The Hunger

by Lincoln Townley

  —Fuck you, you bald cunt! Come in here now!

  Then I see four other officers approaching. One of them is wearing The Glove. This time I don’t care. They can shove a diamond drill up my arse but they won’t come out alive.

  —Come on then, fucking try it!

  I can’t remember what happens next.

  In the morning I am back in my flat. There are three Wraps in my bed. I do not know how I got here. I hear the sounds of Soho below me. I look up and the morning sun bursts on my half-opened eyes. I am blind and able to see the one thing I have left, draining away: Life.

  Length of Stay:

  1 night

  Room Service:

  1 mug of coffee and a visit from the Anal Inspector

  Bill:

  A caution

  Rating:

  *

  The Paparazzi Incident

  I come out of Bungalow 8 at about three in the morning with a celebrity Wrap when a Pap on a moped rides onto the pavement and catches me across the face with his camera as he passes. I push him off his bike and begin punching his head through his helmet. I hit him so hard I make a hole in the helmet and, as I’m about to put a dent in the side of his skull, three other Paps jump on me and begin kicking me. I manage to get free and take one of them out with a single punch. The other three start running up St Martin’s Lane to get away from me. I rip my shirt off and chase them. I catch the straggler – a short, fat cunt – and bring him to the ground. I am beating the crap out of him and he knows his best hope is a deep coma, when two cops pile on top of me. I can hear one of them shouting breathlessly into his radio:

  —It’s Lincoln again; we’re going to need some help.

  In seconds they drag the Pap from underneath me and there are four, perhaps five, of them on top of me, forcing my face to the ground. Because of the angle I’m lying at, my ear is pressing so hard against the street I want to scream.

  —Get off me! You’re on my fucking ear!

  The pain is unbearable and I think my head is going to explode. They don’t release me until I’m cuffed and, when they do, the side of my face is numb and there’s a huge gong crashing inside my head. When they get me to the Hotel, they leave me cuffed for a few hours and I fall into a deep sleep, my hands still bound when I wake up.

  Length of Stay:

  1 night

  Room Service:

  1 mug of coffee

  Bill:

  An assault charge

  Rating:

  **

  When I leave the Charing Cross Hotel after The Paparazzi Incident, I go back to the flat, take a shower and go for a run. I focus only on the rhythm of my feet as they pound the pavement. I go into a trance and, when I come round, I am two miles from Heathrow and my T-shirt is soaking with sweat. The run back is slower, more of a jog than a sprint, and when I get back to the flat I shower again and get changed. I am ready to go to The Office. During the run I was able to Think About Things. Here’s what I thought:

  • I can’t remember the last time I smiled

  • I don’t want to smile ever again

  • I am alive because of my fingernails

  • Without them I would fall

  • I am angrier than I have ever been

  • I don’t understand why I’m angry

  • I don’t care why I’m angry

  • I love my son

  • I need a drink

  • I need a line

  • I need a fuck

  They may be fucked-up thoughts but they are my thoughts and they are honest. My Mum says:

  —As long as you’re honest in life, you won’t go far wrong.

  I think she would be proud I am her son. When I get to The Office, the boys and a few Wraps are waiting for me. Before I sit down, I go to the toilet and finish all the gear I have on me. The boys want to know everything, so I tell them everything.

  I love telling stories. Telling is always better than Doing. When I Tell I am with other people, when I Do I am alone. When I Tell I am whoever they want me to be and it always feels better than Doing. I feel freer when I am Telling. I can run faster, fuck longer, punch harder and, in the world of Telling, I can be who I am without any consequences at all. I move through this world like an atom, undetected and unstoppable, being seen only when I choose and always in the best light. The world is made in the Telling and my words make it real. It ends only when I stop Telling and start Doing again, and then it goes all dark and troubled and I can’t find my way around anymore until someone asks me what I have been Doing and the darkness breaks in the Telling of another story.

