The Hunger (22 page)

The Next Night. The Night of the first Secret Society Party. 10 p.m.

The house is full of Wraps. I’m checking a few things with Tina.

—How many Asians and Eastern Europeans have you got?

—Shit loads.

—OK. Tell two of them they’re Beauty Queens for the night.

—What? Real ones?

—Of course. I told the Members we’ve got five Beauty Queens coming over and I’ve only got three and one of those has been on it since yesterday in the Sanderson. So I need two
more.

The Members start arriving at ten-thirty. When they walk in, there are thirty-two Wraps ready for action, a cocktail bar and eleven bedrooms, two beds in each. The Wraps are all wearing evening
dresses. My idea. The only idea I had all day. By midnight, the house is heaving and the evening dresses have come off. Rik was first off the mark:

—Which ones are they, Lincoln?

I point out the Crown Jewels to him and he stares like he’s just been let out of a monastery after ten years and stumbled into a brothel. Now that I’ve banged them, the Crown Jewels
look no different from the other Wraps. In fact, some of the Russian Wraps Tina managed to get hold of are fucking stunning, but the judgement of the eye is a slave to opportunity. I look again and
this time I do my best to believe they are the Jewels I believed them to be when I first saw them. No change. I am looking out at a sea of Wraps and one Wrap blends seamlessly into another, as wave
after wave of monotony washes over me.

Tina brings two Asian Wraps over to meet Rik. They introduce themselves as Bangkok and Vietnam. When Rik wanders off with them, I turn to her:

—You could at least have let him have the real ones.

—They’re already taken and, anyway, you said they were all real. Remember?

She’s right. There’s no difference between a real Crown Jewel and a fake one. What matters is that you
believe
there is a difference, and Rik, like all men, is a believer.
I’ll tell him one day he got the fakes and his memory will turn sour. But for now I’ll leave him alone in his fantasy because what he believes he’s doing matters so much more than
what he’s actually doing.

As the night goes on I get my cock sucked a few times by some Eastern European Wraps who always seems to put more effort in than English Wraps. The Boss said to me once:

—No points for effort, only results.

I think he got that one wrong. When I have some Bulgarian Wrap eating my cock like her life depends on it, effort is priceless. We had rules at The Club. The Wraps had to work at least every
other weekend. Unless there were
exceptional circumstances.
Here’s an exceptional circumstance:

I was in The Club at about four in the morning when this Croatian Wrap was arguing with George. It ended with her saying:

—Look, I’m not working again this week or next weekend. That’s the way it is. You see the people who pick me up, you don’t want to mess with them. So I am telling you
I’m not working and I suggest you agree with me.

He did, and she waved at him from the blacked-out S-Class that picked her up twenty minutes later.

If you take your clothes off for a living, effort and hardship go hand-in-hand. You can’t expect a Wrap from Romford whose ambition in life is to graduate to a sky-blue G-string and a
bigger mojito, to put in the same effort as a Wrap who arrives at the club from a war zone. Einstein called it relativity. I call it common sense.

As the night goes on, the bankers are cashing in their investment. At ten grand a shot, including membership, this is costing them one sub-prime repossession each, and they always want value for
money. I catch a glimpse of Trevor in a corner with a Wrap on each arm. He’s in his late-fifties, maybe sixty, proud of his own hair and greedy with one of those leering faces that looks up
at you and saps your energy like a sponge. I wonder how the fuck he made it to the board of one of the big banks. Perhaps he drained the life out of the competition. I smile. He smiles back.
Somewhere he’s got a wife waiting for him who thinks he’s meeting international clients. I wonder what it would be like if men like him were honest:

—Hi, darling, I’m home. Just fucked two girls and I’m much more hopeful about us than I was before I had my cock sucked.

If only, for one brief moment, married men could be honest without having to face the consequences. I never understood why women value honesty in men when, if we spit out the truth for a
nano-second, we’re cast aside like the plague. Perhaps we’re better at statistics than women, which is why we have a good grasp of this issue. Here’s some
Very Sad
Numbers
:

This is the reason why Good Men have Big Secrets and those secrets are made at a party like this. All that has to happen to make it right is for men to be honest, women to get a grip on the
Very Sad Numbers
, and do something about it. Except women
are
doing something about it. Here’s some
Very Happy Numbers
:

So Good Men go out, get fucked, go home and live another lie while their wives are out shagging men like me. The issue for married women is never sex. It’s husbands. Get rid of them and
the sex comes rolling back like a tsunami. I know because I drown in it. And the real difference between the sexes? Women are just more subtle hypocrites.

Someone grabs me from behind. When I turn to deck him, I see it’s Rik and manage to stop myself an inch from his face.

—Fucking hell, Rik, I could have killed you.

—
You
kill
me
. What about the Crown fucking Jewels girls? You told me they were real and mine are made by Gerald fucking Ratner!

—Not exactly fakes, Rik . . .

