Just after Midnight on The Seventh Day
I hear Esurio before I see him:
—A bit disappointing earlier, don’t you think?
—Back off!
—Oh, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m as proud of the way you have changed your life as you are. It just seems like it might have gone a bit too far too soon.
I turn to see him standing beside me, squeezing his thumb and forefinger together to illustrate his point.
—Look, I’m not drinking or using, if that’s what you’re suggesting. I may have messed up earlier but the pounding is still there. It just takes a little more to get it going.
Steve, the barman, passes me a glass of water:
—You don’t look yourself, Lincoln. Esurio whispers in my ear:
—Everyone can see, Lincoln. Except you.
I bang my fist on the bar.
—See what for fuck’s sake?
—What you’re missing out on. That you’re not being the person you’re meant to be.
—And who the fuck are you to tell me anything?
—Who am I, Lincoln? After all this time, do you really have to ask?
—Yeah, I do. Who the fuck are you to mess with my life?
—I can show you who I am if you have the courage to look.
—You think I’m frightened? Of looking? At you?
Esurio taps his cane on the floor and draws me into his eyes. They are two dark pools, swirling, spinning, and I feel I’m sinking into them. I want to look away but I have no strength. I am cold and helpless, like a child carried off in the night. He waves something across my face. It is too dark to see what it is. I feel nauseous.
—Not feeling well, are we?
I try to reply but I can’t move my mouth.
—Best get some air, Lincoln.
I follow him out to the back of the Townhouse. I am behind him as we walk through the bar, but all I can sense is darkness swirling around me. I am struggling for breath. When we’re outside I feel the cold air across my face and the sound of his voice ebbs and flows like a giant wave in my head:
—Who am I, Lincoln? Who am I? Who . . .
I cover my ears but the wave gets bigger and louder until it’s crashing inside my skull and I pass out.
When I open my eyes I don’t feel awake. I hear Esurio tap his cane on the ground again as he passes his gloved hand across my face and I am deep inside the dark pools, lost, without a will of my own.
I have never been at the back of the Townhouse before and, as the darkness breaks in patches, I notice a flight of battered-looking steps leading to a door. There are dustbins on some of them, full of empty bottles, and rats peer at me through the weeds and half-smoked cigarettes. Esurio is sitting on a step, drinking a vintage absinthe.
—If you really want to know who I am, follow me in, Lincoln, follow me in.
I walk up the steps and open the door. Inside the smell is thick and musty. There’s a bar with some old photographs behind it and the walls are painted sickly green. There are paintings and drawings everywhere and the till is one of those old ones with buttons and levers. A striking-looking woman in her fifties with dark hair, black gloves and smoking from a long, silver cigarette holder comes over to me. She says:
—Hello, Cunty, are you a member?
I stare at her, unable to move my lips, pushing anger out of my eyes. I think:
—Did she just call me a cunt? She turns to Esurio:
—She looks very touchy, doesn’t she?
—Afraid so. He’s just changed his life.
—And why, Dearie, would she want to do that?
I want to tell her to stop calling me ‘she’ but I have lost the power of speech. The woman carries on talking to Esurio:
—Best get her a seat in the corner. She looks like she might faint.
Esurio pulls an old wooden chair under me, like the ones I used to sit on as a kid in school. Even through the dim light in this room, I can see into the grain of the chair, deeper than I have ever seen into anything. After what feels like hours, Esurio taps his cane on the ground, tells me to sit down and, when I do, the woman asks:
—I forgot to ask. Is she a member? Has she got one of these?
I look up and she’s waving a crumpled, brown piece of paper in front of me with some writing on it. The letters have a life of their own. Esurio sorts them out for me:
—It says: Colony Room, 41 Dean Street, W1. Membership
Card.
The Colony Room Club. I’m in the fucking Colony Room Club. I look again at the woman and, for the first time, I know who she is: Muriel Belcher. Founder of the Colony Room Club. I remember she is dead and then she continues:
—Tell her not to worry about membership. I know who she is. She’s famous in Soho and you know how I adore the Great and the Bad.
