But on the basement steps, Michael faltered. He heard the happy sounds of television advertising. Life. He started to descend.
‘Mike! Fuck. Are you still here?’
Hugo sat in slovenly collapse.
‘Sorry,’ Michael said, stopping on the steps. ‘Where is everybody?’
‘Oh, they went home. I thought, um, they had got you a car out the back?’
Woozy in his chair. Drunk again perhaps, or still shaking off some slumbers.
‘Yeah, they said it would be here at two. It’s out the back, is it? I just came down to say goodbye.’
‘Oh right. Yeah. They were going to get you a car out the back.’
Definitely drunk.
‘I thought your speech was great, by the way. It pissed everybody off.’
‘Thanks.’ Hugo laughed very slowly.
A moment’s sorrow pinched at Michael as he watched the guy, seven empty chairs around his own. It felt right to sell the story. No guilt there. But the desire for revenge had left him. There was simply nothing in the man to punish. Just whisky and television, and what looked like sleeping pills.
‘You shouldn’t drink with that stuff,’ he said, descending fully, placing his old suit on a chair.
‘S’fine.’ Hugo slurred him away. ‘Don’t make a panic. Your car will be waiting. Thanks for everything.’
A jab of unease.
Instead of leaving, Michael stepped further forward, so he could look at Hugo’s eyes. They were bored and hazy. And on the table he noticed something else: a plastic blister pack, crinkled to a shallow arch, sixteen shattered exits in its silver skin. He picked it up. Hugo did not try to stop him.
Diazepam Tablets BP 10 mg, read the intermittent letters on the foil.
‘Have you had Valium too?’ he asked, trying to keep the worry from his voice.
Hugo did not answer. He looked as though he was about to, but then he didn’t.
Hot fear surged up Michael’s spine. He grabbed the other pill bottle. It was very light, and silent when he shook it.
‘Fuck, Hugo! What have you taken?’
‘Ss’OK.’
‘Hugo, what have you taken?’
‘Ssh sh sh! S’fine. Don’t worry about me, just go your car.’
‘I’m getting the police.’
‘Don’t!’ Suddenly the vigour in his voice was back. ‘Just don’t, OK?’
… conditions of the Holy Father are substantially unchanged and therefore are very serious, the television said.
‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Hugo added. ‘Just say goodbye, and get in your cab. After what I’ve done. Just go.’
‘Listen …’ Michael had to find the answer. ‘I know things seem bad right now, but later …’
‘No. This is not about now. It’s about everything.’
‘But I can’t just leave you!’
Fear and pain.
… he seemed to be referring to them when, in his words, and repeated several times …
‘Yes you can. S’the bess thing you can do.’
… ‘I have looked for you. Now you have come to me. And I thank you.’ …
‘Michael. This is what I want. Look at me. This is what I want.’
There were tears on Michael’s face. ‘What about Peru?’ he said.
‘Hmm?’
‘Peru, Hugo. You could go to Peru!’
‘Proo?’
‘Peru.’
‘Mmm … asparagus.’
‘That’s right! You can have lots of asparagus!’
‘Oh … No. I know what I’m going to do.’
‘But Hugo …’
‘S’what I wan. Juss go. I know what I’m going to do.’
‘I’m not going to sell you out, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ll never sell you out.’
‘It duzzn matter.’
Hugo closed his eyes and folded his hands neatly across his stomach.
Michael watched.
He thought.
The man looked almost happy.
He thought.
And now he was walking. Tears and walking. Climbing through his rain. Go go go. Away from choices. Up through doors and handles, up, and out into the sky. Out into the cool elsewhere. The reverential trees and shushing lawn. On and on. Through wet warm land and clean botanic lives. To leave, and leave for ever. To walk into another day.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ the policeman asked kindly.
And Michael walked on. He did not want to talk about it.
Deleted Scenes
Don Scarlett’s spring collection
IN THE FIRST draft, Hugo spoke to Don Scarlett in more detail about his outrageous new designs, which were being worn for the evening by the Italian model Carlotta Bossi. I cut this passage because it felt too similar in tone to Hugo’s previous conversation with Brian and Edie. It is also rather silly.
‘You awight, Hugo?’ Don was half hiding, and half refusing to hide, his irritation at not being listened to.
‘Sorry, Don.’ Hugo scuttled back into himself. ‘I was miles away. You were saying?’
‘It’s camouflage, innnit?’
In contrast to most younger designers, Don had absorbed his love of fashion through callused hands, assembling, staffing and dismantling his mother’s fabric stall in Barking market. His boutique, Smack, had been ignored until the early punks swept in – a noisy vindication Don had never yet recovered from. A recent BBC2 special, in tribute to his three decades in fashion, hadn’t helped. He was somebody that Hugo did not wish to tangle with.
‘Camouflage?’ He presumed he had misheard.
‘Yeah, camouflage. I thought you in particular might appreciate it.’
Carlotta Bossi smiled.
Hugo looked at her again. Unbelievable.
