Free Kill Your Friends by John Niven Page B

standing near him. Poor
bastard, I guess that’s all he’s got now, isn’t it? The pumping.
Can you imagine it? You’re not even thirty and you can’t do anything any more. No nose-up, no pills, no frosty beers, no
warming shots of Jack or Remy. You’re just sitting there,
completely sober, in your fuck-off mansion, dressed head to foot in
all the finery you spent the morning trawling New Bond Street with
some stylist for, you’ve just given up trying to read some book for
the umpteenth time, because it’s too hard , you’re turning on
Sky Sports again, or forcing some underling to drink fruit juice
and play cards with you, and you’re thinking—another forty years of this ? You’re just some stage kid, some poor song-and-dance
spastic with a cheeky grin who fate threw a whole bunch of sevens.
And now you’re staring down the wrong end of four decades with just
your own thoughts for company when you don’t really have two
fucking thoughts to rub together. Nasty.
    Danny Rent sidles up. He’s a scumbag, a real rapist of a
manager, one of those old-school Tin Pan Alley guys that you just
don’t see much any more: late forties, stubble, well-worn Armani
suit with hash burns all over it, heavy gold Rolex (so
wrong) on his right wrist. He looks like a down-on-his-luck
nightclub owner from Miami Vice and smells like he just went
on a four-day Scotch binge and then jumped into a vat of
aftershave.
    “Hey, Stelfox, how’s tricks?” he says.
    “Oi oi,” Isay.
    “Listen, I been meaning to call you. Got a bit of a band coming
together just now that’s right up your Strasse , mate.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Fucking yeah. Four birds. Girl power. Limit.”
    Christ, I bet no one else is thinking that, the week the Spice
Girls go to N°1 in the States. “Any good?” I say.
    “Fucking useless at the minute, mate, but you’d do the lot of
them. We’re working on it. One of em’s got sumfin.”
    “Yeah? What they called?”
    “Get this—Songbirds. Gerrit?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Right, do you want a fucking nose-up or what?”
    Girl power. Do me a fucking favour. However, there’s going to be
a bunch of these whores having it away over the next couple of
years. No question. One thing you learn when you’re in the business
of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there’s
really no bottom to where they’ll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit
bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking
bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it—a bad
photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first
place—the more they’ll eat it up with a fucking big spoon, from
dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time. It’s too good.
    ♦
    Come the early hours we wind up at the Met Bar and then up into
the hotel above, to Parker-Hall’s suite for his
‘after-after-party’. We’re all chang’d up to the eyeballs by this
point and listening to a chang’d-up Parker-Hall go through a
variant of his ‘How-I-Did-It’ speech for, surely, the billionth
time tonight. Now and again Chalmers, Crush’s Product Manager, will
boringly interject details about the marketing plan, how big the TV
ad spend is going to be, the increased poster campaign, who they’re
getting to direct the next video. Chalmers is just one of the
thousand fathers suddenly lining up to stamp their parentage on
Crush’s success. “We’re looking at doing thirty thousand albums a
week from here on,” he says.
    I’m trying not to hear this. The expression on my face is
pleasant while, inside, I feel like the village girl as she stares
at the face of the tenth soldier in the raping queue—blood on her
thighs and half a pint of semen already up her. I’m not
here , I tell myself. I’m walking in a forest. I’m walking in
a forest …
    The room is crowded—industry, random girls and a few fairly
well-known musicians. Trellick is sitting on the ledge of the tall
windows which overlook Hyde Park, arms folded,