Kill Your Friends (17 page)

“Mmmm.” We stand there for a moment in silence.

“Are you all right, Steven?”

“I’m fine.”

She raises her hand, as if to stroke my arm, then thinks better
of it and leaves.

I often wonder what sort of life people like Woodham end up
having. I don’t mean policemen, I mean guys who toiled away in
pointless bands for years, never getting anywhere, until they got
some hag up the duff. Are you one of them? How do you get through
it? You turn round and—bosh!—you’re nearly thirty and standing in
line at some fucking B
&
Q at nine o’clock on a
Sunday morning, a giant monster holding your hand while your
five-year-old runs around smashing the place up and another brat
howls in a papoose round your neck. You’ve maybe got two hundred
and fifty quid in your current account until the end of the month.
I mean, what keeps the noose from around your neck, the razor blade
from your veins? Love? Don’t make me fucking laugh. Look at how
you’re
living
.

♦

Without warning, with no warning at all, winter just becomes
summer somewhere in the middle of May. There is no spring. The heat
does what it does to London; cars become boiling torture boxes
as—and everyone is surprised about this, no one thought it
possible—the traffic slows even further.
Everywhere
seems to
be under construction; the navvies, stripped to the waist, or
wrapped in fluorescent yellow and orange vests, scratch their heads
as they stare at some mad coil of piping they’ve dragged up through
the broken bubbling tarmac. They stand on the hard shoulder, on the
pavement, in the middle of the road, chewing gum and insolently
holding up their circular red ‘STOP’ signs, or—rarer and
briefer—their bright green ‘GO’ signs. All the slip roads lead to
despair. In their torture boxes the people sluice Evian, light
cigarettes, drum their hands on the wheel and fiddle with the radio
and all the time you hear the sampled string loop and Richard
Ashcroft singing ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ and you punch through the
stations and you hear ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.

The summer does something else to London too. You’ve noticed,
haven’t you? How could you not? Look at them appearing; pouring
from the tubes and buses, emerging from doorways and office blocks,
chattering and stretching out in wine bars and at wooden tables
outside the pubs: the fucking boilers.

I mean, girls, where do you all
go
in the winter? Fill us
in. October rolls around and you all vanish underground. Or you fly
off to some island somewhere, some girls-only paradise where you
work on your tans and leaf through lingerie catalogues, planning
the summer attack. From October until May the female population of
London is composed entirely of octogenarian Polack hags wearing
carpet-thick tights and growing beards. You look around Oxford
Street and you think—what the fuck is going on? It’s just blokes,
benders and beasts. Then the sun comes back and—bosh—it’s a
boiler-fest, a sea of silicone-jugged teenage porn stars in
micro-skirts, sawn-off tops and thongs. Taunting midriffs, heckling
arse-cheeks and abusive nipples all over the fucking shop. Even
Nicky has abandoned her traditional fat-chick black leggings and
has taken to parading around the office in some kind of condom-thin
kaftan, her gigantic, nightmare paps sloshing around beneath it
like a couple of carrier bags filled with glue.

It gets worse every summer. It fucks us up. It interferes with
work. The needle of my libidometer, which is generally nudging
‘RAPIST’ at the best of times, is jumping off the scale. The other
night, stumbling through Soho, I became so enraged with lust that I
had to dive into one of those festering doorways off Berwick Street
to spend fifteen minutes and fifty quid having my pulsing balls
drained by an East European teenager in a grubby satin slip. (In
London after midnight, as in many capital cities, it is far easier
to get your cock sucked by a pair of terrified fourteen-year-old
immigrant twins with a gun at their heads than it is to buy a
bottle of Chardonnay. And there are lots of young fit Bosnian and
Kosovan chicks on the game at the moment—a pleasing by-product of
the recent punch-ups over there.) And, yes, of course I feel guilty
about contributing to the sum total of this kind of human misery
and all that. But, come on, what are we meant to do? I mean, have a
heart. Put some fucking clothes on.

It gets hotter and things happen.

Rage is arrested for attacking a British Rail employee who asked
him to put his cigarette out. We still have no plans to release his
album.

It looks like Seagrams will buy EMI.

Ellie Crush’s record goes gold—half a million—in the US.
Parker-Hall is officially the industry fucking wonder boy.