At first sight, he had innocently wondered what the letters UNTC, printed endlessly in black across her lime green gown, might stand for. Some nobly failing cause presumably (the United Nations Tree Charter?) which had got desperate enough to chance it with Carlotta’s semi-lingual ambassadressing. Moments later, however, he noticed a horrible and hilarious accident, which, moments after that, he realised was actually Don’s horrible design. What was written on Carlotta was the word CUNT, many, many times.
‘What do you mean, “camouflage”?’ Hugo was irritated by how satisfied Don seemed. He and Carlotta were still glowing from the stir that they had caused outside.
‘Cam-ou-flage.’ Don enunciated it like Hugo was Japanese.
‘But I’d say it was quite noticeable.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ Don said testily. ‘It’s for high-profile people like yourself who get sick of all the aggro. What newspaper’s going to print a photograph of you in a shirt with the word “CUNT” written all over it?’
‘Cunta!’ Carlotta cheered.
‘I,’ Hugo said slowly, ‘see.’ He laughed a little. ‘It’s definitely a great idea, Don. All that repetition almost takes away the meaning of the word.’
‘Nope. It still means cunt.’
‘No, no, I mean it isn’t shocking when you see it written out so many times.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Don sounded disappointed. ‘How about “NIGGER” then?’
Several people near them were no longer talking.
‘But Don, do you think anyone’s going to want to walk around with “nigger” written all over them? Or “cunt” for that matter?’
‘They will if they don’t want their picture in the paper,’ Don said patiently. ‘That’s the fucking point.’
‘OK. Fine.’ Why was he arguing? Why did he care? ‘So you’ve foiled the paps. But how about the people you encounter who aren’t trying to photograph you? Is it worth provoking all of them?’
‘It’s a concept Hugo, for fuck’s sake. Just choose a different word if you don’t like those. We can’t use “FUCK”. French Connection did that. I like “WANK”, but it won’t work in the States…’ He chewed on his cigar. ‘How about “ANAL”?’
There was a thoughtful waft of smoke.
‘People will think it’s “ALAN”,’ Hugo said.
Their neighbours now were very obviously listening. He glanced at them for support, and didn’t get any. Mellody was laughing with her friends at the edge of the dance floor. Right now, even she would be a relief.
‘“FEESTING”?’ said Carlotta.
Mellody’s early years
NO PASSAGE IN the novel was deleted more reluctantly than this one. It comes from the scene where Malcolm knocks over a tray of drinks, and tells the story of Mellody’s first serious relationship, with an unhappy rock star called Corey Burns. As things panned out, however, she was the last of the four main characters to appear, by which point I was doing everything I could to stop the early chapters being clogged with backstory. That meant wincing, and cutting this.
What was she doing with these kids? No longer one of them herself, Mellody could see their carefree desperation, their synthetic confidence. She’d done the same, and seen it done.
I’m young, I’m wild, I’m free! I’m not afraid of you! It had been the living motto of her youth.
But now she knew what the grown-ups had been thinking. If that is so, then why do you keep telling me?
Even when she was fifteen years old, in the infancy of her career, Mellody must unknowingly have known this. The boys in her class back then, well, they seemed so young. So keen to please, yet so inept. Like it was skateboarding that would impress her, or poetry, or general knowledge. Display, display, display. With teenage boys, there was nothing but display. And looking like she did, of course, Mellody saw more displays than most – though fewer, still, than people thought. So marked had her early beauty been, and then so distant did she become with her success, that most boys in the neighbourhood gave up on her. The exceptions, on the whole, were those too mentally restricted to think their chances through. If anything she treated them – the goggling nerds, the dweebs, the drawling bozos – with more sympathy than their naïve arrogance deserved. She was out of their league; she would not dispute that. Yet she sympathised as well, now that she’d discovered men – men in their twenties, men in bands – who were out of hers.
And though she strained against the tendency, the same men lured her still. Which meant younger men these days – some young enough, she once calculated horrified, to be the sons of her first crushes. Easily too young to know the name of her first boyfriend, Corey Burns. When she met him, Corey had been frighteningly twenty-three. His brains the brains, his voice the voice behind the Jersey grunge band Sling, whose records she and all her friends were smoking to at high school. But ‘Hey, nice boots,’ he’d said to her in passing at a party. Within three hours they’d be screwing in his car. Mellody’s first time, though she hadn’t really wanted it to be. Virginity weighed heavily upon her in the adult company she kept, yet the speed of its destruction, the speed of him … She hadn’t realised. Though nobody, of course, expected twenty-three-year-olds to take you to their car to cop a feel. Still, it hadn’t been that bad. Not bad at all, really. And when she walked back to the party with his arm around her shoulders, it was with the feeling, never known to her before, that she belonged there.
Even so it was surprising when, the next day, her mom passed on the covered phone in their big kitchen saying, ‘It’s somebody called Corey?’ His deep voice, uncertain in the daytime, asked if she would come – that is, if she wasn’t busy – to a gig that he was playing. She said yes about eight times, and loved him instantly. Two months later she told him her age, which was by then sixteen. Though by then it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter when she, the high school girl, found herself responsible for looking after him when he got drunk and started shouting about his dad. It didn’t matter when he called at 4am, or sent a taxi to her window charged with bringing her to him. Despite her homework, his drug use – a shock to her at first – and, eventually, the opposition of her parents, she obliged him willingly. And more than willingly. Though sad, it was exciting, being needed by this wounded star.
