The Hunger Page 2

  —Slow is better, Lewis.

  He reminded me of that a few weeks ago when he found me slumped over a stripper, coke still stuck between my teeth. I said:

  —I know, son, I just can’t find the brakes anymore.

  When I was Sales Director in the transport business, I managed over two hundred salesmen. I was a Great Motivator. There were prizes and promises and praise but that was never enough. That gets you liked. What gets you respected, what drives a hairy-arsed salesman to bring in a deal like his life depends on it, is when he thinks his life really does depend on it. I call it the Power of Fear and no one used it better than me. Men in their forties and fifties who’d been selling since they were in nappies would be terrified to come in to work without a deal to their name. Fear made them my Bitches and Bitches sell best because the price of an unsold lead is more than they can afford to pay.

  When one of the salesmen left the company and decided to take the company car with him, I took it personally. He was in the car when I found him. He tried to drive away so I jumped on the bonnet and cracked the glass with my fist. He pulled over and I dragged him out. He went on his knees and said:

  —Sorry, Lincoln. Please don’t hurt me.

  I took the keys and left him, crying like a baby, on the side of the road.

  When I got back, Frank said:

  —There’s no one I have ever met with as little middle ground as you, Lincoln. You’ll end up in the gutter or the stars. I just don’t know which.

  The Boss, says:

  —Do you hear me, Lincoln?

  He points to the photographs on the walls. The biggest stars in the world look down on me. Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Willis, Elton John, Princess Diana. A pantheon of celebrity with him at the centre of it. He carries on:

  —You can do what I did but not if you don’t clean yourself up. Now get out and sort yourself out.

  When I’m back in my office, George comes in. He is doing his best to appear calm. He says:

  —I don’t know how you hold on to your job. He’s never been like this with anyone in fifty years.

  —Because I’m good, George.

  —No one is that good.

  I smile. He is polite because he has to be. I know he wants to smack me in the mouth and I know I deserve it. I am good. I am probably that good. But work is just the skin of my life, taking in enough money to feed the Hunger and that Hunger is the reason I stand on the face of the earth. Nothing else matters.

  The Boss said once:

  —I see a lot of me in you.

  And that’s how I survive. I am his mongrel child, a bastard mix of charisma and chaos, who looks as if I might just about make it until I fuck up and everything is wasted.

  Esurio walks in and rests his right hand on the ornate silver skull that sits on top of his cane.

  —We’re still employed then, and the day is young.

  —Give me an hour and I’ll be with you.

  —Make it sooner, Lincoln. You know how impatient I get.

  9 a.m. Two hours earlier

  I am back at the flat, my body glistening with sweat.

  The girls are still in my bedroom so I shower and leave. My hands are shaking and my head is full of shit. I try to look straight and fix on a point at the far end of Old Compton Street. I can’t even hold my gaze. I need a drink. Some coke. A drink. A line. Anything to take this feeling away. I want to be sick. I have a meeting at The Club. I can’t let them see me fucked. I catch my reflection in a window. I think I look better than I feel. Grey suit. Open-neck shirt. White handkerchief. All I need is a drink, a line, to make the suit sparkle. I can see Esurio standing outside Cafe Boheme. He is holding the door open for me. I walk across the road.

  —Thanks, man.

  —My pleasure.

  I go downstairs into the toilet and pull a wrap out of the inside pocket of my suit. By the time I’m walking up the stairs I feel more like myself. I’m sure the day will be good. Esurio is still standing outside by the door. When he sees me coming he pushes it open.

  —Better?

  —Yes, thanks.

  I walk across the road to an off-licence. Coke is good. Two shots of vodka will make it immense. As I leave the shop and make my way to The Club, I raise a bottle to Esurio. He raises his hat.

  —Here’s to a beautiful day!

