them in a socially responsible way he would go there, they had little else to discuss. Strangely, at this moment, Robert felt slightly socially responsible himself. In a way, he was the host, and now his guests were trapped with him after they clearly wished to leave. It was like an awful end-of-dinner party moment when the taxi fails to arrive despite repeated telephone calls and host and guest sit staring at each other over empty coffee cups, longing for the evening to finally end.

‘Sorry about this, dude. It’s normally pretty quiet at this time of day,’ Robert said.

‘That’s all right,’ Peter replied. ‘It’s astonishingly crowded, isn’t it? Somebody’s going to get hurt.’

All four Members of Parliament were being pushed closer and closer towards Robert as the ebb and flow of people seeped into every available space. It was not long before Peter was horrified to find himself actually physically forced against this filthy person. Peter was the taller and so his nose was hovering in the vicinity of Robert’s lank, greasy hair. He struggled to master the heaving nausea in his stomach. The smell of piss and sweat and grease and ancient clothing that emanated from the addict was overwhelming. Peter’s discomfort was increased by the fact that Robert was beginning to twitch.

‘Look, man, I’ve got a problem now, right?’

Peter stared into the space above Robert’s head. He could not answer.

‘You see, that shooting gallery you want to build ain’t built, is it?’

Once more Peter could only grunt.

‘Which is why I came here to jack up…’

A pause.

‘But, you see, I didn’t jack up because you lot came along and started chatting…Well, you don’t like to jack up when you’re chatting, do you? So I thought to myself, I’ll just sit on it, you know, man, sweat it out, control my cravings till you lot have found out enough facts, right? Then you’ll go and I’ll hit myself up…’

Peter and his colleagues were beginning to understand where this was going, although they prayed that it was not so. ‘But of course you lot haven’t gone, have you? Because we’ve got all crushed in. I mean, this has never happened before, all these girls filling up the street. It’s really, really unusual. But the fact is, I’m getting really quite strung out now…So what I’m basically saying is I hope you won’t think me, you know, rude or ignorant or anything, but I’m going to have to shoot some scag into my cock.’

And so Peter Paget’s fact-finding mission got more facts than it had either bargained for or desired. Jam-packed though they were, Robert squirmed and wriggled until he was able to reach into his pocket and produce the wherewithal to prepare a needleful of heroin, the tin foil, the cigarette lighter, the twist of dirty brown powder.

‘Would you mind holding the foil while I cook it up? It’s just I’ve no room to squat down and do it on the ground.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m a Member of Parliament and it’s not appropriate.’

‘Oh.’

Peter’s colleagues felt the same way, although the Liberal Democrat thought about it for slightly longer before refusing.

Forced to act alone, Robert held the foil between his lips while f using one hand to pour the brown powder into it and the other to hold the lighter under it. The foil soon glowed red and it clearly must have been burning Robert’s lips, but a combination of necessity and the drug addict’s increased pain threshold meant that he did not flinch. Peter wished that he had had the courage to offer to help. It would have been a powerful political gesture, but he did not offer now. Very carefully, Robert removed the little foil bowl of liquid from his mouth. The foil had burnt itself onto his lower lip and so he tore it, leaving a smoky scrap of tin stuck to his mouth. Then, with the concentration of a brain surgeon, he was able to produce a syringe from his pocket and using only one hand dip the needle into the liquid and draw back the plunger with his thumb. Then, having expelled the air from the body of the syringe while taking care not to expel any of its precious contents, Robert reached down and, unbuttoning the fly of his filthy combat trousers, dug out his penis from its dark recess.

Suddenly, everything went so horribly wrong that Peter’s nightmares would be haunted by the moment that followed for the rest of his life. Never ever would he be free from the memory of the agonizing horror of what then occurred.

There was a scream. It came from three teenaged girls who were crushed up behind the MPs and had been watching with utter fascination as this creature from Mars surrounded by what appeared to be four bank managers prepared what they knew to be heroin. These girls had so far been privately congratulating themselves on their level of sophistication. They knew all about drugs. Heroin was no big deal to them; they knew its nicknames and called it scag or smack. Of course they knew that they would never take it themselves, but there were always rumours about bad girls at school, girls who ‘jacked up’. Oh yes, these girls, like all kids their age, considered themselves entirely hip to the drug scene. They giggled when their earnest teachers tried falteringly to explain to them that which they already knew…But now, suddenly, innocence was lost. Seeing Robert’s choice of inlet, the girls’ happy air of sophistication and sangfroid evaporated completely. The appearance of Robert’s dirty, veiny, bent and slightly knobbly penis, and the vicious, gleaming needle that hovered above it, quite simply horrified these not-quite-as-tough-as-they thought-they-were girls, and together they had let out a single, involuntary, piercing scream.

Three teenaged girls screaming at once and in perfect unison is a big noise.

Robert jumped. Well, he did not so much jump as jerk. There was no room to jump, crammed in as he was by a four-member cross-party fact-finding committee from the House of Commons, but there was room to violently twitch, room to jerk, room for Robert’s hand to fly sideways and in so doing plunge the needle he held a good inch and a half into Peter Paget’s thigh.