2008 - Kill Your Friends

by John Niven

  “Fucking result.”

  “So, it’s after six now—” Suddenly, thankfully, the Bee Gees finish playing and Ben Elton walks back on and starts crapping away. Desoto lowers his voice a little. “It’s after six, so I play the ‘shall we go over to the pub for a chat?’ card. Not one of them, not one, says no.”

  “So, how many did you fuck?”

  “Three. Two of them played the boyfriend card early on. The others, it was four or five vodka tonics, back to my place—bosh. Thank you very much and see you later Sooty.”

  “You didn’t even have to buy dinner?” I ask, genuinely impressed.

  “Once. One of them wanted dinner.”

  “How much was the ad?” asks Trellick.

  “Couple of hundred.”

  “And you got laid three times?”

  “Correctos,” says Desoto, trying to hail a waiter.

  “Bargain of the fucking millennium,” Trellick says.

  “Couldn’t you get sued?” I ask.

  “Bollocks. What am I going to get sued for?”

  “Fuck knows. Misrepresentation?”

  “Listen, clown, I told them very clearly, upfront, “I’m really sorry, there’s no job.” They’re not doing me thinking it’ll get them anywhere. In fact, one of them actually thanked me for ‘being so honest’!” The idea of a girl existing somewhere who is dense enough to believe that Desoto is honest is so lunatic that Trellick and I both burst out laughing. “Two hours later, I’m doing her up the fucking Gary.” Desoto drains his flute and thumps it down, looking very pleased with himself.

  “Did you wear a condom?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah,” says Desoto, with no sincerity whatsoever as he leans back in his chair to survey the room.

  Desoto only got divorced last year. It was a blinder. He’d packed the family off to Italy for a holiday, telling the wife he had to stay on in London for a few days. Work. He’d meet up with them. The wife, nanny and kids fuck off out of it and Desoto gets stuck into a forty-eight hour crack bender.

  He hadn’t got the wife’s messages—the unacceptable hotel, the lost luggage, the heat, the kid’s illness—because he’d lost his mobile somewhere along the line. Nor did he check the home messages. He was so cracked up and the music was so loud, that he didn’t hear the front door, then the feet on the stairs.

  Desoto’s wife opened the bedroom door and the children—aged five and seven—burst out from behind her, laughing at the thrill of surprising Daddy. Daddy gradually came into focus through the children’s watering eyes; watering first chemically from the rubbery stench of burning bicarbonate of soda, then watering naturally through tears of confusion and anguish: Daddy was naked with a jutting, Viagra-fueled erection. Daddy was propped up against the headboard, almost in crucifix position with a Coke-can crack pipe in one hand and a shit-streaked dildo in the other. Daddy had a dreamy grin strung across his face as he watched two young Latvian girls—hired cheaply from an agency he favoured—furiously 69-ing each other across the foot of the bed, their heads coming up, their mouths both slick with cum as the scream began to rise from Mrs Desoto.

  The divorce was swift and financially close to ruinous. Among many other things she sought, and secured, an enormous monthly payment towards the cost of post-traumatic stress counselling for the children.

  We sit and scan the room and gossip and bitch. It’s very easy—everyone falls neatly into one of two categories: winners and losers. People on the up and people on the down. The winners are ‘fucking cunts’ and the losers are, well, ‘fucking losers’. At a nearby table Schneider is talking to Nick Raphael, an A&R guy, recently installed at BMG with Christian Tattersfield. Raphael, in his turn, is monitoring the room over Schneider’s shoulder, casually yet fiercely casting about for an upgrade. He doesn’t need to be caught having a high-profile conversation with a loser like Schneider. Like being caught cracking jokes with a rabbi in downtown Berlin in 1938. Desoto nods towards Schneider and says, “Dead man talking.”

  Trellick, catching the drift, waves a hand in the air and says “Waiter? A bottle of Schadenfreude for my friends here.”

  A few yards away Ellie Crush is interviewed by some TV girl. “Very exciting,” the interviewer gushes breathlessly to the camera, “twenty-one-year-old Ellie Crush taking home Best British Breakthrough Artist tonight. Ellie, just quickly, what does winning this award mean to you?”

