The Hunger (5 page)

I put my drink on the bar and am about to run over to the booth to get my handkerchief when David, the Floor Manager, comes walking over to me, hankie in hand.

—I can’t prove what you did in there but you know the rules, Lincoln. No drugs in The Club. No sex in The Club. Not even any touching in The Club. You can play by your rules on the
outside. In here, you play by The Boss’s rules. And if you break The Boss’s rules, he’ll fuck you off whoever you are.

I am too ashamed to tell him I didn’t break The Boss’s rules, and I never will. Appearances are everything, so I say:

—Fuck you! I’ll do what I want!

I grab my hankie, turn and go back to the bar. The Director of Consumer Affairs at a leading British bank is sniffing the air.

—There’s definitely the smell of a really fine absinthe around here.

Esurio smiles at me and raises his glass. The Director is in his late sixties, moving his eyes and nose in search of the cause of his nostalgia.

—Haven’t smelt one of those for years. A real vintage.

Esurio says:

—A man of impeccable taste. Actually, it’s an Absinthe Jade 1901. One of the finest ever made.

I ignore him. Once he gets onto absinthe, he’s like a broken fucking record. Absinthe La Maison Fontaine. Absinthe Edouard Pernod. Absinthe Capricious.

—
Capricieuse
, Lincoln,
Capricieuse!

He knows them all. Yet whatever he puts in his mouth or up his nose he never seems to get hammered. Here’s the evidence:

7 September 2009

I was with Esurio all night, except when I left him at the bar to go to the toilets three times to pound a Wrap. Because my memory is fucking horrendous I had a notebook with me
to write down what he took. When I looked at the notebook in the morning I had written: eleven glasses of absinthe, two bottles of red wine, four liqueurs and four lines of coke. I made a note in
the margin: perhaps it’s three lines, because he insists the last line was snuff, whatever the fuck that is. I wrote some more but I was too pissed to spell, and part of the page is smeared
because I think the Wrap wanked me off on it when I dropped the notebook on the toilet floor. By three in the morning I needed two extra sachets of Kamagra to get myself going with Suzie and a
stripper from The Club, while Esurio was sitting stone cold sober in the corner reading a book. I fell asleep thinking he must be an alien.

12 September 2009

We went off to the cinema to see Lars von Trier’s
Antichrist.

—A bit of culture, Lincoln, while you can still see the screen and remember a storyline.

Before going, we had been getting hammered in the Soho Hotel until I threatened some guy who brushed against my shoulder as he walked past. Before we got thrown out, Esurio drank volumes of
absinthe and three bottles of vintage Beaujolais. These are the notes I made after we left the cinema:

More absinthe. A gram of coke . . . she crushed his fucking cock and wanked him off until he came . . . blood . . . Another line of coke . . . then she cut her . . . off . . . two glasses of
red wine . . . ant . . . re . . .. wi . . .

The last I saw of him was on the corner of Dean Street and Old Compton Street looking up some bird’s skirt who had drunk herself unconscious and was lying on the street.

—Good night, Lincoln. See you tomorrow. I’ll stay here a while and admire the view.

I stop in the middle of the street. He is not even slightly drunk.

18 September 2009

This was one of my Paid-For nights. I started with a Thai Massage on Brewer Street – one of the best ‘happy endings’ I’ve ever had – then I went
off to the Sanderson Hotel, where I met Sandra, one of the Wraps from The Club, three of her mates and a Paid-For. I annihilated them and, as I went from one arse to another, Esurio lay on the
floor seeing how many bowler hats of red wine he could drink before I came. I counted four but, given the severe competition for my attention, there were probably more. When the Wraps had fucked
off, he poured himself four large glasses of absinthe, laid them out on the bedroom table in a row, and drank them one after another in about thirty seconds before raising his hat to me and going
out for an ‘evening constitutional’. He walked like he had just had a good night’s sleep and a glass of Evian.

I am sitting with Esurio in Starbucks on Wardour Street.

—Tell me, man, how do you fucking do it? Most nights I drink and snort more than you. I’m fitter than any bloke I know. I can shag for England. But I’ve never seen you pissed,
let alone hammered.