  I smile at him. I love him. I hate him. He is a pest. A parasite. He never leaves me alone. I try to remember how we first met. I can’t. It feels like he’s always been with me. When I was a kid he was more ghostly than he is now. It was like I could see through him. There was the time when I was fourteen. A year after my Dad died. I was being bullied at school by a kid called Mitch Walters. He was a tall kid, a boxer. No one messed with him. Before he died, Dad said:

  —No one ever pushes us around, Lincoln. No one.

  My Granddad Bob said:

  —We’re fighters. Hit him back. Just once. So he knows he can’t mess with you. Then leave him alone. He won’t touch you again.

  The next day I was at school. Mitch Walters was drinking a cup of hot chocolate. I snatched the cup out of his hand, threw the liquid in his face and punched him once.

  —Just once, Lincoln.

  Then, faint against the red brick of the school wall, I saw Esurio. Half his face was missing and so was most of the left side of his body, and it was like I could see through the rest of him. His voice was a waspish whisper, not as strong as it is now:

  —Hit him again and again and again. Feed me, Lincoln, feed me.

  I saw fear in the kid’s eyes. I was a rabid dog. In seconds his head was like a ball on a spring. It spun in all directions as one punch then another clattered against his head. I knew I was going to kill him. I could not stop. I wanted to splatter his blood on the schoolyard. Rip out his guts and impale them on the fence. Then he stopped moving. Esurio waved his hands extravagantly:

  —Wonderful! Wonderful! Carry on like this and we’ll be partners for life!

  Mitch survived. He wore a bandage around his head for weeks. His left ear was shattered and he will never hear properly again. Whenever he saw me he lowered his head and hunched his shoulders. His smile was the grimace of the defeated. Everyone thought I was insane. They were right. No one bothered me ever again.

  A year before I beat the fuck out of Mitch Walters, my Dad died and Esurio was with me there too. I was running through a caravan park where we were staying when Dad dropped dead of a heart attack. I rushed into our caravan to get Mum, but she had already seen him collapse through the window. When I came back out again a man was trying to resuscitate my Dad. When I got to my father I could hear Esurio:

  —We’ll be fine from now on, Lincoln, fine. Just the two of us.

  I turned to see where the voice was coming from but all I could see was a faint outline of a black morning coat a few yards away, with the white of the caravans and the blue of the sky pushing through it to create a messy patchwork of colour.

  The first time I remember him fully formed like other people was when I was sixteen. I was shagging one of my Mum’s best friends. She was fifty-two. I didn’t have a place to live, so we fucked either in her house or in the back of a knackered Ford Fiesta I lived in for three months. One night, there he was, sitting on the bonnet of the car as I was pounding away, a ridiculous purple umbrella protecting him from the rain. He wiped the rain off the windscreen to get a better view.

  —That’s very impressive indeed. Quite the little pounder, aren’t we? I predict great things for you, Lincoln.

  And, to get great things, I needed great stages but selling vans can never be enough for a man with an appetite for Greatness. In 2009 I left the transport industry and took off to Ibiza to get my head together. I knew the island well. When Lewis was twelve, my ex-wife took him to Spain to live. That was the first time I thought I would lose him. The second was when he turned fifteen and I thought:

  —I’ve lived long enough to see him past the age
I was when my Dad died. What use am I to him now?

  And one morning when I was having a coffee in Portals, looking out at the yachts in the harbour, this thought came back to me. It was one of those days that are so beautiful it hurts. The kind that magnifies the feeling of being a useless cunt. I had been sitting there maybe an hour when The Boss came in. He lives in Ibiza, and I knew him well because I had brought hundreds of van salesmen into his clubs. We had always got on and, before he left, he placed his business card on the table and said:

  —Come and help me promote the clubs.

  Even driftwood is going somewhere and, two months later, I arrived in Soho, the new Sales and Marketing Director of The Club. On the flight from Ibiza, Esurio sat next to me. He was no longer an uncertain presence in my life, and on that flight he was radiant. He stroked the carnation in his lapel:

  —I got it especially for the flight. Rather beautiful, don’t you think?

