Kill Your Friends (25 page)

“You fucking…idiot.”

“Don’t call me an idiot!” she says, stopping her thrusts,
sounding genuinely hurt.

“Sorry. You fucking…cow?” This restores order and she pushes
back onto me again. Bit close to the bone there possibly.

Well, things degenerated from there. I mean they really went
downhill—coke, Valium, more Viagra and amyl were all relentlessly
produced from Rebecca’s handbag and the minibar was thoroughly
emptied as we got off our chanks and went properly crackers.
Somewhere around dawn, even with the cock-pills, my prick is
destroyed. It’s a cautionary tale—a bloody, red-raw, still-erect
slab of disgrace. And still Rebecca wants more. She’s lying back,
eyes closed and a couple of pillows underneath her as she busily
works the index and middle fingers of her right hand over her
pussy. “Please keep fucking me,” she moans.

Fuck her?
Fuck me
.

I root around on the floor of the bedroom. Nothing—I thought
there might be a champagne bottle, but we’ve been drinking the
mini-splits of Moet from the minibar. And I don’t think a
mini-split is going to do it here. I mean, she wants a fucking
battleship up there. She wants the Death Star.

With Rebecca still moaning and writhing on the bed I charge into
the bathroom and still find nothing. There’s no deodorant cans, no
big bottle of shampoo, not even a bog brush—nothing which could
make for a reasonable facsimile of a functioning cock. In
desperation I throw open the wardrobe. Coat hangers. “Hang on a
minute…” I say.

A few grunts and twists and turns (and in my memory I’m not sure
what Rebecca’s up to during all of this, whether she’s aware of
what I’m doing or not. I think she’s wanking herself off. Or doing
coke. Or both). I manage to fashion a strange cock-like contraption
from a wire coat hanger. I mean, it looks exactly like a long,
thin, cock. The only real drawback, I suppose, is that it is flat
and two-dimensional. But we give it a go anyway, both of us mad and
sweating and naked; me kneeling on the floor at the foot of the
bed, frowning—tongue between my teeth in concentration—as I grimly
work the contraption into her, looking for all the world hike a
backstreet abortionist on an emergency call-out.

After a while, as her moans decrease, I said, “It’s not really
working, is it?” and, shortly after that, thankfully, we both
passed out.

♦

“Hello, you,” she says and leans in for a kiss. Mindful of all
the utter disgrace her mouth was put through just a few short hours
ago—at one point it felt like she was trying to get her whole head
up my arse—I manage to just graze her lips before blurting out,
“Shit, I’m late,” and running for the shower.

I lean tiredly under the stinging needles and think about how
quickly I can have Rebecca fired. Fired? No, not these days, you’re
joking, aren’t you? You’ll be up in front of some tribunal before
you can say, “She loved it, Your Honour.” With a sigh I get a
foreboding glimpse of how very badly I am going to have to treat
Rebecca in the coming weeks and months in order to get her to
quit.

I tiptoe back into the bedroom, praying she’ll have fallen
asleep. She hasn’t. She’s propped up on one elbow on the pillow
watching me carefully. “I’ve got to go,” I say, “Glasgow.”

“I know,” she says, tonelessly. I bend down to pick up my
trousers. There, on the floor next to them, is a strangely bent
coat hanger. The contraption. Queasily I kick it under the bed.
“Steven?” Rebecca says.

“Mmmm?”

“You killed Roger. Didn’t you?”

Total silence. Somewhere outside the window, a seagull squawks.
I blink at her, too hung-over to think, to lie. I manage a hoarse,
feeble laugh as I say, “What?”

“I don’t care,” she goes on, matter-of-factly, “he was an
idiot.”

I sit down and we look right at each other for a long time,
neither of us saying anything. It is like I am really seeing
Rebecca for the first time, seeing some reserve of strength, of
will, that I never knew she had.

“Why do you think I killed him?”

“I follow you sometimes. I go to all these stupid gigs because I
know you’re going to be there. I was parked across the street from
Roger’s house the night he died. Just watching the flat because I
knew you were in there. I saw you leaving.”

“Why would you…”

“I love you, Steven.”

I sit there basking in this fresh hell while I allow myself time
to register the new information:
Rebecca is insane
. It’s a
long time before I speak.

“What do you want to do?” I say.

