Kill Your Friends (14 page)

The Radiohead track, which is called ‘Paranoid Android’, has
built through an appalling crescendo of arty noise into a kind of
washed-out coda with Thorn Yorke, bleating and warbling the words
‘rain down’ over the top. What the fuck were they thinking with
this nonsense? They’re finished. Surely no cunt’s going to be
having this?

I turn it off and just sit there in Waters’ office in the quiet
dark, doing the last of his chang and thinking about Herve
Villechaize, until it’s time to go to the Borderline, to see some
band called the Hitchers who Lamacq has been banging on about.

♦

The car from the airport seems to take a long time and we pull
up at the church already—always—late. While Trellick winds up a
call on his mobile I get out the car and look around: grey skies,
windy, brutal. Down the hillside, off in the distance, is a big,
dismal city. Sheffield or something, I suppose.

Christ, I hate being out of London.

The cabbie is saying something to us but he’s Northern and none
of us understand a word. Ross slips the guy a fifty and tells him
to wait for us. The cabbie blinks at the big, unfamiliar,
strawberry-coloured note and carefully folds it into his shirt
pocket, like it’s an old, delicate parchment or something. “Pay
your mortgage off, mate,” Ross says as we walk away. We go through
the gate and up the path towards the grey stone building, towards
soft, horrible organ music.

Inside it’s busy—a couple of hundred people—and we have to stand
at the back. A minister, a vicar or something, is crapping on about
Waters: “…in London, in the music industry, where he enjoyed great
success and made a great many friends, so many of whom have
travelled here to be with us today. As a boy Roger was always a
huge fan of music and it was because of this…”

It’s been a far easier ride than I ever imagined. Two policemen
came to interview me as I’d been out with Waters on the night he
died. I told them we’d gone to see some bands in Camden and I’d
dropped him off in a cab before going home. They’d nodded away,
made some notes and that was that. They reckon it was a burglar.
Then again, perhaps this isn’t so odd:

Schneider had his mobile and wallet taken from him at knifepoint
on Hammersmith Broadway a few months ago. The Kaffir doing the
mugging even let him finish his call.

Darren was knocked off his bike in Kentish Town. He got up,
dazed and bruised, to find himself surrounded by a mob of
teenagers, who proceeded to kick the shit out of him, dip his
pockets, and ride off on his bike.

Leamington got back from holiday and walked into his basement
flat in Fulham. Everything gone and the proverbial smoking log in
his bed.

Rebecca was waiting for the bus in Shepherd’s Bush. They punched
her in the face and grabbed her handbag.

Nicky from International was sitting at the lights on the
Cromwell Road when the car door burst open and the kid—a snarling
mess of gold teeth and sportswear—took her bag, phone and a handful
of CDs. (“I thought he was going to get in the car. I thought he
was going to rape me,” she said, telling the story in a meeting.
Trellick and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing
—
you’re fucking dreaming, love
.)

Daily, it seems, you walk out to your car in the morning to find
your feet crunching on the tiny pebbles of glass, then the brick on
the passenger seat, the wires hanging like guts from the dashboard,
and your Blaupunkt being flogged for a tenner’s worth of rocks in
some local ragga den.

It serves me well, London: the streets crawl with suspects. The
houses and the cars gleam with motive.

I look around the church at the people who I guess Waters grew
up with. The girls, apart from the industry whores who made the
trip up, are all utter fucking monsters. I’m guessing that most of
them are around thirty, Waters’ age, but Christ, they look like
pensioners—lined, wrinkled faces, massive sagging teats, arses like
busted sacks of gravel. The kind of working-class sows who stop
being doable around the age of twenty-one. You look at the guys who
are with them, guys around our age (but poor guys, failures) and
they look innocent. They look like they don’t know what’s going on.
Like they’re unaware that they’ve married some disfigured atrocity.
I mean, you look at these guys and you’d expect to see a little
shame. Self-consciousness at the very least. If I was one of them I
wouldn’t be able to look a stranger in the eye without gesturing to
my monster and saying, “Sorry, mate, I don’t know what I was
thinking.” Maybe they don’t. Maybe they look at these women and see
the girl they met at school. Is that even possible? That kind
of…well, love, I suppose you’d have to call it. I shudder at the
word, at the thought. No wonder Waters got the fuck out of here as
soon as he could.