—That would be telling, Lincoln.

—Fucking tell, then.

—Let me put it this way. My pleasure, Lincoln, albeit rather a vicarious one, is in sensing your pleasure. When you drink, it’s like I’m drinking. When you snort, I feel the
magic powder in my own nasal cavity, and the tiny part I play in your madness is better than the lead role in my own.

—Yeah, but what’s that got to do with it?

—Everything, Lincoln. If I lose my mind I can’t be there for you, and being there for you is what matters most to me. You’re splendid entertainment and, in a way that you may
never understand, you get hammered for both of us. You’re more than a brother to me; you’re my twin brother. You, Lincoln, are the debauched libertine I have waited all my life for and
I’m not going to miss a second of it.

I think he’s off his pampered head. I finish my Americano and leave for The Club. As I walk out of the door I shudder. I don’t know why.

When I get to The Club, the Bankers’ Party is descending into chaos. I look for Rik. When I can’t find him, one of his staff tells me he’s gone with the
Director of Consumer Affairs to the Dirty Dance Strip Club. When I get there, he’s sitting in a booth surrounded by Eastern European Wraps. There’s about a dozen bottles of champagne on
his table and he’s waving wads of cash at the Wraps, offering every one of them two grand for a fuck.

—Why’d you leave The Club? The party’s rocking.

—You can’t get a fuck in The Club, or even ask for one, and what’s the point in busting the country if you can’t waste your customers’ money doing whatever you
want?

I pull the curtain and leave him to it. As I walk through the seated area next to the bar, I see the Director of Consumer Affairs slumped on a chair. Belinda, one of my Russian Occasionals, with
great tits and an eye for a victim, is pouring champagne into a glass and forcing it down his mouth.

She says:

—Is good for you, Charles. Drink more, drink more.

He says:

—Uuuuhhhhh . . .

When I get close to them I notice a small packet popping out of her knickers. His eyes are bloodshot. He’s slurring his speech and struggling to stay awake. His wallet is open on the
table.

—What’s in his drink?

—Champagne, Lincoln.

—Don’t give me that shit. What’s in his drink?

She pulls the packet out of her knickers.

—Fucking Rohypnol!

—So what?

I sense an opportunity.

—You can’t do that, even in here. Give it to me or I’ll tell your boss.

She throws the packet at me. As she walks off, she shouts over her shoulder:

—Since when have you started caring about rules?

The Director is asleep. I think how lucky the bank’s customers are to have him on their side. Rik walks past with a stripper on each arm. He looks down at the sleeping Director and
smiles:

—See, Lincoln, we’re slowing down; this is the new face of responsible banking.

There are six Rohypnol tablets left. I take them all in one go and finish the champagne. When I leave The Club I don’t feel myself. I fall asleep in Bungalow 8. It’s three in the
afternoon when I wake up. Alone.

October 2009

I look at my watch: 15:55. I’m sitting on a table at the back of The Office. My head is spinning. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke.
Cunt. I wipe my hand across my lips. The Rioja tastes good. I’m on my own. I catch my face in the mirror. I look. Empty. Fucking Empty. The Office is a hub, a terminal I pass through at some
point every day. In a different place it might be a pleasant bar. But it is not in a different place. It’s in Soho and, like everything in Soho, it consumes its own customers.

Mario, the Manager, puts five glasses on my table and the one next to it. He’s nearly sixty and has been running The Office for more than ten years. His profits are recycled in a casino
but he keeps smiling; he’s the kind of man who would be polished and polite on the gallows. Five glasses and two bottles of Rioja. He’s not clairvoyant. He just knows the rhythm of
alcoholics and, within a few minutes, I feel someone’s hand wriggling my foot. I twist my face. I look up and see Maynard, Terry, Simon and Steve. Maynard is sweating. Thin, wiry, American
and in his late forties, with a face so gaunt it makes him look ten years older, he sweats most of the time and always seems to be either on the verge of a heart attack or in the middle of having
one.

