The Hunger (11 page)

4 a.m.

I collapse at the bottom of the stairs. David, the Floor Manager and one of the doormen put me on a stretcher and carry me upstairs. I have a vague sensation of cold air on my
face as I’m carried out onto the street. They drop me off the stretcher and prop me up, legs extending out onto the pavement. I can hear The Boss’s voice:

—Just leave him there. He can sleep it off on the street. What a mess.

Someone takes my hankie out of my jacket pocket and places it gently on my face. I am unconscious within seconds.

6:30 a.m.

Sound comes first. Cars. Cutlery jangling in a cafe. Footsteps. A babble of conversation. Nothing is defined. It’s just a reassuring buzz around my head. Slowly I open my
eyes. Even the morning light is too strong. I can feel a hand lightly tapping my left cheek. Esurio is talking to me:

—Well done, Lincoln! Congratulations! You passed with flying colours. I’ve checked my list and you’ve surpassed yourself.

I groan. I try to raise my arms but my hands flop back against my body. I can feel a wet sensation on my shirt and jacket. Esurio says:

—Don’t worry about that. We can get it all dry-cleaned.

—Why? What is it?

—I’m afraid someone urinated on you during the night. Not very gentlemanly, I agree, but I assure you it will clean up perfectly well.

I put my hand inside my jacket. My phone and wallet are still there. I feel sick. Sicker than I’ve ever felt in my life. Esurio goes on:

—I’m not going to make a big issue about the club.

—What club?

—The one you went to see last night in Kensington.

—Oh yeah. Do I own it yet?

—Not exactly, but I’ve given you lots of marks for effort and you’ve definitely laid some solid foundations, Lincoln, very solid foundations, and you’ve done so well on
the other challenges it would be churlish to mark you down on this one.

Then he’s gone. After a few minutes I pick myself up off the floor and make the short walk back to my flat on Old Compton Street. Every step hurts. I fumble my key in the door. Focus,
Lincoln, focus. When I get up the stairs and into my room there are two people in my bed. One of them is a Wrap and the other one is . . . Rik! He looks up at me:

—Hope you don’t mind, Linc. We hit it off and she said she had a key to a flat. Didn’t realise it was yours.

—No problem, man.

And it really isn’t a problem. I don’t care anymore. About anything. I grab my running kit from the wardrobe. But for once even I am too tired. Too tired to run. I shower, change,
turn left out of my flat and just keep walking. My phone is buzzing with texts and calls. One of the texts is from The Boss. He writes:

—I hope you’re OK. I reply:

—Better, thanks. I’m out for a walk. Sorry about last night.

—I’m glad you’re OK but don’t ever turn up at The Club in that state again. Never ever.

—I won’t.

Then:

—Keep it real. Just keep it real.

As I walk through the early morning traffic, I have no idea what is real in my life anymore. Dean Street, Wardour Street, Brewer Street, Frith Street, Greek Street and all the alleys and dark
corners of Soho. These are fantasy streets. Places where imaginary people get lost chasing dreams they can never find. I pass an art shop on Broadwick Street. I stare through the window.

—Keep it real. Just keep it real.

I think again of my favourite painting,
A Bigger Splash
; all that serenity on the surface and a ferocious struggle going on under the water. And who or what is struggling?

Cars, bikes and people pass me by. All of them going somewhere, doing something, and I’m floating past them, no idea why I am walking these streets, watching reality fade in and out of
life like a flickering TV picture.

9 a.m.

I wander into Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road. I’m looking for a book about Hockney. I find a book by Paul McKenna.
Change your Life in 7 Days
. That
doesn’t seem too difficult. It’s Friday. A Brand New Life by next Thursday. I look at McKenna’s face on the cover. A Geek with Glasses. I feel an urge to smack him in the mouth. I
don’t buy the book. I don’t need to. 7 Days. Change my life. How difficult can that be?