It occurs to me, not for the first time, how strange it must be
not to come from London.

After what feels like a long, long time it’s over and we all bow
our heads as what I presume is Waters’ immediate family file out
behind the coffin. There’s two girls (his sisters?) who look bad,
they’re shaking and crying and holding onto each other and stuff,
and, behind them, the parents. The father looks like he isn’t quite
there—red-rimmed eyes set in a thousand-yard stare—but the mother.
Jesus wept,
the mother
. She’s this tiny woman crumpled into
a ball, half clinging to her husband’s arm, half being carried
along by him. She’s clutching a soaking handkerchief in each fist
and is making this noise. It sounds like the noise ghosts make in
old horror films, a sort of wobbly moaning, whining
‘woooo-aahhhh-ooohh’. I mean, she looks fucking insane.

The guys holding the coffin have to pause, to get something out
of the way, and she comes right up against the coffin. She starts
screaming—“
No! No! My son! My son!
” type stuff—and this
triggers off loads of the girls in the crowd crying even harder
until a couple of old hags calm her down and they get her out of
there.

Going outside a few minutes after this we have to pass in a line
by the family. I shake the dad’s hand and tell him how sorry I am,
that I knew his son through work and all that, and he just nods and
doesn’t really say anything. The mother isn’t in the line-up, it’s
just the dad and the sisters, one of whom looks doable: big tits
strapped tightly into a black dress that’s a little too small for
her and bright red lipstick on. I hug her quite hard and then I’m
out on the steps of the church, lighting a cigarette in the hateful
Northern air.

Ross goes off to try the office again, to see if they’ve got the
midweeks yet. Trellick has to get hold of Fisher and I call the
office to speak to Rebecca, to make sure she’s booked me a cab to
Heathrow in the morning. (I am off to Miami in the morning, for the
Winter fucking Music Conference—which is like MIDEM, but with just
dance music—and then onto Texas for South by
South–fucking-west—which is like the Winter Music Conference, but
with indie music. They’re all the same thing: a tide of networking
cunts going bananas.) The three of us stand off to one side smoking
and talking on our phones as more people file out of the church and
the coffin is carried out.

So. Much. Fucking. Respect.

I listen to Rebecca reminding me about connection times and
check-in baloney as the coffin is rolled into the big hearse.
People are scattered around crying and hugging each other. Waters’
mother is sandwiched between the two old girls on a bench. She
twitches like some bar-rattling inmate from a Victorian asylum,
literally
demented
with grief.

Wow, I think to myself, remembering the expression on Waters’
spastic face when he died, it really is something to kill somebody
and create all of this.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

“
You can’t spell ‘star’ without A and R
.”

Ronnie Vanucci

“Maybe we should go out,” someone says.

“No…I…that would be bad,” someone else says. It might be me.
It’s hard to tell who is saying what because all our voices are the
same now—all cracked, ghosted whispers, static crackling across the
room. Fragments of several different conversations ricochet around,
overlapping, out of sync, at cross-purposes.

The suite is dark, the curtains drawn, the only light coming
from a couple of table lamps and the gently strobing pornography on
the TV screen.

“We’ll need more coke soon.”

“The guy’s bringing it.”

“The black guy? Oh fuck…”

“Go in the bathroom.”

“And we need more fucking booze.
I need a whiskey
.”

“Have you heard that Stardust bootleg?”

“I can’t face him…”

“Get room service to fill the minibar again.”

“Hide in the fucking bathroom.”

“Fucking tune.”

“Oh God. I can’t face room service. I think I’m having a heart
attack.”

“
Hide in the bathroom, you cunt
.”

“I think we should go out.”

“Fuck off.”

“Right, you cunts. I’m calling room service!” Leamington says
this.

