The Hunger (20 page)

—Take it easy, she’s a fucking woman.

When I get to my room at the Charing Cross Hotel, a few of the coppers take pictures of me on their mobile phones. One of them shouts:

—C’mon, Lincoln, give us a twirl.

I rush at the bars of my room and tell him to fuck off. He laughs:

—Time of the month, is it?

After maybe an hour, I start shaking and wrap my coat around my torn dress to keep warm. It’s nearly midday when I wake up.

The Stalking Incident

About midnight on a Wednesday evening I come out of the Aqua Bar and walk down Great Marlborough Street with my friend Martin. I am hammered but my radar for potential violence
is as strong as ever and I notice we’re being followed by a gang of six or seven blokes. One of them shouts at me:

—Hey, baldy!

My first instinct is to kill them. My second is to ignore them because they are seven and we are two, and I’m not sure how useful Martin will be in a fight, so it might be one and a half,
or even one. Then he shouts it a second time and I turn and run at them. Martin follows behind, but long before he gets anywhere near them I have laid two of them out and two others saw what I did
and ran away. Now it’s more even. To be fair, Martin has a go at one of them while I take on the other two. They catch me with a couple of blows but I know where to strike: the solar plexus
and the side of the neck. When they’re both down, I begin kicking hell out of them when three cops jump on me from behind. In the back of the car on the way to the Hotel, one of them
says:

—Not many people could do what you just did. Then again, not many people would want to.

The Battering Ram Incident

Drink. Coke. Some cunt in the toilets at The Office then a short walk to The Box, a nightclub set between sex shops and peep shows on an alley called Walker’s Court. By an
Act of God I cannot understand I am on the Guest List. I walk up the stairs to the main floor area. Simon Hammerstein, the owner and grandson of Oscar Hammerstein, is sitting at a table surrounded
by Wraps in sexy white dresses with tight little arses. My favourite things.

Terry is at the bar selling non-existent investment opportunities for the Cannes Film Festival to Georges, a Parisian hedge fund manager. They move to a booth. Perfect. I join them and nestle in
the corner, snorting a few lines from a discreet little coke dispenser I bought in a sex shop on Broadwick Street. Esurio says:

—That was a good buy, Lincoln, very handy.

I take a moment to think how smart I am when I knock my vodka tonic over Georges’s lap. I go to grab the glass as it falls on his crotch. I think I touch his cock. He thinks I touch his
cock. I apologise. He accepts. With a smile. I don’t like that smile, so I look away at the main floor of the club. The Box is
The Place to Be
in Soho and when a club becomes the
The Place to Be
, it has to deliver even more than its reputation, which means:

The show doesn’t start well. A couple swallowing swords. No tits. No cunt. No madness. I take another line as the audience throw ice cubes at the couple. The girl runs off stage. The guy
says fuck off and someone throws an ice bucket at him. Next on is a stunning-looking Wrap called Narcissister who strips then pulls a ringing mobile phone from her pussy. The audience roars. Tits.
Cunt. Madness. Esurio floats onto the stage, picks up the phone and throws it at me:

—Our time now, Lincoln, this is our time!

I pull a dozen Wraps off the dance floor into our booth. Champagne shoots in all directions, flooding the VIP booth next to us. My cock is being rubbed. I follow the arm to the face. Not
Georges. A Wrap. My mind is playing a familiar mantra: Drink. Coke. Cunt. Drink. Coke. Cunt. I am the Beast of the Box and my nervous system is feeding off an ancient madness that flows through me
like electrified water. On the stage a rapper shouts:

—Anyone want to hit this shit?

We all do and we are all One as we dance and shout, an anonymous tribe wasting ourselves as the rapper drums a gangsta beat from the stage.
My
stage! I crush some gear between two coins
and sniff the holy powder and I am the King of Kings and the message I bring is Chaos. I run towards my stage. In the wings, Simon is naked and runs onstage before throwing himself at the mercy of
the crowd. I follow him and am about to offer myself to the mass of bodies,
My
bodies, when I feel a punch land on my left ear and I begin to hear strange, pagan voices. And Esurio:

—That will hurt in the morning, Lincoln, very much!

I run across my stage, down some stairs and into a big, fucking kitchen.

There’s a door in the far corner and I knock it off its hinges. I’m in a room with ‘Buck Angel’, one of the star acts, a muscle man with a cunt. For a moment I am in awe
of the ingenuity of Nature, then I’m running again until two bouncers pull me to the ground and I’m hitting them with a traffic cone full of sand and, when it explodes, sand shoots into
their eyes. Esurio says:

—You’re in trouble now, Lincoln, Big Trouble.

I think:

—I’m in trouble now . . . Big Trouble.

The bouncers get up and jump on me and one of them puts me in a headlock. I’m wriggling and squirming and shouting and kicking and spitting as three more bouncers join them on the stage.
Together they carry me through the seated area down some stairs until we reach the main entrance. The door is shut and a security guard is about to open it when one of the men carrying me shouts at
him to leave it shut, and they lower me to waist level and use my head as a battering ram. The impact hurts but I manage to force it open first time. They drop me in the alley outside and take a
breather while I groan on the ground and call them cunts. I have no shirt, torn trousers, no watch, one shoe, a black eye, a throbbing head, no money. I feel the boot of a bouncer in my ribs and I
can hear sirens in the distance and I know men in blue will take me from
The Place To Be
to the Charing Cross Hotel and when I get back to my flat my heart will pound and I will burn with
anxiety and fear and be crushed with loneliness and the only defence I will have against a Darker Death is another drink, another line, another Wrap.

