Kill Your Friends (32 page)

He is a dead man and he knows it.

Through the glass wall at the end of my office the new temp Jo
(twenty-five, great rack) taps away at her computer, sucking
thoughtfully on a strand of her blonde hair. She treats me
appropriately, which is to say she treats me like a god with a
hangover. She doesn’t know it yet, but in the new year, when
Rebecca mysteriously fails to return from Down Under, she will be
offered the job on a permanent basis.

Last week Derek invited me to a drinks thing over at his house,
his virus pit. I declined, but still. He knows he backed the wrong
horse. He knows that the industry perception is that he’s the
raving iron who hired a rampant paedo. To my surprise a lot of
people haven’t really needed all that much prompting to put
together the desired equation. It’s roughly something like this:
queer + Internet access × cocaine = potential paedophile. We’re
having lunch together next Tuesday—right after the Songbirds
midweek arrives—to discuss my new job.

He is going to pay.

A few hundred yards away on the Portobello Road people are
already buying Christmas tree lights and wrapping paper. They’re
buying hot sausages with fried onions. My one present was bought
some time back: tickets for my mother and her friend to go to the
Caribbean for Christmas and New Year. It’s a present that works
both ways, as it means I won’t even have to see her over the
holidays, which is fortunate—I won’t be here anyway.

Ross—that dickhead—strolls in and joins in the argument, taking
the girls’ side I think, and Joey and Chandler stomp off to their
place, Chandler turning round and getting a good crack in before he
goes. I wonder, not for the first time, about the viability of a
series of pornographic
Friends
-videos; filmed on a replica
set, with quality lookalike actors and decent production values,
although super-hardcore of course.
The One with All the
Fisting…The One with Phoebe’s Double Penetration…The One with the
GHB and the Ben-Wa Balls
…You could even do a sideline for the
faggots and the diesels—Joey and Chandler finally go for it,
looking tenderly into each other’s eyes, a thick rope of milky jizz
connecting Chandler’s mouth to Joey’s twitching prick. Monica and
Rachel in a long, rapturous 69.
The One with the Ten-Inch
Strap-On
. Massive legal problems of course, you’d have to keep
the whole operation untraceable, but I’m sure there’s a huge
market.

As someone who makes their living from anticipating, from
shaping, the tastes of millions of tasteless morons, you have to
tell yourself that the things you feel are universal, that the
things you think and feel are thought and felt by millions of other
people.

I turn the stereo off with the remote and lie back, looking up
at the cream ceiling fifteen feet above me. Six months later than
billed, and nearly a hundred grand over budget, Murdoch and the
Albanians are finally gone. The room I’m in, the ground-floor
living room, is really two rooms knocked into one. It is forty-four
feet long and eighteen feet wide, narrowing to fourteen feet
towards the back of the house. The huge windows overlook the corner
of Basing Street and Lancaster Road. The only furniture in the room
is the sofa, a massive hardwood coffee table, and a matt-black wall
of TV, VCR and stereo equipment. I won’t be here long. Shortly
after I get back from holiday in mid-January I’m letting the place
to a banker, some Sherman.

The monthly rental is absolutely horse-choking. Foxtons are
handling everything.

Next year Trellick and I are looking to buy a bigger place
together. Paint the whole gaff cream, seagrass matting throughout,
chuck a couple of nice fireplaces in and sell it sharpish.

I top my glass up and wander over to the window. A couple of
streets away, along Basing Street, left on Westbourne Park Road,
right onto Ledbury Road, is Parker-Hall’s place. It’s on the market
and stupidly overpriced. It would be pleasant to stand here—in this
huge, warm, soon-to-be profitable room, with Glenmorangie fumes
tickling my nose and tearing up my eyes—and picture him: shivering
in the dark, turning over in his bunk to face the cold, brick wall,
pulling the grimy pillow over his head to drown out the sound of
his cell mate aggressively masturbating, but, sadly, the CPS wound
up dropping the charges a few weeks later. Trellick was right;
insufficient evidence. Still, there was comfort to be had.