  Before I leave The Office, I look in the mirror behind the bar and check if my handkerchief is sitting properly in my jacket pocket. It is perfect. I, however, am not. My skin looks taut and there is a quality in my eyes that seems new and ugly. Esurio says:

  —That will be the Madness, Lincoln. Ripening so beautifully.

  3 a.m.

  I met Suzie in the Townhouse and we are in my flat. She is already naked. I am looking for my rope. Can’t find it anywhere. I assume it’s me that is absent and not the rope, so I look again. Under the bed, in the wardrobe, in the chest of drawers, in the kitchen cupboards, in the lounge. Nowhere. Suzie says:

  —You get forgetful. It’ll turn up.

  I agree, but I have the suspicion I left it tied to the bedposts in a hotel somewhere in Soho. I look again in my chest of drawers and find a ball of blue car-towing rope. When I have her tied to the bed, she begs me to pound her and I pound her harder than I have ever pounded her before. She squeals and blows out her cheeks like a bellows to release the pressure from her head in case it explodes. She looks at me almost for the first time and sees the intense Fury that has taken me over in recent months. I have passed the point of insanity. I am made of Rage. The doorbell goes. I get off Suzie and go to the hall. It’s the Paid-For we booked. I watch a dark-haired Wrap walk up the stairs in red stilettos. She looks at me and freezes, just for a second, but long enough for me to know that she can see it too. I tell her to go into the bedroom. My face is leaden like a statue or a corpse in the first stages of rigor mortis. She arcs around me and I follow in behind her. As soon as she sees Suzie, breathless and tied up with blue towing rope, she stops, turns around and runs out. She daren’t look at me and is in such a hurry to get out of my flat, one of her red stilettos falls off and she hobbles down the stairs and back out into the comparative safety of middle-of-the-night Soho. I pick up the stiletto and take it with me into the bedroom. I will find uses for it.

  1 a.m. The Next Day

  My need to pound, to make ever deeper, more permanent marks on every Wrap I see, is marking my own face with madness. Because I only see myself from the inside, I consider myself to be charming and fun and wonder what the fuss is about when a Wrap looks at me as if I’m an extra from the set of American Psycho.

  I have a Wrap with me in a taxi. We met in a club in Kensington where I had to meet a hedge fund manager who’s bringing his sales team to The Club tomorrow night. I notice she is shifting in her seat. I have taken more than a week’s worth of gear in one night. I ask her:

  —Do you like porn?

  —Yes I do.

  I’m not convinced so, when we stop at some traffic lights, I put my hand on her thigh:

  —I’m really gonna fuck you like you’ve never been fucked before.

  The lights turn green and the taxi moves on and, as it does, the Wrap opens the door, jumps out in the middle of the junction and runs as fast as she can in the opposite direction. The driver catches my eye in the mirror:

  —Whatever chat-up line you used there, mate, needs some more work before you use it again.

  It’s not the line. It’s me. Something has changed. Not a total personality change, more of an enhancement of what has always been there.

  When I was sixteen and shagging June, my Mum’s mate, in the back of my Ford Fiesta, she used to say:

  —There’s something in you, Lincoln. It’s
a good thing but it’s almost too much and, if you don’t keep a careful eye on it, one day it will be a bad thing.

  I guess that day has come. Here’s more evidence:

  • I have always been great with kids. The other day, one of the Grannies I’ve been seeing walked down Berwick Street with her grandchild. When we stopped to talk, the kid, who is about seven, hid behind her. When they walked on I heard him say:

  —He’s a funny-looking man, Grandma.

  • When I’m in the gym, familiar faces no longer greet me. If they can’t avoid eye contact, they fake a smile and look down before I can speak to them.

  • I have never cared less about my life, whether it goes on or stops.

  • I have become a Fatalist. I believe there is nothing I can do to change the direction of my life and I am happy about that.