She touches my cheek with her gloved fingers and hands me a card. I can just about make out the words Lifetime Member before everything goes black and, when I can see again, there are bright lights above the bar and the Colony Room is getting bigger. The green walls are moving away from me so fast I feel sick, until the room is so big I can’t see where it ends. I feel soft fabrics rubbing against my hands and, when I look down I’m sitting on a throne covered in jewels and the finest furs. I turn to Esurio and, for the first time, I can speak. The words sputter out of my mouth:
—What’s happening to me? Who are you?
Esurio leans over to me:
—All in good time, Lincoln.
Muriel is blowing smoke in his hair. He continues:
—I realise you have achieved so much in a short space of time. A mere seven days. But abstinence is not in your nature, Lincoln, so Muriel and I have organised a Grand Ball in memory of your excesses.
Esurio opens his arms and gestures to the vast, empty room:
—Even this room is barely big enough to accommodate all those who come to honour your insatiable appetites. You are a strong man and I have no doubt you will end the night without a drop of alcohol on your lips, but I have become concerned at, how shall I put it, the seriousness of your life in recent weeks, so tonight you will live like you have never lived before.
He pounds his cane against the wooden floor:
—Let the Grand Ball of Immortal Addicts begin!
I stare into the vast green room and as far my eye can see there are bar stools, wooden tables, ashtrays, endless bottles of wines and spirits and long, winding trails of white powder stretching along a torn green carpet potholed with cigarette burns. ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, an old Bing Crosby song my Granddad used to listen to, is filling the room with sound and, in the distance, the first guest arrives and walks towards us. He’s fat, wearing a dark suit and pink, spotted shirt with a black tie and red trilby. It’s George fucking Melly. He nods in my direction and I think:
He’s dead, too, like Muriel.
He begins drinking a glass of wine. I notice the bottle he’s drinking from never seems to empty and, however many glasses he pours himself, there’s always more.
Within minutes the room is full of people smoking, drinking, snorting, shagging, and I am strangely sober. The room has stopped moving, I seem able to speak again and I can see with a clarity and depth I have never experienced before. One after another, the guests come and bow before me. Esurio taps me on the shoulder:
—Go among them. Let them get closer to you.
I step down off the podium. The ballroom is a mass of bodies. They all drink, some snort, others shag and they are all dead. Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton and countless others who lived invisible lives on the streets of Soho. All drunk. All dead. Yet they look so well. Everyone is drinking bottle after bottle, taking one line after another, and it makes them stronger, happier, healthier. I turn to Esurio:
—But these people are dead!
—Such talent for excess never dies, Lincoln. It goes on and on forever. These people can never die. They always want more. They finish ten bottles of the finest win
e and they consume another hundred; one rock of the magic white powder and they demand a mountain. They have sat in this room and lived and loved in Soho and you, Lincoln, are one of them and potentially the greatest of them all.
I look to my left and see an impish man surrounded by paints and canvasses. His face has a random, ruddy tint to it, as if he has applied rouge in a haphazard way. He is clearly drunk and often stoops to drink from a bottle of Bollinger on the ground next to his easel. His concentration is so intense he makes me feel that if he doesn’t finish what he’s doing, the whole world might collapse around him. When he’s done, he gets up. He can barely stand but somehow he makes his way towards me, his easel floating alongside him. When he gets to the podium he turns the easel around so I can see what he has been painting. I gasp. It’s the ‘Screaming Pope’ but, instead of Innocent X, he has painted me sitting on the papal throne. Esurio smiles down at him:
—Thank you, Francis. Lincoln will be grateful beyond measure.
—My pleasure, Master. To seduce is everything.
I turn to Esurio. I do not understand:
—Why does he call you Master?
—Because my name is Esurio and we are many.