Terry is tall with the kind of long hair that should have become extinct in the late sixties. He raises finance for films that never get made. He has knack of finding ‘old money’
that wants to rub shoulders with celebrity. The script is the same every time. First, he reels off the names of a few films he can remember when he’s sober. Usually this works, except if
he’s hungover and his head is fucked. That’s when he tends to go for the classics and that can cause problems. Like when he told an investor he helped fund
Citizen Kane
.

—But, Terry, you weren’t even born when that was made.

—I’m sorry, not
that Citizen Kane
. I meant ‘Kane’ with a ‘C’ not a ‘K’. Great art-house film made in the nineties.

—Oh, I see. Never heard of it myself.

—Well, you wouldn’t have. Censors sent it underground. I’ll get you a copy one day. Anyway, do you want to go to Cannes or not?

The Cannes close. Works every time. Especially for Terry. He gets to go to the Cannes Film Festival every year funded by some stupid cunt who thinks he’s now bought into the film industry.
To give Terry his due, he does know people in the industry and has good contacts in Cannes. It’s just that he needs to borrow someone’s crazy dream to get what he really wants: smashed.
Preferably with a couple of East European escorts sitting on his face. He hasn’t missed or paid for a festival in more than ten years. Hasn’t made a film either.

Simon is a washed-up Yorkshireman who used to work a few Wraps until he became an ‘agent’, which basically means he puts adverts online and in shop windows around Soho and waits for
Hopeful Girls to bite. I like the copy:

This is his sales pitch:

He photoshops pictures of himself next to some star or other and sticks them on the wall of an office he’s rented for a week to conduct the auditions. He makes sure there are plenty of
pictures of him on red carpets at Cannes or Leicester Square. These are real in the sense that he has a knack of diving under the ropes and getting Terry to take a picture before he gets kicked
off. So when the Wraps turn up for their audition for a non-existent part in a non-existent film, they ask him lots of questions about what it’s like to be on first name terms with Tom Cruise
or Brad Pitt. He says:

—You can find out for yourself if you’re successful.

Then they’re putty. Numbers are exchanged and, within a few days, he’s shagging them.

This is where Maynard comes in. Before he was chewed up by Soho he was a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. He’s the real deal. When he shows a picture of himself with Leonardo di
Caprio to some bird he’s trying to shag, it’s not a fake, and every now and then some A-lister flies into London and comes for dinner with him and the boys at The Office. He arrived in
Soho five years ago to work on a script he was writing and never left. Esurio loves Maynard:

—Nothing more elegant that true talent totally wasted, Lincoln. It’s quite a delicious spectacle.

Then there’s Steve, who hides under a thick mop of grey hair that falls onto his face. He’s the quiet one, and even when he’s snorting he’s so fucking slow the only way I
know he hasn’t fallen into a coma is when I see a line wriggle its way up a ten pound note and into his right nostril. He was married once. Now all that’s left of it is his mantra:

—I was never unfaithful to my wife.

At his own estimate, he’s been sleeping with Paid-Fors every week for as long as he can remember, starting the week after his honeymoon. But for men that doesn’t count as infidelity.
Women never quite get this about men. Our brains are warehouses full of boxes. Some boxes are full of stuff, and some are so fucking empty they might as well be black holes. These boxes are sealed
tight and live on different shelves. The ‘Paid-For’ box or the ‘Porn’ box never gets connected to the ‘Wife’ box, and that’s how men build faithful
marriages. Steve’s wife kicked him out when she saw a picture on his phone of a Brazilian she-male sucking his cock. The best he could pull from his box of excuses was:

—Darling, I think I might be gay.

She believed him, kicked him out, and she still thinks that was his first and only indiscretion.

So the five of us are sitting in The Office and we are laughing. At thirty-seven, I’m the junior of the tribe but we all share an understanding. We are sick but never use that word. We are
desperate but don’t use that word either. We are drunk pretty much all of the time. But, above all, we are lost. We drifted into Soho and haven’t the first idea how to get out. Of
course, we have plans. Great films to be made. Beautiful women to fuck. Sunny beaches to lie on. But it is here, in this bar, stuffed with the scent of alcohol and aftershave, that we belong.
Waiting for the next pussy or patsy to walk in through the door as the boxes gather dust and we struggle for air.