  • I have stopped mid-fuck three times in the last week because the Wrap asked me too.

  • The fact that I am still able to stop is the only sliver of hope I have left.

  • My dreams are terrifying and I often wake up screaming. These are the dreams I have had in the last week. They are typical of the dreams I have every week:

  I’m running through a park full of trees and plants. As I run, the trees and plants all die around me and the sky goes dark. A squirrel comes up to me holding an acorn and tells me if I plant it, some new trees will grow and the park will be a nice place again. When I reach down to take the acorn, I see it is infested with maggots.

  I am walking through a desert in the blazing heat. I know I will die unless I can find water. In the distance I see a woman walking towards me holding a baby’s bottle. As we pass, she offers it to me. I take it but there’s only a tiny bit of water in the bottom. I tell her it’s not enough for both of us and she had better keep it. She tells me she has drunk enough to last her at least another day and tells me to drink. I put the rubber teat of the bottle to my mouth and drink and I notice there seems to be much more water in the bottle than there was when the woman gave it to me. When I go to take the bottle to see how this is possible, I can’t get it out of my mouth. It’s stuck in the upright position and the water keeps coming and coming and I know I’m going to drown in it.

  I’m in The Club and all the Wraps are naked. I am naked too and my cock is hard, but every time I approach a Wrap and ask her to fuck me she just laughs until the noise of laughter is so great I run out of The Club to get away from it, but when I walk out into the street I find myself in a giant circus tent and I take a bow but there is no audience. An undertaker in a black suit walks up to me and asks me to step into a coffin. When I do, he closes the lid on top of me.

  I’m in a room where there are no windows or doors and every inch is covered in exotic fabrics and curtains with Asian designs on them. I know there is no way out, so I just sink into the cushions and take in the smell of incense. I notice the silence is very deep but I wonder why I can’t hear my own breath. I put my hand over my mouth. I can’t feel my breath either, so I try to feel my pulse and again there is nothing but I feel so comfortable in this room, I close my eyes and fall asleep. This is the scariest of all my dreams. I have no idea why this is so.

  The Secret Society

  September–October 2010. 9 a.m.

  I have always found the best way to deal with the consequences of my own stupidity is do something even more stupid.

  The Boss has heard about the arrests and he wants to know what the fuck is going on. I can’t remember what I tell him because I just want to get out of The Club and have a drink, so I do my best to sound apologetic and hope he just lets me go. He doesn’t. He goes at me, so I say:

  —Perhaps I’d better just fuck off then.

  He says:

  —Perhaps you better had. Mark will put the ten grand we owe you into your account today.

  And that’s it. I’m finished at The Club. As I walk up the stairs, I don’t think about anything except where the next drink is coming from. Esurio is waiting for me at the top and opens the door onto Berwick Street:

  —Bravo, Lincoln! Even by your standards, to relieve yourself of your only source of income, without any prospect of replacing it, is commendable indeed.

  —I’ll replace it.

  —How, if you don’t mind me asking?

  —I haven’t had time to think about that yet.

  —But you will.

  —Of course.

  I don’t really care about my income because all I want is a drink, a line, a fuck, and my prefrontal cortex is in such a fragile state, not even Einstein could convince me of the connection between the capacity to think and a healthy bank balance. It’s just gone ten when I get to The Office and everything is reassuringly normal. Maynard and Terry didn’t make it home last night and slept on the floor behind the bar. They look unshaven and ridiculous. They greet me like the Prodigal Son. Like I said: reassuringly normal. As I get into the first vodka tonics of the day, I tell them I have resigned my job. They say:

  —That was brave.

  Then:

  —And what are you going to do now?