I have a couple more meetings with Danny Rent about Songbirds. A
couple of other labels are interested in them now, which is always
good news as it means I’m not completely off my nugget, but…I just
don’t know. They’re so fucking bad. Having said that, apparently
Tracy Bennett over at London Records has just signed some
cobbled-together bunch of sows called All Saints, so it looks like
a few people will be having a pop with the Spice Girls cash-ins. I
need to be signing something soon.

Neither Waters nor Schneider has been replaced yet and I am de
facto running the department, although there is no official
recognition of this and no extra remuneration. If ‘Why Don’t You…’
was shaping up to be a hit I reckon I’d have been offered the job
by now.

Trellick gets some girl from Sony pregnant. But he does the
decent thing and forks out for a top-drawer abortion, an
overnight-stay job at the Wellington near Regent’s Park.

The Lazies fly into the country soon. They’re doing a short
European tour, playing a few warm-up dates for Glastonbury and
meeting record companies. No less than seven labels are now trying
to sign them. Apparently Parker-Hall is all over them. With the
possible exception of Ultrasound, they are now the hottest unsigned
band on the planet. I have managed to convince Jimmy, their
indie-manager loser, to let me take them to dinner while they’re in
town.

♦

I quadruple-park the car on Parkway across from the Spread
Eagle, which is already rammed with summer drinkers, and run into
the off-licence to buy cigarettes and whisky. Waiting for my change
I happen to glance along the top shelf, at the glut of hardcore:
CumSluts, Anal Housewives, Fifty-Plus, Suck. Pump.
Grinder
.

My eyes settle on a pair of brown cheeks, thrust high in the
air, a red satin G-string splitting the cleft, barely covering the
faceless boiler’s gleefully proffered anus. The strapline reads:
“
She Wants You Up Her. Now!
” I am immediately overwhelmed by
a sickening rush of lust so powerful as to be indistinguishable
from total rage. The shopkeeper—a toothless, octogenarian
Paki—doesn’t bat an eyelid, doesn’t register a flicker of alarm or
interest as I add an armful of the most hardcore titles to my
purchases, even though the top magazine is called
Asian
Whores
and features one of his Sikh or Hindu sisters naked and
fingering herself while sucking greedily on a huge orange plastic
prick.

“Sorry, sir. No bags,” he says.

I stagger out to the car, teetering with fags, Scotch and
hardcore, and there he is: a hulking Nigerian monstrosity in serge
blue uniform, frowning at my licence plate as he punches numbers
into his little machine. “Come on, mate,” I begin.

“No parking,” he grunts, not looking up.

“I was only in there a minute.”

He just repeats the two words. The only two words of English he
knows.

I mean, Jesus Christ. They bowl over here, straight out of some
boiling HIV cauldron, some genocide-rape-famine meltdown entirely
of their own making, and are they grateful? Are they fuck. They go
to some language class (probably at the taxpayers’ expense) to
learn how to say ‘no parking’, and then they march around London
nicking you up.

“Look,” I say reasonably, “fuck off, cunt.”

“No parking.” The ticket whirrs out of the machine.

He holds it out to me. I throw it on the ground and spit on it.
He shakes his head and starts writing something in his
notebook.

“Oh yeah?” I say. “You can
write
, can you, you fucking
animal? Why don’t you—”

“Hi, Steven.”

I turn. It’s a girl called Charlie, or Chrissie or something.
She’s a scout somewhere. Sony? EMI? “Ah, hi there,” I say.

“You going to see Ultrasound?” she asks me brightly.

“Ah, yeah. Trying to.” I shift the magazines, trying to huddle
them in towards my chest, but it’s too late, her gaze is already
ambling down towards the glossy pile of total disgrace.

“Right…” She says uncertainly, already backing away, “maybe I’ll
see you in there.”

“Yeah, see you there.” I turn back, but he’s already across the
street and the spittle-flecked ticket has been fixed to my
windscreen.