The First Day

I think:

—I don’t need the book. It’s the Principle that matters. If a Geek with Glasses can change his life in seven days, so can I.

After leaving Foyles, I go to an art shop on Berwick Street. When I leave, Esurio is following me.

—What are you doing with that box of paints, brushes and a canvas?

—What do you think?

—I am, as you know, an art lover. Nothing moves me like a standing in front of
The Satire of the Debauched Revelers
or
The Garden of Earthly Delights.
I have actually cried
tears of joy when looking at
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
. But I feel that painting is not the correct thing for you to be doing right now.

—Why not?

—I saw you in the bookshop looking at that ‘change your life’ nonsense, and if painting is the first step on this new path of yours, Lincoln, it won’t work.

—You sure about that?

—Of course. Why on earth do you want to change when you are only now beginning to lose yourself in the pleasures you have worked so hard to enjoy? And it was only yesterday that you
achieved so much in passing what were extraordinarily difficult challenges.

—But I nearly fucking died. And I woke up covered in piss.

—As far as I can see, you’re alive now, and there’s plenty of dry-cleaners in Soho. And who, I ask you, was at your side when you woke up? Me, Lincoln. And who will always be
at your side? Me again. I understand you, Lincoln, and I know what’s best for you. The last thing you need is a self-help guru when you have me. Am I not enough?

—Enough? You’re too fucking much.

—I’ll take that as a compliment. I know that artists have a long history of abusing their nervous systems in the service of creativity, but I fear that your impulse is rather
different. You just want a break.

—Yeah, I do. I want seven days of doing something different, when I don’t wake up sweating, full of anxiety, waiting for my heart to explode.

—A break, Lincoln, can extend from days into weeks and months, perhaps even years. When you’re on a roll it’s always best to keep going. Breaks mess up an established routine
and can, in tragic circumstances, alter it permanently and you wouldn’t want to stop drinking and using, would you?

—Not permanently, but maybe for a week.

—And what
reason
do you have to stop?

I look at him. He smiles. We both know I don’t have an answer.

Apart from the magic seven days, all I remember about the book was the title of the first chapter:
Who Are You Really?
I haven’t a fucking clue who I am, what I’m doing or
where I’m going, so my job for the First Day is to fill in at least some of those blanks. Here’s the result of my best efforts:

I Really Am:

When he sees the list, Esurio can’t help himself:

—You see, Lincoln, where does honesty get you?

—At least it gets me a list.

—So choose one, then. My choice would be the first item on the list. Absolutely you in one little word.

I want to be a Father or a Son but I lack courage, so I go with the next best thing:

—And mine is the last and that’s what I’m going with.

When I get to the flat I prop the canvas on the dressing table and begin painting. I feel sick and I need a drink. Every stroke of my brush is an effort until, one slow movement at a time, I
disappear into what I’m doing. The twisting in my stomach eases and I become the rhythm of my brush on the canvas.

I am a child again. I feel breathing behind my left shoulder. I turn and my Granddad Bob is watching me:

—Hold it this way, Lincoln . . . That’s it . . . Picture what you want to do and let it happen . . . There’s no right or wrong . . . Just enjoy doing it . . .

I can feel his hand holding mine as it moves.

There were paintings on the wall of our council house when I was growing up; all of them given to us by my Granddad. He was an engineer; a short, stocky man who worked in an artillery factory
during the war, and he was as hard as the shell cases he made. He was also skilled at re-engineering the human body. Someone threw a dart in his head once and before he could say
One-Hundred-and-Eighteeeee
, the guy who threw it had his nose moved to the side of his face, like a Picasso. The rules were simple: you cross Granddad Bob, you pay a price. One of his
favourite sayings was:

—They all pay. One way or another they all pay in the end.

He developed a variation of that saying for me:

—It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a brothel with a prostitute or a church getting married, you always pay for it one way or another.

