Authors: John Niven
I stroll into marketing on the first floor. It’s a morgue, no
music playing, people sitting about in shock. “Morning, all,” I say
brightly, as I cross the open-plan space. I’ve been a bit of a god
in marketing lately, a few of the girls have even put bets on
Songbirds being the Christmas N°1. But, this morning, I get no
reaction beyond a couple of muted ‘hellos’.
I stick my head around Ross’s office door. He’s on the phone,
talking quietly. “Listen, hang on,” he says as soon as he sees me,
“I’ll have to call you back.”
“What’s up with the coppers?” I say, strolling in.
He looks at me for a moment before asking, “Have you been
upstairs yet?”
“No, I just…”
“Shut the door and sit down.”
I do it.
“Strap yourself in,” Ross says standing up.
“For fuck’s sake…”
“The police arrived about an hour ago, no one’s been allowed to
go up to A
&
R since then. We only know because
Jeannie came down and told us. It’s…” He stops, shaking his head in
disbelief.
“For fuck’s sake mate,
what
is it?”
“Parker-Hall’s been arrested. They’ve found obscene images of
children on his computer. I mean, proper hardcore stuff. Babies and
shit like that.”
I let my jaw drop. “You. Are. Fucking. Joking.”
“I swear to God, Steven. The cunt’s a paedo.”
♦
So Woodham came crashing and stumbling down the hallway behind
me. I stood aside and let him see. Rebecca, naked, dead and twisted
in a mad heap, her green eyes staring and the green stump of the
champagne bottle still jutting out of her throat, blood still
pumping weakly over her brown freckled skin and trickling down her
breasts and belly.
“Oh my God. Oh fucking Christ.”
“We were messing about, play-fighting. She…she fell off the end
of the bed. The bottle…”
He inched towards her and extended two trembling fingers to the
side of her neck. I picked up the phone and started to dial.
“What are you doing, Steven?”
“Calling an ambulance.”
“She’s dead.”
“We need to—”
“Don’t be fucking stupid.”
He took the phone from me and sat down. “Fuck!” Woodham said.
“Fuck it!”
“We have to—”
“Think. I’m a policeman. We’re off our heads. There’s drugs all
over the fucking place, she’s full of them. We’ve both…do you know
how this will look?”
“Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus, Alan.”
“Shhh. Let me think.”
I sat down on the bed and buried my face in my hands and
pretended to cry while Woodham thought.
“Right,” he said, “give me a hand. Wrap her up in this sheet and
we’ll, yeah, strip the bed. Here…”
Later I sat in my bathrobe, cradling a half-pint of Glenfiddich,
chain-smoking and watching MTV with the sound turned way up, the
ceaseless din of the videos—Jamiroquai with the floor moving under
him (I wonder if we could get Jonathan Glazer to do the Songbirds
video?), Pulp, Kula Shaker, Mansun—partially obliterating the
sounds of sawing, splintering and hacking coming from the bathroom.
Well, I reflected, the four hundred quid on that set of Japanese
butcher’s knives hadn’t been completely wasted after all.
It took almost two hours for Woodham to cut Rebecca up into
manageable sections (torso, hips, limbs and head) that would fit
into my two biggest suitcases. We sat in silence for a while after
he’d finished. Finally he looks at Rebecca’s suitcase and turns to
me, remembering something we must have been talking about earlier.
“She said she was going to Australia today?”
“Yeah.”
“To visit her parents, but it was a surprise? They don’t know
she’s coming?”
“No.” I’m acting kind of numb.
“She must have her passport on her.”
“Yeah.” It was in her coat. I’d checked.
“How long was she going for?”
“Till the new year.”
“Right. Good.”
Then he got up, got showered and dressed and, just before the
sun came up, we hauled the suitcases out to my car. I handed
Woodham the keys. He said he had a place in mind and that it was
probably best if I didn’t know any more.
I watched Woodham drive off, the silver Saab disappearing
towards the Harrow Road as the feeble sun came up. Then I walked
back through to the bedroom. I picked the digital video camera
up—its black eye had been peering through a crack in a pile of
sweaters—and turned the little switch from ‘record’ to ‘rewind’ to
‘play’. I had a decent shot of the naked, bloody Woodham saying,
“Think. I’m a policeman…” I put the camera in a drawer and went off
to sleep in the spare room.
Remind me not to get sent to prison.