—Not exactly fakes?! Bangkok is a waitress from a fast food restaurant who’s here in the hope of finding a cock with a wallet big enough to pay her college fees because there’s
too many chicken drumsticks to the pound, and Vietnam says she’d like to be a model one day, perhaps when she’s a bit older. What the fuck is she waiting for? Asian Grannies?

I like the sound of that, but do my best to disguise it.

—OK, Rik, but did you have a good time?

—I was having a good time until I found out the truth. I know this is a Secret fucking Society but not telling me who the real Crown Jewels are is one secret too many.

I call Tina over. She can barely walk and has white powder on her cheeks. I start explaining the situation and give up when she falls over. I grab Rik by the arm and pull him after me. We go
through room after room of people fucking, drinking, snorting, and in about the fourth bedroom we go into I see Romania taking a line. She’s a monument to endurance. She’s been stuffing
gear up her nose all day and still looks fresh enough to keep a bloke attached to his right hand long enough for his cock and hand to fuse together.

—Rik, this is Romania. Romania, this is Rik.

He puts his hand on her waist and leans into her so she can hear him above the music.

—Are you real?

—Excuse me?

—Are you a real Beauty Queen?

She pulls away from him, scrolls through her iPhone and shows him a picture. He smiles. As I walk out of the room, I feel a shooting pain in my arm. At first I think I’m going to have a
heart attack. It’s long overdue, so it might as well happen here. I keep walking, expecting to drop at any moment, when the pain passes and I am left with a familiar feeling of Nothing. Fuck
all. It washes over me like a tsunami.

I used to dream of running parties with Crown Jewels and having my own name up in lights:

Lincoln Townley: The Great Impresario.

Lincoln Townley: The Best Gentlemen’s Parties in the World.

Lincoln Townley: The Sexiest Shows in Town.

But dream and reality rarely meet. Naked Wraps, champagne, cocaine, a sea of writhing, falling, shooting bodies, and I couldn’t give a fuck. I might as well be wandering through a
desert.

The next day I get a call from Nick, who takes so much coke I never understand how he manages to get to the stock market never mind trade in it.

—That was amazing, Lincoln. When’s the next one?

—Two weeks. On a boat.

—Great. But don’t go taking on any more members. Secrets are best shared between as few people as possible.

—Yeah, right.

I think:

—Is he really that fucking stupid?

He’s just paid more than he ever should for a party with Wraps he could get any night of the week but, because I put ‘Secret’ in the title, he thinks it’s something
special. OK, the Crown Jewels were a bit special, but there were only three of them and he probably never got near any of them.

I go online and look at my bank account. It seems to have money in it so I assume I have accidentally hacked someone else’s account. I look at the screen and it definitely has my name on
the top. I wonder where all the money has come from. After expenses, I appear to have over thirty grand. That’s what one single, grubby little word can do. Put ‘secret’ before
whatever it is you’re doing and you’ve put a zero on the price. These guys can get whatever they want whenever they want it. Booze. Gear. Wraps. More than they can ever take. But
there’s one thing they can never get enough of and that’s the fact that they get things other men can’t. I think it might be a good idea to close the membership book, charge more
and offer less for the next party. I call it cheating. They call it status.

The Secret Society looks like it has a future. Then it all goes to shit. Here’s what happens:

Of course I haven’t thought about it. I haven’t thought about anything except how I’m going to get enough cash for next bottle of Rioja, the twenty shots a day I need to
survive, and the Mount Everest of Cocaine I need to get me through the day.

I realise I’m a bit stuck. I have no money, and the chances of Members getting another party are more likely if Elvis was organising it. So I close the Society down. I email every Member
and tell them the bad news while being careful to remind them of the Third Principle of the Society that ‘all payments are made at Members’ risk’. Most of the Members seem to
accept it. They’ve had three great parties but, much more than that, they’ve had three great parties
other men couldn’t get access to
. One or two complain but they soon
disappear when I suggest that perhaps they overstretched themselves when they became Members, and that if they can’t see the value in having unrestricted access to London’s most
beautiful women, then in future they should stick to weddings and bar mitzvahs.

When the last Members are off my back, Esurio asks me:

—So what have you learned, Lincoln?

—That I don’t want to do parties anymore.

—And . . .

—I’m a great salesman. The best.

—And . . .

—I’m lost.

—Anything else?

—I don’t really want to do anything. Fuck all.

The Week After the Last Secret Society Party

Since the last Secret Society party I have been wondering if it’s possible to crack up and not know it. Or to crack up and know it only after it’s happened. Like a
delayed reaction. With me it happened in four stages:

The First Stage

When I told Esurio I didn’t want to do anything, I didn’t think I meant it. I just said it. The truth was I still felt there must be something out there I want to
do. It was a matter of finding it. Even if it was fishing or stamp collecting. There
had
to be something. I think it was the Geek with Glasses who said that if there is something meaningful
to find, you will find it when you need it most.