  “Oh God,” says Ellie, hefting the silver statuette into view, “I’m speechless, Jo! Honestly, I can’t even begin to tell you how much this means to me.” She glances around the babbling throng. “I’m going to have to find a safe place to put it, mind you!”

  “Thanks, Ellie.”

  “Cheers!”

  “Doable,” Trellick says thoughtfully. “Very doable.”

  “Mmmmm,” I say as Crush comes towards us through the crowd, the statuette cradled against her chest, a bottle of champagne and lit cigarette dangling from the other hand. “Hi, Ellie,” I say as she passes.

  “Oh, hi…there!” her face explodes into a ludicrous smile. “Mwwwah, mwwwah.” She smacks the air either side of my cheeks.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Shit, I can’t bloody believe it! Will you pinch me? I feel like I’m dreaming!” Her face is just an exclamation mark.

  “Nah, you deserve it.”

  “Aww, thanks, love.” She tries to take a swig of the champagne but burns her hair with the cigarette, dropping her award in the process. Her press officer steps in to help manage the crisis as, right on cue, Parker-Hall emerges from the throng, accepting handshakes, his features a picture of benevolent indulgence. It’s always worse when they’re magnanimous. “OI! OI!” Ross shouts in greeting.

  “All right, lads? Steven,” he says, shaking my offered hand. “What a fucking result that was, eh?” he says, rubbing his hands together briskly and accepting a cigarette from Trellick. “Done them other cunts up like kippers, didn’t we?”

  Remember, Parker-Hall comes from Hampstead.

  “You fluky cunt,” I say.

  “Suck my root,” he says, lighting up.

  “What you up to later?” Ross asks.

  “We got a party on. Up West, innit?” Parker-hall says, reaching into his pocket and handing out a brick of laminates to his after-after-party. “Right, better do one. Ellie’s got to meet the press while she can still fucking speak. C’mon, love.” As he ushers her off Crush turns to me and says “Bye…um, Alex.”

  Trellick is still laughing when we reach the green-and-white EXIT sign which glows in the distance on the other side of the auditorium, showing us the way to the after-party.

  ♦

  After the awards ceremony proper finishes the floodgates open and the cannon fodder pours in: the secretaries, marketing assistants, junior PRs, make-up artists, runners, stylists, hairdressers, accountants, legal assistants and friends-of-friends who could only get after-show tickets. Clearly you or I would, upon being told that these were the only tickets available to us, simply climb into a warm bath and open up our veins. However, these losers consider themselves lucky, fortunate even, to be able to get within two bouncers of Robbie or Liam. To be allowed to pay for their own drinks. The secretaries in our building spend months planning for tonight. They buy new clothes, they get haircuts and facials, and they pool their miserable salaries to buy a few grams. It’s a boiler-fest in here.

  Now, you keep reading things—in magazines, in newspapers—about how the nineties are turning out to be, well, nice. According to these articles, men in the sharing, caring nineties have rejected the hollow materialism and sexism of the eighties and embraced women as equals. Partners. You read these things and you wonder—where the fuck are the people who write this stuff hanging out? Primary schools? A rural Greenpeace office?

  My industry, always resistant to change (in the fifties we hated the idea of singles, in the seventies cassettes were the enemy, initially CDs were the Antichrist in the eighties—boy, we soon got our heads aroun
d that one), hasn’t really bought into all this nonsense yet.

  Thankfully, very few women seem to have understood it either. There are lots of them already here and thousands more clamouring to get in. Every day piles of CVs tumble into the office. Fresh-faced young girls with excellent qualifications, all hungry to get a job where, in return for working twelve-hour days, being sexually harassed from dawn till dusk, having to cope with all manner of coked-up, coming-down, hung-over, flaky, irrational, abusive, demanding behaviour from people like me, they will be rewarded with maybe fifteen grand a year, the odd backstage pass and occasional glimpses of pop stars in the building.