Trellick and I are sitting in the visiting room of Wormwood
Scrubs waiting for Parker-Hall to appear and sipping plastic coffee
from styrofoam cups. The room seems to be unchanged from the
1960
s
: brick walls gloss-painted in filthy white,
and brown, chipped Formica tables, those orange plastic seats with
the holes cut out of the back.
And then there’s the people—these lifetime losers and their
broods. The dads sunk down into their striped pyjama-style prison
shirts with their matted hair and stubble, wearily listening to the
hags they married banging on about money and gossip, wondering
which of their mates or neighbours is lumping it into her in their
absence. The wives are, of course, something else entirely. At the
top end of the scale there’s a couple of council-estate readers’
wives (a type I’m not
completely
averse to)
Razzle
-rejects, bottle-blonde jobs in tight jeans and crop
tops who look like they’d take you into a side room right now and
break your cock off for forty quid. Down the bottom end of the
market it’s the twenty-stone thirty-year-olds who look sixty-five,
women who look like they’ve had their cunts kicked in from dawn
till dusk every single day of their lives since birth and who
expected nothing else. The kind of women who, when their man looked
up and told them ‘before we get married you should know,
darling—I’m a convicted rapist with a history of GBH who’s wanted
for armed robbery’, replied ‘let’s do this fucking thing’, and
started cheerily humming ‘Here Comes the Bride’.
Their kids sit sullenly, fidgeting, kicking their cheap
supermarket trainers at the worn lino, headphones on, tinny
drum’n’bass audible, all lost in their own little ragga worlds,
already hatching their embryonic schemes for greatness: cashpoint
muggings, ram raids, crack deals and lifting your Nokia at
knifepoint. Everyone—even the kids, the babies in their tattered
strollers—seems to be smoking roll-ups. I mean, roll-ups for fuck’s
sake. Where’s your self-respect? You’d just quit, wouldn’t you?
(Then again, self-respect can’t be too high on the agenda if you’re
in here for arse-fucking a struggling nine-year-old, for taking a
chisel to a granny for eight and a half quid.) People are shouting
at each other and banging the tables. Women are crying. The air is
flinty with tension and barely suppressed rage. It reminds me of
something. Business Affairs meetings. It reminds me of Business
Affairs meetings.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
“Fuck,” Trellick whispers as Parker-Hall appears, shepherded
over to us by a warden. He manages a cracked shaky grin as he sits
down. Jesus Christ. He’s only been here for three days and he looks
appalling
. There is a glassy terror in his eyes, like he’s
numb with horror, like he can’t believe it’s happening, and yet
he’s twitchy, nervy, like he knows it could all get much worse at
any moment—the sharpened teaspoon in the dining hall, the ebony
hand, black as a grand piano, on his shoulder in the showers.
“You know,” he asks us, head bowed, “I didn’t do anything. Don’t
you?”
“Course we do,” I say.
“No one believes it,” Trellick lies.
I slide across some magazines I’ve brought him—
Q, Uncut,
Mojo, NME
. “There’s a good live review of the Lazies in there,”
I say but he just stares at the magazines dumbly, perhaps feeling
too keenly the distance between his old life and his current
one.
“Why is this happening to me?” he says to no one.
“Listen,” Trellick says, using his best
let’s-get-a-grip-shall-we? Etonian voice as he counts off the
positives on his fingers, “a) you’ll get bail next week, b) the
company will pay it, whatever it is, and c) that was an old
computer in your office. Christ knows who’s used it over the
years.” Trellick talks law for a bit, burden of proof, beyond
reasonable doubt stuff.
“But what are people going to say?” Parker-Hall looks very small
and very young now. He looks like he might cry.
“Listen, Tony, everyone at the label is behind you,” I say, “and
Derek’s totally put a lid on discussing it outside the company.
Don’t worry, it’s not going to get into any of the papers.”
Well, this wasn’t strictly true. The first call I made when I
left the meeting where Derek put a complete ban on discussing the
Parker-Hall situation was to Leamington. His next call, as I knew
it would be, was to one of his mates at
Music Week
. Front
page next week. With a little luck, if they pick up on the
man-who-discovered-Ellie-Crush angle, it will be all over the
tabloids in time to coincide with Parker-Hall’s release on
bail.
“Thanks, guys,” he says to us, wiping his eyes.
“Don’t be daft,” I say. “You’re a mate.”