She tells me. I can’t believe I’ve heard her properly so I ask
her to repeat it.

“I want us to get married,” she says for the second time.
“OK…”

“And then we’ll never talk about Roger again.”

“OK…”

♦

A few traumatic hours later (I lost my car keys so we have to
get a cab to Gatwick while the Saab stays in Brighton; squatting in
the NCP, racking up thirty quid a day in charges) I’m standing at
reception at the Glasgow Hilton trying to check in. There’s a
braying mob five-deep in front of me, all waving credit cards,
travel vouchers and confirmation slips. The girls behind reception
look like the last few Redcoats left at Rorke’s Drift, trying to
front out an angry mob of spear-chuckers with two bullets and a
tattered Bible.

Behind me the bar, lobby and reception area have all merged into
one drunken scrum and Parker-Hall is already working the crowd.
(“All right, geezer! Nice one! Pack orf, you cant!”) I just want to
get up to my room. To think. To try and plot some way forward
through the chaos.

Parker-Hall and I were late getting up here because of our
conference. Some people, a lot of the scouts, have already been
here a couple of days. Pete Tong says hello. Nigel Coxon from
Island strides by. Matthew Rumbold from Food waves hello. A bunch
of publishers are huddled at the bar; Mike Smith from EMI is
talking animatedly to Bruce Craigie from Deceptive and that lawyer
from Russell’s, the one who is handling the Idlewild deal. Rob
Stringer is listening, angrily, to his mobile phone. Ian Brodie
from the Lightning Seeds shuffles by. People are talking about
bands. They’re talking about Idlewild, the Lanterns and the Smiles.
They’re talking about Magicdrive and Dawn of the Replicants.
They’re talking about the High Fidelity, Tarn and Fat Lip as
‘Candle in the Wind’ is piped through the lobby, swirling beneath
the roar of conversation.

In The City again. In The Fucking City.

In The City is an annual music industry convention that was
knocked together in the early nineties by Tony Wilson, who used to
run Factory Records—until those cretins the Happy Mondays skanked
the whole label down the shitter for a bag of rocks. Then Wilson
somehow chiselled a deal out of Tracy Bennett and Roger Ames over
at London Records for a new label, the hysterically named Factory
Too, which also recently went under, having produced zero hits in
three years. Laugh? I nearly bought a fucking round.

Anyway, it seems that all this wasn’t quite enough to fill
Wilson’s days for him so, a few years back, he decided that what
the music industry really needed more than anything was
another
fucking convention. Hundreds of bands playing in
dozens of venues all over the city, networking opportunities (have
Hans from Düsseldorf palm you a 12 of some mad techno you will
never listen to), and discussions and debates on things like ‘Is
the Remix a Valid Artform?’, ‘Will the Internet Engender a
Pan-Global Dissolution of the Record Industry?’ and ‘Darkies: Have
They Been Ripped Off Over the Years, Or What?’

Every year now you have to sit through this shit. (And have you
ever tried to get hold of a decent hooker up North? Fuck me. A
couple of years ago, desperate in Manchester, I pulled this
toothless pig into the cab off the street. She started undressing
in my hotel room and, for a second, I thought she was wearing some
artful, designer bodice. It turned out to be a lattice-work of
stained, seeping bandages. The AIDS, I supposed, literally leaking
out of her. I threw her a tenner and kicked her into the elevator
rapid-style.)

The whole thing would be just about tolerable if they had it in
Soho but, no, every September we all have to troop off to
Manchester, or Dublin, or Glasgow. You check into the Holiday Inn,
or the Ramada, and bowl around a skanky Northern city—getting in
and out of taxis in the rain, standing in drizzly guest-list
queues, having damp business cards thrust into your hands by
stinking amateur hour ‘managers’ and indie label ‘bosses’—for a few
days, seeing a load of unsigned bands. They’re unsigned for a
reason, of course. Every single one of them is fucking shit.
Cheers, Tony.

Leamington comes over to us through the crush. “Oi oi,” he
says.

“Oi oi,” I reply.

“Did you hear about your boy? Well, former boy.”

“Who?”

“Rage. He was DJing here at this thing last night. Gets into an
argument with some bouncers, starts giving it all the
‘do-you-facking-know-who-I-am’ business—the usual—anyway, they beat
the fucking shit out of him.”

“Good on them,” I say.