I haven’t a fucking clue what he’s on about. Esurio senses my confusion:
—To make it simple for you, Lincoln, where you find pain, there you will find me; where you see a man in the gutter, I am with him. Even the greatest artists and the purest minds know me. I am in every glass and every bottle, I dance on the point of every needle and skip on every line. I am everywhere there is Chaos. That, Lincoln, is who I am, who I have always been, and who I always will be.
Francis Bacon offers me a glass of Bollinger:
—Take it, Lincoln, take it. With my compliments.
I feel a twisting, gnawing sensation in my guts. Esurio whispers to me, like a lover:
—Feed me, Lincoln, feed me.
Then, knowing he will get what he wants, his voice rises, triumphant, angry, bouncing off the walls:
—FEED ME, LINCOLN, FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME!
A chorus of thousands of voices rises up like a tsunami from the Colony Room.
—FEED HIM! FEED HIM! FEED HIM! FEED HIM! My head is splitting and I feel blood stuck in my throat and all I want is this drink; to take it, be done with it. I want the real Lincoln Townley back. The Man who can Drink More and Fuck More and Snort More. The Man who almost listened to people telling him to quit. Quit! Never, never, never, never, never. What was I thinking of? Who did I think I was?
I drink.
Muriel Belcher walks up to my chair and hands me a small, silver key.
—It’s the key to the front door, Cunty. You deserve it. The Bollinger washes against my throat like holy water and fills me with a deeper, more intense love than I have ever felt before and I am certain, more certain than I have ever been about anything, that I am not alone and that all these people, my soulmates, who stand before me, will be with me from now until the end of time and I feel blessed to be who I am, where I am, right here, with the taste of champagne filling my guts with love. Everyone is going mental and clapping and dancing and cheering and Esurio is flying around the room, laughing like a madman, and I have never been happier.
I hear a different noise, a distant rumbling at first, getting louder and louder, like the approach of a thousand armies, cracking their boots against glass and wood and stone. I cover my ears as the cracking noise gets so loud I want to scream and the room begins to break into millions of pieces. There is glass everywhere and people are cut and screaming with pain. The walls shatter and clumps of masonry are hurled at the guests. In seconds everyone is panicking, as the room breaks apart. I get off my throne just before it’s hit by an enormous rock and smashed to pieces. I look up at the carnage and it feels like being on the set of the ultimate disaster movie. Esurio has changed. He is bashing the walls and destroying everything he can with his cane. I notice how big he seems. He towers over the entire scene like an enormous giant and he always has the same, mad, crazy laugh, louder than all the crashing walls and breaking glass and screaming bodies. I see Francis Bacon running until he collapses from exhaustion and his body begins to decompose, his feet and hands first then his arms and legs until he is nothing but a pile of bones on the floor. The poets and painters, musicians, actors and actresses, the homeless and the lost, they are all dying before me and their bodies, ugly and in pain, are slowly turning to dust. I close my eyes and cover my head.
—Please let it all stop! Please!
A voice replies through the carnage:
—Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that, Lincoln, not when we’re having such fun.
And it goes on for what seems like forever until everything is quiet. So quiet, you could hear a gnat breathe. I open my eyes. Before me, stretching on like a vast desert, are mounds and mounds of dust, glistening in the moonlight and all I can say in my head over and over again are the same two words:
—The horror! The horror!
The air is crisp and there is a wonderful smell of smouldering campfires all around me and I close my eyes to take it all in but, as soon as they are shut, the smell disappears. I feel an intense cold running through my body and when I open my eyes the desert of dust is gone too. I feel someone kicking my feet and I see a Chinese-looking guy and I want to kill him except I can’t move. He is saying:
—Move! Move! No lie here. No lie here. People live here.
I look around and I’m lying in the doorway of a shop on Berwick Street.
I can just about make out people moving along the street, ignoring me, except for this Chinese guy who is kicking my feet and who will soon be dead.
—Help move him, to there . . .