The day after he made bail, the headline on page four of the
Sun
raged, “PAEDOPHILE POP GURU!” Below two starkly
contrasting photographs—one of Parker-Hall with his arm around
Ellie Crush at the Q Awards and one of him being led into court by
two coppers—the story continued, “…
the talent scout responsible
for discovering multimillion-selling Brit winner Ellie Crush was
arrested after police seized computers from his west London office.
Detectives later found files containing hundreds of depraved images
of child pornography. Managing director Derek Sommers, 45,
confirmed today that Parker-Hall’s recently signed employment
contract was ‘under review’…
”

Parker-Hall’s contract remained ‘under review’ until the
Star
ran with the story on the front cover the following
day. Then it was terminated. Last week, after the charges were
dropped, Parker-Hall took a flight to Canada. Apparently he’s got
relatives out there.

Another funny incident last week too…

♦

Saturday night and we—me, Trellick, Ross, Darren, Desoto and a
few waifs and strays—wound up, unusually, south of the river, in
Club UK. Three
AM
and we were all separated,
wandering around, pilled up, moving from room to room, checking out
boilers. I was standing by the dance floor, swaying, pleasantly off
my tits when I become aware of a black guy smiling at me. There was
something familiar about him—beyond the usual
they-all-look-the-same business I mean. He continued grinning and
began nodding downwards, urging me to look too, his expression
saying ‘take a peek at this’. I followed his gaze down—half
expecting to see a cock or something—and saw another black guy, his
head at about waist height. In the dark and noise of the club it
took me a few seconds to realise who it was. One side of his face
was all screwed up—from the beating? from the brain haemorrhage
that followed?—and one side was sort of loose and flabby. It looked
like he was sucking a lemon with one half of his mouth and trying
to blow bubbles with the other. Something chrome sparkled all
around him in the dark. I looked up at the guy pushing him,
recognising him now as the guy who kissed his teeth at me at the
gig that night. “It’s Steven, ain’t it?” he said. “Yeah.”

“He wanted to say hello,” he nodded at the deformity in the
wheelchair.

“Hello, Rage,” I said. Rage tried to say something but only
managed to produce a frothy bubble of saliva.

“E don’t tawk no good since his accident.”

I nodded. Rage beckoned me closer with a twisted, flopping hand.
“T…” he said.

I continued nodding, smiling indulgently, like you do at
children and mongoloids. It dawned on me that Rage wasn’t just a
metaphorical mongoloid any more—he’s the real fucking deal.

“T…tu…” he went on, producing a lot of spit, but starting to get
somewhere, and now I noticed that the wheelchair wasn’t some
vamped-up custom job, with power steering and alloys. It was a
bog-standard NHS number. Leather-look vinyl and wheel yourself.
Times, I concluded, must be hard.

He finally got it out: “T…T…TUNE!” he spluttered, gesturing at
the air around us, at the record pounding out of the speakers. Some
drum’n’bass nonsense.

“Yeah!” I said, giving him a thumbs up. “Fucking tune!”

The minder, or helper, or whatever, leaned down to Rage and did
two things: first he wiped the (considerable) drool from Rage’s
mouth and chin, then he held a thumbnail of cocaine up to Rage’s
quivering nostril. But Rage couldn’t inhale it—maybe something to
do with the loss of motor functions or something—so the guy just
rubbed it into his gums, over the chrome and gold teeth, the teeth
themselves now a relic, a reminder of something Rage once was.

The minder glanced quickly around the packed dance floor and
held a grubby thumb towards me. “Bump?”

“Nah. I’m all right thanks.”

He did it himself and we stood there nodding along to the music
for a moment, me wondering how quickly I could get the fuck out of
there, when we both became aware of a terrible stench. We looked
down together. Rage was twisting and puffing and jerking his head
about. “Packing hell. Sorry, mate. Happens sometimes.”

I gave the only possible response. I nodded slowly.

“Do you know where the bogs are?” I didn’t, but I pointed off
into the middle distance anyway, pointing anywhere away from
me.

They trundled off and I stood watching them go, wondering if the
minder’s just a mate or if he’s on the payroll. If so, how much?
What’s the going rate for scraping the crap out of a former
‘drum’n’bass superstar’s’ caked pants? Well, at least it keeps him
off the streets.

Rage, of course, is literally of the streets. The cunt’s in a
fucking wheelchair.

