The Hunger Read online

  —Had you worried there, didn’t I?

  He is a bully. Too strong for me to control. There are no more deals to be done. Where he goes, I will go. Where he sleeps, I will sleep. I will keep doing this even though I know he will tire of me. One day, I know he will devour me. I am powerless before him and he will finish with me at a time of his own choosing. For now, I’m good sport. I make him laugh. I feed him. But I sense he is growing tired of me, and when I am weak and pathetic, when my blood is made of booze and my cock limp, he will throw me into a gutter on Dean Street and move on to other bodies. That’s the end game. Like cancer he will eat away at me until there’s nothing left. We both know the rules. But we are not there yet. For now, I can borrow time on condition that the next fuck-up, the next ridiculous dream, is more costly than the one that came before it. Esurio is without mercy. I hate him.

  I’m also having more nightmares than usual and I’m seeing things. I leave the flat and make my way to The Office. At the corner of Old Compton Street and Dean Street, people’s faces begin to twist and melt like a Francis Bacon painting, and when I walk past a woman in rags in a boarded-up doorway, I recognise her. Her name is Edie and she spent years living on the streets until she died a month after I moved to Soho. A man walks up to me and asks me the time. When I look up to answer him, he is no longer there. These people are my Familiars. They come. They go.

  —Faster, Lincoln, faster!

  Esurio is driving me on, prodding me in the back with his cane. I dream of killing him, of stuffing his cane so far up his arse it comes out of his mouth. But I know I can’t. I need him. And he knows I need him. And so we walk up to the entrance to The Office, joined at the hip, Siamese twins who will stay together until he decides to split us apart and then one of us will die:

  —And remember, Lincoln, it won’t be me.

  I order a bottle of Rioja and go straight down to the toilets to take some lines. When I come back up, Esurio is waiting for me at the table, holding a glass of absinthe. He isn’t smiling:

  —Now entertain me, Lincoln, entertain me!

  Darkness in Soho

  June 2010. 3 a.m.

  The basement of the Dirty Dance Strip Club is full of punters and Eastern European Wraps. The music is banging on the inside of my head and everything is twisting and gnawing. I feel sick. I go into a toilet cubicle and push the seat down. I put so much gear on it, the whole seat turns white. As I snort it, Esurio has his boot on my neck, pressing it down so I have to use all my strength to keep my nose high enough to snort.

  —You’re a strong man, Lincoln, very strong.

  He used to say that with sincerity. Now his voice is laced with derision. When I’m done, the sweat is pouring down my face and my heart is howling like a caged wolf. Esurio opens the door for me back into the basement and makes an exaggerated gesture with his cane, to bloat his sense of generosity. I ignore him and, as I walk through the door, he drops his cane to the ground and I fall over it. A couple of Wraps rush over and help me to my feet. When their hands touch the shoulder of my jacket and I feel their fingers pressing gently into my flesh, I want to burst into tears. It’s a touch that only a woman can give and perhaps only a desperate, drunken man can understand what it means.

  When I’m back on my feet I go with the Wraps to a corner away from the bar. They are both stunning, with long black hair, one slightly darker than the other. I guess they are both Russian. They are dressed in bras and G-strings. One black, one white. I need a drink. Another line. One of the Wraps leans over towards me and whispers into my ear. I think she says:

  —You like my ass?

  I don’t acknowledge her, but she pushes my hand under her buttocks and guides my index finger into her arse. And I sit there. A vodka tonic in one hand. Darkness like I have never felt before in the other. The entire basement seems to disappear and everything is black. I can feel my finger moving about inside her, foraging, but I’ve lost all sense of what it’s doing there or what I’m looking for. In the past, the King of Soho would have taken this arse as his Divine Right and displayed it to the world. Now . . .

  —You not want?

  The Wrap looks at me and eases my finger out. It’s the same look I saw in her eyes when she picked me off the floor. She’s right. I not want. Anything.

  8 a.m.