“Nah, mate, I mean they
properly
beat the shit out of
him. They’re talking about fucking brain damage and the like.”

Wow, I think. How can they tell?

♦

When I get into the room the message light is flashing on the
phone. I hit the button and put it on speaker while I get a drink
from the minibar. As I rummage among the cool shelves I get
this:

“Hi, Steven, it’s Alan Woodham. I gather you’re up at In The
City.” Woodham’s tone is flat, neutral. “Listen, you said you’d get
back to me about this publishing deal before the end of August.
It’s now the middle of September and I haven’t heard anything. I’ve
tried ringing you several times now. I left a couple of messages on
your phone. I need you to call me back because…”

I cannot bear long phone messages. You want to kill, don’t you?
What’s wrong with “Call me back?” Why crap on for a fortnight? It’s
like directions, as soon as someone gets past the third “and then a
left at that roundabout and then—” you just want to cut their
tongue out and fucking feed it to them.

The Woodham situation: after striking out with all the big
publishers I actually sent his miserable demo round some of the
smaller independent publishers—Complete, Rondor, Netting Hill
Music—and got told to fuck off there too.

“…there’s something else I need to talk to you about. In
connection with the Roger Waters murder.”

Hang on a fucking minute.

“So please call me back as soon as you get this.”

I pick up the receiver and drop it back down, cutting the
message off, and start scrolling through my mobile for his number.
Outside, the sky is the colour of smoked glass and it is starting
to rain. Christ, I hate Scotland. What a nation of fucking
losers.

I twist the caps off of three tiny bottles of Johnnie Walker
from the minibar, pour them into a dirty glass and neck the lot. I
start smoothing the coke out, covering the powder with a fifty and
then scrubbing my room key up and down the note. I snort the line
and sit back and give my problems free rein to strut and preen in
my head.

As problems will, they soon settle themselves into a swirling,
but definite, hierarchy. At the bottom level, coughing and
grumbling and looking for attention, are all the constant, normal,
low-level issues to do with work and money: Who can I get to remix
the Songbirds single? How big is the Lazies LP—and subsequently
Parker-Hall—going to be? How much more cash will the house
haemorrhage? I must do my expenses. I should be getting paid
more.

Floating above all this, sharper, clearer, more insistent, are
the newcomers: My car is still in the NCP in Brighton. It is
possible that Parker-Hall thinks I am a loser and will soon fire
me. Does Woodham really know anything? And—straight in at N°1 with
a fucking bullet—Rebecca has been stalking me. She’s gone round the
bend, figured out I killed Waters and yet she wants to marry me
regardless. (On reflection perhaps this isn’t quite as crazy as it
seems—didn’t Ted Bundy get inundated with marriage proposals? And
he was properly hardcore. He killed and raped dozens of women. Top
lad, Bundy.)

I glug a belt of Scotch, honk a stupefying line of chang, and
dial Woodham’s mobile. He answers on the second ring. “Alan? Hi,
it’s Steven. Listen, sorry for not getting back to you sooner. It’s
been mental recently. I—”

“Mr Stelfox,” (no ‘Steven’, ‘Steven’ is long gone), “can you
tell me why one of your neighbours claims that they saw you
entering your flat at 5.30
AM
on the morning of
Roger Waters’ murder when you already told me you’d arrived home
around 11.30 the previous evening and gone straight to bed?”

He just rattles this off, staccato, machine-gun style. The blood
in my head starts pumping so hard behind my eyeballs that I think
they’re going to burst out of my skull. “I…I got up early and…went
for a paper?”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where did you buy this newspaper?” This is a different guy I’m
talking to.

“At the newsagent…on the corner of Shirland Road and Elgin
Avenue.” Fuck, fuck, fuck—are they even open at that time? This
will be so easy to check.

“Alan, is everything OK?”

“I don’t know,” he says, “is it?”

I think hard, and then I’m talking. “Listen, Alan, I’m sorry I
haven’t got back to you, about the demos. It’s…it’s looking good.
It’s just taking a little time. We’ll get there.”

“Whatever you can do would be great.” He hangs up.

Woodham’s new voice is clipped and formal, so much
older-sounding than his indie-kid-down-the-Monarch voice. His new
voice is the leathery whisper of gloves coming off, the hard-edged
crack of cards being slapped on the table.