The Hunger (21 page)

1 a.m. The Next Day

My need to pound, to make ever deeper, more permanent marks on every Wrap I see, is marking my own face with madness. Because I only see myself from the inside, I consider
myself to be charming and fun and wonder what the fuss is about when a Wrap looks at me as if I’m an extra from the set of
American Psycho
.

I have a Wrap with me in a taxi. We met in a club in Kensington where I had to meet a hedge fund manager who’s bringing his sales team to The Club tomorrow night. I notice she is shifting
in her seat. I have taken more than a week’s worth of gear in one night. I ask her:

—Do you like porn?

—Yes I do.

I’m not convinced so, when we stop at some traffic lights, I put my hand on her thigh:

—I’m really gonna fuck you like you’ve never been fucked before.

The lights turn green and the taxi moves on and, as it does, the Wrap opens the door, jumps out in the middle of the junction and runs as fast as she can in the opposite direction. The driver
catches my eye in the mirror:

—Whatever chat-up line you used there, mate, needs some more work before you use it again.

It’s not the line. It’s me. Something has changed. Not a total personality change, more of an
enhancement
of what has always been there.

When I was sixteen and shagging June, my Mum’s mate, in the back of my Ford Fiesta, she used to say:

—There’s something in you, Lincoln. It’s a good thing but it’s almost too much and, if you don’t keep a careful eye on it, one day it will be a bad thing.

I guess that day has come. Here’s more evidence:

I’m running through a park full of trees and plants. As I run, the trees and plants all die around me and the sky goes dark. A squirrel comes up to me holding an acorn and tells me if I
plant it, some new trees will grow and the park will be a nice place again. When I reach down to take the acorn, I see it is infested with maggots.

I am walking through a desert in the blazing heat. I know I will die unless I can find water. In the distance I see a woman walking towards me holding a baby’s bottle. As we pass, she
offers it to me. I take it but there’s only a tiny bit of water in the bottom. I tell her it’s not enough for both of us and she had better keep it. She tells me she has drunk enough to
last her at least another day and tells me to drink. I put the rubber teat of the bottle to my mouth and drink and I notice there seems to be much more water in the bottle than there was when the
woman gave it to me. When I go to take the bottle to see how this is possible, I can’t get it out of my mouth. It’s stuck in the upright position and the water keeps coming and coming
and I know I’m going to drown in it.

I’m in The Club and all the Wraps are naked. I am naked too and my cock is hard, but every time I approach a Wrap and ask her to fuck me she just laughs until the noise of laughter is
so great I run out of The Club to get away from it, but when I walk out into the street I find myself in a giant circus tent and I take a bow but there is no audience. An undertaker in a black suit
walks up to me and asks me to step into a coffin. When I do, he closes the lid on top of me.

I’m in a room where there are no windows or doors and every inch is covered in exotic fabrics and curtains with Asian designs on them. I know there is no way out, so I just sink into
the cushions and take in the smell of incense. I notice the silence is very deep but I wonder why I can’t hear my own breath. I put my hand over my mouth. I can’t feel my breath either,
so I try to feel my pulse and again there is nothing but I feel so comfortable in this room, I close my eyes and fall asleep. This is the scariest of all my dreams. I have no idea why this is
so.

September–October 2010. 9 a.m.

I have always found the best way to deal with the consequences of my own stupidity is do something even more stupid.

The Boss has heard about the arrests and he wants to know what the fuck is going on. I can’t remember what I tell him because I just want to get out of The Club and have a drink, so I do
my best to sound apologetic and hope he just lets me go. He doesn’t. He goes at me, so I say:

—Perhaps I’d better just fuck off then.

He says:

—Perhaps you better had. Mark will put the ten grand we owe you into your account today.

And that’s it. I’m finished at The Club. As I walk up the stairs, I don’t think about anything except where the next drink is coming from. Esurio is waiting for me at the top
and opens the door onto Berwick Street:

—Bravo, Lincoln! Even by your standards, to relieve yourself of your only source of income, without any prospect of replacing it, is commendable indeed.

—I’ll replace it.

—How, if you don’t mind me asking?

—I haven’t had time to think about that yet.

—But you will.

—Of course.

I don’t really care about my income because all I want is a drink, a line, a fuck, and my prefrontal cortex is in such a fragile state, not even Einstein could convince me of the
connection between the capacity to think and a healthy bank balance. It’s just gone ten when I get to The Office and everything is reassuringly normal. Maynard and Terry didn’t make it
home last night and slept on the floor behind the bar. They look unshaven and ridiculous. They greet me like the Prodigal Son. Like I said: reassuringly normal. As I get into the first vodka tonics
of the day, I tell them I have resigned my job. They say:

—That was brave.

Then:

—And what are you going to do now?

To any normal person, this is a perfectly sensible question, but they only ask because they understand it’s the proper thing to do. They don’t even wait for an answer, which is fine
by me because the only answer I have is another vodka tonic. At some point over the next few hours I make a quick calculation. I can’t swear by its accuracy because at the time I do it, I am
only able to count in multiples of a thousand, so the margin of error is significant. Here it is:

I have one bank account with Banco Santander because they are the only bank stupid enough to give me access to my own money. I am one thousand pounds in credit and I have a card from the same
bank with an unused limit of two thousand pounds, plus the ten thousand coming from The Boss, which leaves me with thirteen grand. It seems a good number but it’s meaningless to me, so I
convert it into booze, gear and Wraps. That’s when the panic sets in. I will be skint in less than a month. I try to think of a plan. I begin by listing in my head what I’m good at:

Esurio suggests I flog tickets for
Public Pig Shagging
outside Vinopolis in Southwark. Free booze for the under-10s. I think it’s not a bad idea, but I tell him it’s not that
type of snorting. I think making a list of
What Matters to Me Most
will help get my mind right. It’s the same four items on the list. I have noticed of late that my range of interests
has become more compressed. I listened as a kid to Patrick Moore telling me how big space was and how much stuff there was in it. How could he lie to a fucking kid? Space is bottle-sized and
shrinking. Before long I will have the life squeezed out of me but not before I’ve solved
The Problem of How to Earn Money Next Month.