I feel myself being carried a few feet before being dropped in another doorway. I look up. This one is covered in metal bars and the shopfront is boarded up. I am holding a bottle of red wine in my hand. I feel inside my jacket pocket for some gear. I can’t find anything but when I pull my hand out I lick a few grains off my fingers. Esurio is standing beside me.
—Splendid to have you back with us, Lincoln.
Strange music plays in my head, I see figures dancing and dying, a vast ballroom, fading in and out of my mind.
—What happened to me?
—You just wanted to know . . .
—Know what?
—Not what, Lincoln, who.
—I wanted to know . . . who . . .?
—Me, Lincoln, me.
The recollections grow sharper.
—But what about Muriel . . . Francis . . . the Colony Room
—Mine, Lincoln, all mine.
I look at the bottle in my hand.
—How did that get here?
—I bought it for you. In the course of your enlightenment, your little journey into knowledge, I took the opportunity to remind you that life was for living and unless you started living again you would amount to nothing. Nothing whatsoever. But to see you lying here gladdens my heart. I feel sure the Old Lincoln is back with us. Snorting, drinking, taking the ladies into the toilets. I could weep to see you back to your old self. Your True Self, Lincoln.
I finish what’s left of the bottle of red wine. I lie on the street listening and watching Soho pass me by. My senses are so sharp and I can hear every sound, it’s like I can listen to loads of conversations at the same time and see into people like I have never been able to before. After about half an hour, I get up and walk towards Old Compton Street. I feel a surge of warmth and happiness fizzing through my body. I know I am on the right path and everywhere the signs are spelling it out for me. The last seven days have changed my life. They took me away from who I really am and brought me back again. I feel at home with myself as three words repeat in my head like a mantra: Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Esurio calls them my ‘unholy trinity’. I’m not sure what he means but it sounds good. When I get back to the flat there’s a Wrap in my bed and I think I’ll bang her in the morning
when I have had time to rest and think.
The truth is, something else comes into my mind, a conversation I had with Lisa the Pilates teacher the first time I fucked her. I can’t remember if it was last week or last month. Maybe last year. I lose track of time. The thing with a Granny is I don’t want to leave so quickly when I’m done. I don’t even want to talk that much. Just being with them is enough. Usually I go without anything really happening but this time I was with Lisa and she told me this story:
—In a previous life, the Buddha was a very pious monk and one day he and a young novice came to a river where a woman was standing unable to cross because the water was moving too fast. She asked the monk to help her cross, so he lifted her onto his back and carried her to the other side. She thanked him and left. For the rest of the day the monk and the novice walked in silence. When the monk asked the novice a question he refused to answer. That night, as they sat around a small fire, the monk asked the novice what was troubling him.
‘Now that you ask, Master, it is the woman. You know it is forbidden for a holy man to touch the body of a woman and yet you carried her across the river.’
‘That’s true,’ the monk replied. ‘I did carry her but I let her go many hours ago. You have been carrying her ever since.’
I don’t know why that comes into my head as I sit on my bed in Old Compton Street. I don’t really care. It just popped up. I think:
—Maybe it’s the truth.
I don’t understand that thought.
I feel something in my jacket pocket. I pull it out. It’s a silver key. I don’t know where it came from. I put it in my bedside table and think:
—I wonder what it fits.
I lie down and as soon as my head hits the pillow I am asleep.
A Party in Cannes
April–May 2010
The first time you fall, it’s bad. The second time, it’s worse than you can ever imagine. I remember watching a documentary about a guy on Death Row. When the day of his execution came, he had been praying for hours and got himself ready to walk to the execution chamber. They filmed him leaving his cell for the last time. He was calm and prepared to die. Then he got a reprieve. A last-minute appeal was being heard. So he went back to his cell and waited. The appeal failed. The second time he left his cell he had to be dragged, sweating and screaming, to the execution chamber. That’s what the second time does. It’s always worse.
The Hunger Page 12