  —Yeah, it’s OK.

  —Oh come on, don’t be a party pooper! We’re going to have the time of our lives. Sex, strippers, Soho. A stage fit for us to stand on.

  Esurio has always been a clever cunt. Smarter than me. More agile. He often says:

  —You’re different from the rest, Lincoln. More extreme and more malleable. Two of the qualities I most appreciate in a man.

  Despite the good times and the praise, I often wish we had never met. These are the things I hate most about him:

  • He is so fucking arrogant

  • He thinks he knows me better than I do

  • He tells me he always knows what’s good for me

  • He thinks he’s always right

  • He gets inside my head and fucks with my mind

  • He takes me for granted

  • He speaks with a posh accent and says his father was a baronet

  • He repeats himself in the same sentence like when he says: Feed me, Lincoln, feed me

  • He is so fucking demanding and nothing I do ever satisfies him

  • He knows I am in awe of him

  • I hate him because he is stronger than me and he has a temper like a fucking tornado. One night, I didn’t want to go out with him. I was sitting in the lounge watching Carol Vorderman on daytime TV. I wanted a day without a drink. Just a fucking day. He hated it. Started shouting at me. I said:

  —Fuck off and leave me alone.

  —Well, if that’s what you want, Lincoln, I will fuck off. I’ll go off into the hall and all the while you’re watching TV I’ll be lifting those weights of yours and doing press-ups, getting even stronger, Lincoln, even stronger, and I’ll be so strong I’ll be able to lift you like a feather and carry you wherever I want.

  Two hours later I was in the Townhouse on Dean Street getting hammered.

  • I hate his name. Esurio. So fucking pompous. I never understood why someone who sounds so English should have a Spanish name. I asked him:

  —Are you Spanish?

  —Latin, Lincoln, Latin.

  —That’s what I mean, Spanish.

  —No, not that Latin. I’m referring to the ancient Italic language. The language of gods and emperors.

  —What the fuck are you talking about?

  —Esurio, Lincoln, is a Latin word.

  —Oh yeah, what’s it mean, then? He stopped for a moment, raised his glass and smiled:

  —Hunger, Lincoln, it means hunger.

  Wraps

  September 2009

  —This is the place for us, Lincoln. Look at this . . . and this!

  Esurio is beside himself with excitement. Soho has one language and that is the language of desire. It promises and teases. This is the land of make-believe where whatever you want you can have; where all you have to do is reach out and take it. Most people float in and out of Soho. They come looking for a fantasy and whether they find it or not, they leave. There are others who think they can float in and out but the breeze that blows them in is too weak to carry them out. These are the real victims of Soho. They come in search of freedom and find themselves trapped in a square mile of Chaos. I divide them into two groups:

  Lost Men

  These are middle-aged men. Some as young as thirty, most over fifty. Perhaps they have skirted around the edges of the film or television industry and now that they have surrendered their youth, their homes and their ambition to their ex-wives, they come looking to reverse time. They are happily looking forward to puberty and the joys of having a cock hard enough to use.

  Hopeful Girls

  Most of these are young models balancing their Louis Vuitton handbags on wobbly stilettos, who came to chase dreams and found a nightmare of coke and cock from which they will never escape. Others come from as far as São Paulo or St Petersburg to work in ‘a great English city’ and support their families back home. They, too, find a nightmare of coke and cock.

  Soho connects these Lost Men and Hopeful Girls. It bundles them together in a stuffy little bag, and every day that passes the string around the top of the bag pulls a little tighter until the light and the air have gone and all that’s left is the slow suffocation of hope.

  Then there are those who come to Soho and hurl themselves at its core, daring it to do its worst and, when it does, they ask for more. Esurio says:

  —That’s you, Lincoln!