The Problem of How to Earn Money Next Month

I don’t know exactly when the idea came to me. Esurio tried to take the credit. He can have my soul but not this idea. This one belongs to me. In between bottles and
lines, I remember that The Boss never took me up on the idea of running parties for some of The Club’s Diamond Card Holders and calling them Secret Society parties. I think the idea of a
Secret Society of bankers and other robbers, who will pay me to get them Wraps in secret locations, sounds like my kind of business. I especially love the idea of it being a secret, so as soon as I
have thought about it I tell everyone. Within a week I have somehow managed to get a website up and some business cards made. The website gives away no information, mainly because I haven’t
got a clue what I’m doing. At one point I think of changing the name from Secret Society to Lincoln’s Drug Fund, to make it sound like some kind of offshore trust or specialist
financial operation. Fortunately, I’m still a few lines short of accepting the merits of that idea when I settle once and for all on Secret Society.

Then I hit the phones. The first call is to Tina. I’m going to need at least fifty Wraps for every party and she can sort the booze out as well. The punters can bring their own fucking
gear. It’s all going well, when a Swedish bloke called Erik who drinks with us sometimes comes up to me in The Office and says:

—I hear you’re going to be running a Secret Society and members will have access to parties with lots of birds in them.

I wonder how he heard about it. It’s a secret. Then:

—Well, if you’re interested I’ve got some connections with people who run beauty contests in Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia. If you want the winners to come over,
they’ll fly and fuck for ten grand each for three days. Including expenses.

Within ten minutes, I’ve done the deal, except I haven’t got ten grand. I did have thirteen but that was nearly two weeks ago and it’s down to five if I’m lucky. I need
someone else’s money. I call Rik:

—What? Real Beauty Queens? How many?

—I can get a maximum of five a time.

—How much?

—Get me ten members of the Secret Society at ten grand a shot plus five grand admission to every party.

—There’s not enough Beauty Queens for that.

—Sure, but there’s all the other girls. The best. You know you can trust me when it comes to girls.

—OK. Leave it with me.

I have that conversation with maybe a dozen different people. I forget how much money these guys have got. They got it from their customers, who have lost their homes by now, so Rik sees fit to
take the price of their dreams and pass it on to me:

—And remember, Lincoln, I get first choice.

—Sure.

I have that conversation more times than I can remember and promise a decade’s worth of Beauty Queens. I decide I will worry about the consequences of those conversations when I need to.
So within a month I find myself in the improbable situation of having more thousands in my Banco Santander account than I am able to count. Even when sober. The only downside to this whole deal is
that when people give you money, they all seem to want something for it, so I wish I had called it Lincoln’s Drug Fund, then I could disappear and die in peace.

Tina sets up three parties for me: one in a big fucking town-house in town, another on a boat on the Thames, then it’s a fetish party out of town somewhere near High Wycombe. I check with
her that the booze and the Wraps are all set up. I call the members of the Society and tell them the good news. They are all pissing themselves with excitement. A few of them have no class and ask
me if they get any paperwork for being members and is it only three parties they get for their money? I threaten to give them their money back and let someone else have their place in the Society.
I ask them:

—How can you have paperwork for a Secret Society?

They back off. With every cell in my brain stuffed full of gear, I can forget what day it is but I always remember how to sell. When I take one line too many and the fat lady sings, I know for
sure she’ll hire the venue from me. I even manage to create three Principles of the Secret Society.

PRINCIPLES OF THE SECRET SOCIETY

I even have a mission statement:
Put the promise of pussy before a man and he’ll believe anything. Threaten to take it away and he’ll pay anything
.

The first party is organised for a Thursday evening. I could have got five Beauty Queens in for the night but I’ve had to settle for three, mainly due to the diversion of Society funds up
my nasal cavity. I tell Erik I want them in on Wednesday for ‘testing’. When they arrive, they are the Crown Jewels of Wraps: two blondes, one brunette, with fake tits, shaved pussies
and broken English. All I can think of when I see them is how to decide in which order to bang them.

The money was sorted before they boarded the plane. We meet in my room at the Sanderson Hotel just after lunch and I say:

—OK. Who’s first?

The Wraps look at each other. I lay out nine lines on the coffee table.

—Let’s try again. Who’s first?

Now, of course, they are all first. I notice I am enthusiastic. I actually
want
to fuck them and, when I am doing it, I don’t want it to end. I solve the problem of order. I
don’t ask their names. I want places not names. It turns out they are the winning Wraps from Slovakia, Romania and Kazakhstan. I fuck them in geographical order from west to east. I’m
not sure where Kazakhstan is but I guess it’s the furthest east, so I make them all bend over and run a line from Slovakia through Romania to Kazakhstan. One line, hundreds of miles long. I
pound with a rage I have never pounded before. To mark a Wrap is one thing. To mark the Crown Jewels of Wraps is a guarantee of immortality. When I’m finished, Slovakia can’t walk,
Romania is in pieces and Kazakhstan is on her knees trying to repair the bed.