Free Kill Your Friends by John Niven

to get within
two bouncers of Robbie or Liam. To be allowed to pay for their own
drinks. The secretaries in our building spend months planning for tonight. They buy new clothes, they get haircuts and
facials, and they pool their miserable salaries to buy a few grams.
It’s a boiler-fest in here.
    Now, you keep reading things—in magazines, in newspapers—about
how the nineties are turning out to be, well, nice. According to
these articles, men in the sharing, caring nineties have rejected
the hollow materialism and sexism of the eighties and embraced
women as equals. Partners. You read these things and you
wonder—where the fuck are the people who write this stuff hanging
out? Primary schools? A rural Greenpeace office?
    My industry, always resistant to change (in the fifties we hated
the idea of singles, in the seventies cassettes were the enemy,
initially CDs were the Antichrist in the eighties—boy, we soon got
our heads around that one), hasn’t really bought into all this
nonsense yet.
    Thankfully, very few women seem to have understood it either.
There are lots of them already here and thousands more clamouring
to get in. Every day piles of CVs tumble into the office.
Fresh-faced young girls with excellent qualifications, all hungry
to get a job where, in return for working twelve-hour days, being
sexually harassed from dawn till dusk, having to cope with all
manner of coked-up, coming-down, hung-over, flaky, irrational,
abusive, demanding behaviour from people like me, they will be
rewarded with maybe fifteen grand a year, the odd backstage pass
and occasional glimpses of pop stars in the building.
    In toilets, offices, broom cupboards, hotel stairwells and on
the chill leather seats of BMWs, Saabs and Mercedes coupes, they
will suck cocks and take it up the arse. Their twenties will flash
by in a holocaust of parties, hangovers, semen and bad champagne
until, one fine morning somewhere down the line, they wake up to
find themselves thirty-five years old with sagging tits, a
cancerous, shrivelled womb, tired, fucked-out eyes, and a
complexion battered by late nights, drugs and cocks. A lucky few of
these girls will, through a combination of low cunning and
viciously skilful fellatio, manage to marry one of the executives
they serve and hang on to him for—at best—a decade, raising his
children and decorating the house while he works late at the office
pumping his way through her successors. Eventually, either she will
put her foot down or (more likely) he will upgrade to one of the
Sophies or Samanthas who replaced her. They will get divorced
somewhere in their mid-forties and she will find herself standing
in the kitchen of a big house somewhere in Buckinghamshire with two
nasty, pre-pubescent monsters whingeing at her as she haplessly
uncorks her second bottle of white wine at half past four in the
afternoon.
    A very, very few of these girls will manage to marry one of the
pop stars. The Meg Matthews deal. This is the record-industry
boiler equivalent of winning the lottery—the Pretty Woman ,
rags-to-riches story that surely keeps so many of these girls
choking down warty cocks, swallowing spunk and throwing themselves
down on all fours like it’s going out of fashion for the best part
of twenty years. It. Could. Be. You. For the tiny minority of
Cinderellas who pull off this incredible coup the life pattern will
be much the same as it is for the ones who marry the executives,
although the time frame of the marriage will be greatly truncated
and the remuneration significantly enhanced.
    We’re hunkered around a corner table in another cavernous room.
Billowing white drapes have been hung, candles lit and carpeting
laid down. There are blackjack tables and roulette wheels but, here
and there, you can still see the cement floor, the steel poles and
corrugated metal of the roof and the gloomy dark above the
canopies. You remember that the hulk of Earls Court looks down
impassively on everything from car and