  As usual he’s right. I would like to say the descent into madness was gradual. First a drink, then a fuck, then another drink, then another fuck, then a line, then another line, then another, and on into Chaos. Sadly, that is not the case. Esurio makes sure the descent is fast and total, with not a cell in my nervous system left untouched within hours of arriving in Soho.

  Esurio insists I live in a shared flat on Old Compton Street and, to be fair to him, it does make practical sense.

  —You can walk to work from here and you won’t have to worry about getting home at night. It’s absolutely perfect!

  But then I’m just kidding myself. When I’m surrounded by coke and cunt, ‘practical sense’ is just a disguise, a way of getting my excuses in early and, when I tell them to my Mum, they sound pretty convincing:

  —Well, I need to be close to the clubs; or

  —The Boss really wants me to be in the heart of Soho; or (and this is the best and curiously honest excuse):

  —I want to show I’m a keen worker

  And really, I am the keenest fucking worker in Soho. Here’s what I have to do:

  1. My number one priority is to fill the clubs with the right kind of punter.

  2. Once I’ve got enough of the right kind of punter into the clubs I have to get them in more than once. Preferably every fucking week.

  3. Then I have to help the girls be as good at selling as I am. This means I teach them to get the men into the private booths at three hundred quid an hour plus champagne at anything from five hundred to five grand a bottle. On the surface that seems quite easy. A man can have all the money in the world but when the girls start working him he’s just a hapless fucking ape, dragging his knuckles on the ground, following the scent of pussy until he collapses from exhaustion. The one problem I have is that three things cloud my judgement, and if you could print out the contents of my brain at any frozen moment in time it would look like this: Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt.

  And putting me in charge of three hundred strippers is like putting the Taliban in charge of Homeland Security. Tonight I’m running a party for the City boys. Before they fucked the world economy, the Bankers had an easier time of it. Now they’ve been told they have to be a bit more careful. Rik is a hedge fund manager. He’s younger than me, maybe thirty-five and almost as hammered as I am. He drives an Aston and a Bentley, fully loaded with an expense account big enough to fill the boot with cocaine. When he walks into The Club, he is with his accountant, Steve. Rik says:

&nbs
p; —Can’t even be let out on my own anymore, can I, Steve? The Chairman says we have to be responsible now. He was on the news the other day coming out with all this crap about how we have to sign up to a code of morals or fuck off. Apparently we’re not interested in fast, easy money anymore. He says the rules have changed. We’ve got to have more respect. Think for the long term. In a way I agree with him. Which is why I’ve brought Steve with me. He will monitor carefully the money I spend on the girls and champagne and he will confirm that I am responsible for a morale-building evening of ‘Corporate Entertainment’. Isn’t that right, Steve?

  Steve nods and finishes his Jack Daniel’s. Rik touches my shoulder. I hate being touched by people I don’t love. I don’t love Rik. He must sense it and pulls back. Then he says:

  —All there is, Linc, is naked self-interest. We are the species of Me. There are no morals. Not anymore. There never were any. It was always a game for losers. We’ll bust the planet a thousand times, and as long as it’s got enough left in the tank to get itself together again, we’ll bust it again. And while all this shit is happening and little people are running for cover, we’ll sound as if we care and carry on until there’s nothing left to bust. Now, take me to the pussy.

  Rik closes his eyes, sticks his arms out front and lets Steve guide him to a table near the stage. There are young girls everywhere, most in lingerie; some already have their tits out. I call them Wraps because for me young girls come bundled with alcohol and cocaine. They’re all in the same box, impossible to separate one from another. I need a drink. I need some gear. I need a fuck. Put those sentences in any order you want and the meaning is always the same. You take the drugs away and the Wraps lose their purpose. You take the Wraps away and the drink is liquid loneliness.

  My life is Chaos. I pound Wraps for fame and pleasure. If I have to choose the greater of the two, I always choose fame. In my head I have a map of How It All Works. One day I write it down.