When I arrive at the Hotel I am beyond furious. I am in a Rage that is so intense it is off even my Scale of Fury. It takes five cops to get me into my room and I land at least four heavy blows
on them as they do it. Once they get me in, they throw me on the floor and, as they leave, I rush up to the closing door and force my arm into the gap. They press the metal door against it until
the pain is so great I can’t take it anymore and I pull it in. I scream at one of the officers through the grill:

—Fuck you, you bald cunt! Come in here now!

Then I see four other officers approaching. One of them is wearing
The Glove
. This time I don’t care. They can shove a diamond drill up my arse but they won’t come out
alive.

—Come on then, fucking try it!

I can’t remember what happens next.

In the morning I am back in my flat. There are three Wraps in my bed. I do not know how I got here. I hear the sounds of Soho below me. I look up and the morning sun bursts on my half-opened
eyes. I am blind and able to see the one thing I have left, draining away: Life.

The Paparazzi Incident

I come out of Bungalow 8 at about three in the morning with a celebrity Wrap when a Pap on a moped rides onto the pavement and catches me across the face with his camera as he
passes. I push him off his bike and begin punching his head through his helmet. I hit him so hard I make a hole in the helmet and, as I’m about to put a dent in the side of his skull, three
other Paps jump on me and begin kicking me. I manage to get free and take one of them out with a single punch. The other three start running up St Martin’s Lane to get away from me. I rip my
shirt off and chase them. I catch the straggler – a short, fat cunt – and bring him to the ground. I am beating the crap out of him and he knows his best hope is a deep coma, when two
cops pile on top of me. I can hear one of them shouting breathlessly into his radio:

—It’s Lincoln again; we’re going to need some help.

In seconds they drag the Pap from underneath me and there are four, perhaps five, of them on top of me, forcing my face to the ground. Because of the angle I’m lying at, my ear is pressing
so hard against the street I want to scream.

—Get off me! You’re on my fucking ear!

The pain is unbearable and I think my head is going to explode. They don’t release me until I’m cuffed and, when they do, the side of my face is numb and there’s a huge gong
crashing inside my head. When they get me to the Hotel, they leave me cuffed for a few hours and I fall into a deep sleep, my hands still bound when I wake up.

When I leave the Charing Cross Hotel after
The Paparazzi Incident
, I go back to the flat, take a shower and go for a run. I focus only on the rhythm of my feet as they pound the pavement.
I go into a trance and, when I come round, I am two miles from Heathrow and my T-shirt is soaking with sweat. The run back is slower, more of a jog than a sprint, and when I get back to the flat I
shower again and get changed. I am ready to go to The Office
.
During the run I was able to
Think About Things
. Here’s what I thought:

They may be fucked-up thoughts but they are my thoughts and they are honest. My Mum says:

—As long as you’re honest in life, you won’t go far wrong.

I think she would be proud I am her son. When I get to The Office, the boys and a few Wraps are waiting for me. Before I sit down, I go to the toilet and finish all the gear I have on me. The
boys want to know everything, so I tell them everything.

I love telling stories. Telling is always better than Doing. When I Tell I am with other people, when I Do I am alone. When I Tell I am whoever they want me to be and it always feels better than
Doing. I feel freer when I am Telling. I can run faster, fuck longer, punch harder and, in the world of Telling, I can be who I am without any consequences at all. I move through this world like an
atom, undetected and unstoppable, being seen only when I choose and always in the best light. The world is made in the Telling and my words make it real. It ends only when I stop Telling and start
Doing again, and then it goes all dark and troubled and I can’t find my way around anymore until someone asks me what I have been Doing and the darkness breaks in the Telling of another
story.

Before I leave The Office, I look in the mirror behind the bar and check if my handkerchief is sitting properly in my jacket pocket. It is perfect. I, however, am not. My skin looks taut and
there is a quality in my eyes that seems new and ugly. Esurio says:

—That will be the Madness, Lincoln. Ripening so beautifully.

3 a.m.

I met Suzie in the Townhouse and we are in my flat. She is already naked. I am looking for my rope. Can’t find it anywhere. I assume it’s me that is absent and not
the rope, so I look again. Under the bed, in the wardrobe, in the chest of drawers, in the kitchen cupboards, in the lounge. Nowhere. Suzie says:

—You get forgetful. It’ll turn up.

I agree, but I have the suspicion I left it tied to the bedposts in a hotel somewhere in Soho. I look again in my chest of drawers and find a ball of blue car-towing rope. When I have her tied
to the bed, she begs me to pound her and I pound her harder than I have ever pounded her before. She squeals and blows out her cheeks like a bellows to release the pressure from her head in case it
explodes. She looks at me almost for the first time and sees the intense Fury that has taken me over in recent months. I have passed the point of insanity. I am made of Rage. The doorbell goes. I
get off Suzie and go to the hall. It’s the Paid-For we booked. I watch a dark-haired Wrap walk up the stairs in red stilettos. She looks at me and freezes, just for a second, but long enough
for me to know that she can see it too. I tell her to go into the bedroom. My face is leaden like a statue or a corpse in the first stages of
rigor mortis.
She arcs around me and I follow in
behind her. As soon as she sees Suzie, breathless and tied up with blue towing rope, she stops, turns around and runs out. She daren’t look at me and is in such a hurry to get out of my flat,
one of her red stilettos falls off and she hobbles down the stairs and back out into the comparative safety of middle-of-the-night Soho. I pick up the stiletto and take it with me into the bedroom.
I will find uses for it.