I found Trellick in one of the smaller rooms—his shirt off and
going bananas to some techno tune. I leaned in and screamed in his
ear, “Have we actually dropped Rage yet?” I had to repeat it a few
times. He shook his head. “
Don’t
,” I said.

“
Don’t what?
”

“
Do. Not. Drop. Rage. Yet. Got an idea
.”

♦

The theme music from
Friends
comes on very softly in the
background. “
I’ll be there for you
…” I walk to the coffee
table and drop fresh ice into my glass and then listen to it
splinter under the amber wash of Glenmorangie. I walk back to the
window and sip my drink, resting my left palm on the windowpane.
It’s cold out there.

♦

Generally speaking I don’t like Christmas. It reminds me of
childhood and me and my mother, just the two of us, exchanging
gifts; me handing her the usual box of bath salts or whatever and
her reciprocating with the envelope of cash.

This year is a little different. This year I don’t mind the
half-hearted decorations in the office, or the extra crush and
traffic around Regent Street, or the struggle to get a decent table
anywhere.

Yeah, Christmas looks a whole lot brighter when you have the
Christmas N°1.

Derek and I go to lunch at the River Cafe. I have duck, he has
the penne. We both drink champagne. On the mid-weeks that morning
‘Fully Grown’ by Songbirds is outselling its nearest rival by
nearly two to one. Un-fucking-touchable. Derek does the contrition
thing, phrases like ‘tremendous asset’ and ‘great ears’ are freely
bandied about. At one point the deluded bender—high on the festive
spirit and a couple of Bellinis—even goes as far as to tell me he
knew we’d ‘always had a great respect for each other’. I generously
tolerate this nonsense for a while before graciously accepting his
offer of the position of Head of A
&
R.

He stammers and splutters a little as I spell out the insanely
avaricious terms of my acceptance—bonkers salary increase,
signing-on bonus, profit-share, car upgrade, etc.

—but he pretty much agrees to everything. My lawyer can work it
all out with Trellick in the new year.

In the new year I intend to have a platinum album with
Songbirds.

In the new year Derek’s own contract comes up for renewal. I am
going to make life very difficult for Derek.

In the new year I am going to have Dunn fired.

I am going to have Nicky fired.

I am going to fire Rob Hastings.

Everyone is going to pay.

Derek signals for the bill. Outside the plate-glass windows of
the River Cafe people, poor people, walk by, their chins jammed
hard down into their collars and scarves and their hands in the
pockets of thick coats. I’m leaning back from the table in
shirtsleeves. Although I can’t feel it I know there is a freezing,
salty wind blasting up off the Thames and rolling over the
pavements and people of Hammersmith. The Thames is not quite frozen
yet, here where it bends and heads out towards Oxfordshire. Guys in
canoes slide along it. The trees along the riverbank flatten back
in the chill wind. A
Big Issue
seller—who looks far too fat
to be genuine—has his tattered copy blown from his frozen hand.

The cold doesn’t worry me too much. When Derek’s paid the bill
we’ll stroll the three yards across the pavement to the waiting
car, a toasty chauffeured Merc from Addison Lee, and trundle the
half-mile back to the office, where the temperature is the same
every day of the year. Later, when my busy day is done—there are
final travel arrangements to be made for Thailand, the interior of
my new Range Rover to confirm, the clearing out of my new office
(Parker-Hall’s old office, Schneider’s old office) to supervise, a
rough cut of the new Songbirds video to approve—I’ll walk the
eighteen feet from reception to my new parking space next to
Derek’s. (Parker-Hall’s old space. Schneider’s old space.)

No, I’m not worried about the cold at all.

Derek’s mobile twitters its deranged ringtone. He pops it open.
There are a lot of dusty old houses on these side streets, in the
strange hinterland along the river, between Hammersmith and Fulham.
Ash-streaked net curtains, non-opening, fifty times painted-over
window casements, dead gardens. Probably all full of old boilers
who’ve been living there since the Blitz. Probably all undervalued
to fuck. Find yourself a simpatico estate agent—bish, bash, bosh. I
must talk to Trellick about this.

“No! Oh God no!” Derek says, his hand going to his mouth in that
queenly way. My first thought is that something unthinkable,
something truly terrible, has happened: somehow one of the records
behind the Songbirds single has had a dramatic sales surge and has
overtaken us.