  In toilets, offices, broom cupboards, hotel stairwells and on the chill leather seats of BMWs, Saabs and Mercedes coupes, they will suck cocks and take it up the arse. Their twenties will flash by in a holocaust of parties, hangovers, semen and bad champagne until, one fine morning somewhere down the line, they wake up to find themselves thirty-five years old with sagging tits, a cancerous, shrivelled womb, tired, fucked-out eyes, and a complexion battered by late nights, drugs and cocks. A lucky few of these girls will, through a combination of low cunning and viciously skilful fellatio, manage to marry one of the executives they serve and hang on to him for—at best—a decade, raising his children and decorating the house while he works late at the office pumping his way through her successors. Eventually, either she will put her foot down or (more likely) he will upgrade to one of the Sophies or Samanthas who replaced her. They will get divorced somewhere in their mid-forties and she will find herself standing in the kitchen of a big house somewhere in Buckinghamshire with two nasty, pre-pubescent monsters whingeing at her as she haplessly uncorks her second bottle of white wine at half past four in the afternoon.

  A very, very few of these girls will manage to marry one of the pop stars. The Meg Matthews deal. This is the record-industry boiler equivalent of winning the lottery—the Pretty Woman, rags-to-riches story that surely keeps so many of these girls choking down warty cocks, swallowing spunk and throwing themselves down on all fours like it’s going out of fashion for the best part of twenty years. It. Could. Be. You. For the tiny minority of Cinderellas who pull off this incredible coup the life pattern will be much the same as it is for the ones who marry the executives, although the time frame of the marriage will be greatly truncated and the remuneration significantly enhanced.

  We’re hunkered around a corner table in another cavernous room. Billowing white drapes have been hung, candles lit and carpeting laid down. There are blackjack tables and roulette wheels but, here and there, you can still see the cement floor, the steel poles and corrugated metal of the roof and the gloomy dark above the canopies. You remember that the hulk of Earls Court looks down impassively on everything from car and boat shows to international widget manufacturers conferences—all of them filled with the same kind of guys trying to figure out if Susan from accounts is really up for it or not. Echoing behind the crack of champagne corks, the supercharged laughter, the crackle of suits and sparkling dresses, there is a tinny, reverberating sound. It is the sound of people trying to have a really good time in a lightly decorated underground car park.

  Pete Dunn rocks up to our table, arms raised, a bottle of Perrier Jouet in each fist. “AHHHHHGH! Wahey the lads!” he screeches. He’s a big guy, Dunn. Once chunky and, back in the eighties, ponytailed, he’s now bald and running, sprinting in fact, to fat. His broad Geordie face is ruddy, the stubble greying and the eyes puffy, set back in little pouches. Dunn is our Head of Radio and TV Promotions. He has spent his adult life wheedling and begging radio DJs and programmers and kids’ TV producers and presenters to put our acts on their shows. I’m sure he loved his job when he was twenty-six: falling out of nightclubs with Radio 1 DJs and flying to the south of France with pop stars. Now pushing forty-six his every waking moment is a nightmare. Told to fuck off and die on a daily, hourly, basis by TV and radio executives, he must then drive back to the office where he is—far more robustly—told to fuck off and die by Derek.

  How much better his job would have been back in the good old days of the fifties—the golden era of payola and 1 per cent artist royalty rates. Now payola was a genius idea, wasn’t it? Tell me that wasn’t a winner for everyone involved? You didn’t have to take anyone out to dinner and suck their dick. You didn’t have to laugh at Chris Evans’s jokes. You just paid the cunts. Here’s the money, now play the record and fuck you. Fuck you.

  Not too bright to begin with, a decade of grovelling and sucking dick has turned Dunn into a sort of failed light entertainer with a melancholic streak. He pours champagne into all our glasses, singing, “Here we go, here we go, here we go.” Shouldn’t he be at home with the wife and kids? Then you remember—he went upgrades and left the wife and kids two years ago, to go balls-deep in a twenty-year-old dancer he met at the taping of some Saturday-morning kiddie moronathon. She, in her turn, left him for some photographer’s assistant six months later. His upgrade upgraded him.

  Dunn actually raises his glass to propose a toast—something only the truly suicidal ever do. “To the lads!” he shouts.

  Waters joins in like a retard, pathetically clunking his plastic flute against Dunn’s. Leamington from Virgin materialises through the crowd and sidles over to me.

  “Oi oi,” he says.

  “All right, mate? Two awards for those cows?” I say, nodding across the room towards Mel B, “You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? They must think it’s fucking Christmas.”