  I wake up sitting in a Ferrari in Mayfair, just around the corner from Bar 45. I borrowed it yesterday from a dealership. The manager is a regular at The Club. I look after him and occasionally he sorts me out a car as a thank you. I think I was meant to be taking a Swedish Wrap out in it but it never happened and now I don’t know how I got here or how long I have been asleep. I lift my hands up. They’re shaking. My whole body is shaking. I have a meeting with The Boss in half an hour and I need to get to The Club. I want to puke. I wretch a few times but nothing comes up. I look at my hands again. Shaking. Out of control. I think:

  —I can’t let The Boss see me like this.

  Then I think:

  —One line will sort it out.

  I pull some gear out of my jacket. I am sobbing like a fucking baby as I snort it off the dashboard. When it’s all up my nose I look at my watch. I have ten minutes to get to The Club. I turn the keys in the ignition. The engine purrs. My foot hits the accelerator and then I hesitate. Esurio is tapping his cane on the windscreen and shouting at me:

  —Drive, you wretch, drive!

  I turn the engine off, jump out of the car and start sprinting down Curzon Street. I am delirious. Shouting at no one:

  —Fuck you!

  I’m sprinting across Berkeley Square, heading towards Conduit Street, and all I can hear above the city and the traffic is his laugh. It bounces around my head and when I press my hands up to my ears to block it out, it just gets louder. The laughter is coming from somewhere deep inside me. I pull at my head, trying to tear it out but still it goes on. People look at me like I’m insane. I am insane. By the time I turn into Berwick Street, my entire body is creaking like the hull of a sinking ship. I feel death is close. Closer than I have ever felt it before. I am almost ready to surrender, to let it take me, do what it wants with me, anything to make the pain go away. At the furthest point of this feeling, I feel her touch again on my shoulder: the Russian Wrap, soft, feminine, maternal. Kind. Kinder than I deserve. It carries me to The Club. I am on time. I stumble into The Office and grip the door to hold me up. The sweat has passed through my shirt and the inside of my jacket is soaking wet. The Boss looks up from his desk. I hate what I see in his face: pity.

  He asks the other people in The Office to give us a few moments. I can’t look him in the eye. I wish he was angry. I think:

  I’ll provoke him, force him to be angry with me.

  I can’t. I have too much love and respect for him. He goes easy on me:

  —You’ve broken our deal but I won’t cut your money down to the floor. I’ll take you back to what you were on before I gave you the rise.

  —Thanks, Boss.

  —Please look after yourself. You’re a top man. Don’t waste it. Go home, get yourself cleaned up and we’ll reschedule the meeting.

  I get up to leave and, as I do, he adds:

  —What you do on the outside is your business, but if I catch you taking drugs in any of the clubs I’ll sack you straight away.

  —I know. Thanks for that, too.

  The rest of the day disappears in a nightmare of drink, coke and cunt. Through all the madness I notice something happening inside me. It’s a familiar feeling, a toxic mix of pain and fury, one that has come and gone in waves as long as I can remember, but now it is unleashed, wild and howling, incapable of restraint.

  Like all violent urges it is a defence against an attack, real or imagined, on me or those that I love and, after Dad died, I began to lose control over it. When I was sixteen, my Mum, still lost in grief, became friends with a man called Bob. I didn’t have any feelings towards Bob. I just wanted my Mum to be happy. If he was kind to her then he was OK by
me. He wasn’t kind to her. He piled his stuff in her garage and wouldn’t move it. I asked my Mum if she wanted me to sort it out for her. She said:

  —Yes.

  An instant later, she realised what she had done and said:

  —No.

  But by then I was on my way to the model shop he owned with a baseball bat in my hand. I opened the door, flipped the ‘Open’ sign to ‘Closed’, walked passed battleships and Spitfires and thumped the counter with the baseball bat. I was a kid and this man in his mid-forties fell to his knees and started crying.

  —Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me . . .

  —You’ve got until Saturday to get your stuff out of the garage. If it’s still there when I go to Mum’s on Sunday, I’ll come back for you.

  A strange, gloved hand, attached to a ghostly arm and the faint outline of a body, picked the baseball bat off the counter and passed it to me. I think I heard a voice:

  —Well done, Lincoln, well done!

  The stuff was gone from the garage the next day.

