The Hunger (16 page)

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.

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.

It’s a warm spring afternoon and Soho seems darker than ever. I am drunk when I bump into John in a cafe in Greek Street. He can see how I am but he asks me anyway. I tell him things are
good. The Club is doing well. I am holding myself together. He nods and I tell him:

—The meetings weren’t for me. I feel for me it’s better to find my own way through this.

He nods again and says something I don’t hear, then we shake hands and I make my way to the Soho Hotel. I’ve got a room booked. Two Wraps, a Regular and a Paid-For. I pound the
living daylights out of them and with every thrust I sink deeper into a dark pit. As soon as I begin pounding I want it to be over. To be somewhere, anywhere, other than in this hotel room. As
I’m pounding I think:

—Too much sex is more tedious than celibacy.

Esurio is at the bottom of the bed, trying to get the best angle to see into as many holes as he can at the same time. At one point he runs his tongue up a Wrap’s thigh and blows into her
pussy. I’m amazed how narrow and pointed his tongue is. The Wrap shudders and wonders how I do it. He senses what I’m thinking:

—The monastic life is not for you, Lincoln.

I imagine how many paintings I might do if I wasn’t banging all the time.

—And if you think about how many paintings you might create in a cloister, the answer will be none. Not a single one. Great art and excess are the perfect bedfellows. The one cannot live
without the other.

When I’m done I snort a few lines off their buttocks and leave. I take a deep breath as I walk out onto Dean Street. I try to take in some air but it is too thick and gooey for me to
inhale. I make a list in my head of important things I know:

IMPORTANT THINGS I KNOW

I stop at five and create another list of important things I believe:

IMPORTANT THINGS I BELIEVE

I turn the two lists around in my head, trying to use one to make sense of the other when I almost fall down a hole in the ground. Luckily a workman shouts at me as I knock the red and white
barrier down. I don’t feel a thing as I bash into it, but the shout draws me out of myself and I’m standing a couple of feet away from a hole the men have dug to work on some pipes. I
want to kill the man for shouting at me. Then I’m grateful until the anger rises in me again. I’m about to walk away when I look down into the hole. I think it’s strange that I
can’t see any pipes. It’s dark and seems to go on forever. A man asks me if I am OK. I say yes and thank him. He steps into the hole and I grab his arm to stop him from falling.

—Careful! It’s very deep!

He stands in the hole, his feet on the ground and his entire upper body above street level. He smiles at me. I have seen that smile before when an ambulance crew came to Frith Street to take a
guy away who had been blessing passing cars for the best part of an afternoon.

The second fall is much worse.

When I get to The Office, the boys are there. It’s a few weeks until the Cannes Film Festival and Terry is panicking. He hasn’t got enough money to go. Or rather, he hasn’t got
enough money to go, get smashed and get laid. Toby is his last chance. He is on his seventh shot and third line of coke and staring at his phone on the table.

—Ring, you fucker, ring!

I am sitting on the next table with Maynard and Simon. Maynard shakes his head and says:

—Look, Terry, we’re all going anyway. It doesn’t matter too much if—

—Doesn’t fucking matter! Of course it matters. Fifty grand from Toby turns a film festival into an orgy.

The phone rings. Terry snatches it off the table.

—Hi, Toby, how’s things? Great. Thought anymore about the Fund? Yes, I see, I can understand why you might want to wait. Shame about missing out on Cannes, though . . . Oh, sorry, I
thought you knew. Only investors in the Fund get to Cannes . . . It would be good if you could. Cannes is a great place to network . . . Yes, that’s right. I’ve got several Film Funds
off the ground in Cannes . . . I’m thinking Art-House. I’m seeing Werner . . . Herzog. And Thomas . . . Vinterberg . . . but I don’t want to rule out something more mainstream,
either, so I’ll certainly be catching up with Ridley while I’m there . . . Scott . . . Anyone you’d like to see? Pity you can’t get the money to me before because
she’ll be there and I can guarantee you an introduction. Yes, honestly. Guaranteed. I promise . . . You will, that’s wonderful!

The boys punch the air.

—. . . and of course cash is great. Just bring it round tomorrow . . .

They stand up and start cheering.