  To any normal person, this is a perfectly sensible question, but they only ask because they understand it’s the proper thing to do. They don’t even wait for an answer, which is fine by me because the only answer I have is another vodka tonic. At some point over the next few hours I make a quick calculation. I can’t swear by its accuracy because at the time I do it, I am only able to count in multiples of a thousand, so the margin of error is significant. Here it is:

  I have one bank account with Banco Santander because they are the only bank stupid enough to give me access to my own money. I am one thousand pounds in credit and I have a card from the same bank with an unused limit of two thousand pounds, plus the ten thousand coming from The Boss, which leaves me with thirteen grand. It seems a good number but it’s meaningless to me, so I convert it into booze, gear and Wraps. That’s when the panic sets in. I will be skint in less than a month. I try to think of a plan. I begin by listing in my head what I’m good at:

  • Pounding

  • Selling

  • Drinking

  • Snorting

  Esurio suggests I flog tickets for Public Pig Shagging outside Vinopolis in Southwark. Free booze for the under-10s. I think it’s not a bad idea, but I tell him it’s not that type of snorting. I think making a list of What Matters to Me Most will help get my mind right. It’s the same four items on the list. I have noticed of late that my range of interests has become more compressed. I listened as a kid to Patrick Moore telling me how big space was and how much stuff there was in it. How could he lie to a fucking kid? Space is bottle-sized and shrinking. Before long I will have the life squeezed out of me but not before I’ve solved The Problem of How to Earn Money Next Month.

  The Problem of How to Earn Money Next Month

  I don’t know exactly when the idea came to me. Esurio tried to take the credit. He can have my soul but not this idea. This one belongs to me. In between bottles and lines, I remember that The Boss never took me up on the idea of running parties for some of The Club’s Diamond Card Holders and calling them Secret Society parties. I think the idea of a Secret Society of bankers and other robbers, who will pay me to get them Wraps in secret locations, sounds like my kind of business. I especially love the idea of it being a secret, so as soon as I have thought about it I tell everyone. Within a week I have somehow managed to get a website up and some business cards made. The website gives away no information, mainly because I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing. At one point I think of changing the name from Secret Society to Lincoln’s Drug Fund, to make it sound like some kind of offshore trust or specialist financial operation. Fortunately, I’m still a few lines short of accepting the merits of that idea when I settle once and for all on Secret Society.

  Then I hit the phones. The first call is to Tina. I’m going to need at least fifty Wraps for every party and she can sort the booze out as well. The punters can bring their own
fucking gear. It’s all going well, when a Swedish bloke called Erik who drinks with us sometimes comes up to me in The Office and says:

  —I hear you’re going to be running a Secret Society and members will have access to parties with lots of birds in them.

  I wonder how he heard about it. It’s a secret. Then:

  —Well, if you’re interested I’ve got some connections with people who run beauty contests in Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia. If you want the winners to come over, they’ll fly and fuck for ten grand each for three days. Including expenses.

  Within ten minutes, I’ve done the deal, except I haven’t got ten grand. I did have thirteen but that was nearly two weeks ago and it’s down to five if I’m lucky. I need someone else’s money. I call Rik:

  —What? Real Beauty Queens? How many?

  —I can get a maximum of five a time.

  —How much?

  —Get me ten members of the Secret Society at ten grand a shot plus five grand admission to every party.

  —There’s not enough Beauty Queens for that.

  —Sure, but there’s all the other girls. The best. You know you can trust me when it comes to girls.

  —OK. Leave it with me.

  I have that conversation with maybe a dozen different people. I forget how much money these guys have got. They got it from their customers, who have lost their homes by now, so Rik sees fit to take the price of their dreams and pass it on to me:

  —And remember, Lincoln, I get first choice.

  —Sure.

  I have that conversation more times than I can remember and promise a decade’s worth of Beauty Queens. I decide I will worry about the consequences of those conversations when I need to. So within a month I find myself in the improbable situation of having more thousands in my Banco Santander account than I am able to count. Even when sober. The only downside to this whole deal is that when people give you money, they all seem to want something for it, so I wish I had called it Lincoln’s Drug Fund, then I could disappear and die in peace.