  “Nah, I think Geri’s off crying somewhere.”

  “Ah, fuck her. Congratulations.”

  “Nothing to do with me, mate,” he says shrugging, “but cheers.” We clack tumblers. “Here,” Leamington says, “is it right what I’m hearing about your old mucker Rage?”

  “What are you hearing?”

  “That it’s all gone Colonel Kurtz—he’s upriver, gone fucking native. Off his nut on the nosebag, months in the studio, no contact with anyone.”

  “Fuck knows. Schneider’s problem.”

  “When’s the record due?”

  “Three months ago.”

  “Could be Bad News Bears for Schneider.”

  “Mmmm,” I say. As we drink and gossip and bitch I look over at the recently clean and sober Robbie Williams, who is sitting at a table a few feet away. He’s fiddling with the label on a bottle of mineral water, smoking two-handed, and nodding while some guy I don’t know—some manager, some lawyer—explains something to him. Williams periodically turns away to stare hard—a hard stare I know well—at the glittering rump of some boiler standing near him. Poor bastard, I guess that’s all he’s got now, isn’t it? The pumping. Can you imagine it? You’re not even thirty and you can’t do anything any more. No nose-up, no pills, no frosty beers, no warming shots of Jack or Remy. You’re just sitting there, completely sober, in your fuck-off mansion, dressed head to foot in all the finery you spent the morning trawling New Bond Street with some stylist for, you’ve just given up trying to read some book for the umpteenth time, because it’s too hard, you’re turning on Sky Sports again, or forcing some underling to drink fruit juice and play cards with you, and you’re thinking—another forty years of this? You’re just some stage kid, some poor song-and-dance spastic with a cheeky grin who fate threw a whole bunch of sevens. And now you’re staring down the wrong end of four decades with just your own thoughts for company when you don’t really have two fucking thoughts to rub together. Nasty.

  Danny Rent sidles up. He’s a scumbag, a real rapist of a manager, one of those old-school Tin Pan Alley guys that you just don’t see much any more: late forties, stubble, well-worn Armani suit with hash burns all over it, heavy gold Rolex (so wrong) on his right wrist. He looks like a down-on-his-luck nightclub owner from Miami Vice and smells like he just went on a four-day Scotch binge and then jumped into a vat of aftershave.

  “Hey, Stelfox, how’s tricks?” he says.

  “Oi oi,” Isay.

  “Listen, I
been meaning to call you. Got a bit of a band coming together just now that’s right up your Strasse, mate.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Fucking yeah. Four birds. Girl power. limit.”

  Christ, I bet no one else is thinking that, the week the Spice Girls go to N°1 in the States. “Any good?” I say.

  “Fucking useless at the minute, mate, but you’d do the lot of them. We’re working on it. One of em’s got sumfin.”

  “Yeah? What they called?”

  “Get this—Songbirds. Gerrit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right, do you want a fucking nose-up or what?”

  Girl power. Do me a fucking favour. However, there’s going to be a bunch of these whores having it away over the next couple of years. No question. One thing you learn when you’re in the business of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there’s really no bottom to where they’ll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it—a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first place—the more they’ll eat it up with a fucking big spoon, from dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time. It’s too good.

  ♦

  Come the early hours we wind up at the Met Bar and then up into the hotel above, to Parker-Hall’s suite for his ‘after-after-party’. We’re all chang’d up to the eyeballs by this point and listening to a chang’d-up Parker-Hall go through a variant of his ‘How-I-Did-It’ speech for, surely, the billionth time tonight. Now and again Chalmers, Crush’s Product Manager, will boringly interject details about the marketing plan, how big the TV ad spend is going to be, the increased poster campaign, who they’re getting to direct the next video. Chalmers is just one of the thousand fathers suddenly lining up to stamp their parentage on Crush’s success. “We’re looking at doing thirty thousand albums a week from here on,” he says.

  I’m trying not to hear this. The expression on my face is pleasant while, inside, I feel like the village girl as she stares at the face of the tenth soldier in the raping queue—blood on her thighs and half a pint of semen already up her. I’m not here, I tell myself. I’m walking in a forest. I’m walking in a forest…