  Walking away from The Club after the meeting, I think about Bob and my mind takes me back to that shop and everything looks the same as I remember it, except this time I am beating him with the baseball bat until his head explodes and when I’m done I destroy the fucking shop and everything in it. When the place is wrecked I catch my reflection in a cracked mirror on the wall behind the counter. My face is red and covered in blood. It must be a distortion caused by the broken glass. I look again. The same image. My throat is cut and a gloved hand pulls a knife away from my neck. Before I fall to the ground I am already dead. I have been dead for some time. I doubt whether I have ever truly been alive, so I ask my Mum:

  —How do you know you’re alive?

  She looks at me as if I’m crazy:

  —What sort of question is that? You wouldn’t still be here if you weren’t alive.

  I know, with absolute certainty, she is wrong.

  The Next Day

  What used to give me pleasure now seems only to relieve the pain but I have an idea in my head that if I keep taking more, I will feel more like my Old Self. It is not that I am afraid of pain. It’s just that there are two types of pain. I call them Shallow and Deep. I am used to the first one and I know I can deal with it. The second one is new and scares the shit out of me. Here’s an example of me dealing with Shallow Pain:

  I was in my early thirties on a holiday in Paris with my girlfriend. I had been having problems with one of my back teeth for some time and, on our third night in Paris, I managed to break it. Not chip it. Break it. The nerves were exposed and the pain was fucking unbelievable. I took a painkiller. It got worse. After my sixth tablet I gave up. My girlfriend said:

  —You need to get to an emergency dentist immediately.

  By now the pain had taken hold of my life. Nothing else mattered. I had to deal with it now.

  —I haven’t got time. I’ll sort it out now.

  —How are you going to do that?

  —Get my toothbrush.

  —Your toothbrush?

  —Just get it now!

  I broke the toothbrush in half and pressed the broken end of the handle half against the door with the smooth end facing out. I asked my girlfriend to move the door in and out slowly so I could align the smooth end to hit my broken tooth when the door was shut. When I was certain the angles were correct I gripped the toothbrush and said to her:

  —When I shout ‘Slam’, you slam the door shut as hard as you can.

  —But . . .

  —No fucking ‘buts’. Do it!

  She opened the door as wide as was possible to enable me to keep my grip on the toothbrush.

  Slam!

  I felt a crack as the toothbrush bashed into the enamel and exposed nerves of the tooth. I felt a searing pain rip through every cell of my body. My mouth was like an exploding volcano of hot, molten agony. The tooth had shifted but was still hanging on. Blood was dripping out of my mouth onto my shirt and hands.

  —Again.

  —What?

  —Again!

  As soon as the door was opened to the same distance as the first time, I screamed:

  Slam!

  This time the toothbrush knocked the tooth out of my mouth. There was blood everywhere. I could still feel bits of root dangling in my mouth. I forced three fingers into the fleshy remnants of my tooth socket and tugged and twisted and pulled until I was sure everything was out. My girlfriend was crying:

  —That’s horrible!

  I went to look in the mirror. I lifted my cheek to see the damage. All traces of the tooth were gone. I washed my mouth out and smiled. That’s the thing about Shallow Pain: you know what causes it and you know it will pass.

  Deep Pain is more mysterious. It’s impossible to get a grip on what’s causing it because it seems to be everywhere all at once, like it defines who you are. You can feel strong and fit and healthy and still be riddled with Deep Pain. Shallow Pain takes over a part of your body. Deep Pain takes over your soul, and I think the only way to cure Deep Pain is to kill your soul.

  So it’s the Next Day and I am in a jazz club. I can’t be sure of the time because I am bollocksed. I am not happy because I haven’t had a Happy Day since the Grand Ball. Nor have I seen the sun. Not even in Cannes. All the boys from The Office are in the club and when Geoff, the floor manager, sees me, he points them out to me at the bar. I walk over and Maynard, Terry and Simon are messing about with a couple of Wraps. I have done this a hundred times and I know the routine. Except this time it’s different. The Wraps are as available as they always are, but I am on a different journey now. I want annihilation. To wipe myself out. It’s the only way I can be stopped and I’m waiting for an opportunity. I have only needed a few minutes of patience when a guy standing next to us at the bar slaps one of the Wraps on her arse. I say:

  —Don’t do that.