We’ve been in Miami for thirty-six hours now and I have yet to
leave this room. I move across the darkened, fetid suite (we’re in
the hotel, where they filmed some of
Goldfinger
, as someone
uselessly points out every five minutes) to the window and very
nervously pull the curtains a couple of millimetres apart. A thin
band of intense toxic sunshine lasers across the room and, just for
a second, I glimpse sky, green palms and, beyond them, the beach
and the ocean before everyone is screaming for me to shut the
fucking curtains. “Just…urn, checking,” I say. It is around thirty
degrees outside, but we have the windows all sealed and the air con
on full crank. I reach behind the curtains and open a window. Ten
floors below you can hear the roar of chattering delegates intercut
with splashes as people dive into the pool.

I walk about the room swinging my arms, kicking my legs, my chin
tucked tight into my chest. I’m beyond wired—pure current.

“I think if I did a couple of pills I could go out,” someone
says.

“That’s not totally crazy,” someone replies.

“Fatboy Slim tonight,” someone else says.

“Roni Size.”

“Where?”

“At the Cameo Theatre?”

“Fuck that.”

“We
have
to go out tonight.”

“Size at the Cameo?”

“Maybe we should get some hookers in.”

“No Fatboy.”

“He’s at the Delano.”

“Or strippers anyway.”

“Do you mean where he’s staying or where he’s playing?”

“Eh?”

We started on the chang somewhere over Ireland. When we
landed—having raped the Virgin Upper Class bar for ten hours
straight—we were met by this dealer someone knew. We got a limo and
continued with the chang on the drive into town. I don’t know
everyone here. There’s some guy from some indie (XL? Mo Wax? Rising
High?) and a publisher kid (Warner Chappell? BMG?) and a couple of
expat Brits, drug-dealer types, who someone vaguely knows who’ve
attached themselves to us. Darren hasn’t spoken for five or six
hours. He just sits there, rocking back and forth. At one point I
made an attempt to go downstairs and register at the convention, to
pick up my delegate pass, so I could attend the showcases and
discussion panels (where gak and pill-lobotomised fools will
ruminate on worthy topics like ‘How Will Internet DJing Affect the
Economies of Former Soviet Bloc Countries?’ and ‘Is the Super Club
Killing Club Culture?’). The lift doors opened and way across the
lobby I could see some of the Brit contingent—Dave Beer, Kris
Needs, people like that. I glimpsed a sober, businesslike
Parker-Hall striding up to reception. I pressed the button for our
floor again and
ran
back to the fucking room. “You don’t
want to go down there,” I told everyone. That was, I think,
sometime yesterday afternoon. The outside world now looks like an
abstraction; a dream you had when you were a kid. Intangible, a few
blurred images, the faintest tang of an aftertaste.

“Ritchie Hawtin,” someone says.

“Dimitri from Paris.”

“Get the Yellow Pages.”

“He shit his pants in CentroFly.”

“More coke.”

“Peanut Butter Wolf.”

“Todd Terry.”

“Carl Cox.”

“Basement Jaxx.”

I think someone is crying.

“Grooverider.”

“A case of fucking Cristal.”

“Maybe sushi.”

“Ritchie Hawtin.”

“Double-ended her.”

“Propellerheads.”

There’s a fierce, copper-style rap at the door.

“Oh fuck.”

“Jesus fuck.”

“Who’s that?
Who is it?
” someone asks in a whisper.

“It’s room service, you clown,” says Leamington—incredibly the
only person seemingly in control—as he heads for the door.

“Fuck that. You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I say.

Three or four of us hurdle furniture, elbowing each other out of
the way, as we scramble into the bathroom. We bolt the door and
crouch down in the milky plastic light.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God…” someone keeps saying.

“It’ll be all right, it’ll be OK,” someone else says
soothingly.

“Is this your first time in Miami?” some bloke whispers to me. I
shake my head. I’m off my nut, but I’m vaguely aware that this
isn’t a reasonable way to earn a living.

A long time passes. You can hear everyone’s heart beating. The
tap drips.

There’s a knock on the door, Leamington’s voice, the all-clear.
We open the door and creep out.

Christ.

A black waiter—a young guy, tall, thin—is standing in the middle
of the suite unloading cocktails from a tray onto the coffee table.
He turns and sees us. We all freeze.

“Have you got the coke?” one of the bathroom idiots says to the
waiter, just seeing a Kaffir and mistaking him for the dealer,
despite his tray, and his purple-and-black tunic and the gold name
tag on his chest. And the fact that he’s
clearly a fucking
waiter
.