Bob was one of those men who surprised you. Just when you thought you knew ‘his type’, you found something out which made you question whether he really was ‘his type’ at
all. As well as keeping the long-standing Townley tradition, passed down the male line, of throwing a killer right hook, he was a talented artist. He didn’t just give us the paintings on our
wall. He painted them and he kept painting until he began to lose his mind, and that’s when he forgot much more than how to paint. He forgot who he was. Where he lived. Everything.

When the Alzheimer’s got bad he could no longer live on his own. He had nowhere to go, so I moved him into my flat in London. His memory came and went in waves. One day I came home and he
was sat in the garden with a sketchpad and some pencils.

—What are you drawing?

—A lake and some trees.

—Yeah, I can see it. It’s beautiful.

It was just a random series of lines and colours. He was no longer able to make sense of the sensations that bounced around his brain. Perhaps that’s what it means to forget. Everything
becomes a whirl of words and colours without any meaning. And there are many ways to forget. Alzheimer’s is only one. Drinking and using is another, and the outcome is always the same. You
get lost in a Fury of Sensation. You dance in the Chaos until it overwhelms you. Then you cry. Then nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I cooked him breakfast, came home at lunchtime to check on him, and spent all my evenings with him until, one afternoon, I came home and found him in the garden. There was a smell of gas. He had
turned the cooker on and gone out to enjoy the afternoon sun. I hadn’t a clue what to do except to give him more of myself, and we persevered together for another few weeks. I came home more
often during the day and took days off to be with him. Then he left the gas on a second and a third time. I clung on without hope until whatever it was holding us together snapped and I told
him:

—Granddad, you’re going to a lovely home a short distance away where there’s some cracking-looking nurses, so if you play your cards right, you never know.

Nothing. Not even a smile. Then:

—Had some artist mates come round yesterday. Salvador Dalí was one of them. We sat for hours painting the garden fence. Don’t know who the rest of them were. Think one of them
was bald. Not sure what happened to the paintings after they left. Have you seen them? Might be worth some money.

I visited him most days in the home. It was a decent place but he was out of context and he was dead within a month. The last time I saw him, I thought he didn’t recognise me, until he
pulled his head out of whatever mincer it was in and said:

—Never forget who you are.

But that’s exactly what I do. I forget who I am. People pay to watch me sniff and snort and shag until I pass out before their eyes and I become what they see. I play a part and I’ve
played it so well, I
am
it. I’m a freak show, a circus act that makes the admission fee worth paying. You want a high-wire act, that’s me. A clown? That’s me, too. The
audience, on the other hand, always watches from a safe distance, immunised against what they see. If the wire-walker falls, they gasp and pretend to cover their eyes, but they will be looking,
waiting, hoping, because they paid the admission fee to see someone fall. When they tell and re-tell the story of that fall, they will exaggerate it each time, because
they
become more in
the telling. First:

—It was awful.

Then:

—I couldn’t look. All the broken bones and screams.

Then:

—It was the worst thing imaginable, to watch a man fall and break like glass on the ground. There was blood everywhere.

So if I tell my audience I drink a gallon of whisky every morning before having senseless sex with a thousand Wraps and a smattering of Grannies, they will say:

—That’s Lincoln!

But if I tell them I am an Artist and I’ve painted over a hundred canvasses they will say:

—That’s not Lincoln!

And although I could take them to see every one of those paintings, they are right. That’s not Lincoln because Lincoln forgets. He forgets who he is. He forgets to be kind. He forgets to
love. He forgets to create. He forgets everything that matters because he has become a spectacle, and his act is to destroy anything and anyone who stands between him and his Hunger.

As I finish the painting, Esurio walks in. He looks at the canvas.

—Ah,
A Stag at Sharkey’s
. A fine painting and a
very
fine copy.

—Thank you.

—It’s also reassuring to see that you are connecting with an underworld, Lincoln. I was fearful I might find you copying Monet’s
Women in the Garden
but to see fists and
fighting and dimly lit basements makes my heart sing.