  He replies:

  —I’ll do whatever I want.

  And when I go to pick my glass off the bar, he says:

  —It’s my drink. Fucking leave it alone, arsehole!

  I take it and wait. Nothing. I turn away and a few seconds later I hear him call the Wrap a ‘slapper’ to his mates and he is pointing at me and saying:

  —It’s the only bird a bald-headed cunt like that can get . . .

  I leave my glass on the bar and go down a narrow flight of stairs to the toilet. I have taken a line or two off the toilet seat and I am pissing in a urinal when the guy at the bar walks into the toilet and heads straight for me. I look just past his left shoulder to distract him and when he buys it, I punch him full force on the side of the face. He falls to the ground like he has been shot. He is unconscious. Maybe dead. I hope he is dead, but after a few moments I hear him groan. It’s the last thing I hear before the door to the toilet is stormed by police officers. I don’t know how many. I get my fists ready and start punching wildly. One of them grabs me from behind and I headbutt him. I hear his nose crack and blood drops over my shoulder and onto my cock. I think:

  —Fuck me! My cock’s still out.

  I make a bolt for the door when I feel my body rising off the ground and all I can see is a blinding, white light. I feel like It is Accomplished. Over. The floating, the white light, this is how I imagined it to be. I wait for the procession of dead relatives when I feel a bang on my face as it hits the fluorescent lights of the toilet. There is glass everywhere and the cop whose nose bled on my cock is back on his feet. He says:

  —You’re in fucking trouble now, sunshine!

  More cops rush down the stairs into the bathroom and the cop whose nose bled on my cock turns me face down and two, maybe three, other cops begin dragging me feet first up the wooden stairs. With every step my head thumps against the wood. I’m screaming, kicking, spitting, shouting, as my head bangs harder on the stairs until I hear it crack. I think my skull is about to split open when I’m dragged through a door back into the bar and lifted so high in the air by the
cops, my face almost touches the ceiling. I am borne above the crowd, a Martyr to Nothingness, my cock swinging in the light like a Holy Staff, until I feel the cold night air on my face and I’m thrown into the back of a meat-wagon. Bound by my hands and feet, I writhe like a fish on the floor of the van, waiting for my air to expire and I’m released only when I am placed in a cell at a local Police Station. As soon as the cell door shuts behind me, I rush at the door and pound it with my shoulder. I force bits of my face out of the small barred area at the top of the cell door:

  —Fuck you! Fuck you!

  The door opens and three cops enter. I rush at them, fists flying. They jump on me and keep me face down on the floor of the cell and, when I think I’m going to pass out, another cop enters, his hands and arms gloved up to the elbow:

  —Strip him! I’m going to search him for drugs!

  I am instantly quiet and sober. I raise my hands in a gesture of submission. I say:

  —Please don’t. I’m sorry, I’ll be OK now.

  The cops back off. They look stunned, convinced some benign doppelgänger has taken over my body, and the new cop with the gloves looks at me and backs off. They leave me alone in the cell. I am shocked that I stopped, that I was able to stop, that some remote part of my unconscious mind was still capable of processing enough information to get me to act on it. I assume it must be something primal in a man, the thought of a man’s hand up your arse, a hostile man’s hand, pulling at your insides, that reminds you there is more to life than death. There is the humiliation that precedes death and that is the greater horror.

  I lie down on the bed and look up at the bare ceiling. I am about to fall asleep when I hear a tapping on the cell floor. I turn over, thinking it will go away. It gets louder. I sit up and Esurio is standing before me, banging his cane against the wall above my head.

  —You’re a coward, Lincoln. Losing your fight like that. I’m appalled at you.

  —What did you expect me to do?

  —I expect nothing of you anymore, Lincoln, absolutely nothing. How many people do you think I know intimately, very intimately, as if they were my own flesh and blood, that have found themselves in positions like this, and they would have died in this cell, died rather retreat in fear?