♦

The Ultrasound show is rammed: A
&
R people
from Virgin, Island, Warner Chappell. I see Nick Mander, Andy
MacDonald, Andy Leese and Malcolm Dunbar from Mother, Leamington,
Dave Gilmour. No Parker-Hall, who is already on record as saying
the band are ‘pony’. Across the room I see Rebecca talking to some
girl I don’t know. I wave hello and she smiles back. You often see
Rebecca out at gigs. Why the fuck does she bother? I mean, I
wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be.

I’m in a filthy mood, lounging at the bar sipping a triple
Rockschool when someone taps me on the shoulder. “Hi, Steven,” this
guy says. He’s in his late twenties, a bit old to be in here. I’ve
no idea who he is, probably some manager, some agent. “Hi,” I say
shaking his offered hand, no light of recognition whatsoever in my
eyes. He senses this and says, “It’s Alan Woodham.”

Nothing.

“DC Woodham? I came to interview you about Roger Waters?”

Fuck, the copper. “Oh, hi! Didn’t recognise you, you know, in
civvies.”

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Err,” he looks confused, “about the band,” he gestures towards
the stage where the singer of Ultrasound, who must weigh twenty
fucking stone by the way, is screaming over an angry fizz of
noise.

“Oh them.” I pretend to think. Maybe I actually am thinking. I
don’t know the difference any more. “Not bad. Angular.” He nods,
like this means something. “What brings you here?” I ask.

“Oh, I’d heard some good things about them. Thought I’d check it
out.”

Christ, what a fucking loser. What the fuck is he doing here
watching some poxy unsigned band? Shouldn’t he be out cracking
crime?

“So,” he says grinning, “what did you think of our demo? Be
frank, I can take it.”

“Actually,” I say, putting my drink down on the bar for
emphasis, “I was going to call you about this, but I couldn’t find
your card. I have to say…” His face is doing a good impression of
passive, professional disinterest but you can see the ticks and
judders of fear and apprehension in the way his eyeballs flicker
and dart, the way his lips squirm and quiver. They all look like
this just before you tell them what you think. Obviously I have no
idea what I am about to say. I listened to about half a song of his
demo—worthless sub-Oasis drivel—before I pegged it into the bin. So
I say, “I was really impressed.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Great songs. Honestly.”

“Any song in particular stand out?”

Fuck. “Track three.”

“Time Keeps Moving’?”

“Yeah. That’s the one.”

“Yeah, I like that too. I was trying to…”

He starts to crap on about whatever influences he was trying to
merge in the song or something. It’s good because I can stop
listening now. It’s just a bunch of self-serving toss requiring no
comeback, no specific rejoinders. I nod away, looking across the
room at some girl’s arse and thinking about an Asian boiler being
smacked repeatedly in the face by a very stiff cock. I catch
Rebecca’s eye across the room and she looks away quickly. Finally
Woodham finishes speaking so it’s my turn.

“Listen,” I say, “the only thing that’s letting you down is the
production.” He nods eagerly. “What if I spring you a little demo
money? Put you in the studio with a decent engineer for a couple of
days?”

“Really? Shit, that would be great.”

“Give the office a ring and ask for Darren, yeah? I’ll get him
to sort it out. Have you made any progress on finding out what
happened to Roger?”

“Not really. None of the neighbours saw anything, we don’t have
any witnesses. It was most likely a disturbed burglar.”

“Fucking bastards,” I say, draining my glass and plonking it on
the bar. “Well, keep me posted, won’t you?”

“Of course. And thanks, Steven. Thanks for the chance. I mean,
obviously with the job and the kids and ‘everything and being,
well,
nearly
thirty, I’m not still harbouring any illusions
about being a rock star…”

No shit, mate. You look like a fucking copper. No—you
are
a fucking copper.

“…but I thought,” he continues, “with the songwriting, maybe I
could get a publishing deal? Write songs for other people?”

Fuck me.
Fuck me
. “Yeah, definitely,” I say instantly, “I
mean, don’t give up on it just yet, Alan. Noel Gallagher was, like,
twenty-eight or something when he got signed. And Mark Knopfler.
And Sting was old
and
he was a fucking teacher!”

We share a laugh and I can see he’s thinking the same crazy shit
that they all think. It goes something like this: “
Yeah. It
happened for them, it could still happen for me. Why not? I’m
talented. You just need the break. Right place at the right time.
It’s not
what
you know, it
’s who
you know
.”