♦
Monica is telling Joey and Chandler off about something. She has
her hands on her hips and her hair tied back. The tits are good and
high in a tight black vest thing. I’d like to fuck Courtney Cox and
idly wonder how the planets would have to align in order for this
to be possible. (A huge hit record in the States? I’m on tour with
the act, they’re in LA playing the Hollywood Bowl, she comes
backstage, David isn’t there, she gets a little drunk, I’m being
charming and ‘English’…)
It’s a Christmas episode; the girls’ apartment has a huge tree
in the corner and outside, through that big many-paned window, snow
is—of course—gently falling on the sound-stage Manhattan. It’s
almost Christmas here in London too, but no snow. Rachel comes in
looking really hot—tiny black skirt with black tights and knee-high
leather boots. Yeah, forget Monica, Rachel—now there’s a proper
fuck-jar. The sound on the TV is off, I’m listening to rough mixes
of tracks from the Songbirds LP, lying on the enormous sofa in my
new house in Netting Hill, drinking Scotch and eating guacamole.
The songs are mostly utter donkey. It doesn’t matter. We’re about
to have a huge hit with ‘Fully Grown’ and we’ve got two more killer
singles. I’ve even got one of Woodham’s less offensive numbers on
the LP, which should recoup the idiot’s publishing advance and pay
me back.
You should see the video for the single. It’s incredible.
Annette, Kelly, Jo and Debbie—dressed as schoolgirls, as
pubescent spunk-worshippers, as teenage cock addicts—throw
themselves around a gymnasium in tight hardcore porno-choreography.
Tanned and toned, rehearsed to death and sumptuously lit, they are
a living, grinding-sucking-pumping monument to what can be achieved
with crazed ambition and near unlimited funds and bear no
resemblance whatsoever to the council-estate prostitutes who
fidgeted in my office six months ago.
The girls have been reacting to their sudden success in the
usual manner. There have been strops, walkouts and catfights. There
have been tears and tantrums. Bulimia and bitching. Less believably
they’ve taken to referring to themselves as ‘artists’ and voicing
opinions about the kind of material they’re being offered to sing.
There are rumblings from Debbie about her songwriting ambitions.
(If they really start selling some albums next year I’ll probably
have to start listening to some of this fucking nonsense. Jesus
wept.) For the moment, however, it’s fine. It’s all manageable.
They’ve worked hard; let them preen and strut and enjoy the short
window they’ll be afforded before they’re spat out the other end.
(Spat reeking into rehab and from there onto the daytime TV
confessionals, the presenting jobs, the ghostwritten
autobiographies—“
I always knew I was different from the other
kids
”—and taking a good fucking kicking from their footballer
husbands before drifting into middle-aged mega-obscurity.)
It’s some rush, the process of having a hit record. A proper hit
record, I mean. Not some stinking indie piece of shit that pops up
on the midweeks at N°12, drops to 17 by the Friday, and charts at
21 on Sunday. No. I mean
a proper fucking hit
: a record that
slashes and burns its way in at N°1 and then plants itself in the
top five for weeks. A record that every lowlife toler, spod, pikey,
uber, granny and foetus in the country is going to be singing for
months to come. You turn on the radio, any station, and you hear
it. You flip channels and you see the video. You go into a
nightclub and every sour-cunted working-class sow in there is
throwing herself around her fake designer handbag, smouldering
Kensington in one hand, tumbler of vodka and sugar in the other,
all doing some mad quasi-synchronised dance they’ve invented.
It’s at moments like this that you genuinely feel like you’ve
contributed to the culture in some way.
‘Fully Grown’ is now the most played record on Independent Local
Radio. It’s the third most played record on Radio 1, who, having
blanked the single first time around, have sensed how huge a hit
it’s going to be and have come on board with a vengeance on the Dex
and Del Mar remix.
Daily now Dunn sidles into my office. He joshes. He punches me
on the arm and talks about football and fucking as he gives me
updates about TV appearances and airplay. He even, over two beers
after work, goes so far as to tell me how he knew right away that
‘Fully Grown’ would be a hit, it just needed a little time. A
sleeper. He says he always had his doubts about Parker-Hall. His
banter, his forced jocularity, has the desperate tang of a man
trying to joke his way out the gas chambers, showing a card trick
to the guards even as they’re forcing him to strip and are sizing
up his gold fillings.