Nearly ten years passed between their final break-up and Corey’s death. When she heard, Mellody was inconsolable. He had been clean of heroin for more than a year, according to a news report she found online. On being tempted back, however, he had administered to his disaccustomed bloodstream an addict’s dose, easily enough to kill him, if he realised or not. (Three weeks of tests were needed, even so, to confirm what finished off his kippered body.) Mellody’s grief became extreme. In part, this was because she’d only heard the news so very late: nearly six months after the event, obliquely from a mutual friend who mentioned Corey guessing, as seemed safe, that she already knew. And piecing things together, shaking intermittently with sobs, Mellody realised that she could have made the funeral, if she had known. They had been on holiday in Mexico, she and Hugo – diving probably – at the moment Corey was incinerated. She was even working in New York, not two miles from him, on the day he died. Rouged and lit and grumbling, she sat and smiled while he was pushing in the plunger just a nudge too far. No mystic twinge had warned her. Though it was around that time, coincidentally, that her own illicit needle-play began to build.
Hugo’s struggle with fame
IT SEEMED IMPORTANT to relate somewhere a little of what the top stars have to live with. Like the rest of us, however, they lose sympathy if they bang on about their problems. The inclusion of this section, in which Hugo tells Michael of the paranoia and unfairness that regularly visit famous people, risked taking him too far into that territory.
Hugo had momentum.
‘It’s like I’m a business. They consume me. And it’s like that gives them rights. Like that means they can camp outside my house, and send me shit in the post, and take pictures everywhere I go, and I’ve got to fucking smile about it! There was a guy, this fucking German guy, who showed up when I was on holiday in France – don’t know how he knew where I was – and he just demanded to meet me. “I am driving more than a thousand kilometres!” ’
This was in a crazy German accent.
‘“Five minutes is all I am asking from you!” I could hear him shouting from the pool. “I go to see all your movies! Why will you be cruel to me? I buy all your DVDs!” Well don’t!’
Shouted.
‘Don’t fucking buy them! Just go away and hate me!’ The flowers in his jacket twitched with rage.
Michael did not know what to say.
‘And whatever I do, everyone always thinks it’s part of a big plan. Like it’s always about them. I mean,’ Hugo lowered his voice slightly, ‘there are times when you use the media to your advantage. But usually it’s just to correct the lies they’ve already spread about you. Or when someone who worked for me was selling stuff here and there, just little diary stories, tip-offs about where I would be, that sort of thing. That made it really hard to get some peace. We had to get Theresa – that’s Renee’s assistant – we had to get her to book tables at three different restaurants with 30 minutes’ notice, and not with our usual pseudonyms either, but…’
‘You have pseudonyms?’
‘Of course. Everybody does.’
‘Like what?’
‘Stephen Little is my main one,’ Hugo said without hesitating. ‘Like the movie. It’s just a joke, really. It’s also the name of some poet Mellody likes. Anyway…’ He pressed on. ‘… No, what bothered me wasn’t the hassle of booking tables, it was that someone I saw every day was tipping people off behind my back. So do you know what I did?’
‘What?’
‘I mentioned a few things to different people – totally made up stuff, of course – and waited to see what would happen.’
‘What, like stories?’
‘Yeah, just little bits and pieces about me that I knew the papers would like. And bang!’
His palms slapped together. He was almost gleeful now.
‘Daily Mirror. ‘Hop-along Hugo. Movie star Hugo Marks has injured his knee horse-riding while re
searching his role in the new…’ Blah, blah fucking blah.’
A dramatic pause.
‘It was my reflexologist!’
‘Wow!’ Michael said. Then, ‘What did you do?’
‘Fired her. That’s what. And it was a fucking pleasure. Told some people why as well. She’ll never touch Bowie’s feet again. That’s certain. I still get all sorts of weird stuff happening to me, mind you; people just know things. But I’ve never planted another story after that one.’
‘No. I believe you.’ What else could Michael say?
‘Other people don’t though. They think everything is part of a conspiracy, that it’s all about making them like me, or hate Mellody, or buy stuff, or whatever.’
‘They just need to feel important,’ Michael suggested. ‘They’d rather be manipulated by the rich and famous than ignored.’
‘Exactly!’
Hugo clapped his hands together.
Michael was emboldened. ‘You guys…’ He swigged his empty scotch with feeling. He had never thought this through before. ‘…you guys are special because you are the unignored.’
Tweets
All of the messages below are genuine. The user names of the people who wrote them are in bold, and when a tweet contains an @ address, this means it is intended for the attention of a specific user, or is a reply to another message. If part of a conversation does not contain the #afterpartybook hashtag, however, it has not been included.
To avoid excessive repetition, some retweets (one user’s message that has been relayed to the followers of another) are not included. For the same reason, a handful of tweets by the author in which he explained the hashtag to those who asked have also been removed. Where people have mistakenly used the wrong hashtag, but then clarified their intentions, their messages have been included. We’ve also admitted a small number of late messages. There seemed to be no reason not to.
The Afterparty Page 31